"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
She doesn’t know why everything suddenly felt so claustrophobic.
The same sights, the same faces, and that same lingering anticipation of knowing she was going to see someone with the ability to send her spiraling. Usually, she thrived off those feelings. When she felt so tightly wound, like someone had sucked every ounce of her energy and forced it into a space several sizes too small, and all it would take was one single spark to set her off like a bomb. That was when she was driven to being stupid, careless, and reckless, and that thrilling, intoxicating fear of not knowing how it was going to end was her worst addiction.
But today she is tired of their eyes – strangers and acquaintances alike. She is tired of the way their eyes rest a little too long on her golden halo, or the brand still on her hip, or the not yet healed marks Atrox’s teeth had left.
She is tired, and she is restless with the child that stirs inside of her. For the first time since coming back here, she decides to not give birth in Tephra.
She does not seek out Heartfire when she gets to Nerine. She knows she will know that she is here, and why. Instead she makes her way to the coastline, craving the sound of the waves and the taste of the sea breeze. It reminded her of her first home — before the Valley, and even before that prison-like jungle. She follows a steep but well-worn path that descends to a sandy bar, and with the sheer faces of the cliffs at her back, she stands at the edge of the shore.
Pain rolls through her like the waves that stretch across the beach, and her dark, sable eyes close as she inhales sharply, before releasing on a trembling exhale. Her eyes open at the feel of a cold raindrop against her skin, and then another. A frigid gust of wind twists and twirls the long locks of her mane, and she is not at all surprised that her youngest is choosing to be born during a sudden storm. Just like the rest of them, nothing could ever be normal.
Nerine was in no short supply of caves, at least, and as the rain fell in torrents she took refuge inside the nearest one. The opening was just barely adequately sized, with large boulders piled above and around. She steps through anyway, her golden aura lighting up the dark as she makes her way towards the back of it.
Rain dripping from her mane, she paces and fidgets restlessly, until sweat mixes with her already damp skin and steam rises from her neck and back. She stops only to sigh in frustration, her wings shifting anxiously at the intensity of the pain that relentlessly grips her, and listening to the wind as it whistled sharply outside.
I tried to sell my soul last night Funny, he wouldn't even take a bite
Ah, hell. This fucking rain.
The moment he’d finally gotten off his ass to actually do something, of course it would start to fucking rain. He might have tried to fight through it anyway, but he wasn’t particularly craving a death by drowning. Too damned easy. Besides, he is NOT in the mood to be a fucking child again.
Not that he ever is, but hell, especially not now.
He really has no goddamned clue where he’d managed to land. A beach. Some cliffs. Same fucking thing on a different day. What did it matter anyway? He doesn’t know who in their right mind would be trawling a beach to kick strangers off in a thunderstorm anyway. And if they were, they were clearly idiots.
Nevermind what that said about him.
Grumbling some most likely unsavory things under his breath, wings held half-cocked beneath the torrent of rain, he slogs towards a cave opening he sees in the cliff wall. Thing better damn well be uninhabited or he’d uninhabit them right out of that fucking cave himself.
As luck would have it however, the moment he sets foot inside the dim confines, a low rumble vibrates the very air around him, raising the hair along the entire length of his spine. As the sound grows, he pins his ears, teeth baring as he spins to face the entrance as dust begins rising rapidly. Not that that would do any fucking good against he fucking rockslide crashing over the entrance of goddamned cave he’d just entered.
As the sound of crashing and tumbling rock fades, he expects to be met by pitch darkness. Instead, a faint glow draws his eye. And of all the things he might have expected to see, her pale, lovely face is damned well not one of them.
she fell for the idea of him and ideas were a dangerous thing to love
She feels the rocks begin to slide almost before she hears them – a faint vibration that radiates to her bones, and the way panic bubbles up in her chest so quickly almost makes her forget the physical pain wrenching inside of her. She turns just as the rocks begin to crash, swallowing up what little light had filtered through the opening of the cave. Heartfire is the only reason she does not entirely succumb to the hysteria that threatens to take hold of her; she is certain that the Nerinian queen does not let much slip past her, that she would know she was here and be able to disintegrate an escape. Her mind travels unwillingly to what would happen if Heartfire doesn’t find her, but fretting over it now was futile, especially when there were more pressing matters.
It takes her a moment to realize there is a figure emerging from the dust as it settles, but when her eyes adjust to the dark – a brief flicker with her infrared vision, just enough to make out that the mass is equine – it is an entirely new brand of fear that she feels. To be trapped in here, in this situation, with a stranger.
Until she sees his familiar face, and hears his familiar voice, but the relief that she feels is fleeting.
“Ashhal,” her soft voice trembles off the walls of the cave, and she shrinks backwards, away from him. “You can’t be here,” the words are spoken tautly, and she knows that she isn’t making sense. It didn’t matter why he was here, or that he shouldn’t be here, or that this was absolutely the last situation either of them wanted to be in – she had seen the rocks fall, and he was trapped just as much as she was. He didn’t have a choice but to be here.
“Why would you be anywhere near Nerine anyway?” There is an uncharacteristic shortness to her voice, almost accusatory, followed by a sharp inhale of breath and a clenching of her jaw at the pain that grips her in waves. On a slow exhale, her face softens, but the tension does not leave her eyes as she watches him and whispers apologetically, “I’m sorry.” Another step back, and she feels the roughness of the wall press into her skin, having lengthened the distance between them as much as she possibly could. He was already blurring at the edges, as she slowly sank to the ground with a low, stifled groan, and while somewhere in the back of her mind there was an ever-mounting anxiety at him being here, she knew that in a few moments she would be too distracted to care at how irritated he was going to be.
I tried to sell my soul last night Funny, he wouldn't even take a bite
“The fuck you mean I can’t be here?” he snaps, scowl etching lines into his face. Not that there’s anyone else he’d rather be trapped in a cave with. She at least wasn’t annoying as shit. “What the hell are you doing here?”
Ok, well, to be fair, anyone would be grumpy as fuck after they’d just witnessed a rockslide locking them in a cave. Certainly he’d never heard her come anywhere as close to anger as she’d just sounded a few moments ago. Damn. Maybe this was his chance. Get her all nice and riled up. Pass the fucking time in way more… diverting past times.
Sounded as good a plan as any to him.
“Fucking Nerine,” he growls, not so much as to her as it is an expression of his irritation at realizing where he’d landed. “Of course it’d be fucking Nerine.” Though it should not be possible, his scowl manages to somehow deepen. “Why are you in Nerine?”
He could turn these questions back on her all damn day if he needed to. Mostly because he doesn’t actually have an answer for her.
Of course she chooses that moment to shrink back against the wall, a pained groan escaping her as she sinks slowly to the floor. “Shit,” he mutters, realizing belatedly that apparently all was not well. “Fuck. Are you hurt? Goddamit, tell me you’re not fucking hurt.”
He inches closer, squinting at her through the dim haze. Hell and damnation. Blood had never bothered him, of course, but he’s not a fucking healer. He had no clue what the hell he’d do if he were stuck in here with an injured Ryatah.
she fell for the idea of him and ideas were a dangerous thing to love
She considers not answering him when he asks her why she was in Nerine, but she thinks better of it. This wasn’t the time to argue with him, even though he was one of the few capable of coaxing her into being irritable and short, and ignoring him was tempting. “I was tired of being in Tephra,” she forces her voice to remain steady, ignoring the way her muscles tighten and coil uncomfortably. “So I came to see Heartfire, when that storm hit and then the rocks slid, and now I’m trapped in here with you.” She finishes on a frustrated sigh, shifting her wings again restlessly.
Any other time, she would have found this amusing – the idea of him being so agitated at being locked in with her, as though it was the most terrible thing that could possibly happen to him, even though they both knew exactly how they would pass the time. But this was not the ideal situation, and while she is not afraid of Ashhal, she is afraid of how he will react. She has never bothered to introduce him to their other three children; she knew he didn’t care, and she decided a long time ago that it was better if most of her children never met their fathers. That it was better that they never know that they were, to put it simply, unwanted. It was her fault that she picked the men that she did; it was her fault that she found herself in the same situation over and over, and even though she was hardly a good mother, she always hoped that sparing her children the pain of being openly rejected by their fathers was the right choice.
“I’m not hurt,” she answers him, her voice having softened as her eyes drifted close, trying to block him, and everything else, out. “Your child just has poor timing.”
However he responds after that, she doesn’t hear him. She presses her pale cheek to the ground, and she stops fighting against the agony that courses through her. With muscles drawn taut beneath her porcelain skin, she quiets the sounds that build in her throat – everything felt too loud in here, every sharp intake of breath, and every cry bounced off the walls. She succeeds, more or less, and with the tendrils of her mane clinging to her damp neck by the time she is done, the filly finally slips free.
Still breathless, she sits up, shifting until her mouth finds the wet, shivering body of her daughter and drawing her close. Even in this damp newborn state and with only the dim glow of her mother’s aura, Ryatah can see that she is white – like her – and with small wings, like Ashhal’s. And the more she stared at her face, the more she saw her father there; and that made her heart twist in her chest, the way it always did. Because she was blessed – or cursed – with children that reminded her of their fathers, in one way or the other, so that she might not ever escape them. “She looks like you,” she says in a tone that is oddly flat, her nearly black eyes flickering towards where he stands in the dark, refusing to give up any kind of emotion.
She stands, but with her head still lowered she presses her nose into the little girl’s side, her voice soft and inaudible as she murmurs encouragement into the baby-soft curls of her mane.
I tried to sell my soul last night Funny, he wouldn't even take a bite
Any other time, he might have enjoyed her irritability. Hell, any other time, he would’ve been trying to take advantage of it. But her denial is sure as shit not what he had been expecting to hear. So much so that, for the first few minutes, he’s absolutely fucking positive he must’ve heard her wrong.
Because there was simply no way in hell he had meant to say it was his child.
In a sense, it’s something of a relief to know she’s not hurt. Not really. Of course, any sense of relief is completely overshadowed by the fucking bomb she’d just so casually dropped. He’s not entirely sure how long he stares at her with an utterly blank expression on his face. Suffice it to say, probably at least long enough for her to wonder if he’d completely lost his god-damned marbles. Which, to be fair, he’s not entirely sure he hasn’t.
Then, quite abruptly, on a low, sharp exhale, he mutters “Fuck.”
Without another fucking word, he spins around, stalking right back to the exit that had, by some cruel stroke of fate, closed behind him. Face darkened by a scowl, he starts striking ferociously at the boulders blocking his way, even going so far as to turn around and heave great, forceful kicks at the immoveable stone. As it becomes more and more clear what a fruitless damned endeavor this is, he hurls several last, desperate kicks at the blockage. “GOD.” Kick. “FUCKING.” Kick. “DAMMIT.” Kick.
Breath coming in great bellows, he stops, ears pinned, pale skin sweaty, dusty, and bleeding from half a dozen knicks caused by flying stone chips before finally admitting defeat.
He’s not sure how long he stands there, but when the sounds of straining from the rear of the cave finally quiet, he closes his eyes. Her voice, soft and oddly flat as it echoes through the cave, brings not just confirmation of a newborn filly, but affirmation that it’s his.
God. Fucking. Dammit.
“No she doesn’t,” he growls after a long moment of silence, refusing to open his eyes to look.
she fell for the idea of him and ideas were a dangerous thing to love
He’s angry, because of course he is. Maybe angry isn’t the right word – because she has seen real anger, the kind that makes her blood freeze and her heart stop. The kind that makes her afraid of dying while simultaneously hoping that when it does come it is at least fast. Ashhal does not inspire fear in her the way that real, palpable anger does. She is not afraid of him hurting her; not physically. And if there was even a shred of a chance that he could hurt her emotionally, that was something she had walled off a long time ago.
Because everything about her was a contradiction – an angel with the tainted soul, a heart that loves too much and yet doesn’t love at all.
And so if his denial bothers her, it never has the chance to show. She doesn’t know why his irate reaction suddenly makes her miss Skellig – she always missed him, of course, but something about this situation sparks it with such a fresh intensity that she thinks her heart might split in half. Maybe because he is the only one that things had ever been normal with; he stayed with her when their children were born, and raised them, and he became the closest thing to a home she has ever had.
She had wasted it all, tossed it aside, for her own reckless wants.
She smothers whatever conflicted emotions that churn inside of her chest, and regards him only with a placid kind of indifference. “Just because you deny it doesn’t make it any less true,” she is needling him at this point, and doesn’t really care. Her lips toy with the downy feathers on the girl’s small wings, and again traces the lines of her sweet face before looking back at Ashhal. “Why are you so mad? You can’t possibly be surprised that sometimes this is what happens.” There is still an edge to her voice, however slight though it may be. But she tilts her haloed head away, and though she looks at the white, winged girl at her feet her words are for him. “I’ve never asked or expected anything of you. So stop acting like I’ve somehow completely inconvenienced you.”
I tried to sell my soul last night Funny, he wouldn't even take a bite
She has never given him reason to be angry before. Were he in a better frame of mind, he might have laughed at how absolutely fucked up this situation is. But, even if she had never inspired it before, his anger lives perpetually close to the surface. A therapist would have a fucking field day with him, no doubt.
Her words however, bring the anger bubbling abruptly forth.
Ears pressed flat, teeth bared, he spins and stalks towards where she lay, a frustrated growl on his lips. “I know exactly where babies fucking come from. I’m not a complete idiot.” His eyes flick briefly to the small bundle of white squirming by her side before quickly turning his furious gaze back to her. “Whatever part I had in her creation doesn’t fucking matter. Gritting his teeth, he presses closer. “You don’t want me to be her father and you never have.”
Abruptly, he falls back drawing a deep breath before growling darkly. “No one does.” Suddenly, he laughs, but it’s not a nice sound. “And why would you? I’m a fucking piss poor option.”
He stares at her for a long moment then, eyes dark and cold with his fury. The fury that has been his defense mechanism for too damned long. In his youth, he’d pretended he could be cold and unfeeling. But after about the fifth fucking death, callous anger had taken it’s place. He couldn’t keep fucking pretending.
“I won’t stick my fucking nose in where I’m clearly not wanted,” he finally continues, his voice low now, a harshness grating the edges. His gaze flicks to the filly again, who is now struggling to coordinate her legs beneath her crumpled frame. “It’s better she’s not mine. She has a chance with you at least. I can’t offer her shit.”
Better to be an asshole than watch his endless fucking failures manifest in a child.
she fell for the idea of him and ideas were a dangerous thing to love
She had expected an outburst of some kind, and she had steeled herself for it. She waited for the insults to be hurled at her, because even if Ashhal had never made a move to hurt her, he made up for it in scathing remarks. She expects to hear the usual — that she was nothing, that of course he would want no part in any of their children’s lives because he didn’t want to actually be tied to her, or anyone, in that manner. That it wasn’t his fault that she always came back and didn’t push him away.
It starts similar to what she had been expecting, and with a turn of her head and a tight jaw she waits for him to be done. She can feel the tension and the anger that radiates from him, and even though her pulse quickens, she does not retaliate.
But what he says, right before he draws away, makes her inhale sharply. She looks back at him, confused at first, but that confusion quickly fades into hurt— for him, because she had never known he felt that way, and for herself, because she doesn’t understand what she has done to give him this impression. “Why wouldn’t I want you to be her father?”
She wants to go to him, but the little girl struggling to stand keeps her anchored where she’s at. All she can do is watch him in this dimly lit cave, searching his face in the dark, grasping for whatever it was that she had so obviously missed. “Ashhal,” she whispers, and she doesn’t think his name has ever felt so broken on her tongue. “I never meant to keep any of our children from you. I have always wanted them to meet you, it’s just…” you always leave, is what she thinks but doesn’t say, and she lets her voice trail off.
Her chest feels tight, and her throat aches with the promise of tears but she never lets them reach her eyes. She just keeps watching him with that same bruised expression, desperately searching for what it is that she needed to say to make it better. “I’m sorry,” is all she manages, unshed tears quivering in the syllables of her apology. “You’re not a poor option, and of course I want you. You can’t truly believe that after all this time that you mean nothing to me.”
There is a short silence that she lets build between them, her attention briefly taken from him as the white filly finally manages to stand. She lowers her head to rest her muzzle against the newborn’s side in an attempt to steady her, and then looks back to him and says quietly, “She’s yours, and will always be yours, whether you’re around or not.” She hesitates, and the conflict that reflects in her eyes is not because of what she says next, but because of the rejection that she thinks will follow it. “I wish you would stay, though.”
I tried to sell my soul last night Funny, he wouldn't even take a bite
He should have known better. Should’ve kept his goddamned mouth shut. He’d said too fucking much. The last thing he wanted was pity. Least of all her pity. Every instinct he possesses demands he run. Leave her and the fucking sadness in her eyes she can’t seem to hide. He doesn’t deserve it. Doesn’t want it.
His life is what he had made it. God fucking dammit. He doesn’t want the pretense. He knows exactly what he’s worth. Knows it was never actually him she’d wanted. Just the escape, the forgetfulness he could offer her. He was the fucking idiot that kept going back. Irony at its finest, isn’t it? The only woman he’d ever felt a sort of kinship for beyond the basest kind taking pity on his fucking wretchedness.
“It’s irrelevant,” he growls, barely avoiding interrupting her. “They’re better off without me and you goddamned well know it.” His lip curls, a sneer cutting his words as he presses against cold rock. “I don’t want your fucking pity or platitudes either. I came to terms with this shit a long time ago. Better nothing than second, or third or fucking fourth best. And we already know I would never be yours, or anyone else’s, first choice.”
Pressing farther back, as though he might somehow disappear right through the stone, he glares at her, black eyes glittering and hard. “I don’t have shit to offer anyone, much less a fucking kid. So let’s not pretend I should try when you already know better.”
Hopefully, that would be the end of it.
It might even have been, had the pale little filly not chosen that moment to look up, brown eyes wide and innocent as she mumbled a stumbling, stammered, “Ffuu-uuckkiimm?”
