"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
I was a poor boy; you were a bright light I was a sinner and you were a snake
Finally, he is cold. Cold enough that the breath plumes before him. Cold enough that he can feel it begin icing over his hooves—the frost digging in and yet feeling no pain. That is perhaps the part that he loves most. He loves the numbness. The way it soothes him, wipes him free of it all. He closes his eyes and feels nothing but the endless ice and fog and winter that he calls, ignoring the thrashing of endless summer and writing his own desires into existence.
It is beautiful to be cold. To be numb.
He stands in silence, deep in the forest, and listens to the critters that scurry away from the winter of his own making. He sends it deeper and deeper into the roots of trees until they too shiver and crackle and protest the ache that he drives into them.
Better than him.
Better than the endless anguish of a soul tore clean in two.
It’s easier this way, he reckons. Easier to turn a blind eye away from the sins of his past and embrace ignorance. Ignore those he has hurt. Those he has abandoned. Ignore the women and the children. His parents. His siblings. The wolves that howl in his dreams.
A muscle jumps in his jaw—the only sign of pain buried so far beneath the ice. A twitch on his shoulder as his russet wings rustle and then settle. Another breath as he centers himself and draws the cold back into him. Directing it into his veins. His heart. Freezing whatever he can.
When he opens his eyes again, they are as cold as the rest of him.
And finally, finally, he feels peace.
shook like some old souls when our bones broke swallowed the sickness, a fever, a flame
This is her siren song: the sudden cold at the heart of the forest, the groaning of tree limbs as they succumb to ice, the quiet protest of the earth as it freezes underfoot. Winter. Winter at the height of summer. (She is dizzy with the thrill of it, this creature crafted of the cold.)
(If not for the way the eyes glow pale, glacial blue, you might see a flicker of jealousy if you looked closely enough. But there is nothing at all to see there in that gaze save for the reflection of Winter, the heart of it. She does not own it, the cold, but it belongs to her all the same.)
And what does she expect to find there?
Someone like her, perhaps.
A thing of Winter.
And he is, almost certainly. She can see it in the frost that gathers heavy at his feet, the way it snakes across his skin.
The only perceptible difference between them is that her own skin has cracked beneath the pressure of it, revealing gaping, glowing crevasses. She wonders what he might look like fractured.
Snow gathers on her shoulders and her breath, too, plumes in the cold.
She studies him a long moment, stone silent and stock still. Not even her cold betrays her because he’s got cold of his own.
And, finally, she sends a tendril of ice across the forest floor between them, pools it at his feet.
“You’re a cold thing, too,” she muses, head tilted just so.
I was a poor boy; you were a bright light I was a sinner and you were a snake
Cold begets cold and if he were a man made for softness, it might appeal to him. The likeness echoing from her might pull at him like gravity. Might pique his interest. Might pull him forward so that he might dip his head toward the mirror and then fall beneath it. But he is no such thing. He is no soft man and he just stands there, quiet and still. He tilts his antlered head to the side and looks down to the greeting of ice that slithers across the floor like a serpent.
His own branches from him, but it lacks the grace of hers. It is not gentle or probing. It’s a violent crack, like a deadened tree finally succumbing to the heart of winter.
It nearly makes him startle, the prey instinct in him not so smothered.
It is only by pure stubborn will that he doesn’t move. That his own ice jumps toward hers in a violent burst of speed and then a quiet stilling. It meets and recedes almost immediately, as if he could not believe he would have allowed a touch, separated from him as it was.
“I am many things,” he says and wonders at how it sounds like a snarl. How such a simple interaction can leave him like a cornered animal. How weak and vulnerable he still is, even with this raging blizzard now trapped beneath his skin. “Cold is one of them,” he allows, softening his gunmetal voice so that it sounds more cordial and less like an attack.
There is silence, and he is once again brought face to face with his own ineptitude. Would she interpret the silence in some way? Or would she look through the veneer and see a man who has never flourished in company? Who has only ever known the wrong thing to say?
An ache in his chest, a painful swallow.
“Brigade,” a bullet, a greeting, the only thing he knows to offer.
shook like some old souls when our bones broke swallowed the sickness, a fever, a flame
A current of electricity (adrenaline, certainly, effervescent as it pollutes her bloodstream) snakes through her as the sharp crack echoes, as his ice reaches and then retreats just as suddenly. She does not pursue him, she does not push, she only watches.
She has never craved warmth, Camellia, not in the weather and certainly not in others. She can feel the blade in his voice through her frozen flesh, she can feel it as it cuts clean into the muscle. She smiles and there is something knowing in the glint of it.
(Is he warring with something, she wonders. Not with the cold, but with something deeper? She does not ask, only watches. Only watches and listens when he speaks and there is nothing warm in it but she does not shy from it. She has never craved warmth. It has always been the cold that has called to her.)
It is a foreign concept to her, the notion of being more than one thing. Because she has always been this: Winter. Even before it had become her. Before it had swallowed her whole. She cannot fathom the thought that there might be anything more than this.
There is a pulsing silence that follows while she considers him, head still canted. And then: an offering. A name, regardless of how grudgingly he seems to share it. And perhaps she should give him hers, as she is not completely without manners, but she does not. Not yet.
“Brigade,” she echoes and with the name she exhales a soft, blizzared breath. Snow swirls between them, melting before it ever reaches the forest floor. “What else are you, then?” She asks, as if to say, what else is there? What else matters?
I was a poor boy; you were a bright light I was a sinner and you were a snake
He is numb, but he was never meant to be an unfeeling thing. Heavens, how he wishes that he had been—how he wishes that he could have been. He wishes that he could simply put his heart in a box and never hear from it. How he wishes that he could simply amputate that useless muscle from his body; simply dig a knife into his chest until it pops out—a poor, dull beating that thrums uncontrollably in his head.
But he has no such luck.
No such kindness.
He is, instead, constantly wore down by the thing that thrashes against the ice that encases him. It sets fire to him, protesting the winter that now bears a heavy hand upon his spine. He grits his teeth, burying deeper in the cold so that he can continue to wear this mask of indifference.
There is a flash in his storm grey eyes as they look to her, something that belies his stony expression, and he schools his features as quickly as he can instead. Thinks about the girl before him who is sculpted from the thing that now defines him. Oh, how natural it rests upon her shoulders. How delicate winter looks set upon her brow. He is so graceless in his fight against nature; he nearly cannot recognize it in her.
“So many things,” he says, an attempt at delay poorly disguised behind his steely gaze. This would be the natural pause for a chuckle, for a breathy exhale—something charming, perhaps—but he has no such skill. Instead he lets the silence stretch to a nearly uncomfortable degree before allowing:
“Disappointment, if you were to ask most people who have crossed paths with me.”
shook like some old souls when our bones broke swallowed the sickness, a fever, a flame
She knows nothing of love, Camellia, absolutely nothing of the pain of it.
Because her love is reserved only for the things that love her back. (The sisters, most of all. Her sisters and the ice, the cold, the vicious, bitter sting of it. She was designed to love the things that hurt the most, you see, but not like that.)
Does he not love the ice as she loves the ice? He is a cold thing, but his cold seems born from something deeper. Something she does not understand. He is dark in a way that she is not dark. (She is dark in her own right, certainly, the darkest of the four seasons. But her darkness has nothing to do with pain or anger.)
The flicker of something in his gaze is not lost on her, though she makes no real effort to translate it. He is a stranger to her, they all are, and she only watches. Watches as he smooths his expression, sets his jaw.
(She is a patient thing, because the nights are so long in the Winter. Because the snow never lets up. She has ages to wait while he tries to put off answering in any meaningful way. So many things, he’d said, and she waits, knowing. Knowing that he will fill the silence, knowing that they almost always do.)
She draws in a long breath when he speaks again, a wry smile twisting that cold, cold mouth. “Oh, but I’m not asking them, am I?” she asks. She is not a thing built for small talk. She is a thing built both for burying and for digging. “What do you think you are, Brigade?”
