[private] my bad habits lead to wide eyes staring at space

[Nashua]

He isn't sure how he knows, but Nashua is concrete in his conviction that Illuminae could never be the kind of evil that Gale was.

Nashua can see the shadows that come in waves off her two-toned pelt, that way that they make her appear as something obscure and hazy. But he is absolutely sure that the kind of darkness that is in him (and what of his children, he anguishes? What has he passed on to them? Was there a legacy of darkness waiting for them as well?) - the kind that he is convinced he would find in his half-brother - is not in her. Illuminae could have left him to the dark and the cold; could have left behind for the monsters and Nash wouldn't have lived to see the light of day again. 

Like his mother and brother, he might have ceased to exist if it hadn't been for the winged mare before him.

Under the cloak of her shadows, they remain hidden from the rest of Taiga. They are afforded a kind of privacy that Nashua - as King of the North and then as a father, as a mate and a brother and a son - is rarely given. "It sounds as if you are underestimating yourself," he replies against her firm objections that she is not kind. He doesn't know any more of her history than she's shared with him, that she thinks herself more like her father than her mother. Knowing neither of them, the stoic pegasus counters: "I think you are yourself." He wants to tell her that regardless of who Illuminae thinks she is, Nashua thinks that, "Perhaps, I was only a beginning." He might have been the first that she had saved, but as his mind struggles to grasp those dying moments - the way that his heart rattled between his ribs, the way that his soul shook against his bones demanding to be set free - and the striped stallion turns his blazed face towards her dark.

"There might come a day that you surprise yourself," Nashua murmurs. "Darkness is on your skin, Illuminae, but there is also light." The gold that adorns her wings, that covers half of her slender frame; one eye shrouded by shadows and another gilded by sunlight. His emerald green ones eagerly greet hers. "Don't dismiss that half of yourself so willingly." He adds, hoping that she might come to see the good in her as he did. "But I wouldn't doubt that there is mercy even in your shadows."

Illuminae presses her forehead against his, and Nash rests his head against hers, feeling the exhaustion of the past few months as a heavy weight. A quiet moment of respite before he had to return to the world as the leader of the North and whatever else was demanded of him. He listens as she tells him that these burdens might not be his to bear, but those of his siblings. And to that, all Nash can say is: "Why should anybody else have to pay for the sins of this bloodline?"

@illuminae

[illuminae]

It makes her seethe with pain and fury that this conversation has turned itself on her, that he is so intent on proving her goodness when she is sure there is none but what exists out of a strange, inexplicable affection for him. “I underestimate nothing.” She says, and she feels like there must be wounds opening across the chimeric white and black of her skin because every part of her hurts to exist in this moment, every part of her feels made of broken glass. But it is so important that he understands the nature of her, so important that she not be yet another piece of trust misplaced and returned to him broken. “Don’t you remember what happened when night eclipsed day? The dark was like a sickness.” She is like a sickness. There is pain on her face and in her strange eyes, pain in the way she steps back from him like it could ever be enough distance to keep him safe.

“Stop, please stop.” She thinks she must be begging, but this pain inside her chest makes the words feel flat, feel hollow, feel like shards of a heart that had been created broken. He makes her sound like someone good, speaking of her light and her mercy. Maybe that is why it feels so easy to love him, and maybe it isn’t love at all but some need to keep close the only one who has ever seen her as something worthy, something worthwhile. But she knows what that looks like, and she knows that she is not it. Not like her mother, maybe not even like her father. She is something caustic, something that seethes and ruins, something that had been made to thrive in the violent dark of a broken world.

“Then I’ve misled you in some way.” She tells him, and she makes her eyes as hard as stones, as hard as the frown on her mouth, as hard as that beating thing inside her chest so busy falling and tripping over itself. “Because I would take you from your family if I thought I could ever convince you to stay here with me.” It makes sense, suddenly, this chimera of colors split across her skin, the bright halo and the dark halo, the part of her that is angel and the part that is shadow; in this moment she is both. She means every word of this dark secret, she is the ugliness she speaks of. But it is also a lie, an ugliness that feels like erosion inside her chest. “I would keep you, Nashua.” Because he is the oddity that anchors her, he is the good that makes her want to be better. He is everything when she only knows how to be nothing. “My shadows are deeper than you will ever know.” Yet even they seem to need him. “I will ruin everything if you let me, because all I have ever wanted is to be what you think you see in me, but I am not that.” A promise, a warning, the sound of her heart tearing itself apart against the blade of her ribs. “And if I lose you, I lose that too.”

But he is not hers, not even to lose.

The darkness shrouding them falters as she takes more steps back away from him, masking this unraveling inside her chest with distance that will never, ever be enough. “You can’t trust me.” It seems out of place, but there is a note of pleading in the tone of her voice, an ache that shadows firmness until the lines go blurry. “Maybe, subconsciously, you are drawn to me because I am like what you know.” She means the treachery of his family, of his father and his siblings and the sin of his bloodline. Her voice is quieter now, like it knows these words feel like shards of glass in her mouth, like it knows she’ll bleed if she says it any louder. “I don’t want you to pay for my sins either, Nashua. I think you should go home.” It is a new kind of dark that blossoms like a void inside her chest, cold and fisted, tangled in the brokenness of her ribs. It is a loneliness unlike what she has known before, it is the loss of light in her dark world.

ILLUMINAE

we can't dream when we're awake,
or fall in love with a heart too strong to break

@Nashua