"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
09-26-2016, 02:00 PM (This post was last modified: 09-26-2016, 02:01 PM by Djinni.)
This is the last time she will go out to look.
She wonders how often she can lie to herself before she stops believing. At least one more time, every time. She has not stopped yet; she does not quite seem able.
The brine of the sea has begun to soak into her skin, staking its claim on her even if she seems unable to do the same. There is something about the sea - the sand, the dolphins as grey as the water - that keeps her coming back, time and time again.
Is that enough to make someplace a home?
The returning, even when there are other things that call to her?
Is the constant coming back enough for her to call herself loyal?
No.
No, she says to herself, and knows that it is mostly a lie.
If it were, then she has a home. If it were, she has had a home for years, for decades. If it were, her home is a horse and not a land, a familiar yellow face that she keeps coming back to despite the allure of the world away.
This is the last time she will go out to look for him.
@[Walter]
(ooc: did i write a post with absolutely no physical description at all? yes, yes i did. hashtag no shame)
He feels like an anchor stuck fast in this new world.
The rest of them are pulled here and there as the mists part and fresh meccas are revealed. The rest of them scurry, frantic with their worry or fear or desire for power. He watches them from the meadow, one of the last vestiges of the old Beqanna. It never occurs to him to move his feet in earnest like the rest. He doesn’t dash for the salt air that tangles in the manes of one group of survivors and turns their faces northward. He doesn’t head towards the west when the heavy scent of pine lures in another band (he ignores the ravens that stir in his mind). He has no desire to see the world torn asunder and haphazardly rearranged. Here, it is easy to imagine that all is well, that nothing has changed. He stays in his meadow, lets the wild grasses grow higher with each passing day against his hocks as they always have.
He tries not to think of her.
It becomes yet another failure to add to his life’s total. Because Walter sees her in the golden haze of spring fading into summer. In the faces of the sunflowers that bob along the edge of the meadow, almost playful as he passes them, he thinks of the mischievous gleam she kept in her eyes. He hears her bangles in the shrill call of a waxwing.
His memories and feet are anchors.
The palomino drags himself through each day that seems destined only to repeat itself. Nothing changes, save for the entire world outside of his little realm. Nothing inspires him to change course, either. He spends entire days walking through his memories, replaying conversations and tracing the lines of faces. He tries to pinpoint the exact moments where he went wrong (what he left unsaid, what touch or gesture he missed because he simply couldn’t reach out). He counts all of the times he slipped back behind the pine trees as Djinni slept, too afraid to push through, until he runs out of numbers.
The night becomes his next companion. The stars wink at him like the sunflowers. It’s easier to hold their gaze, too. Easier to slip in the shadows of an untouched oak and turn his face towards the speckled black above. Easier to watch the sky spin around the earth while the constellations danced instead of thinking about her. Walter becomes almost drunk on the spin. Dizzy and disoriented, he levels his gaze on someone’s approach. She shines, and he wonders if the stars are falling – wonders if they’ve heard the silent wish he’s made nearly every night.
“You,” he exhales, somewhere between a question and confirmation. His head is fuzzy with exhaustion and the tilting, spinning sky, but he knows she must be. Like his meadow, like the rising and falling of nations and changing of the seasons, constants do not disappear.
Walter
come down from the mountain
you have been gone too long
As soon as she sees him, she is running. Barreling haphazardly through the long grass, brushing past strangers without apology. The grullo mare slows when she must, but she does not stop entirely, not until her neck is tucker beneath his throat and her head is pressed to the familiar warmth of his shoulder.
She wants to care about his personal space, but she does not. She has respected that for long enough, and this is not just any day. This is the day that she has found him.
She knows that he will flinch and pull away, but for one glorious moment she can feel the solid warmth of his chest, hear the thrum of his heart - so strong, so alive, and breathe in his scent that is as familiar as her own. She does not care because she knows he will forgive her, that even as he pulls away for his own comfort that he will tut and smile and all will be well with the world again because now, finally, things are back as they should be.
Djinni beams up at him, remembering as she does just how much taller he is when she is truly herself. She rarely was Before, but in the Now (even with her djinn returned) she changes far less frequently. She reaches out again, seeking to press her dainty black muzzle to his as she says: "I missed you. I missed you so much."
ooc: i took forever to reply and i powerplayed a hug and if you don't like that you can fight me :|
But as they collide, he does not crumble like the shore. Instead, he is fortified by her presence, made stronger in her wake. He feels her push the last stone building his courage into place when she slides under his neck. It will not fall apart like Beqanna had, not again. The mountains may tumble, the seas may drain, the stars may fall – but he will remain unchanged.
The moon is his witness; he will not flinch away from her again.
His resolve is as brand-new as the back-drop of their lives. She will see it, in the hard set of his chin (the only outward defense against her physicality). She will feel it, in the way he softens otherwise (the way he lets her melt into him, fill all the spaces between them). Walter brushes the top of her neck with his muzzle and smells the sea. He remembers the travelers who had tracked north with the brine-scent trailing them; he wonders if she’s gone there and come back. He hopes she’s come back, at least for him.
Her smile lights up the night and pulls him from his musing. Djinni is happier than she was before, he thinks, happier than he’s ever seen her. She is more herself, too. Her unique brand of magic still thrums in the air between them (and he bets she’s kept hers’ all along, defying the reckoning when no one else could) but she doesn’t use it to morph herself. She is her natural wisp of smoke; he breathes her in. “I’ve missed you, too.” The golden stallion pulls away from her, but only to better see her face, to gauge her reaction. “As much as the desert misses the sun when it passes behind a cloud.” One corner of his dusky lips rises in a crooked smirk because it is heresy and they both know it.
But there are mysteries that even her smile cannot better illuminate. There is a dark stretch of time that bridges raven feathers and sap to spinning stars and brand-new resolve. He’d traversed it perhaps like the eager others had the mist, stumbling and groping his way through. Walter starts to ask her where’s she’s been, what she’s seen; he opens his mouth and promptly shuts it again. It doesn’t matter, he tells himself, we have all the time in the world to see it again, together. Because he doesn’t want to be left behind or run ahead of her or whatever had separated them in the first place. This time, he won’t let the mists swallow him, won’t pull back into the cover of the trees. Except,
“Take me to the ocean,” he says, already picturing the pink waves at dawn. It doesn’t matter how long she’s been there or been away from the sea; he only wants this last memory with her, to push away the rest – to forget those days he spent alone. The meadow seems stale now, clustered with too many bodies taking too many breathes. He wants to feel the salt-breeze cooling his neck. He wants to sink into the sand as he walks along the shore, to leave a parallel pair of tracks as the sun climbs in the sky above them. “Please don’t make me stay here any longer.”
Walter
come down from the mountain
you have been gone too long
ooc: s'okay. apparently he is in need of many hugs. I don't even know what this is
He does not pull away, and she seizes the opportunity.
She stays, motionless but for her heartbeat and exerted breathing, holding him as tightly as she can, as though he might be a dream that will vanish if she lets him go. When he does pull away, when he tells her he missed her too, she releases him too, an easy smile on her dark face.
"That is a lie," she says as she presses her muzzle to his jaw in a kiss that she pulls away from just as quickly as she does it. "I know you missed me too." She does not want to test her luck, to push him too far and risk losing whatever it is that she has just gained. Djinni cannot quite put it into words, and she knows that to think on it too long would be to force it into an unnatural shape for her own benefit. She will not do that, not to herself and never to Walter.
He starts to say something and stops, and for a moment she thinks that she has lost him again. These are the steps to the dance they know so well; her pushing, him standing, neither willing to give in.
But then he does, and she feels the tempo changing; with a another soft press of her muzzle to his chin she spirits him away in a cloud of golden sand, and opens her eyes to the very waves that Walter had been thinking of a moment ago. They are alone on the beach, without a soul in sight. Only the chirruping of gulls and lonesome brays of the seals break the constant crashing of the waves against the shore.
"Stay here with me," she says, "We call it Nerine."
