"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
careful, child, light the fuse and get away
Because happiness throws a shower of sparks
Being a beloved thing means never having to wonder. Being a beloved thing means never having to be afraid. And she is a beloved thing, isn’t she?
The first child whose name was not like the others. The first child who, born to plain parents, emerged into the soft dawn as something different. And, in the days after her birth, the father stayed. This was perhaps the biggest difference of all.
(The father’s staying did not have much to do with the birth of the girl, though. No, the father’s wanderer’s heart had finally settled. The love of a woman finally became larger than his love for the wandering. There was nothing remarkable about the child, at least no more remarkable than the others, it was simply that she was the first to come along in such a dreadfully long time. She was the reunion, the embodiment of a love that had weathered decades.)
She has been wild since the day she was born, careening through the underbrush alongside the deer she so closely resembles. (Though she still bears a fawn’s spots, even at her age. She has never grown out of them and, because of them, she appears much younger than she is.)
Her laughter echoes sweetly through the forest and she shakes her antlered head, studying the shapes in the shadows. (And remembers, too, a time when the world had been plunged into darkness and the shadows had been a place for all manners of evil to lay in wait. Perhaps she had been frightened then, but she’d had good reason to be. They all had.)
How she delights in the flurry of summertime activity. The buzz of bugs, the soft calling of birds, the slanted rays of sunshine that filter hazy through the canopy overhead. And she is smiling still when a branch cracks, when she turns to investigate, when she calls, “hello?”
It is not often that Daedalus wanders this earth during the day.
Perhaps he should be more appreciative of the sun being a creature built of space itself, but the comet-studded stallion has never adored the light of the sun like he adores the light of the moon and the stars. Dae understands the needed cycle of day to night—the perpetual and constant light to dark; and yet he often shirks the heat of the day, expressive eyes squinting ruefully toward the sky. The sun dappling light between shadow on the forest floor reminds him of the dotted stars within the night sky, so he sighs in quiet, perhaps joyful, defeat.
She is much more an image of joy when Daedalus spots her. Merely flitting glimpses of chestnut among the lush summertime growth, Dear reminds him of all the sweetest pieces of his childhood. He only blinks and breathes for a few seconds longer before deciding to step forward.
Her brilliant hello follows the clumsy snapping of a twig beneath Dae’s wide hoof. He curses to himself but can’t deny the handsome grin that begs to brighten his face. He approaches Dear in a friendly attempt to fully reveal himself.
“Hello,” Dae answers, voice rich with honey and chocolate.
careful, child, light the fuse and get away
Because happiness throws a shower of sparks
He steps into the light and kicks the air clean out of her chest.
She goes absolutely still, trembling in the way that deer do, stricken.
(Not with fear, no. Not with fear because he is smiling at her, he is asking her name in a voice dripping with sweetness.
It is awe instead. Wonder. She has never seen anything that has bore even a passing resemblance to the wondrous creature standing in front of her.)
She sucks in a sharp breath, leveling her soft gaze with his face. (After appraising the planets suspended in the air around him, the planets that seem to belong to him.) And she scrambles for a smile, too. It is a beaming thing, unbridled.
She takes a step toward him. (Is this because she is drawn to him literally or simply figuratively?) She tilts her antlered head, catching her want to reach out and touch him between her teeth so as to keep from reaching for him.
“Dear,” she murmurs, lending it absolutely no thought. It is an automatic response.
She is entranced.
“What is your name?” She asks this insistently, as if this is the thing that really matters. Her name is of little consequence because she is of little consequence. How could a small, spotted thing matter at all when there is someone like this out in the world?
“Where did you come from?” she asks after a beat, mesmerized.
Colorful planets orbit the stallion’s head as he bends to peer closer at Dear. The smile on his face matches how sweet his previous words were. The fawn is much smaller than him, delicate and flighty in all the ways Dae has never been. An even opposite to him, somehow balanced in their interaction.
“Daedalus,” he answers quietly, a low-pitched voice rolling gently in Dear’s direction.
“Where did I come from?” Daedalus echoes back to Dear, charmed by the utter sincerity she seems to possess. He blinks as a sly but good-natured smirk paints his mouth. He draws the slightest bit closer to her before whispering conspiratorially, “A tree.”
Glittering arrays of stars and comets twirl around the stallion as he lifts his head back up to stare into the swaying canopy above them. He sees Isilya in the endless shades of green, hears her sweet voice in the susurrations of summertime. With such gentle memories in his mind, Dae settles back comfortably (perhaps a bit arrogantly), and stares at the fawn.
“Has anyone ever told you that you’re quite disarming?” he asks, a low chuckle following.
She likes the way his mouth moves, each shift betraying some new emotion, and she tries in vain not to stare at it. (The deer do not wear their emotions so plainly, their mouths so rarely twitching with amusement or bewilderment.) How bewitching the soft curve of his smirk, she thinks, but shifts her gaze then to the slow orbit of the planets as they circle his head.
(She will dream about this for weeks, she’s certain of it. She will never forget this stranger who smiles and speaks in honeyed tones and tells her his name so easily it’s almost as if she hadn’t even needed to ask for it.)
A tree, he tells her, and she blinks in surprise. How could a tree have birthed something so spectacular? She’s seen so many thousands of trees in her life, but she’s never seen one capable of this kind of magic. And how strange that something so intrinsically connected to the sky could come from something so firmly rooted to the earth.
She watches as he lifts his head and feels one strong pang of longing when he turns his gaze to the canopy overhead. She wants to call his attention back to her because the forest is suddenly cold without the weight of his eyes. He laughs and heat pools in her cheeks as she herself looks away, bashful.
“No,” she says, smiling, shaking her antlered head. But it has been so long since she’d last spoken to anyone capable of speaking back.
“Love,” she answers, peering up at him, doe-eyed. And it’s true and she has always known it and it has always been the most important thing.
“But I’m ordinary,” she continues, “compared to you, I’m nothing at all.”
More and more of Dae’s rugged armor falls from his body as Dear charms him into oblivion. Typically charming himself—and touched with a bit of arrogance—he doesn’t often find himself at loss for smooth words. But the longer he peers at the little fawn in front of him, the less he has to say. It’s as if his tongue dries up in his mouth, curling inward as every wicked response dies in his throat.
“Love is far from ordinary, Dear,” Dae finally answers, nearly puzzled.
Looking at her, smaller than average and delicately antlered, the stallion knows she is anything but ordinary. Flighty and beautiful, but certainly not ordinary. His bright eyes stray to the spots dotting her back and a wistful smile upturns his lips.
“I think,” he starts, conspiratorial once again, “that coming from love—and to know you come from such love—in a place like this is to be celebrated.” He leans down as he speaks, voice as low and slow as a lazy summer thunderstorm.
“I’ve never seen anyone quite like you . . . or been disarmed in the way you’ve disarmed me.” He smiles and it’s so genuine and handsome that it’s almost wicked. There’s a warmth petering out of his chest, a sincere and almost intoxicating enjoyment, as he looks away—embarrassed.
Love is the only thing she has ever known, she has feasted on it from the earliest days of her youth, basked in the warmth of it, turned her face into it and drank it in with the understanding that the well of it would never run dry.
But that love had only ever been familial. Her mother, her father, her siblings, the herd of deer she considered some extension of her family. And she has loved friends, too. She has loved some small part of every creature she has encountered.
But she has never been in love. She has never loved anyone the way her mother loves her father. She does not know what it means to give your heart away entirely, to trust someone else to look after it. Heat pools in her cheeks as she considers this, embarrassed, perhaps, by her naivety.
“It’s not?” she asks, the question coming out in a kind of timid quiet. He dips his head closer, as if sharing with her some great secret, and a spike of adrenaline surges through her. Not out of fear, no, but a kind of thrill. Because no friend has ever spoken to her this way, no one at all has ever smiled at her this way.
She blinks up at him, breathless. She had been raised to believe that she was everything, just as her siblings had been. But this has a different feel altogether. It sets her heart to pounding, the corners of her mouth itching in the beginnings of some new, shy smile.
“I’m…” she begins and then stops herself, uncertain what to say. She wants to insist that he is the special one, that he is spectacular in ways that she is not and never will be. Instead, she shifts, glancing away and murmuring softly, “thank you.” Because it is thrilling to feel as if she, too, is something worth marveling.
“My parents have always told me that they love me and that they love each other,” she explains, drawing her focus back to his face. (Stricken, again, by the wonder of it.) “Weren’t your parents in love? Didn’t they tell you how much you were loved?”
If there is an emotion that Daedalus knows more intimately than brooding, it is love. Isilya surely loved all of her children equally, but the stallion grew up telling himself he was made with a little extra love. Because his mother spent months breathing his life into a tree, whispering to him, and welcoming him heartily when he was finally big enough to stumble onto the ground—pure magic.
“Touched by the moon,” she had whispered. “Daedalus.”
“You’re very welcome,” Dae murmurs, gravelly voice just an octave above a whisper. He shifts backward, leaning to one side to get a better view of his new companion. The delicate nature of Dear’s doe-like features reminds him of all the little details Isilya had molded into his creation. He smiles, warmed.
A quiet, gentle laugh escapes Dae’s throat as he considers her question. His gaze flicks to all the green around them as the perfect words form on the tip of his tongue.
“I have one parent, my mom. Isilya. She’s a magician. We lived in Tephra before . . .” he trails off, feeling that sharp ache that only comes with missing something you don’t know if you’ll ever get back. “But, ah, yes. She always told me how much she loved me. And I always told her she’d never love me as much as I love her and the sky. She always laughed, and told me she loved me again.” There’s a wistful smile on Dae’s face as all the sweetest memories of his childhood splash playfully against the Tephran beaches in his mind.
“I don’t know love like your parents have, but I’ve only ever rarely seen it exist,” he finally adds, a shockingly shy smile on his face.
She wonders what it might be like to touch him. (Would she come away kissed with stardust? Could she touch the planets that orbit around him and know what it’s like to be caught in his orbit, too? Would she ever be the same again if she did?) But she does not, because he is a cosmic thing and she is bound to the earth. Because he has not invited her to and she has always been so much like those deer, smiling but shy.
He laughs and the sound of it echoes in each chamber of her heart. It vibrates through the marrow of her bones and her expression softens around something lax, something without pretense. She is wholly in the moment, lost to the sound of it. And she leans into the story of his mother, the magician who’d crafted him in Tephra, before…
(Before. She remembers, though she had watched the changes from the forest, safe amongst the deer there. She had watched and been untouched by it, certain her parents and each of her siblings were safe, too.)
She cannot stop herself now. He is smiling something faint when she finally reaches out to graze his shoulder. There is some strange tremor at the heart of her to think of him with his mother, smiling, insisting that he loved her more. She smiles, too, a thing that’s barely there at all as she draws away to meet his gaze.
“I’m certain you’ll find it someday, Daedalus,” she says and she means it fiercely. Because he is a spectacular thing, a thing made of magic and wonder, because the sound of his laughter reverberates in the bones long after he’s gone quiet.
This time, she does not argue. She just tilts her delicate head and says, “so are you.”
