"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
I know some things that you don't; I've done things that you won't there's nothing like a trail of blood to find your way back home
She thought of him often.
There was a small pang of doubt lingering within her - did he ever think of her, too? It most often emerged beneath the descending darkness of dusk - when her mind should be quiet, should be still, and while her heavy eyelids should be closed, and it was ravenous and unforgiving. Each and every time her heavy lashes fall over her golden-flecked gaze, the doubt seizes her heart, stirring her awake and expanding within the hearth of her chest into a loneliness and longing she cannot ignore.
It had been so long since she had seen him - he had made himself scarce, and she could not blame him. He had come to her, to find her, to draw her close and to trace the gentle curves of her body as she longed to touch the hardened ridges of his own - but had found her heavy and expecting another, and though he had sought her out with worry heavy on his brow, he had felt isolated, and unwelcome. Nothing could be further from the truth. It had taken her days, nearly a week, to recover from the difficulty of that birth - his comfort in the earliest hours had been more than she could have asked for; more than she might have been willing to ask for. And yet, he had known.
In a way, he knew her better than she knew herself.
She had clenched her teeth after his departure, feigning indifference at her own frailty, pretending that she did not ache and did not feel the immense burden of fatigue. Dahmer had sired a beautiful son with her, and yet, she could not - would not let her guard down with him, not as she had with Ledger. Though the two had shared a brief tryst beneath a raucous and ravenous river, she had yet to know him, and he had yet to know her.
She could not unveil herself with him, as she had with the one-eyed, brooding man her heart pined for. He knew the anguish her heart had experienced all too well, and it had brought them together, emotionally and intimately. But she had spurned him, too, in the wake of his transformation, and she could only imagine where his mind had been at since. He had gone out of his way to avoid her, perhaps with the wrong impression settled on his mind, and she could not rest easily without knowing if he, too, felt as she did.
Once she is satisfied that her son is safely kept within the darkest crevice of a seaborn cavern, she is one with the night, as the pale moonlight of eventine bathes her in its splendor, gleaming off of the surface of the finely preened, perfectly placed feathers that lay across her wings. She does not take to the sky, for she knew the thick plume of the unpredictable, rumbling volcano would be too much for her, and her unwieldy temper hardly needed reason to rise.
When she does find him, at last, she is breathless, her lungs grasping at the thick air as the darkness of her hazel eyes settle upon his russet skin, tracing the hollow line of his figure (filled out more than she had ever seen it, but it is lean with muscle - he was still gaunt). Quietly, she stands, unmoving, her heart pounding rigorously within her chest. She yearned to touch him, to press her pale lips across the scarred surface of his cheek, but she does not - though she is close enough for her ivory feathers to brush lightly against his barrel, while her breath brushes over the nape of his neck.
”Ledger,” she murmurs, her brow furrowed, uncertain of what to say - she had rehearsed it a thousand times, but none of it seems enough, standing beside him. ”I have missed you.” She whispers, her confession heavy and dense in the humidity of twilight.
Bound for trouble from the start I've been walking through this old world in the dark
As if he could think of anything else but her. She had her responsibilities to Tephra, a son to love and raise, it's father to occupy her spare moments. All he had was endless stretches of time. He barely spoke to anyone, continuing to pace the ashland or brood in the salty surf that was his only refuge. They probably think him mad these people… They might be right. Nights are spent awake and gazing at the pregnant belly of the moon, wishing with all his heart that the consuming pain and loneliness would leave him once and for all. Berating in his mind the gods for this new torture they had bestowed on him. How much more? How much more could he take?
The moment in the cavern haunted him the most. Her exhausted sweat covered body pressed against his own with the newborn foal before them. For a moment he had tasted true peace. Wrenched away the second Dahmer had arrived. He was not stupid, there was something there between them besides the child they had conceived. Perhaps it was small but it wasn’t meaningless. A small dagger in his heart, twisting with every thought of that dark tense cavern. It had been best to stay away for fear of doing something he might later regret.
Moonlight shimmers off the surface of the waves, fetlock deep in the swelling surf. His gaunt frame still as his hollow dark gaze looks out into the endless sea, into black nothingness. What would it be like to be swallowed by the ocean? Magnus had done it once when he had died. The thought of sinking to the bottom, to feel nothing once his lungs had filled with saltwater… His haunted thoughts broken by the sound of his name behind him. He had not heard her come, had barely heard the whisper that floated in the breeze.
He turns slowly, the good eye unable to look at her fully. His heart threatens to burst open like a beaten piñata before her, the emotions storming his senses. She’s so close her feathers graze his side and he tenses, afraid of the moan that might escape from touches he had not forgotten. I have missed you…. Oh it’s almost too much, the sincerity of her words. How long had he been waiting for this moment? And yet…
He cannot allow his grudge to slip so easily. It would only be a bandaid to a gaping wound. They could not go on like this, a relationship based on uncertainty and what ifs. Only clarity, one way or another, would fix this.
”And I you..” Gravelly words filled with so many unsaid things. Forcing himself to meet her unsure gaze. ”Every second of every day, I have missed you.” Flaxen forelock grazing against the empty socket, tickling the raw skin there. ”I can’t go on like this Ellyse.”
I know some things that you don't; I've done things that you won't there's nothing like a trail of blood to find your way back home
She has been hurt, before –
And as such, she has learned with time how to fiercely guard her heart, feigning indifference and wearing a thick armor of disdain and stoicism. Yet, beneath the still and unmoving surface of it all, the emotion rising within her was often as tempestuous as the wild and unwieldy sea that lay along the horizon. She is impulsive, often permitting her anger to take the rein, resulting in a sharp or scathing word, while a festering grudge is settling like the heavy sediment drawn down to the bottom of the ocean – thick, viscous and unyielding. Alas, it is her most fatal flaw.
She can see, yet again, how it has scorned another –
She had spurned Magnus in much the same way long ago (oh, but Ledger does not know how she had pushed him away, or how she had torn him apart to preserve her own bruised ego and bleeding heart), and some distant remnant from the broken heart that had once been twinges with a pang of discomfort in her chest at the thought of him. She had never been at ease with her own emotions, and she had been even less at ease with the thought of being out of control, with the idea of being anything but whole – she was a force to be reckoned with; a warrior through and through with an iron defense to show for her time spent in solitude. Nevertheless, despite the forged strength she strives to portray, and the welling emotion she so often suffocates before it has ever had the opportunity to surface, she is, beneath it all, not what she seems.
Alas, such thoughts are fleeting, and in the end only serve to remind her of the mistake she had made once before. She had never given herself away - not to Magnus, not to anyone – not wholly; only a small part of her and only for a time before she would inevitably recoil and draw away into herself again. A part of her had loved, and a part of her had lost, and it had nearly caused her to unravel, but time had mended the tender wound and left little else but a scar that ached only when her darkened hazel gaze has settled upon his.
It held no candle to the way Ledger stirred her heart into a rapid, thundering pace, or the way she could never seem to stop thinking of him – there was something so much more to the alluring electricity crackling between them (even now, with so much unsaid, with so much ache and longing and resentment roiling in the void). As her pale mouth presses against the crook of his jaw, breathing the salty sea breeze and sunlight that lingered on his skin, she is all too aware of how she had never felt in such a way for anyone before, in all of her time –
And it terrified her.
(He would not merely unravel her –
– he had the potential to destroy her.)
She can see the emotion shifting through the tension of his strong, handsome face, and she is quiet, waiting with baited breath for something, for anything to be uttered from his lips, and when it finally does, her heart is hammering once again. And I, you, I have missed you, and there is a whirlpool of relief and of trepidation churning within the pit of her anxious belly, as her forehead presses flatly to the hollow of his throat.
Finally, after a long moment, her gaze is once again seeking his own, stepping forth to impede his attempt to avert his single eye away from her –
”Then don’t,” she breathes, the ridge of her brow furrowing, and though her mind is screaming at her not to say it, to self-preserve, to protect her wayward and wild heart, it is whispering, if you don’t, you will never know, you will lose him.
”I need to know,” she murmurs, her voice hushed, barely rising from the tightness of her throat. ”I need you to tell me what is on your mind, Ledger,” and it is little else but a whisper now. A plea. ”I cannot know if you do not tell me.”
Bound for trouble from the start I've been walking through this old world in the dark
His tongue is heavy, his secrets buried so far within him that it is hard to brush off the debris and release them. His heart is even harder to uncover, so frozen in it’s case of never melting ice. And yet, this mystery woman who had once loved his sire, has set before him the greatest tempest he has ever faced. It wasn’t just that night of lovemaking (it had never just been sex, not when that level of passion and emotion had consumed them both) that had threatened to chisel away his fractured heart, piece by piece. It was that sense of peace and contentment he had finally felt for the very first time in his entire life. His whole world had been built on darkness, decay, sadness, loneliness. Yet she had shown him not only complete understanding but light at the end of a very long empty tunnel. Hope which had been given up so long ago.
But how does one convey that message? How could he ever truly explain to her just what she had done, what she meant to him? Even to Magnus he could never truly explain the pain he had suffered but perhaps that was because he was one of the sources to that hurt. He had never told a single soul what had truly happened in detail that day on the Beach. Or the secret of his torment with Carnage which he held within his ribcage with the trapped bear. Cruel secrets that festered and infected him with every second he draws breath. The icicle that had pierced his heart, made him cold and angry, how could he ever explain that feeling, that sensation? Knowing he would never truly feel warmth again until she had set a fire beneath his hooves?
Her forehead presses against the hollow of his throat and reflex makes him curve over her, scooping her into him. It sends shockwaves of desire through his skeletal body, after being away from her for so long. Pulling away, a pang of regret as she forces herself into his line of view, forcing him to make contact with her. A plea, a whisper. Begging him to speak. His throat constricts, pure panic evident along the ridges of his facial features. How could he ever subject her to such terror? How could he ever force his curses, his punishments, on her?
”I…” Hesitant, that encased heart pulsating rapidly in his chest. ”I’ve never felt anything like what I’ve felt for you.” The words thick but heated off his tongue, feeling stupid as he blindly rushes through his anxious confession. ”My life…. I lost my family when I was hours old, Magnus… His breath is ragged and gasping, barely afloat in this new drowning terror of trying to be honest, to unlock those secrets. ”I’ve never known any sort of happiness until I met you. I’ve never loved anyone but..” A hard swallow, he cannot look at her and instead glances down to where her hooves become submerged by thick foam.
”I look at you and for once know exactly what I want, exactly where I want to be.” Thick murmurs that threaten to drown in the crashing of waves behind him. ”I want you, only you. But I can’t force you to feel the same for me.” And here the resentment creeps into his resigned statement, thinking once more of Dahmer and everything that had happened since he had found out she was carrying his child. Ever since he had seen them together.
It’s a pathetic attempt at unloading his feelings but damnit he’s trying.
I know some things that you don't; I've done things that you won't there's nothing like a trail of blood to find your way back home
Her plea does not go unanswered –
There is a flicker of trepidation in the core of his dark, roving eye, mirroring her own, as her thundering heart pounds endlessly at its tightly wrought, iron cage. He is as uncertain as she is, entangled in the complexity of the emotion drawn out from that night spent beneath a bare but starlit sky – it is almost foolish, how her heart had become tethered to the fragmented, damaged pieces that remain of his.
She had sworn she would never love another so broken, but he is not simply like any other – the heavy barbed wire around his heart, not unlike her own, fell with ease, longing to find a purpose to beat still, raw and vulnerable once more beneath the splendor of the falling sun and the caress of her lips against his. He was not so heavily guarded, and beneath the roughened exterior, there lay a deep yearning to be wanted – to be loved, and she longed to quell the deep-set worry hidden in the shadow of his sullen eye, of the weariness that contorted the handsome lines of his masculine face.
She can almost feel his pulse thrumming with a sudden ferocity, pulsating through the length of his slender, nearly gaunt body, where the faint ridge of his hipbone can be seen even beneath the darkening descent of nightfall. The dread and frothing anxiety is already rising to the surface, glimmering in the darkness of his amber eye, settled within her own deep, watchful hazel gaze – and for a moment, her heart is skipping a beat. She is certain that any moment now, he could recoil – he might draw back into himself, leaving her both breathless and speechless, and wrought with an emotion she is not altogether prepared to relive again so soon.
When he does not, she is stunned – her breath caught in the tightness of her throat, suddenly constricted with emotion – and in that brief, flickering moment in time, a thick line is drawn between the one her heart had once pined for and the one that stood before her, raw, vulnerable and beckoning her to take his fragile heart into her grasp (he may be from his loin, but he is nothing like his father – not where it matters most). Quietly, silently, he is begging her not to spurn him; not to break what little is left by the unforgiving hand of time and heartbreak.
Soon, he has averted his gaze, his half-confession lingering somewhere in the thick humidity of the falling sun, the memories too much. He is drowning before her, and gently, her cheek brushes against his own, drawing him nearer to her, reaching up to drape the elongated slope of her neck over his own and to pull him against her. Softly, her lips touch and tug at the matted tresses that lay tangled across the length of his neck, and soft, gentle kisses rain upon the deep russet of his skin – until her pale mouth is pressed against the golden of his own, seeking to chase away the dark fear and unshakable insecurity taking hold of his heart.
”I have never felt for anyone the way that I feel for you, Ledger,” she says finally, her voice rumbling against the corner of his mouth, where soft and urging kisses press, longing for him to not only hear her words, but to listen to her words. ”you must learn to trust me, and I, you. We have both been hurt – but I am nothing if not loyal,” she breathes, tucking away a lock of hair away from his eyeless socket, nuzzling the scarred flesh that lay beneath it. ”and if I tell you that I am yours, I am yours, and yours alone –“
Her head tilts then, seeking to meet the darkness of his gaze with the light of her own – the rising moonlight gleaming within the golden flecks that lay around the rim of her eye.
Bound for trouble from the start I've been walking through this old world in the dark
For once, just once could everything be simple? Just once could something actually go right? They dance tentatively around each other, prodding each other’s thick walls in the hopes that the other would crumble first. So much hurt, pain, mind games. At the end of the day, those guarded looks and thick stubbornness would only hurt them more. Both of their anxiety simmering and mirrored in the dark reflections of haunted pupils (or pupil in his case).
Despite the fear of the unknown, the fear of rejection, he cannot turn and leave her. He can’t withdraw, too far gone. She had let him taste that pure moment of unfiltered happiness. Such a raw overwhelming feeling. So greedy for more, needing to feel that trembling want of her pressed against him forever and always. The desperate clumsy words that escape him taste bitter on his tongue and he instantly regrets saying them at all.
That is until his wishes come to fruition and she is pulling him close and his face is buried into the sweet salty scent of her tangled mane. Breathing in deep, skin of ash and brine. Feather light kisses trace alongside the hollowed slope of his neck and he is so overwhelmed to have her so close after avoiding each other for so long. The moment her heated mouth finds his own, any lingering doubts are instantly thrown out the window.
Soft curved ears gently swivel forward, his eyelid closing as he listens for the truth in her pleas. And as the last confirmation finally reaches him he steadily looks at her with such unbridled desire, suddenly so very calm amongst this raging storm they had created. ”I love you Ellyse.” Whatever uncertainty that had lingered in his mind simply disappears as the words become reality, realizing within himself how true they really were. Words he had never said to anyone, ever. Only for her. ”There is no one in this world for me but you.”
If the day came when Magnus returned then he would face it head on. Knowing his father the way he did, deep down he would probably understand. It didn’t matter anyways, nothing mattered but this. The last remaining cobwebs of doubt are shed as a strength surprising to everyone, including him, takes over the gaunt stallion. Pushing himself against her, fierce kisses pressed to her lips.
There is something different when he tastes her, when their flesh blurs against each other’s. There are flickers of stallion and bear, becoming one and the same as they both acknowledge the fire she inspires. The passion better than that first time, ignited. His touch a little harder, a little rougher, casting off any last trace images of Dahmer from his mind and from her.
I know some things that you don't; I've done things that you won't there's nothing like a trail of blood to find your way back home
For a moment, she is still.
Though her heart is beating recklessly inside of her chest, her breath is hitched, and her sinew and bone are still, enveloped by the embrace of the slender column of his throat, with his pale, tangled tresses of sunlight draped over her own while her mouth lingers along the corner of his. Around her, the world is continuing to move – the gentle ocean breeze brushing over her skin, while the wild and ravenous tide lips hungrily along the shoreline and against her lean, gilded legs – and yet, until a breath she hadn’t realized she’d be holding emerges across the surface of his cheek, she is unwavering, wanting to hold onto the moment for as long as time would allow her to.
When his lashes rise to reveal the darkness of his searching gaze, there is no longer any trace of uncertainty – there is a glimmer of the very same ferocity she had come to know so intimately that brisk, autumn evening (it felt so long ago, and there is a soft ache that yearns to be closer to him, to capture the unbridled desire that had been stoked like an effervescent flame). Her pale lips part, though her voice is caught in the tightness of her throat – there is no uncertainty; only the hesitance that comes with the utterance of any proclamation of love.
She had never said it before, either – not even to Magnus, though as maturity has found its way into the softened ridges of her gaze and in the marrow of her bones, she had come to find that what she had felt for him was not love at all – not a deeply romantic love. It was nothing compared to how she felt when she was close to Ledger, bathing alongside him beneath the pale dusk amid the salty seawater, his lips against her own. There is a gentle fluttering beneath her chest plate, and though it is unfamiliar, she does not shy away from it – embracing it wholly, until her heartbeat thunders harder than a thousand hoofbeats at his soft, but definite confession.
Love.
He loved her, too.
And softly, she murmurs to him, I love you, too, before pressing her lips against the curve of his jaw, the hollow of his cheek and where bone meets the defined muscle of his neck, trailing along the length of his body as her own hunger grew – eager, aching, needing, and she gives herself to him as wholly as the starlit sky gives itself to the moon, and as freely as the wayward breeze gives itself to the open sea.
