"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 watches her pale coat take on the stars, a twisted mirror of his own. The galaxies engulf her, for a moment, and then settle on to her skin. He is tempted to take her right now, with nothing else done, but ah, there is still more to do with her. Or to her, perhaps.
She asks her question, and it’s a fair one. He doesn’t have a clean answer – she had crossed his mind, and yes, he had thought of her dressed in stars, been curious how she might take to it – but this cannot be articulated simply. He is not one to overplay his hand.
“I thought, after so long in darkness, you might like to see the stars,” he says, and it is partially true – an iota of romance, bleeding though – but the truth is not so clean, not so selfless.
“You look good in them,” he says then, trailing his mouth over her back, tracing his own constellations, “but to truly appreciate them, you should feel them.”
He reaches into her, flips some invisible switch, and the stars that adorn her begin to burn, as if she is implanted with real stars. No skin sizzles, but the pain will be real enough, the bright burn of galaxies on her skin.
He knows this pain – he felt it himself, out of curiosity, when he first ventured into the stars, took them on to himself. But he watches, his expression hungry, as the stars come to life on her body.
“I want you to feel as though you’ve earned them,” he says, though this, too, is mostly a lie – he is merely curious to see how she’ll handle such pain, and hungry to see her burn without fire.
(Last time she had drowned, for him. Or because of him. This time, there is no death in sight, only invisible, endless pain.)
“Ryatah,” he murmurs, touching her skin again – a dark place, one where he will not be burned by the stars, “you’re doing so well.”
(btw please powerplay him "turning off" the burning realness of the stars in the next post, he just wanted her to have a taste )
There is a shadow of confusion that befalls her face at his answer, because the words are wrapped in an almost kindness. She overlooks the fact that she spent so long in the darkness because of him. There is a thought somewhere in the back of her mind, a gnawing thing that makes her wonder why this time is different. Last time, he had ripped her eyes out and disappeared. Last time, she had been left broken and bleeding in the middle of a kingdom that was plunged into chaos, while she plummeted only into darkness.
He had not fixed her, he had not saved her. He had left her in the darkness, and still, she had never hated him.
And now, she finds some sort of strange trust in him, because he has drowned her and brought her back, he has touched her in a watered-down memory of the Valley, and they linger now, covered and surrounded by stars. She is foolish and reckless and incapable of grounding herself with logic and reason, especially with his mouth moving along her back. “I did miss the stars,” she affirms softly, not trusting herself to say much else.
She doesn’t have a chance to protest when he says you should feel them, and she knows from experience it would have been a useless plea anyway. The stars suddenly alight from the inside out, white hot and searing beneath her skin, her blood boiling with the strength of an entire galaxy. She burns, until it is all that she knows, until she is afraid it will never stop, until she wishes she was drowning instead. She wants to beg him to make it stop, but her throat is closed and raw and only strangled cries escape. He can still hear her; she knows he can hear her mind screaming, and she knows every plea and prayer will go unanswered until he decides to be done.
Finally, it ends, and she is left shuddering and gasping, with tears streaked down her delicate face. Her heart races uncontrollably, trapped in an adrenaline high spiked by the pain and by fear and by a tangled, inexplicable want. She finds his shoulder with her lips, as though he is somehow her savior and salvation, rather than her tormentor. She trembles there, the stars across her skin glittering and rippling, and there is a choked laugh when she remembers what he had said just moments before when she was still burning. “I don’t know that I am,” she tries to brush it off, tries to not get lost in that need to please him, to find more ways to earn that subtle praise. “Because I still don’t entirely know or understand what you want from me.” She says it, even though she knows she will never understand. It would never be black and white; it would never be clean-cut, and it would never make sense to anyone except them.
09-20-2019, 06:18 PM (This post was last modified: 09-20-2019, 10:06 PM by Cassi.)
lord, I fashion dark gods too;
He is taken with her pain, her wordless burning. He knows, faintly, what it is like, as he has done such to himself. But pain is a different being to a god, he can hardly recall what it had felt like when he was mortal.
He knows her so well, yet when he stops, he still half-expects her to cry, or scream. But she comes closer, a trembling touch to his body. He returns the touch, though his is steady, his wanting growing higher, more insistent. He listens to her question - I still don’t entirely know or understand what you want from me - and he debates the answer.
(He thinks of another women, his death queen – opposite of her in coloring, but alike in many ways. He’d asked her, once, what’s another word for love?, and she’d answered, we’re indefinable.)
“There are parts of you I’m still discovering,” he says, which is a cryptic answer, but there’s an honesty to it, “and I can never entirely predict you.”
He moves in their strange and beautiful void, towards the parts of her that are well-discovered, because this is part of it, too, children bred in strange, unknowable places. The ghost of the valley, a distant galaxy, he will ensure that they are born with complexity in their veins, if nothing else.
For a time, he does not notice the stars.
After, he sends her back to earth, keeping her return painless, for the most part. He remains, moving through the galaxy, time turning to nothingness and stars erupting, celestial chaos reflecting in his wine-dark eyes, a god, indefinable.
im sorry it took me a hundred years to reply and they're welcome to start another thread but since this has gone on for months i'll let time pass a minute ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
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