"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
The sun went out, and there were shapes that moved in the darkness, but Agetta didn’t mind. Not even when her ability to make light failed, or when she noticed a cut she received from a branch didn’t heal. These things are pushed from her thoughts with utter ease and she does not worry about them for a moment. Because every time she woke, before she opened her eyes, she’d feel Garbage’s presence beside her.
She’d cried the first time, just from the sheer joy of it (and that guilt she cannot shake).
And every day after that she’s been in a constant state of never being quite sure whether she’s dreaming or not.
It doesn’t matter where they go, where they wander, it’s his presence that grounds her in a way that the Gates used to. Spring has come, the first time in a while she has not born a foal, and she finds herself missing it - and she’s hopeful for the coming year, for the promise of the family they’ve spoken between them. Holler and the twins are still young but they need her less every day. She craves a long and lasting peace, a retirement that they can both enjoy, and she is happy to let other, younger horses worry about how to bring back the light.
Without the sun, moon, or stars it is difficult to stay what part of the day it is but a strange, screeching noise snaps Agetta from her daydreaming as she grazes near him and her head snaps up. She uses a trick she learned from Mazikeen (the creativity of her daughter delighting her) - swapping her equine eyes out for that of a snow leopard as she peers into the surrounding darkness.
There is nothing that she can immediately discern, however. The meadow seems quiet - the spring grass swaying with a gentle breeze. “Did you hear that?” Despite the peace they’ve made for themselves over the last year, there’s a warrior still buried deep in the pale mare and she’s instantly on edge. Sounds have all felt amplified in the suffocating darkness but this is not something she’s ever heard of before and her concern is evident.
He would take a thousand years of darkness if it meant they could stay like this.
He does not mind when their world is plunged into chaos, when the sun refuses to rise and there is word of monsters, things that no one can ever quite describe, haunted and hunting things. He does not mind because they are together, they sleep and wake together and she has had a hundred chances to leave and taken none of them.
Sometimes, he wakes and he looks at her and his chest is full enough to burst and he doesn’t have a name for what he feels. Happiness, yes, love, yes, but there is something else that comes over him when he settles beside her, his dark skin against her pale one.
It's a month or more before he realizes. Peace, he thinks, the word is peace.
They do no speak again of dying and he pretends to forget she once spoke of it wistfully. Peace is too fragile a thing.
When he first hears the noise, he isn’t fearful. They have heard any number of noises, strange things in the darkness, disembodied. As Agetta peers out, he doesn’t follow her gaze (his own orange eyes aren’t half so useful as her feline ones), instead he looks at her, searches her dim-lit face.
“I heard it,” he says, and as he speaks, it comes again – the noise shrill and horrible even at the distance. He cannot tell if it’s a cry of pain or of fury, but whatever the cause, he finds his skin prickling into gooseflesh, the first inkling of fear crawling into his chest. Don’t, he thinks weakly, uselessly, don’t take this from us.
It’s quiet but his body is tight, waiting for that awful cry again. He knows they will hear it again. And will it be closer, next time?
“Agetta…” he says, not knowing what to say, but needing to say her name, the word comforting in his mouth, “should we…move somewhere safer?”
Not that he knows where that is. Is anywhere safe?
She’s not sure whether it’s a comfort to know that the noise was not just in her head or not. Actually, no. It is not comforting - she quickly decides - when she hears it again. She would rather have imagined it, rather be hearing things and a little crazy than have to face the idea that their peace could be in jeopardy.
Agetta moves to stand closer to him, brushing her pale muzzle against his cheek and gaining strength from the contact. Fear pulses through her but it is not overwhelming her yet. There is still hope - they just need to get away from whatever is making that noise, and then they will be safe again. “Yes, let’s go.”
And then it comes again, closer but from another direction. Her head snaps towards the new direction as her heart begins to race in earnest. She shifts fully then, but instead of transforming into the familiar and favourite shape of a snow leopard she becomes an eagle and rises above with a few powerful strokes of her wings. From there she can see movement - two figures coming from opposing directions. Even with the powerful sight of this animal she cannot focus on their shapes - they appear to be made of darkness and though one is sleek while the other is hulking, they move towards Garbage in perfect unison.
Her heart sinks.
She swoops down and calls out - only just managing to keep the panic from her voice. “Run! To the west!” And she rises so she can keep an eye on their pursuers and call out directions as needed, desperate to keep him safe above everything else - already calculating her chances against both figures but still hoping they'll give up after a short chase. She will not let this peace be taken from them.
Garbage is used to fear as a weighty, draining thing. The fear of being alone, the fear of having to keep going, the eventual fear that he may not die at all, as his back grew swayed and his muzzle gray but he stayed so persistently alive.
(This was before the rebirth. Now he knows he can die, but does not know if he can stay dead. None of us do, I suppose.)
He is not used to this fear, the thing that spikes white-hot in his chest as the noise rings out, impossible to place in this furious darkness, and then Agetta shifts to an eagle and the fear spikes even sharper, thinking for a moment she has disappeared altogether – but no, he sees her then.
And then there is not much time for thinking, because she is calling for him to run, and he obeys – he will always obey her – and he runs, trusting she is with him even if trust feels like dust in his throat, choking.
The cries are more frequent, and he can sense, even as he runs, that there are two distinct ones. That they are hunting. Branches whip at his face, his sides, and then he stumbles, falls to his knees, and the noises are closer, giving chase, because it’s all a game to them. And oh, once he wouldn’t have cared, would have halted, let them come – (Have you died before, my dear?)
But he wants to live. Wants to live with her. With that beautiful peace.
He’s found his feet again, still running, and then he is at the river, ground to a halt. The river is high, here, its rapids furious, and he thinks of the beach, of the dark ocean that he once sank into so easily.
He can’t see her in the dark. But he feels her. She hasn’t left him. Unfortunately, neither have the things that pursued, because something bursts from the grass and it moves so damn fast and the river might well be his only option, to hope that the damned things can’t swim, and hope that he can.
“Agetta!” he shouts, and the word is a stand-in for everything he does not have time to say, all these things he has told her but it’s not enough, nothing is, if he saw her every day, forever, it still would not be enough.
Agetta’s heart stumbles with Garbage and she swoops down, circling and ready to defend him if anything gets close before he can rise again. They’re both going to live. They're going to survive this. They deserve to live and be happy - both of them have so much living left to do. She can barely hear her own thoughts over the thundering pace of her heart.
She sees one burst from the grass and hears him call out her name. There is no hesitation - she dives straight for it - shifting into a snow leopard before she even hits the ground, her body colliding with the creature in a tangle of fur and claws. “Keep running!” She begs, shouts, the desperation so obvious - she’s going to try to give him time to escape.
Those two words are filled with so much just as her name had been on his lips. There's too much to say. They need more time.
Even though, as she scrambles with the beast she had intercepted, she remembers there is more than one thing hunting them. That she cannot fight them all. He just needs to escape. That single thought becomes a chant through her mind and her heart. Driving her on and on and on as she tumbles and wrestles with the creature and casts wild midnight eyes around to watch Garbage’s progress to the river - hoping with every ounce of her being that it is enough to keep him safe and terrified that she is not enough to stop whatever comes next.
He watches her fight, for a moment. She is glorious, in this moment – well, she is always glorious, but this is new, this is savage, and even with everything else, even with his adrenaline pumping and monsters god-knows-where, he is transfixed, for a moment.
He could die happy, watching her.
But there is no time for watching, before there is movement and another cry – this one high and keening, almost mournful, a cry that he feels skittering along his nerves. The creature that flashes out, that slips past Agetta’s fearsome teeth and claws, is whippet-thin but it’s fast, and then something is burning at his leg, and he looks back, stunned to see the skin torn, flapping ghoulishly against his pastern. His body reacts before his mind does, and he moves, trying to keep the river to his side, but there is movement up ahead and there are more of them, he’s penned in, and his leg feels strange now, dragging, an object foreign to him, and he is slow, stupidly slow.
So he does the only thing he can do.
He once followed a woman into the ocean. He once shouted the names of those he loved, those he wronged (often the same), some meager attempt at atonement. He was ready to die, then, the whole affair well overdue.
He follows no one into the river, but he goes there nonetheless. Knee-deep, than belly-deep, and then his feet barely touch the bottom. The current moves him and the water’s cold, but his leg feels better, numbing now, and he drifts and the monsters aren’t coming and all he can do is hope that she will turn back into the eagle and rise up, away from them, and he will see her fly.
In the ocean, he didn’t fight.
In the river, he does.
He moves his legs, tries to control his motion. The current is stronger than he thought. Something crashes against his ribs – a rock, maybe – and suddenly it’s even harder to breathe, even when he gets his nose above water the very act of drawing a breath is like knives, and the water’s colder and colder and then not so cold at all anymore.
He can’t see the sky through the rushing water, but he imagines he sees an eagle flying there, anyway.
There’s a moment where Agetta is too focused on the fight she is in, too focused on the frantic bliss she feels when she’s battling, that her gaze shifts from Garbage and his retreat to the river. Doesn’t notice where the other creatures are apart from the one she is digging her claws into. Finally, the shape she is fighting seems to sputter out and it ceases moving. And then, then she looks around.
And she cannot see him.
Everything is still around her, ghostly quiet except for her ragged breathing and the single word she whispers into the dark air. “Garbage?” His name is soft on her tongue, far kinder than the curse it had been meant as.
Agetta moves to the river, wincing in pain as she does but the sting of her injuries fades into the background as her feline eyes scan the dark water - looking for a sign as she splashes into the shallows. Panic begins to set in though she has just enough time to curse herself for not trying on more aquatic forms. She doesn’t know which animals can swim and see in the dark. So she takes flight as an eagle, not noticing or caring for the blood that falls from her into the inky water. Each wingbeat causes her heart to beat wilder and wilder and when she cannot see signs of him, of anyone, she begins to cry out his name. Over and over, shattering the darkness with it as she circles and feels the weight of her failure.
She had not been enough to keep him safe.
Agetta
@[The Monsters] please do your thing with Agetta's light beam emission!
