"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
The sickness is coming on faster each and every day. He can feel it creeping along his bones—burrowing into his marrow. Blood now flecks his lips when he coughs and his ribs are beginning to show against the sides of him, so much so that fingers could trace along their morbid patterns. And yet, he does not return to the Chamber. He does not stop running until exhaustion every day. It as if he is tempting fate to just cut the life cord already—and maybe he is. Maybe all he wants is to just have it all end.
Maybe it is what he knows he deserves.
Today is no different. He is frothy with sweat, eyes wild, breath wheezing in and out of diseased lungs. That is, until he sees her. She is not swollen with child, but he knows that the two can’t be far from her. Neither can that buckskin stallion who fathered them. But Makai decides that he does not care. Maybe it is the actions of a dying man; maybe it is just that he is delirious from lack of sleep, but he does not care.
He staggered toward her, and he is by her side before he knows it, mouth on her neck as if he is tasting salvation, body trembling. “Oksana,” he murmurs, teeth hitting flesh. But he breaks away, stumbles back, coughing violently. “No,” is all he says, although he is the one who should, would, be reprimanded in this situation. “Where are they?” he finally manages, his voice thick with the agony. “Where is he?”
Makai doesn’t bother to explain himself; he knew that she would know what he was talking about. He shakes his delicate, regal head, mane flying. “It didn’t take you long.” Each word drives the knife in his chest just a little deeper, and he knows this is crazy—knows that he should be anywhere but here. But if he is going to let himself die, the last thing he wants is to be near her again. Even if she rightfully hates him.
MAKAI
I'm a dead man walking here but that's the least of all my fears
you taught me the courage of the stars before you left
how light carries on endlessly, even after death
She had left Isle and Wyck with their father for a while, taking some time to stretch her wings beneath the sun, to feel only the sky on her skin, only the clouds on her back. It felt important to give them these moments, moments made more effortless by the ease with which all three could communicate – two mind readers and her beautiful, wordless wonder. There were no barriers between them, no room, no need for guessing and exaggerated gestures. It wasn’t that she felt out of place with them- no, their family was strange and unconventional, but everyone fit, everyone belonged, and there was a balance she had always craved. But she felt like she slowed Wyck down sometimes, like maybe she missed the little details, the difficult-to-follow enthusiasms of a small child with no words, but one of the loudest voices she’d ever known. It felt like giving him a voice again, not that he seemed to mind, but she was a selfish beast, she always had been.
Her wings tucked close to her sides and suddenly she was hurtling through the bright blue like a red comet, falling, falling, until at the last moment they flung wide and red, all leather and sinew, and her hooves met the crush of soft spring ground with little resistance. Hardly a second had passed and her skin prickled like she was being watched.
She knew instantly, how could she not.
Her wings shrink and tuck against her sides and over her back just a second before his mouth crashes against her neck. She doesn’t push him away though, and she knows she should, it’s like an instinct, like the way lungs scream for air when they’re sunk like ships at the bottom of the ocean. But she needs the moment as much as he does, craves the heat that flares in her veins and the adrenaline that burns away in her chest. At least she isn’t surprised when he pulls away, isn’t reduced to rubble when he tears away another piece of her foolish heart.
“Don’t tell me no.” She warns him with a frown, eyes shadowed and emerald beneath a furrowing brow. She is quiet for a moment and her expression deepens, those eyes hardening as they trace the valleys between his ribs, the hollowness of his dying face. “They’re with their father.” She says at last, and though her face remains unchanged, her heart flinches in her chest. It isn’t regret though, not even a hint of it, just sorrow as the fissures between them widen further. He coughs and she flinches again at the way his lungs rattle like dead leaves on brittle branches.
“It isn’t enough to break my heart, then?” She says quietly, those emerald eyes fixed on his. She makes no effort to move closer, even despite the way she aches to fill those valleys with kisses. “It isn’t enough to send me away. You needed to let me see you like this?” Her heart explodes a thousand times over again in her chest and she can hardly look at him, can feel her jaw tremble with tension at the way she forces it to be still even as she’s falling apart. “I’m not good enough to love you, but I’m good enough to watch you die?”
She can’t help it, she turns her face from him then, hides the hurt and the disgust and the anguish that paints itself like the truth over her delicate chestnut face. His words bury themselves likes hooks beneath her skin and she turns back to him, not entirely composed but also no longer falling apart by the weight of their sheer proximity. “It didn’t take me long to what, Makai?” She says in a voice that is dangerously quiet, dangerously low.
He knows it is perhaps not fair to pick a fight with her when he is so clearly on the edge of death, but he has never been overly concerned with fighting fair—just with winning. Specifically, with winning her. All of the reasons he had believed before about needing to push her away had evaporated in his head, all of the self-convincing that he had done was forgotten. Instead, he stood before her shaking and feverish, his eyes rung with white and his nostrils flaring so that you could see the pink lining and the blood flecks.
“I broke your heart?” he is incredulous, and his laugh is tinged with crazed disbelief. “All you have ever done is break my heart. From the moment that we met.” His chest aches to be near her, and he coughs again, straightening when it subsides. “Your very existence shatters me.” Makai shakes his slender head back and forth as if trying to shake the thought, as if he could let it loose from him and forget it all. “You are a constant reminder that I will never be good enough. That everything I want is just out of my reach.”
He takes a step forward, unbidden, and his body is a study of earthquakes, the fault lines clear in the sick angles of him, the pronounced bones of his skeleton. “It didn’t take you long to fall in love again, Oksana,” he cracks, face falling open before her, eyes burning with his anguish. “You believed me so easily. It was like you wanted me to push you away. You believed me.” He is laughing again, and his throat is tight, “As if I don’t live and die by you. As if I would even dream of touching someone else."
Makai is shaking again, and he coughs, but this time it doesn’t subside quickly. His head drops to the ground, and spittle and blood froth on his lips and then fall to the grass. His sides heave with the motion, and he feels dizzy—from the heat, the moment, the closeness and yet distance from her. His knees buckle for a second and he drops slightly before he catches himself; he could practically feel the strength flooding from him.
“You should go,” he whispers, his voice small. “I am sure that he is waiting for you.” I am sure that he deserves you, is what he thinks, but this hurts too much to say aloud.
MAKAI
I'm a dead man walking here but that's the least of all my fears
you taught me the courage of the stars before you left
how light carries on endlessly, even after death
She watches his face change, watches those hollows deepen as he regards her with what seems to be a sense of incredulity. It is, she realizes, when the words tumble from his mouth like a damned confession, when he flings them like stones at her heart. “Yes, you stupid fool, you broke my heart.” Her brow furrows and her jaw tightens when she looks at him, and though it isn’t hatred, never hatred, that changes her face, it is something dark, something devastating. “You are everything I have ever wanted, the only thing I have ever needed.” She pauses for a heartbeat to find her voice again as it wavers, though her eyes never drift from his. “And for a while you gave it to me, I’m sure you remember, when I was failing so miserably at being Queen?” Her voice breaks off bitterly as she throws one of his own stones back at him. “I had you and nothing else mattered.” She pauses again and her jaw clenches and unclenches with all the tension and turmoil rippling through her body. This time her eyes do drift from his face, but only to trace the death hiding in the shadow of his eyes, in the valleys between his bones. “And then you left. You used every one of my fears and regrets against me, and you left. Don’t you ever forget that the things you want are out of reach because you’ve put them there.”
She turns from him, exhausted. “A life with you is the only one I’ve ever wanted and yet you force me to have it with someone else." He stumbles closer and she lets him, but she makes no effort to close the yawning gap between them. It kills her though, like claws digging in her chest, gnawing through her heart, he is close and he is dying, and she cannot shake the fear that as soon as she touches him he will leave again. Disappear like a ghost.
But what he says next astounds her and she cannot help the way her body recoils from him in the wake of her shock. “You think I’m in love with him?” She asks in a voice that is low and soft and shattered. “Makai, you are the only one I have ever been in love with. Whatever your soul is made of, mine was made from the same.” She doesn’t tell him that she doesn’t love Dempsey, it wouldn’t be true anyways, she did love him. But it was in the same way she loved Straia, it wasn’t intimate, it wasn’t romantic. When Makai had shattered her to dust, Dempsey had scooped up the pieces so she wouldn’t be lost forever to the wind. The friendship forged from that was strong as iron. But she didn’t know how to explain this without pushing him further away- she wasn’t even sure if he would believe her. So she let it be. Instead with a hollowed out smile that sucked the light from her shining emerald eyes, “Of course I believed you, how could I ever be enough?”
Makai coughs again, but it doesn’t fade like the others before it. Instead she can see the tightening of muscle beneath skin stretched too thin, too tight, and they ripple and quiver and heave with the effort of remaining. He coughs again and the sound is wet. Her mouth breaks with the crushing weight of the frown that appears there as she notices the blood on his lips and in the grass. “Makai.” She whispers, and her voice is filled with loss and anguish and possessiveness all at once. “Oh, Makai.” And she is at his side immediately, her shoulder braced against his, her nose wiping away the blood as it beaded on his lips. “I never knew why you settled for me,” she says filling the place beside him, “you are so much better. Than me, than this. Fight it.” And she know it’s true, crushed selfishly against his side with her mouth pressed to his. To his cheek, to his neck, to his heart beating sluggishly in his chest. She is so weak, so greedy, so willing to drown in this moment even though he’s like a knife buried in her chest and as soon as he pulls away, removes that blade, her life will bleed into the dirt at their feet.
His voice is so soft that she nearly misses it, drowning so eagerly as she is with the feverish heat of his skin pressed to hers and his scent burying itself in her nose. “You’re wrong, as usual,” she says quietly, her eyes hidden in the shadow of his dark face, “there’s no one waiting for me.” A bitter, strangled laugh that she cuts off just as quickly as it tumbles from her lips and then a quiet, agonized murmur of dissonant sound, "I will never be enough."
You should know that, she thinks with her face pressed selfishly to his neck.
Whatever stretches between them will never be kind. He had hoped it would be once; he had hoped that he would be able to provide her with a gentle love, the kind he had never experienced. He had wanted to walk with her in the sunshine and cradle her at night and whisper every sweet nothing into her ear because she had deserved it. Lord knows that she had deserved it. And what had he given her instead? He had just given her pain, anguish, sorrow. He had selfishly taken from her and given little in return; he had used every intimate knowledge he had gathered and weaponized it because he was weak—
too weak to be the kind of man that she deserved.
Now, even now, she makes her way toward him and she is the one who is supporting him, his diseased weight resting against her shoulder and his mouth finding its way to her neck. She tasted like heaven; she tasted like salvation. His breath is hot and he moans a little from the nearness of her, the proximity of her doing more to cloud his vision than the fever. How often had he imagined this since their last parting? He had assumed he would never see her again—let alone touch her. He had long thought the possibility gone.
“He’s a bastard,” he manages to mumble, words slurred as he leaned heavily against her, coughing again, the blood managing to fleck her shoulder. “I’ll kill him.” The world begins to slant, and he closes his head, head dropping heavily to her side. Makai has never gone this long between Chamber visits before, and were he more conscious, he would be surprised by how quickly his life was being drained from him. Death normally came quietly, nipping at his heels and at his throat like an illness, but this was like water circling the drain, each moment bringing it faster and faster so that he could barely keep up with it.
Delirious, he reaches out weakly to lip at her jaw. “I’m glad you are here,” he confesses, eyes unseeing and bloodshot. “But where is Malis?” Makai lifts his head, looking sightlessly around as if he could find their once-small girl before he takes a shuddering breath, exhausted by the effort. “She shouldn’t run off so much.” Nuzzling into her, her presses his cheek to her skin, “But it’s nice to be alone.”
A fevered kiss to her jaw before he goes very still, muscles hard beneath his coat, sweat sickening his coat. “I killed them—her.” He is seeing now, but it is not what is before him. It is the beach and he is young and there are two mares before him. He is drenched in their blood and Magnus is there and before he knows it, his brother (his brother) is raging and he is dead. Now he is older, but the beach is the same, and she is mumbling words about changing wings and he is so angry at her—so angry at her for reminding him of Oksana—that he cannot control it. She is dead before he knows what's happening.
“Why?” the voice rips from him and keels on the wind, strangely high-pitched before it dissolves into nothingness. “No!” he screams and his voice is thick now, hoarse, the sound ripping from his torn throat and the violence is enough to draw forth another coughing attack. “No!” His head is splitting apart, and he can hardly think around it—cannot even feel Oksana pressed against his side. The time, when his knees buckle, he does not bother to catch himself. Instead, he crashes to the ground, sides heaving, and nose coming to rest on the wet soil. “I love Oksana,” he confesses to no one. “Please tell her when I die.”
MAKAI
I'm a dead man walking here but that's the least of all my fears
