"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
He blindly walks away from Starsin. He’s not even sure how he gets away.
At first, he thinks that he will give himself some time to get his thoughts together. He thinks that he will be able to hide himself away and lick his wounds—get some perspective and then find her. Or not. He thinks maybe he won’t ever find her again and just live out the rest of his days bitter and alone.
It’s what he was going to do before he found her anyway.
But there is something that stirs in his chest and before he can rationalize it away, his wings are flaring and he is in the sky. His pace is urgent and he feels his pulse rocketing, wings pounding powerfully as he continues to gain more and more speed. When he finally lands on the Hyaline border, the red of his coat has darkened and his neck is slick with sweat, but the physical exhaustion does little to break through.
He takes shaking steps forward and the red of his wings shift to match the colors of her, his feathers turning to gold and ivory and flaxen. He barely notices the change and only focuses on trying to continue moving forward, stepping further and further into a kingdom where he does not belong and he doesn’t know where he’s going. He only knows that he has to continue moving or he will fall apart.
When he finally sees her, his grey eyes are darkened with the storm and his expression scrubbed raw. He doesn’t move forward and crush her to him even though everything in him screams for it; instead he stands apart, the wings that still mimic her tightening at his sides and his antlered head remaining proud.
“Were you ever going to tell me?” he asks, his voice roughened on the edges.
He swallows hard and thinks about the ridge that she had told him about. About the places that he wanted to see with her—the places that he had dreamed of showing her.
“About Litotes?”
The name catches on his tongue and he has to break his gaze to stare at the ground, feeling the way that the muscles begin to shiver beneath the merlot of his coat, the tiny tremors threatening to tear him apart.
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
Kensa in the aftermath is a thing of unholy beauty. She glitters fiercely in the late summer light her heartbreak an underlying electricity. In the past the difficulties or losses have weakened or maddened her. It may be that it is easier to bear the destruction of what remained between herself and Litotes because it was by her own hand. She does not wonder what could be or what she missed this time, does not grieve to anyone or twist her mind into broken shards like she did once before. All of the agonies live inside her tangled together with shame and fury. There will be so much more, and the inferno will burn white hot in her before it finally comes loose and tries to level her. There is no one to tell, she thinks, and she is about to find out that even the one person who might understand her is far from safe. Starsin burns everything down around herself and Kensa has chosen to stand too close.
She does not hear the beat of his wings over the sound of the wind that whips through the peaks at intervals and makes the leaves of the trees themselves like flocks tethered on string. Too there is the noise of splashing from the lake, her sons sparring. Voices. These all drive her away from the central valley and the company she finds herself to be a poor partner for today. Life has continued, but all the normalcy sometimes rings in her ears.
In the expanse of open land that lies low between the last two mountains before one comes to Loess the grass is long and still green. Indian paintbrush bursts up amongst this in colonies of rich red. Normally there would also be snowy yarrow or yellow wallflower but this year there is only red, like blood stains dragged through the leaves of grass. His scent comes to her over the rippling meadowland and Kensa’s entire body sings with tension as she lifts her head to look for him. Her ragged heart raging against its own ache to beat a desperate rhythm.
Brigade’s wings once more mirror her coloring, but his pelt is darkened by sweat. He has come here in haste and she does not hesitate to go to him until he makes no move to meet her. Stopping Kensa stares at him in bewildered silence, whatever sanctuary she was expecting to find is closed to her and her mind does not have time to guess at why.
Litotes.
The chestnut and gold beauty had known in some part of herself that this would happen, that Brigade would need answers about who she is and what ties she already has but it had been easier to ignore it. She’d wanted to exist with only Brigade when they were together, without distraction or the guilt that grew the further she fell to her feelings for him. Her voice is clear and soft when she answers, though she doesn’t know what she’s going to say.
“I don’t know.” She isn’t listless, only honest when she admits this. “I should have already.” Is this too at an end? More destruction? Can she fit the ruins of this within herself too?
“You mean so much to me, Brigade. I had an entire life before we met and I would tell you every detail of it, if it would make up for this…” She should not be surprised that someone has told him but does not understand why they have. Why it should matter to anyone. Then there is guilt in the wondering, and she stops herself before she can come to the obvious conclusion, before the rage with which she will next meet Starsin can be born. Her heart is breaking to see is exhausted body quivering across the span between them. As wrong as it is to try and salvage this she tries anyway.
“Litotes and I are no longer together, but we were the night I found you in Loess.” He will have her honesty too, even if it hurts him too.
Brigade feels nearly blind with his grief, with his shame, with his confusion. It swirls through his chest until he feels bruised by it, until he feels the darkness of it wraps around his throat. He watches her and wonders at how he can feel so deeply for her—how he can desire nothing more than holding her close and pulling her into his chest like he did in Loess—and how it feels like knives to breathe next to her.
All of the storms that had quieted in her presence before stir into existence again, whipping through him until he is breathless with the power of it. Until he is choking on the debris and the thunder that pounds in his veins. “Yes,” his voice is harsh, cutting on his tongue and his grey eyes are darkened. “You should have.” It feels better to lash out—to let her feel the brunt of his anger instead of holding it in.
It reminds him of the first time they met, when they clashed, and he struggles to break apart the desire and the hurt and the anger that brew in him. He struggles to separate them and focus on only the fury.
He shakes his head as she speaks again, his nose wrinkling as he begins to breathe harder. “Do I?” his voice nearly breaks on the question, the words coming between gritted teeth. “Or was I just some distraction? Some puzzle that you had to win?” He does his best to shield his expression, to pull back the hurt that leaves him so vulnerable—open and raw before her—and it leaves his face hard, cruel.
His wings shift by his side again, dark as charcoal and jagged on the edges, and the tighter he holds them to his sides, the more he feels his flesh begin to protest. “Stop,” he manages as she confesses and his throat is raw, the word pained as he manages to say it. “Just stop, Kensa. Please.”
When he glances up again, his light grey eyes study her face in confusion—feeling that horrifying melding of want and loathing. “I thought I could—“ he stops. “I almost—“ again, the words die in his throat and he feels earthquakes run down his spine. “I thought that we..” but this dies too because he doesn’t know how to complete the sentence, how to let this final confession rest between them.
I thought I could love you.
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
08-17-2019, 07:22 PM (This post was last modified: 08-17-2019, 07:42 PM by Kensa.)
KENSA
we were golden. we were fire. we were magic.
She refuses to turn back the whip cords with their iron and bone braided in, because these are truth. So another man’s back splits and bleeds under the measured lash of her tongue. And still she will not lie. As if she might balance her past omissions with the brutality of honesty.
Stupid girl.
“No!” It is too ragged and she too remembers fighting any show of weakness before a hard man who refused the desire that burned between them. Kensa has crossed beyond that and her eyes are shining and intense. Brigade’s anger, his pain amplifies her own and she struggles for breath to fuel the words. “You were real. It was real! I just didn’t know how...” He doesn’t want to hear. His wings grow dark against his sides, the feathers splaying and crimping along his sides like the scales of a dropsied fish. It is an ugly horrible twisting pain and he has done nothing to be owed even a fraction of it.
The three steps she takes closer still leave a chasm between them but they tire her as much as a thousand. Its worse when he says these next words, when she knows how close they really had been in all that he does not say. Hot tears dash down her cheeks no longer to be held from her burning and unblinking eyes. Brigades hatred she will not be able to bear, not amplified by what it should have been instead except she was too early and he too late. She is the most honest liar in the world, and there is an evil in that blacker than almost any other. Kensa has only seen it after everything she cares for has already nearly burned away.
“I know, Brigade. Gods, don’t you think I know? Didn’t you feel everything I wanted for us? I couldn’t go no matter how much you tried to be rid of me.” It’s hard not to succumb to anger then, pointless and self-loathing. “I couldn’t. I wanted you and then I needed to be with you and the time between was an instant.” Nothing she says sounds right, it is all hollow and worthless before the look of confusion he wears. So instead she takes the remaining steps required to reach him, though she hardly remembers doing it once she is there within his reach. Kensa does not touch him, but speaks softly and waits for whatever punishment he will level upon her person. “You hated me that first day and if you do again now I understand. I am going to end up feeling for you either way. Some part of her hates the weakness, the submission of the words but Kensa does not stop, turns her topaz eyes away. “It was too late to tell you, and now it’s too late to stop.”
He wishes that he had hated her from the first instant that he saw her, when her beauty tore through is heart and left open chasm that she filled with her pride and her strength and her raw honesty. Now he is left, riddled with the bullet holes where she had passed; now, he is nothing but the spaces around it.
There is something like a groan in his throat when she presses closer to him and his eyes turn like the tides, the waves crashing up against the edges. “Don’t,” he croaks, but it’s a weak defense because she is so much closer than he thought when he opens his eyes again, because he can smell the perfume that is so unique her, because he can feel the warmth spread across his chest like some strange phantom pain.
“You wanted me?” he is incredulous now, wild with his pain, feral as he rides the crest of it. “You wanted me and didn’t care if it destroyed me? I was just a night for you—just an instant.” He wants to weaponize her words against her; he wants them to carve them up as she so deftly carved him, but they feel flimsy on his tongue. They are fragile compared to the roaring beast of pain that now crashes around him.
“This is why I fought it,” he says as he closes his eyes, swinging his antlered head—crazed with pain. “This is why I tried to stay away.” It’s not, he knows. He had fought it because he had distrusted himself and distrusted the way he could break them apart. He had never guessed that the doe-eyed beauty would be poison that slipped on his tongue. He never would have guessed that she would tear him apart.
Tears do not come, but he feels the pain of it squeeze around his heart. It wraps around his throat and he clenches his jaw until the muscles rope there and pain shoots between his teeth. She is so close and he breaks, groaning again as he reaches out for her blindly—always so helpless to stay away from her. So helpless in the face of her gravity. “Kensa, why,” he says as he buries his face in the blonde tresses of her mane. He presses searing kisses across her neck, possessive and brutal and gentle all at once.
“Why did you do this to me? Why?”
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
Brigade twists her words, turns on her like a beast prepared to claw her heart out. She should let him, and leave nothing for her to destroy anyone else with. “No that isn’t what I meant!” Though it is a fruitless protest. Kensa is frustrated with her tears and the way they choke her voice. Her head is pounding as the reality sets in and she fights back sobs, terrified of the wailing horror building in her chest. “I made a mistake…I...” Should have told him, should have let him escape right away or fuck her and then spurn the love she wants so much to pour out for him.
She had been afraid of Brigade, of what she could feel for him when in fact he should have feared her. Yes she is ravenous, but just like any hungry creature she fails to truly grasp the terror of her appetites, the violence left in the wake of her satisfaction. She is ever angrier with herself but when he shakes his antlered heat she raises her voice against him. “You did, did you? And yet you cannot understand why I would risk this pain to be with you?” The worthless argument dies on her tongue because Brigade is reaching for her, pressing kisses to her neck, a succession of hot desperate oaths.
She gives up trying to defend herself, his lips familiar but not familiar enough on her skin. Now Kensa sobs, presses in, burying her face against the merlot tangle of his mane so that her tears soak his skin. “I was selfish. I am so selfish.” The words fracture, grief crumpling them in her throat. “Brigade, I am sorry. I am so sorry.” She does not feel forgiveness in the heat of his touch, only pain like electricity looking for a way to the ground. The tears flow freely down her cheeks, and they are tears for Brigade, they they are tears for other agonies that she thought she could allow to dry up, unshed. “I wish…” It doesn’t matter that she wishes she could do it over again, she tastes the bitter selfishness this time. Kensa silences herself and instead presses in to his broad chest, before he remembers himself and shoves her shivering frame away.
She folds into him and—oh—he wants to hold her. Everything in him wants to just grab her and crush her to him, to hold her close and remind her that this is right and natural. Remind her of the fire that lives between them. But she’s crying and it only crushes him further. It breaks him clean in two and he wants to hate her—wants to push her away and run. He needs to be out of here. He needs to be gone.
“I wanted to be more to you,” he groans it, low and deep in his throat. His kisses slow and he just closes his eyes to listen to the sound of the tide of his pulse. For a second, he just stills and lets the silence grow until it consumes him. “I wanted—I just wanted to be more.” He wishes he could cry; wishes that the dam would break so that it could crash down around him. Maybe he’d drown in it. Maybe he’d—
His thoughts fracture and he feels her against his chest but he stands still, like a statue, like a cliff, and she is the storm that presses into him. He feels the way his body wants to give out in protest; he feels the way that she consumes him and he realizes in this moment that he was a fool to ever think that he could survive this. He was a fool to think that he would be strong enough to get away unscathed.
Finally, he breaks again, but this time, his body does not split open on passion. Instead, he quiets and he just holds her to his chest. His heart thunders in his throat and he feels anguish twist around him so that he can barely breathe. “It doesn’t matter.” He wraps his neck around her and he knows that it’s a goodbye because he couldn’t keep breathing if it wasn’t. “I don’t deserve beautiful things, Kensa. I never have.”
He swallow hard and there’s an apology somewhere in the regret.
“This is my fault. I should have let you walk away that day. I should have known better.”
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
His quiet is somehow worse, his pain louder without the gnashing and tension. She can feel his resignation knows that soon he will let go and leave her and she wonders how she will stand when he goes. Or how she will stand herself. Before he’d come here Kensa had thought she could live on her anger and pain a while, let it feed her ambitions until she could let herself feel again. The difference now is...she recognizes what terrible things she has done to a man who loved her, and a man who would have.
Would have, just as she would have.
No, she is just not saying something again. A little omission to keep him safe. Once more self-awareness buries its hatchet in her ribs and Kensa is breathless. The tears would start again if there were any left. She presses her lips to his shoulder, but remains silent until Brigade embraces her and his words wash over her. Her chestnut shoulders tense. “I am not a beautiful thing.” Her bitter reply comes with a slow and nearly impossible step back, out of his embrace. Her words are juxtaposed against the glitter of gold around her ochre eyes which she levels on him once more. “You deserve the love of a truly beautiful woman, one who is not so pleased with her twisted heart.” Kensa reaches out to once more smooth his forelock across his forehead, to let her lips press tenderly to the ridge of his cheekbone.
“You are beautiful Brigade.” Words she cannot keep from saying knowing even as she does that he will hate them. That he will not understand. Just as he does not understand that it would have been impossible for her to stay away from him forever, that it still might be. This is a punishment she will suffer gladly and thinking of that Kensa kisses him again, though she should not. Let them tell themselves it is a kiss goodbye, hurried and unexpected just as the first.
This would be so much easier if he did not know the beautiful complexities of her heart. This would be so much easier if he had only cared about her gilded beauty—about the kind of beauty that lures men to their deaths and draws boats to the shore. If only she was a lighthouse and he would gladly crash on the rocks around her. If only he lusted after her; if only it was pure desire. It would be so much easier to lie to himself and sever himself from that kind of need. This would be so much simpler—so much cleaner.
But he knows that it’s more than that.
He knows that the wild tangles and thorns of his heart wanted—want—so much more.
They quiet, and he wishes they could have remained there in the storm. Instead, they live here in the eye of it and he can almost lie to himself that this is the end. He can almost pull himself and walk away—or, rather, he can lie to himself and say that he can. Because the truth is that he has never been capable of walking away from her. He has never been able to sever the connection that sprung up so quickly.
“I’ve only wanted the love of one,” he says, defeated, closes his storming eyes as he lets her lips move across the broad swath of his face. He doesn’t counter her compliment, even though he knows it’s not true. Even though he knows just how ugly and needy his heart is and how much he would devour her. Even now. But before he can draw in another breath, her mouth is on his and he returns it.
He doesn’t try and pull away or turn the edge of it into something ugly. Let him have this moment, he lies, as he deepens it and as his teeth pull at her lip, biting and then releasing. He swallows hard and lets his mouth wander from hers up the side of her face, crawling her jaw, and slipping to her throat.
This should have been forever, he thinks, as he moves closer, his chest meeting her own.
This should have been forever, he wants to cry, as his teeth graze across her shoulder and to her spine.
This should have been mine.
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
There is a longing whimper in Kensa’s throat when Brigade returns the kiss and his teeth capture her lip. He feels familiar and exciting, beauty and danger mingled seductively. When he releases her and his lips pass over her jaw, seek the warm tender pulse at her throat her eyes flutter open. His last words are still fresh in her mind. Maybe what she says next is selfish too, but it doesn’t feel it. The admission is painful, like stripping herself down before him and waiting for a blow.
“You already have it.”
Kensa does not say the words sadly or desperately, but with her battered heart behind them entirely. Then she presses herself into his chest and accepts whatever will come of him knowing this truth that like all the others wants to be a danger to both of them. It does not eclipse other loves as she had expected it to, but becomes something all its own and she does not try to look at it too long...Not when his teeth are grazing her shoulder, reaching back along the curve of her spine and sending a shiver through to the ends of every nerve.
Her lips press against the perfect curve of his merlot neck. He will be finished with her after this, and so she will make her love for him the torment she deserves by consummating what she feels and being cast aside. It is all the justice she can give to him. Her teeth catch at his mane above his withers, tugging him as close as she can. Then her kisses blaze over his broad shoulder, each hungrier than the last.
Breathless she presses her cheek to his neck, breathing in the warmth of his scent and making one last decision. A toss of her head pulls Kensa back from him, just enough, just enough to turn her face in toward his to let him see she means this.
