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  • Beqanna

    COTY

    Assailant -- Year 226

    QOTY

    "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


    [private]  ive never fallen from quite this high | aegean
    #1
    finger trips across my cheek----------------
    ----------------kiss me until i can't speak

    Ahead of him the valley falls away into forest, then rises again to the first of Hyaline’s real mountains. The tops of them, blurred by distance, are already white with snow. A cold wind lifts the stallion’s blue mane with a promise of snow here as well. He shivers and pulls his wings tighter to his body, an unconscious attempt to further warm himself. The motion causes the still-healing right wing to pinch, and Pteron hisses sharply. The sound is exhaled along with a cloud of breath into the crisp autumn air. He had managed to not jostle it during his journey south from Taiga earlier in the day, but he grows tired as evening creeps nearer and had forgotten to be careful.

    His broken wing will heal, but he has never broken it quite this badly before, and it seems that even with the aid of regenerative magic, some things take time. Unable to fly, the tobiano had been forced to depart the northern woods on foot. He had not expected each step to shake away a little bit of weight, and yet even with the ache in his wing, Pteron feels as light as one of his own feathers as he looks north into Hyaline. He is not quite happy, not yet, but he is far closer to it than he has been in years. Pteron smiles, and steps down into the valley.

    Aegean is ahead of him somewhere, and Pteron is determined to find him.

    Exactly what will happen after that he is not certain, but for once it does not matter. There’s no need to plan for anything beyond that. Pteron tosses his blue forelock behind one dun ear and continues down the slope, a faint smile on his face as he goes.

    @[aegean]

    -- pteron --

    Reply
    #2
    Aegean

    I should have loved a thunderbird instead
    at least when spring comes they roar back again

    Aegean no longer knows what it means to have a home—not really. The idea has bled from him a long time ago, leaving instead an emptiness that rings inside of him, a siren’s call that takes him further and further into the depths of his own imaginings. He leaves the outside world, in his own way. He withdraws completely from it, choosing instead to paint his own reality and find some level of comfort within it.

    Not true comfort, he knows, because his illusions are not real.

    But when he finally does come to rest each night, the warmth of his imagined Pteron is real enough.

    Still, there is an emptiness that he isn’t fully able to solve and it grows with each passing day, leaving him with the kind of sadness that does not always abide. It has teeth, this sorrow. He finally feels that, although he has always known the beauty of a love’s kaleidoscope of colors, he knows its counterpart. He knows the endless depth of it, the way that he can pull the shadows over his head like a blanket.

    So he doesn’t know what to do or say when he glances up and Pteron is there. For a second, he believes it to be an illusion—something of his own imagining—but he has spent enough time with his craft to be able to tell the difference between reality and his paintings. His breath catches on his tongue and the stars that he had been painting around him come crashing to the ground, splattering and then disappearing.

    It leaves the two of them to stand there, facing one another, with nothing of his paintings to distract. It leaves him glowing in the faint light, his antlered head swung up, his purple eyes clear.

    “Pteron?”

    His voice is lower than usual, caught somewhere between the smoke and the ash.

    “Is that you?”

    I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead
    (I think I made you up inside my head.)

    Reply
    #3
    finger trips across my cheek----------------
    ----------------kiss me until i can't speak

    Overhead, the sky grows dark. Pteron’s journey continues, and he loses count of the steps he has taken and the ridges he has climbed. He could be halfway to the Hyaline lake or nearly there; the trail is not a familiar one and he has no way to measure distance on foot. He has never been limited in this way before. It is strange, but it allows the dun stallion time to think.

    Taiga falls further from his thoughts, and with it the offer of the rough-faced mare and the curious swell to Lilliana’s sides. Those things are unimportant.

    Blue fades to red in the sky overhead, and later still sunset bleeds into blackness. Distant stars blink overhead, and Pteron pauses now and then to look up at them. Many are familiar, though placed differently than he’s grown used to seeing this time of year. The moon is little more than a crescent, and Pteron is grateful that the promise of snow was a delicate flurry rather than a winter storm. The wind died with the sun, and so the flakes drift down slowly. By dawn they will blanket the forest floor, but tonight they only add a glimmer to the path along which Pteron travels.

    The glitter a little more brightly, and it takes him a moment to realize it. The moment he does, stars crash to the earth around him, a shattering illusion. Pteron blinks his olive eyes against the brightness. When he does, Aegean is standing in front of him.

    This time, for the first time, the antlered stallion is just as Pteron remembers him. Aegean is as perfect as at their last meeting, pristine and ethereal in the soft glow of his own light. Pteron smiles, and it is as relieved as it is joyful. The amethyst-eyed stallion is unharmed; his worry had been in vain. Unharmed, but is he happy? Pteron had wished that for him despite their last conversation a year ago, and his olive gaze flicker across the familiar face in an effort to find it.

    “It’s me,” he answers pointlessly, too busy drinking in the sight of Aegean unharmed to think of something clever. “I missed you,” he says instead of something charming.

    @[aegean]

    -- pteron --

    Reply
    #4
    Aegean

    I should have loved a thunderbird instead
    at least when spring comes they roar back again

    It doesn’t feel real. It’s difficult to think of how it ever could.

    Before him, he sees something that he has spent so long imagining, dreaming of, longing for, and he doesn’t have the slightest idea on how to make it feel real. It crashes in his lungs until he struggles to breathe, as if his very tongue has grown swollen and his throat closed up. He shakes his glowing head and then opens his eyes again, as though he would be able to shake away this illusion that he doesn’t control.

    Except it doesn’t work.

    Because it isn’t an illusion, and because Pteron is real.

    Aegean takes a deep breath that he feels penetrate every inch of him, flooding him with oxygen until he is nearly dizzy with relief. There is a laugh that feels so very distant from him, floating above him as though he had not made the noise at all. “I haven’t missed you,” he says quietly, before shaking his antlered head again. “I mean,” he struggles for words for the first time in his life—trying to find the right way to say what he needs to say. Struggling to put to form the things that he feels beat like a drum in his chest.

    “It has been so much more than that.”

    How could he possibly put to words the ache that he has felt since he last saw the other? How much he has dreamt of him? How it has felt like surviving on no air, no water, no food. He feels starved and shaken and he knows he just a few feet from reaching out and touching the very thing that would give him sustenance. “My illusions do you no justice,” he manages, his voice hoarse. 

    “I have tried very hard though.”

    I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead
    (I think I made you up inside my head.)



    @[Pteron]
    Reply
    #5
    finger trips across my cheek----------------
    ----------------kiss me until i can't speak

    Damage to his heart is rather unlike damage to the rest of his body, Pteron has found. Bones break and heal and break just as easily the next time. His skin is still fragile despite ten thousand magical mendings, bruises color him just as darkly no matter how many times they’d been replaced on freshly healed skin. But the aches and pains of his heart are not things that his magic can mend. They are not scratches or dents in the tissue; nothing is missing that needs regeneration. So his heart recovers in its own way, and it builds itself stronger each time it must do so, patching over the weak areas with something stronger.

    Once, the words might have crushed him. Once, when he was primed to assume the very worst, the statement would have broken him.

    Once, but not any more.

    He knows better now, knows to wait for everything to be said, knows to not jump to the worst conclusion. The worst might be coming, Pteron knows, but he will gain nothing by fearing it too early. Instead he waits, his ears flicking to catch each word and a faint smile at the edge of his mouth.

    “Well,” he says soothingly, a gentle shrug of his winged shoulders wordlessly indicating the task of creating his image is an understandably difficult one. “It is rather hard to recreate perfection.” His face is too perfectly still to be serious, the arched brow frozen at its peak during the silence that follows.

    There are a thousand ways that he could fill that silence. A younger man would have done so, freely professing the emotions that rattle within him. Instead he quiets them, releases the tension through a casual resettling of his left wing. Rather than spill out an explanation for his behavior at their last meeting, Pteron chooses to find out if one is even necessary. He has wished Aegean happy each day they have been apart, but has the other man become so content that reminding him of the past would be painful? Pteron cannot bear the thought of hurting him.

    “Have you tried recently?” He asks, or have you moved on in the year since I pushed you away? "Perhaps having a reference might inspire you."

    -- pteron --



    @[aegean]
    Reply
    #6
    Aegean

    I should have loved a thunderbird instead
    at least when spring comes they roar back again

    I He feels suspended in the moment, trapped between each breath and each pulse of his wretched heart as it stammers ineloquently against his chest. How he wishes he had the skill to tell the other of what he feels. How he wishes that he could somehow twist his tongue into something poetic enough to capture the way that he soars in Pteron’s presence—how the very glimpse of him makes everything feel dull and lifeless in comparison. Instead, he just stands there, quietly, his purple eyes dark, his mouth set.

    It is only when Pteron speaks again, rolling his shoulders, that Aegean gives a breathy laugh, the sound catching and tripping on the end of his tongue. “It is impossible, I have found,” he agrees, because he who has dedicates so much of his life to the art of weaving illusions could never quite capture the beauty of Pteron within them. There was always something astray, something missing. Just the spark in his eye and the mischievous tilt of his lips when he was beginning to smile. The warmth and the fervor.

    Still, he has tried.

    How hard he has tried.

    The question catches him off guard and were he someone prone to feelings of embarrassment, he would perhaps think of lying. Perhaps think of trying to at least obscure the truth behind something like a fib or a weaving of tales that would hide the meaning of it. But Aegean has never been anything but honest and he doesn’t change now. He instead catches Pteron’s gaze and holds it steady, studies him for a second before he nods his antlered head. “I have tried every day since we last met. I find that I cannot sleep unless I have at least the faded whisper of you next to me.” A sad smile that pulls at his white mouth.

    “Is that intrusive? To think that I carry your memory with me in such a way?”

    He does not answer whether the reference would help.

    He’s not sure he could.

    I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead
    (I think I made you up inside my head.)



    @[Pteron]
    Reply
    #7
    finger trips across my cheek----------------
    ----------------kiss me until i can't speak

    The days of his search have passed without the Pteron truly marking them. Some part of him had been aware of autumn drifting into winter, winter melting into spring, spring blossoming into summer. The rest of him though, feels as though it has been suspended, like a floating bubble escaped from a frothing stream. The rest of the world goes on without him, heading ever onward, ever downstream like the rest of the water. What does it matter that time passes, anyway?

    Aegean is in front of him now, and the trees overhead have barely been touched by autumn’s color.

    Has a year really passed?

    It doesn’t feel so. His dedication to this hunt has left him blind to all else. The bubble he’d not quite imagined disappears without a sound, and it seems like the world comes rushing in at him. Not Aegean though. Aegean doesn’t rush any more than the moon races across the sky. Everything about him is purposeful. Elegant. Graceful. He is as calm as the moon as well, his words steady and measured. It’s a rather marvelous ability, and one that Pteron with his deceptively rapid heart cannot help but envy.

    “No,” he admits. “I’m glad that you have.”

    “I shouldn’t have sent you away,” Pteron’s words spill out in a rush, because he will never be a creature of great restraint. “I’ve regretted it every day. I left Taiga. I’ve been looking for you.” Short explosions of truth, a desperate attempt to make up for the time that has passed since their last meeting.

    -- pteron --



    @[Aegean]
    Reply
    #8
    Aegean

    I should have loved a thunderbird instead
    at least when spring comes they roar back again

    Aegean’s heart hammers against his chest.

    Can Pteron hear it?

    He wonders if there is some echo of it in the world around them. If perhaps they are surrounded by the memory of it, even as they live within it. He feels it like a rhythm on the tip of his tongue—this dance that they both engage in. It’s beautiful in its delicacy. Beautiful in the way that it comes together in such impossible elegance and he wishes he could hold it. Wishes that he could capture it here forever.

    But it melts like snow on the tongue.

    His purple eyes swing upward as he looks toward Pteron, memorizing all of the fine details of him, wondering if he would ever be able to recreate something so desperately dear to him. There is relief that the other is not angry at his attempts—does not begrudge him his efforts at soothing a wounded heart—but it does nothing to stop the jackhammer of his pulse. Does nothing to stop the riptide of want.

    When Pteron speaks again, when the truths spill out and over him, Aegean gulps for air. He feels it explode in his lungs, his mind suddenly impossibly clear. He says nothing as he finally closes the gap between them, each step intentional and direct. When he is close enough to catch the sweet scent of Pteron, he reaches forward and takes the kiss that he has dreamt so long of having.

    His white lips graze over Pteron’s and the illusions that he has bottled inside of his chest explode outward. The world goes dark as a brilliant array of colors flash outward and then drip down slowly.

    He feels the pulse of light against the back of his eyelids, but he sees nothing but Pteron.

    I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead
    (I think I made you up inside my head.)

    Reply
    #9
    and since you’re the only one that matters,----------------
    ----------------tell me: who do i run to?

    His heartbeat grows louder with each step Aegean takes. By the time he is close enough to touch, the sound of it drowns out everything else. It quiets – the whole world does – when their lips meet. Always before, Pteron has been the bold one, taking caresses that he thought asked for only later. This time, he accepts only what he is given.

    “I do not think I can make it up to you,” Pteron breathes against the coolness of Aegean’s neck. “But if you will let me, I will try.”

    The how of that trying is somehow a blurry thing for all that he means it. Pteron has been taught to be careful with his words, knows of the danger that a promise can hold in a world of magic. He knows, but he also knows that anything Aegean requested he would do without question. He can see Aegean even with his eyes closed, Pteron finds, the everglow of his coat bright even against closed eyelids. He smiles, his mouth curling upward. This close, Aegean smells of creeks and meadows and autumn leaves, like everywhere and nowhere all at once.

    He knows that the antlered creature calls no place his home, though Pteron cannot help but think of him as from Silver Cove, where he’d first made eye contact with the boy across the beach. His antlers had been smaller than, Pteron thinks, and amends with a smile his earlier thought Aeagean hadn’t changed. He had – the span of his antlers is far more impressive. Pteron reaches up closer to them at the thought. Will he lose them in the winter, Pteron wonders? Does he shed them each year like the deer and regrow them afresh? Their days together in the past had been spaced so far apart that he’s never even thought of it. He will know soon, Pteron thinks, he will be there to see.

    “But even if you won’t, you will find that I am very hard to get rid of. I do not plan on letting you out of my sight again.”

    -- pteron --



    @[aegean]
    Reply
    #10
    Aegean

    I should have loved a thunderbird instead
    at least when spring comes they roar back again

    Aegean isn’t sure he understands Pteron—the idea of making it up to him. His sorrow had been a living thing, but there had been no one to bear the guilt of it. Instead it had manifested in his very marrow from the fabric of life, a response to the tides and the winds as much as any conscious decision. It had never occurred to him that he could assign responsibility to Pteron or make him bear the weight of it. That the other boy would perhaps be at fault for the heaviness in his lungs, the stone settled in his chest.

    There is a flicker of that confusion across his face, but the ripples ease just as quickly.

    Should Pteron want to try, then he would not stop him.

    Instead, he loses himself in the gentleness of the moment—the way that the heat between them seems to fade into a whisper, although it makes it no less potent. It is a lingering feeling, something that demands it be felt in the quiet and in the lull. It isn’t a wildfire that overtakes them and razes everything in its path. It is not the destructiveness of a hurricane. It is the blooming of a spring flower. It is the gentle drizzle of a spring storm. It is constant and inevitable and perfect in every moment, in every breath, in everything.

    “I have no desire to rid myself of you,” Aegean breathes as his lips trace Pteron’s face, finding the nooks and the crannies, memorizing the angles and the curves. Each piece is a new thing to discover and a new thing to learn—something to tuck away for later and indulge in now simultaneously. “I would gladly drink of these waters for the rest of my life. I would gladly spend all of my days right here, with you.”

    I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead
    (I think I made you up inside my head.)

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