"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
01-04-2022, 04:37 AM (This post was last modified: 01-17-2022, 02:37 AM by Ryatah.)
Ryatah
WHEN I WAS SHIPWRECKED I THOUGHT OF YOU
IN THE CRACKS OF LIGHT I DREAMED OF YOU
She is almost afraid to find him.
She is not sure how long she has been gone, but knows it is long enough for her to have lost all track of time and for him to have lost all hope.
She has died before—more than once—and time has passed differently each time but this time was incomparable. This time she is left hollowed and changed, her mind nothing but frayed threads that have come unraveled, and while she has no sense of what is real and what is not real she knows that she loves him infinitely and has to find him.
She did not expect him to wait for her. She had already braced herself for that. He may not have settled with someone else—that wasn’t like him, that much she knew—but she could not blame him for falling back into old habits. She could not blame him for filling the void of her absence with whatever or whoever he saw fit, but it would be a lie to say the very thought cleaves her in two.
She should have been cautious in finding him, in knowing that the worst could be true, but she has always been quick to break her heart faster than anyone else ever could, and with only one single thread left intact she follows it straight to him.
Her steps stall once she finds him, though, and she is surprised at her own hesitancy. At the way she stands and stares, that ethereal aura of hers chasing away the shadows cast by the trees he has secluded himself in. His eyes are the same striking yellow that she remembers, sharp enough to cut herself on, and while her delusions in the void and the after had seemed accurate at the time she is reminded of how stupid she had been for ever believing them.
There is nothing her mind or anyone else’s could ever conjure up that would compare to the real him.
“Atrox,” her tongue has memorized the shape of his name, because she had never stopped saying it, and the only difference now is that he can hear her instead of it being swallowed by darkness. She imagines herself stepping forward, she stares at the spot against his chest she would press into, and knows she would be able to smell the pine and mountains and all the other scents that remind her of him. But she doesn’t move, frozen by her own uncertainty and fear—and by the nagging darkness trying to draw the thread back in and remind her that this isn’t real.
“I’m so sorry,” she finally whispers, her eyes seeming to suck the shadows into them as they darken with unshed tears. The way her regrown heart aches and throbs she knows that this must be real, but the fear of his rejection almost has her wishing that it wasn’t.
AND IT WAS REAL ENOUGH TO GET ME THROUGH — BUT I SWEAR YOU WERE THERE
hangman hooded, softly swinging; don't close the coffin yet, I'm alive
Unlike his son, Atrox does not try to move on.
He’s not sure that he knows how to anymore.
His long life has been an exercise in gain and loss, in trying to piece together what has been ripped from him, and he is tired of sacrifice. He is tired of remaking himself. He is tired of moving on. So he lives in his grief instead. He grows crueler and angrier. He hunts without purpose, slaughtering the animals that he finds. He picks fights with strangers. It is only when he is around their children, her children, that he softens at all. That he becomes the man that she had remembered, that she had left behind.
The man that she had made.
But her children are not here today. It is only him and it is only his pain. Today it takes the shape of two souls he had ripped from the underworld to stand guard by his side. Large, imposing figures, glowing that eerie blue, and he snarls when they get too close as he walks through Hyaline—through their home.
He is not gaunt, but he is sharper than she left him. For all of his hunting, he eats little of it, and he can feel it beginning to whittle away at him. He can feel it carving out the strength and livelihood from his very bones. His face is tighter than before, eyes more piercing against the sharp angles, and his scarred mouth pulled tight—but he does not care. Let death try and take him, he thinks. It would be a relief.
It is only when he catches that phantom scent of her that he pauses.
It is not the first time that he has thought he smelled her, but he never tires of the illusions his brain composes for him, and he sighs at the cruelty and kindness of it. It will hurt when it fades, he knows. It always does. But for the moment that he thinks he can smell her, it is joy, and he smiles softly as he closes his eyes and angles his head into the breeze, letting it wrap around him, letting it penetrate.
He takes a deep breath, feeling the sweet sting of it, and freezes when he hears her voice.
Disbelief rages through him, followed by the hope that this is perhaps the truth end. Perhaps his mind has finally fractured beneath the weight of his grief and given him this final gift. Perhaps she is here to usher him into the next life; this time, he would stay, he promises—so long as she was tearswith him.
His eyes open and he swears his missing heart clenches in his chest at the sight of her.
Real or not. Angel or not.
It doesn’t matter.
Atrox says nothing. There are only the tears that fall down his cheeks.
She isn’t sure how long they stand there staring at each other, but it is long enough that shadows of doubt snake through her mind.
He is mad that she left, he is mad that she could not find her way back sooner, he is mad that she came back because he has already moved on and now she is here before him ready to take an ax to all he has rebuilt (and she would—her mind fires that retaliation in response to the last conclusion she jumps to so quickly that she is surprised by it, by the almost ferocious jealousy that ignites in her chest and the eerie, resolute calm that follows).
But the light shifts and she sees the way tears glint as they slip down his dark, hardened face, and she does need to use her empathy to look inside of him to see how he feels.
She never has to, because he is always her mirror, and she knows the myriad of emotions that spill from the confines of her ribcage and down her porcelain-white cheeks are the same as his.
“I’m sorry,” she repeats as the distance between them disappears, until her scarred chest is pressed into his and her face is buried into the tangled mess of his mane. Her body shudders as she chokes down the tears, pulling back only to gently brush her lips against his face, tasting the salt and the sorrow that matches what is already on her tongue. “I was trying to get back to you,” she whispers around the aching knot in her throat, a desperate kind of plea because she is afraid he might think she had been gone for so long on purpose, or that she had not been doing everything imaginable to herself back to his side. “I would never willingly leave you,” she says with her forehead now resting against his neck, her eyes closed against the throbbing pain that refuses to ease in her chest. “Please, please tell me you know that.”
AND IT WAS REAL ENOUGH TO GET ME THROUGH — BUT I SWEAR YOU WERE THERE
hangman hooded, softly swinging; don't close the coffin yet, I'm alive
He is already shaking his head as the apology begins to slip from her lips. He is already breaking through the haze of his disbelief and stepping forward, pulling her to him, and he remembers what it had felt like to hold her when they had spent that year so close and yet so distant. Is he destined for this then? Destined to have these brief moments in the sun before she is ripped from him? Would he ever hold her for long?
“Don’t,” and his voice is rough, nearly angry were it not so drenched in his love for her. “Don’t you dare apologize,” he says and this is said against her temple as he presses a fierce kiss there. Because this wasn’t her fault. This was never her fault. “I should have found a way to you,” he says, expelling the treacherous truth from his chest, pulling the poison straight from his veins. “I should have cut a deal with the devil if it meant saving you,” he confesses, and there it is—his failure, his weakness.
He should have been there to save her and he has never been able to.
He has only been able to watch and rage in the aftermath.
But he doesn’t let that sour this moment for long. He puts his self-loathing away for another time and he just holds her close, his body stilling with the knowledge that she is finally here. That his world has once again righted. “I know,” he whispers softly to her, a voice that has only ever been hers, and he runs his scarred lips over her cheeks to catch the tears that have fallen. “Because I know how hard I would have fought to get back to you,” a soft smile against his hard mouth. “I know,” he repeats once more.
“I don’t know if you could have found me,” she whispers, her voice raw with regret and with the tears that she blinks away, because she hates admitting that out loud, and knows too that he will hate to hear it. But there was a darkness, she learned, that was not meant for anyone to find it; a darkness so far removed from all the dimensions that she knew she was meant to have remained lost there for an eternity. “I don’t even know where I was. It wasn’t the afterlife, and it wasn’t like being dead before. It was dark, and it was nothing, and yet somehow full of everything.” It’s only by her own brand of luck—if it could even be called that—that for whatever reason Carnage had thought to look for her. That the one being in existence that could scan all the dimensions and galaxies in a single heartbeat had for some indiscernible reason sought her out and pulled her from the dark.
But he is his own kind of devil, and that is why she shakes her head vehemently at what Atrox says. “No,” the word sounds sharp in her desperation, in her need for him to understand. “I would never want you to make a deal with anyone. Not for me. Not after what happened with—” she catches herself just before she says Magnus’s name, swallows it down, but the melancholic apology is clear on her face as she finishes quietly, “Firion found me, eventually.”
She does not say that Carnage found her first.
She does not clarify that Firion had found her somewhere else other than the black void.
She will tell him everything eventually, because he is not someone that she has ever kept secrets from. She will tell him, from beginning to end, all that had transpired — from Gale to Carnage and everything in between — but for now all she can think about is how solid and real he feels, how his skin is so much warmer than she had remembered, his voice so much sweeter.
She presses into him, her pale cheek against his neck, and she almost forgets everything else. Almost, until she closes her eyes and the darkness that rushes to greet her is overwhelming and suffocating, and all at once she is again suspended in a place with no light and no sound. Her eyes fly open and her heart beats hard and fast in her chest, and it’s all she can do to quell the panic that is building there. “I kept thinking you were there,” she confesses, quiet and tense, suddenly all too aware of how astray her mind had led her over and over. “I kept hearing your voice or thinking I saw you, and you disappeared every time.”
AND IT WAS REAL ENOUGH TO GET ME THROUGH — BUT I SWEAR YOU WERE THERE
![[Image: atrox.png]](https://i.postimg.cc/XBppy9VY/atrox.png)