"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
04-17-2020, 12:45 AM (This post was last modified: 04-17-2020, 12:51 AM by thorn.)
Between now and the monster’s belly, Thorn has shed the skin of a kind boy and grown the scales of a monster. In his worst moments, there is the stark sound of gasping accompanied by the blistering white of rolled eyes. In his best . . . there is nothing. Nothing because Thorn is mostly a zombie, the faint drip of his wounded chest the only sound that follows him, eyes so glazed they look like they might just roll out.
Nothing—because what remains of him is the constant presence of suffering thoughts but no actual coherency—because ever since that monster threw him up he hasn’t been able to loosen such heavy shoulders—because when he breathes he is often heaving through a pain-locked chest—
“God, I’m tired,” Thorn exclaims, though it comes out more like a question and he isn’t sure he actually spoke. The sun above is hot, dries sweat against his neck and blood against his legs. He pants a little then squints through the bright dapples of the canopy to see if there might be some relief ahead. Nothing, mostly—except for the occasional cloud passing over the sun. He’d sigh if he was capable of such an expression; instead his head limply falls and his eyelids droop in exhaustion, not disappointment.
Forcing numbness is a better alternative to a constant barrage of stranger’s suffering.
The wound in his chest pulses. Fresh blood drips down his chest, drip, onto the forest floor.
Thorn stops. He’s too tired now.
thorn
under your skin, over the moon
don't let me in, I don't know what I'd do
roses are fallin', roses from fallin' for you, ooh
If only because it is here that the memory of that terrible dream is most vivid. She can almost smell the blood. And when she closes her eyes here she can see that vicious glint in her sister’s eye. At least, she had called her sister. In the dream, she had merely been a viper. And Prayer didn’t know she had a sister.
But there is some burgeoning curiosity in her now, as she picks her way through the dense underbrush to find the place where she woke from that dream. Gasping, sweat-slick, the breath coming quick and hard, as if she might swallow the whole world.
What she does not know is that it had not been a dream at all. No, the viper had sunk her teeth into Prayer’s neck and there is still a scar there on her neck, though she cannot see it and no one has ever asked about it.
It is here, at the height of summer, that she sees him. And the sight of him and all that blood stops her heart just long enough for it to slam back to life in its ribbed cage.
“Thorn!” she gasps and rushes toward him, the eyes wide with panic. “Thorn,” she says again, the voice strained as she reaches for him, stops just short of touching him. “What happened? How can I help?” He looks different, so much different than she remembers him, but she’d recognize him anywhere.
04-17-2020, 01:20 AM (This post was last modified: 04-17-2020, 01:21 AM by thorn.)
The silence that blankets Thorn’s mind is all-consuming. Prayer that appears like a dream and reminds him of a nightmare, seemingly materializes immediately before him.
Thorn, she says, and it sounds like an echo, or like a scream made underwater. All of his blood rushes to his head and he flushes, hot and dizzy, out of breath. That strain, the way she draws back just before touching him—that’s what really drives the dagger in.
“Prayer,” Thorn gasps, casting eyes so disturbed that they look surreal paired with such a lovely lilac. There’s a plea that sits on the tip of his tongue: please touch me. Because this pain Thorn can feel, the one balled tight in her chest, is the heaviest he’s borne and maybe—maybe, if her touch were too much for him, it would be a fair way for him to die.
Thorn hesitates to respond for a moment too long. He can’t get the crystal clear sound of the wintertime river he had met her in front of out of his head. Thorn’s there, now, small and belly-deep in water too cold for any being, but especially a child. “Don’t touch me,” he calls from that frigid water. The glaze over his eyes is cold, his voice somehow distant even as they stand next to each other. “You can’t be here.”
With a gasp, the boy locked in the river hops out—Thorn’s eyes glimmer with just a hint of light, just enough to furrow his brow.
“There’s nothing you can do.”
It’s the truth, and it’s spoken more sweetly than his previous words, but to speak to her in such a way still stings.
thorn
under your skin, over the moon
don't let me in, I don't know what I'd do
roses are fallin', roses from fallin' for you, ooh
He says her name but he’s looking at her strange and she feels her heartbeat slide sideways. A vise tightens around her throat, hitches her breath. She feels some terrible trepidation, which is compounded by the thing he says next. She shrinks, a staggered, aching step backward, away from him. Eyes still wide, that steady stare still fixed to his face. Those eyes. How the heart aches!
“Thorn?” she whispers it now. It comes out all strangled, scared, and there is a tremor that starts in her knees and splinters outward until it consumes her entirely. She frowns, cut to the quick, cold down to the marrow of her bones. She swallows hard around the lump wedged into the narrow space at the base of her throat, continues to shrink.
You can’t be here and she has half a mind to turn and flee. But he looks at her and she sees some distant glimmer in his eye. Her eyes burn as she extends her nose toward him without moving her feet, without allowing herself to sink any closer.
“What happened?” she asks and the question is all doused in pain that doesn’t belong to her. “What happened to you?” What agony! To look at him now and know that he is not the same boy who’d walked beside her so many years earlier, who’d buoyed her heart with his laughter.
She doesn’t know what’s wrong, doesn’t know where all that blood’s coming from until she forces herself to study his chest. Until she sees that fresh wound and recoils in horror.
“Let me help you, please.” And this comes out watery, shaky, as her frown deepens. “I can help you!”
Those first moments back with his father had been the worst in his life. Nightlock’s initial grief and confusion had made Thorn so nauseous it took days to eat again. He didn’t think there would ever be another like that—he thought that he could get used to the weight of the ones he adored the most but—
Here Prayer stands, bearing the silks of a rosy childhood friend, and it wrenches his chest in ways he didn’t know existed. Even the simplest, unselfish kind of love is tainted by his curse. He would be angry if he could feel something other than Prayer’s heart splitting in two. Thorn genuinely cannot remember what happiness feels like. When he sees this face that brought him so much joy, all he can feel is the pain he causes her.
Thorn would take dying again over bearing such knowledge.
Prayer asks her questions and he does not interrupt, simply standing while the curse’s gash weeps faster so near another’s pain. Thorn wants to drag her to beneath his neck and tell her it will be okay. To know what a touch like that feels like one more time—oh! just once—before banishing himself to the bottom of some shadowed lake. He wishes to convince her entirely that this hole in his chest is meant to be there, that he is the boy from the river—
Oh, to know his differences cause her suffering.
“You can’t,” Thorn finally coughs out. “You can’t.” This time more defeated.
“Magic won’t fix it.”
thorn
under your skin, over the moon
don't let me in, I don't know what I'd do
roses are fallin', roses from fallin' for you, ooh
How fiercely she resents her trembling. The iron fist of panic closed around her hard-beating heart. She doesn’t want to look at it because it puts a sharp pang in her own heaving chest.
She swallows and blinks against the burning in her eyes. Magic won’t fix it. Is she a coward if she doesn’t try? She fixes her pleading stare to his face and tilts her fine head and drifts a little closer. He’d told her not to touch him, even if the voice had sounded so many thousands of miles away.
She drags in a shuddering breath and she searches his face. “Thorn,” she whispers this and it comes out all strangled by her grief. The mouth’s all twisted in a frown and there is some great furrow in her brow as she resists the urge to reach for him all over again, notching her chin toward him in fractions.
And, because she cannot resist the pull, she glances down at the gaping wound. The blood leeching out of the wound with every beat of his heart. His blessed heart. It turns her stomach and her breath hitches when she meets his eye again.
“Will you die?” she asks, the voice shaky, just like the rest of her.
If Thorn could turn back time, he absolutely would. There is no romanticized it made me who I am mania. If there was a way to drag himself from the mouth of that cave, he would say or do or sacrifice anything. He only had so much to offer, with the way his chest tells his tale, but maybe his slim pickings will earn his loved ones a new story.
Thorn.
Her voice is throttled by all the hands that tore Thorn’s chest open.
They come back to him to dig deeper into his wound, flat palms pressing into the bleeding flesh, hungry to see more pain crease his face. Satisfied with the work they’ve done on another.
Will you die?
Prayer’s question is one Thorn doesn’t think he can answer. The leviathan had said no, he will not die from this curse; but every passing day increases the chances that he’ll die by his own hand. Sometimes, when the wound stings and swells with infection, Thorn thinks he’ll let it go just long enough for him to be too weak to heal it. He’ll have taken himself just far enough into the woods to be too far away to find another healer, and he’ll die (alone).
Thorn looks down at Prayer, holding his breath because the distance between is so small and so fragile that even a reckless exhale might shatter them. “Not from the wound, no,” he whispers, desperate to break Prayer’s gaze but wholly incapable of doing so.
“Not from the wound.”
thorn
under your skin, over the moon
don't let me in, I don't know what I'd do
roses are fallin', roses from fallin' for you, ooh
