[private] sweating all your sins out, breckin

[Torryn]

choke them on the ashes of the dreams they burned

He feels like he is spiraling. Like he is caught in some sort of never-ending free-fall, and he cannot decide if he ever wants to hit the bottom or not. Because he is afraid that the impact will take him straight through the earth, until he is back in that twisted network of pulsating tunnels, a lifetime below the ground.

Sometimes he wonders if going back would reverse it all. If he could put himself back into the belly of the beast and be spit back into the world as the plain boy he had once been. Or maybe never be spit out at all, and just left to rot inside its gut, and he didn’t have to feel himself morph into something — someone — that he never wanted to be.

He vacillates between the forest and the river, preferring the shelter that they provided. In the open, especially in the daylight, it was too obvious how strange he was. The shadows were too stark in the sunlight, though they lessened the harshness of his red eyes. Regardless, he hated the attention either one garnered. At least in the dark he disappeared, and very few were tempted to approach two disembodied glowing red eyes.

It is a half-light that he stands in now, though, with evening not quite settled. He drifts at the edge of the forest where it meets a bend in the river, a heavy fog hovering above the damp grass and winding its way through the autumn-touched trees. 

A sound makes him turn his head, an eerie shifting of shadows, his mane billowing like smoke. His glowing eyes take her in, they drink in the curves and shape of her, and he wonders if she is sad, or angry, and he wonders when he will stop wondering that about everyone he meets. “Evening,” he says before he can stop himself, his voice a quiet rasp beneath the lulling current of the river. There is a part of him that hopes she will leave, that she will take one look at the shadows and sheer emptiness of him, and that she will run. He debates making her; can feel the fear aura itching inside of him, but he reins it in. He will let her decide on her own whether she stays or leaves.

torryn

@[Breckin]

[Breckin]

Pensive.

It felt strange to think of a word she was so unaccustomed to, and it felt equally strange, nearly clumsy, when she spoke it aloud.  No one was around to hear it, or to see how her brows knit together in a contemplative manner, or to tell her outright that she had always been a creature of such thoughts.  

She had no way of knowing that, however,  not of her own accord.
And it would be some time before she would become the wiser.

That strange sense of deja vu is dredged up again as she strolls the river’s edge, making her mind and heart feel lofty and light, as if they awaited to be tugged back into some bittersweet memory.  And she nearly lets herself believe such a thing was possible as her mind and body drift along on two very different planes of existence.

Nearly.

She's visited this place before.  She knows how this endeavor starts and how it crashes and burns every time she gets close, and so she stops it before it has the chance to take flight.  She would destroy it with her own volition and contempt, unwilling to rest against disappointment’s threshold for another wasted day.

And that’s how the night finds her,  pensive, and in a melancholy sort of mood.

A murmured Evening makes her pause, inspired to pass a glance through the shrouded trees and mossy thickets, and the way the escaping light touched them.  Breckin nods, “A lovely one too, I think.”  Towards the shadows, she turned, positive that the voice had come from somewhere in that general direction.  The eyes are what she sees first, bright and imposing and on the brink of otherworldly, then the darkness that encompassed them, as though someone existed within the negative space of the forest trees.

Curiosity takes her a few steps closer, “I’ve always thought it was silly to not pay closer attention to the shadows.  You get so used to them being there, that you forget the constant company you keep.”  She offers a smile then, small, but endearing, “Seems I might’ve been right to think that.  My name is…” she falters slightly before making up her mind, reassuring herself that it was just as well to use her real name.  “Breckin.  Who are you, if you don’t mind me asking?”

B R E C K I N

Beast Banger Becki <3

@[Torryn] i suck and it only took 5 years but here have some hot garbage becki words

[Torryn]

choke them on the ashes of the dreams they burned

He had wondered if she would be afraid of the seemingly disjointed voice coming from the shadows, but he did not expect the spark to flicker in his gut when she was not. It was a strange thing, to want them to be afraid — to want to feast on their fears and their sorrow. But there is a part of him, that piece of soul that the darkness has swallowed, that still clings to what he used to be. The man that would have preferred to ease their fears rather than agitate them; the man that would have fought the monster, rather than become it.

He could make her afraid, and he hovers just above that trigger but decides not to pull it.

Her eyes find his own, the only things that seem to reassure any of them that he is real and that he is one of them. Sometimes he curses that; wishes that his eyes had been shadow like the rest of him so that he might be entirely invisible. But he liked it too much when her eyes locked with his like she was able to really see him, and for now, he is grateful for the glinting ruby-red of them. “My name is Torryn,” he offers her. Her name was vaguely familiar, but he cannot place why, but for some reason thinks he can remember it being spoken from his mother’s tongue.

“The shadows are not always friendly,” he tells her, and though the way his lips quirk into a crooked smile is lost in the shifting shadows the action can almost be heard in his voice. “But I like to think that I am.” He has stepped closer now, taking in the feminine curves of her body, the pretty angles of her face. “You're alone?” the question sounds strange in the smoke of his voice, and he realizes belatedly that it could sound intimidating. For once, he did not mean any harm by it. He was simply curious, and a little bit surprised, that there was not someone she should be next to this time of night.

torryn

@[Breckin]