"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
TAKE ME UNDERGROUND, TAKE ME ALL THE WAY
BRING ME TO THE FIRE, THROW ME IN THE FLAMES
Perhaps he was more like his father than he thought.
It was the only thing he could think of as he slid amongst the shadows, the darkness clinging to a body that was finally recovering from the latest battle with death. It had been months since it had rattled in his ribs and woke him up with blood splattered on the dirt. Panic had seized him. His eyes had rolled back into his head, his lips had frothed, his mane had tangled; all he had thought of was Oksana. His mind had flooded with her as surely as the ocean spills over the sand and in that second he had been lost.
Oksana was hail and thunder and lightning in his breast. She was the peace of the morning sun slanting over dew-kissed hills and the passion of the wind whipping through the forest. She was everything. Everything. More than he deserved and less than he expected and he had cradled the dream of forever like a precious jewel between them. But, he knew. In his heart of hearts, Makai had always known that what he was (demon, undead, monster) could not cling to the sun for too long.
Eventually, even the masochistic’s fingers crumble.
So he had fled. It had been cowardly; a decision wrapped in the desire to protect her (from his family) from what is most certainly the disaster that was his life. Was it not kinder to slip away in the dead of night than subject her to watching him slip in death and crawl back out? Would it not be mercy to snip the ties so that she could live her life away from the poisonous slavery that claimed his own? (It was not—he knew that. It was weak.) So he had run when he thought no one was watching.
He had run and died and come back to life and hated himself more than he ever thought possible. Until even his own self-hatred and his own dying corpse had not been enough to keep him away from the one thing he cherished: her. So he stole back as silently as he had left and stalked the shadows of where they had first collided (his chest quivers with the memory) and waits impatiently for just a glimpse.
All he had to do was see her once and then he would be gone again.
Just one glance to sustain him for the coming years.
you taught me the courage of stars before you left
Each day is different, and each night lonelier than the last. When the sun hangs bright like a gold coin in the sky, and the blue stretches on for miles and miles, it is impossibly easy for her to think about something else. Anything else. Straia was good about keeping her busy, filling her free time with stories and laughter and flying through open skies. She kept Oksana preoccupied when the children didn’t, when those metaphorical shadows crept over her skin and darkened those bright emerald eyes until they seemed bottomless. But as the sun dipped lower in the sky and blue gave way to pink and gold, Oksana could feel that tremble return to her bones, a subtle quake that never quite spread to the bright of her chestnut skin. And when night did finally come with quiet and starlight, bleeding sleep into every corner of the quiet kingdom, Oksana fell to silent pieces.
It was more than lost love, more than a broken heart. It was a loneliness whose cold hand had plunged into her chest, whose sharp fingers clutched raggedly at a heart turned to dust. When everything else in her life had been uncertain, there had been Makai. He was as wild as the birds in the sky, and just as hard to hold on to, and she had loved every minute of trying. When Rodrik had placed her on a throne she couldn’t possibly fill, it had been Makai who kept the homesickness at bay. Every single high and low of her life had been had with Makai at her side, and to suddenly lose him, to have no choice in giving him up, it had been her ruin.
Even now she found herself leaving the pine trees behind with hope burning dangerously like a flame in her chest. She did not leave often, it tied her stomach in knots to leave what was left of her family behind, but Pyxis and Ilka never strayed too far from the heart of the kingdom or one another, and Malis had taken Striar of to explore. It seemed Malis was disappearing more and more readily lately.
The narrow path she followed widened suddenly into the vast space of the meadow. For a moment she thought she might just turn back around and follow that path home, but a sense of longing stilled her restless feet and stayed her. With a sigh that shuddered uncomfortably in her chest, she followed the edge of the clearing for a few long minutes, her chestnut and white face a mask of trembling disinterest. Only those close enough to see her eyes would be able to make out the wild hope and uncertainty flickering there like dying stars.
She wasn’t surprised when her search yielded nothing, though she was surprised when disappointment still settled like a rock in her gut. But a dangerous thought landed like a stray dandelion seed in her mind, taking hold and growing until her feet had complied before she had given them permission. Every other time she had come, she had specifically avoided this place, their place, for the dangerous way it made her heart wither in her chest.
And yet-
Oksana paused, uncertain, those eyes as bright as raw emeralds in the dirt as they landed on a shape so devastatingly familiar. “No.” She breathed, a stiff, choked sound. Her expression changed suddenly, darkening, those green eyes flashing dangerously. She wouldn’t go to him, not now, even despite the way every single fiber of her being ached to crash against him as they first had. It didn’t even matter that he would know how she felt, for who could possibly know her heart any better than he.
TAKE ME UNDERGROUND, TAKE ME ALL THE WAY
BRING ME TO THE FIRE, THROW ME IN THE FLAMES
The scent of her is not pleasant. No, that word is too little, too feeble, too weak. It hits him like a knife wrenched into his heart and he wonders at how he does not crumple before the force of it. He smells her before he sees her, and the reaction to her is almost involuntary--the way one might gasp at air after having nearly drowned. He can feel his nostrils flare to drink it in, and his powerful chest expands, and yet his skin begins to quiver and bunch until he feels like one giant ripple that is sending shock waves along his nerves to catapult into his heart. What a fool he was to think he would be satisfied with just one glance.
She looks toward him and he knows the anger that radiates from her (and how righteous it was) the same way that he can feel the need that echoes the same carnal desire flowing through him. He does not control himself, has never been able to control himself, and he is soon catapulting through the trees--shedding the shadows as if he had never planned to keep them for long.
Before he has a second to draw another breath, they are together and his flesh is her flesh and his heart is her heart. His lips travel the journey down her neck and taste home in the salt of her sweat. It is forbidden and wrong and he knows he should say something, but there is an urgency to the way that he holds her. This moment could not last; it was stolen without permission, taken without deserving. There was no love in the world that could shield him from his wrongdoing.
Finally, without prompting, he is whispering her name, “Oksana.” Repeating it like a prayer against her as he closes his weary eyes and rests his forehead. “Oksana.” The sound of water hitting parched lips. The sound of a starving man’s sigh after eating his fill. “Oksana.” How could he have ever thought that he would be able to live without her? How could he have ever thought? Shame hits him. Guilt floods him. His instincts scream to pull away and apologize and give her space but instead he clings desperately. His mind tells him to tell her that he is sorry, but the only words his lips can form are this: “I love you.”
you taught me the courage of stars before you left
With each ruinous pound of her aching heart, she unravels. In an instant she is flooded with feelings of lust and longing and fury and regret, and each one strips back a layer of skin until she is nothing more than a bundle of raw nerves trembling in his wake. She hates herself for coming here, for hoping to find her undoing, hated herself the moment their eyes had locked and a wicked fire had burned life back into her veins until her heart nearly burst with it. Yet she also knew she was nothing without him, just a charred shell of memories and could-have-beens. And she knew just as he did that a single, fleeting moment would never sustain the fire roaring in her belly.
So when his hooves hit the ground again and again, and each beat synchronizes with the drumming of her heart, she does not turn away. But the sound that tears from her dark lips is a cry of loss and rage and relief as they come together in a writhing tangle of flesh and sweat. She is primal in her anguish, in this uncertain reunion, and her teeth rake fiercely across the inkiness of his dark, gleaming skin. It is only when their tangled, panting bodies still and come together, chest against chest, heart against heart, that Oksana recognizes the dangerous way she folds into his embrace.
She cries out again, pushing him back, her wings unfurling violently at her sides as each feather narrowed and gleamed, the edges glinting like dangerous obsidian in the high sun. “No.” She tells him through a jaw clenched so tight it’s a wonder her teeth don’t crack. “We aren’t-” She pauses, she hadn’t meant to, and just like that uncertainty rushes back in to pull a frown across her mouth. Aren’t what? Because they were, they were everything, they always would be. Her wings dropped just a fraction, the sharp edges softening back to downy feather as they returned even closer, settling perfectly around the curve of her ribs.
And then he says her name and it is just the same, just as hopeless, as being swept out to sea. She is lost to him, and he to her, and neither one seemed to care. The breath she hadn’t realized she was holding rushed from her lungs as fell back into that familiar embrace, forcing his lips against the soft curve of her gleaming chestnut neck. He whispered her name there, and it his hot breath branded the word into her flesh. Oksana, mine. But the force that pulled her to him so magnetically also repelled her. An indecisiveness that took her heart in its hand and peeled back piece after piece to find the secret it held within.
I love you.
She flinched, stiffening in their embrace, her breath coming out in feverish huffs against his neck. “No,” she says again, welcoming the cool air that rushed in as she pulled away from him, “if you loved any of us, you never would have left.” Any last resolve that had formed like a mask over her desperate chestnut face crumbled and fell away as she looked back at him. Her face darkened, those green eyes flashing as a chill brushed haunted fingers across her skin.
Something had shifted, something important.
She wondered if he felt it too.
TAKE ME UNDERGROUND, TAKE ME ALL THE WAY
BRING ME TO THE FIRE, THROW ME IN THE FLAMES
She is fury and when the razor-edge of her wings slice against him, he can feel the blood welling. It is a shallow cut, but he revels in the pain because she deserves to hurt him so much more. It is but a drop in the ocean of agony that he should feel for what he has done. Not just abandoning her, but for ever having the audacity to love her; for being so selfish to draw her into the hellish light of his life. He should have never returned to the meadow, should have never cradled her close, should have never led her to believe he could love in a way that was not wholly broken. So he thrills at the scraps along his flesh. This is justice.
But soon the wings turn soft again and he aches for the punishment and the hatred and the knife to his throat (I deserve it, I deserve it, he repeats over and over in his head). So he presses into her more and his mouth becomes more urgent and the heat of her name unravels in a fever. “Oksana,” through gritted teeth because the feel of her malleable form against him could not last. He could not allow it.
And it doesn’t.
For the softening soon turns to steel when she shoves him away. Her eyes harden (yes, my darling girl, hate me), and even as he unravels from the seams, he presses further into the blade of her anger. “I do love you,” he says and feels himself anticipating the attack. He steps toward her again and waits for the rebuttal, both clinging to her and desperately wanting her to push away again. “I love you. I love our children.” The words now rushed and falling over themselves. “I love you so much.”
But in his heart of hearts, he knows the truth. He knows that his love is a poison and his body a corpse. She would never find peace with him or normalcy or anything that she deserved. He could never love her in the light or in the way that she deserved to be loved. So he closes his eyes and hopes that she will push him away--that she will run. “I love you,” he says again as his thoughts center on one thing and one thing only:
you taught me the courage of stars before you left
She can smell the blood welling in his wounds, the ones she had given him, and her stomach clenches like a fist. Regret is a poisonous thing and she can feel it filtering through her veins from her heart with each thump thump thump. “I don’t want your love.” She spits, and the lie tastes like corroded metal on her tongue. “I don’t need your love.” Nothing could be further from the truth though and the lie unravels her even as she spins it. There is an instinct buried like a blade in her chest, pressing dangerously close against her heart, and it begs her to hurt him, to hate him, to send him away.
But she can’t.
Could never.
“Makai.” She says, singular, solitary. Tired. All at once she looses the knife and rips it from her chest. The fight goes out of her immediately. Her wings close and fold tight against her hunched withers, the feather tips brushing the scars along her ribs. His mouth is still on her neck, his breath hot and familiar and dangerous. She pushes him away again, but there is no venom left, no animosity burning in those gleaming emerald eyes. When she looks at him again, tracing shadows and curves of a face so achingly right, so perfectly familiar, there is a new softness in her expression. Her mouth touches the side of his muzzle, the impossibly soft hollow just beyond the corner of his lip. “I don’t trust you anymore.” Her voice is soft, weary, though she’s careful not to let the confession strike him like a stone.
She pulls away again, settling back on her haunches to watch him from beneath a brow furrowed with concern. “Makai, I love you with everything I am, with everything I have. I’m yours.” She pauses and her face darkens subtly, the softness in her voice sharpening slightly. “But it means I have nothing left when you leave me. I’m hollow.”
I want to love you, but I’m afraid to. Afraid I’ll have nothing left. She doesn’t say.
The cold in the space between them draws her close again and she pushes her chest against his, her mouth on the hard slant of his shoulder. “We have a son,” she says quietly, breathing the confession into the crook of his dark, hard neck, “he looks so much like you.” She presses a kiss against his skin to hide her indecision, glad he can’t see the doubt seeping from the shadows of her face. “His name is Striar.”
they call kids like us vicious and carved out of stone
but for what we've become, we just feel more alone
She fails him, and he feels himself breaking (splintering) from his very core.
She is disappointed, and the agony is both sweet and vicious, but she does not hate him; she does not run like he has begged her to in his mind. Instead, she plants an indecisive kiss against his neck and he cannot stop the groan that wells in his throat--mirroring the blood from where her wings scraped his flesh. “You shouldn’t trust me,” he finally spits out with as much venom as he can muster, turning the blade he had been burying into his chest against her in a last ditch attempt.
“You were stupid to ever trust me,” he backs away and feels his cells sing with the parting, the knowing that he couldn’t cradle her close as he so desperately wanted to. “Stupid, stupid girl.” The words are heavy on his tongue, but he wills his eyes flat and pulls his lips into a sneer. Shaking his sculpted, royal head, he sends the tangled, heavy matt of his forelock flying—his ears flattening slightly.
Another step backward and Makai can feel the muscles of his haunches roping in anticipating of the flee; but not yet, not yet. He needed to sell this—and he could. “Do you know where I was?” his voice is softer now and it takes everything within him to not crack. His neck snakes forward lightly and there is malice in the way that the corners of his mouth begin to curl, “Of course you don’t.” A soft laugh. “She was beautiful though—and she says the same thing about our children. ‘Looks so much like you.’”
He hates himself more viciously than he knew possible, the idea of touching another curdling in his stomach, but he knew this was the only way. She deserved better. She deserved a life and not waiting for him to die and then bring himself back to life; she deserved to not live through his tantrums and self-exile. She deserved someone sweet and stable and wonderful—not him. Not this poisonous love.
There is doubt in her veins, and he intends to take advantage. He plants seeds desperately and plays the part. His smile is arrogant and lazy and a perfect imitation of the father he hated—but it masked the pounding of his pulse in his head and the bile on the back of his tongue. “You should go see to the children, love,” he says softly and the word does not taste as sweet as it has before.
“And pray that Striar only takes after me in looks.”
M A K A I — vagabond son of atrox and twinge
always weigh what I've lost against what I left
so progress report: I am missing you to death
you taught me the courage of stars before you left
He flays her, and she lets him.
She can’t help herself.
No one can.
For a moment, stretched further than the oceans, she withers beneath the blade that is his tongue. It isn’t that she believes him, believes the hatred that spews like black blood from his sick mouth, it’s that he would ever say these things to her at all. There is a numbness that settles like dirty snow over her bright, aching skin. Her eyes fall on his eyes, reflecting the flatness, tracing the tension in his face, the sneer on his mouth. It feels like looking at a stranger, and her heart cries out as it burns up in her chest, settling like ash in the shattered hollows.
“Stupid.” She repeats numbly, clinging to a word that he kept carving away at her with. “Yes.” But there is some fire creeping back into her voice, and those eyes she fights to keep so flat and empty flash like melted emeralds. “I suppose you must think I’m stupid if you expect me to believe that.” But doubt is such a poisonous thing and she can feel her stomach clenching like a fist at the thought of Makai with someone else, of his children with someone else. The hurt and jealously and betrayal that flash through her veins hurt more than any physical pain ever could.
Her eyes settle stonily on the muscles quivering impatiently beneath the satin of his skin. “If you’re going to leave, then leave. But I hope you know better than to expect me to ever come looking for you again, Makai.” Suddenly she is Oksana again. She is tall and bright and mortally proud, and somehow, impossibly, she is keeping the unravelling pieces of her soul stitched tight. And it doesn’t matter that she’s spinning him lies, won’t matter unless he’s knows. Her wings fluff and resettle above her back, the edges of the feathers glinting suspiciously in the fading light.
Love, he says, and the word sits like poison in her belly. “Don’t call me love, Makai, you’re nothing more than a stranger to me.” More lies, they suffocate her. But she plays the part as well as he does, and it doesn’t seem to matter that each knows the others heart intimately enough to see the lies through the sneers. He’d be a fool to believe she wouldn’t always love him. That she would always be looking for him. But she hides that truth with distance in her eyes and disgust twisting her mouth. “I’m glad our children won’t get the chance to know you. They deserve so much better.”
This knife, delivered directly into his heart, this lie so carelessly crafted, hurts her more than anything he had said so far. It takes everything she has left to hide the sway as her knees shudder beneath her. But the effort it takes to stay stoically on her feet with her delicate head drawn proudly back saps believability from the mask she wore like a shield over her face. There will be a second, and maybe he’ll blink and miss it, where the agony in her heart reflects perfectly in the sudden vulnerability of her delicate chestnut face. But she recovers quickly because she must, because if he notices for a second and uses it against her, there will be nothing left to fight for.
they call kids like us vicious and carved out of stone
but for what we've become, we just feel more alone
This is the kind of pain that you don’t come back from. This is the kind of venom that can’t be cured. He feels it like a gunshot straight to the heart, and it takes everything within him to not gasp for breath. He who has fallen so often into the hell that is death has never experienced something quite like it. His vision goes blurry for a second, but he stands upright and manages to keep the arrogant, lazy smile on his face—even managing to give an impassive flick of his tail as he watches her with an apathetic gaze.
Something is crumbling, and he cannot feel anything but grief and regret. He can’t feel anything besides the vicious knife in his gut at the coldness in her eyes. “What makes you think that I would want you to come looking for me?” he says with authentic incredulity. “Don’t get me wrong—you have been fun, doll.” His stomach flips painfully, but he just shakes his royal head. “But I’ve grown tired of pretending.” A careless shrug of his shoulders. “How long can you pretend to be in love with someone?”
“I love you, Oksana. I love you so much.” He imparts the same urgency that he would normally, but there is something cruel and wheedling about the tone—a mockery of something that he knew was the only truth. He forces a harsh laugh. “And you believed it. So easily.” He wasn’t sure how much longer he could keep this up, so he just lifts one corner of his lip. “All it took was a little attention for you.”
“I stayed with you longer than I ever planned to—mostly because of how admittedly pretty you are and how interesting it was to watch you fail so miserably as a Queen,” here the words sting coming up his throat, but he knows he has to make it final. They knew each other’s weak spots, and in his blind craze to drive her away, he sought to hit each vulnerable joint—strike each delicate corner until the whole of them collapsed. “But now what’s the point? You’ve grown boring and I am bored.”
The bile strikes him hard and he feels his knees threatening to give as he looks at her. She strikes back just as hard at him, and he feels his resolve crumbling. “Can’t argue with that, love.” He says the nickname pointedly and winks at her with a roguish smile. “Maybe you can find someone else to play dad. Hell, you can take them to see the grandparents and play family. But don’t count on me there.”
He felt wild inside—wild with anguish and self-loathing and a suffocating need to feel pain. He could barely suppress the need to flee—could barely smother the wailing groan that was clogging in his throat. (What have I done? What have I done?) But he wouldn’t break now when he was so close to getting her to a new life without him. He wasn’t even sure he could repair this—even if he tried. He had killed the only good thing he had ever experienced in his life; he had murdered the one thing that he cared about.
“I believe we’re done now.”
If he had ever fooled himself into thinking he deserved her, he had just proven it wrong.
In trying to save her, he managed to prove the one thing he always knew: he was a monster.
M A K A I — vagabond son of atrox and twinge
always weigh what I've lost against what I left
so progress report: I am missing you to death
you taught me the courage of stars before you left
A moment ago she had stood before him like a tree bowing to a storm. She had felt her bones bending and breaking and caving through her skin, had felt her veins unravel like yarn and fall away into the dirt. Her heart had beat itself ragged months ago, but the tattered remains were little more than a flayed pulp now, thudding wetly within her imploded chest. How could words hurt so much. How could he cleave the flesh from her bones with something as simples as a sneer slashed across his mouth. It was becoming impossible to breathe, she realized abruptly, to force her lungs to expand beneath the press of furious, frightened muscle.
Her soul thrashed in wild death throes.
Something had to give.
So it would.
Like a switch, Oksana dimmed. Her lungs expanded without the clutch of muscle to stop it, her pulse slowed to a steady thump-thump. She felt, in an instant, calm. But even this was a lie – how could it not be, how, when everything else was, too. She watched him distantly, those glittering emerald eyes flat and dull like stone. It wasn’t that she had stopped listening, the words still registered somewhere deep, somewhere that still bled and broke and writhed in agony – it was that she didn’t care. Couldn’t remember how.
It’s better this way. A voice whispered in her mind.
But in an instant she is toeing the line of lucidity again, and she doesn’t bother to hide the flinch that tightens beneath her skin. I love you, Oksana. I love you so much. It is a phrase so devastatingly familiar that the cruelty warping it makes her sick. “It was never a lie for me.” She says in a voice so mechanical, so dull that even she doesn’t recognize it. “And I will spend my eternity loving you, a suitable punishment for being so stupid, don’t you think?” It isn’t really a question, not when she knows he’ll agree, so she disengages again, her face slack in the twilight.
He mentions the Falls, and of course he must, but she doesn’t have anything to say, nothing left to give him. For a moment she had thought to remind him that he had been the reason why. To see if he still remembered his dying days, or the kingdom that had tried to steal him from her, that pivotal moment when she had realized Makai meant more to her than any kingdom ever would. But the memories flash and burn out, turning to ash on her mute lips. They mean nothing now.
I believe we’re done now.
“Yes,” she tells him quietly, those flat green eyes settling pointedly on his face, “I think you are. You should go.”
Not me.
I’ll never be done with you.
And even through the haze of coming undone, of pretending so perfectly (oh, Makai, it’s easier than you think), she has a moment to wonder why he’s still here, why he’s stayed so long.
