"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
Alive? he might be dead for aught I know, With that red gaunt and colloped neck a-strain, And eyes squeezed shut ‘neath rusty mane;
Not a day goes by when he doesn’t think about how he’s not supposed to exist. Never mind that his very existence is a slap in the face to nature (demon-conceived, damned from the start). What matters is he died. He almost remembers it – the memories come and go, bright, awful flashes that leave him stuttering in the afterimage. He remembers water, cool then cold, he remembers darkness, enveloping. He hadn’t known, then, what his body could do – some wretched trace of magic from his mother (oh) or something else. He shouldn’t exist. Not anymore. He’s paid his dues, lived out a long and wretched lifetime. He is owed death. But death thinks otherwise, and so – And so. And so he is. No longer drowned. Existing. He looks young, now, reborn into a new body – his skin no longer sinks into his ribs, there’s no gray on his muzzle. He looks healthy. Vital. He’s barely aware of where he is, today, he wanders and time is a strange and slippery beast. He walks until he doesn’t. Until he pauses to rest in the shade, to stare out at the world with orange eyes, his existence a defiance and a curse.
Seldom went such grotesqueness with such woe; I never saw a brute I hated so; He must be wicked to deserve such pain.
The eyes. She remembers his eyes as they bore into her.
And his skin, so warm and heated by a sinful lust as she trembled beneath him in want.
Another desperate attempt of hers to sate her reminiscent joy. Children, she had thought, would lift the darkness that swirled at the front of her mind. Love: she tested the theory, but nothing was ever meant to be. What she wanted never came to fruition – not with him or any other suitors that warmed her bed.
Their coupling resulted in a deformed son, one of many that she discarded because survival would be a struggle for him. Only the fittest, right? But while her children had been physically weak, Shiya was emotionally and mentally. A man could merely smile in her direction and her knees would quake as though her world was shifting. She was desperate to mirror the love of her parents, but monsters never have happy endings, do they?
Her tongue slips thoughtfully across her lips, wondering whether he would remember her. It had been so long ago; if not for his vibrant eyes, she would have forgotten him. Some nights, he would visit her dreams, but she never quite grasped whether she was glad or sad to see his face when her eyes closed for the night.
Shiya blinks, confirming that he is here and this is not another dream or memory. Slipping forward, she searches the face that once looked down on her and bit her neck, sweated onto her and left her pregnant. ”Hello,” she catches herself from saying his name as curiosity twists through her thoughts, testing him without knowing the desired outcome.
Alive? he might be dead for aught I know,
With that red gaunt and colloped neck a-strain,
And eyes squeezed shut ‘neath rusty mane;
She is not familiar, at first.
His memories are hazy things, reflections on a rippled pond. More things come to him, as he continues on his strange existence, and they are rarely good, rarely memories he wants – they are memories of loving and being left, testaments to his sins. He would prefer such things stay buried.
At first, he only looks upon her with curiosity, the strangeness of her features – slit eyes and scales, curious, but as his eyes fall on the scales, the scales fall from his eyes, and he is struck with memory of her. A brief encounter, driven by a mutual wanting. He had not seen her again.
He can recall the warmth of her, but not her name. Her name is still muddled in his memory, and he isn’t sure what’s true, what isn’t.
“Hello,” he echoes, orange eyes meeting green ones, and he wonders why they never saw one another again. The timeline of it is muddled, too, where she fit in.
“How are you?” he asks. It’s a banal question, pointless, but she is something fitfully familiar in a world that is terribly strange, and he wonders if she’d stay, this time, and if he could learn her name again.
Seldom went such grotesqueness with such woe;
I never saw a brute I hated so;
He must be wicked to deserve such pain.
When their eyes meet – orange to green – she stares and relives the fading memories they share. What of their child, she briefly muses, but she dismisses it because all of her children were seemingly cursed. Each one has been a defect that led her back into the arms of Vulgaris. Shiya doesn’t mention their son either, content to let that sliver of her past hide in the concubines of her mind.
Hello, he repeats, almost like a mockingbird. A pause thickens the air between them and she wonders if she is just a figment of a lost memory to him, simply a new face to see lurking in the trees. ”I’m well,” she lies, masking her turmoil behind a jagged smile. ”And you? How are you?” Recognition brings her voice to tremble, her heart’s desperation seducing her to melt into him as she once had years ago. That’s her solution for everything. To love, to tempt, to fuck.
She should know by now that it isn’t enough to fill the void, but still she tries.
Swallowing down the lump in her throat, Shiya manages to peel her gaze from his and look over the body that once lied across her back, overpowering, dominating. He should have strong, beautiful children, but instead she gave him a monster. He didn’t deserve it. The boy would’ve been a hindrance, a blemish.
Lifting her eyes, she searches and tries to sate herself with the memory of his warmth on her scales. She remembers that but tries to blot out the outcome of their rendezvous. ”It has been a while,” her tongue is a lead weight in her mouth as she scrambles for conversation while still trying to squelch her incessant need for contact. He won’t want it, not anymore. Still, she inches closer. ”Shiya,” she whispers her own name sweetly, hopefully. ”You look different,” a pause because she can’t quite grasp it, ”yet the same.” The scars of his past are gone and there is an innocence in his startlingly orange gaze, an expression she once adorned
Alive? he might be dead for aught I know,
With that red gaunt and colloped neck a-strain,
And eyes squeezed shut ‘neath rusty mane;
He’s not a smart man – never was – but even he can see how she lies, how the smile cuts her face like broken glass. He sees it because it’s practically a mirror, his own cut-glass smile slicing his features.
He does not recall her being so broken, but then, was he, when they met? It was years and years ago, and so fleeting, maybe he didn’t learn anything about her at all.
(And, of course, the obvious – that time is cruel and unfailing, that it leaves wounds, some that scar and some that never quite heal.)
“I’m fine,” he says. He can lie too.
He is aware that she creeps closer, and his breath catches for a moment. He was a mistake on her part, he’s sure – for who could ever love a monster, and all that – but she hasn’t left yet, her and her broken smile, and now he can breathe in the scent of her, see the way light glints on her scales, as if held there.
She whispers her name, grants it to him – a gift he doesn’t deserve – and he nods. Shiya. Of course.
“Of course,” he says – echoes.
And then, he stumbles, and tells the truth.
“I died,” he says, “and then I came back. I don’t know- I don’t know why.”
He’d wanted to die. His time had run up long ago. He had not wanted to wash back up on the shores in a new body, new but the same, just unmarked, younger, but with the same awful heart, the same awful orange eyes, the sins of the father.
“You,” he says, still looking at her, at her green eyes, the scales, the features that have gone unchanged, “you are still so beautiful.”
Seldom went such grotesqueness with such woe;
I never saw a brute I hated so;
He must be wicked to deserve such pain.
