tell me you love me just one more time; viscera

[leliana]

I know what it is but I'm hoping that all is well
no harvest of green but it's still my heart to sell

 

Leliana was made to heal, to soothe and yet she carried inside of her shards of glass that she could not rid herself of. With each breath, she felt them digging in deeper, her breath painful, her lungs constricting. She woke up in cold sweats, her traitorous wings wrapped around her gently and transformed into that brutal reminder, the bone and black leather a crushing reminder of him. She always changed them quickly, back to soft red down or glinting copper, but that didn't stop the pain. Worse, it didn't stop the glimmer of hope, that split second between dream and awake when she saw the onyx and ivory and murmured deep in her throat, the need to curl into him instinctive. 

And then the reminder.

That crushing, bruising reminder when the fog cleared and he wasn't there. 

She didn't talk of it, the embarrassment, the hurt, not even with Exist. It was too much to confront. Too much to comprehend. Instead she turned toward others as best she could, helping where she was needed, healing from afar when she was not. It eased her soul; it was easier to sleep when exhaustion finally caught her instead of waiting for slumber. 

Today was no different. She had left Tephra early, unfurling her wings into crimson dragon wings, the leather rich and strong, the talons copper. She soared over the forest, refusing to look down. He could be there. Like he was last time. She pushed herself faster, wings pumping strongly until the trees melted away and it was nothing but the meadow, soft grass swaying beneath the sun as it peeked over the horizon. 

She landed gently, head turning from the corner where she had first met Dovev toward the belly of the common land, the swath of land where groups congregated and peeled apart. For a moment, she closed her hazel eyes, unrooting the healing from her chest so that it could seek out into the crowd around her. Minor aches and bruises were soothed, small scrapes knit together again. She sighed gently when her powers came back to nest in her chest, and she dropped her head, chin resting against the mahogany of her breast.

Today would be better, she lied to herself. 

It had to be.  

I put everything I had into something that didn't grow
like going on a wild hunt, shooting arrows without a bow

@[Cassi]

[viscera]

She is an agonizing thing: normal.
This is agonizing because she comes from a family of monsters and magicians, born at the edge of a great mountain and left there. She only knows them in stories, knows her sisters are a necromancer and a monster both.
But she? She is nothing.
A black filly-turned-mare, named for innards – for things discarded, leftovers from violence (a theme, in their naming – they are named for death and dying, the trio of women born in succession: violence, charnel, viscera).

(She doesn’t know the things that are inside her, encoded but not expressed because of the gagged magic. The things yet to come.)

She is not a social creature; instead, she seems to echo some of her father’s feral qualities – she prefers shadows and silence, and does not know how to speak to others, does not know how to connect when she has spent so many months being alone.
But the path today has led her here, where it is more crowded and the air is thick with words. The muffled conversations itch on her skin and her ears flatten backward. She thinks to run, to recoil back to her solitude, but before she can she crosses the path of a horse with wings like some terrible beast. Her ears are still flicked back, she is nervous and strange and agonizingly plain, and it surprises her more than anyone else when the word spills from her lips: “sorry.”

She should move, be on her way, but she takes a moment. Watches the mare, looks at the curve of her wings, and wonders, briefly, what it is like to fly.

.

v i s c e r a

you have blood on your hands, and I knew it was mine

hoo boy am i out of practice

[leliana]

I know what it is but I'm hoping that all is well
no harvest of green but it's still my heart to sell

It catches her by surprise, the mare. She hadn't been paying attention, hadn't been looking, and the embarrassment floods her as she takes a step back, her hazel eyes widening. "Oh, no. It's my fault. I was being foolish." Her smile was hesitant, but kind, the crimson of her lips folding into a hint of a smile at the corners of her mouth.

Her wings shift silently by her side, the dragon melting into something more familiar, soft down and copper, although this time not metallic. She hopes that the other mare would find it less intimidating, although Leliana had never considered herself in that light. She was just Leli. She was meant to fade into shadows, to work silently in the background.

She was nothing to be scared of.

She was not much at all.

"My name is Leliana," she finally offers, her voice made of fog. It is a deep voice that is distinctly feminine but not overly so. Low, pleasant, calming. It is the kind of voice you want to hear in the midst of chaos. It is the kind of voice you want to hear when the storm simmers into action. But not the kind of voice to whisper soft nothings.

She regards the other mare more closely for a moment, taking in the onyx of her coat and ignoring the sharp pain in her chest. It is something she would have to ignore; something she would have to get over. She couldn't go the rest of her life cringing whenever she sees a black horse. As the silence between then stretches onward, Leliana felt herself shift and then settle. She is good  at silence. She can manage this.

Let the other say what she wanted, when she wanted.

Leliana can wait.

I put everything I had into something that didn't grow
like going on a wild hunt, shooting arrows without a bow

yeah...your words are always beauty.

[viscera]

“Perhaps,” she says in agreement – it was foolish, to daydream so. She says this not because she thinks herself above the mare, but because she thinks of most things –herself included – as deserving of disdain.
(Exempt from this is her family, which exists like a mythos in her mind – gods and goddesses on their mountain, and she, the mortal, cast out.)
The wings change before her eyes, like liquid, and her eyes widen in an unwelcome curiosity. These new wings are more like those of a bird, though brighter.
She still intends to go, to be on her way – back to where it is quiet, back to the bracken where she can be alone with her distant thoughts, but then a name is offered, a gift she does not want but does not refuse either.

“Viscera,” she says, and her voice is soft, because she does not use it often, she does not see much need for it.
Go, her mind whispers, but her hooves stay planted, sunk into the earth. She notices a tenseness about the girl – someone more empathic might notice it for what it was, and inquire about it, offer comfort. Viscera does no such thing. Instead, her feet, in a terrible act of betrayal, step a little closer.
“Your wings,” she says, still soft, “you made them change.”
She is envious of this. There is much about herself she would like to change.

v i s c e r a

you have blood on your hands, and I knew it was mine

[leliana]

I know what it is but I'm hoping that all is well
no harvest of green but it's still my heart to sell

If daydreaming was foolish, then Leliana was the Queen of fools. She spent hours on the subject matter, her mind drifting upward and outward in thought, chasing after spiderweb dreams, hours lingering over the impossibility of them, the fragility that left them caught on fingers and then gone without a trace. It was something she held close to her chest; a silly pastime for an otherwise practical, grounded girl.

Still, she had enough of a mind about her to blush against the confirmation, head dipping slightly.

She caught the widening of the girl’s eyes at the shifting of her wings, and her heart warmed slightly. It was one of her more frivolous bits of magic, but useful in its own right. She conjured dragon wings when she needed to fly great distances for they rarely tired. Down when she needed to sleep. And when that stallion had charged her, they had shifted into something steely and dangerous. Her heart clenched at the memory, and she turned from it, forcing it to the wayside as she focused in time to catch the girl’s name.

“Viscera,” she repeated, enjoying the sound and weight on her tongue. It was a good name, and she found she liked the way it felt as she rolled it around in her mouth. “Viscera,” one more time as she caught the other’s gaze and held it steady. At her comment, Leliana unfurls the wings and stretches them wide, the coppery feathers catching the rays of light. “It was a gift passed down to my sister and me from our mother, and gift she in turn received from her grandmother.” The wings without singular shape.

At her thoughts, the wings grew fuzzy on the edges, shifting first into the hard copper that had protected on that fateful day, the edges sharp and glinting. They stayed like that for a moment before they turned into the dragonfly wings she had seen her sister wear, iridescent and nearly-translucent, the veins spidering through them. Then, before she could stop them, they turned into the black leather, spattered with the faint colors of constellations, the ivory of the bone sticking out.

Something rippled across her expression, pain perhaps, that she smoothed over, the wings turning into those of a barn owl, russet and cream as she pulled them back. She gave the other girl a soft smile. “A neat party trick,” she rolled her dappled shoulders, wishing she had not put on such a bold display.

I put everything I had into something that didn't grow
like going on a wild hunt, shooting arrows without a bow

[viscera]

Viscera aches a little. She is without gifts (she does not know the story, how the land took from them what was once for granted, that imbued in her DNA are strange and beautiful things). Her own mother is a magician, beautiful in a terrible way, made of too many angles and shadows; and her father is something altogether alien, with his
(its)
strange clicking language, the spines protruding from the back.
She sighs, audible. She sees no reason to hide her jealousy, unsocialized thing that she is, honest to a fault.
“You’re lucky,” she says, “my family is all…gifted, expect for me.”
A confession, made to a nobody in a nowhere place: I am normal.
She’s accepted it, sure, but it doesn’t mean she’s not the more bitter for it, that she doesn’t envy those who are gifted, even if it is in less terrifying ways.
(Wings that shift and change rather than fanged teeth or bones made to walk again. An interesting trick. One that draws in rather than repels.)

She stills watches raptly as the wings transform, to something glinting and hard, to something like gossamer, to a painting of stars. A story was being told, in these transformations, but it’s not one Viscera knows how to read.
“What else can you do?”
She assumes, here. She assumes because all the others she knows (her family, all others, now, fond and distant memories). Her mother had been nigh unlimited in her powers, of course, but even her father spat acid, and Violence once chased her with the fresh-dead body of a rat, a change from usual menagerie of bones.

v i s c e r a

you have blood on your hands, and I knew it was mine

[leliana]

I know what it is but I'm hoping that all is well
no harvest of green but it's still my heart to sell

She does not miss the jealousy, but she is not sure that she understands it. She was not something to inspire envy in others—that was her sister. Her sister who flared so brightly, who had constellation smiles and galaxies in her eyes. Exist who was so beautiful and wild and free. Exist was the one who was enough to cause jealousy but not Leliana. Never Leliana. She tilted her head slightly, as if confused, and then shook her head, the tangles of her red mane framing her jaw as it curled around her pretty face.

“You’re lucky to know your family,” she said quietly, her fog voice honest. “I have my sister, but my mom left us a while ago. I never met my father.” She wasn’t sure why she was being so forthcoming about her family, except that it felt right. She didn’t like to think about her mother often; her mother who had succumbed to the dark in her heart. Her father who was nothing more than a shadowy figure.

At her next question, she smiles. Unsure why the mare knew something else simmered in her blood but not correcting her because she wasn’t wrong. “I can show you,” she said quietly, taking a step forward. “It is sometimes easier if I can touch you.” She didn’t wait for permission, instead letting her muzzle come to rest on the mare’s neck, breathing in her earthy scent. She closed her eyes on a low hum, the noise in her throat, as she pushed her healing into the mare. There were no visible wounds to heal, but there was enough—there was always enough. It astounded Leliana how much people would just live with pain.

Her power flowed freely through her companion, dipping in and out of her veins, finding a path through her arteries. She found whatever aches there were, whatever bruises lived under the skin. She soothed them as only she could, exhaling as she withdrew her powers, letting it coil back in her chest cavity.

“How do you feel?” she asked quietly, her amber eyes finding the other.

I put everything I had into something that didn't grow
like going on a wild hunt, shooting arrows without a bow

[viscera]

She barks a laugh that is not quite bitter. Her family was a brief moment on a mountain, where stories were shared, where Violence brought forth bones and made them grin and dance.
“I wasn’t wanted,” she said – she, too, is forthcoming here, because she does not care to regulate herself, she is a blunted object, unrefined, uncaring, for she has never had anything to care about, never had enough dignity to worry about tarnishing it.
“I would have preferred not to know them at all,” she says, which is half-true. She can’t imagine a world without her mother’s strangely-angled face, beautiful and hideous all at once, her father’s clicking language that Viscera’s dumb ears couldn’t decipher. What would she be like, without those memories?

The mare says I can show you and Viscera steels herself for pain, because pain seems a commonality amongst the powers she knows. But instead, there is a tingling feeling that is not altogether unpleasant, and small bruises fade, a small, scabbed cut on her leg closes for good.
“Amazing,” she says, because she is not used to magic used like this, she is used to chaos and bloodshed, shadow and bone creatures.
And better, the feeling of healing. Of being reshaped, made complete. An addicting feeling.

So this is why she ducks her head down and tears at her own skin, rips at it with blunted teeth not meant for such acts. She breaks the skin of her shoulder, tastes blood on her tongue, coppery and rich. It’s not a devastating wound by any means, but it’s larger than any borne before.
“Do it again,” she breathes, then, being polite, adds, “please.”

v i s c e r a

you have blood on your hands, and I knew it was mine

[leliana]

I know what it is but I'm hoping that all is well
no harvest of green but it's still my heart to sell

Her words tear at Leliana’s chest and she struggles to breathe for a moment, the pain in her chest almost more than she can bear. “I wasn’t wanted either.” Not by a father who left long before they were born, his name lost to their history. Not by a mother who would rather turn to the darkness than her children. Not even by Dovev who had found comfort and love in the grips of his family instead of in her embrace.

She was never wanted; not really. The thought burned her throat.

The loneliness is eased when she sees the light in the mare’s eyes, when she sees the pleasure in the small gift of her healing. She did not always get to experience such things up close and personal; it was much more common for her to heal from afar, to press her powers into strangers from a distance, watching the way that it danced and dove into them. To get to see it so close, to practically feel it in the air, was unreal.

But the joy of it does not last for long before the mare was ripping at her flesh, the blood pouring forth from her shoulder. It is a shallow wound but it makes Leliana ache, a soft cry ripping from her mouth. “Oh!” she cries as she twists her body so that it is pressed to the mare’s side, her wings large and down as they flare up and over her back. “Oh, please, don’t hurt yourself.” She dips her head down to the wound, the blood staining the crimson of her nose, and she pours her gift back into the mare.

The healing is fast, skin knitting together, the wound staunching, but when she looks back up, there is still concern naked in her hazel eyes. “Why would you hurt yourself like that?”

I put everything I had into something that didn't grow
like going on a wild hunt, shooting arrows without a bow