"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 should have loved a thunderbird instead at least when spring comes they roar back again
For someone who lives so completely in his own head, it has been difficult to get out of it lately.
Aegean has thought of the boy of ivory and cerulean. Has dreamt of the way it felt with his teeth against his neck, the way that his body had reacted—running hot and cold. The visceral feeling of being so alive, the dreams ripped away until he was standing breathless before a strong headwind. He has dreamt of that moment, the quiet and the roar, but his dreams are dull in comparison. No matter how he weaves them, how he imagines Pteron, it always falls flat, and he finds himself staring at the horizon, wondering.
Finally, when it is nearly night, the antlered stallion finds himself moving forward.
He barely registers that he is moving, that he is going somewhere, until he recognizes the path that he is on. He glances down to his amethyst hooves moving with such certainty and just smiles, seeing the way that his body casts a glow on the ground as it fades and then morphs into the beginning of Taiga’s forest.
When he is further within the trees, he stops.
He remembers the last time that he was here, and he considers calling for Pteron, but instead he just sits silently—something within him content to know that he is near the other. He smiles and then tips his head back, for once not calling on his gift of illusion and content to watch the stars and the sky slowly darkens.
Perhaps Pteron will find him.
Perhaps he will spend his hours deep within the trees alone.
Either way, it is enough to know he stands where Pteron has stood.
It is enough.
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead (I think I made you up inside my head.)
finger trips across my cheek---------------- ----------------kiss me until i can't speak
Pteron’s dreams are no less frequent, and yet they have all ended the same of late. Cloying ash overwhelms the fragile scent of flowers, smoke chokes the clear sky, true flames burn away the warmth of his memories. Today is no different. Having chosen to roost in a bole far from his usual nest, the first breathe he takes upon waking is flavored only by the trees and the fog. That makes it easier to forget the dream – or at least that it was ruined.
The rest of it is forgotten as he descends to the ground, a slow spiraling of his pied body down to the forest floor. Once there, he tucks his pale wings tightly to his sides, takes a sip from the little creek that flows near the base of the large redwood, and begins his journey through the woods. He’s not headed anywhere in particular – except not south, because that is where Reia is likely to be – and instead meanders slowly toward the east. Perhaps he might visit the sea, he is thinking, try and pick out the distant rise on the watery horizon that is the landmass of Silver Cove.
He doesn’t make it there, because part of his dream stands in the shadowy forest ahead of him.
Aegean is unburnt (he never leaves the dream unburnt, and rarely as more than a pile of ash) and Pteron knows he is not sleeping. His chest constricts tightly after the briefest moment of overwhelming joy, and though he continues forward, he pauses far far out of reach.
“Aegean,” he says softly, and even the sound of his name hurts, because Pteron has done his very best to put it from his mind. “What are you doing here?” The words should have been happy, should have matched the initial brightness in him at the sight of the antlered stallion, and instead they are torn and ragged.
I should have loved a thunderbird instead at least when spring comes they roar back again
There is something wrong.
Aegean is not quite able to pick apart what it might be—unable to find the reason why everything feels so broken. Perhaps it is the way that Pteron’s voice does not sound bright and carefree but instead exhausted and worn. Perhaps it is the fact that he stops so far away, the distance between them painfully large. Perhaps it is, instead, the look in his eyes, the bruises underneath the surface that still shine through.
Whatever it is, or perhaps the culmination of it all, it strikes a strange blow to Aegean. Enough to break through the dreamy distance he usually keeps himself at so that he focuses his gaze on the two-toned stallion before him, his deep purple eyes a touch sharper than usual—a strange clarity settling on him.
“Pteron,” he greets, his voice as soft as ever, wrapping the name with the same adoration that he always has—cherishing each and every syllable. The question does not hurt him, although perhaps it should. Perhaps he should feel the ragged edge of a knife at the idea that he would need a reason to be here, but such things have always rolled off of him, leaving him as unaffected as the beach by the tide.
Instead he just ponders the question, glancing up toward the darkening sky and the steaks of color across it. “I wander,” he says simply, rolling an impossibly white shoulder. “I do not always know where I will go, but I am not surprised that I ended up here.” Then, a softer smile, his eyes still studying the other boy’s face, as if trying to find the reasoning beneath it. “I have dreamed of you.”
A sentence he has uttered before, but this time, it feels strangely weighty on his tongue.
A finality, a looming sense of dread—things he has never encountered and feel alien within him.
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead (I think I made you up inside my head.)
finger trips across my cheek---------------- ----------------kiss me until i can't speak
Pteron had imagined this sight a hundred times in the past. Aegean, here in Taiga, the soft glow of him illuminating the fog that clings to his sides. He looks half-mist himself, and beautiful enough to make Pteron’s throat catch. Aegean, here in Taiga, reminding him that he had not dreamt those nights in Hyaline. Pteron had worried, a time or two, that he might have made it up - perhaps the high mountain air had made him dizzy, made the dreams seem real. But this is Aegean, and there is that soft whorl of hair just above his left eye, a place that Pteron has so tenderly kissed. He’d not imagined that.
“You can’t be here,” Pteron whispers in reply. He’d come nearer without realizing it, near enough to see that crooked whorl, near enough that his hushed voice easily crosses the space between them. Near enough to touch, though he pulls himself back a moment before his lips brush against Aegean’s shoulder. He shakes his head as though that will return the sense to it, as though that might disrupt the near-magnetic force that draws him closer to the amethyst-eyed boy.
“You can’t be here,” he repeats, with his blue ears twisting about, dark nostrils flaring to catch a scent. He should look for the danger too, but he cannot bring himself to take his eyes from Aegean. “It’s not safe. My wife lives here now; you can’t stay.” The pegasus is only half-aware that his words will make little sense to Aegean. He is most concerned with being discovered by Reia, and can’t know that she is miles away, occupied by the antics of the child whose existence is living proof of the danger they are both in. Were she to discover Aegean here – Aegean, whom Pteron cannot keep his eyes off – she will have no qualm about destroying him.
Pteron is not allowed ties to others, ties that might threaten Reia’s possession of him. Aegean is nothing but a scent to her now, and Pteron’s acquiescence has spared Aegean and Aquaria thus far. But were she to discover him here, were she to suspect even a fraction of the affection that Pteron has for the antlered boy? The forest would surely burn along with them.
His words - his actions - are those of a man whose affair has been discovered, who intends to sacrifice it for the continuance of his marriage. Only the tone of those words, the way his voice breaks as he lets himself brush just one wayward lock away from Aegean’s face, suggests that it might be anything different. “We can’t see each other anymore.”
I should have loved a thunderbird instead at least when spring comes they roar back again
This world does not make sense to Aegean.
It is only the bits and pieces that he is able to comprehend, to piece together into a whole that is clear. He does not understand the words—the warning of it, the way that Pteron seeks to drive him away—but he does understand the way that he comes closer. He knows the gravity of it because it pulls at his belly too, it drags him further along, although he too resists that primal urge to close the gap with his lips to the boy’s jaw, the strength that has long since been planted and grown along the pegasus’ maturing body.
“I am here though,” he finally says, his voice still detached, foggy with confusion but each word so carefully said, the syllables handled with care. Then, a moment, where the uncertainty settles into the curves and the angles of his handsome face, shadowing the impossible white of him. “Wife?” he says, angling his head so that he may stare at Pteron, study the whole of him, try to understand the moment.
Around him, fog begins to grow dense. Perhaps to mirror the fog that creeps through the whorls of his heart. Perhaps in response to the idea that his safety may be compromised. Either way, the illusion of it crawls slowly toward the pair, darkening until it is nearly shadows. It wounds around his legs and then spreads like vines across his back, dimming the glow of him but not snuffing it out entirely.
“I am not afraid for my safety,” he whispers, although he does not tell the other everything that he is afraid of. The things that break a poet’s heart—the ending, the loss, the stretch of the inevitable. Aegean would hold onto the glow of the moon forever, let himself be burned by the surface of the sun for the beauty of it, but he feels that he has no such choice now. The choice has been made and he is meant to live in the afterglow of it, forever shackled to the world of darkness with the sun ripped from his grasp.
The silence between them stretches but Aegean doesn’t look away, doesn’t move toward or away.
He leans into the touch as Pteron brushes the hair away.
“I will go,” he whispers. “If that’s what you want.”
He wouldn’t dream of forcing himself where he is not wanted, of giving into the hunger of his own heart for the beauty of the sun if that hunger was not requited. His selfishness knew boundaries.
“But I do not need to be here to see you,” a sad whisper of a smile.
“I will always see you, Pteron of Taiga.”
In his dreams, both asleep and waking.
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead (I think I made you up inside my head.)
finger trips across my cheek---------------- ----------------kiss me until i can't speak
The tobiano pegasus had once come across a wren, freshly escaped from the clutches of a hawk. Many feathers had been torn from its nutbrown wings, so many that each frantic attempt at flight lifted her only a few feet from the ground.
Pteron’s heart feels like that wren. Aegean’s presence elicits that desperate need to soar, and yet all it can manage to do is flutter weakly on the forest floor. Reia’s ripped the wings from him, and she’d do far worse to Aegean.
The amethyst-eyed boy says he is here, repeats wife, and Pteron only nods. He hardly notices the fog around them until it begins to dim Aegean. Only when he whispers, when Pteron looks over his shoulder to see if anyone’s arrival has caused that, does he really notice the swirling mist. I am not afraid, he says, and Pteron reaches over, presses his mouth to Aegean’s as if to stifle the words. He feels so cool, and yet the heat flares through him, leaving him biting his lip as he pulls away.
“It isn’t,” he says, his forehead against Aegean’s, his heart quivering uselessly at their blue and purple hooves. “It isn’t. ”
“But you must. I won’t let her hurt you. I couldn’t, I couldn’t bear it.”
It’s cheating, Pteron knows it, but he cannot bear the shadow of smile that curls at Aegean’s mouth, not when he has seen the real thing.
“You will be [happier] without me.” He tells the other boy. “You deserve happiness, and being near me will be anything but.”
01-04-2020, 03:21 PM (This post was last modified: 01-04-2020, 03:25 PM by aegean.)
Aegean
I should have loved a thunderbird instead at least when spring comes they roar back again
None of this makes sense.
Nothing except that feeling of warmth that flares in his chest when the other boy’s mouth meets his own. That feeling of rightness that clicks in his chest—letting him know that he is home, that he is here. Aegean does not hesitate to answer the call, that fluttering of wings in his pulse. The other both feels smooth and warm as the sun that he had once compared him to. He drinks him down, savors the taste of salt and fresh air and the wild gooseberries that he is certain that he can taste brimming on the surface.
When the other boy pulls away slightly, his lips trace down his jaw to where he had once spent so much time learning the curves of, and then rests his antlered head against the other—content to just sit in this moment that felt so stolen, so forbidden. “There is no hurt greater than a life without you,” he whispers softly, unsure of what had Pteron so convinced that staying here would cause him physical pain.
Surely there was nothing worse than the distance threatened between them.
Surely no fate darker than that.
Still, there are things he doesn’t know—uncertainties that swirl in the mist around them—and even though he feels that happiness thread through him, it feels like a falsehood. A planted thing that does not have roots, despite the authenticity of it. Aegean frowns, his lips pulling downward. “You and I both know that being near you is the only thing to bring me true happiness,” his voice cool, measured, his eyes searching the other boy’s face. “But if I am to lead a life apart at least I am to lead it having known you.”
Because suddenly, he is certain there is a hurt greater than a life without him.
The only fate worse than the one he is facing would be the one without having known Pteron at all.
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead (I think I made you up inside my head.)
