"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
01-15-2021, 02:15 AM (This post was last modified: 01-15-2021, 02:15 AM by nikolaus.)
how do I learn my dreams to mold, to lay them bare in the morning cold?
Nikolaus does not remember how exactly he had left her that day.
His memories had blurred over time—perhaps, he thinks, in some kind of self preservation. It had taken everything in him to step away from her. Everything in him to walk the other direction and not stand there holding her forever, but he had managed. He had finally broken away and walked.
And kept walking.
And kept walking.
Because what else was there to do but keep walking when he had left her behind?
But then the world had turned on its head and he had known fear once more. The same fear that he had felt when they had fallen through two sides of the portal. The same fear that he had felt when he had watched the magma reach for her and then swallow her whole. The same fear when he had woken on that icy island and felt the knowledge that he would die long and slow and his parents would forget him.
(Hadn’t they in the end though? Castile vanished and Sochi living her new life with her new family.)
It was bitter thoughts that followed him—bitter thoughts that kept him company. Bitter thoughts that he could only lean into, even when all the light had bled from this world. He had stumbled forward into the shadows, feeling the whistling breath of creatures nearby that did not feel of this world.
“Linnea!” he shouted, feeling the sound of his own voice swallowed up. The wind picked up and he felt it whip around him faster, pulling at his hair and sinking icy fingers into his skin. “Linnea!” he shouted again, his steps quicker but no less stunted, his leg struggling to keep up as he limped faster and faster into the darkness. Not for the first time, he cursed his inability to run—cursed his broken body.
Cursed himself for being foolish enough to walk away.
nikolaus
if they’re still out there then the chasm grows ( for all you know, for all you’ve known )
02-12-2021, 08:06 PM (This post was last modified: 02-12-2021, 08:06 PM by linnea.)
Pride kept her from following him, kept her rooted in place as he turned from her and disappeared, left her promising herself that she would spend every second of every day for the rest of her life trying to forget him.
That isn’t what happens, of course, because he is as rooted in her thoughts as he is in her heart. He is hers, and maybe it is only because they are broken in the same way, all their jagged edges finding ways to fit together, but she knows they belong. Even if he does not. And that knowledge is both lonely and alienating, it keeps her isolated and angry until it finally breaks her, and through all those new cracks return the doubts that perhaps she had been wrong all along.
Not about trading her life for his, never that. But maybe they had never been something capable of togetherness, never whole or broken in any way that fit together. So when the dark comes, so does a bitter disloyalty that settles like a rotten seed in her chest, taking root. She does not wonder about him - there is a wall of thorns around her heart, an impenetrable maze of which she is the center - and he is a banished thing she refuses to consider.
Except, as always, thoughts of him slip through her guards. But they come paired with the frown on her delicate mouth and a subtle fury in her brow, with a glint in those beautiful eyes that turn the pink from flower petal to something hard like tourmaline.
But it is only at first, because when the dark never lifts and the sun cannot break free of whatever shackles it to the moon, Linnea begins to die. It is slow at first, like a coldness at her core that makes her feel lethargic and unsteady, but that cold stays and it drains her and it leaves her as brittle and bare as the dying forests until she is all but skeletal.
That is when Nikolaus finds her.
Or, he would have if she had returned his worried shouts, but pain silences her as effectively as death will. She cannot see him now, cannot let him find her, cannot allow his heart to love her again. She is ephemeral, she is loss, and her impermanence will only break him.
It is easy to hear the desperation in his voice as he searches for her, and the sound of it has even sharper teeth than the wind of this nuclear winter. It flays her. But he cannot be allowed to find her, cannot be allowed to watch her wither away into this death that is more certain with every passing moment. So she finds a place amongst the bare bones of the nearest trees, slipping the wasted dry rot of her body in beside trunks and branches until, in this dark, she is nearly indiscernible.
Her eyes close and she presses her brow to the rough bark of a tree, clinging to the sound of her name on his lips like the selfish creature she is. But this is better. He will kill himself trying to keep a dying thing safe, and she is not like him. She is not strong enough to survive the loss of him in trade for her life, if it ever came to that. So she is still and she is quiet, and the only sound that escapes her is a muted sob she tries to strangle.
This love will break them both.
linnea
these wildfires grow and grow until a brand new world takes shape
how do I learn my dreams to mold, to lay them bare in the morning cold?
There is a piece of him that is a honing beacon for her—that returns the call of her gravity. He can feel it, like a hook in the very center of him that drags him forward toward her. That calls him into the deepest parts of the shadows where the world around them shifts and drags and pulls them closer to the nightmare that is this reality. His leg screams in agony as he goes, the muscles knitting together, the flesh pulling at places where it was stretched too tight, but he doesn’t stop. In some ways, he cannot stop.
For minutes, there’s nothing but the whistling screams of the wind around them.
There is the fingers of it that claw at his face, bringing tears to his eyes, a dryness to his mouth.
He wants to stop, wants to fall to his battered knees and quit, but she’s here.
He knows it.
The shadows morph around him again, and he feels something brush against him—something that nearly steals the breath from his lungs. He shouts out as claws sink into him, gouging his flesh, and he stumbles forward, nearly losing his balance. His vision doubles and then blurs as something in him changes. Something stolen, something replaced. It leaves him off balance, disoriented, and he takes two steps to the side, blindly falling forward through the broken trees. When he stumbles against her, it feels like fate.
Or, it would, if he had his right mind to him.
Pain explodes in his chest as the blood stains his haunches. His mind nearly cleaves in two as the new power surges through his veins. “Linnea,” he whispers as he presses his mouth to her wooden jaw, like a prayer, a whisper of hope, before the world shifts under his feet and his new gift tears through him.
Another cry as he brings her still, cold body to him and then silence as reality shreds.
He shudders, his throat aching, when it stills again.
He feels the warmth first.
The touch of sunlight against his back. Confused, he pulls back from her, blinking into the light, the sound of spring suddenly coming into perfect clarity. “Linnea,” this time her name a question as he takes a step into the forest of their youth, a place where they had met so many times in the before.
The world reversed, time snapped in half, and he can only blink into the light.
Words once again stolen.
nikolaus
if they’re still out there then the chasm grows ( for all you know, for all you’ve known )
He shouts and it feels like the sound has been ripped from her own chest because the ache that settles there has teeth and claws sharper than any beast she’s yet known. It carves a crater out of her, builds a home inside the hollow as though that sound will never leave her. As though it will haunt her as all of her decisions have. “Oh god, Nikolaus.” Her eyes open immediately, and the pink is so pale it almost shines like crystal as she pulls her desiccated body from the tangle of dying, swaying forest. Branches reach for her, tangle in what is left of her mane and scratch at her delicate face, but she cannot stay, not now. It is a wonder she ever thought she could hide from him.
She had never been able to deny his gravity.
But they come together like magnets, her delicate broken body hurtling into the warmth of his just as he lunges forward into her. “Nikolaus,” she cries, and the sound is so brittle, too broken to be like birdsong, too soft to be anything less, “Nikolaus are you okay? Are you hurt?” His mouth is against her cheek and even now his touch smooths away every hard, broken shard she’s used to build a wall around her heart. She leans into him, letting his mouth touch whatever part of her he can reach, but she is scared and breathless and whimpering because the scent of blood is like a tangible thing spilling down her nose and choking her.
She tries suddenly to push his face aside, even though her body burns at this closeness she’s missed so desperately, craved for so long. He’s hurt, he’s hurt and she is useless, he’s hurt and all she can do is touch the jagged edges of the wound with cool wooden lips when she finally finds the place blood is spilling from.
But something shifts between them, around them, and he’s dragging her into his body like she’s the one that needs protecting, like she’s the one that needs to live. She fights him, trying to understand where this new danger is, trying to gauge how to protect him. “Nikolaus, no.”
Silence catches the no, holding it uncertainly as though it cannot fathom all the wretched fear she had pushed into that one, single syllable. While his name had been shouted into the dark, into the wind, into the wild of a world torn apart by living nightmares, the no was shouted into a world suddenly bright and warm, and from lips made soft in a way that breaks every last thing inside her.
She is aware of the sound of her name on his lips, but she is completely and wholly incapable of doing but this ragged gasping thing that might be like breathing. He hasn’t noticed, she is sure he hasn’t noticed. His back is to her now, only slightly but it is enough, and his beautiful silver eyes are turned to a world that is impossibly day and green and alive. Yet it is nothing compared to what he has not seen, to what he does not realize.
Linnea is alive.
And not in a way of strong bark and leaves and blooming flowers. She is alive. There is sound in her ears and it takes a moment to remember that this is what her heart sounds like when it races, what her breath sounds like when she can hardly catch it. She is soft and warm and her skin is a stormy gray with dapples ringed in the crimson of her family. She can feel the sun on her back, feel the breeze tangling in her hair so that it dances along her neck and tickles her face. “Nikolaus.” She whispers, and the sound is so quiet that she won’t blame him if he does not hear her, but he must, he needs to see this, needs to confirm that she is not losing her mind. So she says his name again, a little louder, “Nikolaus?” And though she wants to move forward and press herself into the warmth of his body, she feels terrified to move, terrified to breathe, terrified to shatter this impossibility that seems wilder even than this peaceful spring day around them.
linnea
these wildfires grow and grow until a brand new world takes shape
how do I learn my dreams to mold, to lay them bare in the morning cold?
The world is ringing in his ears, pulling back the curtain of reality second by second.
It’s almost painful to take in the light after so long in the darkness. Painful to try and discern what is happening in this quiet, peaceful place when they had just be thrust here from chaos itself. There is no wound on him and he feels no pain. He feels…nothing, actually. He takes a hesitant step forward and find that his leg does not protest. It does not try and crumple or ache or groan beneath the weight of him.
It is a leg remade—or, rather, a leg that had never shattered in the first place.
He whirls around on his healed legs, joy spreading across his face like rays of sunshine, but before he can say anything at all, his breath catches. Because she’s there, the girl he had always known. She is soft and warm and impossibly beautiful—as beautiful as she was in her form of leaf and wood, but different. His eyes widen and his mouth opens on a sharp inhale, his heart suddenly pounding feverishly in his chest.
“Linnea,” he finally manages, her name like a breath as he takes a step toward her, nearly dizzy with the impossibility of the moment. Somewhere beyond him, he has some knowledge that this is a stolen moment. Something like a faint buzzing—a pressing knowledge between his shoulder blades that he could only hold onto this reality for a while—but he ignores it. Ignores whatever strange magic happened.
Instead he walks, limp-free, toward her, laughing suddenly as the joy escapes him in the throaty sound. He grabs her and kisses her, pressing his head into the sweet curve of her neck. “I don’t know what happened or why,” he says under his breath, “but I would take every stolen moment with you here.”
No matter the consequences, goes unsaid.
nikolaus
if they’re still out there then the chasm grows ( for all you know, for all you’ve known )
She is so selfishly in love with the moment he turns and sees her, and she promises herself that she will remember every single detail of it for the rest of her life, no matter what happens next. It is the way his beautiful silver eyes go wide, the way his mouth opens with a shock she understands intimately. The way he inhales sharply and all she can do is smile at him like she is made of porcelain and frozen in this perfect moment of pure joy.
He moves to her, and she is too distracted at first to notice the evenness of his stride, too busy pressing herself into the warmth of his body and laughing beneath his kisses which feel so different without the thickness of cool bark between them. She touches him everywhere, her lips to the corner of his mouth and to his jaw, to the curve of his neck and down to his chest, and it is so impossible to do anything but breathe raggedly and smile and fight back the tears that always ride the wake of such wild emotions.
“I don’t know.” She says, exclaims, breathes out into the warmth of his cheek. “I don’t know!” Because suddenly her thoughts have fled her and all she can do is revel in the impossibility that she is flesh again. That she is warm and soft and alive like she hasn’t been in years, and that he is whole and steady and there is no stumble in his steps as she leans into the curve of his waiting body.
It is enough to make her forget that he had left her and she had vowed to forget him. But as she remembers that truth and pauses long enough to pull back and look at his face, listen to the vow in the quiet tone of his voice, she realizes that it is a past she is willing to let go of. That nothing matters as much as the way he presses his head into the curve of her neck and she leans around to kiss him softly. There are broken pieces in her chest, things shattered by him and by her and by a life that always seemed to happen too roughly, but she knows that in moments like these she can begin to heal.
She gentles again, and her now plain brown eyes soften with affection as she reaches to trace the crest of his neck all the way down to his shoulder, where she settles with a whispered exhale. “Why did you come back, Nikolaus?” She wonders without criticism, marvelling at how out of place the question feels when whispered beneath a warm sun and between two entirely whole bodies.
And then, though she is careful not to let too much of the tension build beneath her dappled gray skin, “Do you think this is true death?” True, as opposed to before when Leliana had yanked her back from the brink. “I wouldn’t mind.” She tells him quickly, in case he is worried that she is scared. “I’m just glad to be here with you. You are all I’ve ever wanted.” Her voice grows quiet with this whispered promise, and she presses it to his withers with a kiss.
linnea
these wildfires grow and grow until a brand new world takes shape
how do I learn my dreams to mold, to lay them bare in the morning cold?
The moment could never last long enough, he knows that.
Knows that he could stretch it for days, weeks, months, years, and it would still end too soon. Because underneath the joy that he feels so acutely there is a moment where he realizes that there is also a faint feeling of fatigue. Something straining beneath the surface—pushing and pulling as though he was actively exerting himself, even though he knew that he was simply standing here in the sun next to her.
It is a frustration that he locks away tight, pretending that it doesn’t exist, to focus instead on her.
She is bright and effervescent in this moment, glowing with her happiness, and all he wants is to give her more of it. To give her whatever she wants to keep that smile on her face. To keep in the sun instead of plunging them both back into the unknown darkness once more. He would wear himself ragged to do it.
He kisses the parts of her that he can reach, brushing velvet lips against the soft warmth of her and marveling in the ways that she feels so alive here. It is not wonder because he finds the other pieces of her repulsive, but rather because of how much joy that she herself finds in the form. He marvels at the acute happiness that explodes from her, thrilled to see the freedom of her living as her younger self once more.
“I never could leave you,” he whispers into her, careful to keep her close, “not really.” He wishes that he had learned that lesson sooner—that he hadn’t even tried to put distance between them when such a thing feels completely useless now—but he would take the closeness. At her question though, he frowns, feeling the memories of her death creep over him like a shadow, tugging at the back of his mind.
“I don’t think so,” he says, slowly, trying to explain. “I think…I think I did this.” He shakes his head. “I don’t know how.” Then with a smile, he closes his eyes to press his forehead to her. “I’ve loved you for my entire life, Linnea,” a breathy chuckle under his breath, “and I’m going to continue loving you.”
nikolaus
if they’re still out there then the chasm grows ( for all you know, for all you’ve known )
