"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
Watch the coward slink out of the shadows.
Watch him cast those glacial blue eyes upon the folds of earth, the valleys, and wonder where he might find her.
(He has not seen her since before, learned only in passing of her resurrection, and thought of how he had failed her, too. It must be embarrassment that kept him from her, the yellow belly of his cowardice.)
He emerges but he does not wish to be seen. He emerges but he shackles that dodgy gaze to the earth underfoot and does not lift it. (Because he cannot bear to think that they might look at him, that they might perceive him, that they will know just by looking at him that he has failed all of the most important souls in his life.)
There is no death worse than any other, but this one twists a knife in his chest. This one is a blade cutting away the meat of his heart. (He had fled her death just as he had fled Este’s inevitable demise, just as he had fled Mazikeen’s.)
He sways on his feet.
He does not know where to find her.
So he wanders back to the place where it all started. There in the darkness, where his mother had curled herself around Este, bled herself dry just to breathe life into his sister. And he had gasped for air at the edge of the forest, desperate for relief.
How dare he show his face here?
But he has to apologize. Because he had not known, because he had not stopped it, he had not warned her.
He rounds a bend in the high light of afternoon and the place looks so different now, though it still reeks of death. But he drags in a long breath, lets it pollute his lungs, holds it hard and fast as he finally lifts his gaze from the dirt.
She wonders if it is something wrong with her, that all of her children are such broken things. She watches each of them as they struggle with their various curses and hardships, and the guilt gnaws at her in a way that she cannot shake. It must be her fault, she reasons; it must be something to do with her own wretched blood that she has bled into them, that her own misfortune turns itself into the thing they inherit most from her. They break a thousand different ways, and sometimes they come to her and sometimes they don’t, and either way she feels like a failure.
She fails to keep them safe and she fails to not be something they think they need to hide away from, but how can she blame them? She has never managed to piece her own life back together. It is no wonder they assume she cannot do it for them.
And they are all painfully beautiful even in their brokenness — all of them lovely and striking in their own ways, though none of it is because of her. Her heart was known for being a foolish thing, and when she learned that she could not keep those that she tried to love, she learned she could take something from them that would be hers forever.
Even if it is wrong to have children as the keepsakes of romances that were harder to hold onto than smoke, she does not regret it.
When she sees Sela in the golden afternoon light, when her starless-dark eyes find his, she does not see him for all the things that he counts as faults. She sees him only as another thing too perfect to have come from her, an angel carved from ice—another version of his father’s darkness combating against her light. “Sela,” she says his name, soft and almost a whisper, afraid that speaking any louder will send him back to the outskirts he always seemed to prefer. Another failure on her part, because he had been born during the eclipse with a twin not meant for the dark, and so much of her energy had been spent keeping Este alive that Sela inadvertently fell through the cracks.
“I’ve missed you,” she tells him once she has closed the gap between them, taking in the familiar yet unfamiliar angles of his face, because he has grown since the last time she saw him. There is a pain that alights in her eyes, an ember that never quite goes out as she stares at him, all the unspoken apologies sitting in a tangled knot in her chest where they never learn to take shape on her tongue.
AND IT WAS REAL ENOUGH TO GET ME THROUGH — BUT I SWEAR YOU WERE THERE
The word alights on his tongue, but he does not speak it. Mother.
She stands there like a vision, as if he has divined her, as if she has been forced into being purely by his wanting.
(Something shifts in the coward’s chest, something long-dormant, a kind of softness that has not existed in him since the darkness—is it fear?)
He swallows at the sound of his name. Because she was the first who ever uttered it, as if to speak him into existence. He blinks once, slow, eyelashes fluttering. He wants to turn his face away in shame. It has been so many years now since she had curled herself around his sister and he had choked on the stench of death. It had been his failure then and it is his failure now. It has always belonged to him.
But he does not look away until she comes closer. It is a reflex, perhaps, as if he worries she might see something in his face. Some dark truth. As if she might read the reality of him in the glacier-blue eyes.
(He has learned to breathe around the stench of death, though there is something different in the smell of this one. Because, not only had he not been able to prevent it, he hadn’t even tried. These are the worst, he has found. These are the deaths that wrap themselves so fiercely around his neck that he could not breathe even if he wanted to.)
“I missed you,” he echoes. And he means it, of course he does, but there had been some small comfort in the separation. Because it had meant he did not have to confront his failure. He exhales a shuddering sigh, remembering. Remembering the rift, its jagged edges, how the blood had gone cold and all of the light had gone out of the world when he had learned of her death.
There is a brief moment of quiet before he says, “I should have killed him myself, I’m sorry.”
And the coward chances a glance at his mother and thinks, there are so many things I should have done.
04-25-2022, 07:57 AM (This post was last modified: 04-25-2022, 08:52 PM by Ryatah.)
Ryatah
WHEN I WAS SHIPWRECKED I THOUGHT OF YOU
IN THE CRACKS OF LIGHT I DREAMED OF YOU
His apology snags against an already-existing crack in her chest, and pulls it apart just a little further.
Because she wonders what she has done to make her children think that she needs to be avenged; that they must become killers themselves when something happens to her. For all her faults (and they are innumerable), murder has never been one of them—not even when Carnage had lifted her own hoof over the paralyzed xenomoph’s head, positioned her so perfectly to where all she needed to do was do it. But she had looked down and all she could see was Ripley, and she thinks that it would be a different version of the same thing in every situation. She has loved too many, has tossed her own roots so far that they were tangled everywhere. Anyone that she was faced with killing she is certain she would see the echoes of someone she loves, or had once loved, and she would never be able to see the action through.
Or perhaps she is just a coward, and these are her excuses—just as innumerable as her failures.
Perhaps the fault does not lie in the idea that she has failed her children because they think they need to seek revenge, but rather she is the flawed one because she seems to be the only one that does not look for it.
“Sela,” she murmurs his name again, and she steps closer to him. Gently, she brushes her nose against his cheek, follows a glimmering crack of ice along his skin with her touch before withdrawing. “You don’t need to kill anyone. I would never want, or expect, you to do something like that. I would never want anyone to have a reason to come after you, and especially not at my expense.” She doesn’t know if Gale would have done that, but she does know that part of his fixation had been on angels specifically—like Sela. She does not think Gale held any special dislike for her, and that if it had not been her, it would have been Sela, Este, or Baptiste. She’s glad it was her, even if she had not been entirely aware of the sacrifice when she made it.
AND IT WAS REAL ENOUGH TO GET ME THROUGH — BUT I SWEAR YOU WERE THERE
