"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
and I'm the kind of love it hurts to look at, but once I was enough to make you try now, I'm underneath the rubble, trying not to feel the trouble.
He is no longer afraid.
He is older now and more confident in the glass.
He has learned everything there is to know about how it expands and contracts as he breathes, how it sometimes shudders as if it were real flesh, how the cracks splinter but do not come apart.
It is stronger than he thinks it is.
And, as a result, so is he.
He is no longer meek.
He does not tiptoe, pays much less mind to the terrain, cares little where he puts his feet. Because the earth has taken him to his knees and it has not broken him. Because he has learned that it’s all right to fall because he can get right back up.
But he is still kind and good and soft.
He is still filled with all that hunger. A desperate want to swallow up all the world has to offer him. He wants to travel, still, to the very edges of the earth just to see what’s there. He thinks of his sister sometimes, how when he’d press his mouth to her shoulder in the morning she’d smell like the sea. She’d smell like someplace he’d never been before. He thinks of how she’d lied to protect him and how it had harmed them both.
He wanders now and he studies the world unfurling around him rather than the next place he’s going to step. It fills him with breathless wonder. How beautiful it all is, filled up with fantastical creatures with wings and horns and scales and magic he knows nothing about. He remembers a girl he met once, how she’d warned him not to come closer because she broke things without meaning to. Even beautiful things. He wonders still what kind of magic that was.
He moves with new confidence. Because he is no longer a child. He is leggy still, yes, but he is beginning to fill out. He is beginning to take the shape of what he’ll be for the rest of time. (He knows that he’ll live forever, he can feel it in his veins, a gift and a curse inherited from his father). He is no longer red, the color having drained from the glass over the course of a year. How funny, he thinks, that he’d started out looking like his mother – just like her, red glass – and has ended up more closely resembling his father. At least in color. Because Jarris is not made of glass, though perhaps he ought to be.
He is no longer red, but a storm cloud behind a windowpane. And perhaps he is handsome or perhaps he is not, Thomas has never known the difference.
He moves with new ease regardless, grateful to be rid of the shackles of his fear. And he occasionally stops and turns his head to press his mouth against his own shoulder, reveling in the heat that collects on the glass’s surface.
sometimes I'm terrified of my heart; of its constant hunger for whatever it is it wants —
She is easily taken by pretty things and he is no exception.
The sunlight glints off the edges of him, and yet also filters through, and in an instant she is captivated. He reminds her of water, and how the sun can make the surface glitter like diamonds, but still send ribbons of light streaming into the shallows. And she wonders if he is fragile like water – if he could be displaced by a simple touch, or if he was stronger, like ice, and could withstand a harsher blow.
Not that she would ever actually try; there was something twisted in her curiosity, but she was still too kind to ever execute anything.
Shedding the shadow of the tree that she had been resting beneath she strides towards him, the yellow sun seeming to warm the otherwise impersonal blackness of her eyes. She is young, likely around his age, with skin covered in stardust that melts across the curves that have begun to emerge from the once baby-softness. The sharp angles of her face lend an edge that should perhaps not be present in one so young, but the smile that laces across her lips manages to soften the severity of it. Everything about her seems to be at odds with each other; with a body that was trying to mature into the weapon it could be but a mind that was still too innocent to use it.
“Hi,” she breathes once she is close enough, but instead of stopping she presses flush alongside of him. Without hesitation her muzzle reaches out to touch the smooth, glassy surface of his skin on his shoulder, reveling at how the sun had warmed it, and she laughs in delight. “I saw you, and all I could think about was touching you,” and it is only because she still possesses that childish sweetness that there is no covert meaning lying within that phrase.
It was just a touch; just her being inquisitive. She wanted to touch him the same way she touched the dew that laced the tall grasses of the meadow in the morning, or the pointed tip of an icicle that hung from a branch.
She withdraws her muzzle from him, and her lips still tingle pleasantly with the warmth until it fades away. “My name is Desire.”
12-19-2019, 11:19 PM (This post was last modified: 12-19-2019, 11:20 PM by thomas.)
and I'm the kind of love it hurts to look at, but once I was enough to make you try now, I'm underneath the rubble, trying not to feel the trouble.
She touches him and it hitches his breath.
She touches him before he has fully registered that she’s there at all.
And when he pulls back his head to get a good look at her, the heart stumbles in the smooth cavern of his chest. Has he ever seen something so beautiful? It registers that she’d said something in greeting, but he is perhaps too involved in trying to jumpstart his own heart to have caught it.
It does not occur to him to be embarrassed by his breathless wonder, the bewildered way he studies her. She touches him without hesitation. As if he’d invited her to do it. And if does not occur to him to shy away. Despite the way he burns with something he does not fully understand. She touches him and he thinks that maybe he can feel even an ounce of the warmth of her mouth. But he’s imagined it, certainly. The heat he feels is internal.
This is it, the most powerful thing he has ever felt. More powerful even than his wanderlust, his want to swallow up the whole world. Perhaps it is because she is the first stranger who has ever touched him or perhaps because she is undoubtedly the most beautiful thing he has ever seen.
He blinks his bewilderment and then smiles slow. She’d seen him and then she’d touched him and he’d been set ablaze and it was really that simple. They walk in step for several paces before it occurs to him to stop. Because he is no longer cautious but he is not reckless either and she has arrested his attention so completely that he cannot tear away his gaze long enough to even glance at the ground.
She speaks then, again, and it is the first thing she says that actually registers. Desire. He does not yet know what the word means. But he will come to know it soon enough.
“My name is Thomas,” he says, perhaps a little dumbly. The grin remains. He is bewitched. “Where’d you come from?” he asks and then tilts his head. “Where have you been?” As if he’d been waiting for her.
sometimes I'm terrified of my heart; of its constant hunger for whatever it is it wants —
She doesn’t notice the way that he looks at her, because he is not the first.
She has always known she was beautiful, because her mother told her, and because she could see how beautiful Stave was, and she was just like him. She could tilt her head back and take in a night sky full of stars and know that was almost what others saw when they looked at her – almost, because she is so much more than just stars. She is covered in the very stardust and stars that she had been created in, crafted from the galaxy where she had been conceived. She is not just constellations and nebulas – she is a map to a place that almost no one has ever been to.
But she is too young to recognize that he looks at her differently. That maybe he thinks she is more than just another pretty face, and that her touch had lit something inside of him. She would learn, someday, that the things she is careless and reckless with – her touch, her heart, and their hearts, too – were things that others treasured and kept safe. That fragile things were meant to be handled with care, but she was meant to be a hurricane.
She stops when he does, mirroring his smile with one of her own. “Thomas,” she repeats his name, and she finds that she is again stepping closer to him. She can feel the heat that radiates like waves off of the glass, and she is fascinated by it, but she does not touch him again. “Where did I come from? I was born in Tephra but –” and she pauses, angling her head back to gesture at the galaxy coloring that covered her, “My mother said my brother and I came from the stars.”
“And you?” She asks, and this time she does touch him again – her delicate nose following the slender arch of his neck, marveling at the smoothness of it. “What are you made of?”
and I'm the kind of love it hurts to look at, but once I was enough to make you try now, I'm underneath the rubble, trying not to feel the trouble.
She smiles at him and he has no choice but to give up on trying to catch his breath.
A fruitless endeavor, to be sure.
With the way she’s looking at him, bold in a way he has never known how to be.
How sweetly her wide-eyed innocence (presumed) could take him to his knees if he let it. Because he does not know how to respond to beautiful things – truly, remarkably beautiful things – except by collapsing into them. He does not know now, he has absolutely no way of knowing, but he’d let her destroy him if it came to it. He’d let her break him down on a molecular level, shatter all that glass and carve out the smooth marble of his heart without hesitation. How foolish he is, in his youth and in his awe of beautiful things.
She says his name and it’s like hearing it for the first time. Has it always sounded like that? It is sweet but it is something else, too. Something like a secret. It makes his lips quiver and the sound of clinking glass betrays him. He shivers with it and he cannot hide it, not with the sound it makes.
He does not know Tephra. He has no reason to. He has traveled as far as his legs could carry him (which, admittedly, is not far with the way that the joints ache after too long because the legs were not built to be made of glass), but he has not committed himself to learning the names of all the places he’s been. But he knows the stars. Of course he knows the stars. He has loved the stars, wondered how it might feel should he take one into the safe harbor of his mouth, swallowed it down and let it pulse in the pit of his gut.
Of course she is from the stars. Only the cosmos could make something so spectacular. She touches him again and he wants to touch her back. How fiercely he wants to touch her back! But he is shy, suddenly, and only smiles at her in that same breathless way when she dusts her nose along the length of his neck.
“Of course,” he murmurs, throaty, the words sticking someplace between his gut and his mouth, “of course you came from the stars.”
She turns the question on him. He cannot know all of the darkness he came from. He cannot know that the mother he knows for his mother is not her real name, that she is not at all who they think she is. He cannot know that his father belongs to someone else. He cannot know these things, so he says the simplest thing. “Glass,” he says. Because he does not know to say that he is also made of heartache.
sometimes I'm terrified of my heart; of its constant hunger for whatever it is it wants —
He doesn’t try to touch her back, and she notices, but she does not fully recognize the way it makes her feel.
On the surface there is something like hurt, but it’s a superficial feeling, and not one that truly takes root.
At her core, though, it is the way the hunger inside of her strengthens, and how her heart twists strangely in her chest that lingers the most.
It’s a peculiar feeling that scratches at her, but she doesn’t know how to name it, and maybe she never would. She knows it feels like the space inside of her chest is too large, and she doesn’t know how to fill it. In the back of her mind she thinks that maybe it’s another heart that she needs, one that could beat steadily alongside hers. If she could just fill up all that empty space with someone else then this longing ache would disappear, but she is afraid that no one will ever want her.
Someday, when she was older, she would not take no for an answer. She would convince him to want her, to want to touch her, but today she is still young and naive. She steps away from him, her eyes diverting away from his almost shyly, but she still smiles when he speaks again. “My mother says the stars are beautiful, but they hurt. She says that most beautiful things are like that, though.” She looks back at him again, her dark eyes alight with admiration, because she cannot fathom how anyone can be so lovely. “But you’re beautiful, and I don’t think you’d ever hurt anyone.” Glass can cut once it’s been broken, but she doesn’t realize that; perhaps the only shred of innocence she had been born with is not being able to grasp that everyone is capable of hurting someone.
and I'm the kind of love it hurts to look at, but once I was enough to make you try now, I'm underneath the rubble, trying not to feel the trouble.
She draws away from him and all of the warmth is drained out of him.
He wants to reach for her, to draw her back in, to tuck her against him so that the heart might go on beating in that funny way that made him dizzy. Instead, it pulses at the base of his throat now. It shivers with a kind of guilt he doesn’t know how to identify.
There is a strange fluttering in the pit of his gut. Something taking flight. Something that spirals, heady, through the network of his veins. It is troublesome, in a way, because he has never felt anything quite so unnerving in his short life. But it is also the most brilliant he has ever felt – as if he has swallowed stardust and it has turned him effervescent.
The stars are beautiful, but they hurt, she says and a cloud of confusion darkens his brow only briefly before it is gone again. Because he cannot look at her with darkness. Because she is certainly the most beautiful thing he’s ever seen and the expression cannot help but lighten when he looks at her. The eyes wide, greedy. The mouth turned up at its corners. The breath quick and light.
She turns her gaze on him again and he is silently thankful that they’ve stopped walking, otherwise she might have knocked him off-kilter with the way she looks at him. It quickens his pulse. It makes his head swim. And he is so young and so foolish and he will one day look back on this moment and think about what a fool he had been. But now he just grins at her, awash with heat. She is not the first to call him beautiful, no, but the word sounds so sweet coming out of her mouth that it makes him sway on his feet.
He should thank her, he knows. Blush and look away. Find some shame. But he just goes on staring at her for a moment, his head tilted slightly. As if he’s trying to figure out how the two of them have ended up in the same place at the same time. “You’re the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen,” he tells her, “and I think I’d let you break me up into tiny little pieces.” It is a romantic notion, certainly, but it is delivered by a child’s mouth and comes out funny. Alas, he does not laugh. Just sucks in a sharp breath and holds it.
sometimes I'm terrified of my heart; of its constant hunger for whatever it is it wants —
She doesn’t really understand love, or romance – she doesn’t even understand the full weight of her own name, desire. With the exception of her twin brother she has never felt a particularly strong connection to anyone; not even with their mother.
And until this moment, she has never noticed or cared.
Until she felt the way Thomas was watching her. Until she let herself reach inside of him and find what he wanted, and she only saw herself. But was that real? She didn’t think it could be. He wanted her because she was in front of him, shimmering like a night sky that longed to be trapped beneath his glass, but what about when she was gone? Beautiful things tended to attract other beautiful things, and she is sure that the next time she finds him there will be someone else that he holds in his heart and his mind.
She hadn’t realized until now how guarded she was. He thought she was beautiful, and she thinks she might be able to feel the way his pulse thrums in his veins, and she realizes that if she wanted she could try and spin this into a romance – just to see what it’s like. But her mother had said that love was dangerous, and she still wasn’t entirely sure what that means – only that she took it to mean she should never feel it.
But she could still find out what it’s like, she thinks; it just won’t be real.
And so she straightens herself and says with a light, teasing laugh, “I would never break you, Thomas.” She steps towards him again, her white lips touching his smooth neck, following the arch of it until she comes to rest on his chest, where his heart pulses beneath the glass and she breathes sweetly, “Not on purpose, at least.”
and I'm the kind of love it hurts to look at, but once I was enough to make you try now, I'm underneath the rubble, trying not to feel the trouble.
The boy is honest.
He’s never known how to be anything but.
So, when he tells her that she is the most beautiful thing he’s ever seen, he means it with everything he has. Every fiber of his being trembles with it. And maybe it’s because he’s never seen anything like her before, something so obviously made of stardust that it seems impossible. But whatever the reason, it doesn’t change the fact that it’s true. It does not change the fact that he will always think she is beautiful. Even if their paths never cross again. Still, he is certain that she will visit him in his dreams.
And, in the wake of his admission, there is only silence. He can feel it pulsing between them like a living thing. And then she laughs and the sound is so sweet that it almost takes him to his knees. He swallows thickly, uncertainly, tries for a smile but comes up short. He trembles with the effort it takes to keep himself upright when she reaches out to touch him again.
First his neck, which feels innocent enough. He has touched his sister plenty, perhaps too many times to feel like it means anything at all that Desire touches him there. But then she shifts, drags her mouth tenderly down the length of his neck until her mouth comes to rest against the slight swell of his chest. And this is the most intimate thing that has ever happened to me. He goes absolutely still so that she might feel the way the heart swells and bursts and strains to rise up and greet her beneath the glass’s impossibly smooth surface.
He tries to find some humor in her words but he finds that he cannot force his thoughts into any kind of coherent pattern. So, he drags in a shuddering breath and turns slow. So slow, so terribly careful. Turns so that he can press his mouth against her shoulder. The stars there do not burn him as he’d expected they might. So he smiles. A secret kind of thing, lingers there a long time, exhales his breath warm and slow across the surface of her skin.
“I’d still let you,” he says finally. And then draws his mouth again with a slanted, boyish smile.
sometimes I'm terrified of my heart; of its constant hunger for whatever it is it wants —
She can feel him tremble, and she is surprised at the sick kind of delight that flutters in the pit of her stomach. His body shook because of her; her presence, her touch, her voice. It was a strange sort of power, to realize that she could have such an effect on someone. And for a moment, she almost understands what it means –that love could be dangerous.
She tilts her head, marveling as she stares at him, and the look in her eyes could have been mistaken for some kind of infatuation. And there’s a part of her that is; she is fascinated and taken with him, because he is remarkably beautiful, and the way he admires her stars is the same way she admires the glimmer of his glass. As her lips continue to caress the warm surface of it she still cannot help but to wonder what it’s like underneath. Does he bleed if it breaks, or does he just shatter into shards? Is his heart made of muscle, like hers, or is it glass like the rest of him?
She had promised she wouldn’t break him, and she wouldn’t – of course she wouldn’t, she was not sinister like that – but she cannot stop her ever inquisitive mind from wondering.
His mouth touches her shoulder, and though she does not shiver the way that he had when she feels his breath curl across her skin, she offers him a shy kind of smile. “They don’t burn, not like real stars,” she says, recognizing that familiar question in his eyes. She is glad that they don’t, though; she is glad that she can let this glass boy touch her without growing so hot that he would break.
With a step, she comes to duck her head beneath his neck, her chest resting just lightly against his while her cheek lays against his shoulder. She breathes a quiet sigh, before asking him softly, “Where do you live? Do you live somewhere where you are kept safe?”
