"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
10-16-2019, 07:20 PM (This post was last modified: 10-16-2019, 07:22 PM by Agetta.)
She lingers in the meadow because it is familiar.
It’s a taste of the world she once new, where she can still feel echoes of the lives she has lived before. Two of them, separate but entwined, and now here she is lingering on the precipice of a third. It would be easier, she thinks, just to die instead of half-living surrounded by so many younger generations but she’s no longer certain that is a possibility for her. She returned from the dead once, and maybe doing so did more than change her coat from coal to snow.
All Agetta has done for dozens of years is think, so she watches a dark shape moving in the meadow and decides to approach. Any sort of conversation is better than being on her own and she feels desperate not to spend any other moments in silence. However, as she gets closer, his orange eyes startle her, pushing out any witty conversation starters that might be lingering in her mind from decades as a diplomat and she comes to a stop.
They’re not frightening at all, but they are different enough that she finds them rather fascinating. It's not a colour you see often, even after a century.
“Hello.” She manages, once she’s realized she’s been standing there, rudely and quietly, for a moment longer than she should have been. Still, she hopes that she isn’t too late to have caught his attention – and her own midnight blue gaze watches him as she waits to see if she’s too much of a ghost to acknowledge today.
Agetta
@[garbage]
alternate title is "is it necrophilia if we're both ghosts" but I GUESS that's too out of character for my dumdum here
Alive? he might be dead for aught I know,
With that red gaunt and colloped neck a-strain,
And eyes squeezed shut ‘neath rusty mane;
This is only his second iteration (gods, how he hates to think of it like that – will there be more? He will go mad, surely, if he is not mad already), but it feels like much more. His first manifestation had lasted so long upon the earth, had seen murder and mayhem and love and heartbreak and heartbreak and heartbreak, and they are all things that he carries still. Not in such sharp relief, granted, but all those sins exist still, as ghosts and chains that do not leave him.
(There was a time, brief, when he first returned and had almost no memory of his past. It has since returned, in part, not complete, but enough – enough that he does not want the complete story, the clear list of his sins. He wants them gone, banished from memory, but he shall never be so lucky, they are his crosses to bear.)
He is deep in his thoughts, perhaps drowning in them, when the white mare approaches. He does not know her, but there is a certain something that draws the eye. Perhaps it is the immortality drawing immortality, the bizarre and unfortunate curse of persisting, whether it is wanted or not.
He meets her eyes – a vivid blue – with his orange ones. He doesn’t smile, but his expression lightens as he claws his way out of his thoughts, focuses on her, however briefly.
“Hello,” he says, then, “my name is Garbage.”
Seldom went such grotesqueness with such woe;
I never saw a brute I hated so;
He must be wicked to deserve such pain.
His name takes her by surprise, and she’s so far out of practice with the whole interacting with others thing that it shows plainly on her face. For a moment, a longer moment than was probably polite, she just stares at him. She might not have believed him if he had phrased it another way and she wonders if he learned to use one manner of introduction over another.
‘My name is Garbage’ instead of ‘I am Garbage.’
Whatever other small talk she might have attempted has flown right out of her mind, and while she’s still deciding whether it’s too rude to ask about why he is named that, she manages to not be a complete idiot and introduce herself. “I’m Agetta.”
She’s not quite sure yet whether it was a pleasure to meet him or not, but she can’t deny that her interest has been piqued.
And, well, in the end and after not very much consideration she decides to ask the question on her mind. After all, she’s a century old and she’s been murdered before and there just comes a time when you ask the questions you want to because you’ve lived (and died) through too much to dance around topics like the weather. “Did you parents name you that?” She can’t quite bring herself to call him Garbage, even if that’s his name, however.
She hasn’t yet known him long enough to know whether it fits him.
Alive? he might be dead for aught I know,
With that red gaunt and colloped neck a-strain,
And eyes squeezed shut ‘neath rusty mane;
There’s a memory that’s not faded –
His mother, recoiled in shock, in disgust, cursing at him, banishing him. He had not known why then,
(those eyes, those goddamn eyes)
he’d only known the strike of her hoof to him, her cries for him to leave, her final hateful name as she drove him from the desert.
The last thing his mother called him, and so it had settled into his skin. He’d been called other names, briefly, but this was the one the always circled back to. And it was a rightful enough name, and whether his wretched existence begot the name or the name begot the wretchedness of his existence, he does not, and will never, know.
He doesn’t say all this, of course. Though he is wont to overspill his emotions, he has enough common sense to keep the truth of the story locked away, at least the grisly details of it.
“My mother did,” he says, which is true enough. He never met his father – only knows he shares his eyes – but from the faint tales that lasted, he knows he was not a kind man, and would not have cared a whit what he was named.
“She didn’t like me very much,” he adds, a whisper of the truth. Even such a droplet is stupid to share with a stranger, because the rest of the tale is wretched, just as he is.
He turns his attention more fully to her, then, struck by her eyes. He wonders why she’s in the meadow. But then, why are any of them?
“What brings you to the meadow?” he asks, and maybe it’s a diversion, but it’s a sloppy one, it sounds more like some sad pickup line, and he lacks the suavity to carry such a thing off even on his best days, of which this is not one of.
Seldom went such grotesqueness with such woe;
I never saw a brute I hated so;
He must be wicked to deserve such pain.
You can be sure, though Agetta doesn’t know who Garbage’s mother was nor where to find her, if she did know, the small white mare would certainly walk right up to her and give her a piece of her mind. “I’m sorry.” She says, half because it’s what you say and half because she does, truly, mean it. She has no idea who this stallion is, really, no idea what his life has been filled with – but she’s not about to start believing in a world where foals deserve to be called Garbage.
He changes the subject, and she doesn’t fight against the change. Her midnight gaze flickers momentarily away from his to take in the meadow, as if she could spot what she had come here for.
Of course, she can’t.
“I’m not really sure. Looking for… faces I used to know, I guess. New friends maybe. Hoping I’ll find either a reason to either slip into the world of ghosts or come fully back to this one.” Although she did not think of his question as a pick-up line, she becomes belatedly aware that hers could have come across as one. Not that she had ever been good at flirting in the first place. There are some skills that elude her even now, and she’s far too old to be learning. And, besides, her words had been spoken with a naked, blunt sort of honesty that leaves nowhere for traces of flirtation to linger.
It’s brutally true, she’s been feeling as though she’s been walking the knife’s edge between life and death for years now. She’s not sure why she had actually said that, except maybe in response to his own honesty about his name. A sliver of her truth for the one he had shared. They’re a step above strangers, and it may be stupid to share their secrets, but sometimes it’s easier to be honest with someone you’ve never met before.
It would be polite to return the question, but Agetta doesn't ask the orange-eyed stallion because she's being polite. She asks because she's genuinely curious. “And what about you?”
Alive? he might be dead for aught I know,
With that red gaunt and colloped neck a-strain,
And eyes squeezed shut ‘neath rusty mane;
She strikes a chord with her words, an unknowing one. He’s looked for familiar faces too, since returning, and found nothing but strangers. One of them, he loved, but she left – no surprise – and everyone else has been fleeting, unwilling to engage with a thing such as he, for which he does not blame them.
It's hard, to be so old, worse still when his body doesn’t reflect it, remade as it was. It was easier, when he was sway-backed and gray-flecked, because the old age was a promise that things were coming to an end. Now, he is back, filled out and sleek and dark as coal, and there is no end in sight.
(He knows he could finish the job himself, yet he doesn’t – cowardice, perhaps, or a base instinct too deeply rooted to overcome.)
“Have you found anyone? That you used to know?” he asks, almost hopeful. Maybe she had, and maybe he could find hope in that. Not that he knows who he’s looking for. He has a dozen loves, his heart well-versed in the art of being broken, but they had left him, and if they reappeared, well, surely they would turn their backs and leave, again.
(Tabytha had come back, but she was dead twice over, and he has no hope of her return. He only thinks of her sometimes, and aches.)
She turns the question back around on him, and he considers. Truth is, he doesn’t know if he has a reason, other than the stifling, wretched boredom of his existence, but such things cannot be confessed to strangers, not if he wants her to stay, if only for awhile longer.
“I was tired of being alone,” he says – too honest – and it is still a sugarcoated truth, for he doesn’t speak of how grief is a weight upon him, constant, how solitude only makes it grow, cancerous.
Seldom went such grotesqueness with such woe;
I never saw a brute I hated so;
He must be wicked to deserve such pain.
When he asks if she had met any familiar faces, her midnight gaze brightens with a smile. “I have, one old friend and a few that knew the same lands and the same faces that I did - so it’s almost like we were old friends.” She thinks of Kensley and of Set, two that were undeniably old souls like her, but who she felt a kinship with almost immediately because they were bridges to her past. They had wandered the same pathways she had. “There are most ghosts haunting this place than I ever would have thought. Which makes it feel a little more like home.”
And then, when he replies to her, she takes a small step closer. Not too close, because she certainly doesn’t want to impose herself on anyone, but just a fraction closer than they were before - adding a physical emphasis to the words that she speaks next. “Well you’re not alone anymore.” She states this simply, though there’s warmth in the words and her gaze as she looks at him, every word and every line of her body soft.
Obviously, at the moment, he wasn’t alone - but it was more than that too. Every time Agetta met someone, met another ghost, it made her feel more solid. There was one more someone out there who knew her face, who knew a little of her heart.
And she was that for this stallion. This stallion who she was going to have to think of a nickname for or something, because she was quickly deciding that she liked him too much to ever call him Garbage.
