Brigade takes a step forward, unbidden, when he hears the tears in her voice.
Something like concern would cross his features if he knew how to express it. Something like concern would blossom beneath the surface like a bruise but instead his face remains carved from stone, his light grey eyes watching with just a pinch of tension on the brow. He doesn’t know how he could possibly ever relate to her. He doesn’t know how he could possibly ever understand her world.
So he doesn’t try.
He doesn’t pretend and instead remains still as she works through her own thoughts, processing his own question and then reaching out to him. He nearly braces against it but he looks for her gaze and he tries to relax into it. He compartmentalizes the rest of his pain—forcing it in the back of his mind as he focuses on hers instead—and lets the exhaustion that she offers like candy slip under his tongue.
She touches him and his lashes flutter and the ground rises up to meet him.
He doesn’t feel the impact because the second he falls, he rises as if through water on the other side. The first breath that he takes feels strange—how does one breathe when they do not need it—and the body that he inhabits is his and yet not his all at once. He frowns, feeling a shadow of a headache forming (for him to deal with later, he is sure) and he looks to his side where she stands, small and fierce and there.
Brigade doesn’t say anything at first but instead takes a step forward, lifting his merlot head and looking at the vines and the jungle that feels so real. His lips press together in thought, a muscle working in his wide jaw, before he glances down again, angling his gaze back to her. “It’s warmer than I thought it’d be.”
In so many ways, it feels like his home, like Tephra.
But when he draws in that phantom breath, he knows it could not be further from it.
BRIGADE
when I was a man I thought it ended when I knew love's perfect ache
but my peace has always depended on all the ashes in my wake