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    COTY

    Assailant -- Year 226

    QOTY

    "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


    [private]  the ghosts that we knew,
    #1

    I never cared for anyone so much. I was born with a bomb inside my gut.

    There is a pulse in the earth.
    If she stands still enough, she swears she can feel it.

    Never mind that it compounds the ache in her chest. Never mind that sometimes she holds her breath so long that it makes her vision swim. Never mind that she can never seem to make anything last. Can never make anyone – including herself – stay.

    She has tried to smile. Every once in awhile she has opened her mouth to strike up a conversation with a stranger only for them to skirt just out of earshot, unaware that she’d even been there at all. She inherited this from her father, too. This great well of sadness at the very center of her. She’s lost all of his kindness, the softness he had pressed into her bones in the earliest days, when it had just been them. When she could still remember what his voice sounded like.

    She has nothing left of him now except this. The loneliness that spreads like disease through her veins. Even now, as she moves slow toward the river. And perhaps she ventures there because it is where she’d found Velkan after weeks of searching for him. Because it is the last place she felt any rippling of happiness in that vast sea of sadness.

    He is not here now and whatever flowers might have bloomed along the bank are buried beneath a thick blanket of snow. She hopes that he’s safe and warm, wherever he is. There is a thin sheet of ice along the shoulder of the river and she edges her way across, slow and careful, to dip her mouth into the water and drink. The water, frigid, burns all the way down. Festers in her gut.

    The ice splinters under her feet and she scurries backward, a frightened gasp lodged in the aching column of her throat as she casts herself away from the river’s edge.

    lilian

    Reply
    #2

    Brigade should be happy, but he cannot stop the way that his soul continues to shatter beneath the weight of reality. He cannot stop the way that he spends hours looking into the wilderness or studying the way that the river thrashes and feeling that strange kinship with it. He feels it like a gravity in the morning. He feels it and does not resist the way that it tugs him forward, pulling him into the endless darkness.

    He does not have rhyme or reason to his path.

    His antlered head swings as he levels out, as his pace picks up and his hooves thunder against the ground. The sun rises and he barely notices it. His wings turn to bramble and thorn and press to his side because he has no desire to take to the skies. Not today. Not when he needs the solid earth beneath him to remind him that he’s real. To remind himself that there’s a connection here; that he hasn’t turned to dust yet.

    It is only when he reaches the river that he pauses.

    The air is bitter and his lungs sting and he turns toward the water when he sees her. There is something about her—that strange, delicate sadness that catches his attention. He frowns, a movement that passes over his wild features like a storm and then washes clean. When he sees the ice begin to crack beneath her, he feels his pulse spike dangerously in his throat and he springs forward just as she flings herself backward. It’s over nearly before it began but the fear for the stranger awakens something in him.

    “What were you thinking?” the words are hot and blistering and he’s spitting them before he can stop himself. He hates the way that he studies he face, the way his heart thunders in his chest.

    “You can’t walk on the ice when it’s this thin. Were you trying to get yourself killed?"

    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

    Reply
    #3

    I never cared for anyone so much. I was born with a bomb inside my gut.

    There is one singular moment when she thinks the sound of his voice is the ice breaking.
    It crashes around her all the same.
    It wedges the same terror into the empty space around her hard-beating heart.

    It sends her reeling, skittering away from the sound of it so that she puts a back foot through the ice and the cold spurs her back up the bank. She burns hot with shame as she clumsily thrusts a wide berth between herself and the river’s edge. She swallows thickly, so embarrassed that she cannot bring herself to look at him. She presses her mouth tightly closed and studies the ice where she’d nearly fallen through.

    Had he called out to her before or after she’d collapsed in on herself and lunged for the bank? His anger seeps into the marrow of her bones, rakes her throat raw. She blinks, uncertain why an apology alights on her tongue. She is a scorned child, several years removed from her youth, but hanging her head regardless.

    Was she trying to get herself killed? Finally, she summons up the nerve to meet his eye. Is she surprised by what she finds there? Her chest is still heaving with fear and adrenaline and something else, too. Something she doesn’t know. “I-,” she begins and then sews her mouth up tight again. Her voice quivers and she shakes her head. The antlers make her think of Velkan and how her joy had filled her to bursting and she squeezes her eyes shut so tightly that they ache.

    I wasn’t thinking,” she whispers, thinking this is somehow better than the string of apologies that line her throat. “I didn’t mean anything. I didn’t...” But there is nothing to the thought and it ends there, abruptly.

    lilian

    Reply
    #4

    It is easier to be angrier at someone else than angry at himself.

    It’s so much easier to harness the anger, the confusion, and let it point outward. It’s so much easier to just let it unravel and maybe it is that relief that lets him forget any sense of common decency that his parents had tried to teach him. He had once been kind, he thinks somewhere in the back of his mind. He had once been wild but joyful; he had known what it meant to be gentle with strangers, to be concerned.

    To not so easily unlock the fury that simmers behind his heart.

    But he is a wild, feral thing now and he reacts to his pain like it. He lets it leave him furious and cruel because it is so much easier to be angrier at her than angry at himself. It is so much easier to be angry with her than be honest and admit that he had actually been afraid for a stranger—he had cared.

    The fact that she reacts the way that she does, nearly afraid and then apologetic, does nothing to slow down the heat that tears through him like a storm. “No, you were obviously not thinking,” he snaps and then he jerks his head. “We need to step back. You need to get to away from the ice,” he nearly nudges her, nearly forces her back and would carry her to the solid ground if he could.

    When they are far enough away that he no longer is concerned about immediate danger, he is surprised to know that his pulse still races. Maybe it melds dangerously with his exhaustion or his confusion about the current state of his life, but he doesn’t question it. Instead his stormy eyes cut back to her, studying her without blinking, without shielding her from the full force of his intensity.

    “Why were you out on the ice in the middle of winter?”

    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

    Reply
    #5

    I never cared for anyone so much. I was born with a bomb inside my gut.

    She could go.
    She could turn tail and run.

    She could plunge herself into the freezing river because she thinks that maybe it would be easier to weather than his fury. It dams up her mouth, arrests the air in her lungs, knocks the earth off its axis. It roots her to the earth there in front of him. She couldn’t run even if she tried, she knows, had been foolish to even entertain the thought.

    She knows it in the way she follows him away from the river’s edge, hoping that her knees will give out. She trembles. Not from the cold but from the dark thing surging through her. This foolish thing that keeps her steeped in his anger.

    How remarkable that she should be so starved for attention that she will duck her head into this storm, let it crash over her in waves, let it hollow out her bones. Because no one has spoken to her in weeks and she has begun to rot and rust. Because negative attention is better than no attention at all.

    Her breath is thin, burns her lungs, and she forces herself to meet his eye. The question is simple enough and so is the answer. She’d been thirsty and the river was the nearest source of water. A more complicated answer is that she hadn’t known anywhere else to look for it. It has been so long now since her father walked with her through this land, sharing with her its storied past. Even if she could remember all of the places he’d told her to look for help, it wouldn’t matter. Everything has changed and the people with it.

    I’m sorry,” she says instead, finally letting slip one of the apologies that has pulsed at the base of her throat for so many months now that she’s surprised it doesn’t come out rancid. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to disturb you.

    lilian

    Reply
    #6

    He is looking at her but he is seeing Brinly’s face as they raged at each other. He is seeing Kensa and the way she snapped. He is seeing Vastra and her wildness and then Brunhilde and her venom. He is seeing Lilliana and the way she had broken beneath his cruelty. He is seeing Wonder and the disappointment that would paint her expression black. It makes his throat dry, this ache that spreads through him.

    This realization of the monster he has become.

    It snaps his mouth shut and he swallows hard, his tongue suddenly swollen. He would bite down until he severed it clean off because he had no right to talk to anyone—not any longer.

    His grey eyes focus and although his face does not soften—the edges and cliffs of his it do not suddenly become gentle—the storm rages just a little less. He is quiet as he studies her, as he lets the silence between them stretch and he just watches her. Sees the way that she crackles beneath the pressure of his anger and so quickly bends to it. The way that she apologies but stands still, doesn’t run from him.

    It lights his curiosity just a little—enough to dull the keen edge of his self-hatred.

    “You didn’t disturb me,” he sighs, bitter and defeated. “I was coming to get a drink when I saw you…” his voice trails off and his wings shift by his side, turning from that thorn and leaf into the red down feathers that are most common. They are as dark wine as the rest of him and press into his sides as he falls silent again. Because what was he going to say? When he saw her nearly die?

    When he had raged and yelled at her like it was on purpose?

    Instead he sighs again.

    “My name is Brigade.”

    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

    Reply
    #7

    I never cared for anyone so much. I was born with a bomb inside my gut.

    She knows nothing of the war inside him.
    She just stands there and absorbs the aftershock.

    She mistakes his anger for something that it’s not. She remembers the way her father would snap at her – so very rarely – when his worry swallowed him whole. When she strayed too far off the beaten path and he’d have to fetch her when she inevitably got herself tangled up in thick vines of ivy. He’d snap at her for being so careless and then immediately soften, apologize. He’d say, ‘I just thought I’d lost you’.

    She knows that this stranger, tucked safely behind his wall of fury, does not care about her. But it does not stop her from leaning into his anger. Because it reminds her of her father, it reminds her of being cared for, and that is enough. It is enough to reorganize her pulse.

    He does not soften but he does not continue to rail against her. Perhaps aware that the foundation of her is beginning to splinter. Maybe he can see it in the soft set of her mouth or the silent plea in her eyes.

    She casts a glance over her shoulder back at the water, the gaping hole in the ice. The smaller hole where she’d stumbled backward and stepped through it, plunging her foot into the water and arresting the breath in her lungs. She wants to ask him what he would have done when he found the ice along the river’s edge. But she doesn’t, stuffs down the question instead.

    She shifts her focus back to him just in time to see the wings’ transition from something thin, feeble into something more substantial, something feathered. She tries to swallow her wonder. How unbecoming, to be so enamored by these things.

    She doesn’t expect it, the way he so freely offers his name. It is accompanied by a sigh and she thinks herself such an insufferable inconvenience. But she says, “I’m Lilian,” anyway. “I didn’t know where else to go,” she admits finally, quiet, ashamed.

    lilian

    Reply
    #8

    She is softer, kinder, than he deserves and it is like swallowing thorns. He can feel the way his throat wants to tear on it and he wishes that he could be something different. If he was, perhaps this entire interaction would go differently. Perhaps he wouldn’t have snapped at her. Perhaps he would have just shown his concern instead of letting it transform into fury and then wonder at the aftermath of his rage.

    Maybe his entire life would be different by now.

    But it’s not and he knows he has no one but himself to blame.

    “Lilian,” he says her name quietly and does his best to take the edge out of his voice, remove the gravel that so naturally turns the corners of it dark. It was a beautiful name, he thinks, and he has never been very good at handling beautiful things. All you had to do was look at the way he had crushed the women in his life between his palms. All you had to do was look at the twisted thing he had turned with Kensa.

    But she is innocent, and he hates himself for ruining it.

    He hates himself for not being what she deserves in this moment.

    “Do you not have a home?” he asks and this question burns because even though he lives in Sylva, he does not feel like he has a home—not really. His home had been Tephra until it wasn’t. It had been his home until he had left to find a healer for his father’s wolf and traded himself for it instead. It had been his home until he sat on the sidelines while his new home waged war against it and he did nothing.

    Now he knows the worst of himself.

    And he knows that he doesn’t deserve a true home—but maybe she does.

    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

    Reply
    #9

    I never cared for anyone so much. I was born with a bomb inside my gut.

    She wonders if the name sticks sideways in his throat like it does hers.
    Sometimes she cannot remember if her father had given her the name or if she’d taken it for herself.
    It is inherently light, despite all of the sadness it evokes in her.
    But it turns down at the edges in his mouth and she wonders if he feels like it doesn’t fit quite right.
    If it is cumbersome, like her. Not worth the trouble.

    She doesn’t mind the gravel, she thinks, because it’s better than nothing at all. She has been called by name so scarcely in all the time that has passed that she would have delighted at him shouting it at her. Spitting it like poison. Because she is such a simple girl, has always wondered the shape it takes in other mouths.

    Brigade,” she says. From any other mouth, it might have sounded flirtatious. Anyone else might have battered their lashes and grinned, carefree and airy and untainted by that depthless well of sadness. But she merely tests it. Rolls the peaks and valleys of the letters across her teeth. It hitches at the roof of her mouth and she thinks it has a specific taste. It tastes like smoke. Smoke and fury.

    Her question plunges her back into that sick sea of shame and she looks away again. She had thought she’d found her nerve, some solid ground. She had scrambled for purchase and summoned the nerve to look him in the face and now she looks away again, swallowing thickly. She had tried to find a home, she had. But no place had any use for her.

    She summons the ghost of a grin there, tries to assemble some flimsy scrap of hope when she shifts her focus back to his face. “The meadow,” she says and tries to make it sound like something it’s not. A home worth having.

    lilian

    Reply
    #10

    He is not used to the sound of his name like that—tentative and sad. He has heard it growled angrily and spat and, more often than not, ignored. It nearly startles him and his light grey eyes flicker upward, grow a little thoughtful and pensive and his mouth presses into a thin line as he continues to sink into himself.

    Even though he feels himself unravel around the thought, he still watches her, still picks up on the small cues that she gives to the ways she fractures inside. To the way she looks away when he brings up a home and he curses himself for asking. He knew firsthand what a sensitive subject it was.

    The self-loathing returns and his throat tightens around it.

    “The meadow is nice,” he says, acutely aware of how lame it sounds. His nose wrinkles, and he thinks about the times he has been there. He thinks about how you can feel all alone even when you are completely surrounded by others. He thinks about the loneliness that can set in so quickly.

    For a moment, he is silent and he struggles to come up with what to say. He can’t exactly tell her how he understands whatever it is that she is feeling—whatever it is that he thinks she is thinking, of course. He can’t imagine the feeling of cracking open his ribs and letting it spill out when he barely knows her.

    So he is quiet instead, letting the silence stretch and the disappointment in himself simmer.

    Finally, he feels himself glance up again and study her face. “I live in Sylva,” he says, wondering why it sounds different than when he had imagined it. Why it sounds more like a statement and less like an offer but he doesn’t know how to rectify that and so he is quiet once more.

    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

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