i like that you’re broken; any

[abysm]

He cannot shake the dark eyes that haunt him —

Everywhere he looks, they wear her eyes - dark and mysterious. It no longer matters if the face is a mix of navy and moonlight; only that the shape is feminine and delicate. He can manipulate the rest of her into existence via his dreams if he chose to. Except he does not, banishing the temptation of this thought to the back of his brain and likewise, her name.

He’s buried himself time and time again in a plethora of hips just to forget her. Spotted hips, dappled hips, solid hips and all of them smooth and inviting, promising salvation through sex. Part of him knows this isn’t right but the rest of him could care less. Every one of them has a bit of her in them, but not a one of them is her. 

Abysm looks for her in the delicate lines of their faces; falls head over heels in love a little with each of them because a subtle nuance might trigger the memory of her and because at the same time, they are so not her but wholly themselves. He’s become quite the connoisseur of the broken and lovely. So much so, that he looks for them on the dreams that fill the night air from the sleepers’ heads.

The stallion skips along as if alighting upon clouds, sometimes smiling to himself as he plucks things from their dreams. Like plucking grapes fresh off the vine, and he delights in his feast as he grows fat and full, sated and disappointed all at the same time. Every so often, he checks in on his children and smooths the unruly hairs back from their little brows and gives them good dreams to dream.

However the rest of the time, he broods and looks so unapproachable from the flag lay of his ears against his head to the irritable twitch of tail at his flank. It is farcical but he’d never let them know that, quite masterful in his moody deception as he stands there, alone and aloof. It’s the same old meadow and the same old Abysm, not much has changed.

[normandy]

 
For her, there is nothing worth remembering.

She flits just out of reach, always has. There are no faces that swim in the periphery when she closes her eyes. There are no names that alight on her tongue when she wakes, startled, from her slumber. 

She has touched and been touched, whispered secrets in the dark, coaxed ill-shaped promises from the depths of hearts too shifty to keep them. And she has preferred it this way.

Until now. 

It is not loneliness that spurs her into motion. No, she knows exactly how and where to find company should she want it. Instead, it is something she does not have a name for yet. Perhaps it is some longing for a sense of permanence. Perhaps she has grown weary of being temporary.

She passes him by, then thinks better of it, doubles back and settles into the negative space beside him. There is a beat of silence that pulses between them. She mulls over the quiet and the lay of his ears and the irritated swish of his tail like a pendulum. They are warning signs, to be sure, but she has never been particularly good at heeding them. 

“Waiting for someone?” she asks finally, turning a dark eye on him. It’s refreshing, she thinks, to happen upon someone so perfectly ordinary. There are no wings, no unnatural color, he does not look the part of someone who might turn to her and breathe fire in her direction. How strange that he should be the odd one out. 


normandy
it's better to feel pain than nothing at all,
the opposite of love's indifference