"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 cremello chokes on the question, golden eyes panicked and searching when he lurches from a fitful sleep. He has asked himself that everyday since he and Kensa parted. Why? Why tear me to shreds and then take what little I had left? Why push me away? He cannot even begin to piece together what his once lover’s reasons were - he just knows that he is full of pain, of ache, of a poison that will not paralyze him fast enough.
Litotes has spent his time avoiding Starsin. Most days, he sneaks into Loess and whickers for the twins to come say hello. They will trot after him faithfully, but the suspicious eye of Draco haunts him. The boy can tell his mother of every broken piece of his heart, Lie knows this, but some foolishly trusting part of him believes the demon to hold his father in higher regard. Maybe his poorly reassuring “I’m going to talk to her” actually does work, though Draco can see through those empty words to the fear that resides beneath them.
I cannot avoid her forever, he thinks as his head hangs low to the ground soon after forcing himself to his hooves. Both sullen eyes peer upward, cautiously examining the scenery as Pangea fades into the rainbow of autumn that Hyaline is. He skirts the border, curling his lip and baring his teeth at the constantly lingering scent of Kensa.
There is anger there, so much fucking anger. He knows he is not done with her, at least not until he screams at her that her lack of regret will never fucking matter, because she has always been chosen by him. She has nothing to regret. He wants to fade into his lion just to stalk her, roar in her face and banish her from the East; but, he does not, even as his hackles raise in suppressed fury.
Loess is around him before he realizes it, and Starsin is before him before he can mask himself in shadow. Litotes rears his head back, eyes guarded as he takes three steps backward. “Starsin,” he grumbles, her name harsher and colder and much more of a growl than he means it to be. There is no anger, and there is not a void of emotion; there is only caution and the tiniest glimmer of fear.
He breaks, though. He breaks like he always does when he is around her. She has never been easy to resist.
“Why did you do this to me?”
i don't want your pity, i just want somebody near me guess i'm a coward, i just want to feel all right
and let me crawl inside your veins. I'll build a wall, give you a ball and chain.
Her games had a way of catching up with her. Or rather, they had a way of twisting and morphing until she wasn’t sure where her game ended and her reality began.
Lie had tangled himself into her reality without her even realizing it. She had never intended for him to be anything other than another piece on the playing board. She isn’t sure when it happened; isn’t sure when she started to care, when he became an actual friend. She remembers the first time she had felt that fierce flare of protectiveness when the east continued to wrong him, but then they dared to keep coming to Loess just to tell him why they thought he was wrong. She remembers how if she could have, if she had wielded such powers at that time, she thinks she would have leveled the entire east to ash and dust. Her mistrust for them never really faded, even though he stood now in his rightful place as their king.
She supposes, though, this makes her a hypocrite.
She has wronged him in ways that the east never could. A knife in the back from her, she is sure, was far worse than a cut from someone you already expected to betray you.
It has been months since she felt any sort of real peace. Ophanim was gone, because of her she is certain, and everything with Lie had felt so strange and uneasy since the twins had been conceived. Her conversation with Brigade had left her simmering, but she had swallowed that fury away. She would deal with Kensa later, but there was a large part of her that felt like she was being engulfed by her guilt. Guilt because Lie never knew about that day with Kensa at the river, guilt because she had situated herself right in between Brigade and Kensa, and guilt because she hadn’t told Lie what she knew.
But nothing compared to the shift that had taken place recently. They had been civil before, at least, and not avoiding each other when they traded their time with the twins. But in the last several weeks, she has not caught so much of a glimpse of him. She wasn’t entirely stupid. He knew where to find her, if he wanted to; she was always either in Loess or Sylva. And since Draco and Dove moved so fluidly between them, he would have to try to not see her. The thought caused her to flash between anger and hurt, and there was no telling what she was feeling at any given moment. The emotions were often one in the same for her, regardless.
The day that he finally comes face to face with her, it is anger that greets her first.
It flares up in her veins, like an ember catching just enough wind to fuel itself into a flame, and it glows in the darkness of her blue eyes. She can feel her tongue begin to grow sharp, and she is ready to lash at him, until she actually looks at him. Until she listens to his thoughts, and she falters.
The fire dies, leaving only regret and shame in its wake. Her jaw clenches, but only in some halfway effort to keep the emotion from reflecting on her face. “I’m sorry,” her voice doesn’t sound as soft as she wishes it did. There is a clip to it, because she isn’t ready to break in front of him yet, but even though her face is set into hard lines, she never has been able to shield everything from him. Her eyes have already lost their spark, and only the guilt was visible there now. “I don’t have an explanation, and I won’t give you any excuses.” She knows too well that the excuses mean nothing. They don't erase what happened, they don't ease the hurt. If anything, they dig the wound deeper.
She looks at him, at the shadows of hurt that still linger there, and she wonders, not for the first time, when she will stop hurting anyone that ever bothered to care about her. “I don’t know how to do things right, Lie. Not friendship, not love. I fuck everything up that I touch, and I’m sorry that I did it to you, too.”
starsin
it’s not like me to be so mean. you’re all I wanted. ( just let me hold you Like a hostage. )
The fight Litotes felt the night he and Starsin made love returns with a furious vengeance. He stares the space-girl down with a cold-heartedness he did not know he possessed. What can she say to him that can right this wrong? What can he say to her that can change their fates? They were always doomed, from the beginning, and the King falls into a mourning deeper than the deepest trench.
He is losing a connection, a friendship, one of the few things he treasures. He does not know how to forgive her, or Kensa, or himself.
Instead, the cremello drifts into that same bitterness he has known his whole life, except now it is overwhelmingly disgusting - and it begs to send bile up his throat. A small part of him rages against such a submission. Allowing this bitterness to take control would mean returning to that Hyalinian lake and dying beneath the dark surface. He thinks it would not be so bad if he could turn back time and pretend he did not notice Kensa. Would he have died, or would they have met differently? Less romantically? Would they have defied fate?
“You’re not sorry,” he whispers, so low she will not be able to hear it but the thought is loud and clear in his mind. You’re not. And maybe she is - Litotes cannot pick through her brain like she picks through his, but staring at her in all of her raw regret and beauty, he cannot help but to think someone so cutting feels no regret.
Which is silly, of course. Starsin is like a piece of him. He knows her intentions even if he will never know the full truth.
Litotes gulps as she blames herself, anger lighting a fire in his belly. The surge of flame dies as quickly as it appears, leaving him feeling hollowed out, like Starsin scooped all of his organs from his inside and ate them like the predator she is. “Stop,” he says, choking on the single syllable that should save him. “Please. I . . .” His voice wavers, and he fucking hates himself for it - hates himself for always being so vulnerable with someone that can take whatever she pleases from him. “I knew you could never love me. I knew I would always be second best. But third best? Or is there another? Fourth best? Fifth? Am I a notch in the bedpost of your games?” He stops, fury like a hot iron branding his eyes, three tears just as hot dripping down his face. “Why do you want me around, Starsin? Why - fuck - me?” Pain enunciates each word, and he wishes it didn’t. “You don’t love me, you never have. I’m not Ophanim, or your fucking reflection. God, did you tell Kensa you loved her, too? Did you organize the destruction of my relationship so I can remain your toy?”
The air is still between them when he finally stops, shock from his own searing words obvious in his gaze. Litotes takes several steps back, chest aching with the weight of his mistakes.
“Good job, Starsin,” he murmurs, blank-eyed. “I love you like I love Kensa, and now you’ve taken both from me. I hope my crushed love keeps you warm at night.”
i don't want your pity, i just want somebody near me guess i'm a coward, i just want to feel all right
and let me crawl inside your veins. I'll build a wall, give you a ball and chain.
For one who loved games and manipulation, she had never predicted this.
She could have never imagined that one day he would be the one standing before her, that they would be the ones staring at each other with bruised eyes and fractured hearts. She had never planned on them becoming so twisted and tangled, and never would she have wanted him to be the one staring at her with such a coldness. Vadar had grown to hate her, and it had hurt, but only in that moment. He had been her first taste at humiliation, the first to flip the tables on her, but she was surprised at how quickly that fury faded. So much has happened that he rarely crossed her mind – not even in Sylva, where he had tried to kill her, had sex with her, and left her.
He was like a papercut, but Lie’s seething anger was like being split wide open.
The way he snaps at her and tells her that she is not sorry causes her to flinch, and this is when her resolve first begins to falter. But she sets her jaw tightly, her dark blue eyes growing cold and hard in an attempt to fight off the way she was splintering apart on the inside. She could handle Vadar, Brigade, even Kensa hating her. She could deal with nearly the entire world turning against her, but not if he turned, too.
She shakes her head against the barrage of his words, her heart leaping into her throat but she swallows it back down. “You know absolutely none of that is true. I’m sorry about Kensa. It was before me and you were….it was before we were anything.” She doesn’t even know what to call them. Doesn’t even know what to say they were, because she doesn’t know what they are. She can’t let herself think about it, because letting herself acknowledge they were, or ever could have been anything adds another painful twist to the story, another impossible complication. “But even then I never should have done it, and I’m sorry. I can’t fix it. I can’t change it. I should have told you, I know.”
He is chiseling away at her, relentlessly, and she can’t find the strength to keep him out. Her eyes blink rapidly but they still darken to an impossible blue with the tears that fill them, and her voice weakens and breaks. “You were never apart of my game. You have always known the real me, every single part of me. Every part of me that’s bad and good, I’ve never kept anything from you and nothing has been fake.” She steps towards him, even though she thinks he will continue to pull away. She fights the urge to reach for him, and instead she just watches him, with a gaping chasm full of mistakes resting between them. “It doesn’t matter if I love you, it doesn’t matter what either of us feel, because it’s not going to work. I would never leave Ophanim, and you know that. Just like I know that I would have always been second best to Kensa.” There is a watery tremble to her voice that she desperately tries to keep away, and she feels foolish for letting herself crumble. He was already so convinced that everything she had done and said was an act that she doesn’t expect him to trust the genuine way she is slowly shattering.
starsin
it’s not like me to be so mean. you’re all I wanted. ( just let me hold you Like a hostage. )
Stars die in space constantly: thousands and thousands of years away infinitesimally small balls of gas burn out, or explode, or are reborn. Even in their death, their energy lives on. Their matter becomes another. Perhaps something purple, or orange, peach and green and red - matter desperate to become something else blossoms into a rainbow of impossible to imagine options. “Made of stardust” - isn’t that the silly phrase they whisper to each other in a universe far, far away from the pair of dying minds? Maybe if they had a god he would comfort them; but alas, they continue to face off in their selfish pain, unaware they are of the kinds of things that live past their desire-filled lives.
“Please stop,” he whispers as Starsin talks, closing his eyes tight against the sight of her breaking. His legs carry him a step backwards, head shaking back and forth with the weight of all of this knowledge. Ignorance calls to him with a soft hand and a gentle cusp of his cheek, telling him that life will be easy again if he just does not know . . . Stop, stop, stop, he thinks; but all of the sugar of their forbidden indulgences rots his teeth, and he cannot spit another rebuttal.
A scream builds in the back of Lie’s throats. His eyes fly open to reveal the stark red of shot vessels against the dangerous gold of his irises. When he opens his mouth to respond, nothing comes out - nothing until something finally does, a choked gasp, a last ditch arrow of fury:
“What the fuck do you know of Kensa?” The snarl is unforgiving, and his eyes go as hard as iron. The flats of his teeth grow to dangerous points, and he meets her approach with a deadly grace. “You know of the rose-colored tint I used to see her in? And you know the way she tastes? You know nothing, Starsin. For someone that can read minds, I never expected you to be so fucking narrow-minded.” He breathes in a shaky gasp, though it is not of pain but of all-encompassing anger and confusion, for even he does not know exactly what leaves his mouth. “Look at our last moments together, Starsin. Look.” He drags them to the front of his mind, relives the pain of Kensa’s robbery all to cruelly share it.
And he breaks, again and again, against the rocks of his lovers’ oceans.
Tears streak unbidden down his cheeks, and the lips that were raised in a growl begin to quiver. His eyes no longer carry a sword.
“She took and took and . . .” he chokes, “I was never enough. Please don’t tell me how I feel, Starsin. You . . . you have no idea.” His head falls to her neck, leaving Lie to hold his breathe against the sweet smell of her skin.
i don't want your pity, i just want somebody near me guess i'm a coward, i just want to feel all right
and let me crawl inside your veins. I'll build a wall, give you a ball and chain.
It’s almost a relief to find that the true root of his anger and pain stems from Kensa and not from her. It was selfish of her, perhaps, to be grateful that the sword turns towards another, and is no longer pointed at her own throat. But in the confusion of heightened emotions she has not been combing through every thought that passes through him. She does not realize that she, herself, had been a tipping point in the relationship of Kensa and Lie. Her feelings towards the gold-laced mare had been less romantic and driven more by lust, but of course she had cared for her. Kensa was an extension of Lie, in her mind, but she had made the egregious mistake of getting too involved with her.
Lie offers her his memories of his last fight with Kensa, and she feels like her chest is caving in. She tries to listen to as much as she can, but she finds herself blocking much of it out, shaking her head to rid her mind of their heated voices. Starsin, Starsin, Starsin, they spit her name over and over, and if she had not been aware of the severity of her mistake, she is aware now. “I’m sorry,” she whispers again, meek and unable to meet his stare.
She doesn’t look enough to see that Brigade is not apart of their fight. She doesn’t look enough to see that Lie doesn’t know about the other half of this equation, another barb to be stabbed in his chest.
Her breath leaves her lungs in a sharp gasp when he is suddenly against her, and she cannot help the instinctive way her neck curls around his. “Lie,” she whispers his name like an apology, pulling him in as though she could somehow rid him of all the hurt in that way. She moves to brush her muzzle against the dampness of his cheek, tasting the salt of tears on her lips, before once again settling against him. “I don’t know why Kensa is being the way that she is. I don’t know why she never told Brigade about you, I don’t know why she was so quick to walk away from you.”
She doesn’t realize what she is saying – she doesn’t realize that she is slowly digging a new wound into his heart, that she is going to fracture him further, because she had not read far enough into his mind. She has wrongfully assumed that if they fought about her, they fought about Brigade, too. If she had known this wasn’t the case, if she had known she was walking across a minefield, she would not have so carelessly dropped a grenade right in the middle of it. “She’s going to wake up eventually, though. She’s going to wake up and realize she lost you, and she’s going to regret it.”
starsin
it’s not like me to be so mean. you’re all I wanted. ( just let me hold you Like a hostage. )
All alone on his throne of loneliness Litotes sits, even in these moments when he should be sharing his pain. What rage he possessed has been burned up; now he is hollowed out and disgusting, sweating and unwashed against the raging wind of solitary kingdom. Those golden eyes that glittered with tears once again turn to stone; but this time they are empty stone, like man-made diamonds: hardly as valuable or cutting. He wants the comfort he feels from Starsin to be true, but time has not healed his wounds, and even just her smallest touch tears them even wider.
Still, he remains, statuesque and arched against her: eternal.
“Who is Brigade?” he whispers against her skin. It is a vulnerable question, one a child would ask; and that is what he feels like: a fucking child, once again in the dark on huge pieces of his lovers’ lives. Perhaps he has always been too naive to know of Kensa’s true inner workings, perhaps he has been in denial, perhaps he simply does not deserve to know. This, he wonders, as he feels absolutely nothing. He broke initially, that whisper a desperate insight to his bleeding heart, but he quickly forces himself to not care.
“Another secret to break my heart?” Now he smiles then steps back, eyes wild like lightning just before rain pours. “I am already torn in two, Starsin, all the way down the middle. Don’t feel bad for this accident.” He pauses and looks away, eyes closing on a heavy sigh. “Is he like me in her heart?”
i don't want your pity, i just want somebody near me guess i'm a coward, i just want to feel all right
and let me crawl inside your veins. I'll build a wall, give you a ball and chain.
She realizes her mistake quickly, and she wants to withdraw from him. Instead, she remains completely still, with hardly a breath escaping her lips. She rests her mouth against his neck at his question, and she can feel the way her heart begins to split along the cracks and fractures already formed. It wasn’t often that she made a mistake like this – entirely unknowing, as a result of an oversight on her part. She was always so busy picking through the pieces of his thoughts, trying to use them to decipher this unknown path they were both blindly treading, that it was nearly unfathomable that she could have slipped up like this.
“I thought you knew,” she finally says, her voice uncharacteristically quiet, almost fragile. “I’m so sorry, Lie, I shouldn’t have said anything.” He steps back from her, and she doesn’t follow. She could recognize the way he had begun to break, at first, and how he now had already steeled himself into something stronger, building a fortress around his hurt. She sees it, because she has done the same countless times.
“I can’t see feelings, only thoughts. Sometimes I can piece things together, when there’s a thought and an action. So I don’t...I can’t really tell you what she feels for him.” She pauses, unsure if she should continue. She holds his gaze with her own, with a nearly palpable sympathy and regret radiating from the depths of her eyes and into the lines of her face. “But Brigade...he only thought of her. And he didn’t know you existed.” Hesitantly, she reaches forward, touching her nose gently against his shoulder as she says softly, “I’m sorry.” But she knows all too well that no amount of apologies can mend broken hearts.
starsin
it’s not like me to be so mean. you’re all I wanted. ( just let me hold you Like a hostage. )
@[litotes]
so you definitely don't have to reply to this, I was meaning for it to be a closer. we can just assume now Lie knows most of what Starsin knows?
