"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
The last thing that he remembers is the sight of her running from him in the rain.
He sees the way she was illuminated by the lightning as it cracked across the sky, the crushed gold of her hips and the way she had looked at him with such hate in her eyes. He had taken comfort in that, the way that she had spit back at him (try to destroy me). He had taken comfort knowing that she had been the one to finally sever the moment, to finally cut him off and move away—leaving him alone.
(He deserved to be alone. He did.)
It had taken him several days, but he had finally managed to make his way back to Loess. The maze that had overtaken so much of the kingdom was mostly gone now and he was glad for it; glad that he did not need to stare everyday at the physical reminder of the war that he had unveiled his true nature during.
He still keeps to himself within the kingdom. He has no true ambition to rise in the ranks for the dragon king and although he had pledged the strength of his back, he is all too content hiding it. Let them think that he is weak. Let them think he is lazy. He would rather run with the pack than bend the knee anyway.
Today, he finds himself roaming the hills during the wintery afternoon.
The bite of the breeze does little to dull the ache in his chest when he thinks of how much of his life lay in shattered pieces around him—pieces that he is responsible for. It does little to dull that gnawing need that has not left him since he met her, that constant, biting reminder of something more that stretched in him.
It is so sharp today that he almost thinks she is a mirage.
But when he glances up, there she is, standing in his home and it knocks the wind out of him. He remains still, his antlered head cut against the cruel blue of the Loessian sky, his face as impassive as the Hyaline mountains that lie east of him. “Kensa,” he hates the way that he says her name, hates the way that it sounds so gentle on his tongue—his gravely voice at war with the sharpness of his features.
“What are you doing here?”
BRIGADE
when I was a man I thought it ended when I knew love's perfect ache but my peace has always depended on all the ashes in my wake
you could break my heart in two, but when it heals, it beats for you
It’s been a long time since that day in the meadow and she would like to think she has forgotten about Brigade. She did not think of him those few weeks later when she tracked down Ophanim in Sylva and bedded him. The angel boy’s beautiful child grew in her belly and was born before the snow had even begun to melt. Delicate thing, she did wish she could have kept her warm and safe a little longer. She did not think of Brigade most of the time, her mind on the child, on Hyaline, her plans.
Thoughts of Brigade were sneaking, deceptive things. He would appear in the shadow of emotions, antlered and brooding in the shadows of her aching heart.
Ophanim is a father eager for the company of his children and since she does not yet trust her yearlings with the infant she delivers the girl to him instead to free herself for a few hours or a day. Thus she is alone when he finds her, traveling toward home as the icy breeze snags the ends of her hair and makes waves over her winter coat. Her mountains are still beautiful from here in rocky Loess. No wonder Castile has dug his Eyrie into the opposite side of the same mountain she chose for her own nest.
The canter that carries her disintegrates quickly into a walk when she sees him, her feet stopping all together as every cruel edge of that first meeting bursts into her chest. Kensa doesn’t even have a name for the emotion evoked by the sight of him but she is not interested in repeating that day in the meadow. When he looks at her, her face is still and cold (no matter how her name in his masculine tones makes her ache).
“Hello Brigade.” Too gentle. Find the ice that needs to harden around the syllables…
“Castile and I are on good terms. He is welcome in Hyaline and I take my liberties visiting Loess as I need to.” The topaz of her eyes darkening, she continues more archly than she means to, “I’m on my way back to my own territory now.” She'd never told him who she was. You don’t know me. She is Primarch of Hyaline, not an interloper for him to question. Even if he means only to greet her she will not strip her armor for this hateful man again. She isn’t hostile, only glittering and restrained.
“I hope you had a good winter. Loess is colder than I expected it to be.”
There is none of the heat of their last encounter.
Instead it is frigid between them—so cold—and he fidgets slightly, a muscle twitching on his shoulder but otherwise nothing else giving away his annoyance at the cold way that she greets him. It was nothing that he didn’t deserve, he thinks, but he doesn’t say that. She deserved to give him nothing but these cold daggers, nothing but the way that she keeps the distance between them like they didn’t know one another.
She says his name but it’s nothing like the way she said it last time when she was splayed against his chest and her teeth were running down his side. His face grows stonier when he remembers it; when he realizes that his heart is clenched in his chest with the thought of what she had felt pressed against him.
“My own territory,” he repeats, mostly to himself, letting the pieces click into place when he realizes what that means. She wasn’t just some girl. She wasn’t some girl he met in the meadow. She was a leader of a territory. She was a player on the world stage and he was just a boy with too much anger to process.
It makes him edgy and makes him feel small and he hates that about himself. So he gives her a tight smile, nodding his head in a play of show, letting the dreadlocks of his mane slip down his neck. “Well then, my Queen,” he knows that territories don’t claim such titles but it feels good to let it be bitter on his tongue. “far be it from me to get in your way.” He motions, antlers swooping. “Be on your way then.”
He looks away for a second, stomach clenching, before looking back at her.
There is a split second when his mask slips (how much like his mother he is in this moment) and there is nothing but the raw, wild want, but he washes it away quickly, leaving nothing in its wake.
“I like the cold.”
If only she knew.
BRIGADE
when I was a man I thought it ended when I knew love's perfect ache but my peace has always depended on all the ashes in my wake
you could break my heart in two, but when it heals, it beats for you
He denies her any victory at all, and so she chokes on her pride.
What is the struggle here? The humiliation of not being able to bully him with her beauty or humble him with her power? Not just power over Hyaline (she doesn’t wear a golden circlet or lord herself over others) but power over men, over women, with her carnal appeal. She has embraced it but with Brigade it cripples her, leaves he struggling for even footing.
Brigade is dismissing her again and she feels foolish, chided by his mocking her implied grandeur. “Only Primarch.” She says more gently, without the barbs that had guarded the words she had first thrown at him. Even though she knows better than to give him softness, she does because he cuts her and her first instinct is to be kind. Instincts that are wrong when it comes to this man, she reminds herself.
She’ll go, in a moment, walk away from him rather than run as before. She’ll still cry when she is safely away and secluded, but at least this time it wont look like a retreat.
Her eyes haven’t left him for a second but she does not realize it until she is watching the hard planes of his face flex into the feral desire she remembers from the moment he’d taken her by the mouth and torn away any chance of escaping him unscathed, unbranded. The stillness that takes its place is not familiar at all. Kensa almost prefers his fury.
“That does not surprise me.” Another she would invite into the snowy slopes of her home, the glittering chill where you could often be the first to break trail through the mountain powder. Not Brigade, he would not come and now that he knows who she is, even a maybe would be an insult. So she doesn’t say anything and steps forward to leave though it brings her closer to him.
“It was…” Her topaz eyes search his face, trace the divide in his blaze, linger on the wine colored lips. Her farewell dying on her tongue. “I’ve thought of you.” Kensa is direct and honest whenever she can be but this is a confession she has no reason to provide him. In fact she looks away, turning her face from him so that light ribbons down the rippling gold on her neck. Let him be cruel to her before she goes and remind her why she fled.
But she softens and it reminds him of the way she looked with tears in her eyes. The way that he had wanted to just hold her quietly, brush away the sadness that he had put there and tell her that everything was going to be okay. How he had wanted to protect her from himself. He doesn’t respond to her mild correction because the title doesn’t matter to him. The fact that she has a title at all is enough for the boy raised by wolves; he had lived within kingdoms but never truly been part of them.
Even now he was nothing more than a lowly soldier.
A soldier who wasn’t even certain about the depth of his commitment.
She goes to leave and he wants to reach out and stop her—wants to tell her that there’s more to him than this rough exterior, but he stops himself. Doesn’t even let himself hope with the way that she is looking at him, the way that her voice trails off at the end. He remains still, lashing down the oceans that churn in his chest and the wild aching that spreads through him. Still even when she delivers the gut punch.
The impact doesn’t show on his face but he feels it rippling throughout him—a simultaneous fury and want and disappointment. “You shouldn’t have, Kensa,” his voice is quieter, the edges not quite as harsh as they have been, and his stormy eyes are earnest when they meet hers. “You really shouldn’t have.”
He means to leave it at that.
Means to just let her leave with that final goodbye—the final warning—but his guards whine underneath the pressure and then creak and then it spills over. Not a lot, but enough.
“I’ve thought of you too,” his voice a hushed whisper, roughened and nearly hoarse.
He hates himself in that moment but he doesn’t trust himself to turn and leave.
Doesn’t trust himself to do anything but stand there, watching the elegant curve of her neck and the way that the light reflects off the gold of it. He just stands there, burning with everything left unsaid.
BRIGADE
when I was a man I thought it ended when I knew love's perfect ache but my peace has always depended on all the ashes in my wake
07-08-2019, 09:57 PM (This post was last modified: 07-08-2019, 10:04 PM by Kensa.)
you could break my heart in two, but when it heals, it beats for you
It is what she wants. Kensa is relieved by his words, his voice softer and deep as calm waters. Its good she knows that beneath that is an undertow, a riptide that wants to all but drown her before throwing her back to shore diminished. Something has been taken from her, punishment for not listening to all the honesty he has given her and Kensa does not want to make the mistake again. Brigade at least can turn her away when she loses her head again.
Even though the sound of his voice ensnares her and summons a burn low in her belly.
If she touches him again she’ll lose all of the cold strength and dignity she’s managed in this encounter. No matter the temptation to brush a goodbye over his muzzle, a fuck you to make herself sick on, she needs to just walk away. Don’t even look at him again.
Kensa’s legs don’t want to move but she forces them to. They are long legs, fine but not frail, they have been pale all her life (despite how the rest of her has changed), lightly feathered at the fetlock, coronets of gold or chestnut above pale hooves. She watches her foot settle on frosted earth and if it takes a thousand steps to get herself home she will count every one to drown out her desperate heart.
When he says it she knows she should dismiss him but instead she breaks. Kensa breaks all the way down to her most honest and vulnerable self and she will hate him for it if she survives this. No one is supposed to see her like this but still she raises her head, lets herself see the violent hearts-blood beauty of him and she begs. “Please Brigade.”
“Please…”dont, but she doesn’t ever get the rest of it out. Kensa’s throat closes against asking him not to drag her in. The breeze that races and switchbacks through the hills whips her mane around her face and twists her tail about her cannons. Topaz eyes, wet once more, cannot be torn from his face. How easily she could have gone home, escaped without ever meeting him again and now Kensa only understands that she will never be free.
How desperately she wants to never be free.
Perhaps he is always to find himself trapped within the gale winds that find his heart; perhaps he is always to create these storms that later suffocate him. He knows that he is the harbinger of all of the destruction in his life and yet he finds it is so much easier to blame others. It is so much easier to blame Castile for not just giving him access to the healers when he needed it. Blame Kensa for playing these games with his head. Blame Brinly for triggering such a reaction in him and pushing him over the edge.
Always someone else’s fault and never his own.
But staring at her, the tears wet on her delicate cheeks and the plea just resting on the edge of her tongue, he is so acutely aware of his own downfall and the part that he has played in this, that he can’t look away. He can see the way that she looks at him and he knows that it is his own fault. He can see the way that she must feel, and he knows that there’s no one to blame here except for himself and what he has done.
He would curse if he could say anything at all.
Instead, he feels all the words stop up his throat and all of the apologies that he somehow can’t form rest there acutely on his face. “What do you want from me, Kensa?” he finally manages, his voice torn on the edges and raw. “I don’t know what you want me to do.” He only knows all of the different ways that he could fail her; all of the different ways that he has messed everything up and they have barely met.
Give him an inch of rope, he would surely hang them both.
Couldn’t she see that?
BRIGADE
when I was a man I thought it ended when I knew love's perfect ache but my peace has always depended on all the ashes in my wake
you could break my heart in two, but when it heals, it beats for you
How should this have gone? Is there a world in which she could want someone the way she wants him, where each of them is flint to the others steel but without all the things that keep them apart? Kensa doesn’t understand him or why he can look at her like she is a detestable thing and still make her want to crawl beneath his skin.
She shouldn’t want to. This shouldn’t be happening at all. She knows that even if she cannot understand his reasons for rejecting their attraction she sees all the complications rising up around herself. Still she lets her heart ebb toward him. If Brigade had been simpler, fallen to her wiles or been utterly dismissive of her she might not have been trapped. Kensa feels the way she claws toward him and it is wrong. Already she has given her heart and to only one. No matter how she uses her body, the feelings and the attachment are fleeting. The lines might muddy sometimes (Starsin is a blurred line, a little confusion) but other than those rare occasions where she could find something more in her heart if she leaned into it Kensa is emotionally chaste. Until Brigade.
There is no leaning, not even away, and Kensa sees all the broken glass on the road ahead of her and steps out of her shoes anyway.
A bitter laugh escapes her as they continue to echo their last encounter, backward and more confused than before. It’s difficult not to come apart but one tear has already snuck out of her flooded eyes and swiftly fallen. A million answers to those two questions run through her mind and if she screamed in his face like a harpy instead of managing to speak, she would not have surprised herself.
“Things I shouldn’t...” Sometimes saying something aloud can numb its power even when Kensa should be listening to any and every fear of what he could do her heart and body. Other things she can say aloud and feel how the come alive on her tongue, truths more powerful than she wants them to be. “It was too late for me the moment I heard your name.” Its too late for a lot of things. Her words are harder than she means them to be, thick with tears and Kensa’s nostrils flare as she draws a steadying breath full of the scent of him. Topaz eyes make a slow search of Brigade’s face before a thrill of madness makes her speak again, fiercer. “Tell me what you see when you look at me. I want you to tell me what made you look at me like that last summer… and then, once you’ve done that.” The thundering of her heart combined with the tightening of her chest leaves little room for her to breathe so that next words hitch. “I want you to fucking kiss me.”
It’s been a long time since she’s been willing to admit it to herself but she really is a stupid girl.
This is a mistake. It’s a horrible, horrible mistake and he can’t stop himself from leaning into it. He is so young and so foolish and she is beautiful and wild and unattainable. She has the kind of qualities that both drive him away and pull him in; she has the kind of face he could dream about for years. He feels his heart thundering in his chest and his face hardens, brows drawing together, mouth pulled tight. He wishes that she would just leave already. He wishes that she would be gone so that he could breathe again.
But she doesn’t go.
She stays, pauses, and answers his hoarse question.
Her first answer stops his breath for a second and he bites the inside of his cheek until it bleeds, until he can taste the copper on his tongue and spreading throughout his mouth. It would be enough to undo him, but she does not stop with that. She continues and before he knows it, he’s taking a step toward her.
Restraint be damned, he thinks.
Let himself be damned.
“I see someone beautiful,” he says, because it’s obvious, but the shallow words feel weak on his tongue and his face almost turns with disgust. “And you’d think that’s what makes me want you but it’s not that. It’s the fact that you run an entire damn land and never even thought to mention it. It’s the fire in your eyes and the way it’s so fucking clear that you’re the smartest person in the room but would never admit it.” He laughs and it’s almost a bitter sound. “It’s the fact that you’d as soon slit my throat as kiss me.”
Another step toward her and something subtle changes on his face—maybe it’s surrender to the undertow or maybe it’s giving up or maybe it’s something else entirely but it changes him. “You’re a mystery that I can’t figure out and I’ve thought about it a lot, Kensa.” Another step and he moves painfully slow even though he can feel the tension like a rope ready to snap in his chest. “I want to keep trying.”
And then he reaches down, letting his teeth bite at the corner of her mouth and then claiming it.
BRIGADE
when I was a man I thought it ended when I knew love's perfect ache but my peace has always depended on all the ashes in my wake
07-12-2019, 01:23 AM (This post was last modified: 07-22-2019, 06:53 PM by Kensa.)
you could break my heart in two, but when it heals, it beats for you
Beauty.
It is the first thing he noticed as she should expect, but there is something so raw about their connection (already… and it terrifies her) that a fleeting shame dashes through her belly. She would hate to trap him with that, he is not a little lizard to fall into her pitcher, to be consumed and left to rot in the darkness of her endless heart. ...but its not that.
How wide and clear, fierce and terrified are her eyes as he speaks. There is heat in her cheeks. Kensa realizes she had not believed he had actually thought of her. Brigade has not given her lies but he has taught her to expect him to push away and scorn her. Despite the foreboding her gold freckled face does not change, she will meet him with fury before she cowers from his cruelty. The fact that he knows that would make her laugh too if she weren’t barely able to breathe from waiting on the rest.
Brigade is masculine and intense and she realized all too late that she would not be able to escape his gravity. She’s told him she doesn’t understand him, and knows she is far from being able to say she does. Once more he shows her his maelstrom and this time she looks into the depths and her lips part in awe. How beautiful and terrible is the churning sea within this man.
He comes closer and she should tell him that she is not such a mystery, should say what a selfish, reckless disaster she is. Her neck arches, muscles quivering, nostrils flared, perhaps this anxious motion will be turned to defending herself, claiming a scrap of him for herself when he rejects her again but she isn’t thinking about that when he speaks again. A raised hoof settles back to the earth, and she breathes his name so softly that it is not a word at all.
This kiss is so like the first but she is not as stunned this time and surges up to meet him. Those tears she tried so hard to hold spill down her cheeks, freed when she closes her eyes against the brightness of the day to kiss him back and kiss him again. She isn’t a sobbing fool, her damp cheeks gain no new tear tracks. Kensa’s kisses press to the line of his jaw, then part to catch at his skin. Her heaving chest presses to the broad expanse of his own, her lips brushing the sensitive skin beneath his right ear. “Don’t let this stop.” Whispered, and though she can speak with command she gives him her vulnerability instead before pulling that ear through her teeth only barely gentle.
