"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 restlessness that had settled uneasily into her bones after the disastrous tornadoes had not yet abated, and she found herself growing increasingly more agitated by it. Ever since she had noticed the darkness that followed her back from the void—ever since she had realized it was a real, physical thing—there had been a newfound edge to her, a sharpness that lay hidden beneath the ethereal softness. So far she had been successful in keeping it reined in, never relenting to the dark even as it twisted and thread itself between her ribs.
It was a relief, almost, to know that the void had not entirely altered her. That morally gray though she was, there was still light slipping through the cracks, that countless years of being intrigued by the dark had not left her entirely powerless against it once it finally managed to take root inside of her.
But it would be a lie to say that she did not think some of this restlessness was because it needed a release, but she was far too controlled to let it slip around Atrox, and she did not think herself cruel enough to experiment on a stranger.
Normally the forest would offer her the isolation she was searching for, but not anymore. With the shrinking of Beqanna’s habitable space the forest had become more crowded than usual, and it was not until she neared almost the heart of it—the part that most chose to avoid—that their voices began to fade, and the faint light from above gradually was swallowed by the over-arcing branches of trees. The brightness of her aura sent strange shadows jumping across the broad trunks of the trees, and she did not need her infrared vision to see through the dark, providing herself with her own flood of light.
She realizes belatedly that she is not alone, her light glancing off a pale glimpse of skin and the glint of dark eyes, and the apology that leaps to her tongue falls back down her throat once she realizes who she has stumbled across. “Oh,” is all that she says, and the surprise that flashes across her face is unmistakable, though quickly followed by confusion.
When had she last seen him?
The tangibility of the lost memory is so fleeting that it is gone before she could even attempt to pull at the thread, and she is left feeling flustered, almost irritated. The void had not toyed with her memories near as she could tell, but it is the only explanation she can come up with to account for the strange gap she kept brushing over. “It’s been awhile. I think.”
I tried to sell my soul last night Funny, he wouldn't even take a bite
There is a familiarity in the stagnant depths of the forest that he cannot find elsewhere. Not anymore. Not after the land had buckled like the thinnest flint beneath the cruel hands of the gods. And now he struggles to remember why he had even bothered to try making something of himself once more. Wonders how the fuck he had given in so easily to the whispered longing for a life he would never have again.
So he had retreated to the familiarity of these ancient trees.
It is not nearly as comforting as he had imagined it might be however. So many others had invaded the darkest reaches as well, pushed out by the ever shifting lands. He had been pushed ever deeper, until he thought he had at last found some peace.
Even that is broken too easily. And this time by a face he almost wished he would never see again. It’s far easier to ignore the flickering piece of himself that thrills at her presence in favor of the irritation that rises, blanketing him like an old cloak.
Her simple words seem innocuous enough, but they cause his dark eyes to flash and his ears to press against his tangled mane. “Yeah,” he agrees on a grunt, nostrils flaring as he glares at her. “Not fucking long enough if you ask me.”
She hadn’t asked him of course, but who’s counting?
For a long moment, he only stares at her, the heavy emotions of their last, ill-fated encounter cascading through him in a horrific rush. Not for the first time, he wishes he could have shed his own memories of that day as easily as he had stolen hers. Finally, he looks away. A strange action, given his great love of angry staring, but it’s not anger he feels when he looks at her. No, it’s something that feels far too similar to grief for his comfort.
“Why the fuck are you here?” he manages after a moment. “We already said everything we needed to.”
now and then there’s a light in the darkness,
feel around until you find where your heart went --
He’s angry, and where once the bitterness in his stare might have caused her to wilt, she finds herself instead staring back, unwavering. Maybe it’s the restlessness that she cannot shake—it wouldn't be the first time she had behaved somewhat recklessly simply because she was bored—or perhaps it is the darkness that surges all at once in her veins, but either way, she does not flinch at the venom in his voice. The strange shadows that are thrown across her face from the dark of the forest and the amber glow of her halo makes it difficult to read her expression, but she is sure that he would be able to read that, for once, she does not seem to react to his barbs.
She appraises him with a different eye now, studying him in an almost detached kind of way, and is surprised by the urge to use her empathy to wrest his emotions from him. She has never been able to decipher where the serrated edges of his words come from—does he truly hate her, or does he hate what might have been if their fates had been just slightly different? She had marveled at this, too, after all, that their lives were so intertwined, and yet they fell apart each time the wind shifted, unable to withstand the smallest of storms.
She used to think that he had to have loved her, at least in some capacity; she is accustomed to men that do not know how to handle their emotions, is used to violent displays meant to disguise something that they do not wish to acknowledge.
But it has been years now of interactions just like this, where he acts as though he’d rather see anyone else in the world other than her, and she is beginning to accept that she misread him.
It should sting to have him look at and speak to her this way, but the darkness that had burrowed itself inside of her in the void has begun its ascent towards the surface, seething beneath her skin, tired of being held captive. “Please try to contain your excitement, it’s overwhelming,” the shadow-wrapped words come before she can stop them, and though there is a flicker of surprise in her nearly black eyes at her own shortness it quickly melts away, replaced by the same eerie calm as before.
The temptation to peel back the layers until she finds the core of his anger sits like a stone on her tongue, weighted and metallic, making it difficult to ignore. But she has never been the kind to use any of her powers against someone else, and even with the darkness whispering sweetly in her ear, she pushes the desire aside. “Everywhere is flooded, there aren’t many places to go,” she says, her tone not as sharp as before, but instead almost exasperated. She can longer tell if it’s the darkness making her irritable, or the fact that she feels as though she has been defending her right to exist in the same space as him for years, but there is something wearing thin inside of her, ready to snap.
But the last of his words that he spits at her seems to break through the darkened veil that she felt trapped behind, and a frown softens her face. “I don’t remember us ever saying anything to each other. I don’t remember our last meeting at all.” She has never had her memory toyed with before—not that she knows of—and so she does not suspect him of this. The hollow place that she feels in her mind she attributes instead to being in the void. “But if it went anything like all of our other conversations, I suppose it wasn’t good.”
I tried to sell my soul last night Funny, he wouldn't even take a bite
It’s the sharpness of her words that draws his gaze back to her. Despite his repeated attempts to push her away in the past, she had never had a genuinely harsh word for him. She had always been soft, molding herself to fit even the most ragged edges. Now, instead of giving, she pushed back.
He had ignored it before, but now he noted the darkness curling around her. A darkness that hadn’t been there the last time they met. He should be surprised. Instead, jaded creature that he is, he can only wonder how it hadn’t happened sooner. But for some inexplicable reason, it eases something inside him. The uncoiling tension is enough to loosen his tongue, though perhaps not for the best. “You’ve grown a fucking spine.”
There is something that almost tastes like amusement in those words, though they are too bitter for true humor. When everything he does and says is flavored by bitterness though, who can tell anymore?
If he had known she could unwrap his emotions, he might have tried to quash that impulse. He had hidden his feelings, had stolen her memories, for a reason. She had everything she’d once thought she wanted from him, and for the first time in his life, he had done something marginally selfless. The pain of what might have been did not need to be her burden to bear. Far better for her to spend the rest of her life believing he had been incapable of loving her rather than too broken to admit to his feelings until it had been too late.
So he did what he has always done, driving the harshest edge of his words towards her like a blade. “Maybe if you’d had one then, the last time we met wouldn’t have been such a shit show.”
who could ever leave me, darling, but who could stay?
She doesn’t know what it means, being tired of fighting with him.
She thinks it feels a little bit like failure, like some integral part of herself was suddenly malfunctioning, when she finds that the only thing his anger inspires in her is apathy.
She had never been the type to give up before—had never let her heart grow cold if even a flicker of love still existed. But standing before him right now, with his sharpened words clearly meant to maim, she is not sure where the emptiness in her chest comes from, why his words have nothing to bruise. She does not know if after years and years of him puncturing holes her well of love for him finally ran dry, or if it is just the darkness swallowing that remaining ember whole and extinguishing it.
Her pitch-dark eyes meet his flint-like own, and she wonders if maybe she just struck herself hard enough against him if the fire would reignite.
“Now if only you could manage to grow a heart,” she answers him in a voice much more similar to what he would have been accustomed to, coming from her—soft, with notes of melancholy, a whisper of sorrow ghosting across her face. Somewhere behind the shadows the girl that once loved him is still there, patiently waiting for any kind of sign that she did not have it all wrong.
There is a moment where it almost seems as though she is going to let him force her to shoulder the blame (for what, she still isn’t sure). Last time, he says, and she reaches again for that gap in her memory, reaching for something, anything to shed light on what he is referring to, and she is met with only a frustrating emptiness.
This frustration, amplified further by the shadows that now bled from her skin, shifting like smoke, finally pushes her over the edge she was so precariously balanced on.
“I have no memory of what you’re speaking of, Ashhal, but clearly you do. Perhaps you want to enlighten me, or perhaps I can just find out for myself,” the last word falls sharp and heavy from her tongue, and before she can register what she is doing she reaches for his emotions. But she does not just look for them, because it is not enough, she decides, for her to just know what he is feeling.
She wants to be in control of what he is feeling.
She drains away the anger and the hurt, weeding out all the negative emotions until she finds the barest trace of love left for her, and she latches onto it. She has never purposely used her empathy to force emotion onto someone—and certainly has never used it to make them love her, but she does it now. She takes his love and amplifies it, until that is all he can feel. Burning and warm and bright, she lets him be consumed with love and contentment and peace, while her own anger licks like a flame against her ribs. She realizes she is still unsatisfied with him feeling only his own love, and so she adds her own.
She revives everything she had ever felt for him and she plants it alongside his own emotions—the exhilaration and lust, the longing and hope, and the aching love that he never let her show him. She lets him feel what it’s like when love finds its match, when two halves make a whole, and feel what it might have been like had their paths been different.
When she takes it away, it is not a slow bleed; she does not ease it away, letting it gently diffuse.
She cuts it off entirely, like a candle being blown out in the wind.
The anger and bitterness rush back to him like a flood, filling up the empty space the ghost of love had left behind.
“I loved you, you impossible fool,” she says in a voice that is oddly steady despite the way she trembles and her skin seems to hum with an unnamable electricity, not realizing that the darkness is already rising around her like a shield in preparation for his possible retaliation, “and that is something that cannot be undone or erased.”
I tried to sell my soul last night Funny, he wouldn't even take a bite
Her words bring a sneer to his lips, though it is hollow despite the unpleasantness of it. Once he would have told her what she said was impossible. Now he knows his heart has always been there, buried under so much pain and anger and hatred that it had been nearly impossible to find.
So he does not have a response for her. Even if he did, he would not have been given the chance to say it. He feels it the moment she pulls at his emotions, and it drives him a step backwards. How could he not feel it, when the absence of rage is so foreign?
And then the love floods through him. Like a man who has been numb from cold too long feels pain when introduced to warmth, so too does he when flooded with love. It fills long atrophied muscles with a suddenness that causes them to seize, and for a moment, he forgets even how to breathe. For the first time since he had been a very young child in merciless care of a mother who despised him, tears track down his cheeks unchecked. If he had noticed them, he would have hated it. He hadn’t shown such weakness since that distant childhood nearly two centuries ago.
For a moment, he can only stare at her with the helpless devotion of a man who had so long denied his ability to love. Until that love drains away just as quickly as it had risen, leaving room only for the comfort of his painful, barren existence. Rage rises, filling him with its familiar sharp edges, a weapon he has honed over decades. Everything in him tenses to attack, lips peeling back to bare teeth as his ears press flat against his neck.
But even in his blind fury, he knows a physical attack would never hurt her. She had always bent so willingly beneath that kind of pain before. It is an attribute that had drawn him to her, that submission she gave so easily. No, he wants her to know more than just physical pain.
“Did you find what you were looking for?” he snarls instead, eyes burning as he advances on her. He doesn’t wait for her to answer however. He’s not truly looking for one. “Let me fucking help you.”
He slams her stolen memories back into her with all the kindness and gentleness she had shown him while playing with his emotions. But it’s not just her memories he gives her. That’s not nearly enough. He gives her some of his as well. She wanted his truth? She could damned well have it.
Let her see the ways in which his own mother beat him senseless as a young boy. Let her witness the cruelty of a man who had learned the only way to attain what you want in this world is through violence and force. Let her finally know how she had drawn him to her time and again. How she had given him everything he needed and then left, returning to another man’s side. How he had only ever been the other man, until suddenly she wanted more than that. How he had known he would never be enough, so he ran. Let her experience his sheer panic at being trapped in her with that cave, a tiny, innocent life at his feet. Let her understand how desperately afraid he’d been of destroying the only good things that had ever had the misfortune of gracing his life.
Let her at long last understand why he had left them there, knowing that that little girl would be far better off with no father than with a father like him. A father who could only teach her about pain and hatred, because that’s all he had ever known. That in his warped way, he had loved their children, had loved her, in the only way he knew how - by sparing them from him.
Let her finally know him in the way she has always wanted so desperately to.
“Fucking choke on them,” he manages to say through breaths run ragged by his effort. More than effort. By emotion. By the pain of reliving memories he had tried to bury so long ago in order to save himself from madness.
who could ever leave me, darling, but who could stay?
Beneath the veil of darkness she had known she made a mistake, and already her heart is withering.
The darkness did not feel regret—it did not care when it acted in a way that its host might not prefer, it did not care when the light tried to rebel back against it. It did not care that Ryatah was the type to withstand blow after blow and never retaliate, it did not care that it went against her very nature to take the knife someone pointed at her and plunge it into their own heart.
It did not care that she had been built to withstand pain, not to inflict it.
But it knows, too, that she had always wondered what it would be like; to be the one watching rather than the one crumbling, and in that moment of weakness it takes control. It is only with the help of her fledgling magic—and the way she falters at the pain on his face, at the raw anger in his voice, at the realization of what she has done—that she reins the shadows back in, the light of her aura consuming it until all that is left in its wake is her and the consequences of her actions that he slams into her mind.
“I’m sorry,” she gasps around the electric pain that his memories elicit, her chest contracting to a size so small it is a wonder her ribs do not splinter from the sheer force of it. The eerie glassiness of her eyes has disappeared, replaced again by their usual warmth and pain and regret. “Ashhal, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to—” but even she can hear how hollow that plea sounds.
Blaming it all on the darkness is too easy, and as much as she wants to pretend that the shadows from the void have a life all their own, she knows it is not entirely true.
The only thing the shadows had done was steeled her nerves so that she might find the answers she had always searched for, and now she had them.
In the aftermath of the emotional attack they had launched at each other they are left breathless and trembling, and she is hit with the stark realization that the rift between them is, finally, impassable. Whatever pieces of them she had salvaged from wreckages in the past are gone—crushed to something beyond dust, something that not even her foolish hope could cling to. It is not the first time it has happened—she thinks of Skellig and Illum, the way she had sabotaged seemingly without thought or regret—but it is the first time it has fallen apart in a way that was not entirely of her own doing.
There is nothing left to fight for, and it is an alien feeling.
“You wiped my memory of that day, but why didn’t you wipe your own?” she asks, referencing the now-filled gap in her mind and though her gaze is searching, there is nothing accusatory in her voice. She wants to understand, although she thinks that she already might; she would have done the same for him a long time ago, if she’d had the ability. Would have excised herself from his memory like the cancer she had become, let him be free of at least one ghost so that she might no longer haunt him.
But, she would not have erased him from her memory.
She would have held onto it like she holds onto everything,
And perhaps that is the mistake they keep making—both of them trying to spare the other, in their own way, while still being too selfish to let go entirely.
“Perhaps it would be best if neither of us remembered anything at all,” comes her soft suggestion, and it almost does not feel like her saying it. She has never willingly let go of anyone—but especially not him. And she knows that even if she were to walk away now the damage that she has done is irreversible, and that the only way to salvage him would be as if she had never existed at all.
She steps towards him, and though sorrow shadows her face there is an earnest plea there too, willing him to see the sincerity, to feel the way it thickens in her voice when she implores, “Tell me you want me to, and I’ll do it. I’ll remove every part of myself from your memory, and you can do the same for me. And then this—whatever it was, whatever it was never meant to be—will be over.”
I tried to sell my soul last night Funny, he wouldn't even take a bite
All he has ever known, all he has ever been able to give, has been pain. For the barest span of time, she had offered a tiny flicker of hope, but like everything else in his life, it had been extinguished as quickly as it had been lit. Her apologies fall on deaf ears, and the anguished rage choking him prevents any answer to the question she poses from rising past his throat.
But it seems she hadn’t required an answer, even if he’d had one to give. A fucking blessing, though he would never admit it. How could he possibly explain to her that it had been a twisted combination of kindness and self-loathing that had seen him erasing her memories while leaving his own intact? They might have stayed that way forever had she not inadvertently picked at wounds still raw and festering.
Now, for the first time in a long time, he feels curiously drained. As though the infection rotting away inside him had at long last been lanced, leaving only a gaping emptiness in the space it had once filled. Whatever love (if it could truly be called that) he had once felt for her had slipped away with it, replaced by the icy realization that he had been living in a demented fantasy. They had both been lying to themselves for fucking years, actors in a decades long farce.
Just as she had been unwilling to let go, so too had he. A stolen glimmer of hope he hadn’t wanted to admit he’d been hanging onto.
Her offer, when it comes, is not met with immediate and angry rejection like it might once have been. He had always hated the thought of magic changing him, but now, as he stands before her, raw and aching and exposed, he thinks this one time it might not be so bad. His breath is faintly raspy inside his chest, his normally flint-hard eyes over-bright and bordering on madness. For a long, heart-wrenching moment, he can only stare at her, his eyes tracing features that have been more familiar to him than his own. As though he might burn them into memories that would soon be stripped away.
“What the fuck are you waiting for?” he finally demands, his voice more rough and gravelly than usual. It is as much permission as she would ever receive, forced passed lips gone numb with dread. He doesn’t know what he would have been without her, nor is he certain he wishes to find out. What he does know however, is that he cannot continue like this any longer.
who could ever leave me, darling, but who could stay?
After invading him so cruelly with her empathy she finds that she is afraid of touching his emotions at all, as if it is one of her own nerves rubbed raw. If anything, she has placed a shield between them now, knowing that if she felt anything from him in this moment that she would lose all fortitude. She could not afford to feel his anger, or his pain—she does not trust herself to not immediately revert back to herself, and to not desperately twist herself inside out in an effort to earn his forgiveness.
She knows, as much as she knows anything, that if she felt even a glimmer of his emotions that she would not have what it takes to erase the only one who has been a constant in her life since she first arrived in Beqanna.
His voice pulls her focus back to his face, and she can feel her chest tighten as her jaw clenches, steeling herself for what she is about to do, for what she knows she must do.
She doesn’t say anything to him when she first begins to brush across his memories, not allowing herself to linger over any of them for long. She sees them in flashes, and for the most part they reaffirm why this needs to be done—for every memory full of light there are twice as many marred by darkness, shot through with anger and hurt. She takes them one by one, dissolving them as if they are dust, and finds relief in knowing that soon she, too, will not have to remember any of this either.
It is the final memory that causes her to pause, letting herself get tripped over it and losing focus just long enough that her selfish nature regains control. A single memory that she cannot bring herself to eradicate, a last, thin thread left between them: the two of them, all those years ago in the valley, just after she had first arrived; not friends, but not strangers, either. She shields this one and only memory, wrapping it in magic that neither of them would be able to touch, assuring that should they ever cross paths again there would be only a flicker of recognition, but nothing more.
“I hope someday you find someone you do not need to be afraid of loving,” she says softly as she begins to withdraw, preparing to teleport herself away from him as her own memories begin to evaporate, saving herself the trouble and confusion of trying to understand why she is caught in the simmering stare of an almost stranger.
