"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
You think I'll be the Dark Sky so you can be the Star? I'll Swallow you Whole.
She is used to waiting. As a star she had done nothing but wait—wait for the day she would collapse in on herself, wait to be nothing, wait for a galaxy to swallow her into darkness.
But waiting for him, with a heart that throbbed with every beat in her chest, with strange emotions that she still couldn’t name roiling like a storm that clouds her veins, was an entirely different thing. She almost forgot about the stars. She found herself staring into the dark closest to the ground rather than the dark of the sky, hoping that when the shadows stirred to life it would be him and not the creatures that crawled the red rocks of Loess now. She looked at the lake that had taken him, she fought the urge to sacrifice herself to its depths just to see if it would take her too, and Kamaria is the only thing that keeps her here.
”Do you miss my dad?” their daughter had asked her, and though her answer had only been two words, just a quietly spoken, ”I do,” the weight of them was like an anchor that could have drug her to the bottom of the sea. For her to miss anyone was such a strange emotion for her, but for her to miss him on this level—to the extent that sorrow has settled into her bones, to miss him in a way that makes her chest ache and consumes her mind—was something even she could hardly grasp.
When the sun rose she had stared at the sky, frozen in disbelief. It almost felt like a trap; like a flash of light just before the end, something to finish the rest of them off, and while there was a time she had hoped that when she died she would be returned to the stars, she finds instead that she only wants to go where Tiercel and Kamaria will be, too.
From the other end of Loess it takes her too long to get to the lake that had taken him. She runs beneath the newborn light, ignoring the way it feels too bright and hot after being in the dark for so long. Stones clatter and fall down the ridge as she makes her way down the path, and when she reaches the edge of it the water is clear and calm, giving no hint to the turmoil that had taken place. She turns, a foreign desperation tightening her throat as her impossibly dark eyes search for any sign that he has returned, but the landscape refuses to give anything away.
She is following the path that would lead her back to the cave, the one that she thought of as theirs, and doing her best to temper the despair that was trying to take root in her mind. She had thought the return of the light would mean the return of Tiercel, but perhaps she had been wrong, and in reality, it had been foolish to think anything would ever be that simple.
It’s why when she looks up to find him, the expression on her face is nearly unreadable. The white of her face is still hard and sharp like cut marble, with eyes dark like starless-galaxies as she stares at him, afraid to hope, afraid to feel any kind of relief should the world try to strip it from her again. “Tiercel,” she says his name in a cautious, questioning way as if to speak it out loud would startle the ghost of him away. She takes a step forward, and then another until she can reach to brush her nose against the curve of his jaw. He feels solid, and warm, the way that he always has, and she almost presses into him, but something stops her. She is uncertain, afraid that being away has changed him, has made him dislike her, that maybe he would be disappointed that she had not found a way to fix this herself.
“I didn’t know how to find you,” an almost whisper as she withdraws, and regret rises to the surface of her dark purple eyes. “I’m so sorry.”
Islas
@[Tiercel] you get my only, very bad, post <3 congrats/I'm sorry.
He is used to waiting, too. He had been terrible at it before falling into the Underworld. But that place of harsh light and dark, blood-stained clay had taught him what it meant to wait. His patience had grown and deepened, but then it became one of the only things he held onto. He had waited for the eclipse to end, for their torturer to return, for the expectant release of death, for the painful reformation, for the beginning of death all over again. Most importantly, most consistently, he waited for Islas.
There was another victim in his chamber, someone for their thousand-eyed guardian to pick at while the other soul felt the agony of death before living again. A winged mare with cheekbones that became more pronounced each time their torturer ripped her heart from her chest. More often than not, her face became softer and her eyes grew darker, and Tiercel would see Islas’s pale face. He would hear her voice in his ears, a metronome against the melody of screaming.
I can’t leave you. I can’t leave you. I can’t leave you.
It would be an understatement to say that Tiercel was disappointed when a grayed stallion met him at the lake’s shore. He hadn’t expected Islas to wait for him, and he certainly hadn’t expected her to go looking for him. She had been heavy with their child when he’d fallen into the lake, and his heart twists with this thought. His pale eyes trace the red clay as he follows the familiar path to their cave, and he picks out pieces of a face among the stones. Did he have a son or a daughter? He wonders if he will find traces of his family in the face of his child or if it will be as lovely as Islas.
Islas. His chest tightens even harder, drawing a sharp sigh from his dark mouth. “Tiercel.” He stops breathing altogether. Her voice comes from behind him, and it takes only seconds for the stallion to swivel his body around. Exhaustion makes his muscles cry out, but he ignores them because there she is. Tiercel almost can’t move; he feels like he is starstruck, like he is caught in a trap, like this is another nightmare in the darkness between dead and alive. But when she draws close and touches him, when she feels soft and warm, when she smells like Loess and wind — he shudders at the familiarity and leans into her.
She has always been a balm, and she remains so. Tiercel can feel the harsh trauma of the Underworld beginning to fade, becoming a distant memory. Yet as she pulls away, it comes rushing back. His pale eyes search her dark ones, twin blue skies seeming to sink into the exhausted, jagged angles of his face. “Don’t apologize,” he says, and his voice is raspy from months of screaming. “I’m glad you didn’t find me. I didn’t want you to end up there, too.” His throat feels tight with emotion, yet deeper than that, he feels suffocated by fear. Tiercel’s eyes begin to well with tears, and he feels as if he is at the edge of a bottomless hole. There is too much to explain to Islas, and he worries that he will scare her with the memories that lie in his mind.
“I’m glad you’re okay… What about our child? Did” — his gaze flashes to their surroundings, to her naked side, to the vastness of Loess — “are they…?”
You think I'll be the Dark Sky so you can be the Star? I'll Swallow you Whole.
She can see that he is changed, even if she is not quite so adept at reading emotions as most would be. She can see it because she knows him better than she knows anyone, because if there was anyone in this world that she would be able to muster an ounce of empathy and emotion for, it will always be him. Where his eyes had once looked like bright skies and blue waters now seemed darkened and tired, and his exhaustion is nearly palpable. There is fear, too, that still lingers despite being back in the safety of daylight and Loess, and she once again finds herself wishing that she was different. That she would know what to say or do to make him feel at ease, that she had a better grasp on empathy instead of the wispy, ghost-like hold that she has now.
Worry tinges her eyes at the sound of his voice, at the rawness of it, as if it is not even his own. His reassurances that he is not angry or disappointed draws her closer, though, until her lips can once again brush lightly against his cheek, before trailing upward and to the groove of his throat. “I missed you,” a rare confession, that even in the cool, silvery notes of her voice still manages to sound soft, conveying the ache and the longing that resides in her chest. “I was afraid you would never come back,” she continues quietly, voicing her greatest fear aloud.
It was a strange thing, to realize she cares about someone more than she cares about the stars; to be willing to be trapped in a starless existence if it meant that he was still here.
He asks of their daughter, and the smile that touches her lips is a true one, the kind that seems to soften the impossible dark of her eyes. “She was born not long after you were taken,” she tells him, marveling at how odd it is to recall the fear and panic of that day when they stand now in the sunlight, alive and whole, together. “Her name is Kamaria, and she reminds me so much of you.” From the dun markings and the emotions to her vibrant spirit and ability to keep Islas centered, she is nearly certain that Kamaria was the only thing that kept her anchored during this tumultuous time. Even though it hurt to know that Tiercel had missed so many things he would have otherwise been there for—a pain that she has grappled with for the entirety of his absence, because she had never envisioned herself doing any of this at all, much less alone—Kamaria being the way that she is had proved to serve as a worthy distraction.
“She asks about you all the time,” she tells him with a short, quiet laugh, having now stepped alongside him so that her shoulder could rest lightly against his. “Maybe you’ll have better luck at controlling her.”
Tiercel’s haunted eyes close as her lips touch his skin. She feels like a dream, her mouth leaving a trail of glittering stars under his cheek, and he tries to count the number of times he has prayed, wished, begged for this moment. He loses track easily, and he can’t figure out if it’s because the number is too high or if it’s because she erases his thoughts with each sweeping touch. He promises himself that he will never neglect her again, never forget how important she is to him, never take her touch and presence and affection for granted.
“I missed you,” she says, and his eyelids flutter open. Her confession is as much a strange thing to him as it is to her. Their relationship had begun with her emptiness, her ability to turn a cold shoulder to the world. He had been (still is, as exhausted as he feels now) full to the brim with emotions, a whole rolling sea of them that crashed against his insides. They had chanted to be set loose, and Islas’s star-gifted black hole had been a place he could release them. Yet he’s assumed her emotions are fabricated from his, that her love and empathy for him had been echoes of how he’s felt for her.
But she tells him she’s missed him, that she’s been afraid, and Tiercel can’t imagine his emotions have enough power to reach across worlds. He wants to tell her that he’s missed her every day, but the reality is that he has no idea how many days have passed or what day even looks like anymore. The Underworld had its own concepts of time, and it did not include the sun rising and falling. There was only the stark white light burning his eyes, and his deaths to keep track of time. And even this number he lost track of, like the times he has prayed for Islas.
Instead, he says, “I missed you beyond words,” and he doesn’t have to place the loss he had felt into her darkness, because he knows she feels at least a fraction of it on her own.
Tiercel falls quiet as she begins to speak of their child (“She,” Islas says, and his chest tightens at the thought of a daughter). Marni had been older by the time he was born, and so he really only has Eyas to base his knowledge of daughters or sisters. His winged triplet had been quite the experience… and one reason why he had fled his family at his young age. The dun quickly hopes Kamaria will love him more than Eyas had, though sometimes he wonders if his sister ever loved him at all.
They’re foolish thoughts, especially with such a happy day as his reunion with Islas, but he can’t help the way his firstborn dredges up his memories of the past. Tiercel’s ragged throat chuckles alongside her softer laugh, but he can’t stop the regret that soaks into his pale eyes and the air around them. He’d abandoned her right when she needed him the most — through childbirth, through the worst of the eclipse, through the newborn days — and now he’s somehow back when things have gotten easier.
A heavy sigh leaves his chest, and he turns to push his face into the soft bend of her neck. It doesn’t make him feel any less guilty or ashamed, but he deeply inhales the smell of her nonetheless. “I’m sorry I wasn’t there for you… and Kamaria.” His mind reels at the thought of actually having a daughter, a girl somewhere in Loess that reminds Islas of him. “I should have been here for both of you.”
You think I'll be the Dark Sky so you can be the Star? I'll Swallow you Whole.
Just as it has taken her all of this time to learn how to love, or to feel much of anything at all, she does not know how to hold any kind of grudge against him.
She does not know how to be bitter that he was gone during Kamaria’s birth and those first few weeks where she struggled to navigate how to be a mother to a living, breathing child in a world still consumed by dark and danger. She does not know how to resent him for an absence he had no control over, or how to turn her own sadness into some kind of weapon against him the way someone else might.
Her mind simply cannot comprehend how to be angry or how to cling to the sorrow she had felt when he was gone, when he is now right in front of her. The last of the dark that had hung like shadowed cobwebs in her mind were effectively erased the moment she laid eyes on him, but when she feels the regret he unintentionally pushes from himself towards her she feels something tighten inside of her chest.
“Why are you sorry?” she asks as she turns her head to where he rests against her neck, pressing a soft touch to his forehead. “You’re here now,” she murmurs in a tone that is still so strangely soft for her, her lips skimming gently along his jaw. “You’re here now, and you’re alive. That’s all I wanted.”
She doesn’t know where it comes from, then, the sudden surge of affection and love that rises up in her heart like a tidal wave. It is nearly consuming in its intensity, perhaps brought on by the feel of his body fitted against hers after so long apart, and the relief of having the only living thing other than their daughter that she cared about with her again. It swells in a way that she could have never ignored it or mistaken it for anything else, and she feels simply by the way it seems to spring from her own blood and bones that it is not fabricated by him.
“I would have given up the stars for you,” she whispers against his cheek around her heart beating in her throat, and she is no longer surprised at how easy it is to admit such a thing.
He’s surprised at how easily she calls him out, how she paints his regret in shades far lighter than he feels he deserves. Islas doesn’t sound harsh, but her words find his core and wiggle uncomfortably there anyway. Throughout Tiercel’s life, he’s held onto those darker emotions — guilt, jealousy, regret, shame — and it’s no surprise that he would try to do the same now. It’s probably more work than it’s worth, and deep inside he knows that there’s no use trying to feel upset when he’s so thankful that he’s made it home alive.
But he can’t help himself; he wants to feel guilty, and Islas’s soft words remind him that there’s no reason to be.
Tiercel frowns at her question at first, but his face relaxes when she says she’s only ever wanted him here. Whenever he saw her face in his mind’s eye, he’d assumed she’d missed him just as he missed her. He is relieved to know that he was right, that she’s been waiting for him ever since the lake absorbed his spiraling body and placed him on the black clay of the Underworld. Tiercel’s voice matches the gentleness of hers as he says, “That’s all I wanted, too.”
His heart jumps in his chest as Islas admits she would abandon the stars if it meant she could have him. Before the eclipse, Tiercel wouldn’t have understood what such a sentence would truly mean. How could the stars have such an influence on her life? But when they had vanished, he had watched as she faded. Her familiar glow became thin, her steps became heavy and sluggish (and though she was pregnant then, he’d known it was unnatural even still), and black crept up her legs and darkened her face.
To know that she would rather fade than be without him… Tiercel understands that’s as close to saying “I love you” as Islas may manage.
A sigh leaves his chest, and it’s one that replaces the regret with love. The emotion threatens to drown him, to burst the hard shell he’s placed around his heart while he endured the guardian’s horrors, and he feels tears prick at his eyes. What could he say that would amount to what he feels for her? Tiercel thinks there are no words to adequately describe his emotions for Islas.
So instead he amplifies the emotion, wrapping it around them like a blanket to keep away the dark memories that lurk at the edges of his mind. Islas fits perfectly against his side, and her soft, warm curves feel like heaven on his skin. Tiercel pulls her closer, running his mouth down the bend of her neck and the slope of her chest, and he exhales another sigh (this one warmer, with a different intention to it) across her skin. “I thought about you all the time,” he says, and his roughened voice is thick with emotion and heat.
