06-21-2021, 01:57 PM
Dark
Her first few strides are some strange kind of jubilation, and for a moment it is almost as though she has forgotten the state of the world around her. She is running, and it is not because death chases her, not because the dark that touches her skin is something evil and salivating, something eager to consume her. She runs because she wants to be followed, because she has found someone in this not-so afterlife that is the same blue as her, the same wasted body as her father. He is things that feel like home, and for just this moment it is easy to feel like she has been reunited with someone she misses so much it carves entire wastelands out of her chest.
The dark is dangerous like that, it revives all those broken pieces you thought you buried so well. It takes reality and bends it until everything feels like dream and nightmare and entirely unreal.
It makes her forget that there are consequences, that this man who turned and lunged to follow in her wake did not do so out of play.
She remembers though. By the fourth, fifth, sixth stride she can feel the dark seeping back into the quiet of her chest, feel the weight of it like universes plucked out of the sky and dropped onto her shoulders. Seven, eight, nine strides and she remembers that she runs now because if you don’t then you die. That this night is long and dark and all the stars broke open to reveal that they were hiding death inside them all along.
“I’ll never stop.” She calls back to him, but the words are hushed and wary, and if he hears them at all it is only because they drift back to him on a stale breeze that whispers through her mane. She doesn’t think about slowing, not even to let him catch up. But she also suspects that there is more to him than there appears to be - and maybe it is only because her father had been thin in this same way, all sharp angles and sharp bones, and he had never for a day in his life been made weak by it.
Something hurtles past her, and it isn’t the man at her heels. It is something the size of a boar and just as vicious, and she nearly loses her footing as she spins to face it with an expression of frozen wariness on that delicate blue and white face. It is something twisted and malformed, a creature made of gleaming shadow with no eyes and no discernible ears, yet somehow it halts and turns to face her. She has exactly one moment to pick between two different beasts. This chittering, gnashing thing before her, or the man at her heels who she thinks would love nothing more than to catch her.
She chooses capture.
Chooses the evil she knows over the one she doesn’t, and when he is near enough to reach for, she does so with a kind of gentleness that belongs to nothing that survives in a world as broken as this one. Her mouth touches his neck, touches the black and the boniness, touches death and wonders what choice he will make in turn.
Her, or the creature slinking nearer.
The dark is dangerous like that, it revives all those broken pieces you thought you buried so well. It takes reality and bends it until everything feels like dream and nightmare and entirely unreal.
It makes her forget that there are consequences, that this man who turned and lunged to follow in her wake did not do so out of play.
She remembers though. By the fourth, fifth, sixth stride she can feel the dark seeping back into the quiet of her chest, feel the weight of it like universes plucked out of the sky and dropped onto her shoulders. Seven, eight, nine strides and she remembers that she runs now because if you don’t then you die. That this night is long and dark and all the stars broke open to reveal that they were hiding death inside them all along.
“I’ll never stop.” She calls back to him, but the words are hushed and wary, and if he hears them at all it is only because they drift back to him on a stale breeze that whispers through her mane. She doesn’t think about slowing, not even to let him catch up. But she also suspects that there is more to him than there appears to be - and maybe it is only because her father had been thin in this same way, all sharp angles and sharp bones, and he had never for a day in his life been made weak by it.
Something hurtles past her, and it isn’t the man at her heels. It is something the size of a boar and just as vicious, and she nearly loses her footing as she spins to face it with an expression of frozen wariness on that delicate blue and white face. It is something twisted and malformed, a creature made of gleaming shadow with no eyes and no discernible ears, yet somehow it halts and turns to face her. She has exactly one moment to pick between two different beasts. This chittering, gnashing thing before her, or the man at her heels who she thinks would love nothing more than to catch her.
She chooses capture.
Chooses the evil she knows over the one she doesn’t, and when he is near enough to reach for, she does so with a kind of gentleness that belongs to nothing that survives in a world as broken as this one. Her mouth touches his neck, touches the black and the boniness, touches death and wonders what choice he will make in turn.
Her, or the creature slinking nearer.
The heaviness that I hold in my heart belongs to gravity.
Dovev x Luster
@[Balto]