"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
How strange it is, to see himself from her perspective.
The expression smooth and the eyes blank. He has caught no glimpse of himself since all of the life had been drained from him. He has felt no thirst and therefore has had no reason to venture down to the river, no reason to interrogate his reflection.
But she shows him himself and he thinks that were he capable of pain he might have felt it then.
And, as if conjured by the thought, there is another sharp twinge in the cavern of his useless chest. Strong enough that, had he drawn breath, it might have hitched the air in his lungs. Strong enough that it makes him grimace.
He blinks at her as she withdraws, perplexed. He misunderstands what she’s asking, his head hazy with a kind of baseline terror. Not enough to jam him up with panic, but enough to know that it’s there. A steady hum in his bones. There is no way of knowing what he’s afraid of, really. Afraid of the glimpse of feeling, maybe. Afraid of the fact that he can feel that terror (even if only just barely) at all.
“My mother named me Kensley,” he tells her, as if talking alone will distract him from the kinetic buzz in his bones, “and the name was mine for decades. But,” he pauses then, shakes his head mournfully, “so much has happened, I don’t think it belongs to me anymore.”
It is almost the answer she is looking for, but he does not specify exactly when he lost the name. When he disappointed everyone that had ever loved him.
He does not recognize the concern in her expression, if she wears any at all. And still, he does not recoil when she reaches for him. Not until the spark, which ordinarily would not have troubled him enough to retreat. For so long, he felt no fear, no trepidation. He had no sense of self-preservation left after being dead so many years. But she skitters back and he does, too. And he finds, when he comes to rest, that it had not been instinct that had driven him backward. He feels it now and there is no mistaking it, the steady rush of surprise.
The terror he’d felt as a steady thrum in his bones reaches a crescendo, drowns out everything else. If he drew breath, certainly his chest would be heaving.
He feels alive.
One glimpse of euphoria before the inevitable downfall.
He grimaces and he shakes his weary head.
It is only a matter of time before the pain comes.
i swore the days were over of courting empty dreams
08-31-2020, 07:04 PM (This post was last modified: 08-31-2020, 07:06 PM by Aela.)
Aela recalls very little of the mother that named her. Her name is the only thing that she has carried with her from her old life. There is a memory at the back of her mind that she'll recall when she's older; when she is ready to realize who she is and what she comes from. There will come a day when she remembers why she so dislikes the pitch dark and the water.
When that day comes, she will remember @[kensley] too.
She will remember the horror haunting his expression. She will remember the terror written along the fine lines of his gray face. And most importantly, she will remember his eyes. She will remember how they had been like stillwater and then how quickly they turned like a tide. Maybe that is why now, as a girl, she takes the step back. She remembers the water and how angry it had been. She remembers the black wave behind her and she remembers that primal instinct to run.
If there is a twinge of panic in his chest, it becomes rampant and wild in Aela's chest. There it spirals, tempted to spin out of control. The girl is standing still - though her eyes have grown wide and deep like a never-ending well - and her small chest suddenly labors to keep up the with the heart that frenzies within her. It beats loudly, like a war drum, but Aela is too young and inexperienced to know the rhythm.
His mother had called him Kensley, he tells her. (And Aela realizes she has no memory of her own naming; she remembers Heartfire speaking it aloud and Kota calling her that. But there is no memory of when or why the name was given.) It might not belong to him anymore and that terrifies her - for him or for her, she doesn't know. Their emotions have become so intertwined that even though there are no images passing between them, Aela thinks she lost her name too. She imagines that she is lost in the fog with him.
And like her shadows, there is something about the fog of his mind she finds terrifying.
It makes her reaction an almost thoughtless one. Aela who has never known a father, who knows nothing of the brothers who would have loved her, reaches for him. She doesn't reach up this time. The petite filly takes a pressing step forward and another before ambling up and pressing into him. Aela tucks herself there like there is no other place in the world she could possibly fit. There are no memories to share; the only thing that echoes between them are the frenzied beats of her heart that feels as if it will burst out of her tiny chest.
The child’s chest heaves with his panic. Almost as if it is her body responding to all of the dark things that spiral through him. As if these things belong to her, too.
And, perhaps if he were not so thoroughly awash in the terror of it all, he might have mourned for the ice that had protected him from all of these things. The pain and the disappointment and the fear. (Certainly he could ask Anaxarete to repair it, but he is not weak enough to ask her for help twice). Perhaps the knees might have buckled and he might have fallen to the earth and keened for what he had lost.
Were he prone to anger (though he never was, never had been, likely never would be), he might have gnashed his teeth in protest. He might have sent her away, scolded her, blamed her.
But he does none of these things. He does not collapse beneath the weight of all of the things suddenly returned to him. He does not turn away from her. He does not skitter out of her reach when she comes to him again. When she tucks herself under his neck like a daughter had done so long ago. How this makes his chest ache, too! To think of his daughter, to remember all the ways he had failed her, too.
Still, he does not send her away. Instead, the ache coursing through him so rampant that it makes the edges of his vision strobe, he lays his weary head across her back. In another lifetime, he might have exhaled a shuddering sigh. And it would have been such a mournful sound. It would have spoken of the chaos in the cavern of his chest. It would have told stories of a heart beating frantic.
But there is no breath and there is no pulse. There is only the two of them here. Absolutely still. Caught up in some caging embrace that he does not understand but brings him a glimmer of comfort all the same. Eases the pain by fractions.
“Don’t be afraid,” he tells the child, addressing her heaving chest and thundering pulse. He tells the child, but he tells himself, too.
i swore the days were over of courting empty dreams
09-16-2020, 01:46 PM (This post was last modified: 09-16-2020, 01:50 PM by Aela.)
She’s trembling. (When had that started?) Aela is not a weak-willed girl (nor will she become an uncertain woman). Perhaps it had been the absence of Kensley and the sudden emergence of him that has startled her. There had been nothing there - nothing of substance, nothing of cognizance - when she had first stumbled upon him.
He had been a comfort because there was nothing to remind her of what others often try to forget. There are many thoughts in a day, many memories recollected. But it is so often the ones that a soul pushes away that Aela finds - tragedy, sorrow, heartbreak, betrayal.
(Maybe that is why Aela tries to avoid the echoes all-together and that the few she identifies with are the opposite of those. Better to recognize those emotions than the ones she had been created from. A soul can only take so much weight.)
He had been a comfort because he was nothing to her and now, he becomes something.
There is still fear coursing in her veins, sparking, and lighting her legs in an itch to run. Her skin continues to quiver, lightning striking beneath that lovely gold coat. But she huddles closer to him and though she tells herself his name is @[kensley], she also gives him names like Storm-Chaser and Lightning-Striker. He comforts her with his touch, his head resting on her small back.
Don’t be afraid, he tells (answers) the rolling thunder in her chest.
It subsides. The shaking. The trembling. The storms raging beneath her skin (and perhaps between them?) stills. It passes. Aela knows nothing of his past; of his daughter and what he considers his failures. She doesn't know why he had crafted himself - his core - into something that reminded her of ice. Cold, frozen, unyielding.
Aela only knows that he tells her not to be afraid and so she believes him, like a daughter would a father.
