"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
It’s getting harder to drown out all the noise in his head.
Though, were you to ask him, he wouldn’t be able to tell you why.
Because there are so many things that he does not know.
But you can’t kill something that’s already dead and, while he is desperate for reprieve, there is some small part of him that is grateful he will never find relief. There is nothing he deserves less, he thinks. Despite the fact that he had found his sister someplace in the Afterlife and she had forgiven him. It had done so little to alleviate the weight he’d been carrying and has continued to carry.
He returns to the meadow because, like his father, he had not been built to have a home. There is no comfort to be gleaned from the deserts of Pangea except, perhaps, the fact that the woman he loved called it home and so, too, did their two children. The boy, who had emerged from the womb solid darkness and the girl, who had been born undead, too. Were he dependent on breath, the guilt might have suffocated him. Because the girl would never know the warmth of another’s touch, would never know all of the wonders of being alive, and it was his fault alone.
Another burden to carry.
And carry it he would.
The sun has finally emerged, though he cannot feel its heat. He thinks it’s nice, still, to be bathed in its light. Even if it does nothing to lend any warmth to the cold, cold flesh. He moves, aimless. Sometimes, he drops his head and takes the grass into his mouth and lets it linger on his tongue but it means absolutely nothing. It had been sweet once and he had delighted in the taste of it in the spring and now it is nothing. It may as well be dirt, he thinks.
So, he stands. He does not cock a hip in relaxation because the muscles do not tire. He merely stands there and studies the many strange, fantastical beasts that filter through the meadow. All of them on their way to someplace better.
And when he sees her, he does not quite believe his eyes. He has no reason to, really. But the closer she gets, the clearer she becomes. The heart does not race. It just goes on lying dormant in the cavern of his chest. There is no spike of adrenaline or delight as he moves toward her.
But he smiles. He smiles because it has been so long since he last saw her.
“Kennice,” he says and he smiles but this, too, lacks warmth. He smiles but it does not reach his eyes.
i said i told you everything, but i left something out
She remembers so little. She feels like a ghost even though she knows she isn’t.
She can feel her heart as it beats in her chest – steady and never-ending, and sometimes she wishes it would just stop. It feels loud; loud in her ears, loud in her veins, loud in her head. But maybe that is just because everything else is so very quiet. Solitude could drive you mad; she knew that. The dark and the quiet, it could breed insanity in your mind, but for some reason she doesn’t remedy it. She waits for it, thinking that maybe living the rest of her life out of touch with reality would be just like dying; or maybe like dreaming.
It never happens, though.
She remains consciously aware of the dark, and the quiet, and the solitude. She blinks her eyes open every day into the dark forest, so far away that not even the wildlife goes there. It is just her, and her thoughts, and the broken shards of a tattered heart that stutters and pulses, unfailing, every day.
Today, the meadow draws her out like a magnet. She follows the light like a moth to a flame, she blinks at the brightness of it and has to duck her head to shade her eyes. And it’s loud. Has the meadow always been so loud? Every voice is jarring, the sounds coming together in a deafening chorus that makes her want to turn around and disappear again.
Until, she sees him.
She sees him, and her eyes lock with his and that stupid heart of hers that never stopped doing its job, finally stalls in her chest.
“Kensley,” she breathes his name, and she isn’t even sure if he could hear it. He looks different; she can see it from here. He is broken and cold and distant, and though he smiles his eyes remain shadowed by ghosts. She steps to him, and when her muzzle touches his skin she is surprised at how cold he feels, and her heart twists. “What happened to you?”
She brings with her some relief.
Because she had once been the most important thing in the world to him.
Because he had laid his own life to waste in an effort to protect hers.
And so much has changed since then. They have grown so much, the pair of them.
They had shared a womb once. And they had curled themselves around each other in the days that followed. They had whispered secrets to one another, away from the watchful eye of their mother. They had been thick as thieves, the two of them.
She is still important, his twin sister. He has carried her in his heart, too. And he should have tried to find her in all that time. He should have sought her out before he left Beqanna. And why hadn’t he? His need to leave had felt like the most important thing then. A fish hook in his belly that he could not ignore, not even long enough to say goodbye to his sister. And he had not come back for her either.
He had come back for himself. His reasons purely selfish. Because he had been gripped with grief and did not know where else to go but home. But he had not been looking for her. And this is another heady dose of guilt he forces himself to swallow as she comes closer. She is not angry with him, though he suspects she should be. He had been a good, dutiful brother once and then what? What had he become? What has he become?
She touches him before he can tell her not to. Before he can register her reaching for him and skirt out of reach. She touches him and he knows exactly what she feels. It has been explained to him several times over. Not unpleasant, just cold. As if his sadness seeped from his pores.
But she says his name just as sweetly as she ever did and the smile deepens but does not gain any warmth as he studies her face. Time has aged her, just as it had aged him before he’d kissed their sister’s head and cleaved several years from his life. And then he’d gone and died and it didn’t matter at all.
“So much has happened, Kennice,” he whispers, the voice thin without breath to buoy it. “But I’m so happy to see you.” Perhaps if he were still alive, the heart would have sighed the way it had when he’d stumbled upon their mother in this very meadow. But he is a dead thing and he feels nothing. “Where have you been?” he asks, trying desperately to steer the conversation away from himself, “I’ve missed you.”
She cannot think of anyone on all the earth that she loved the way that she loved her brother. They belonged to each other in a way that they could never belong to anyone else – they knew each other’s heartbeats in a way that no one else ever would. She has loved, romantically, but it was not the same; maybe because the love she had found had been all wrong. It had hurt more than it healed, had left her feeling hollowed out and inferior. Love wasn’t supposed to be like that, she doesn’t think – romantic or otherwise.
Because the familial love she had for her brother was unconditional, and even when he was gone she never doubted it.
She held nothing against him for being gone, something she is sure she has learned or inherited from her mother. Because she had grown up watching her mother refuse to crumble in her father’s sporadic absences; had seen the way she never harbored an ounce of malice towards him for being gone. And Kennice knows that just as she is a little piece of their mother, Kensley is a little piece of their father, and they could not be anything other than what they were born to be. He was born to leave and she was born to forgive, and she forgives him as easily as her heart beats in her chest.
He is redirecting the conversation, and though her eyes linger on his face a little longer, and she cannot hide the skepticism on her own face, she does not argue. “Hiding,” she says, and it is more or less true. “There hasn’t really been anything left for me here. I didn’t see the point in watching the world go on without me.” She pauses, and maybe if it was anyone else she could have ignored the extreme changes in someone she had once known. But it’s not just anyone, it’s him, and even if his heart his dead hers is still alive, and the pieces of them were too much the same for her to ignore it. “Please don’t hide things from me, Kensley,” she says softly, reaching to skim her lips across the plain of his cheek. “You can tell me anything, you know that.”
It pains him to think of her in hiding.
Pains him even more greatly that she should think the world was moving on without her.
He wants to tell her that she is wrong, that the world did not merely move on without her but limped. Staggered. Trudged along because it did not have her to carry it. Because the world had known that she was not moving along with it. His beautiful sister, his arguably better half.
But he says none of these things because he has never a poet. He has never been anything but a steadfast companion. He has never had anything to offer anyone except the idea that, should he be around, they would never have to be alone. But then he’d left and he hadn’t thought about who it might hurt. And he curses their father for this. For the fact that he has never been able to not leave the things he’s loved.
“I’m sure the world missed you,” he murmurs and then smiles, a quiet, slanted thing.
Had he meant to keep things from her? She reaches out to touch him and he is consciously aware of the gesture but he feels nor the warmth nor the softness of the mouth she touches him with. It puts another pang in his chest, a hurt that rattles his ribcage and the useless thing that lies on the floor of it.
He does not drawn in a breath to steady himself, though he wishes he could. Just stands there and shifts his gaze to the ground, stares hard at the earth underfoot.
“Keiran’s gone,” he whispers and the voice shakes beneath the terrible weight of the admission. The weight he’s been carrying. “I couldn’t save her.” He rolls a shoulder in kind of a shrug, though there is nothing casual about it. Still, he does not look Kennice in the eye. “There was a call to the beach and I answered it. I found her in the afterlife, Keiran. She was okay. She forgave me, but...” He shakes his head, goes quiet a long moment before summoning the nerve to continue, “the damage was already done. When I came back, I was...” he shakes his head, “this.”
