"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
At the ends of her emotions, Galadriel feels guilt for how she left Frey. It sits in her gut, twists her insides until they turn and turn until she is not able to eat. Every bite comes back bitter, sour—like the face that curls her features when each swallow becomes sickly. She doesn’t think of her abandoned daughter often, but when she does, the fatigue is powerful.
Still, she chomps irritably at the wet grasses surrounding the pond on the western side of Taiga, eyes absently scanning the snippets of horizon around her. She watches the dapples of sunlight, wavering back and forth through the might of the Taigan trees. Days—it’s been only a few days of observing the creatures of the dark wood and yet, she feels her heart sing their wayward tunes. Like an inspired bard, traveling from land to land with endless tales, she picks up their mannerisms and picks them apart, endlessly curious about what makes the North sing.
She wants to make them sing, the quiet Northerners. She thinks their voices might be beautiful were they to finally harmonize.
So she stands, quiet, complacent—fighting against that nausea.
It’s only when she spots a familiar, scaled face that she stops her pondering.
It has been years since Varick and Sabbath moved their family into Nerine, and still Riptide found it difficult to return. Guilt often drove him back, since he had absolutely no reason to not go. He is the son of two parents that loved him fiercely, and who did their best to love each other. His family is, truthfully, relatively perfect, and perhaps that is partially what causes him to erect that imaginary guard between them. Because he is most certainly not perfect. He is flawed in countless ways, and instead of improving he seems to unravel more day by day.
And yet, every time he does return he finds himself wondering why he had put it off for so long, because the relief was often immediate. Whatever burdens he shouldered—most of them self-inflicted, crafted by his own mind—seemed to be lifted and carried away by the frigid coastal winds, beaten against the cliff sides and forgotten.
Winter was not his ideal time to travel, but he could not shake the feeling that he needed to go to Nerine. And so, ignoring the cold and the way it turned his blood sluggish and tired, he began to move north.
Following the river, he keeps to himself, not wishing to disturb the residents of the places he passes through. It is not until he hears a voice, lovely and haunting and familiar and saying his name that he stops. His sage green eyes find hers, and he is reminded of their bodies tangled together, the way her skin had tasted and the way her hair and smelled, and he is frozen. “Galadriel,” he says her name, and even on his serpent’s tongue it is lilting and soft. “You’re in Taiga,” he continues, stating the obvious. He clenches his jaw, working to gather himself as he takes a hesitant step towards her. “How...are you?” He settles on asking her, stupidly, and almost immediately he regrets it.
— i slithered here from eden just to sit outside your door —
The pair had barely known each other when they first met, hardly exchanged words before some needy understanding passed between them and words were no longer needed. Galadriel almost smiles at the thought, eyes tilting upward with subtle wrinkles; but no pretty gleam of her teeth flashes across her mouth, no. She is not a gentle creature. She never was and is even less so now.
“Yes,” Rel answers simply, blinking curious violet eyes at the handsome snake. A smile glimmers now—not a pretty thing, no. One quiet and amused and perhaps—perhaps calculating. She wonders what Riptide knows but doesn’t ask, not yet. “You’re in Taiga, too,” she murmurs, that simmering humor coloring her voice. There is little guilt when she stares at him. She desperately wishes there was.
Rel casts a wayward gaze at the towering pines and redwoods. She sighs, breathing out so heavily there’s hardly any air left in her lungs to speak what comes tumbling out:
“Did you know?”
When the question comes out, her voice is demure, muted. Perhaps she does feel guilt. Perhaps she instinctively tried to hide it with amusement. The guilt swells up her throat again, souring the meal in her stomach. She frowns, brow furrowing and eyes burning with dimly lit embers.
“That we have a daughter.”
A stupid question, really. She didn’t seek him out once she found out she was pregnant; and why would he keep tabs on a whirlwind encounter? Rel feels that ache, the stillness of something that never was and will never be meant to be.
Rel realizes she has ignored Riptide’s question, but she doesn’t offer an answer to it—instead zeroing an intense gaze on his.
“Her name is Frey. I haven’t seen her since two days after she was born.”
Did you know? she asks him, and his mind cannot begin to comprehend where this is leading.
He remembers their meeting, of course, because his encounters with women are so few that it was not difficult to keep them straight. And he is sure that somewhere in the back of his mind he had been aware of the risk they were taking, because he is not entirely naive. He knows exactly what sex can lead to, but for some reason had foolishly believed he could somehow be careful enough that it wouldn’t happen.
He watches her eyes, unable to hide the perplexed look that colors his face, and before he can ask her what she means by the question, she has continued, and despite the weight of the words, it seems to take ages for them to hit.
A daughter.
A daughter that she lost. His daughter.
He stares at her as understanding slowly settles as a shadow into his snake-like eyes, and there is something like anger that begins to spark in his chest though he keeps it carefully in check. “How have you not seen her since she was two days old?” he asks her, the words measured despite the tension pulling through him. He was raised by a mother so fiercely protective that the very idea of he, or any of his siblings, being lost was unfathomable. Sabbath would have figured out a way to reduce every land to ash until she found them, and he knows Varick would not have been far behind. “How do you lose a child, Galadriel?”
— i slithered here from eden just to sit outside your door —
Yes, your daughter, she wants to snap back, as if she can read the emotions on his face perfectly; but she doesn’t snap back for all her wits tell her she does not want to face the simmering rage burbling just beneath Riptide’s surface.
Yes, she thinks again, like a cauldron. Riptide boiling away with all the ingredients she haphazardly poured into this spell, enchanting him with chaos and youth. That bitter regret is a flavor she saves only for herself, not allowing its nastiness to color her tone when she finally speaks.
“It was the Mountain,” Rel murmurs, turning from the gaze that might devour her whole if she peers into it for too long. “I could not control it. When I came to, it had been days—perhaps weeks.” Her voice does not waver but those amethyst eyes she keeps as strong as stone—they still do not seek the snake-creature out. In any other circumstance, she might consider herself weak; but Rel . . . she remembers what it was like to be a child.
She remembers how vulnerable she would have been had family not fought to keep her safe. That bitterness, the grossly overwhelming flavor on her tongue, it burns like acid down her throat.
The mountain, she says, but that does nothing to assuage the torrent of emotions that storm his chest.
He knows Beqanna has strange magic, that her story of the mountain could very well be true and perhaps that is how she first lost track of their daughter. But it did not explain—in his opinion—why she had never looked for her after the mountain. He does not comment on this outloud, but he is certain his anger is palpable. Despite the way he is careful to keep himself composed there is no mistaking the way the already sharp angles of his face seem to be harder, his snake-eyes narrowed with his irritation.
But he notices the way her face (he hates how he still notices how pretty she is, even when he is simmering with a hardly contained rage) is angled away from him, as if she is avoiding meeting his judgmental gaze, and it causes something to shift inside of him, something to dampen the simmering emotions he wrestles with. It is as if she can sense the fury that heats beneath his frost-covered scales, and that is the only thing keeping him tempered, because if his point had hit its mark there is no reason to push it even further.
“Of course I want to find her,” this is said with a note of exasperation, punctuated by a low hiss and a sharp rattle of his tail. But he straightens, setting his jaw and again wiping the irritation from his face. He watches her for a long moment, trying to decipher if she actually feels remorse, or if it is merely an act because she had never anticipated running into him again. Eventually, he decides it does not matter. If she is willing to help, then he will let her.
“Do you remember where you last saw her?” he is calmer now, his mind switching gears from being angry to simply wanting to find her. “And what does she look like?” He tries to ignore the way his chest twinges in regret; that he does not know what his own daughter looks like, that he had not been there for her in her first days. He would make it up to her—he just has to find her first.
— i slithered here from eden just to sit outside your door —
