"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
12-10-2019, 10:05 PM (This post was last modified: 12-10-2019, 10:06 PM by kensley.)
i swore the days were over of courting empty dreams
i worshiped at the altar of losing everything
He has been a dead thing for weeks now.
Or has it been months?
He had kept track of the cycle of the sun for the first week or two. He had swallowed each sunset and then waited, patient, for the sun to return. In those days, he had known exactly how long he had been dead. Or undead. But it has been so long now that he has lost track. And what good did tallying the days do anyway? All it had done was remind him of all the things he had lost, the things he would never get back.
In all that time – the weeks or the months that have passed since he came back a dead thing – he has learned everything there is to know about being a dead thing. He has felt neither hunger nor thirst in all that time. He has drawn breath but only sporadically and only out of habit. The heart has not stirred in the cavern of his chest. He has cut himself on sharp things and he has not bled. He has not slept. He has found himself impervious to the heat that swells with the coming of summer.
There is only one thing he does not know, has not been able to test.
How will the heart – dead and useless – react to her?
Word has traveled as far as the meadow, the last place he saw her. Word of a shadowmare taking over the land of Pangea. So it is there that he goes. He remembers the kindness of a stranger in the earliest days of his return to Beqanna, the way she had breathed a magic into him that had chased the exhaustion from his muscles. He thinks about how he does not need the magic now. Because the muscles do not quiver with the effort it has taken him to travel, he does not feel even the slightest edge of tired.
He arrives in Pangea exactly as he had left the meadow. Nothing at all.
He descends into the great canyon, scans the horizon, surveys the landscape.
And then he lands eyes on her.
He would know her anywhere.
And the heart, that cursed, stagnant heart, it stirs in the cavern of his chest.
But that is all it does. It does not leap or throb. It simply acknowledges that it knows her, that it loves her.
“Ana,” he calls out, but the shape of her name leaves him as little more than a breath.
i'm finding all this well-worn sadness i never knew i kept
and i still chase you into heartache every time you take a step
When her gaze falls upon him - she freezes. And not just freezes in place but the ice sinks bone deep. Kensley. Her mind cries out in anguish, but her lips remain sealed shut.
There was much she could have said. Perhaps more she should have said. Her eyes betray more than her voice, the shades shifting from her typical ice blue to a shimmering violet as the flames threaten to burn their way to the surface. Her emotions were far more labile since she’d found him again. She does not fear this, rather embraces the flicker of feeling he has stirred in her. The shadowmare felt alive and that alone meant Beqanna should be wary.
“What happened?” she asks, simply. She wasn’t angry at him. She couldn’t bring herself to be angry at him. Not now. Not after everything. But she knew that someone had done this. The anger she kept so carefully suppressed prickled just beneath her skin - wanting nothing more than to be unleashed.
Someone had done this.
Someone would burn for what they had done to him. To what they had stolen.
Her attention shifts back to him and she runs her muzzle against his shoulder. The flesh is not as she remembered. It is cold.
Like her.
She wants to restore his heat and his warmth and his life, but she is unwilling to give him up even now. He is hers, living or dead. And she needs him to know - needs him to see that no matter what they do to him he will always hold that piece of her she had given him freely.
What a pair they were now. Undead. Soulless. Cold.
i swore the days were over of courting empty dreams
i worshiped at the altar of losing everything
How fiercely he wants the heart to stutter back to life.
How it aches – figuratively, of course, for he feels so little now – to know that she can touch him now and it will not set him ablaze. She can touch him and the heart will not beat new.
She does not touch him, though. Instead, he is left to watch as the eyes shift from ice to fire. And he loves her for it. Oh, how terribly he loves her. She knows. Without him having to tell her, without him having to cough the dust out of his throat to explain exactly what has changed. He wonders if she can smell the death on him the same way the others could. If it was obvious just by looking at him. He had not begun to rot. Miraculously, he had not lost anything other than his pulse, his hunger, his thirst. But they have all known. Something in the eyes, perhaps, a kind of dullness he cannot see.
What happened, she asks. He does not immediately know how to answer. He does not immediately want to answer. So much has happened, he thinks. So much they had not bothered to talk about on that day in the meadow when they’d found each other and his heart had sighed, having found its home again.
He can feel her anger. He can feel it as if it is a part of him, too. Even before she touches him. The hide does not quiver, no matter how desperately he wishes it would. The body does not respond to her, only the psyche. And the psyche, the soul, it does not want her to pull away.
“I thought I could fix it,” he murmurs. Had he really believed that, though? Or had his want to believe it been enough? He’d gone without stopping to think. He’d gone without hesitation. He does not know to what he is referring. What had he been trying to fix? The heart, perhaps. How it had struggled to beat beneath all that pain.
“I thought I could fix it, but I couldn’t,” he says. But there is no self-pity. There is a rueful smile, a mournful shake of his head. “I was a fool to think I could.”
i'm finding all this well-worn sadness i never knew i kept
and i still chase you into heartache every time you take a step
She wants to tell him she can fix it. That she can restore what was taken from him.
But she knows such is beyond her.
And it burns her from the inside out.
These feelings are foreign to her - having been dormant for so many years. She is so accustomed to living in a world of dark and shadow and cold that now she lets the fire tear through her - burning through her veins.
“What can I do?” she asks, her voice soft but still so cold. She breathes into his skin, for everything about him is still so familiar even though he had been so changed. The anger doesn’t sit well with her uncertainty and desperation to spare him from this. Part of her wants to simply disappear - to hunt whomever had done this to the ends of the earth. The other part refuses to leave him - especially now. But she’s wholly unaccustomed to feeling so helpless, and she knows if anyone can see the war of emotions taking place inside - it would be Kensley. He was perhaps the only one who had always been able to see right through her - through each and every one of her own defences.
“How can I help you?” There’s an edge in the usually calm voice - a flash of pleading. The barest touch of desperation. All she wants now is for him to tell her what to do - how to help him. She’s unwilling to abuse his autonomy at this moment - not when so much has already been taken from him. So she waits for him to tell her how she can possibly make things better.
She doesn’t draw away from him - he is still hers. He will be until the moment decides otherwise. The ragged little sigh that escapes her says more than her words had managed to convey thus far.
She steps back only enough that she can see his face - the fire in her gaze had quieted. To some degree, she can understand how this had happened. She had wrapped her heart in ice and stone once - her own doing to spare herself the pain of loss and of life. Since that time her emotions had been muted - fleeting sensations she had all but forgotten. So she can understand the desperation to be free of the pain. But somewhere, deep down, she feels a profound sadness that he had not come to her first and sought solutions with someone who had been careless with him. There’s no resentment, but perhaps disappointment in the fact that so many years later they could still not trust themselves to ask for help when they were drowning - even from each other.
“You’re not a fool, Kensley, you never have been. Let me try to help you. Maybe together we can fix it,” she says, though she knows she cannot take it back and undo what has been done. Not completely. But she knows how the cold and the darkness can provide such comforts - and she cannot keep that comfort from him despite the fact that it always comes with a cost.
i swore the days were over of courting empty dreams
i worshiped at the altar of losing everything
What he would not give to feel the warmth of her breath.
He would almost certainly forfeit the forgiveness he’d earned in return.
If he had known then what he knows now, he might have ignored the call.
He might have turned his gaze away from that rift on the beach and ambled back to her.
Because the pain – purely psychological now, because he feels absolutely nothing physically save for the faint pulse of pressure at her touch – makes his vision strobe. Because he had not known all of the things he’d lost until he was confronted with them and perhaps this is the worst of them all.
Surely the pain of it could have taken his breath away were there any breath left to take. But there is nothing – not even a sigh in those useless lungs – and he is left to stew in the knowledge that he has no one to blame but himself. For all of this.
There is a twinge of something deep in his chest – not in the heart, for it is useless, too, but someplace at the very center of him – when she asks what she can do. This is not her responsibility, he knows. But he thinks of what Agetta had said, how she’d insisted that the two of them go find this magician friend of his. Let her help him.
He does not speak, not right away. Instead, he turns his head into her, presses the plain of his forehead against her shoulder. Touches her but feels nothing. He knows the warmth of her flesh, fiercely summons the memory as if it might somehow help him to feel it. But there is nothing. Not even cold. He grits his teeth in frustration and shakes his weary head.
He thinks himself pitiful when he finally lifts his head, shifts his focus to the place where she touches him, too. He cannot bear it. And perhaps this is the worst weakness of all. When she draws back to look him in the eye and he forces himself to meet her gaze. He loves her, still. The heart is useless, certainly. But it is still the cause of all of his pain. It still feels, even if it does not beat. It is the thing that tells the brain that what it’s feeling is anguish.
He is a fool, but he does not argue. He merely ruminates. What can she do?
“I don’t want to ask anything of you, Ana,” he says, quiet. And he shakes his head.
“But...”
He does not know how to ask anything of her.
“Can you make it stop?” he asks and then drags his gaze back to her face.
“The heart, can you make it stop?”
Not stop beating, of course, for it has already done that.
i'm finding all this well-worn sadness i never knew i kept
and i still chase you into heartache every time you take a step
She wants to make it go away.
To destroy whoever it was that did this to him. This thing that she cannot change.
That does not mean she is powerless. She knows this and she years to pour whatever she can of herself into him to make this go away. She feels his pain so acutely because she’d live it. She remembers so vividly what it was like to go from vibrant and mortal to something else. She remembers what it was like to watch time and circumstances come for those she loved but never for her. It was what had led her into the darkness and the cold. And ultimately it was the cold which kept the pain away, and the darkness that kept her company.
“Shhh,” she breathes into his cold skin. “You didn’t ask. I offered.” She feels the need to reassure him since there was no one to reassure her that she had done the right thing so long ago. But his palpable pain makes her willing to look past the consequences that come with what she offers.
“I can,” she says, softly. “I can make it stop. I will make it stop.” She knows she must do this. Not just for him, but for herself too. She doesn’t want to watch him live in such crippling pain. She doesn’t think she can.
“I know it works,” she begins, “It’s how I’ve survived so long,” she says, oh so softly. This admission is sheer vulnerability - letting him in on the secret she’d kept for so long. There is no other she’d trust with this information. Only him.
She would never try something with him she wasn’t sure was safe. And while there were likely other solutions that could have the same result, she felt confident in her ability to give him this. The pain would be blunted by the ice. The cold soothed and the ice protected the vulnerable flesh. The most painful memories could be frozen and tucked away. Safe. Harmless. Painless.
She moves closer to him still, pressing her shoulder to his and draping her head and neck across his withers and down the other side of his barrel. “Hold still,” she breathes, as she calls upon the ice. Her breath becomes icy cold - condensing in the still-warm air. Frost and shadow leech crawl up her dark legs, her chest, and finally to where her skin pressed against his. And then it consumed him too - covering every surface of the pair - leaving them frozen there together for the span of a single heartbeat.
And then the ice seeps beneath his skin. The cold travels through his veins until it seizes upon his heart - freezing it solid in his chest. She did not let go. Not yet. She holds him there for another moment before finally stepping back to find his eyes - hoping that the pain she saw in them would have lessened.
“Say the word, and I’ll make it stop. I’ll take it back,” she says - her voice still cool as always but dripping with honesty.
i swore the days were over of courting empty dreams
i worshiped at the altar of losing everything
It is as if the pain knows that it will soon meet its end.
Because it compounds as she speaks.
It builds like unbearable pressure in the long column of his throat.
Were he reliant on breath, he would not have been able to draw one.
But to think of her in pain makes the edges of his vision soften and strobe. He wants so fiercely to draw her into a firm embrace. He wants to hold her tightly against him and promise her that he will never leave again, that she will never have to be alone – that he will live (figuratively speaking) forever and he will never leave her side. But to touch her would surely only hurt them both, he thinks. So, he refrains. He does not gather her into an embrace, merely stands there and tilts his head and studies her face. He has loved her so completely for as long as he can remember, he knows, and he rails against the injustice of it all.
She’d shushed him and insisted that he wasn’t asking at all, that she’d offered to help, and he tries to allow this to absolve him of some of that guilt. It does not, certainly, because he has always been so careful. Careful not to ask anything of her. He’d never even asked for her heart.
He trusts her completely. It does not occur to him that he should be afraid, even when she does not tell him what she’ll do. He does not tremble when she draws him close, though he wishes that he could. He turns to press his mouth against the swell of her barrel, closes his eyes, murmurs, “I love you.” And then he does exactly as he’s told – stands absolutely still and waits.
He does not see the ice as it travels up her legs. Does not feel it as it spreads from her chest to his own skin. He does not feel it until it slips beneath the surface of his skin and then collects, concentrated, around that useless clenched-fist of a muscle sitting stagnant in the cavern of his chest. There is a singular instant of blinding relief. Like a breath held too long and then released. He feels quite suddenly weightless and he opens his eyes to find that the landscape has not changed. He is still standing pressed close to her, Ana. He is still whole, as far as he can tell.
He is silent a long moment before he nods and presses another chaste kiss into her skin. “Thank you, Ana,” he murmurs and then lifts his head. He does not know yet what she’s done but, in that moment, it doesn’t matter.
i'm finding all this well-worn sadness i never knew i kept
and i still chase you into heartache every time you take a step
She’d met him after she’d already shielded her heart. She’d already been chewed up and spit back out more than once by the time they had met. He had offered nothing but kindness and understanding and in return she had given him all that she had left.
There were times where she wished she had more of herself to give to him. There were times she wished she could give him her whole heart and not just the sliver of flesh and feeling nestled beneath the ice and stone. But that part she could give, she gave to him entirely. She loved him in her way, and she loved that he never asked for more than she was able to give him.
And now, in a selfish sort of way, she feels relief. For they’re so much more similar now - gingerly sharing battered hearts.
Both wounded.
Both healing.
Both with a heart sealed away from the wickedness of the world.
She wouldn’t expect anyone else to understand. She didn’t care if they did or not. She would enjoy this for as long as she could. Even if it did make her vulnerable.
She hadn't let go of the anger. There's a voice in her head screaming for revenge - to bring her wrath upon whoever had put him in this situation. She does her best to try to suppress the impulse. But deep down she burns. Someone will pay. Not today. Not tomorrow. But ultimately, justice will come on dark wings. Of this, she is absolutely sure.
She hopes that she’s done the right thing for him - that this will allow him to live despite...despite everything. “I’ll always try to keep your heart safe, Kensley,” she breathes, “Always.”
