"But the dream, the echo, slips from him as quickly as he had found it and as consciousness comes to him (a slap and not the gentle waves of oceanic tides), it dissolves entirely. His muscles relax as the cold claims him again, as the numbness sets in, and when his grey eyes open, there’s nothing but the faint after burn of a dream often trod and never remembered." --Brigade, written by Laura
all i want is to flip a switch before something breaks that cannot be fixed
He is growing far too comfortable with her constant presence, far too attached to the warmth of that porcelain angel body curled beside him in the dark each night. Every morning feels as impossible as the night that came before it, and there is a very guarded part of him that expects to wake and find her as distant a memory as the dreams he comes untethered from each new dawn. But just as the morning before, and so many before that, he wakes to her warmth and her light and gentle motion of her breathing chest.
He knows, by her own admission, that this is not forever, that it is only for now. But it is hard to keep any kind of distance between them in his chest when all these days feel like a balm on every broken part of him. He is forgetting to be afraid of losing this, of losing her. He is forgetting how much the dark loves him, that it will always come for him.
He is forgetting himself, and it is a beautiful feeling.
Her halo lights the dark of their sleeping place, and he is glad for it because he uses it to find her and pull her closer to him, pressing his nose to her mane and breathing in the smell of her. “You are starting to smell like me.” He warns with that morning roughness to his voice and almost crooked smile finding recently well-worn paths across his dark mouth. That fact pleases him, feeds that dark sense of possessiveness she is so good at keeping at bay. “I hope you don’t expect me to apologize for it, because I am absolutely not even a little sorry.”
His eyes are nearly smiling now, an almost warm shade of dirty gold as he pushes her mane aside to run his lips across her neck, tracing a slow path to her shoulder, leaving a constellation of kisses over that glowing white. He is slowly learning what she loves, memorizing every piece of herself she is willing to give him, committing these pieces of her to a forever place inside his chest to have even after she is gone again.
“Angel,” he murmurs, knowing she is slow to wake, but also just loving the way that words tastes on his tongue. His attention wanders, and his heart feels oddly light in his chest as his lips move from her shoulder to over her ribs, settling on the ever-growing swell of her belly. He knows what it means, though he has not spoken of it aloud, just as he knows the life inside must be his. It has been only them for more time than he has means to count, just them.
The sound he makes is almost a groan, and completely involuntary as he kisses her stomach, rubbing his dark cheek against the shining white in a way that is more possessive than he means to be. “Angel,” he says again, mouth climbing her neck again to press against the heat of her delicate jaw for the briefest moment, “what piece of you do I get to learn about today?”
“I know when you go down all your darkest roads I would have followed all the way to the graveyard.”
Sleeping next to him comes with a faint flicker of guilt. She has never been very good at staying in one place – not even with Skellig. Tephra had never felt like home, and that had always been her excuse. It made her feel restless, it made her feel trapped, to be expected to be somewhere. And the more something told her where she thought she should, the harder it was for her to be there.
Like Hyaline.
Like with Atrox.
And that was such a ridiculous way for her to feel since he had never given her the impression that he wanted her to stay there.
She doesn't admit to herself that that is why she keeps leaving; she doesn't admit to herself that she recognizes the same self-destructive tendencies that had developed with Skellig, that she wanted to see just how far she could push Atrox before he snapped on her.
She does not let herself get accustomed to what it feels like to sleep next to Illum, but she allows herself to pretend. She lets herself pretend this was forever, she lets him hold her and trail touches and kisses across every part of her whenever he wishes. Allows him to make her his own, lets him lay claim to pieces of her that no one else will touch.
She had told him this would not be forever, but she is a selfish liar clear to the core, and she does nothing to keep the distance between them.
His touch and his voice, low but sweet when spoken into the warmth of her skin, stirs her awake. She says nothing at first, only shifts closer to him, though the frost of his skin sends a shiver up her spine. She laughs at what he says, a hushed sound, afraid of disturbing the peace of the morning. “I don't think there's anyone that cares who or what I smell like,” she tucks her head beneath his chin, pressing a soft kiss to the side of his throat as she does.
She leans into his touch with a soft, contented sigh, having forgotten what it felt like to just be with someone. Someone where one false move or remark did not end in punishment, someone that actually wanted to keep her and showed it to her in every way imaginable.
She hates herself for how that makes her skin itch; she hates herself for knowing she will abandon this light for the all-consuming dark, eventually.
Her heart flutters in her throat, though, when he touches the swell of her side. Neither of them had spoken of it, but of course, they both knew. She never quite knew how to navigate this, since typically those that she was with didn't seem to care one way or the other. Most of her children grew up only knowing their father's names, and that had been her lifestyle for so long that it made the normal situations feel strange. It was easier to ignore it than to acknowledge it. Living in denial was just a default state for her at this point.
“What do you want to know?” She asks him, smoothing away the frost off the surface of his neck to place a kiss to the cool skin beneath it. “I'm really not all that interesting, but you know I will tell you anything.” There is a small part of her that hopes that the more she tells him, the less that he will want her. That maybe he will realize what a mess she is, and that he does not want to deal with all the tangles and twists and turns that came with her.
And she knows that is only a small part of what is wrong with her; that she will break herself apart to be what she thinks someone like Carnage or Atrox wants her to be, but when faced with someone like Illum she subconsciously only hopes to eventually chase him away.
all i want is to flip a switch before something breaks that cannot be fixed
He marvels as always at the softness of her. Of her lips in a kiss against his throat, and that way she laughs as though she does not want to disturb the quiet of the day. It seems impossible that someone like her, like his angel, would have any interest in someone as incomplete as him. He is a mosaic of mismatched pieces, maybe even pieces never meant to come together at all. He is jagged and broken, ill-repaired at all his junctions.
“I care.” He reminds her, almost a shade darker, a shade more reserved because he knows she does not see that in him, and he knows he is incapable of showing her. These new feelings inside him are not enough to teach him how to be something he was never meant to be, certainly not enough to show her what it is she means to him.
She is as imperfect as him in that way, blind to her worth.
He doesn’t realize she’s lost him for a moment, that every part of him has stepped out of her light and into his own deep shadow until she speaks again, her lips like morning sun on the frost of his black neck. She feels like strands of pale sunshine fracturing the dark, and for a moment he is basking in a warmth only he knows he doesn’t deserve. He leans into her touch, eyes blinking closed with a heavy quiet and a grunt of disagreement at that assessment of herself. It is a wonder she does not understand what it is for someone to be given this fragment of herself.
“Terribly dull.” He says, and his voice still sounds like his earlier grunt as he opens his eyes and turns to look at her. “But it is doing wonders for my insomnia.” And there is a part of him that hates the way he searches those dark eyes and the curve of her mouth for any little shade of amusement, the way he craves to be the reason she smiles.
She is changing him.
But he pauses, and there are a hundred minute changes that race through every part of his expression as he considers what it is he wants to ask. It is in the furrow in his brow and the crinkle that appears faintly beside his eyes and mouth. It is the flick of one ear as he considers, and the way his worn golden eyes harden and go soft again, settling somewhere in between with a shade of stubbornness. Then, finally, “What is it you’re running from?” Because he knows it must be something, someone, just as it will be him when she finally acts upon her warning of for now.
“I know when you go down all your darkest roads I would have followed all the way to the graveyard.”
She wonders if he will hate her, eventually.
She wonders if once she disappears from here if he will think of her in disgust, if her face infiltrating his dreams will be met with rage. If he will come across her in the meadow or the forest and she will see that familiar, hardened disappointment on his face.
She has never been good at staying, but it has never mattered because so few actually wanted her to.
But he is too kind compared to the rest. He reminds her of Skellig, and she is so selfish, so love-starved, that she does not stop to think of how trying to love him is going to hurt him. She just knows that he holds her so close when everyone else pushed her away, and though she had warned him this would not be forever - had warned him that his future did not hold her in it - she was doing nothing to make him think her mind could not be swayed.
His teasing makes her laugh, a low hum in the back of her throat when she presses her lips again to his jaw. "You will see what I mean the longer you're with me," and she knows she is doing it again, letting him think that her not forever could lead to eternity, but she cannot seem to stop herself. She dips her head again beneath his, her cheek resting against his chest. She can feel his breath as it fans across the other side of her neck, and for a moment, she relishes in the way that feels, warm and consistent against her skin.
Her lips trail across the slope of his shoulder, considering his question in a heavy kind of silence. She has always run, ever since Dhumin left; ever since she lost the only thing she was ever tethered to. He had been her sun and moon and stars, and without him, she never quite found her way again. He took with him everything that she had been, everything she had been told to be, and when given a chance to build herself up from nothing, she had failed.
“Nothing,” is what she tells him at first, a lightly spoken lie, before a pause, and she adds softly, “and also everything.”
She does not stop touching him, does not lift her warm lips from his cold skin. She kisses his chest where his heart beats, feeling the pulse of it against her lips. “My life is a string of numerous mistakes; most of them brought on by myself. I suppose someday I will either finally outrun them, or just stop making them.”
