"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
throw me to the wolves & i will return leading the pack.
Keeper chased deer. Lost them. Found them. Chased them again. It was an obsession for her to follow them, tracking their faint magical trail through forest and meadow and back again.
Once, her grandmother had asked her why she chased after the deer.
The deer people are beautiful and distant, and I want to know the secret of their ways. They can disappear like smoke, make brown eyes shine yellow in the moonlight, and all with a flash of their white tails like pale warnings of secrets the trees swallow whole. Mostly, because I am not like the rest of you - I’m not like any of you at all.
That pained her the most. Even her sister had green skin to set her apart. But Keeper, she was as ordinary as a dandelion - as common as any branch on a tree. Grandmother told her that wasn’t true, not if the deer people had a hold of her heart because that meant that Keeper was something special but she found it hard to believe the medicine hat mare.
Keeper believed in secrets, and quiet.
She believed in snow falling on stars and a pair of deep brown eyes that look wounded, and looked right through her as if he saw her, just Keeper, and nothing else.
His name was something she had banished from her lips, no matter how many times it rose unbidden to them. It could leave her smiling, staring at a slip of sunlight through the leaves or a shadow that grew long in the grass. Most must think her daft when they caught her this way, remembering him and savoring the almost-taste of his name on her lips before she buried it beneath the continuous quest to know the deer and their secrets. Keeper longed for their slimness and their grace, neither of which she had - she was almost a pony in size, and much too lean to move like the deer did. She resembled a horse that has been run too long until it little else but gristle and bone, growing long in the whiskers, and much too unkempt.
There were bits of fur and bone in the knotty straggles of her mane.
There was the haunted look of wind moving through the trees in her black eyes.
There were thorny scratches on her thin hips.
Keeper could tell you which berries not to eat. She could tell you which grasses were good for digestion and could even tell you the best places to sleep if you followed the deer but what she could not tell you is why sometimes, she stopped and stared as if a ghost followed her. Or why sometimes, she woke up whispering his name to herself like a prayer as if that alone could call him to her or save him from the things in his eyes that had stayed with her, following her, like hounds hot on her heels.
Keeper also could not tell you why she picked the meadow on this night of all nights. Why she stopped her chase after the deer to tip her head back and look at the stars. All she saw was black and white, like the hairs in his coat, amidst the constellations and the night and his name rose unbidden from her lips like a whispered summons, “Argo.”
He knew the heart-wrenching ache of being nothing at all. He could not remember a time in his life that he had not been viewed as frail, as feeble, as less than. He is fragile, with a ragged and irregular heartbeat – it left him easily winded, his breath stolen by some unseen force that stirred frustration in the pit of his stomach. Despite the sinew and bone that built him to what he is, all that is seen along the surface is weakness, and deep within the hearth of his chest, his callous, hardening heart lay, buried deeper than the memories that he had tried so desperately to forget – deeper than the emotion that kept him awake at night, staring at a starlit sky that held no promise for him.
The world had changed, and with it, he had changed too. No longer was he the same awkward boy he had once been – with sharp hipbones protruding beneath the darkness of his skin, or the inlet of his ribs peering out from the thin and sallow ivory that lined his barrel. He had grown, inevitably becoming broader and more muscular with time, and yet it all still seemed as if he were wearing a skin far too big for him to manage. He was still gaunt (he preferred the stillness of the lake; to bathe in its pristine, crystal clear water – as still as it was, and so his muscle had waned) and he was still far from the prime that had been sworn to him by his youth.
He was a shadow of what he could be; a shadow of what he never would be. He often kept to himself, tasting the sweet flora on his tongue, savoring the way the soft and fragile petals felt on his supple, parted lips – relishing in the icy dew that sated his thirst. It had been years since he had seen his mother, his father, his brother – his sisters. His heart pined, when the dark moon failed to show itself in the clarity of a barren sky, or when his breathing became most ragged and his body felt its weakest. That was when he thought most of his mother, of her cradling him close to her chest, soothing his ache, untangling the frayed knots that had found its way into the tousled mess of his mane – he missed her; he would always miss her.
But he could not bring himself to return to her, to return to him - to the father had had become calloused and distant; to the mother that had seen the brokenness inside of him and worried herself into exhaustion. To return to the brother that had loved him in a way he never deserved to be loved (by no one – he is worthless). To return to the sister who had been bitter, who had never been a sister at all. To Keeper, the gilded, fleeting doe-eyed mare that had whispered her name to him, who had never seen him as anything but Argo.
When he sees her, his heart – oh, what a frail and pathetic thing – hammers suddenly inside of his chest, stirring a hitch of breath in his throat. He is uncertain (could it be her? After so long? After so many years?), while anxiety emerges and roils with a fury of its own within the thick blood lining his veins, but he does not shy away. And when she whispers his name – it carries in the breeze, caressing the surface of his flushed skin, enveloping him in its embrace – he is suddenly all too aware of how the pale moonlight had brought him to her; that fate had held a different plan than his own.
”Keeper,” he breathes, his slender neck outstretched, nostrils flaring with the scent of pine and sage lingering in the tangle of her haphazard tresses. His teeth delicately clasp a tangled dandelion and leave it to drift away with the eastern-bound wind, breathless for a reason he is not at all used to.
throw me to the wolves & i will return leading the pack.
She had no idea that he’d come; that their paths should be fit to cross again and on a night like this, when she could say his name to the small fierce fires in the sky and think that maybe, just maybe, they had something to do with this. It is a silly thought to think that she had but to breath his name and the stars would conjure him out of the darkness for her. If so, why this night and none of the others? So many other times his name had come to her lips only to be swallowed back on a thick knot of foolishness and girlishness, but not tonight. No, not tonight!
It is her name on his breath that brings her head round and down from the constellations and her foolish thoughts to look at him with her black eyes from inside that pale dun face of hers. He is the same, but older - like she is, though she has never given age much thought or to how either of them could have changed. It just never occurred to her that there could be differences. She was naive enough to believe they were the same, unchanged, just older. He still smelled like wild things, just as she did, more like a lake though - cool deep water and the night, and she… well, just look at her! Sticks and bones in her hair, she looks like something dredged up from some obscure corner of the forest!
There is no surprise in her eyes. She knew he’d come, one day. One day was now though and all that shone in her eyes was a happiness that Keeper didn’t know she could feel. It kept her quieter that she ought to have been to see him in that moment, but between his face and the stars behind his beautiful head, she turned over this new feeling inside of herself that she had never known. Her own slim neck stretches out like his does, until they are almost nose to nose and he breathes in pine and sage as she breathes in lakewater and moonlight. Keeper cannot stop herself from smiling as he plucks a dandelion out of nowhere (her hair most likely, she accrued all kinds of woodland and meadow trinkets in her travels) and lets it loose to the wind.
She can feel her heart blowing away with it, going right out of her like a hushed breath of awe. Keeper is only awestruck because he came to her, the one time she allows herself to say his name out loud and not just in the back of her mind as it becomes a companion to the fleet-footed quietness of the deer she follows. Keeper belonged with wild things, least of all her own kind but she could never quite go far enough to escape them - him, his name on her lips, moonlight and shadow, and the awe mixes with the happiness in her eyes that she cannot seem to take off him after the dandelion drifted by, gone with the wind.
“You came,” and she could not help the incredulous way it left her still smiling mouth. The disbelief was a truth she could not hide from him like the way she could not hide the fact that he had had some lasting impact on her from their first meeting until now, though she could not say what it was about him that left him running through her mind. She hadn’t expected him to be there, not on the same night as her - chance never favored her, not like this.
But here he is…
Argo.
Keeper cannot help the silly way the sight of him makes her heart flip-flop inside her narrow breast.
