[private] a fever, a flame

[brigade]

I was a poor boy; you were a bright light
I was a sinner and you were a snake

He remembers how she burns, but it’s like a memory now. An echo. He can barely hold onto it these days, so deeply encased in ice. Sometimes, he feels it like a flash burn across his dreams. A wildfire that blazes through and he feels the best of it wash over him—but always when it’s gone. Always when there’s nothing but the whisper of heat to remind him. 

He stirs in his dreams now as he remembers. As something so important and so far gone calls out to him. A grunt as he shifts, as he clenches his jaw. His wings rustle and pull tight and he screws his eyes closed even tighter. It’s so close, he thinks, and he wonders why it matters. 

Why he dreams of wildfires when he is now a thing made of winter. 

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 swallows as he draws himself to standing, frowning faintly at his imprint left there on the ground, before shaking himself off. A flick of his tail as he turns his stormy gaze to the east, to the endless abyss of a land he once had known so intimately and now doesn’t know at all. 

The young man in him once greeted every day with curiosity. 

In his later years, he greeted it with a fight. 

These days, there is just a slow exhale that mimics a sigh. An emptiness he has carved into his very own chest. An acceptance. And he rises once more to meet it. 

shook like some old souls when our bones broke
swallowed the sickness, a fever, a flame

BRIGADE