"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
“A heart was made to live in the dark–
maybe we were, too.”
I’m alive, she remembers thinking. I’m alive, and the moment her heart started to beat her veins were flooded with sorrow and hurt. I’m alive, she thinks, and she wishes she wasn’t.
She does not remember how she passed back through the veil that led her back to here. Not into the land of Beqanna’s living, but into Beqanna at all.
She had lived here, once, but the memories are hazy. She had died here too, and that she remembers even less clearly. The last life that she remembers was not here, but a different place. She remembers the vibrant colors, and how even she was painted differently; no longer a pure, lily-white but instead a body of ivory and a mane and tail of dusty pink, with nearly translucent flowers in places. And she remembers him, the man with fire around his legs and the scar across his face, and how he had made her forget, just for a little while, that she was broken.
Dreamscape, it had been called, and she wonders now if it was just a dream.
As quickly as it had started, it had all ended. Her second chance at life – at happiness, if it had even existed – went up in smoke, and when the haze cleared she was back in Beqanna’s afterlife.
Against her better judgement she steps through the veil, and finds herself in a meadow of knee-high grass. She is white again, her skin impossibly smooth, with dark eyes like her mother’s and that same familiar haunted look she had surely learned from her. It’s autumn, and in the distance she can see trees alight with crimson and gold and orange, backlit by a late afternoon sun, and she thinks she had loved autumn, once.
Her heart stirs, sluggish and slow, and she’s not sure if she loves anything at all now.
( i'm just here to fight the fire
oh, a man ain't a man unless he has desire )
He’s been here all of a week.
Or has it been a month?
Time had passed differently in the afterlife and, if he’s being honest with himself, he no longer has any idea how time works on earth. He’d been dead much longer than he’d ever been alive and he’s spent most of his time back in Beqanna – this new, different-but-still-somehow-the-same Beqanna – asleep in the sun, not bothering to keep track of how any times that sun has risen or set.
The point is that he hasn’t been here long and he’s already pretty tired of it. But Antidote is not a coward and he feels no overwhelming urge to fling himself off the nearest cliff just to get back to the afterlife. Especially not with the way he’d left things with Cuerva Lista, when he’d insisted on being the one who came back. (Wasn’t there supposed to be a reason he was here? So far he’s done little more than sleep and complain about having to be here). He couldn’t give her the satisfaction of him lasting all of a month back on earth before he threw in the towel.
He’s in the meadow, has spent most of his time in the meadow (primarily because it’s one of the only places he still recognizes), and a brilliant white thing catches his eye. He lifts his head, grunts, and then hauls himself to his feet. She doesn’t remind him of anyone he knew once but with the uncertain way she’s blinking into the light, he thinks she might be like him. Dead. And then not dead.
He moves slow, cursing the way gravity affects the body, and offers her a slanted smirk as he stations himself near enough to not have to shout when he addresses her. “Ain’t this just a son of a bitch?” he asks, gestures vaguely to the great swath of land unfurling around them. Earth. Being alive.
“A heart was made to live in the dark–
maybe we were, too.”
She doesn’t realize how much things have changed. That all the lands she had once known were gone, that magic is not the rarity it had once been, and that everyone here was now painted just as beautiful as everyone had been in that far off dream-land.
There are things that are the same, too, like this meadow that appears to have been untouched by time. She knows that in the spring this field is scattered with flowers of all colors, that the sky turns bright blue in the summer and that snow blankets it in the winter. She thinks of all the things that have happened here, and how it is the home for her darkest and brightest memories.
It looks exactly the same as she had remembered, and she is surprised that that sparks anxiety in her chest rather than nostalgia. She doesn’t want to remember some of the things that have happened here, and she doesn’t think there are any familiar faces here that she wants to see. In death she had not relived all of her nightmares, and she had forgotten how being alive brought memories to the surface, unbidden.
She had died because she had wanted to forget, and she regrets coming back.
It’s why when a voice cuts through her reverie that she involuntarily starts, spinning to face him with eyes bright with something that is a little too close to fear. Fear that the voice might belong to someone she would rather not see. The relief that floods through her when she does not recognize him almost sucks the strength from her knees, and she inhales a steadying breath as her pulse gradually returns to normal.
It takes her a moment to register what he had said, and she almost can’t control the perplexed frown that crosses her face when she says, “Excuse me?” She’s not sure if she has ever met someone that spoke so bluntly, but her face flushes hot with embarrassment when she realizes she perhaps sounded rude.
She shakes her head, ridding her eyes of the wisps of forelock that framed her face, before clearing her throat softly and trying again, “I mean...I guess so.” She doesn’t say that she actually agrees with him. Being alive had never worked out well for her, and she cannot imagine that this time is going to be any better.
But she had forgotten what it was like to meet someone new – someone that didn’t know of her past, and she didn’t know theirs. Someone that didn’t have to know that every piece of her was damaged, someone that likely had no interest in the fortress she had walled herself up in. It doesn’t spark anything inside of her, but it keeps her drawn to him, for now. “My name is Anonya.”
( i'm just here to fight the fire
oh, a man ain't a man unless he has desire )
Truth be told, he hadn’t been expecting such a strong reaction.
She spins around to face him and he takes one stumbling step backward, away from her.
It has not been lost on him that the magic in Beqanna has taken a stronger hold on its inhabitants and he’s seen more than a few horses wandering around with a predator’s teeth in their mouths. He has no way of knowing that she doesn’t have venomous fangs that she could easily plunge into the meat of his throat. (Strange that he should have any shred of self-preservation left in him when all he really wants to do is go back to being dead – and what better way to get back to the afterlife than by being attacked by someone else? Cuerva Lista couldn’t give him shit about that, could she?)
“Son of a bitch,” he yelps, more at himself than at her, because he’d spooked her and she had, in turn, spooked him right back.
He drags in a ragged breath, trying in vain to tame the wild beating of his heart.
The good news was that she didn’t sink her teeth into his throat. For all intents and purposes, she seemed just as regular as him.
But the fear in her eyes is not lost on him and it feels bigger than him simply catching her off-guard. It’s a real fear he sees, not the temporary kind that comes from being startled. Not the kind of fear she undoubtedly saw in his eyes when she’d spun around to face him and he’d awkwardly stumbled out of her reach.
She says, ‘excuse me’, but she says it in a way that suggests she has no interest in hearing him repeat what he’d say. She says it more in a way that suggests she’s offended that he’d said it at all. But he’s never been very good at apologies, so he doesn’t immediately say anything. She guesses so. Which is not her disagreeing with him, so he considers it a victory.
“Did you come here on purpose?” he asks without bothering to clarify whether or not she’d been dead before she arrived here. “Were you in the river?” he plunges on without giving her a chance to answer his first question. The river, of course, being the place where he’d been reunited with Cuerva Lista, where a roan mare had cloned herself for a reason he hadn’t totally figured out yet, where they’d been tasked with helping… with something.
Anonya, she says, and he doesn’t recognize the name but he supposes it doesn’t matter. He’d been dead a remarkably long time. “Antidote,” he says, pauses and then adds, “I think.” He rolls one shoulder in a kind of shrug before he says, “my name was Antidote when I died. I don’t know if you get a new one when you come back from the dead.”
12-27-2019, 01:11 AM (This post was last modified: 12-27-2019, 01:13 AM by Anonya.)
“A heart was made to live in the dark–
maybe we were, too.”
She had not meant to startle him when she had jumped, and she can feel herself growing increasingly flustered with the situation.
She doesn’t think she had always been like this; always on edge, and wound so tight that the slightest unexpected sound or movement triggered a reaction. Her memories of being alive feel like they are trapped behind a veil, one that is almost transparent enough that she can see them but not quite touch them. They are there, fully within reach, but no matter how hard she tries to clear the fog, she can’t escape it.
But this version of herself doesn’t feel right – she knows this, even without being able to remember everything.
It makes her feel uneasy in her own skin, but she blames it on being alive. It’s been so long since she last heard another’s voice, since she last felt a heart beating inside of her chest – since she last felt fear ignite in her veins.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to…” She trails off, not even entirely sure what she was trying to say, or even what she was sorry for. Instead she inhales, and though her pulse feels steadier the breath still trembles when it passes through her lips. She looks back at him, and again there is confusion lingering in the shadows of her eyes when he starts questioning her. “I mean, I guess so. I knew the gate had been opened, so I walked through. I don’t remember anything about a river, though.” She’s looking at him warily now, afraid that she had maybe answered his questions wrong.
He offers his name, and this time when she smiles, it feels real. There is a light that reaches her eyes when she tilts her head to look at him, and an almost lilt to her words when she says, “Do you want to change your name? Is there anyone alive that would know one way or the other?” The laugh that she exhales feel like life being breathed back into her, a sudden realization washing over her – no one knows who she is.
She barely knows who she is.
She is a blank canvas and the pen all rolled into one, and she isn’t sure why that hadn’t dawned on her earlier. “I bet we could be anything and anyone that we wanted to be, and no one would know the difference.”
( i'm just here to fight the fire
oh, a man ain't a man unless he has desire )
Her apology is unnecessary and, as such, easily discarded.
Apologies had always made him uncomfortable anyway.
Just the whole concept of taking responsibility for his own actions. Or, if he was the one being apologized to, absolving someone of guilt. If he had palms, surely it would make them itch. As it stood, though, they merely made him want to crawl out of his own skin.
So, he moves past it as quickly as he can. Doesn’t bother to acknowledge it. Hopes that she’ll follow suit and not try to force him to tell her that she was forgiven. He’d known plenty of women like that in his day. Women desperate for reassurance. Or, even more specifically, women deadset on finding reassurance in the very last place they’d ever find it. Antidote had never been built for stroking egos or soothing broken hearts or making anyone feel like they were worthwhile. How he’d managed to maintain a herd for so many years was really anyone’s guess because he had never been what you’d call personable or even mildly pleasant. Quite frankly, he’d been an asshole and that was one thing, at least, that had not changed.
She mentions a gate. He doesn’t remember hearing anything about a gate. It had been like he’d kind of just blinked and he was awake in the meadow in a place that reminded him of Beqanna but certainly was not the Beqanna he’d known. The corners of his dark mouth turn down in a frown as he considers this. So, she’d walked through a gate and hadn’t been in the river. Which meant… what? The dead were allowed to just mosey their way back to earth?
“That’s interesting,” he says. But he asks her nothing further. Instead, they exchange names and she smiles, which is a relief because she’d been starting to look like a damsel that he was going to need to reassure. He hadn’t meant to be funny, but she seems deeply amused and who would he be to stand in the way of that? So, he offers up a kind of sideways chuckle.
“No, there’s no one left who’d remember me,” he tells her. In fact, most everyone who would have remembered him have probably been dead as long as he has. How long has he been dead? Centuries? He doesn’t know how to go about drawing up that kind of equation, so he skirts around it. “But I’ve never been known for my creativity, so Antidote works just fine.”
She looks awfully alive for someone who’s just returned from the dead, perhaps invigorated by her own realization. “And who and what do you want to be this time around?”
