"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
She had been carefully avoiding the meadow for a while now, just as she avoided the Chamber, for fear of who she would find (or who would find her). There was Sleaze, and Sleaze had placed the words in her mouth before she spoke them, he knew of impossible things, a world that should be a dream and yet even now seemed to grow more tangible every time it was spoken of aloud. There had been Erebor too, and it was just the same with him. His memories were hers and hers were his, but for the finer details which always seemed to vary.
And somehow Malis had to find a way to forget it all, to ignore the memories, the nightmares that filled some nights, the bright aching indigo that had never meant to be hers to keep. But the color had never faded, not for her, it was like a scar of impossible permanence. A wound that wept perpetually. And if she couldn’t find a way to forget, then she had to find a way to survive beneath the weight of it. But how could you tuck something like this away in your heart and not expect it to leak poison into your soul. This weight would crush her.
It was crushing her.
She paced the edge of the meadow, just a flash of indigo like a precious stone buried in the earth. Loneliness, a self-imposed loneliness, had every last nerve in her heart aching as though each throbbing beat would drop it from her chest. Even if she had ever been close with her mother, she had little desire to risk facing the kingdoms prince. To see her nightmares reflected in his dark eyes. Likewise, she could run away to the Gates to see her sisters, but she couldn’t bring herself to make these fears theirs. So when she notices the flash of black, a silhouette so impossibly familiar, she reacts without thinking.
“Dad.” She says, crushing herself against him, hating the sob buried in her voice. For a moment she says nothing more, but she wills him not to pull away, wills him with every raw, aching nerve in her heart. “Please just stay. Just for the night.” She can feel herself crumbling with each moment that stretches past them. And then even quieter, her broken face still buried in the curve of his dark shoulder, “I won’t tell mom I saw you.”
TAKE ME UNDERGROUND, TAKE ME ALL THE WAY
BRING ME TO THE FIRE, THROW ME IN THE FLAMES
Out of all of his children, Malis was the most of him—and it made his heart ache. The rest of them had inherited Oksana, either in their softness, their kindness, or even in their strength (except Pyxis who was an enigma to him with smiles that never reached her eyes), but Malis had inherited the darkness from him. There was the same haunted look in her eyes, the same stubbornness, the same penchant for the shadows. He looked at her and knew that she carried the same stones in her heart, the same weight on her shoulders.
He hated himself for passing along his family’s personal brand of poison.
So he can’t retreat when she collides with him, he can’t do anything but hold her closer, closing his eyes against the shattering in his chest at her pleas. His breathing is ragged, her presence both a balm and a burn. She should be with her mother, her siblings—anywhere but here. She should hate him, he thinks—although, at the same time, his soul cries out with joy that she, for reasons unknown, does not.
“Malis,” he murmurs, his voice jagged on the edges. “I won’t leave,” he promises, although he knows it is a foolish mistake—and one he would pay for later. “But you can’t tell Oksana. You can’t.” He pulls away and the secrets between father and daughter are open for the world to see. “She has to hate me.” He closes his eyes, grimacing, “She deserves that.” He leaves it at that, because he knows that she will understand. If anyone in this world was to understand the complexities and monstrosities of his heart, she would.
She doesn’t hate him though, could never hate him. They were too much the same (and so entirely different) with hearts meant for anguish and darker things. Their shadows bled together, shadows that weren’t cut by the light of Ilka, of Oksana. Reshaped, reformed, though neither ever meant to. Her aching heart stills against his side, and when she looked into the dark of his eyes she was unsurprised to find not an ounce of pity. Like knew like and their torments bled together.
“Do you really believe that, dad?” Her voice is hoarse, stretched miles too tight by the burdens pulling her soul in every which direction. “She will never hate you. She’ll only ever hate the way you hurt her.” But there’s something else that flashes darkly in those emerald eyes, a secret she crushes before it has a chance to make itself known. “But I’ll never tell her.”
She could feel herself being smothered beneath the weight of each new secret.
Her eyes close and her anguish is a raw flash of pain across the indigo and black of her strange face. “I can’t do it.” She whispers, gasps as though a blade has buried itself in the soft of her narrow blue chest. “I don’t know how to live when everything hurts so much.” Her words comes in short, shuddering gasps and she’s appalled by her own weakness. And then, bitterly, “You didn’t ask me why I’m blue.”
Another pause as that bitterness wells and spills over like a stain across the grimace of her face, though none of it is directed at Makai. “You wouldn’t believe me anyway.”
And then, so quiet she isn’t sure she’s said it at all, “I don’t.”
It should not surprise him that he is a horrible father, but the truth of it still burns—enough that he grimaces at her words, cursing inwardly at himself for being so selfish as to not ask about her. Of course he had only been concerned with his own situation; of course he had dragged her into it and asked her to keep yet another secret. Was he surprised that he burdened even his own child with his suffering? Was he surprised that he would add yet more weight to her shoulders before even inquiring about her own?
“I don’t know, Malis,” he said and his voice is laced with a marrow-deep fatigue. “I wish she did.” But she admits to carry his burden and he loves her for it at the same time that he loathes himself. “Thank you.” He sighs and pulls her close to him, relishing in the silence and the sweetness of being with his family, even if he had to do it in secret and in the middle of the night. It was at least something. It was something he could hold on to.
Her next words tear at him, each syllable carving a new hole. “Malis,” he says with a broken voice, “I wish I could tell you how.” But he himself didn’t know how to live with this weight on his shoulders; he didn’t know how to carry on with this agony dragging him down. What source of knowledge could he possibly be for his daughter?
What wisdom could he impart?
So he doesn’t bother pretending that he could. He just closes his eyes to steady himself before opening them, his expression vulnerable and aching. “Why are you blue?” A deep breath. “Please tell me.” Even though he has never given her one good reason to trust him.
MAKAI
I'm a dead man walking here, but that's the least of all my fears
She regretted her words as soon as they left her lips. The blue, that aching indigo, it was the stuff of nightmares (her nightmares) made real, tangible. She didn’t want him to know about her ghosts, about the things that waited for her as soon as sleep came. Memories relived again and again. Memories that blurred at the edges, frayed and unraveling, bleeding into dreams and impossible things.
And yet-
The burden of knowing was more than she could bare alone. It eroded the edges of sanity, blurred the lines between real and pretend. She saw things in the shadows, in the corners of her eyes, beasts brought to life by the consequence of a mind worn too thin. She had tried to tell Sleaze, to tell Erebor, and for a moment the world had seemed a little smaller, a little less lonely. But when she looked into their eyes and found their ghosts staring back at her, it was like falling into a bottomless black pit. Nothing to catch her, nothing to slow the fall. Only fear and loneliness, only the dread of the unknown.
When she looks to him, when those same green eyes flash to his and hold steady for a heartbeat, there is only sorrow waiting for him there. She knows she cannot tell him why, or how, cannot make her burdens his. And even if she could, even if she could trade these demons, how would she ever find the words to explain to him of a world that should not exist. What could he possibly know of little human girls and their toys, of dolls and clowns and boxes meant for trapping things.
She presses her chest against his and slings her chin over his back, she doesn’t want to be able to see his eyes now, doesn’t want him to see the ghosts hiding in the indigo hollows of her face. “I can’t.” She tells him in a voice soaked through with regret. Can’t, not won’t, and she wills him to notice the difference. Her eyes close and for once there is nothing waiting for her there. “I love you, dad.”
They are cut from the same cloth, and they breathe the same poison. He can feel the toxic nature of her own self-doubt and self-loathing rolling off her flesh, and he hates himself for instilling it in her—for handing off the worst of himself to his child. He hates himself even more for perpetuating the same vicious cycle. Sighing, he drops his head in exhaustion against her and just focuses on breathing, even as she denies him the same story she had just harpooned him for ignoring. It was nothing he didn’t deserve.
Still, he notices the subtly in her choice of language.
“Please,” he says again quietly, his cheek resting along her back, his bones thawing from her warmth and nearness of his family. She was, perhaps, the only one of them who would come near him, this he knew. Not that he blamed the other children. He was a horrendous father. Flashing in and out of their lives like a comet—appearing and disappearing on a whim. Sometimes, he had no choice (when death was on his lips and rattling in his lungs), but other times it was his own fear that drove him away. Just weakness.
“I love you too, Malis,” his voice is broken and his eyes close, breathing in deeply, feeling his own demons stretch through him to tear at his lungs. “You don’t have to tell me,” he knows that he can’t force her to say anything, to give him anything that he had never once earned, but he can’t stop himself from wanting to help, for wanting to do something right in his godforsaken life—especially for her. “But I wish that you would.”
MAKAI
I'm a dead man walking here, but that's the least of all my fears
Please, he says and she winces because somehow that single word feels the same as being flayed.
Of course she wanted to tell him, she needed to tell him. She could feel the secret burrowing in her stomach, the weight of it like a rock except for the way it slithered and thrashed and tore her up inside. This secret sat like rotting poison, spreading death and decay through the marrow of her bones. But to tell him, to give this secret words would be to give it shape, to breathe life into it so it could go nest in his thoughts and turn his blood to sludge in his veins.
But it’s too much, please, and she can feel her resolve coming undone, please, and his chin feels like fire under her skin where it lays across her back.
She crumbles against him with her head tucked to his neck and the row of horns pressed uncomfortably close to the dark skin of his shoulder. “I don’t feel like me anymore, I don’t even know who I am.” But that was a lie, and she could feel the heat of it flushing in her face. She knew exactly who she had become, knew the demons in her heart and the darkness in her mind. It was just easier to pretend she didn’t.
Her mouth opens and her chest expands but no words come out. It seemed an impossible thing to explain- hands and feet and bodies that stood on only two legs. A dream that wasn’t a dream because the blue was still here and still real and he could see it too.
‘But I wish that you would.’
She pulls away from him and her eyes flash to his face, and in that moment they are every bit of her mother’s green and fire and ferocity. Don’t ever forget you wished for this, they say as they drown in the black and blue of her haunted face.
“Imagine waking up to find yourself in a dream, an impossible place, where nothing makes sense and you know things you shouldn’t, but it’s the realest thing you’ve ever experienced.” She’s incoherent in her dismay, frantic, but with wild eyes she continues anyway. “Imagine you’ve been tortured. And then imagine waking up in another not-dream to find the ones who tortured you the first time.” She pauses again to look away from him, the fever-pitch of her shame an almost unbearable heat beneath her skin. “I did, dad. And I killed them, I killed them both. And I can’t even tell you I’m sorry because I’d do it again. I’d do it every time.”
Fevered dreams where all he saw was bodies of strangers flayed open before him and his own face drenched in their blood. Fevered dreams where his buckskin brother, dark knight that he was, stood over him with an expression wrought with fury and pain and regret. Fevered dreams where all he felt was the battering hooves of his own blood breaking him open, and he could do nothing to stop—do nothing to overpower the soldier raining down on him. Fevered dreams where he felt his life spill out of him even as his brother sobbed his apologies. Fevered dreams where they all lay in the sand and the blood and it was all broken—all broken because that is all their family was ever destined to be. Broken. Dying. Dead.
Makai knew bloodlust.
He knew bloodlust that bubbled and simmered in his veins until it was all that you felt. He knew bloodlust that choked out all reason so that you were just a hellhound waiting to be released. He knew bloodlust that took control until vision became hazy and your mind slipped into the background of an animalistic, feral need to kill. He knew a bloodlust that brought him to ruin before and would do so again.
He knows Malis. Knows the innermost workings of her mind because they are his mind. Knows the demons that haunt her because they have haunted him in this life and the past—and would haunt him in his next, he was sure of it. He closes his eyes as she explains her story, and he groans a little, the sound dark as it uncorked from his throat. “Malis,” he finally says, his words throaty and thick with emotion. “I, I,” but he cuts off, shaking his head, pressing into the edge of her horn and almost wishing that it would just finish the job and cut his throat. It was more than he deserved. “I did this to you,” he confesses.
Stepping back a little, he watched her with haunted eyes, the color as black as soot. “All of this,” he says quietly, taking a deep breath into diseased, creaking lungs. “It’s my fault.” He couldn’t blame Atrox for this, although he wished that he could. He couldn’t blame Magnus or Twinge—and he certainly couldn’t place any blame on Oksana. Everything that Malis was saying came from his own personal fountain of disease, and he knew it. “You aren’t alone in this.” Although it may be better for her if she was.
you're the fire and the flood and I'll always feel you in my blood
