"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
His mother had not expected it; the strange magic that pierced through her negation armor like a knife through paper. The trauma of the earth rattling and the air going dark and then finding herself on top of the mountain. It had all been too much, too painful, and contractions had seized her stomach before she had known what was happening. Etro had barely had enough time to find a quasi-shelter before she had been forced to the ground, before the minutes stretched into laborious hours. Pain exploding like constellations behind her eyelids.
Silver and gold and ink with horns that curved beautifully from behind his ears.
She had loved him, as she loved all monsters, but fatigue had eventually claimed her, and she had slipped wordlessly into a slumber that looked suspiciously like death. The colt had waited for several hours before the pangs in his belly became more than he could bear. He nudged her, but she did not move. He cried and pleaded, but she had not budged.
Finally, he had gathered what little strength he had and pulled himself to his feet, helped by the remnants of his gift embedding him with strength and agility. Were it not for the traces of that gift, he is not sure that he would have made his way down the mountain. Even now, hours later, he is not sure how he managed it, except his cloven feet had been surefooted and it had seemed like a game. When he had reached the bottom, he had found a mare the color of cream with a belly that curved with child still. She had ushered him toward her.
He had lifted his head up and latched on, suckling hungrily—selfishly, eagerly. Teeth had clamped down and the mare had yipped. “Careful! she had cried, pulling away. She had bent her head back toward him, face beautiful with large, clear green eyes. “Oh, that’s going to bruise.” she had murmured, and the colt felt a faint thread of something familiar in the air.
The same thread that had run through the air like a live wire when his mother had screamed bringing him into the world. Something intoxicating. He reached up and yanked on it clumsily, watching as the mare’s eyes went wide and then glassy, her breath hitching. “What are you?” she gasped before her knees buckled. That was his first true taste of Fear.
It was heavy on his tongue as he left the mare on the ground, drunk with the memory of it. He had not realized when it began to fade from him. Perhaps it was the second when he first stumbled, his agility having bled from his body. Perhaps it was that moment when he felt the weight upon his head shift, the two horns dissolving to be replaced with a single one in the center of his forehead. Either way, he found himself on the edge of the meadow—young, alone, confused. Things that had once felt permanent having filtered between his grip like sand in the wind. The wind blew across his back, and he shuddered.
Bruise
head like a hole; as black as your soul.
@[Pollock]
look, i don't even know what this is, but here you go.
Has built up from a foundation of dereliction – the gifter’s progenitor had not fallen into some heavy and unusual languor like the boy’s (though, years ago, he had reminded a lad of bright flesh and wide eyes, that abandonment came in many forms; that mothers had certain predilections… had it not bore out true, time and time again?
—had he not found her – Elve, he had called her – still clung to by a membranous sac?
—had he not come to him – Rapt, his dear disciple – vulnerable and alone, as a lamb?
—had the monster not seen indigo, time and time again, in his halls and by her graveside?
Careless, all. He is sick of herding their lost youths – but he is their shepherd. And so, with careful crook, he gives them things to sustain on.)
No. His bitch had gone, painted-faced and sweaty, into the night – blood and nativity fluid perfuming her haunches. The distinction is as negligible as the details are irrelevant – both, father and son, had stumbled from their dens alone, wielding the tools of their survival, half-mad and milk-sick.
Except, when the colt passes the foot of that goliath of stolen toys, they drain from his body. They leave him, as they had left his sire, light-headed and clumsy – bereft of fear, it can only offer itself in its base form, ungainly and unrefined.
(—he has stirred, jilting light bugs from their beds and fruit from their branches, and paced. Every night, finding no peace in sleep (though, there is little that is new about this, at least). Like an angry, nervous beast, he stalks. He listens to his heart thump heavy in his ear, lonely without the carol to harmonize with.
He traces the tracts of land inside his kingdom – places where he had left bones and teeth and found them still, undisturbed but growing ever softer. He ventures, careful not to be followed, to the places where he had buried – hacked to manageable pieces, roughly bagged in plastic, unmarked and forgotten – the things that must be forgotten.
Somehow, they had gotten out. They had conspired against him, he had believed he had interned them far enough away from each other to control them. And though he would never admit it (barely to himself, once the sun breached the horizon), they had sunk their teeth and claws deep, squeezing ever tighter for arterial blood.)
But he has built from ashes just as deep and acidic as these.
Pollock has fought and fallen – he cannot remember it all, but he knows, somehow, that there have been darker things. Stranger things. Queer constellations of another sky, gathered around that northernmost star, leading him ever towards a mechanical hum. Greedier things trying to keep him from his destiny. So he marches on, tired-eyed and hobbled by the night, past his ghostly hideout and through his kingdom until he scents familiarity and follows it. He has been waiting for them – all of his things, named and unnamed – wondering how long it would take for each to cross his path.
He would have known the boy by the curvature of his baby horns, and by the split in his little toes. Or by the way he made fear his – it would have been the first time Pollock had ever met his match, though not the first he has ever made one. But deprived of these things – only the keratin coalescing into one, single protrusion from his head – he knows him only by the scent of his mother’s insides.
Pollock moves to meet the colt, crocodile smile and none of his adornments – for once, it may have actually made him more relatable. He stops so close, taking a moment to examine him – he has never met one before, though he has always assumed he has dropped life alongside his… other offerings. “You made it down, then? Hm,” he muses, low and gravely, and he thinks he understands how. He unfurls his great, over-large wings, blocking the wind from Bruise's body, leaning down and in.
“What did your mother call you, boy? Where is she?” he turns his dark eyes from him, for a second, to peer through the evergreen murk. And there is something like hope on his tongue, though it is nothing like it should be.
There are things that still stir in his chest—memories of when Fear had been but briefly a weapon in his hand—that will stick with him in the coming months. They are dangerous and cruel things on his tongue that he finds he hungers for more than the milk that had so briefly dripped down his chin. His stomach churns with want as he thinks of the way her eyes had glazed over with things of his own making, the way she had hit her knees and then gone limp. He thinks of it, how it had played out even with his own clumsy handling of Fear, and his heart thumps painfully in his chest. Gifts—such brief gifts.
Gifts wrenched from his hands.
His dark eyes lift when the stallion approaches him and although there are no horns for him to know him by, nothing for him to recognize as a mirror, he knows.
He knows in the same way that he knew when he had spilled onto the ground and looked upon his mother, weak and spent from exertion. His shuddering stops and he remains silent in thought—quiet for too long, past the point of propriety. His mother had not named him; she had said nothing before eyelashes had fluttered down and shuttered her face.
So he says the only word that comes to mind, the word spat from the mare when his teeth had sunk into her flesh. “Bruise,” he says, finally, the word solid on his tongue with the weight of his decision. “My name is Bruise.” And then, to the second question, he swings his childish head around toward the mountain behind him, rising into the sky with such vicious, cutting lines. “Still up there,” he contemplates before rolling his shoulders.
“She had fallen and did not wake; I grew tired of waiting.”
He had grown tired of nudging her, of the hunger twisting his stomach. He had not felt loyalty enough to stay and wait; he had not cared if she had ever woken. The thoughts cause his lips to curl a little in the corners as he looks toward the stallion with wings stretched wide, chin rising in defiance. “And what of you? What did your mother call you?”
“Bruise?”
The corners of his mouth twitch upwards as he considers the boy. “Interesting.” She had seemed a thing left black-and-blue. Ruptured, just under that delicate skin, by someone with crueler hands than even he. Crueler, because he had left love around her bruises, yellow and sore, ever expanding as arterial blood continues its outpour.
He supposes mad minds are prone to project ‒ to reach out into the world and look for lost things, leaving breadcrumbs behind, in case they never come back.
(Bruise. A hurt.)
(Pollock. A nonsense. —an artist, in that distant world, under those other constellations.)
(Nameless things. At least one other – indigo-haired and golden-bodied.
And Bruise.)
It is more interesting, still, when he realizes it must be the makings of his own young mind. How very dark. He’d get a chuckle out of the full story. Maybe will, one day.
He might even be proud.
“Yes,” his mouth forms it’s straight, stern line again and he straightens up, jaw flexing as his teeth clench together. “Yes, well, I grew tired of waiting, too.” A seed from this very apple, indeed. Patience had never been his forte. It may have even been his downfall, just as it may have been Bruise’s; because the wilds could have gotten them both, wood-beasts and mountain-ghouls. Such tender and soft-boned morsels, easy pickings. Undefended and largely defenseless.
(Except Bruise had his Fear and Pollock, his invisibility. He’d have to take the boy back up that Mountain one day, where his mother may still be, black-and blue, and show him how high the stakes truly are.)
Men like them build.
They build until they are great, and then like iron-clawed titans, they tear each other down, just to be the greatest.
He speaks of mother and… no. With anyone else, that would be a no-no. But he gives the boy a warning eye (very paternal) and exhales slowly through his nose. She is a distant thing he is meant to forget. She is buried below a hundred leagues of sand and bone. “My mother called me Pollock.” He lowers his head again, down to the upturned chin and bold eyes, “never ask me about that bitch again, Bruise.
Fuck our mothers.” He holds his eye for a moment long, depth meets depth, and they echo each other. “You’re with me now.”
(so paternal. much dadliness. wow. sorrythistooksolong. forgive me, @[Laura]. whenever you want, we can always skip timeline other to post-pangea, since this would be before carnage met with everyone. doesn't matter to me!)
It doesn’t occur to Bruise to be afraid—to feel anything but interest, curiosity, hunger.
(Perhaps, in the future, he would learn the danger of inducing fear but never feeling it.
Perhaps it would be his greatest weakness. Perhaps. Perhaps.)
When the older stallion snaps at him, lifts his chin, Bruise allows it, but the defiant spark in his eyes does not dim and he does not cow to the other’s demands. Instead, he simply just nods because he made sense. After all, he had no great need for the mare, ugly and simple. She had been weak and he had dismissed her. She had not provided—he had provided for himself. She had been but a vessel to carry him into this world and if the storms were to shake the planks loose, then he would not mourn her sinking.
She was but a vessel and he had already been delivered.
“Pollock,” he repeats the name—wonders if he too should have had a more elegant name and then disregards the thought. He liked his name. He liked that he had given it to himself. He liked the way that it sounded on his tongue, a warning, a promise. Simple—a contusion that ached. Deceiving when the blood blossomed outward and inward, when the bruise hit the skull and billowed outward on delicate brain matter like constellations. Fatal then. A simple kiss of death. Yes. His name would suit him just fine.
Still, he appreciated the gild of his father’s name, appreciated the paternal, even territorial, reaction. He did not mind being claimed in this way. There was much to learn. “Indeed,” he responded, because he was not yet a man of many words. “I am.”
He tilted his head back again, studious in his approach.
“Where do we go now?”
Because boys, men, like them always had somewhere to go—something to do.
The world was too large, too empty, for them to sit and slumber.
![[Image: kkN1kfc.png]](http://i.imgur.com/kkN1kfc.png)