"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
06-16-2019, 04:24 PM (This post was last modified: 06-16-2019, 04:27 PM by litotes.)
but you’d never get hit without earning it
and i only hit you first ‘cuz i deserved my own hit too
still it comes the time to call you out
since i’m the one that you should be about
The air is strange today. As Litotes passes through the breeze of Pangea, he finds that the land smells stale - perhaps destitute. He sighs, a deep and resigned noise, a heaving of his chest he almost wishes he is incapable of. There is hardly anything to do within his shadowed home, and maybe that is why hardly anyone wanders past its border. Though, there is hardly a thing to do in all of the kingdoms, and Pangea had played its role in the most recent war . . . The Archon shakes his head. He has much to do today, worrying about his land is not on the list.
Even as he passes the border into Hyaline, the air is off. It is too still, almost melancholy. Whatever odd emotion it presses into his chest with each quiet breath, it stiffens him. Every muscle clenches as he walks, tightening as he steps further into Hyaline. The graceful slopes of the mountains no longer catch the air in his throat, and the beautiful wildflowers no longer catch his eyes.
This is alien in a way unlike his reunion with Kensa. Anxiety twists his stomach into knots.
Eventually, the jello air becomes too much. The way each thriving plant is new and yet so old unsettles him. He drags what little shadows exist beneath the Hyaline sun to his sides and emerges in the meadow his family calls home. Kensa is ever brilliant and golden beneath the heat - almost too blindingly bright for his mortal eyes. The Archon rushes to her, buries his mouth in her mane and breathes in deeply.
“I’ve missed you.”
She is right, even when everything else feels wrong. She has always been right.
you could break my heart in two, but when it heals, it beats for you
She has embraced the quiet of her Hyaline, though it has taken years to adjust herself to the fact that the bustle she perceived in her childhood here was only an illusion of youth. If there were children here other than her own they too might see Hyaline in just the same way, their perspective narrowed down to the small busy lives they lead before bedtime. There have been times she has considered that if it were in her power she would sweep all of the east together into a single land of black shores, snowy peaks, and red canyonlands, redrawing and erasing the borders. In this daydream though, many more things than boundary lines are different...except for one.
Behind Kensa, through round green leaves and thin white trunks the lake below glitters and glares under the sun, she stands in the midst of her tiny paradise doing nothing at all. She gazes around perhaps, noticing how the years have altered this place. There is a worn path around the entire meadow where six children have left the track of hundred races. Scorch marks on the sheer rock wall at the back of the meadow are Brunhilde’s work, one of them having left the perfect outline of a butterfly. The stream has been walked and splashed in for years and there is a little pool near the wall that Valek created by digging and rolling until he could lie there with water running over his back during the hottest days of summer. Risk and Kelynen’s ever widening shared nest where they curl together even as the grow taller and taller. This meadow is all the lines on the back of the door marking out memories of her precious family.
Yet when he arrives to press his muzzle into the blond fall of her hair and breathe her in she finds she can let the years and the children retreat to the back of her mind. I’ve missed you. He says, and it makes her smile until she realizes she does not hear a smile in the words. Kensa curls into Litotes and draws her lips along the masculine ridge of his neck. He has not brought her lions, or shadows, and from this vantage there are no snowflakes in silver. Though she remains freckled in gold and splashed with white she forgets that too. The beautiful woman is pushed aside by the empathetic, innocent girl who recognizes the melancholy boy in her arms in a way she has not in years.
It is strange to see Litotes again in the way she is seeing him now, to recognize her lover with a raw clarity. It is a flicker but still it makes her chest ache with nostalgia and her shoulders heavy with the burden of loving someone so deeply. “I like it here.” She says wistfully, drawing back to rest her cheek against his. “But I like it a lot more now.” He’d said that to her once, her sad boy, and then he’d kissed her that very first time. She hadn’t loved him that day, but she should have. She should have loved him from the moment she’d seen his face so that now she might not have this feeling of overflowing, of love too spent too thriftily. “Tell me what’s in your head, darling. Tell me anything at all.”
06-29-2019, 01:04 PM (This post was last modified: 06-29-2019, 01:04 PM by litotes.)
but you’d never get hit without earning it
and i only hit you first ‘cuz i deserved my own hit too
still it comes the time to call you out
since i’m the one that you should be about
Kensa has always been his destiny. The lovers are magnets: no matter what god’s hands drag them apart, they always come crashing back into each other. Sometimes they clash so hard there are lightning strikes, electricity, sizzling and burning of flesh they do not feel between the love they have.
Litotes feels tears prick at his eyes when she curls into him. For once, they are not crumbling into each other, some tension tainting what carefree love they had before. His wife holds him, gentle and loving, and in this universe they are stripped of everything they have become since their first meeting in the lake. They are young, naive, broken but hopeful. The Archon sighs into her warm skin, releasing the wrongness he felt on his trip here.
The smile he that curls into her neck is sweet and sad when Kensa repeats such bold words from their first meeting. What innocence they possessed then must have washed away in the water. A longing to rush into the cool water with his wife consumes his mind. Perhaps they can regain a bit of their freedom by diving headlong into the water that once held them steadfast. Nostalgia and regret grow sharp in his chest as he remembers how once this Hyaline was his Hyaline; now, he can hardly step across the border without a bitter and bloody taste in his mouth.
“I’m just thinking of you, and our children . . .” he murmurs into her mane, then nips at her neck and pulls away. Lie’s golden eyes flit to the trees beyond, to the spots where their flock takes shelter. A hesitant smile curves one side of his maw, and he trots a playful circle around his wife, nipping at his hindquarters before bucking and rushing headlong down their well-worn path.
“To the lake, my dear!” he calls with a toss of his head backward, glittering eyes taunting.
you could break my heart in two, but when it heals, it beats for you
She grieves a little for those last days of their young adulthood before the twists and trials that made them who they are now. In many ways she is still the same as the girl who waded into the lake to meet Litotes, still confident and at home with who she is. It is lucky she has not lost herself in the troublesome years. He will never come home to her here, even though it is the Cove she feels repulsed by his pain is tied to the land she so loves and so they will be always a little divided.
Lie nips at her, his eyes roving after the children napping in their meadow. She knows what he is about before his teeth can even touch the curve of her rump and she squeals and bucks at the kiss of his teeth before barreling after him down the hillside. It is a track she knows well and she has always been nimble, though perhaps one day she'll come to her end racing down one of these mountain sides. Quickly she catches up to Litotes, recklessly snapping at his creamy side before thundering along beside him. Kensa’s hooves slide as she turns for the lake, bursting from among the hardwood and pines and out onto the green expanse between the two of them and the clear water.
Kensa splashes into the pebble-strewn shallows, rearing up with her fore limbs tucked close before dropping again. Always she is reaching for Lie but today it is with playfully snapping teeth, pawing the water beneath her feet into great wet arcs. She presses close, grabbing his mane at the crest of his neck roughly before releasing him to trail a laughing string of kisses up beneath his jaw line. “Here we are darling, it’s been too long since we’ve had a swim.”
but you’d never get hit without earning it
and i only hit you first ‘cuz i deserved my own hit too
still it comes the time to call you out
since i’m the one that you should be about
There are countless thoughts Litotes could whisper into Kensa’s ear about how he will love her to the ends of the earth. She could take a mouthful of his tail and drag him over the edge of a cliff, and he would slip to his death with a smile on his face. I love you, he thinks, even as she splits his heart in two. What ungodly devotion she has lassoed around his neck goes unnoticed - he thinks all love must feel like this - consuming, painful, a brand across his flesh.
His wife’s nip do not come as a surprise, though their sting is adds speed to his chase. They race together: gold and cream, dark and light, blurs of nothing in a land that can take their lives without much notice. Hyaline stands around them stoically, a reminder that when they are dust and grass all they have built has never truly been theirs.
Litotes leans into Kensa’s affection when she offers it, heavy breathing slowly cooling by the mountainside water. He shakes out his mane roughly when she parts, then headbutts her neck. Their chests are meeting again within a moment, and Lie sighs into his lover’s back. “When is the last time we felt like this?” Though he does not know Kensa’s thoughts, he is certain she feels the weight as it slips from their spines. He tries desperately to hold the somber man he is at bay.
you could break my heart in two, but when it heals, it beats for you
Kensa settles as Litotes embraces her, though she does not entirely still. She straightens the fall of his mane against his neck, contentedly admiring her handsome love, his corded neck, the muscles in his back and shoulders shifting as he stretches his head out onto her own back. The water quiets around her legs and Kensa knows he needs this, a moment of closeness to say things that they both already know but haven't taken the time to voice. Litotes struggles more than she with his burdens because he has suffered more, so much more than she even knows, she realizes.
How many years have they been together without her ever asking? For a while she had just tried to pretend he was just out for a swim in the deep water, enjoying the refreshing chill on that first hot summer. Now she knows better, life experience opening her eyes to things a girl who had never known despair saw but did not understand. They don't know a lot about one another from before they were Kensa and Litotes of Hyaline, then of the East, and now just themselves--known to many for their individual peculiarities.
Her thoughts thus drifted, her gold tipped ears twist slowly to pull his words from the air, turned back to catch the rest of what he might say. "I know, my love.” This is all she can say, her lips pressing to the point of his shoulder after she speaks. He cannot come home any more than she can leave. This isn’t home for him anymore, that Hyaline does not exist and they are not the children who believed in it.
“Litotes, where did you live before you came to Hyaline?” Kensa pulls back, smoothes his forelock off his face and then drops a kiss onto the highest snowflake, the lightest of them just a ghost of silver on his creamy hide. “Why were you out there under the water?” She whispers, so many years later a secret between them still.
but you’d never get hit without earning it
and i only hit you first ‘cuz i deserved my own hit too
still it comes the time to call you out
since i’m the one that you should be about
A map of the lover’s lives would be well-marked and smeared by the tears of joy and pain. A wildflower valley of their children, a birthing here and here, an adopted child there. The first time they kissed, in a crystal clear lake protected by mountain. The deeply trodden path through tall grass and thickets of trees that leads to the home where their hearts reside. A map such as this, one that Litotes spends hours sweating over everyday, leads him to where he belongs at the end of each day:
By the side of the one that has stuck with him through fear, hate, survival, disgust - by the side of the fiercest love and will to live he has ever known.
Pain rises in his throat when she asks of his life before Beqanna. Most of his time has been spent here, chasing dreams he is not sure are all his own. His short life with an aggressive father is years and literal miles away. It is not something he dwells on often anymore, but when he does it is a nosedive into everything Litotes has ever done wrong - everything his father would have done if he were in the cremello’s place. He swallows, pressing the tip of his nose to Kensa’s, sad gentility in his eyes.
“It’s funny we haven’t talked about that, huh?” His reply is a hesitant murmur, and he looks to the mountains on the opposite side of the lake. “I came from a place called Mustang. My father was a ruler of a territory called Cattail Lake. I grew up in the shallows of murky water, and mud always coated my legs.” Lie smiles now, finding Kensa’s gaze with a dazzling nostalgia he has never felt before. “Do you think that suits me? I am not certain it does.” The smile fades. “My father was a cruel man. I used to spend a lot of time fearing I would be like him.” He does not admit that he thinks he is more like his father than he should be.
“What about you, Kensa? Tell me all about your life before . . . this.”
you could break my heart in two, but when it heals, it beats for you
She watches her beloved’s face as he speaks and tries to read the emotions that drift beneath his skin but finds that she cannot. So as he speaks she just listens, though she longs to lovingly soothe him, to kiss his cheeks and banish the history of sorrow from around his eyes but instead she is still. In her stillness she respects his story instead of easing away the discomfort of hearing how he has suffered by distracting him with her affection or her body.
He tells her of Cattail Lake, of a childhood she’s never heard of before. “No my love.” She murmurs fondly before he continues, letting her eyes shine with her adoration of her handsome King. Then he continues, and though she should have expected something like what he tells her next it still hurts to think of him suffering.
Kensa imagines Litotes, small and lean like Kelynen, muddy and cold. She sees the weight of the sadness she has always felt in him on the shoulders of a little boy and it makes her physically ill. It strangely makes her want to hold their yearling son who she has wanted so much to love and yet never found the spark a mother normally does.
Of course she does not know if he is like his father, but she cannot imagine this man behaving so that one of his children thought him cruel. “What happened to him?” She has known so little unkindness that Litotes’ unknown father looms large in her mind, she wonders what he must have done to make his son wish not to be like him but she will not ask for things Lie is not ready to give her.
He asks about her beginnings in turn and there is very little to tell, or so she believes. She thinks of her mothers, her fathers, the family that raised her from rambunctious, inquisitive terror into willful intelligent woman and she misses them terribly. Would they have loved Litotes as she does? Would her children bring them all the joy they have brought her? Certainly. She should not even wonder. So instead she smiles gently, carefully, not wanting her beloved to think less of her for the ease of her beginnings. “It was different, but simple. I had a large family. Mothers enough to keep me out of trouble and two fathers to keep trouble out of me.” This joke, off-color as it might be, serves to lighten the mood a fraction. “I might have stayed but I wanted to know a place like this one, with beautiful and dangerous places and people. I’ve always just wanted to savor the world.”
