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    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


    [mature]  who could ever leave me darling, but who could stay; illum
    #1
    “I know when you go
    down all your darkest roads
    I would have followed all the way
    to the graveyard.”
    She does not leave Taiga immediately after her conversation with Lilliana. She could blame it on still being restless; that the journey back to Hyaline didn’t seem long enough, and she is afraid of what else – or who else – she might find to waste her time with. 

    That isn’t it, of course. It’s never anything quite that simple.

    In the densest parts of Taiga she cannot help but to be transported to a different time and place. The darkness reminds her of when shadows swallowed the sun, when she choked on smoke while bringing new life into this world; how her newborn daughter had opened her eyes to wartorn chaos and sucked in a lungful of ash and there was nothing Ryatah could have done to protect her from that.

    She remembers him, too, because how could she forget? The way his shadows had crept like ropes around her throat when she was blinded by a foreign magic, and how she had let him – a stranger – lead her away from the fires and destruction in Tephra. He had disappeared though almost just as quickly as he had materialized, fading back into the shadows she is so sure he was made from.

    He never came back, either, and that is what confuses her the most though it should not be surprising. She never understands why anyone comes back, but she certainly understands why they never stay. It’s not as though she herself gives anyone a reason to. She is insatiable and easily distracted and too much and not enough, all crammed inside this imposter of an angel-form. She has tried to accept that he is a portion of her life that would always be a “what if” – as if anything romance-related was ever a mystery to her. It’s always the same and somehow she clings to this naive notion it will ever be different.

    Like she did not completely destroy it the one time that it was.

    It’s why when she slips through a grove of trees and she finds him she immediately freezes. She stares for what feels like the longest time, her amber glow radiating against the shadows, seeking out a face that never had the chance to become familiar and yet somehow he is exactly as she had remembered him. “Illum?” Her voice hangs softly in the dark, and she wonders if he can hear the countless questions hiding in the syllables of his name. She ducks her haloed head almost shyly as she steps towards him, and there is a smile that plays at the very edge of her lips when she confesses before she can catch herself, “I was looking for you.”
    ryatah
    Reply
    #2

    all i want is to flip a switch
    before something breaks that cannot be fixed

    She lives among the constellations of his memories, a star in a sea of speckled light - though perhaps hers is brighter than some. Their meeting had been such a strange one, and maybe that alone is enough to make her remarkable, to hold her aloft in his strange galaxies. But he never expected to see her again, certainly never expected her voice to find him in his shadows with words the shape of, I was looking for you.

    His jaw tightens, every inch of his body tenses, and his dark eyes snap to hers. And at once, he is greeted by a strange kind of impasse where part of him thinks he should pretend not to recognize her, and the other part of him whispers a quiet kind of delight.

    It leaves him with a strange kind of grimace while his eyes unfocus so subtly and his mind recalls their previous encounter.

    He had gone into Tephra to answer the cry of war - and not because he was valiant, or for some inner moral compass, but because there is such dark in war and such dark in him. He will never not crave chaos. So he had gone for a sense of self fulfillment, to please the roil in his belly and the shadows that live wild beneath his skin.

    But instead he had found her. And yes, for a moment he had wanted to kill her, had gone as far as to unleash the darkness in his heart and allow the shadows to wrap around the curve of such a delicate throat. But there had been a still-damp babe, and, though he specifically tried not to notice, something painfully gentle in the way her unseeing eyes had searched for him through the eternal dark. It is still strange to him that he had chosen them over the burn of wild war, chosen to bring them through the haze of fire and living vicious dark and into his own home.

    He blinks, and a scowl warps the shape of his brow, though it is mostly hidden beneath the dark of a heavy forelock. But there’s an almost gentle curiosity in the backs of those dark eyes as he takes her in. The voice is still the same, ethereally gentle, ethereally curious, and she is still the color of sun-bleached bone with eyes as dark as night. But she has wings now, white and shining gold, and his own delight in this, lifting in that arrogant way of wings to be noticed by hers.

    “Oh really?” He asks, shrugging and stepping close enough to notice that beautiful glow and the halo ringing her delicate ears in golden light. “Tell me, what use does an angel have for a demon like me.” His eyes wander quietly to the shadows wrapped gently around her throat again.



    Illum
    Reply
    #3
    “I know when you go
    down all your darkest roads
    I would have followed all the way
    to the graveyard.”
    He is such a beautiful mystery that she cannot help but to want to solve him. He is different than most in the sense that he doesn’t seem to want her at all. Even when he turns to face her, even though his face is shrouded in shadow and tangled forelock, she knows that the  look in his is different.

    She is used to having to fight the urge to shrink away from their stares; when Carnage’s flip from their almost neutral wine-red to something infinitely darker, or when the yellow of Atrox’s sharpen until they might cut her open with a glance. She is used to the way they can make her blood run cold only to bring it back to a wanting simmer again, and it’s become something she seeks out in most everyone.

    With Illum there was something almost unreadable, but she is not afraid yet.
    He doesn’t seem to want to kill her, but he doesn’t seem to want to touch her either.
    She doesn’t know why she takes it as a dare to see which she can incite from him first.

    Their eyes find each other through the dark, and she thinks that maybe, just for a moment, there is something there. That the flickering jump of her heart did not happen out of nowhere and for no reason, and perhaps he might see the curious spark that lights up her eyes when he moves closer. He calls her an angel, though, and that is what reflexively makes her nearly close up. Her nose curves towards her chest until the long tendrils of her forelock hide her dark eyes and the heat that she feels rise to her cheeks, and to an outsider it could be misinterpreted as a shyness at the veiled compliment. “I’m not an angel,” is her soft reply, and the words are confusing when paired with the amber glow of her halo and the way her gold-tipped wings shift when she moves.

    She feels the shadows at her throat again, and she forgets for a moment what an imposter she feels like when she lifts her eyes to his. She does not move when they curl at her throat, though she does notice how his shadows seem immune to her ethereal light – that they swallow it whole, suffocating the angelic glow in the places they touch, and this brings a smile to the edge of her lips when she murmurs in a way so quiet that it betrays the rapid uptick of her pulse, “Do you threaten to choke everyone, or is that your special greeting for me?”
    ryatah
    Reply
    #4

    all i want is to flip a switch
    before something breaks that cannot be fixed

    He does see that spark in her eyes, a silent flicker that says as much to him as any words ever could. Though he chooses not to be, tries not to be, the dark inside him took the form of predator long ago, and it has only ever been sharpened by the wickedness he’s encountered throughout his early life.

    There is a voice in his mind that is not a voice at all, it is an urge or an impulse, an ache in his belly that makes him feel sick once it passes. It whispers to step closer, to touch his mouth to her neck because it knows she will allow it, because it saw that flicker in her eyes too. To trace love with the heat of his still breath over skin so white that even doves must be jealous. That impulse tells him to take her, because he could have her if he wanted it.

    And maybe that is the difference she sees in him, a yawning distance in his eyes and the way he does not look at her as others might.

    Because the voice is him, and it makes him sick.

    His face is almost a snarl now as he drifts through those thoughts, but it softens when she speaks again and reclaims the dark of his eyes as he works quietly to understand the things she didn’t say aloud. Like the way her chin tucks to her chest and her eyes disappear behind a forelock as bright as fresh morning snow. Is she pleased with his assessment, or is she hiding from it?

    The snarl is completely faded now, and the corner of his mouth pulls up just a hint as he watches her. “Then whose halo did you steal?” And for just the briefest disarming moment, there is an actual smile on his bemused mouth, crooked and reaching to touch the shadows in his eyes. But it’s like the dark in him feels it and it is gone again in an instant. He nearly turns from her, but her gaze lifts and those eyes hold him hostage again.

    “What makes you think it’s a threat?” He asks, but his eyes have hardened again a little because there’s this goddamn smile on her lips making that voice in his head whisper terrible things. “Maybe i’m just friendly.” But he is helpless to caring now, to stop that he is slipping from man to beast, that his dark is a tide swelling in his chest and she is the gravity of twelve moons. He blinks, and maybe the war in his eyes is visible, maybe she feels the shadows tighten for a moment and then disappear again with silent caress at her bare throat, but he’s trying.

    He takes a single step back, though his pulse is an ache in his chest remembering that smile and those dark angel eyes, how easy it would be to make them open wider. “So,” he says, grasping at the words she had spoken moments ago, those first words, anything to break this moment, “you found me. Now what?” But there is a quiet, simmering heat behind the scowl of his gaze when his dark eyes lift and settle against hers.


    Illum
    Reply
    #5
    “I know when you go
    down all your darkest roads
    I would have followed all the way
    to the graveyard.”
    He seems to be at war with himself, and she finds herself wishing for just a glimpse of the demons he kept locked away inside. She wonders, then, if this is why she too captures the attention of the most unlikely sort. Because outwardly she is all things ethereal and light, she is soft with those endlessly dark eyes, she is pristine white and accented with gold, and she glows as radiant as any angel ever could. But it doesn’t take much to see that the wretched heart of hers does not match the appearance that she wears, and maybe it is that curiosity to see how far she will let the dark encroach upon her light that brings them back.

    Because Illum, she can see, is not so easily black and white either. He wears his shadows like armor and sometimes she thinks there is something sinister that flashes in his eyes or hardens the already unreadable features of his face. He gives her every reason to believe that he is similar to all the other cold, distant men she lets her wickedly foolish heart latch onto, if it were not for the simple fact that he has already proven that he is different.

    It was, afterall, he who had appeared from the smoke and the flames in the middle of a war, to guide her and a newborn daughter to safety. And she doesn’t think she will ever understand what had driven him to do that.

    “I don’t know, but, they probably want it back,” she retorts lightly and with a faint laugh, though the sound hitches in her throat when she thinks she sees – or perhaps she just imagined – a smile touching his own lips. Her heart does that awful thing again where it starts to get ahead of itself, and it makes her pulse race and blood rush and she feels like she might crawl out of her own skin just to get rid of the feeling.

    She is grateful when the topic redirects from her and back to him, though she is sure he doesn’t feel the same. “Believe it or not, you are not the most hostile company I’ve kept,” the words are spoken with a light-hearted jest, but she knows better than to underestimate anyone, even if she could never imagine Illum doing the things that Carnage has done. “So far, at least.”

    He takes a step back, and she has to mask the disappointment from her face, and she can only hope that it was also lost in the darkness of her eyes. Her gaze falters from his momentarily, readjusting the position of her gold-tipped wings as she regains her false sense of composure before answering him, “I ended up in Taiga by accident and I couldn’t stop thinking about you.” It is truthful, but the levelness of her tone makes it impossible to discern if she means romantically or just because she associated Taiga with him because of their past. “I suppose it was fitting, though, that you came from out of nowhere and then disappeared right back into it.”
    ryatah
    Reply
    #6

    all i want is to flip a switch
    before something breaks that cannot be fixed

    “I don’t know angel, looks like a pretty good fit from here.” It is so incredibly disarming the way she watches him with those dark, beautiful eyes, and the way she keeps them half-hidden behind her forelock when she peers up at him. It makes her seem shy in a way he thinks she is not, or bashful maybe. But generally speaking, if you’re shy you don’t go around confessing to strangers that you’ve been looking for them.

    Or that you can’t stop thinking about them.

    Her words unsettle him at his core, because they reach a dark place inside him long ago abandoned, a room closed and locked, all filled with dust. It is a piece of himself he had thought he would possess when he was a child, when he still believed he would be a protector like his father, or compassionate like his mother. That he would grow up to be the kind of man his children could be proud of. Someone worth the time the woman has wasted thinking about him.

    “Not the most hostile?” His voice feigns offense, as though he cannot believe she would insult him like that. “I’ll have you know I can be very hostile.” He is almost teasing though his voice is still gravel, like he’s slipping in and out of versions of himself he thought long dead and the version he is now who slavers at the back of his thoughts at this pointless banter. There is no purpose to this conversation, it simpers, she is already his if he wants her.

    And he does want her.
    It is part of the dichotomy that now consumes him.

    The beast inside him paces, so frustrated with the way he fights himself. With the way he pretends he is not all carved out inside and filled with the dark he let devour him years ago when he learned how easy it was to take what others would not willingly give. But it is as though some of this dark recedes in the light of her, of this angel who watches him like she wants to know more of him - and the longer she waits, the more willing he is to let her have glimpses. No one ever stays this long. How much can he show her before she regrets this?

    His face is a frown again because he knows he’s being foolish, just as he understands her curiosity in him is a waning thing. She is a lure to him, like his dark cannot be without her, and even though he gives his feet a million reasons to stay, they carry him close enough to reach out and press his lips to the curve of that beautiful throat. He doesn’t though, because he is not sure he will be able to stop himself if he touches the warmth of her. “Is that what you plan to do next?” He wonders, marvelling at the impossible dark of these angel eyes this close up. “Here out of nowhere and disappear right back into it?”

    He’s too close and speaking too quiet, and he shouldn’t because there is absolutely no reason for it, but his lips find the curve of her neck with such tamed curiosity that even his feet carry him another stride closer. He could reach her wings now too, but he’s still busy discovering the curve of her slender shoulder and the way her mane settles against it. She can almost certainly feel the frost on his skin at this distance, maybe even where his lips touch her shoulder. “Is now the part where you tell me your name, or should we do that later.” And though she likely cannot see it at this angle, there is once more an amused smile on his lips as she holds his dark at bay.


    Illum
    Reply
    #7
    “I know when you go
    down all your darkest roads
    I would have followed all the way
    to the graveyard.”
    “Looks can be deceiving,” and though spoken lightly there is a weighted truth to it, and again something like sorrow or confusion shadows her face. He hasn’t left yet, and he keeps looking at her in a way similar to how she looks at him – like he is trying to figure her out, or like he wants to learn all the things that make her tick. But he calls her angel, and she wonders what he would think if he discovered that she was anything but.

    Would he change his mind if she knew she had love, once, and it was honest and kind, and she left it behind in favor of those that could never reciprocate it? Would he still think she was an angel if he knew the only light she had was this ethereal glow, but even she doesn’t know where it comes from, because it certainly cannot possibly be from her?

    He could not possibly still think she was angel if he knew how quickly she yielded to nearly any man that pretended to want her, that she would rather let them use her than to never have them at all. She is covered in their marks, from the scars at her neck and withers, to the intricate design burned into her hip, and the spider-web of cracks across her heart. There is not a single part of her that has not been touched by someone else, she was wretched and used and nothing like an angel at all.

    His own version of teasing coaxes another real smile to her lips, and she tilts her pale head to lift her gaze to his when she responds in kind, “Well, hopefully I never have to see that hostile side of you.” The sudden simmer that alights in the dark of her eyes betrays the lilt and almost laugh to her words, because what a lie that is; as if she does not seek out the dark in everyone, as if she would not beg for shadows to choke away her light.

    She is surprised, though, when he steps closer. When she is suddenly staring so close at his handsome face, when she is made aware of every breath in her lungs and every quickened beat of her heart. She resists the urge to reach out and touch him, and instead she focuses her eyes on his, at the shadows that seem to swim behind them. “Maybe,” she says quietly, an almost aching whisper, because the truth of it is she has always been terrible at staying in one place, and yet there is an inexplicable pull that always takes her back to Hyaline. “Would it still be considered disappearing if I told you where to find me?”

    His lips touch her shoulder, and there is a breath that sighs from her lips, her dark lashes fluttering closed. There is a moment where she just lets him touch her, where she just stands and lets him explore that one single part of her, until she, too steps forward. Her nose brushes against the tangled fall of his mane, pressing until her lips find his neck beneath it. There is a soft intake of breath when the feel of frost meets the warmth of her own skin, but instead of pulling away she shifts closer. So enraptured at the way her touch chases away the cold of him she almost does not hear what he says, but when she does it incites another laugh, though this time the sound is lost in the tendrils of his hair and the slope of his shoulder. “Did I not tell you that last time? No wonder you disappeared.” Another touch against his neck, trailing towards his throat before she says, “Ryatah.”
    ryatah
    Reply
    #8

    all i want is to flip a switch
    before something breaks that cannot be fixed

    Everything in him sharpens like a blade at those four simple words. Looks can be deceiving. He does not realize that she is thinking of herself when she says that, he is too busy registering the underlying threat in that truth. The risk that she might somehow know his thoughts or past, or worse, that she might know the shade of the dark inside his chest. His burnished gold eyes harden, and he is glad that his face is hidden from her when they stand close like this. He feels like a snake, feels that predator thrill as the beast in him lifts its slumbering head to examine her with new eyes. To notice the flutter of the pulse at her throat, or the way those angel wings just ask to be flayed apart. His mouth moves to her skin to taste her, and it is only by the grace of whatever God she believes in that she says what she says next.

    Well, hopefully I never have to see that hostile side of you.

    He stiffens, or maybe it is just that creature inside him, that living dark he will never be free of. But he freezes and closes his jaw tight, his gaze hard and flat as something like bile rises in the back of his throat - as the boy who would’ve grown up to love a woman like this is faced once more with this alternative future, with a self more beast than man, and in no way worthwhile.

    But there is good in him, because it is a battle to stay here by her side. To soften again and leave a trail of sensation with the soft of his whiskered lips over the hollow of her small back and around the base of such snowy wings. The good in him loses, of course, but she won’t ever know it because this curious new affection will seem like the good. These lips that trace the lines of old scars like they’re paths he wants to travel. Because if the good in him had won, he would’ve left to keep her safe, to protect her from whatever it is she makes rise in him.

    “You mean to tell me you came all this way and you don’t intend to stay?” There is an almost rumble of amusement as he turns his head to look back at her face, struck again by those dark, gentle eyes. “You said you ended up here by accident. Are you still in Tephra?” He is careful to ignore that feeling of wanting her to say yes, that even when she is gone from here (and him) she will still be close by. He pretends that if he ignores it, it is like it never existed at all. But it settles like a weight in his chest until she steps closer and reaches out to touch him, and something in him comes undone.

    Nothing should matter this much, but when she deliberately shifts into him as though the frost on his skin doesn’t bother her, his entire body softens with a silent exhale of something very much like relief. Like how a bone might feel after it has been broken and returned to wherever it is meant to be, still fractured and hurting but able to heal. Is that how she makes him feel? Is that what he finds when his eyes meet hers?

    The dark inside him laughs.

    But for once he can ignore it because her lips are still in his mane and against his neck, and all he wants to do is lose himself in this. In whatever it is she thinks she sees in him, whatever it was she thinks she missed. Because at some point she will realize her mistake and he will be alone with the dark again, and there will be no angel eyes to keep him tethered here, no soft lips against his neck. So he bows his head against her side for a moment, closing his eyes and feeling lulled by the way she touches him, by the sound of her smiling voice and her name whispered against the pulse of his throat.

    He could lose himself to a life like this, to gentle lips and gentle eyes, the face of a goddamned angel. To the kind of dark he’s caught glimpses of when she looks back up at him from behind the pale fringe of a spider-silk forelock. A dark that feeds his even as her light tries to gentle him.

    But this wanting makes him sinister.
    It ruins him for things he will never be able to have.

    “Ryatah, angel.”His voice is so carefully light, almost laughing when he lifts his brow from the white of her shoulder and turns to look at her again with eyes so dark they are almost pupiless now as the shadow spills from him. It spills from his skin like dust until it thickens and coalesces around them like a web of deep, starless night, until it consumes the trees and every last one of their branches, until it fills the empty spaces so there is no sky. Nothing but an angel and the devil, and the shadow that presses in to touch her beautiful glowing skin. 

    His breathing changes, an almost ragged movement to the rise and fall of his dark chest as he steps close again to press his chest against her shoulder and touch his hungry mouth to the opposite side of her neck, craving that warmth and that light and that gentle willingness. He is so gentle with her, despite the dark as dense as night around them, despite the way he holds her firm against his chest. He is everything wrong and broken, but he knows she is precious. His mouth wanders the path of her neck, and those faded gold eyes are so broken as he pauses to bury his nose in the silk of her mane. “Do you see why it is that I have a habit of disappearing? Some things are better off forgotten.” There is broken bitterness in every single part of him as he releases her and takes a step back, all the shadow around them thinning back to dust again. 



    Illum
    Reply
    #9
    “I know when you go
    down all your darkest roads
    I would have followed all the way
    to the graveyard.”
    She is used to dark things, but even still, he feels different. He feels different because despite the shadows he has twined around her neck and the iciness of his skin, he does not feel sinister. She has been with what could be called evil —  has loved it, still loves — and there is something about Illum that does not strike her like that. He is closed off and cold, he is distant and seemingly indifferent, but so far he does not seem cruel.

    And for that reason, perhaps, she is most afraid.

    She is afraid of what will happen if his darkness is not strong enough to shut her out. She is afraid of what will happen if he lets her light in, if they see each others hearts, raw and open and real.

    She is afraid of a love that will remind her of Skellig; something that was so normal and honest, something that she had utterly destroyed until it was unrecognizable.

    It’s why it was so much easier to be with someone that kept her at arm’s length. To understand that it was not real love, not in the normal sense.

    And so she is almost grateful when the shadows begin to spill from him. She thinks this will be it, that this will be when he pushes her away — physically, emotionally, every way possible. He will suffocate her with shadows and she will remember that she cannot be anything to him; that not all darkness craves light.

    But then he is reaching for her even as the shadows press so close, as her angelic light struggles to illuminate in the presence of such a heavy darkness. He pulls her close to his chest and she goes soft, turning to push her nose against his skin. Her head dips beneath his, the smoothness of her cheek resting against his chest, not minding the way the frost melts against her, turning her skin damp. “Illum,” she begins, wondering in the back of her mind if she is going to regret getting herself tangled in another romance, but feeling powerless to stop it. Because she can feel his heart in his chest, and she feel her own beating and the rush of butterflies in her stomach. “If you think I can leave here and just forget you, you’re mistaken.”
    ryatah
    Reply
    #10

    all i want is to flip a switch
    before something breaks that cannot be fixed

    He does not understand what it means when she turns to duck beneath him and press her cheek to his chest, neither does he understand why she stays that way, leaned into the frost over his skin as though she hasn’t even noticed the cold. His body tenses, and it is as though the frost exists because he is made of ice inside. Solid and cold and so unyielding. But then his heart thaws, and his chest is thunder as he reaches down to touch his lips to the crest of her glowing neck. “You are not the first impossible thing I have ever encountered,” he muses, so quiet and distant because this thawing in his chest might absolutely destroy him, “but you are the first one I find myself unwilling to give up.”

    He takes another step closer so that they are pressed firmly together now, so that there is no room for her to wonder what it is he wants, what it is he intends for them. He demands but he does not insist, leans into her as his lips return to wander over such pale, perfect skin, tracing every inch of every scar as though they had been left there for this specific reason in this specific moment. Paths laid out for him to travel while he gives her every chance to pull away and leave.

    And she should pull away and leave.
    She should fear the growing dark in his eyes as he steps aside to claim more of her, erase more boundaries she might have thought to set for him.

    But the dark is very hard to keep out.
    It exists wherever there is light.

    “Ryatah.” He says, whispers, and his voice is like gravel as he presses his dark and bright face to the curve of her hip, breathing her in. “You should leave, angel. But I really don’t want to let you.”


    Illum
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