"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
I can get there on my own. you can leave me here alone.
He is a simple man.
Or, at least, he thought he was.
But he has spent the last few days wondering when his life had become so deeply complicated.
He has dissected every moment of what little of his life has been worth remembering.
It would be easy to place blame, certainly. He could say that it started when he’d met Adna. Or even when he’d met Sabbath. But he knows that his meeting the both of them served only to compound a complication that had already been set into motion.
He has never been one for soul-searching, finds himself deeply uncomfortable with the idea of introspection. But he is hell-bent on find someway to shoulder this blame alone. Because he should have known. Because he should have kept to himself. He should have cast himself out to sea and left this place behind. He should have condemned himself to some desert somewhere, alone. So that he could never touch anyone and no one could ever touch him.
Because he’s got a weak, bastard heart and he was not built for this. He was not built for being a man worth having around. He is simple and his view of the world is narrow and, more often than not, he sees nothing of the world that is any more than ten feet in front of his face.
But he has thought about the daughter that he has not met tirelessly. He has wondered about her. Sabbath had called her beautiful, said that she deserved the world. And he thinks that this is true for both of his daughters, though Gospel absolutely loathes him. He considers striking out in search of her. Seeking her out. Finding her and telling her the truth. That he hadn’t known about her and he’s sorry and that he’ll always love her, even if she doesn’t want anything to do with him.
He has thought about Adna, too. And how quickly she had taken Gospel and left. He has tried to find the beginning of the knot so that he might unravel it. But he has never been smart enough. So, he has done the only thing he knows how to do: he has walked. Traveled the perimeter of Taiga until his joints ached. He has thought about their venom and their hurt and the part he has played in all of this and it dams up his throat, makes it hard to breathe. So, he punishes himself the only way he knows how and he continues to walk.
He thinks her a mirage when he happens across her. He only knows that she’s not in the way relief surges through him. The muscles, tired, relax and he hangs his head. He hangs his head and he says, “Adna.” He sighs it and it sounds like the beating of his heart. “Adna,” he says again and he loiters. How desperately he wants to go to her, to lay his weary head upon her shoulder. But he does not, because he knows that he’s done something wrong even if he doesn’t know what it is.
BETHLEHEM
I'm just tryin' to do what's right. oh, a man ain't a man unless he's fought the fight.
I will commit my soul to your door tonight, and I'll last 'til the gas fumes float on higher
She loves her sister. She does.
She wants her to be happy.
But all of that love, and all of that want, does nothing to stem the rapid, head-swimming agony in the days that follow. She imagines their reunion in a thousand different ways, a thousand different times. She looks at it from afar with breathtaking clarity and then under a jeweler's lens until each and every refraction of light has her seeing stars. She feels it like pressure around her throat, like a dagger to her breast.
At least they will be happy, she tells herself.
Beth was so relieved to know of their daughter.
Sabbath will forgive him.
The tears do not come. She does not feel her back wracked with sobs. In some ways, she feels completely and totally hollowed out. She remembers the way that he had so clearly told her that he could never love her—so kindly, so gently that it makes her stomach twist with sickness. She remembers the way that he had moved around her toward her sister, as if she wasn’t there, as if she never existed.
It is easier when she feels nothing.
But she does not feel nothing when she finally sees him coming. She swallows and buries it; she pulls the poison into her belly and lets it simmer. She is grateful that she has sent Gospel off to play today—let her have her fun, her adventures—but she misses the shield that her daughter provided. She could be watching her instead of staring at the ground, her worry forming a furrow in her brow.
He says her name once, then twice, and she wishes it did not sound so soft. But for all of the arrows lodged in her heart, she forces herself to pull her elegant head up, the skin drawn just a little tight around the mouth the way that her mother’s always did when struck by some impossible sadness.
“Bethlehem,” she forces herself to use his full name, reminding herself that the shortened version is not hers to say. He is not hers to claim in such small intimacies. She wonders, for a second, if she should be angry that he had not been able to piece together her relation with Sabbath—or, perhaps, if she should wonder if he had—but the anger does not come. Shame, guilt, for her part, but no anger.
Just the ringing bells of her loneliness as they clash and clang inside of her lonely head.
in a dying love I'm nothing but a stone cold liar but, oh, I got an iron in that fire
I can get there on my own. you can leave me here alone.
She does not feel the same relief.
She merely lifts her head and looks at him and it wedges something cold and dark into the space around his heart.
And, for a singular moment, he wishes that it had never returned to him.
That heart. The putrid, worthless thing.
He doesn’t want any of the hurt that goes along with it.
But their eyes meet and he sighs and he wishes so fiercely that things were different. But he’d told her, hadn’t he? He’d tried to warn her. That he could never love her the way she deserved, that she should save her heart for someone who would know how to take care of it. And yet. And yet.
He takes one shuffling step toward her, the expression plaintive as he stares at her across the vast distance that separates them. And when he laughs, a breath of it, it is a mournful sound. Mirthless and dark. And he finally looks away, shakes his head so that the tangles of his forelock fall over his eyes. But it doesn’t matter because, for the moment, the eyes are closed and he tries hard to steady the beating of his heart.
She is still there, still watching, when he opens them again. There is a smile that stirs in the furthest corners of his own dark mouth, but this, too, is mirthless. There is no joy in this. When he opens his mouth to speak, the words have to claw their way up his throat. Strangled. “I don’t know how we got here,” he whispers.
“I don’t know what I did and I don’t know how to make it better.” He shakes his head again, presses his mouth into a thin line, averts his gaze to the sun-dappled ground underfoot. Thinks of the bugs and the worms and how he belongs with them, if not lower.
BETHLEHEM
I'm just tryin' to do what's right. oh, a man ain't a man unless he's fought the fight.
I will commit my soul to your door tonight, and I'll last 'til the gas fumes float on higher
If only they could go back to the beginning.
If only she could reverse time so that she had run right by him and they had never stopped to talk. He had not asked the kind of questions that made her introspective and furious. He had not pushed her until she had felt the only source of tension release was to leap and press her fangs to his throat.
But she knows she would never take it back.
Would never take back what had existed between them.
What they had created.
But, gods, it hurts now to watch him and pretend that she feels nothing. She wishes that she could just lose herself in the anger that usually came so easily. She wishes that she could just rage at him but there is no spark within her and she feels only that empty, looming cavern—echoing and fierce.
The sadness in his voice rings of pity and she shakes her head as if she could stop.
“You didn’t do anything wrong,” she manages and is amazed that her voice does not completely crack on the edges. “You were honest with me from the beginning.” She forces herself to study his face and forces herself to strangle the need to walk closer to him, to press into his side—even if only as friends.
“You told me that you couldn’t love me.”
She wishes she could make it sound lighter, but it falls heavy on her tongue and she has to break her gaze and look at the ground, focus on the breathing that comes so unsteadily. Seconds pass. Minutes, maybe, but when she looks back up, the curls of her forelock falling to the side of her face, she puts every ounce of effort into looking composed, into not looking like the insides of her are curling away like aged bark.
“I really hope that you guys are happy,” she forces a smile. “I really, really do.”
in a dying love I'm nothing but a stone cold liar but, oh, I got an iron in that fire
I can get there on my own. you can leave me here alone.
This doesn’t feel like forgiveness.
This sinks like a stone in the pit of his gut.
It hardens that worthless heart in the cavern of his chest.
You didn’t do anything wrong, she says, but he knows that’s not true. He knows it in the way she does not close up the space between them. She does not curl herself around him or press her mouth against the curve of his shoulder. She is aloof, cold. Detached. And he stands there and he takes it because he doesn’t deserve for her to be anything else. He knows this, of course, he just doesn’t know why.
And she won’t tell him. This much is evident. He’d been foolish to even ask. Things are never that simple, though he wishes so desperately that they were. This is his punishment and he grits his teeth and he nods.
But what she says next plunges him into a peculiar kind of darkness. The brow furrows and he lifts his head sharply. It is confusion that passes across his face then, but an angry kind of confusion. He takes one step toward her and then stops short. “That’s not what I said,” he counters, the tone insistent. That hadn’t been what he’d said at all. He remembers it well. Remembers all of the nerve it had taken for him to say it at all.
She looks away then and he is powerless to do anything but watch, study the downturned face, the way her own forelock tangles around her eyes. The furrow in his brow remains. A neat knit as the seconds march past them in absolute silence. He should do more to prove that’s not what he’d said and that it’s not true at all, but there is that same old vise tightened around his throat and he doesn’t even try to speak. Waits instead for her to reveal more of what she’s kept under lock and key.
Were he any smarter, he would have immediately made the connection, would have immediately understood what she meant. But, were he any smarter, they would not be in this situation in the first place.
The furrow deepens.
“Who?”
BETHLEHEM
I'm just tryin' to do what's right. oh, a man ain't a man unless he's fought the fight.
I will commit my soul to your door tonight, and I'll last 'til the gas fumes float on higher
If only she could breathe around him.
If only she could figure out the way to make her lungs pump so that she could more easily draw in air—so that she could at least see straight. So that she could find the solid footing beneath her and know that she was going to make it through this. But she hasn’t been able to find her center of gravity since the first time that she saw him, since the first time he held her with his mouth on her spine.
Her world has fractured around him; rebuilt around the stone pillars of his heart.
She struggles to look at him because it is so much more difficult to fake this indifference when he is looking her in the eye. It is nearly impossible to pretend that she doesn’t feel anything. Nearly impossible to let the rest of it fall away until she’s just the naive and vulnerable girl that she has always been.
She feels that strange ache in her at his question.
Don’t make me say it, she thinks. Please just—
But she is powerless from the gravity of him and she drags her gaze back to him. Finds the confusion on his face and the depthless brown of his solemn eyes. She swallows hard, trying to force something like a breathless brevity into what she says next. “Sabbath,” her throat feels raw from the confession and she does everything she can to not grit her teeth together, whispering it between the clenched jaw.
“I just,” her voice is shaky but she continues, “I saw how happy you were to see her again—to find out you had another daughter.” Maybe this daughter would love him, she thinks, and feels the weight of it settle in her like a stone. There is not an inch of her that regrets Gospel with all of her vicious, fierce independence but she knows that it is not the family that Beth would want—and she couldn’t blame him.
“I know Sabbath was angry but I am sure she’ll come around.”
Now she can’t stop the words that pour of her—loose and shaking and vulnerable. “I should have told you. I should have. I’m so sorry. But you can be with her now, and I am so happy for you both.”
in a dying love I'm nothing but a stone cold liar but, oh, I got an iron in that fire
I can get there on my own. you can leave me here alone.
It catches him off-guard.
It rips a laugh out of his throat before he can stop it.
It is a mirthless sound, though. Something that borders more on surprise. Confusion. And, though he laughs, his expression does not change. The furrow in his brow does not soften and he goes on studying her with that neat frown. He tilts his head a fraction, his mouth half-open as if on the verge of speaking. But he cannot immediately think up anything to say.
She saves him the trouble by continuing. He had not been unhappy to see Sabbath. Granted, he might have been happier to see her under any other circumstance. He had not harbored any ill-will toward her, certainly. Seeing her under this particular set of circumstances had wedged a thick sliver of guilt between his ribs and he suspects he’ll carry it with him the rest of his life. But they’d never had a relationship, the two of them, neither of them had ever had any expectations that he’d been aware of.
Finding out that there was another little girl in the world who shared his blood had had a profound effect on him, certainly. And he won’t apologize for that. He will not claim that learning about her did not make him some convoluted version of happy. He will feel no remorse for living that truth.
Still, his expression is collapsed around the hard edges of his confusion and he shakes his head. “I was happy to learn about Prayer,” he concedes, “but things were never like that between Sabbath and me. I don’t think either of us expected anything to come of our...” He gives pause then, carefully choosing his words, “union.”
He shrugs his shoulders then, shakes his head again. “If I wanted to be with Sabbath, I would have been with her. And I suspect the same could be said for her. But she didn’t even want me to know about my daughter and I think that says plenty about her feelings about me.”
BETHLEHEM
I'm just tryin' to do what's right. oh, a man ain't a man unless he's fought the fight.
I will commit my soul to your door tonight, and I'll last 'til the gas fumes float on higher
She doesn’t know how to handle his laughter—the confusion, the lack of mirth.
She doesn’t know what to do when she is grappling for some edge of balance and control and there is none to be found. Because he doesn’t say that he wants to be with Sabbath. His face does not collapse around his love for her; he does not swell with it at the mention of her name. But neither does he come to her. He doesn’t draw her close and press a kiss to her forehead, a place where he has grown fond of.
So she stands there, lost in the ocean of her feelings.
Feeling pulled by the riptide of it.
“I just,” she starts and then stops, shaking her head. “I guess I,” again, but the words fail her and she looks around, bewildered and lost and more than a little hurt, her sage green eyes vulnerable and searching as they finally remain on his face. She hunts the angles of it, looks underneath every plane and loses herself in that solemn steadiness of his eyes, the depth of them so calming when they are not infuriating.
Her tongue touches her bottom lip and then she bites it and rolls a scaled shoulder.
“I don’t know.”
Because she can’t tell him why she was so fiercely afraid of what she had assumed—or why she had truly believed it. She can’t confess to him again the depth of her feelings when he has rebuffed them again and again, always meeting it with a sigh and an apology for not being able to return it. So she remains stuck in it, swallowing it down for the millionth time and finding that it is no less bitter than the first.
She shakes her head and feels everything flood from her.
This is no easier, she thinks, as she looks at him.
Perhaps nothing with him was ever meant to be easy.
in a dying love I'm nothing but a stone cold liar but, oh, I got an iron in that fire
I can get there on my own. you can leave me here alone.
She looks away.
But he doesn’t.
He goes on watching her as she searches their surroundings and he wonders what kind of answer she’s looking for. If that’s what she’s looking for at all. The laughter – short and breathy and mirthless – has gone and it is just the two of them standing there in absolute silence. He grits his teeth, the muscle in his jaw pulsing, when she finally drags her focus back to his face.
He nods, the muscle still pulsing as he finally looks away. There in the furthest corner of his dark mouth, a smirk. But this, too, lacks in mirth. It is gone just as quickly as it had appeared and he shakes his head. “You assumed,” he says, simply.
There is some darkness to it. It lacks in bitterness, sounds more like defeat. He exhales and relaxes the muscle in his jaw before he shackles his gaze to hers again. He does not want to be cruel or dismissive or angry. But he’s tired. He’s so tired. He had not been built for this, this marathon of emotion.
“You assumed because you just can’t help yourself, can you? When it comes to me, you can’t help but assume things.” He pauses only briefly before continuing because he can feel the darkness spreading steady through him. “You think you love me but you think the worst of me. You think I’m too honest and then think that I would lie about something like this.”
He drags in a breath in an effort to steady himself. “You put words in my mouth. Pick and choose what you want to hear. Fucking demonize me. And for what? To make yourself feel better? So that you have something to be angry about? I told you that I never agreed to be your punching bag, Adna.”
BETHLEHEM
I'm just tryin' to do what's right. oh, a man ain't a man unless he's fought the fight.
I will commit my soul to your door tonight, and I'll last 'til the gas fumes float on higher
She holds it back.
She stands there quietly and lets him rant, breathes it in deep and tries to hold onto the anger that she has let lash out at him so many times. She just settles it into her bones and lifts her head, watching him carefully, letting each and every lash find its home on the curve of her back, the ridges of her spine.
But, finally, the dam breaks.
Finally, it snaps within her and she feels it flood throughout her.
She tastes copper on her tongue—that buzzing quality of poison.
But it’s too late, it’s too late.
“What the hell do you want from me, Beth?” Her sage green eyes are sharp and there is a relief in just letting her feel the rage instead of feeling the bone-aching, marrow-deep pain she had before. Fine. If he wanted to fight then she would fight. “I’m never good enough for you. I’m the cause of all of your problems. I ask too much, push too hard, demand things from you that you don’t want to give.”
She draws in a breath and she is shaking from the effort. “Do I look like I feel better to you? You absolute insufferable ass.” She bites her lip until its bleeding and then continues. “I wasn’t making you a punching bag. I misunderstood and was trying to tell you I was happy for you. I wasn’t mad. I wasn’t yelling. I never fucking asked a thing of you.” She is shaking now. “But if it makes you feel better, by all means. Go ahead and tell me all of the ways that I am the worst thing to ever happen to you. Tell me all about exactly what I think and feel and do because you seem to know me oh so well.”
She shakes her head, finally furious.
“Let me be your punching bag, Beth. Have at it.”
in a dying love I'm nothing but a stone cold liar but, oh, I got an iron in that fire
