"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
There are times he misses it.
The way the joints had ached.
The way he’d wondered whether he was a real thing at all.
How he’d hid from the sun, tucked into the shadows of some small-mouthed cave. How he’d pulled the fog around him to protect himself from the light. How he had laid there in the dark and keened.
It had been the pain that had raised him, after all. He had been a child just as Livinia and Beyza had been children, but he had also been something altogether different. Something strange, even then. Gaunt and sinister and unnatural, the breathing labored and the voice thin. Such a troublesome creature, Jamie.
He returns to Pangea now. He had been powerless in the beginning, meek and meager. Pathetic even. Pitiful in the way the pain crippled him. And now? Now the power is almost boundless. Now he can drape the fog across his shoulders like a cloak.
And with each step he takes he grows smaller, shrinking, stepping steadily back in time until he is that child again. Until his movements are stilted and he has to grit his teeth with the vicious aching in his joints. But gone are Beyza and Livinia. Gone are all the others. It is quiet here and he thinks perhaps he is the only creature that stirs as he limps toward the cave where he spent his youth tucked into the darkness.
The air is damp inside but it smells so terribly familiar. The shadows close in around him, welcoming him home as he lies down there. He is a child again, he is weak. Every terrible thing he has done has not been done yet. If he listens hard enough he can hear children laughing outside.
For the entire trip, Beyza doesn’t know why she is pulled here, back to the place she was born. Back to the remnants of when she was someone else. Or when she had convinced herself she was someone else. The truth of her had always been there, warm and lovely deep in her core, waiting patiently for the frost and outrage to thaw on the outside.
When she passes the border to Pangea she senses two things — the first is the realization that she had come here to find a trace of her twin. Caledonia, the sun to her moon. The sister who was truly warm all along, and who Beyza had wasted time feeling like a shadow of. The ache for that missing piece had been so easy to keep locked tight within her amongst all the other things she so expertly represses. Now, in the place where they had once roamed and played and been frightened, that box opens up and fills her with longing.
The second thing she notices is that Jamie is here. The inky traces of his death magic float like rot around her.
Beyza will hide herself away, she will lock herself up tight just like her emotions somewhere to keep her children as safe as she can, but today she will not run from this. In a flash, she materializes just outside of a cave she recognizes from their youth. Where the strange sickly boy had once enchanted her and she had seen so much potential.
The unnatural glow of her coat burns hot as white fire, refusing to let the shadows and the past squash it as she enters the cave.
And there he is.
Not the stallion he had become, but the young colt. One of her first friends. She cannot imagine he would be doing this on purpose, returning himself to this weaker state, so perhaps this is only a trick Pangea is playing on her. A ghost of the past and not the reaper himself.
So she says the name she has not spoken for years, quiet and dull like the rocky walls around them. “Jamie.”
The child stirs, thinks perhaps it is his mother calling for him. Or maybe Livinia. The child blinks open his strange yellow eyes and cringes away from the light. He moans, as he had always moaned. He turns his freakish head, though he can feel the way the light touches his skin. Or what might have been skin, had he been born a real thing and not something more like an idea.
He draws in a long, rattling breath. He is trapped here, the child, too weak to summon a shadow portal to spirit him away to someplace dark and safe.
Jamie.
She does not say it again, it simply echoes. Echoes like a dawning. A realization. The light is familiar. How many times has the child cringed away from it? How many times has he tucked himself behind his sister to spare himself the pain of it?
Beyza, he realizes. Beyza. But this cannot be Beyza, he thinks. Unless, perhaps, his mother has taught her ways to manipulate time. Unless she is coming to him from some distant future where she is no longer a child as he is a child.
He turns that ugly head in her direction but cannot bring himself to open his eyes. “Beyza?” he asks and then drags in another sickly breath. He summons what strength he has to rise, eyes still closed tightly against her light. “Did my mother teach you this?”
He closes his eyes against her light and that instinct to dim her glow still exists, much to Beyza's annoyance. She hopes it is only because he is masquerading as his former self, that colt she had befriended, the one she once felt sympathy for. But she cannot believe this is anything other than a trick so her glow brightens. Just a little. Keep those yellow eyes closed, keep him from coming too close.
She reminds herself that this may be a trap and anything she can do to remind him that she is untouchable is worth it.
If saying his name aloud was strange, it doesn't come close to hearing her own rasped out. She feels the sickly inhale of his breath like a breeze against her skin, so familiar and so foreign at the same time.
"Your mother?" The truth of it was that Beyza had not thought about Anaxarete in a long time. Her life had been so filled to the brim with parental figures and mentors and she does know that at one time she had revered the grey magician. But a lot has changed since then.
And because of that, the mention of Anaxarete confuses her. Not only was she a piece of Beyza's past but she would have assumed it was the same for Jamie. The Reaper didn't seem like someone who checked in with his mom.
Then again, this wasn't exactly the Reaper in front of her now. "Did she do this to you?" She asks quietly, her unblinking gaze regarding him with a cold version of curiosity.
All her warmth is kept safe, deep in the boxes where she parcels off the pieces of her that need to be protected or buried, and she can only hope she will know which box is which when it is safe to be herself again.
Well yes, he wants to say, of course his mother has done this to him. Of course the shadow-magician has crafted him from those very shadows. She has forced those shadows into the shape of him, given him these strange yellow eyes and this strange ink-black mouth. Sometimes he thinks that she, too, put the ache in his bones (if you can call them bones). Sometimes he thinks that she must be punishing him for something. He does not know yet that he will spend his entire life trying to become something that Anaxarete might be proud of.
“You must not hold it against her,” he says, quiet, almost pleading. It all sounds like pleading though, doesn’t it? When it comes out of his mouth, sick. Weak. He cringes against the throbbing in his joints as he shuffles toward his friend. “Beyza,” he murmurs, “she only wants what is best for us.”
But this isn’t true, is it? It has never been true. But his mother has always been a stranger to him. Beautiful and unreachable. Perhaps he had thought that being a shadow-thing might have made her love him by default but that does not seem to be the case. She is more enamored with the young magician in front of him, but he does not resent Beyza for this.
“Look what she has done for you,” he continues, grimacing, referencing of course this new ability to bend time. (How it would have terrified this child-thing to know that it had been, in fact, he who had bent time. Or not time, really, but himself.) He grins, but there is worry in the Reaper’s brow. “What a gift this is.”
jamie
