"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 never cared for anyone so much. I was born with a bomb inside my gut.
She knows the loneliness well.
It has been her only constant companion.
The only thing in all the world that she can count on.
She knows that there are creatures in the world who thrive in solitude, who shirk the company of others. But she has never been one of them, despite how fiercely she has fought to become one. Oh, how desperately she has tried to drag some semblance of joy out of the silence. She has tried to make herself hard, stoic, daring them not to look at her instead of wishing they would so thoroughly that it absolutely devastated her.
But why should they look at her? Why should he have called her back to the shore? She is plain, ordinary. The stars have not leaned down to kiss her, she has neither magic nor wings. Nothing about her is beautiful, nothing about her is designed to arrest anyone’s attention. So, she does not hold it against them. There is no one to blame, really. So she swallows all of it. Lets it fester, lets it eat a hole through her. Lets it absolutely destroy her.
“It is nice,” she concedes. But it is so terribly lonely and it has done nothing but further erode whatever hope remained in her. Hope that she might someday be worthwhile.
He does not turn and go, though she expects him to. He does not offer her one last parting word of warning before disappearing back into the forest at the river’s edge. Instead, he goes on standing there and she finds that this makes her heart pound just as frantically as the ice that had splintered beneath her weight. She presses her mouth into a thin line, for fear that she might say something foolish just to fill the silence.
She blinks at him then, tilts her head a fraction. Her breath is still thin and she searches his face a moment before remembering herself, looking away again. “Oh,” she murmurs, “I’ve never been there.” Has she ever heard of it? She cannot be sure. “Do you like it?” she asks and is immediately plunged into a sea of self-loathing. What a stupid thing to ask, she thinks, fighting off a grimace.
Brigade would be so much happier if he was left alone, he thinks. He would be so much happier if he was able to truly find a place where it could just be him and the wild and no one else. Perhaps in this kind of world he wouldn’t be able to hurt anyone else. Perhaps he would be able to dull his edges until he could just find the core of himself; until he could run with the wolves and just be alone.
But he has never been able to find that place.
No matter how hard he tries, he keeps getting pulled back into the mud and the muck.
Her voice is so quiet that he nearly misses it and he wonders how anyone this delicate was left alone in the world. How anything this fragile would be left in a place where he could run into her. Where he could crash into her sides and leave her ruined in his wake. He curses himself. Wishes him anywhere else.
She asks if he likes it and he isn’t sure how to answer. For the most part, Sylva is just him and Starsin. It’s like living with a ravenous wolf except far more difficult to predict. He imagines that she holds a knife to his throat every night he sleeps; he imagines that one day they will be the death of each other.
She would enjoy that.
“It’s better than my previous home,” is all he says because he has little kind things to say about Loess. Little kind things to say about a place that made a bargain with a boy for his freedom and little kind things about himself for bending to their wishes. He could have gone elsewhere, he knows. He could have gone back on his word. But he still lives under their rule and perhaps that says everything you need to know.
“It could be worse,” he follows up.
“It’s no meadow though,” a faint smile that disappears before it fully settles on his lips.
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
I never cared for anyone so much. I was born with a bomb inside my gut.
She wonders why he stays.
She wonders if it has anything to do with pity.
If he feels some sense of remorse for scaring her.
She wonders if he can smell the loneliness on her, if he can see it in her face.
Wonders if he can tell just by looking at her how desperate she is for company.
If he cannot see it in her face, he can certainly tell it in the way she asks questions that make her blush in embarrassment just to keep him there. He must feel like he owes her something otherwise he would not entertain her lame attempts at keeping the conversation afloat.
She does not fully understand his answer but she dares not ask him for clarification. She doesn’t ask him what about his previous home had been so bad. He does not seem the type to take kindly to such personal questions and she can imagine him gritting his teeth, can imagine the muscle in his jaw pulsing. She can imagine him snapping at her to mind her own business. So, she saves herself the trouble. Reminds herself that she is a stupid girl – she does not need anyone else to remind her – and tries to erase it from her mind altogether.
But there is some semblance of humanity beneath the seething exterior, she thinks. He’d come at her swinging, berating her for being so absent-minded, but there is something like a smile when he speaks and she wants to smile, too. But the muscles have atrophied and she just goes on looking at him with some kind of breathless wonder.
She has always wanted to be the sort of woman who can buy into a joke, giggle and grin. She has wanted to be charming and coy. But she just goes on looking at him with that same peculiar tightness in her throat.
“It’s lonely,” she says, matter-of-fact. “I go so long without talking to anyone sometimes that I get scared that I’ve forgotten how. Sometimes I worry that if anyone were to ever talk to me, I’d open my mouth and no sound would come out at all.” She shrugs then and the corners of her mouth turn down in quiet contemplation.
He couldn’t tell you why he hasn’t found some excuse or, if he was being honest, just walked away. He has not been known for his patience or his ability to care about others—lease of all strangers. But he does not feel any strong need to pick up his feet and move; he does not feel compelled to walk away.
Perhaps it is because she does not push him.
She doesn’t ask him to be anything but he is.
She doesn’t press him for more information.
She’s just there and there’s something like understanding in the sadness that pulls at the corners of her mouth. He sees himself in the shadows of it; he sees himself in the tautness of her mouth.
What he doesn’t see coming is her outpouring of feelings.
His brow furrows and he bites down until the muscles drag furrows across his jaw. He doesn’t reply right away because he struggles to find the words for it. Struggles to articulate everything that explodes in his chest because it makes him see stars, makes his teeth hurt with the honesty that she throws his way.
Finally, he is able to find the words, but they are stilted and short.
“I prefer to be lonely sometimes,” he manages and his gaze finds hers, searches for the core of it so that he could maybe find the ground again. “It’s better to be alone than hurt others.” He bites back the rest of his reality and looks away, swallowing all of the hurt and pain that feel like broken glass inch throat.
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
I never cared for anyone so much. I was born with a bomb inside my gut.
She doesn’t know why she’s said it.
Perhaps because it had become too heavy to carry on her own.
Because the thought it might be easier to stomach if someone else knew it, too.
Maybe it would not feel so big, so insurmountable, so suffocating.
But she knows as soon as she’s said it that it was a mistake. She thinks about taking her leave. She wonders what it might be like to do the leaving, rather than being left. She could apologize and move on and try to convince herself that she would never think about this again. How foolish she’d been. Stupid, ignorant girl, thinking a thin sheet of ice might somehow support her. As if feeling invisible made her weightless.
The silence is almost unbearable and she watches in abject horror as another storm passes over his face. Her muscles tremble with all of the energy it takes to pull themselves taut beneath the surface. She is not afraid, really. It is something akin to fear, but it is not the same terror that had closed an iron fist around her throat as she’d skittered back to shore. In comparison, it is subdued. But she could still choke on it, she thinks.
But then, mercifully, he speaks. An eye for an eye. A confession for a confession and it is a kindness she had not expected. It could take her to her knees if she let it. She cannot dwell on it, certain that it will bring her to tears if she does. She swallows thickly and grits her teeth and tries to imagine what it might be like to want to be alone. Perhaps she might feel differently if it were a matter of choice.
She blinks her surprise, inadvertently shifting her focus back to his face. She knows better than to ask about this, too. So, for a moment, she merely studies him. Her expression betrays nothing as she searches his eyes and then speaks like forgiveness. “I’m sure you didn’t mean it.”
There is plenty that lives within him that is too heavy to carry. It’s a constant burden. It presses into his spine every day until he can barely keep his shoulders straight, until he can barely draw in his breath. He wonders if she knows what that kind of burden that is like. If she knows the actual pain of it.
Looking at her now, he imagines that she must.
He imagines that she knows exactly what that is like.
It doesn’t soften him completely, but it keeps him in check. It keeps him standing there with her before him and it stays his cruel tongue, leaves him alone to swallow the actual cruelty he is capable of.
He wants to laugh when she tells him what he means. Wants to laugh and tell her all of the ways that he has meant it. The cruel things he has said without thinking twice about. The way his heart has crushed in his chest. The way that he has crushed others with the weight of it. The destruction he has caused.
But he doesn’t laugh. His face doesn’t give any of it away.
If anything, the edges sharpen and his mouth pulls just a little tighter.
“What if I did?” he finally questions, feeling his lungs burn with the question of it. Feels the way that he nearly splinters beneath it and finds himself loath to hear the answer of it. He doesn’t want to know. Doesn’t want to know what she actually thinks about him, even though they are nothing but strangers.
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
I never cared for anyone so much. I was born with a bomb inside my gut.
It strikes fear in the heart of her.
It presses the air out of her lungs.
She bites her tongue. She is a simple, stupid girl and what had she thought she’d been giving him in saying it at all? She had mistaken his anger for caring, allowed herself to believe something that wasn’t true. She had been desperate and greedy and it’s no wonder that her conversations expire before they ever really get started.
She frowns. Pointedly. Doesn’t bother trying to hide it. But it is neither anger nor confusion that furrows her brow. It is concentration instead. She bites her tongue and tries to determine why she’d thought herself fit to say anything in the first place. The frown dissolves around the edges of the grimace she’d tried so desperately to hide only moments earlier.
And then the expression softens altogether. She has ruined this, certainly, the same way she has ruined everything else. She shrugs her shoulders then and she looks at the snow underfoot, the mud mixed in. She thinks about how he had hurled himself down the bank toward her as she’d thrown herself back onto land. She thinks about how he’d snapped at her, asked her if she’d been trying to kill herself.
When she speaks next, she does not sound so certain, so self-assured. When she speaks next, her statement sounds more like a question. “You would have let me drown,” she says, quiet. So quiet that it’s almost as if her worst fears have been realized – one day she’d open her mouth to speak and no sound would come out at all. “If you hurt people on purpose, you would have let me drown.”
Her assertion, so timid and yet so sure, strikes at him and pulls him up short. The red of his wings press even closer into his sides and he feels the question swirl around within him. He feels the way that it bruises his insides, tests the borders, until he is short of breath and unsure about where to turn next.
Would he have?
Would he have watched her drown?
Once, he would have been able to answer so certainly. For all of his flaws as a youth—brash, reckless, a touch self-absorbed—he had never been cruel. Wild, perhaps, and cruel but only in the way of the wolves. It is not cruelty when it is nature’s law that drives you forward and determines the path you take.
But the last few years turns everything inside out.
The last few years have made him question everything that he thought he knew.
Was he truly cruel? Was he heartless?
His face sharpens even more, the muscles in his jaw pronounced, and he doesn’t bother to look away from her. Doesn’t bother to pretend that he is uncertain about how to proceed and how to answer her.
Honestly, he supposes.
There’s nothing he can do but be honest.
Still, it unsettles him and he finds that it’s more difficult than he would imagine to find some balance in the world. “I wouldn’t have,” he finally answers and it is like pulling teeth. He swallows and wonders why he is still here, why he is admitting these things to her, why her sadness pulls at his belly.
“I am a deeply flawed man, but I wouldn’t have let you drown.”
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
I never cared for anyone so much. I was born with a bomb inside my gut.
She burns with shame.
It had been reduced to smoldering embers.
But they flare now and they lick at her ribcage, the underside of her tender heart.
They pool heat in her cheeks and her eyes burn in a way that has nothing to do with tears.
She has never actively wanted to be invisible until now. She has never wanted to disappear until this moment. The silence that follows her bold assumption about a man she does not know, has never seen, has certainly never spoken to. She has drawn judgments based on one split second and she deserves whatever fury he rains down upon her, she thinks.
She swallows thickly and yearns to look away. But he’s staring at her and she cannot summon the courage to look away. She wants to apologize. She can feel it gather on her tongue. She can feel its barbed edges as it claws its way up her throat. She drags in a shuddering breath and feels something inside of her break loose when he finally speaks.
Had it sounded like she was accusing him of something? The corners of her mouth turn down in a frown and she shakes her head, studies him a beat longer.
“I’m sorry,” she finally whispers and her eyelids flutter heavy and she finally looks away. “I’ve really made a mess of this.” Of what? A thing that perhaps was never meant to exist in the first place? An interaction between two strangers whose paths happened to cross at a very strange moment in time? Her life, maybe.
She is taking all of the blame for this catastrophe of a meeting and he supposes that he cannot blame her. He as not given her any reason to think otherwise. He has only glowered at her, snapped at her, given her short answers, none at all. He has done nothing to make her think that he did anything but actively loathe her presence and so perhaps it is not surprising at all that she would think this is her fault.
“Don’t apologize,” and this too comes out harsher than he intends. He curses himself for his inability to be gentle with fragile things. He is too brutish—too rough. He has never learned the art of having a kind touch and looking at her with all of that sadness that she wears so heavily, it’s what she needs.
Perhaps the greatest kindness he could give her would be to simply leave.
But with a jump of the muscle of his jaw, he realizes that she would read that as rejection too.
“I’m the one who did this,” he finally manages and he is proud of the way that it doesn’t sound cruel. It could even be apologetic if the other person was actively looking for goodness in him, which he has found that most people are not. Not that he can blame them when he gives them very little reason to.
“Like I said, I am deeply flawed, Lilian,” he doesn’t think that he really deserves to say her name but it at least softens the gravel and grit of his voice just a little, his grey eyes looking up to study her face.
“I wish that I could be someone different.”
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
