"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
He had not meant to morph himself into this strange canine shape, and he is not even sure what triggered it.
Maybe it was because the hunger that had been sinking its claws into his gut had finally managed to tear him open. Maybe this was what happened when the monsters of the shadows did not get their fill, and this was his new body’s last resort for survival.
Because while he had not felt like himself – his old self – ever since he left the endless maze of that underground hell, this form was something entirely different. This form seemed to take hold of whatever rational thoughts he had and simply crush them, until all that was left was this insatiable need to hunt something, anything.
He travels through the dark of the forest, an overcast sky trapped somewhere above the tops of the trees. His steps are soundless, the shadows of himself shifting and moving in a way that replicates a wolf tracking over logs and through bramble, but if not for the glow of his eyes he would blend almost seamlessly with the night.
He comes across her by accident, and he falters.
She is alone, and he pauses to take her in. She is alone, and she would be easy prey, he thinks. He wonders if he could physically kill her – if that is what he needs to do, even though he knows it’s not her flesh that he craves. It is something else, and the sorrow radiates from her in such a way that he is afraid of losing control. She makes his stomach twist with want and way that he hadn't known possible, and his body shudders with a longing that he has to swallow down.
It takes every ounce of willpower he has to shape his shadows back into his equine form, and though the feral fog in his mind slowly dissipates, the hunger does not. He stands there, the smoke-like tendrils of his mane billowing despite the lack of breeze this far into the trees, and he watches her with those vibrantly red eyes, silent and still.
Sometimes, she wonders how she does not drown in the depth of her pain.
It is the only constant in her life—the only thing that she has always known would be there with her. It haunts her steps, trails her every move. She feels it lurking around the corners and beneath her skin until she is lit on fire with it, alive with the nerve ending that rage and spin in rapid fire. She wonders if her mother ever thinks of her. If she knows the way that she has set her on this life of sorrow. If her mother knows that she still dreams of the iridescent blue of her blaze, of the darkness of her silvery eyes when she could barely look at her—of the silence as she was walked to the den to be abandoned.
She does. She always will, she thinks. Her dreams are alive with the pain in a way that few understand and although there is something about Draco that keeps her gravitating around him, she wonders if he is able to fully understand either. Does he know the way that her soul fractures? Does he understand the way that she will never be fully whole? She is just a shell of a girl, the pieces without the entirety.
Today, she breaks from Pangea to walk on her own. She doubts that he will notice because she doubts that he cares when she is around. Instead, she slips into the shadows, loathing the way that her body reflects the light back at those near enough to see. She has no business being this bright, being this noticeable. In a way, it makes her crave the darkness of her other form, but she cannot bring herself to slip into it tonight. That body does not belong to her either. She has no claim to the strength of it, the darkness in it.
She is an orphan that does not fit in either home.
It is only when she catches the movement of his shadows that her thoughts fracture and her forward motion stops. She jerks her petite head up, black eyes peering into the shadows and catching the outline of where the shadows become more whole. Where they become something tangible and real.
Then she notices the eyes.
Her breath catches in her throat and she bites her lip.
She considers running, considers shifting, considers doing anything, but instead she does nothing.
She just stands and stares back.
I guess the sound of your voice in the aching will just have to do
He expects her to run, because for a moment he thinks he sees the thought flicker across her face. It’s a fleeting thing, but it happens when their eyes meet, and he recognizes the look on her face. He has seen it before, when a stranger finds the red glow of his eyes, and finds that it is unsettling. His jaw clenches and he steps back, his nose angling towards his broad chest and briefly his eyes close, and he disappears entirely into darkness.
It would have been so easy to disappear entirely, then. To dissolve back into the shadows, soundless, and let himself be forgotten. To be even less than a memory, a thing that she maybe thought she saw, but can never be sure.
Something selfish stirs inside of him, though, and he opens his eyes again, harsh and glowing even though he felt no actual malice. He looks at her again, at her lovely delicate face, and wonders if the old him would have even earned a second glance. “You don’t have to be afraid,” and the words curl from his mouth like plumes of smoke, and though he wants to step closer, to better look at the iridescent blue of her, he doesn’t. Instead he settles for watching from where he is, watching her with glowing eyes that are somehow so sharp and yet still harbor so much confusion and sorrow. “My name is Torryn.”
For all of the negative emotions that swirl within Despoina, fear is not often one of them. She has stared at death from the very first day of her life when her mother lunged at her and then when the dragon stallion stared at her with such contempt. She has never been afraid of pain, of dying, because in her wicked heart, she has always known that there are things so much worse than a quiet, final end.
She has always known that what she carries within her is so much worse than any such fate.
So, no, she doesn’t feel fear when she looks at him—when she takes in the smoke tendrils that curl away from a face that disappears from sight, the sharp eyes that cut through her. It is something else entirely that simmers in her stomach. Something like a curiosity to learn more, a dangerous thing that she feels bite through the layers of her own sorrow. And perhaps fear of such a thing is indeed what she feels.
“I am not afraid,” she whispers, her voice so delicate and small. She angles her head to the side, her black eyes studying him and wondering at everything that he must be. Is he often stared at with derision? With admiration? Do the eyes that follow him burn with hunger or with fury? She can’t imagine that there are many eyes who seem him often. He feels more like something that dissipates with the morning sun.
For a second, she considers giving him her name but it is a small, terrible thing and she knows that it doesn’t matter. She doesn’t really matter and even giving that much of herself feels like a burden.
So she holds onto it close to her chest.
Instead she just settles her weight, feeling a strange stirring in her chest when she asks:
“Do you feel it?”
She angles her head around them.
“There is something heavy in the air tonight.”
I guess the sound of your voice in the aching will just have to do
She is not afraid, she says, and he bites back the words you should be. Something stirs in his gut, an instinct almost, to make her afraid. Invisible claws that want to reach for her, to manually make her heart race and sweat shimmer across her skin, to make the hair rise on her neck and twist her mind until she is afraid even if she doesn’t understand why. There is something aching inside of him, something that he fights but he can feel himself growing weary, and he is afraid that someday he will not be able to look at soft, pretty faces and be able to keep himself from unleashing every ounce of terror and fury on them.
He doesn’t, though. Not tonight.
He is silent and unyielding while he watches her, wondering why someone so delicate and soft-spoken is not afraid when faced with something that is not exactly terrible, but dark and unsettling nonetheless. He thinks he might recognize something in the faint flicker of her eyes, something haunted and hurt – and he can relate. He wonders what kind of underground labyrinth of terrors she faced to become this way.
“Everything feels heavy,” he answers her, with an almost apathetic rolling of his shoulder. It’s strange, actually, that everything feels heavier up here than it had down there. Even with an open sky above and a lack of pulsating walls that closed and twisted through darkness, it still felt heavy – almost crushing.
He watches her for a moment longer, the quiet coiling like his shadows, before he says to her, placid but direct, “I want to know your name. Will you tell me?”
06-05-2020, 07:00 PM (This post was last modified: 06-05-2020, 07:12 PM by despoina.)
DESPOINA
What would he do if he saw the real her?
What would he say if she shifted here and now—if she pulled the hellhound from behind her breast bone and put it there for the world to see? Specifically, for him to see? Would he be the one to spook? She doubts that, staring at the dark of his eyes and the way that the shadows curl up from the width of his back. She cannot imagine that he has ever been afraid of anything, and she imagines that it’s for reasons far different from her own. How thin the line between her sacrificial despair and someone’s true courage.
The thought remains just that though—a thought—and she merely stands still. She summons enough of her spirit to keep grounded, to remain still before him when everything within her chest is thrashing and wild. To flee would be a wondrous thing, she thinks, as even the very thought strikes her as very wrong.
“That’s true,” she answers in her voice of filigree and glass. “The world is such a heavy place.” She tips her head back, gulping the cool night air and feeling no relief from it. Has he felt the crushing weight of it, she wonders. Has he looked into placid waters and felt himself drown above them? She has. She does.
The next question catches her off guard and she does not have the wherewithal to hide the surprise from her features. She stumbles a little when she finally does offer it up to help,
“D-D-Des,” she swallows. “Despoina.”
It sounds like such a sad, whimpering thing on her tongue and, not for the first time, she is ashamed of it. Ashamed of the name given to her by herself and the sorrow that permeates every syllable.
(Better than the non-name given to her by a mother who had thought first to crush her throat.)
She slides her dark gaze up to find his, searching and wondering why she came up empty handed.
I guess the sound of your voice in the aching will just have to do
He wants to know why she is so timid and quiet. He wants to know what happened to her to make her feel as though she needed to be unsure of everything she said. Or maybe it’s just him. Perhaps she lied about not being afraid, when in fact a pair of crimson eyes glowing against billowing shadow was too unnerving for her.
He decides, of course, that that must be it. And he can feel shame and rage burning like a coal in his gut, not because of her, but because of him. Because of everything he is and everything he is destined to become. He does not understand why, when all he ever wanted was to be like his family, why fate had to laugh at his wishes and dreams and turn him into an actual monster.
He swallows away his bitterness, and shift his glowing gaze back to hers. He stares at the loveliness of her face, and wonders what things would have been like if they had met before — before he became what he was.
“Despoina,” he says quietly in the smokiness of his voice, and even on his course tongue it sounds lovely and light. “It’s a pretty name.”
He steps closer to her now, a cautious and careful step, afraid of sending her running, but more afraid of letting her leave. “You are not afraid of me,” he recalls back to her earlier comment, all the while studying her face, her eyes, her mouth. “Which means you have seen or felt something far worse than what I am.” It’s a statement. Not one that he expects her to clarify or expand on. Simply something he says, because he wants her to know. Wants her to know that he understands, because he is certain now, that after what he faced down below, there are very few monsters he could face that would scare him now.
She has never thought of her name as pretty. Never considered it as anything but the despondent howl of a young girl without a name. A placeholder for what should have been bestowed upon her by a loving mother. It was an eternal reminder that she had to carry the weight of something given to herself. Something that she had whispered in secret in the den when the faeries were not around.
It was a badge that she carried—the weight of her lonely existence.
Such things do not come to her lips though. Such things live in the base of her belly, curled in her chest like some hopeless secret, and she hopes that they do not stain her depthless eyes as she tilts her head back to consider him. “It is a name,” she responds, almost dryly, and she wonders if she has somehow managed to pick up on the humor of those around her. It feels unlikely, she knows. After all, the very thing—this humor—rattles around her and falls away as quickly as she had been able to hold onto it.
He closes the distance between them and she feels the hound within her respond. It bristles in response, a need to shelter, and her entire coat shifts in a wave. The blue shifts to the endless black and then fades back to blue as she settles once more. She adjusts her weight, hoping that he had somehow missed the change, and settles her weight, squaring her shoulders. She would not run away—not now.
His words cut to the very core of her and she cannot keep it from her face. Cannot keep the truth of it from pulling at the corner of her mouth as she angles her head away, breaking the eye contact so that she can look toward the ground. “I have felt the absence,” she says, her voice soft. “And the quiet—the empty—is so much worse than anything that you could ever be.” She glances back up, holding her breath, before exhaling and rolling her shoulders. “So much worse than even I could ever be.”
I guess the sound of your voice in the aching will just have to do
He sees it. Sees that ripple of black fur, sees that defensive look in her eyes when he stepped closer. And though he doesn’t recognize it for what it is — does not recognize that it is a hellhound that she harbors — it still calls to the twisted shadow creature inside of him. It makes the beast inside of him snarl, as though her nearly shifting had been considered a threat; a taunt. He withdraws again, almost abruptly, his face turning to look away from her, gritting his teeth and closing his red eyes as he fights to regain control of every part of him. There is a strange unrest that rolls across him, like waves in a storm, the shadows rippling and twisting until he finds a way to settle them.
He looks back at her, eyes glowing but steady, no longer bright and nearly feral.
He tries to pretend nothing had happened. Tries to pretend he had not just nearly lost himself to the monster that is slowly devouring him, tries to pretend that his own fear is brewing like a tempest in his gut.
“You don’t like to be alone, then?” He asks her, trying — wanting — to understand. He wants to understand her, even just a little bit. He wants to chase away the thoughts of hunger and how sweet her sorrow smells, he wants to forget that he is twisted and deranged and just think of her. “I didn’t used to have to be alone,” the smoke of his voice carefully crafting each word, though he does not tell her of the family he had to leave behind. “But I think it’s for the best, now.” He flicks his crimson gaze to hers. “And you’re right, the silence and the emptiness is the worst part.”
His jerking motion away from her is noticed and she withdraws in kind. Recognizes it more as a kind of rejection than any kind of threat—how could she not? She has spent her entire life dealing with the very kind of rejection that she is now faced with. From her very first breath, she had known that she was not good enough. The fact of the one she was meant to trust above all else had been twisted with derision.
She has known nothing but the back of those who she might have loved.
So when he withdraws she feels the knife’s edge of it in her belly. She feels it slice clean through her and she wonders that such a thing can still make her feel pain. How strange that she still has the capacity.
For a moment, Despoina contemplates running. Considers simply turning on her heel and retreating, but she is caught be the fierce edge of his gaze. She hangs there for a moment, feeling the ground give out from underneath her and she swallows, trying to catch her breath, catch her bearings—anything.
“Life has shown me that it matters very little what I want,” she hates the way that her voice trembles, how thin it sounds out there between them. There is a pang of jealousy at the thought that he had once had something—how pitiful, she thinks, to be envious of something that he himself does not even have any longer—and it shows for a moment on her face. “It must be special though, to have the memory of it.”
There had once been an almost memory—a family that she could have pretended was her own. With two parents who loved another and an entire brood of children. The kind of family she had dreamt about.
But it hadn’t lasted.
She had ruined it, as she ruins all things.
“It is nice to share the silence,” another soft whisper. “For now, at least.”
Even though she is not sure sharing something with him is nice at all.
I guess the sound of your voice in the aching will just have to do
