"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
It confuses him when she steps closer. He watches her with those eyes that are too quiet, like the stillest of dark waters, but he does not move from her. He still refuses to let himself think too much on why she has captured his attention in such a way. It is more than just the blood-bordered bones that grow outside of her skin, even though they were the first thing to pique his interest. The armor of bone, the sharp and twisted antlers, and the raw and bleeding skin completely betrayed how utterly soft she was. It was that softness that he wanted to capture; wanted to figure out a way to harness it for himself, to only let those muted teal eyes look at him the way she is looking at him right now. He wanted to keep her here, for as long as he could – or until night fell, and he would have to leave.
He recognized the possessive monster that was slowly stirring in its cage, having lain dormant for so many years. He never would have thought the doe-eyed girl before him could have roused it awake so quickly.
Her breath is warm as it fans across his skin, her lips so close to touching that all he would have had to do was minutely shift into her. He angles his head, until his own lips are hovering just above her withers, and for the first time the wings he had kept clenched to his sides lower to a more relaxed stance. The salted breeze stirs at the silken feathers, and he doesn’t seem to notice how the bones and muscles ache from being clamped. The tension he had been holding is released on a slow exhale across her skin and bones, and followed then by a quiet, but definitive, “No.” He could have told her of the things that live in the shadows, creatures that live so deep in the forest they have never seen light; things that should have been left to nightmares and morbid imagination, but somehow they exist. But she is young, and delicate, and even though he hardly knows her there is something about her that he knows he wants to – has to – protect.
“The world is already terrible enough,” He begins in that low rumble of a voice, and finally, his head drops. His lips find a place at the front of her shoulder that is skin, and he lingers there for a moment. She feels as soft as she had looked, and she tastes of dried blood and the sea; just as he had thought she would. Slowly, almost achingly, he draws a path from her skin and across the plate of bone, mindful of where the skin was open and bleeding but making no effort to avoid it, either. He withdraws his touch from her then, though his muzzle skims the tangled strands of her mane as he does so. He wants to keep touching her; a hunger that he so rarely feels, and even less often actually acts upon. Something holds him back; something uncertain and clawing, but he obeys nonetheless. “Why would you want to hear stories to confirm it?” He peers at her with an angle of his head, seeking out her pale blue-green eyes, unable to look away from her.
She feels his breath first, and the nearness of it is almost enough, the heat of it as it climbs across the mountains and valleys of her skin. It coaxes a long-lost sense of peace from the guarded stone walls she’s thrown up in her chest, reminds her what it is like to be acceptable. Only her parents and her brother have stood this close to her, allowed her ruined wrongness to be pressed into the soft warmth of loving, unbroken bodies.
But she cannot help but wonder at the way Nightlock does not step away from her - and she knows she is close enough that he should want to. Not only can he see the way her red skin stretches like a weeping welt around the patterns of bone, but he must also be able to smell the copper stink of her. It is a smell that even the ocean cannot rinse from her - a smell that is, admittedly, less strange in this sickened plague-world, but still wrong all the same.
She braces for the moment, counts the seconds as they pass, imagines a dozen different ways he’ll pull away and a dozen different things he’ll wound her with by the whip-lash of cruel words on his tongue.
But it never comes.
No pain, and the seconds are so many that they start tripping past themselves as she counts them.
No. He says, and it takes her a moment to understand why he’s used that word, because the breath he releases in a sigh across her withers makes her thoughts spin like blown dandelion seeds behind her eyes. The world is already terrible enough. And she knows the words, but it is hard to remember the things they mean when those soft teal eyes are lost in the maze of the feathers that now droop gently by her nose. So busy following every line and soft, slanting angle. Tracing every smudge of dark color that mimic the steel and pale bellies of stormclouds.
Then he touches her, lays his lips against her skin, and she is undone.
She might’ve cried out if the surprise hadn’t paralyzed her, but it is all she can manage just to close her eyes and bow her head and wonder if she had ever been touched like this before. When his mouth begins its path across her bare skin and to the ridges of bone, hitting that line of welted, ragged skin in-between with a gentle carelessness that makes her gasp softly and press her face into the soft of his feathered wing, she knows she has not.
He pulls away, but she can feel that sunshine-soft sensation of his lips when they skim over her mane, can feel his eyes too when he turns to find her face again. But she doesn’t look up at him, isn’t ready and doesn’t understand, doesn’t want to see a shade of mockery in his face to let her know this was cruelness. Doesn’t want to not see it either, because she isn’t sure what that might mean, isn’t sure if that would be worse. Isn't sure which she is more scared of.
Besides, she is content tucked against his side now, content with those storm-gray feathers pressed against her cheek and tickling at the soft of her bare nose. He doesn’t touch her anymore, but he also hasn’t pulled away. Why would you want to hear stories to confirm it? And she is yanked back into the present, sudden and jarred by reality as she remembers the nature of their conversation, of her questions. She steps away from him, sorry and apologetic, glancing at the places she had smeared red over his grey, stained him with her rust. She is horrified in an instant, reaching out to clean a spot near his shoulder with the soft of her tongue until she feels the tines of her antlers bump higher near his withers and pulls back, distressed, wishing the beach would open up and swallow her deep inside itself.
“Because I think you’re wrong, and maybe you just need to say one out loud to realize i’m worse.” Soft, so soft, and like a dropped glass ball shattering and tinkling apart. She’s taken a few more steps back now, and there is a soft kind of wild brightening in the teal of her eyes as she turns her face to him, shrinking backward like a trapped bird still unsure if it wants to escape at all.
For a moment, he tenses at the feel of her pressing closer against him. He can feel her lips as they brush across the silver feathers of his wings, and it sends an odd shiver along the ridge of his spine. It wasn’t often that he touched anyone, and it was even less often that he was touched back. There was something about her that shattered nearly everything he thought he had known about himself, and the longer he stands alongside of her, the more confused and enchanted he becomes.
He knows it is the bones that plate her body that drew him in. He wants her to know, wants her to see him in what he considered to be his truest form, but he has no way to put it into words. When he tears his gaze from her face long enough to look at the horizon, he can see that the sun is low in the sky. Not quite twilight, but close enough that it tightens the coil of anticipation that sat in his gut. There is a war being waged inside himself, between wanting to leave her here on the shores and escape to the safety of solitude, and yet also simultaneously wanting to stay, to let her see.
His internal conflict sets his jaw into a hard line, but the feel of her tongue against his shoulder and then the brush of her antlers near his withers draws him back. He is perplexed at first by the look of sorrow and apology in her sea-colored eyes, and at how he notices how empty his side feels without her there. Not even realizing he’s doing it, he traces her backwards footsteps until the gap between them disappears again, until his chest is nearly to hers. With a lowered head, his lips touch against her cheek, and then move up to rest at the soft skin behind her ear. “I know I’m not wrong.”
He does not withdraw this time. There is a gnawing, relentless hunger in his gut, one that tells him to just take her and make her his in every way imaginable, but he smothers that monster with the softness of her eyes. Instead, he placates himself with continuing to touch her face and neck, his lips caressing against both skin and bone, the metallic taste of her blood lingering on his tongue. “I can show you something, to make you understand why I don’t think you’re terrible.” The rumble of his voice could have almost made the words sound threatening, but the way his touch is still so light against her skin betrays the roughness of the gravel in his voice. “But you have to trust me.”
05-06-2019, 02:56 PM (This post was last modified: 05-06-2019, 02:56 PM by wonder.)
Wonder
She is so stunned when he closes the distance between them again that, with a thumping, aching heart, she nearly steals a few more steps back. But there is something in his face that stills her, something that calls to the softness in her heart and makes her merely freeze with those seafoam eyes gentle against his face. He doesn’t stop until they are nearly chest to chest and she is sure he must be able to feel the way her heart throbs and races even at this distance.
She is stunned again when he reaches for her, presses the soft heat of his lips to the lines of her worried face and eases them upward to the curve of an ear flicked backward to listen to him. I know I’m not wrong. And she cannot help the way she lifts her face to him, the way she pushes subtly closer until that delicate little chest is pressed to his so that her heart can match the rhythm of him. She would close her eyes and savor this strange, unexpected closeness, but there is still the fear that if she does he’ll be gone when she opens them again, just the painful product of a fever-dream.
So her eyes stay locked on his face and the way he doesn’t try to pull away from her, the way he doesn’t recoil from her wrong and her ruin and the sticky way she bleeds color into the grey of his dappled skin.
He touches her until it is all she knows, until she is buried beneath her confusion and suffocating happily beneath this weight of him. She can feel every gentle pattern he traces along skin both ragged and smooth, every stroke he makes across the welts of bone that sit like strange continents against the red oceans of her body.
She likes it best when he soothes the ragged places, when the soft and warmth of his tongue wipes them clean and coax little sounds from the back of her aching throat that would be better kept buried. But he is teaching her about pleasure in places that have only ever hurt, showing her good when there has only ever been bad - and when her eyes do finally slip from his face, it is only because they are suddenly too heavy-lidded to keep open while he touches her in this quiet way.
I can show you something, to make you understand why I don’t think you’re terrible, he says, low and rough, and she blinks because she has forgotten again, because she is so easily lost to this thing that feels like kindness pressed against her skin, but you have to trust me.
She thinks she must or else she wouldn’t still be pressed into him like this, must trust him even if some part of a very broken heart still wonders how any of this can be real. But she doesn’t shift immediately to meet his eyes again, because her lips have found the joint of his wing where it erupts from his shoulder, and she is busy nosing through the soft down of stormy feathers that smell so much like him. It is a good smell, like deep forests and secret places, like sleeping sunshine and cedar.
“I trust you, Nightlock.” She whispers after a beat, those soft words stirring in the down of his feathers until she leans back to look up at him. But the words feel like a vow more than they feel like the truth, because it would be so much easier to doubt him. To doubt this kindness and the way he holds her close, the way his lips have been so busy memorizing the soft and hard contrast of her delicate red body. But when she finds his eyes again, there are no beasts laying in the dark of them, no wild but the same that’s settled in her eyes too.
No reason not to trust him.
She reaches up to touch his face with her lips, to taste the salt that’s settled there from the ocean spray and the dusty sunshine laying in beautiful contrast over strong, hard angles as the sun sinks low on the horizon. She is more careful of her antlers now as her lips sink lower over his face until they are settled at the corner of his mouth and against skin that is so impossibly soft on a man so impossibly not. This closeness makes her heart ache inside her chest, makes it pound and race ragged until she is sure he must be able to hear it, sure she will feel the corners of his mouth twitch with a knowing smile. But she doesn’t move away, only sinks closer again so his mouth rests against her cheek and she can close those soft ocean eyes to ask, “Do you trust me?”
Her chest feels so small in comparison to his, and he is surprised at how clearly he can feel the rhythmic beat of her heart against his skin. He had never paid much attention to heartbeats. Not to his, and not to anyone else’s. If the previous mares he had taken beneath him had had racing hearts, he hadn’t taken the time to notice. He isn’t sure, then, why he is so aware of every move she makes, every sound that whispers from her lips. He isn’t sure why it sends a strange sensation that rides the ridge of his spine when he feels her caressing and nosing at the feathers of his wing, and the way that he almost forgets he’s suppose to be planning his escape before night falls.
She says that she trusts him, and he wants to correct her, even though it was exactly what he had just asked her to do. Of anyone that she should trust, it wasn’t him. He didn’t know how to be what she surely wanted; what she needed. He had lived too long on his own, buried away in solitude, until any softness he had ever learned from his mother was long forgotten. Even though Wonder managed to unearth so much of what was lost, he doesn’t think he could ever be something she deserved.
But it didn’t keep him from staying.
It didn’t keep him from continuing to caress his lips along her smooth cheek and the delicate curve of her jaw, to continue to breathe in how she smells of Tephra and blood and the sea. Her own lips feel like sparks against his mouth, and for a long moment he is quiet, with the soft inhale and exhale of their breaths mingling. “I’m trying to,” He finally says, with his muzzle resting against her cheek. He doesn’t know how to trust, but with the last threads of light illuminating that line between the sea and the sky, he realizes he has, essentially, forced himself into trying with her.
He offers no explanation when he separates himself from her, but the way the darkness of his eyes locks with hers even through the waning twilight, he hopes will be enough reassurance, until he eventually is swallowed by the thick brush and trees that flanked the beach.
The transformation is never a pretty one, and he spares her that much, at least. Immersed by the darkness, he remains out of sight as the flesh begins to fall away, a quickened display of rot and decay. The minutes tick by, and the sharp angles of skeletal bone emerges in place of what had been dappled skin and supple muscle. Dark and still stained with blood from the freshly torn mass and sinew, he looks nothing like the bleached bones that lay scattered in the sun.
It is tempting to simply remain here, in this sanctuary of shadow and trees. But he slips through the night anyway, his steps not nearly as fluid as they had been before, but mechanical and rigid. He can still see the glow of her bones and the way they jut so harshly from her skin, and the way her pale, ocean-colored eyes somehow seem softer in the ribbons of moonlight that stream from above. He stops once he is a little more than halfway to her, hollowed and empty sockets seeming to stare at nothing, and simultaneously appearing to see through her. “You aren’t terrible at all, Wonder,” comes his seemingly detached voice; still the same in some ways, deep and flat, but also somehow emptier. The bare bones of his wings no longer sit clamped to his sides, but instead clatter like the empty limbs of trees in the autumn. There is nothing for her to read on the plain, expressionless bones of his face, and so she will never realize how carefully he is watching her.
She leans into the feel of his lips against her jaw, the way his nose settles against her cheek so she can feel the heat of his breath so warm against the damp copper of her skin. It feels dangerous to like this so much. The cedar smell of his skin, the rough and careful way he gives himself permission to memorize her face with more than just his eyes. It feels treacherous to trust him so immediately, so readily, but he has already given her more to believe in than anyone else she has ever come across. She doesn’t even remember to worry about how much more violent the loneliness will be when he finally goes until he steps away from her and the cold sweeps in to kiss her tingling skin.
“Nightlock?” His name is a jagged murmur, a worried sound even despite the way she tries to soften out those brittle edges. She knows it is better not to be so vulnerable, and more than she has to be with her bones outside her skin and bleeding all her beauty away. But she doesn’t understand why he is leaving so suddenly, not even when those dark, beautiful eyes settle with such weight against the tides of pale teal in her own.
She takes exactly one step towards him before she freezes again, hides the bruises that surface in her eyes before he can see them in the dwindling light of dusk. For a moment her nose extends to him, hangs between them like a question until he is finally gone. Then she fades a little, shadows shuttering the warmth from her eyes as she tucks her chin to her chest and tries to understand what went wrong.
The minutes pass in stumbling clusters, but all she feels aware of are the ones already long gone. The ones with the rumble of his words pressed to the soft, ragged wounds of her skin. The ones where he stood so close that she left little smudges of rust outlines against his grey dapples. He hadn’t seemed to mind, but then what does she know of anything.
She turns where she stands, looking out across the ocean as the final strands of gold light disappear on the furthest waves as though the day has been washed clean from the world. There is only black ocean and black sky and black shadows in-between. Except for the moon and the stars when they blink into view, all soft and milky white.
And her, of course.
Red and white and red some more, glowing like star plucked from the sky, and just as cold and lonely.
But then there is a sound, and though it is not the same as before, her heart is stumbling as she turns to look for him. She is certain no one else would come, no one else would know to find her here. But the shape that emerges into the milky glow of night is not one she immediately recognizes. This creature is nearly the embodiment of all her pain and strangeness, all bone and dark and stained with blood. And it is him, she would have known even if he hadn’t spoken, but the voice is the same. More hollow, maybe, the sound more free without lips to force them into their shapes. But still him.
An ear flicks back uncertainly, but then she’s moving forward to press gently against him again, ducking her nose to the spring of his ribs as she traces the shape with lips as soft as moth wings. “You’re like me.” She whispers, accepting this in an instant after only a beat of surprise, and it makes her realize how afraid she is of him in this form, how fragile he seems and how desperately she wants to keep him safe. It seems like the wind could kick up and sweep him aside, especially the littlest bones of those clattering wings.
She shifts backwards again, turning to trace her lips along the notches of his neck, dropping to the curve of his jaw with a gentleness that is almost moth-like. “Does it hurt you?” She wonders softly, tasting the metallic tang of his blood on her lips as she drops her face to rest cheek to cheek with him. It unsettles her to look at his face now - and it has nothing to do with the stained bone structure angled in her direction, it has been a long time since bone unsettled her - it is that, without those dark eyes and the play of muscles at his mouth, it is so hard to know what he is thinking when she whispers, “You scared me when you left like that.”
He is exposed like this before her, and he isn’t sure if she even can grasp the full truth of it. He is baring himself to her, in every sense of the word. Stripped to bone, so that she might see the cage of ribs that would hide the heart that beats when he is fleshed and alive; a heart that would likely always be hidden from her, no matter how much he would fight himself over it. They have known each other such a short time, and yet still she has given him glimpses of what he could be – of what he could have – if he could only learn to be different. If he could only learn to be something not so harsh and cold, if he could only be something that could keep every part of her safe. He could protect her, physically, this he knows. But he isn’t so sure if he knows how to handle that delicate of heart of hers, that sometimes he thinks he can see beating even beneath the red of her flesh and the armor of bone.
When she touches him, he cannot feel it, but he can imagine what it must be like. How her breath is warm when it whispers across the red-stained bones, and how her touch is feather-soft in its wake. But not being able to actually feel it is as good as torture, as he tries so hard to imagine and conjure it out of thin air. “I suppose I am,” He agrees with her in the grating yet hollow of his voice, tilting his head so that the empty void of his sockets might look at her better. He reaches to touch her, then, even though he knows that as his the bone of his nose and jaw traces along the arch of her neck, that he will feel nothing. But she will feel it. She will feel the hardness against her satin-soft skin, she will feel the way he lifts just slightly away as he skims over the red and raw wounds that outline her armor.
And then there is the sensation of his bones against her bones, and even without all the receptors and nerves, it forges a connection that burrows so deeply into the marrow of him that it is like an electric shock. He presses his skeletal frame into hers, as though the warmth and fullness of her body might somehow remake him anew, letting her delicate exploration of him continue. “Sometimes,” he says into the strands of her mane, and he finds himself wishing he could feel the stray wisps of hair against his skin like had not so long ago. “But it doesn’t last long.” It has always been a gruesome transformation, but one that left behind only phantom pain. A pain that he can hardly remember once it has past, or perhaps he has just learned to accept it.
The flat bone of his cheek rests against her skin, but her quiet confession stirs him to move. He runs the blunt edge of his nose along the curve of her jaw, and up her cheek and into the groove of her throat. He can almost imagine what she smelled like; the same way she had before, of ash and the sea and blood. “I’m sorry,” and here his voice lowers in pitch, apologetic and quiet. “I wasn’t trying to scare you. I just didn’t want you to have to see everything.” And I don’t want to leave you, he wants to reassure her, but he doesn’t. He wants to tell her that he doesn’t want to leave her alone and waiting, but somehow he knows that is a promise he cannot keep, and for now the kindest thing he can do for her is to not promise her anything at all.
He is so careful with her, and she tries not to notice for the way it stirs something so bright and fragile within the cage of her chest. But her skin comes alive beneath his gentle caress, and for once it is pleasure that flares someplace just below the surface, tiny electric jolts that gather in her eyes when they turn against his face with such soft fire burning inside. She inhales sharply, holds that breath for more years than she’s been alive, just watching him touch her like she’s someone worth knowing. Like he wants to touch her as much as she wants to be touched by him.
She can’t blink, can’t breathe, can’t move at all for fear that this moment will shatter and he’ll realize her strangeness. That he’ll look at her and wonder why she isn’t more like him, why there is still flesh beneath her bones and blood in the veins keeping her tied together. She is something in-between.
But then he’s stepping closer and pressed against her, and there is a sob trapped in her chest because he doesn’t seem to care that she is all wrong. Doesn’t seem to notice the way her blood stains his bones, the way she is not just soft and warm against him. That she is bone and bare and a tangle of antler along her armored brow. But she can tell that he does not see what she sees when he looks at her. That, by his gentleness, he might even think her to be something so soft and lovely. She wonders if she would see something different now, if when she wades back into the safe-haven of lapping waves, the face looking back up at her will be changed in some visible way.
He apologizes, and she is so distracted by the feel of his lips at her throat that the only acknowledgement she can give him is a hum of sound that vibrates beneath his wandering mouth. It makes her feel dizzy, feel hazy at the edges as she finally remembers how to make her body listen to the cacophony of her mind. “Don’t be sorry.” She says, and the words are so soft and so fragile and falling like snow from lips that tremble against the cold of them. For a heartbeat she wishes he were more than bone in this moment, wishes she could tuck against him and steal his warmth, could borrow touches from his lips while she explored the valleys and ridges of his soft, warm skin. “Can you feel me?” She wonders suddenly, those pale beautiful eyes flicking up to the ivory of his bare face, tracing the curve of each bone with a growing softness in her gentle expression.
He is truly so beautiful, all long slender ivory and a presence that is easy enough to read from the bearing of his bones. He is something that should be so fragile and vulnerable, but the longer she stands pressed against him, the more certain she feels that she must be wrong.
“Is it your choice?” She wonders in a murmur, recalling how he had gone from her and come back changed, how he had said he wanted to spare her that. It’s such a small thing, but his concern births warmth inside her chest and she is careful to duck her head against him gently so that he won’t see that affectionate smile that climbs across her lips. It’s too soon, too fast, too strange for her to feel so bonded to him, but everything inside her clamors to keep him close. But all she says so softly is, “I think I’d rather see everything than see you disappear again. It won’t change what I think of you.” A promise born too early and held uncertain between trembling hands.
