"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
10-01-2017, 08:49 PM (This post was last modified: 10-01-2017, 09:09 PM by Ledger.)
What makes our love so hard to be Is it you, or is that just you with me
And just like that, as he throws his rapidly shifting body against the iron bars, he is suddenly thrusted back into the world just as quickly as he had been taken. Rolling on sand, gnashing his teeth, clawing at the sky. It takes him a moment to realize that the world his lit up around him. That he is no longer trapped in darkness. His body stills, somewhere between bear and equine, as he blearily looks around him.
He felt… Different.
On the inside, where his heart should be thumping madly against his chest. Instead, he feels nothing. Vapid, airy, almost empty. There’s no frantic pumping of his wild tattered heart for Carnage had finally claimed it as his own, a trophy that he had failed to collect last time. Now a glass replica stood in it’s place. Of course he did not fully understand this, despite the words “Mine.” that were snarled at him before he was thrown from the cavern and the chaos.
He doesn’t understand anything anymore.
Where ever he looks, he sees ghosts. Things and people that should have been but never were. Stuck between two realities, broken in spirit by that he could not change. His mind a shattered mess of what was real and what wasn’t. But that compared little to the carnage inside his chest.
Could he still wrap around the weight of the heartbreak of Ellyse’s betrayal? He could feel the steady simmer of anger in his breast, fueled by humiliation and wounded pride. But could this intact glass heart comprehend such things as love? There’s a continuous ache beneath the X, a non stopping heaviness that competes with the vapid emptiness. Such a strange feeling. There are still the emotional ties there, wrapped within the delicate clear surface, but hard to reach. What he had felt for Ellyse was there, trapped beneath the surface but very much damaged. One would have to chip at the surface to release it. And even then, would that not damage him? Or worse, to experience such grief again… Would it shatter the glass and he would no longer exist?
All he knows is that Ellyse has broken this family. Has betrayed him and their children. It is unforgivable. How could he have ever loved her to begin with when she had been so careless with him from the start? All the nights he had wasted away, pining for her (confusion as he remembers the loving embrace of the girl of glass and the nights spent in her delicate warmth) when she had taken her time to come back to him. Had he ever really known her to begin with? Had she ever truly given her love to him as he had her?
His muzzle wrinkles, bitter with the distaste he feels for her. For them all. Except the twins, the last link of humanity he has. The one eye looks towards the dark ashy sky and the sullen volcano. Feeling the anger within him writhing much like the magma beneath the charcoal surface. He can see Raaquel there at it’s base, pity in her eyes. And with a blink of an eye, she is gone and he is reeling with grief. Perhaps he can still feel? The emotion is washed away quickly, leaving him cold as ice at his core.
All he had ever wanted in this world was love and family. And now?
Keep a little fire burning; however small, however hidden.
Worry has settled in his stomach, heavy and acidic. He hasn't seen his parents in days - nor have the twins, whose stomachs have begun to yearn. He's left them near the volcano today, nearby to Offspring, to search through their home again. Smoak is too fearful to leave Tephra while the twins are alone, so he must force himself to consider his rounds of the territory sufficient. None of the other residents have seen the trio, leaving the panicky Smoak to care for his younger siblings.
Today, while he searches for his parents, he also searches for someone who will be able to offer their milk to Joaquin and Joplin. The bone-armored colt is gaunt in the face as he moves across the rocky shoreline of northern Tephra, his hazel eyes sharp against its contours as he searches. The air is gray and forlorn today, but the champagne yearling still feels hopeful.
He is not disappointed.
His brow furrows quizzically on the misshapen heap sprawled out a few yards away, nestled into a rolling sand dune. Smoak pauses, albeit briefly, before his hooves carry him tentatively forward, neck extended to investigate the creature. He realizes, after a moment, who he is staring at, stuck mid-shift. "Ledge?" he whispers to the one-eyed flaxen, concern etched on his face as he notices the stallion's tattered chest.
Smoak
lineart colored by sanaa
@[Ledger] ♥ Jejeee, I swear my next one won't be #PoopSmoak !
What makes our love so hard to be Is it you, or is that just you with me
The space where his beating heart once lay is silent, hard and yet vapid. He had given it freely to Ellyse, practically shoved it into her arms, only to let her shatter it to bits. To be stolen by a Dark God. Now he is empty. Now he has nothing but his madness, the tattered remnants of heartbreak, betrayal, and foggy reality. Despite the ghostly figures that dance around him (Adaline’s screams ringing in his ears), he still remembers one thing. One important piece of information. How his beautiful perfection (which he had fought for years to obtain) had slipped from his fingers. Dahmer. The thief, the snake, the scavenger.
His sharp canines are exposed as he snarls at the thought of the winged stallion. Of his claws twisting into his dark flesh and exposing him for the scum he was from inside out. Images dance about his head, red and dark and each one featuring his enemy. The one who had stolen his family from him. A soft voice makes him slowly turn his head, polar bear muzzle leading the single gold flecked eye as it falls on a familiar concerned face. Pieces of bone, glimmer of champagne. The place where his glass heart rests aches coldly with remembrance. The foal that lay between his beloved and the home wrecker. If Smoak (who he had once tried to love as his own) never existed… None of this would have happened.
Adaline would still be alive (for her death feels as real as the sand beneath his crumpled figure), Ellyse’s eye would never have wandered (and she will pay in time for such treachery), Dahmer would have no hold over his Warrioress. If only Smoak did not exist. A tinny whine of a voice alerts him, a dark god wheedling into his mind. Seeping into the blackness that threatens to submerge him. You can change that, you can ruin this foal as he has ruined you. Kill the bastard.
Slowly the half bear/half equine lurches forward on unsteady paws and hooves. Lunging towards the foal with a gleaming red rage in the heart of his pupil. No longer seeing Smoak but the one that sired him. The newest man to wreck havoc on his life. Spittle flies from curled lips as he snaps at the colt, his claws clumsily trying to reach for the boy and end his life. End it all.
Better beware, I go bump in the night. devil-may-care with a lust for life.
Rage.
White-hot, blistering rage. Blood still caught between bristled, unkempt feathers – no longer ivory, coated in grime, filth and decay, haphazardly placed over hollowed bone tucked against her flank. She is breathless, delirious with an anger she cannot conceal, a fury she cannot contain. She can feel the dried blood across her cheek, caught in the sullen, concave eye socket that once held delicate nerves that had been torn freely from her skull effortlessly. The anguish and agony of it had long since faded – she felt numb where she should feel misery; she felt numb to the loss, to the vertigo that had come and gone in its absence, to the hideous disfigurement left where beauty had once held its place.
She did not feel numb to the betrayal of the one she had given her heart to (he had left her to die, and she would one day do the same to him) – to what had been given to her by her tormentor, only to be taken away – to what she had been forced to do, to what she had destroyed in the process of it all.
She felt every agonizing moment of the woe that inevitably came as the distant sunrise bathed her in its warmth and vibrant color. Oh, how it causes her brain to ache - she cannot process the sight as she once could; she had taken her eyesight for granted – she no longer felt whole, merely a shadow of what she once was. It would not last, however – she had not fought through the blood, sweat and tears to falter, nor had she done so only to fail – she would go on, she would thrive, and in the end –
Only time would tell.
She is worn and weary, but the familiar, stifling humidity envelopes her, as the gentle ocean air caresses her open, seeping wounds – caught between a plethora of emotion, she is raw, unrestrained and flinching with every wayward step. A shiver traverses the length of her spine as her single eye roves the thick and swaying vegetation for a glimpse of her sons, of her daughter – her own stomach snarls with a ravenous hunger, but if she is aching with famine, she cannot imagine the hunger stirring in the young bellies of her children. Her longing for vengeance is strong, but her yearning for her young is stronger.
Smoak - his scent is heavy in the stagnant air, and a winding knot of dread has already begun to coil within her heart – what would he say, what would he see? The blood, the gaping wound of her missing eye would not go unnoticed, but she had not fought for the fragile tendril of her life to go another forsaken moment without clutching him close to her rapidly beating heart. There is a glimmer of gold among the flora and fauna, and some small part of her writhing, shriveling heart is warmed by the sight – she only hoped that Joaquin and Joplin would be near, and well – the dark God had taken so much from her already.
What lay before her is enough to stir her heart into a furious frenzy, and her blood into a churning force of wrath and anger – and her long, muscled legs are carrying her over rivulets of magma, roiling water and through the dense field of undergrowth as a bellow of anger echoes out from within the dry confinement of her throat –
”Get away from my son!”
As she lunges for the misshapen, partially transformed creature before her, her body is sheathed in overlapping diamond, glistening brightly beneath the pale but unforgiving sun – a blinding sight, as her outstretched wing and diamond-encased body shield her yearling son from the snarling, snapping jaws that belonged to a shadow she had never known at all.
What makes our love so hard to be Is it you, or is that just you with me
Destruction. He thought he had seen it all, had known it more intimately then anyone. Until he met her. Seeing how she seemed to now be the root of this most recent explosion of his already miserable life, the core of chaos. There is a scream of rage, words of fury. The voice sends shock to his system despite the unusual tone of anger that dismantles it. It’s not enough to make him let up on his attack. His sight is blinded by a sudden flash of glittering diamond as it puts itself between him and the blight on his life. His claws seem to rake against her flesh with a bloodcurdling screech that makes anyone nearby cringe with the sound. Nails on chalkboard. Frustration floods his system, the confused and muddled bear growing angrier with this barrier between him and his prey.
The narrowed pupil sees through the red wall and finds her face as a claw swipes at the ravaged white feathers. They smell of brine and ash, they smell of the sweat that beads across her back as he grabs at her withers, a soft exhale of ecstasy.. The bear is finally able to complete it’s shift. Leaving the bloodstained stallion peddling back away from her, anger and disgust on his face. It’s the despair that lingers along the dark hollow of his eye and the curve of his cheek that’s most haunting of all.
”Your son. Only son. Your son of love”. The words spat out but he does not look at her. She who had ruined them all. Rambling, the crazed remaining eye roving back and forth between her, him, the ocean. Adaline. Raaquel. Magnus. All there, watching. Waiting. Except for them, the children. His.
”Twins.” He spits again in his agitation, trying to grasp at where they could be. If they could be. ”Never existed. Gone.” Unable to find them in the fog, to see them with the ghosts. ”Like your heart.” His accusing glare back to her, finally staring her down. His chest heaves and the curdling skin on the x stretches mockingly before her. ”Like mine.” Knowing it was gone, taken. Unable to understand the severity of it, at the cold weighty hollowed thing in it’s place. Her eye is missing, she is a mess of her former self but none of it registers. She is a demon now sent to plague him. Perhaps she had sent him back to the Dark God on purpose. Perhaps it had all been part of her master plan.
The fluttering sluggish feelings trapped within the visible heart peck at the glass. A slow sadness gripping at his mind. Remember. Remember. For the first time he seems almost clear headed. ”He told me. Your lies.” The anger returns, rushing through his blood and scattering his marbles once more. ”Rabbits caught together in the snare.” Sharp teeth protruding through his gumline as he snarls, heated, angry gold glinting at her. Calling her out. ”I know you now. I know where you’ve been” Hissing, the last word said with finality.
Magnus stands behind her with sorrow in his eyes. The sins of his father…. Taken out on the son. ”It wasn’t real.” Anguish in the fury. Back to the sea as his hooves sink into sand and surf climbs to his belly. ”It never was.”
Better beware, I go bump in the night. devil-may-care with a lust for life.
The grinding scream of sharpened claws raking over glistening diamond is nearly enough to send a shiver along the slope of her spine, but she is too far removed to flinch at the mere shudder of piercing friction – her sanity clinging precariously along the precipice. She cannot marvel at the way her bloodstained flesh is sheathed in an impenetrable armor, nor can she admire the way it overlaps in heavy sheets across the rapidly rising hearth of her chest as her thundering heart (broken, beaten) pounds beneath it. Her wing is not as fortunate as her skin – and a cluster of feathers fall away to the soft and fertile ground beneath her, leaving her aching bones bare – and beneath the weight of his impact, a bone is crushed, splintered by the sheer force.
She does not cry out in anguish – the agony is vertiginous, but not unbearable – no more unbearable than the heartache and loss she had already endured beneath a cold and unforgiving presence draped in celestial mythos and malevolence. Her breath is heavy, lurching from her shallow, shaken lungs as her chest heaves. Every movement is difficult for her. She is tired and weary and worn but she does not waver, not as her son lay trembling behind an outstretched wing as his assailant – the once keeper of her fragmented, heavily damaged heart – flinches and recoils into himself, words falling away from his parted, cracked lips where the sharp teeth of a carnivorous creature still lie in wait.
His utterances are broken and splintered at the core – he cannot see reality from the carefully woven lie spun by a God so cruel, and the heavy, daunting despair lingering in his single eye is not lost upon her. Yet still, the anguish of his betrayal is not dulled by his condition. The glowering glare that he had left her with, laced with hatred and a loathing so deep and unshakable she hardly recognized him – it still haunted her, it settled deeply into the hollow of her aching bones and she is unable to see beyond it, even as he sway to and fro before her, as broken as she.
Your son of love. Love.
Her heart aches with remorse – she did love Dahmer; she had come to love his humor and his wit – the gentle way in which he encouraged the life that had been created between them by a fleeting encounter; the love and devotion tucked away within his piercing gaze whenever Smoak tucked himself away within the darkened hearth of his chest or beneath his wing. She had come to love him deeply, and wholly – she could not deny the truth of it.
And yet, it is so different from the deeply passionate, destructive love that had swept her closer to Ledger, that had churned her heart into a frenzy and lit her entire world in a flame.
He had set her world on fire, and he had left her to burn.
”Ledger, you have lost your mind,” she breathes, with no edge of accusation tracing her words – she is certain of it, as he mutters incessantly before her. ”our son and daughter do exist –“ and her sunken belly is growling yet again, reminding her once more of the deep and devastating hunger her newborn colt and filly must feel without her sustenance to fill them to the brim.
”You never had a heart,” she lashes out with venom lacing her tongue yet again, her single hazel eye narrowed and steady upon him as he becomes as tumultuous and as unsteady as the roiling sea that hungrily touches the shoreline. ”if you had, you wouldn’t have left me for dead. Say what you will – I know what happened between Dahmer and I,” she hisses to him, even as he wavers unsteadily before her – there is a lurch of regret (her young son did not need to know of such things, of the way his father and mother had shared one small moment of quiet intimacy before the world had come crashing down in fire and ash – it gave too much promise) – but it is fleeting. ”you never trusted me; you never tried.”
It wasn’t real.
It never was.
Had she loved him at all?
Had he loved her?
It seemed so long ago, so distant –
The gentle ache of her fatigued and ruined heart said he had, that she did.
A lie. All of it had been a lie.
She had been a fool.
”Come, Smoak,” she murmurs softly to him, her pale lips brushing across his bone-plated shoulder, exposing her barren eye socket to him with uncertainty carried in the other, nudging him to go while watching the shadow of what once was with a wary eye - watching the frothing seafoam wash away the blood and the sin that linger on his skin.
What makes our love so hard to be Is it you, or is that just you with me
Ledger you have lost your mind. He is laughing, laughing with no trace of warmth or humor. It crackles like ice, becoming lost in the foam of saltwater that churns around his ankles. She claims the children exist but he can’t trust the words that fall from her lips. All she does is speak in lies. Like when she had claimed to love him. When he had made love to her. Had that even been real? Or was every sigh and every exclamation a forgery? Faked.
She lashes out at him with venom but it’s nothing compared to the anger of the bear inside him. Of the constant mounting layers of betrayal and loss. She is ravaged but still standing. He is broken and splintered before her. She doesn’t care. But how could she if she never had to begin with? ”So you admit it.” The laughter fading, his one eye looking to the endless expanse of ocean. Wondering if the bear could submit if he only sunk beneath it’s dark surface.
”You were with him. When you should have been with me. With us.” The fog lifted for those brief moments as he looks to her. The anguish churning in the fogged glass of his chest reflected in the mirror of his eye. ”I loved you Ellyse. I LOVED YOU WITH EVERYTHING I HAD!” Roaring words, unable to force the emotion of what she had taken from him. What she had done. As the sorrow expands in his breast, the glass heart cracks slightly at it’s bottom. He coils into himself with an exclamation of pain and surprise. It’s a piercing sharp stab that leaves him gasping for breath, that makes him fall to his knees into the froth. Seawater sprays against his chest, stinging the raw wounded skin. The pain is too much, shifting back to the other reality. The safer one where love was real, once upon a time. Not like this reality. Not like her.
There is so much left that’s unsaid. That she had been his world. That all he had ever wanted was her and their family. That he would give his life for her if she had wanted the same. But she hadn’t wanted that.. Had she? Or perhaps she had… But not with him.
”Scavenger.” Snarling into the wind, his body crumpled now into the water. Letting the stinging salt reach for him. ”He pecks and prods but he will never know you. He will never consume you. Did he save you? Can he save himself...” His words loud enough for her to hear as she coaxes the child away. As he rumbles to himself. ”I know you. I know you better than anyone. Don’t I Dad?” Magnus before him, still silent. Still filled with sorrow. It sounds like laughter when he starts again but there’s a distinct break in his voice, choking on silent tears that his glass heart refuses to release.
Better beware, I go bump in the night. devil-may-care with a lust for life.
”Go,” she whispers then, her pale, bloodied lips brushing across the tuft of her son’s forelock, brushing it away with a breath of a kiss – a kiss she yearned to lay a thousand more of across his forehead, having feared she would never see him again. ”find your brother and your sister – I will come for you, I will find you.”
And then her cheek is turned, as the heavy armor that had so suddenly and so carefully sheathed her worn and aching body in its crystalline, shimmering splendor fades away (the only thing beautiful about her – she is broken, frayed and worn along the edges; devastated by a God that had ravished and ravaged her with a twisted smile settled on his pale lips and crooked teeth).
She is left, then, bare and exposed before him, as broken as he – though her pride dare not allow her to crumble as he does, as the anguish and agony of his own despair falls away to the sea as the tide rises to the hearth of his bleeding chest. Her single eye roves across the wound that lay there, over a heart that is no longer - she does not know what has been taken from him; only what she assumed lay broken beneath - and her stomach does writhe and turn with nausea at the symbolism of it. Of the symbolism of the claw marks that had so deeply damaged her eye; of the beast that had nearly stolen it away from her and from the God that had plucked it out with a tendril of care.
Still, her anger is roiling beneath the surface. Simmering as if it were a hot flame, festering and burning hotly within her chest, but she is too worn and too tired. His laughter is wry, and it drives the proverbial knife deeper within her chest – she is reminded of how easily he had left her to die, of how certain and steady his gaze had been upon her then, laced with the same burning hatred she yearned to feel as her own single, golden-flecked eye bore into his.
But she cannot.
Try as she might, as the anger, the resentment, the betrayal threatens to consume her –
She cannot hate him.
Every fervent kiss, burning embrace, and whispered sweet nothing had led to the inevitable demise of a love she had thought relentless and true – his heat and heart had consumed her, swallowed her whole, but there had always been a shadow of doubt harbored deep within her splintered heart. She had drawn away from him in her fear, longing to seize his heart and to keep it as her own, but with each fading sunset, her doubt and dread had begun to feast upon her, devouring her hopeful reverie and leaving her feeling insignificant, empty, and hollow.
The intensity of his exclamation stirs her from the darkest recesses of her mind, as the salty brine of an unshed tear slowly mixes with the dried, coagulated blood that lay across her gilded cheek. She had sought Dahmer in a moment of weakness (he was the closest she had ever grasped of friendship - he soothed the disquiet of her wayward mind, and anchored her to the shoreline of her own reality), in a moment in which the doubt of her mind had become too much, when she became too fearful that all she had come to know with Ledger would fall apart – would shatter, like fragile glass, and leave her heart bleeding and broken yet again.
It was not Ledger that had destroyed her happiness –
It was her, her fear that none of it could ever be, that she meant nothing to him – her self-preservation had become her own downfall, and the realization is enough to nearly buckle her to her already too-tired, too-weak knees, as her spent heart thuds tirelessly within her chest. She is drawn from her own despair only long enough to see him cry out in anguish, crumble away to the sea, amid seafoam and sand particles seeping into his gaping, open wounds.
”I’m sorry,” she gasps, but it is strangled, remorse and regret sinking into the tender marrow of her bones and drowning out her delicate pride – too little, too late, her realization is a heavy burden, threatening to bury her within the tumultuous sea of her own mind. Ledger lay bleeding and broken before her, as she, herself, is ruined – she knows not where Dahmer is, or whether there is even still a beating heart in his chest – and it was her fault. Her doing.
The memory of words once spoken to her by Magnus, in the very place where Ledger lay bathing in the dark ocean tide, echoes in her mind then – a confession she had not understood then rife with despair as he looked upon the sea that had taken his life before:
The place that sometimes calls to me the most, that pulls at me the hardest, is right here.
And she weeps. For all that had been lost, for all she had caused –
Gently, so gently –
