"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
He had been certain that he would awake to an emptiness beside him that would match the hole in his heart, but it is filled with molten sunlight and rubied lips; with wide and uncertain eyes that search the depths of his desperately, trying to fill in the gaps that he so hopelessly tries to keep from her. As concern ripples across the crystalline of her beautiful face, his own contorts into distraught, hardening with the realization that he is what put it there in the first place. Is she terrified, scared? Even then she is at his side in an instant, seeking to soothe despite her own confusion and hurt, which made regret and guilt plague him all the more. He allows himself to wonder bitterly if she still finds her last exclamation to be true - did she want to be there with him?
Warden cannot pull away from her, however selfish it may be. His dream hadn’t been a premonition but it still rattled him to his core - the thought of knowing he would lose her - and he selfishly allows himself to be engulfed by her embrace, a shuddering sigh from his lips pressing into the coolness of her cheek. Her voice is so small yet so steady against him, a soothing warmth against the glass of her skin that now feels so familiar, so intoxicating. Her apology is met with a displeased snort, curling his neck slightly so that the darkness of his eyes fall into hers, his brow furrowing almost angrily. “Flower.” His voice is heavy with sleep and with a firmness he had yet to use with her - but he had to make sure she was listening.
His expression softens, as if a realization has come to him, the sharp furrow of his brow breaking into that of inquisitivity, a passive thoughtfulness. “You are not responsible for the broken pieces inside me.” Warden’s voice has softened in solemnity, in truth, and his lips trailing from her golden cheek to her ears so that he may speak intimately to her. Both are still curled together on the sand, dawn rising across the ocean that rolls and thrums timidly in the distance. Warden’s pale mouth presses tenderly in a gentle kiss just behind her jawline, trembling as the white of his lashes close around his eyes. His chin tips upwards to pull her to his chest with a gentle tug, admiring the glimmering of her glass flowers and amber skin. “There are things that sheer will cannot fix; dark, ugly things that even love cannot fully erase.”
Warden’s breath catches in his throat at his own remark, thankful that her head is cradled in the strength of his chest so she did not see the wave of uncertainty pass over his expression. It wasn’t like him to speak so boldly, to suggest such things; as if he knew anything about love and the power it wields. “I - ” his voice is caught, hesitant and unsure as it sits in his throat, “I don’t want you to go, Flower.”Please don’t go. He wants to forbid her from leaving his side, to battle his demons for him each and every night - but he can’t so instead his embrace around her tightens with his words.
Her presence did not keep the darkness at bay, but he had been coming face to face with that beast every night since he had been born.
Her absence upon waking, however, he believes will be the thing that will tear him in two.
No one is ever firm with her, so she is bewildered by the shape of it when his brow is suddenly furrowed and his mouth turns down at the corners. Even the snort throws her a little, and it is all she can manage just to blink back at him quietly, wrestling with a curious kind of uncertainty. “Are you mad?” She wonders, those luminous golden eyes widening as her head tilts in an inquisitive way. She even goes as far as to reach out and brush those cool ruby lips to the unhappy lines in his brow, and then the others around his mouth.
But he answers her with a softening of his expression, an undeniable solemnity in his quiet, almost resigned, tone. “So?” She says almost immediately, a scowl on her face now as she stares stubbornly back into his ancient, weary eyes. “That doesn’t mean I can’t help put the pieces back together.” Her glare is eternal, and she focuses it on him like a laser beam, daring him to try and disagree. But he disarms her so easily with his lips against her cheek and beside the crook of her ear. She does not fight it when he pulls her in against his chest, choosing to settle back against the beating of his heart. “You just haven’t encountered willpower like mine yet.” She disagrees stubbornly, relaxing into this embrace like she’s known him forever instead of just one night.
It surprises her though when he speaks again and his voice is tight with something she does not quite recognize. She leans forward a little so she can turn to face him again, frowning so carefully as though it is the weight of this uncertainty that pulls her mouth down at the corners. “I can’t stay here forever.” She points out, and though her tone is as light and airy as the lift of feathers in a wing, there is still a weight in her golden moon eyes as she holds his gaze and searches for the answer to a question still yet unasked. For how long?
She settles back on her opposite shoulder, leaned very much away from him but only so that she can continue to hold his gaze. It is certainly not a distance she craves. “Don’t you have someone who would miss you if you stayed here with me on this beach forever?”
I’ll run the risk of being intimate with brokenness
He is the opposite of her. He is a shattered soul, broken beyond repairing, rough at the edges with bitterness on his tongue and the cold dread in his chest replacing the warmth that should be there. This fact becomes uncannily true as his dark eyes watch her beautiful crystalline face try to interpret the firmness in his voice. Warden cannot help the way his ivory lids fall closed across his ocean eyes, a piece of him - somewhere deep inside the recesses of him - breaking as she asks him if he’s mad, because he cannot answer untruthfully but also cannot bear to tell her that he is always angry.
How silly of him to think that peace could find him; how even more childlike that he would think that the anger and turmoil inside his soul would remain there, unseen from the surface. She has pried him apart far quicker than anyone before and she hadn’t even been trying. He wants to be better for her but he doesn’t know how - he’s never tried - and it brings a hardness to his face that darkens him like an ocean-brewed storm.
All the while these chastises echo in his mind but they suddenly cease when the familiarity of her cold, crystal mouth presses against him, easing the tense lines and the rigidity that had settled there. Once again he finds himself drifting to that same hope once again - a light that spills like a beacon from her lips and her eyes and her voice, a craving that he didn’t know he had been longing for.
Flower’s anger (though nothing like his, the bitter and festering thing that weighs him down and strips him into nothing) and her quick retort is enough to rouse the horned stallion, lifting his face and his heavy brows with something like surprise. He watches her for a long moment - studying those brilliant and sparkling depths of her irises - before a softness finds his own and the crease of his mouth ticks upwards in a mild smile. It is then that she settles against him and the smile on his face only deepens, wondering just how it is such a delicate thing carries such determination.
She knows nothing of his true plight but even then, she decides to carry it with her. He hadn’t even asked her to, but she had taken it upon herself anyway. Though he isn’t sure he would ever willingly expose the details of his visions (or that she had been in one of them), he decides then and there that she is under his protection as much as he is under hers.
I can’t stay here forever, she says to him though she has curled up beside him as if settling in for a long while. Even with the gentleness of her light and airy voice, his heart sinks. But couldn’t she, though? Stay here with him, forever? Couldn’t it be that easy? Couldn’t just one perfect thing be that easy? His jaw tightens as that same uncertainty surrounds him, attempting to remain unshaken outwardly by her declaration. “Why not?” he replies unknowingly; the thought falls through his lips before he can stop it and when he realizes it, a single ear flicks towards her and he then glances downwards, his dark eyes meeting the boldness of hers. Give me a reason, his face demands, ready to convince her otherwise no matter what explanation she is bound to give him.
For a moment he watches her in silence, content with merely looking at her. He wonders if he could watch her all day, for now, that the sunlight refracts through and beneath her skin, he isn’t sure he will ever be able to look away.
“No,” Warden finally answers her question with a rather quiet admittance, his gentle stare never wavering. “No one could convince me to move from this very spot.” He pauses, a near glimmer of laughter in his eyes as he tilts his horned head with curiosity. “Except maybe you, perhaps. With your willpower and all.” He grins at her, then inhales deeply as he turns his head out towards the sea in the near distance.
Surely as the sun rises into midday, the luster of the night before will become dull, and the enticement to fix him will fade away. He cannot expect her - or anyone - to give him forever. Warden’s eyes furrow in thought once more before turning back to survey her inquisitively. It’s already felt like forever, to him. But it hasn’t - it’s only been a night - and there is no certainty that even though he may be free to lie on this beach forever, Flower may not.
“But forever is a long time,” he muses quietly, as if attempting to convince himself that they simply cannot lie here forever. Right?
If he is the culmination of all his dark and broken pieces, then she must be his counterpoint. She is the sum of all the love she has ever known, all the love she has ever been given. Made kind by the love of her parents who have protected her well from a world that would only see her hurt. Made brave by the way her brother gave her life, by the way he always heals her, by the way he heals more than just the fissures like rivers of still red across the surface of her skin.
She is made to be broken, born to die, and yet everyone she has ever known has given her a courage too big to fit inside her delicate body. A love so strong it erodes all the edges of her beautiful heart. She knows that if it ever becomes too much for her, a current that pulls her under to drown, there will be someone there to give her life again.
“You disappear sometimes.” She tells him so softly, her golden eyes like lanterns in the hazy dimness of early morning. “You’re here, but you aren’t here with me.” Her lips are cool and gentle when she pushes his forelock aside so she can better watch his eyes. They are so expressive, with as much depth as any ocean, and she doesn’t think he knows how to keep his secrets out of them. At least not completely, and she is glad for that. Without these glimpses she wonders if she would ever truly know him at all.
She can feel him tense when she says she cannot stay forever, and that surprises her too. He feels like stone at her back, and when she turns to lift her small ruby face to him, she can trace vivid lines of tension across the brown and white of his strong jaw. The fact that his eyes stay quiet tells her that he doesn’t want her to know how her answer had affected him. So she doesn’t mention what she has seen in him, just reaches out again this time to press her delicate head into the curve of his throat and beneath his jaw, eyes closed in trust.
“I would miss my family if I never went back to them.” She tells him, and she knows her breath must tickle his skin with lukewarm heat but she does not pull away. “But I wouldn’t have to miss them very long because someone would come looking.” She smiles fondly at that. “And I would return to them happily because I love them.” But that doesn’t mean he couldn’t come too. She wonders if he’ll ask that next, because she thinks her answer would be yes.
But he says something that makes her smile, fills her delicate chest with a laughter that feels warm and almost exultant. She leans back and lifts her face to look at him again, her golden eyes sparkling. “Yes I am very convincing.” She agrees, and she loves the way he gives her this, allows her to feel as bold as her claims. “I’ve even been called bossy before but I’m pretty sure they were wrong.” Her twinkling eyes dare him to disagree.
But then the mood shifts again and she exhales slowly, turning her gaze to look out across the shining water. “Forever is a long time.” She agrees, and there is a new weight in her voice as the burden of that truth settles itself more heavily over her twinkling shoulders. “I don’t think I have a forever,” she muses, looking down at her own legs all full of divots and cracks, “do you?” Her eyes find him again, but the light has gone gently from them.
I’ll run the risk of being intimate with brokenness
Even in the midst of a family that loves him without end, Warden finds himself lost in all these in between spaces of himself - the part of him that exists in the present, and the part of him that always has one foot in the future. It causes a divide, fissured and ugly, that cracks along the hardening of his heart and brings a sadness that, without his ability, he would never have known. It makes him lost even now; even when his whole body and mind fall into a whirlwind of spiraling feelings (ones that are gentle and sweet, tainted with something so foreign to him and yet...it is like a dream finally coming true) and thoughts, a myriad of tribulations with a desire for hope, for love, for something that would bring him peace. And he wonders, idly and absentmindedly, if she is that something.
And when his eyes - sad and bold against the stark of his bone-white face - turn to her, it is with the knowings of a thousand deaths.
Even her own.
Yet, he wonders, if death would even be powerful enough to break something so enchanting, so beautiful.
She speaks to him the things she doesn’t understand; the things he hides from her, keeps tucked in close (for what reason? To keep the darkness at bay? Even he, the Watcher, knows that hiding the truth often does anything to stop it from happening). He blinks slowly, lost in the fire-gold of her irises, finding their warmth and curiosity something he could sink into forever. But he is only proving her point, disappearing into his thoughts and the way that his mind wanders, never staying long enough. When the crystal of her lips pull the darkness of his forelock from his ivory forehead does his eyes truly come into focus, brought back to life and existence by her very touch.
She doesn’t know the truth in her words - how he is here with her, physically (and even mentally, at this moment in time) but he often he is elsewhere; lost within the future and its time, foreseeing death and destruction only to be brought back here, to this beach. He often came back alone.
“I don’t mean to,” he confesses gently, confirming her suspicions with a guilty flick of his eyes downward. “I don’t want to,” This part is said more bitterly, though still just as gentle, instead, his breath rushes from between clenched teeth. His brow furrows, something like anger shrouding the handsome planes of his face, and though he cannot help his resentment towards himself and his ability, he hopes he would soon feel the cool press of her mouth against the angry divots in his face, calming them with a sweet breath.
To feel her breath against the auburn of his neck, even with the fury of thoughts that run rampant in his mind, causes the horned stallion’s tense muscles to begin to relax. His pink nostrils flutter with a quiet huff, though he has not yet brought his eyes back to hers. He wonders if she can see the secrets he hides within them. “Take me with you, then.” There is a finality in his voice, his black-tipped ears tipping back only slightly in apprehension, wondering if he shouldn’t have made such a statement out loud. But Aletta’s voice rang true in his ears: ’Take your joy where you can, Warden. Illuminate your life with it.’
There is a gentle pause and this is when he finally lifts his eyes to hers again, those same ocean depths finding gold. Her twinkling irises and the laughter residing there brings his lips to twitch in a tiny smile, soft and barely there (but just for her), “They were definitely wrong,” he agrees with a rumble of a chuckle in his chest, bringing her closer to him by shifting his weight and drawing his white wing around her back and flank, shading her from the rising morning sun’s heat.
I don’t think I have forever.
He isn’t sure when, but at some point, his mouth had come to her cheek so that when those delicate, feeble words pass through her ruby lips, his kiss presses there fervently. The back of his eyelids burns as white lashes fall in closing, his vision of her in a million shattered pieces still sweeping across his mind. As if putting all of his affection and emotions into her would stop his vision from coming true. “No one has forever,” he finally breathes against her with a tightness in his throat, unable to take his ivory mouth away from her fire-red skin. “I’ve seen it.”
You’ve seen the endings. The reminder is bitter as it thrums in his mind; but for once, he feels ready to fight against the finality of his visions.
For her.
He’s wrapped up in her, the smell of her and the soft sadness in her voice. “Maybe we don’t need forever, though.” Warden’s voice is reassuring as it rumbles against the fragility of her rubied skin, his dark eyes looking deep into hers. “But I do know that I do need right now, right here, with you.”
He confirms her suspicions, and at first she does not understand the look of guilt that darkens the navy of his eyes to a shade of desolate night. There is a bitterness too, when he speaks again, and she finds that it makes her watch him more closely now, analyzing the furrow in his brow and the lines of tension making near welts along his jaw. She reaches out with cool lips to touch the muscle there, smoothing it with a touch like is not unlike worn garnet. “Where do you go when you disappear?” She asks, and the question comes without waiting for her permission, spun to life on a tongue that has far less shame than the body it belongs to. “Must you go alone?”
And when the subject shifts again, she is not quick to push it back to her own curiosities. She cannot be sure that her questions do not wound him, that her words aren’t creating new wounds over the top of old scars that never have a chance to heal. Instead she smiles at him, her golden eyes as soft as that impossible smile on such impossible, glass lips. “I hope you aren’t shy,” she notes, and her eyes shine with a mirth she makes no effort to hide from him, a smile she intends to warm even the most frigid depths with, “or squeamish. Though, perhaps it is best that you’ll meet them in daylight.” The next smile is a secretive one, but her eyes shine as bright as trapped suns, burning in golden perpetuity as she watches him.
When his eyes find her again, lifting to meet her own gaze, she rewards him with another easy smile, reaching out to touch her lips to the soft place beside the corner of his mouth. She notices the smile, though it is only a gentle twitch from a muscle she decides he should use far more often, but the presence of it feels like a reward and fills her with a warmth she holds close. “They were possibly wrong.” She amends, and then a soft laugh bubbles up from the depths of her. It is easy to settle against him when he pulls her in closer, shielding her beneath the feathers of his wing.
His kiss though, when it comes hand-in-hand like a companion of her quiet pain, surprises her. Not because it is unwelcome - in fact she leans into him more gently, eyes closing so her vision reduces first to the fringe of lashes, and then to nothing at all - but because it comes with an intensity she had not expected from him. One, she thinks in the secret parts of her deepest self, that she does not share with him. He doesn’t pull away, and she doesn’t ask him to. This closeness is a comfort, his unguarded affection unexpected but welcome. Though, it is dangerous for the broken to feel beautiful, like finding higher peaks to fall from.
“Maybe I should be glad not to have a forever like this.” She is thinking of her easy brokenness, of all the things she cannot do, and it is long moments before she becomes aware of the way she sinks so readily into the dark. With an abruptness she shakes herself, frowning and then softening again, bumping her cheek against his neck with a smile that is only forced for an instant and then suddenly real. “I am being silly now, aren’t I. A life of short joy is far better than an eternity of pain.” Her tone is stubborn and warm, her eyes flashing gold as she lifts her chin to smile at him. “Well, come on,” she says, wiggling out of his embrace to stand beside him, bumping her nose playfully against his shoulder, “time to go meet my family before I reduce us both to tears, yes?”
