"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
No, the change in him was gradual.
So subtle that he hardly noticed it.
Until he woke one morning and found no phantom ache. There was no tremble in his limbs. The joints – real or imagined, he still had not determined which – did not throb. Still, his chest rattled when he breathed but it did not fatigue him. He summoned a portal that delivered him from one end of Pangea to the other and then, immediately after, summoned another back again. It labored his breathing, certainly, but he did not collapse with the effort.
And when he summons another portal, he emerges by the edge of the river and feels nothing at all. No trace of the exhaustion that had marooned him for days the last time he’d done it. He thinks briefly of Beyza, his mother, their magic and who could have healed him. It does not occur to him that it is a matter of biology.
And he could summon a portal home without having to build up the strength to do it. But he does not. He lingers there at the water’s edge as if waiting for something. Or someone. And perhaps he is.
It is daylight now. There is no shadow for him to sink into. He is the darkness. The fog that gathers around his legs is thicker in the sunlight, as if trying to protect him from it.
She is not surprised to be with child again this season. It was rare for the season to go by without her having the weight of it. Ivar was, if anything, predictable in this. Perhaps because she is compliant. Perhaps because she has a knack for bearing him children of the water. She doesn’t know anything else but this life at this moment. Doesn’t know anything but the role she now fills—this life of living on the sun drenched beaches, obeying the kelpie, and bearing him children when the seasons turn.
It is not what her parents would have wished for her.
It’s not even what she would have wished for herself.
Perhaps that’s what leads her back up the freshwater of the river, despite the way that she despises the way that the pure saltwater turns brackish and then muddy. Despite the way her scales dry out and her body feels strange. Still, she feels the pull of it and she follows the stream until it grows shallow, until her hooves can touch the muddy bottom and she can work her way toward the shallows of it.
She rises again slowly, blinking the water from her eyes, the water running in rivulets down her.
He’s there, again, and she doesn’t bother to hide the delight in her silvery eyes. “I was hoping that I would see you again,” she rises further, not thinking about how differently she looks from the last time that he saw her. Pregnancy is now such a routine part of her life—why would she think twice about it?
She emerges, as if from a dream.
And is it any wonder that it is even more difficult to look at her in the light than it had been in the dark?
The sunlight, cruel as it is, draws into focus all the sharpest parts of her and he is reminded of how he’d had to snap at her to stay put. He could not bear to look at her any closer.
This new strength does precious little to protect him from his aversion to beauty.
Not only is she beautiful, so terribly beautiful, but she’s looking at him as if she’s glad to see him. As if anyone has ever been glad to see him. She’s telling him that she’d been hoping to see him as if she is not embarrassed to admit it.
He would frown, certainly, if he were able. But the face is nothing but a sheet of smooth darkness. There is no brow to furrow, so he merely blinks those freakish yellow eyes at her. And then, finally, the mouth shifts around a shark-tooth smile. Ink black, all of it, but the teeth catch the light, glint as he studies her.
There is no tremor in his limbs when he slides his focus to her barrel, heavy with child. He tilts his peculiar head and feels some strange pang of something possessive. Something ugly. But it is gone just as quickly as it had spiraled through him and he meets her eye again, shifts.
“You must have thought of me,” he murmurs, the breathing still labored, the breath still thin as the fingers of fog that reach for her.
Evia knows nothing of embarrassment. She has never grown enough in the ways of the world to know the framework of it. She has never had any reason to second guess herself or think twice about her desires. She does not know the things that would make something worthy of shame or that she should perhaps try and shield her own interests lest they be used against her. In this, she is purely childish in her innocence.
“I thought of you often,” she says, honestly, because she can’t think of a single reason why she would lie. Her face is washed clean of pretense, the river water still running down the length of it to her silver nose. Without waiting, she takes a step forward again, hardly noticing the weight of her belly as it sways.
There is a sigh of contentment when the shadows reach for her and something else that curls in her belly. She angles her head, pressing her cheek into the darkness. “Have you thought of me?” she asks quietly, realizing that she still does not have a name to call him by. He is still just a shadow, just a swath of darkness against the backdrop of the riverbank. He is hers this way. Her own shadow.
He has no name and she cannot name him, cannot claim him—
but neither can the world.
A pause as she walks closer again, even though she knows she will likely pass right through him as if he does not exist at all. “I like to think that you have,” a breathy confession, the honesty stark in her eyes.
Just as she knows nothing of embarrassment, Jamie knows nothing of arrogance.
Certainly not enough to know that this is what itches its way through his veins to hear her admit it, that she has thought of him often. There is some flicker of cruelty, too, when he shifts his focus from her lovely (so terribly lovely) face to the swell of her barrel. And there is a singular moment when he considers saying something, calling it into focus, objecting to the hypocrisy of it.
But he does not.
He is no monster, even though he looks like one.
Sounds like one.
Feels like one.
She sinks closer and there is some tremor in his knees – or the space where he has imagined his knees out to be, the space where his dark legs bend whether by biology or by magic – but he does not cast himself out of her reach. He lets her come, even though she brings with her a question he does not immediately know how to answer.
When he’d left her he’d found a stranger in the darkness of the forest. A stranger who told him that they belonged to each other. They were the same. How easily he had been convinced, when only hours earlier he had convinced both himself and Evia that he belonged to her. She had dreamt him up and there he stood.
He has not answered by the time she speaks again, sinks closer still. He wonders if she can tell the changes in him this close. How the breath still rattles but he does not bow beneath the effort. Can she see that he looks at her steady and does not tremble with exhaustion? Does it matter?
Still, that shark-tooth smile when she speaks.
“What would you give to have me think of you, Evia?” he murmurs and he reaches for her. But he does not touch her. He merely exhales a breath across the soft plain of her shoulder.
It is good that he does not call attention to the swell of her belly, because she would not be able to explain it. Would not have the words to describe the strange alienness of her life. The gravity that kept her at that little island, living underneath the sharp eye of Ivar, bearing his children year after year. How could she possibly explain a life to the man of shadow when she was incapable of understanding it herself?
He does not ask though, and she doesn’t answer.
Instead, the heaviness in her barrel is forgotten and she focuses instead on the feel of his shadows wrapping around her, pressing into her cheek. She notes the small differences in him but is unable to put words to it—does not understand what about him feels more substantial when so much of him is not.
“What would I give,” she murmurs, feeling his phantom breath rolling against her scaled shoulder. She has never though before of the concept of sacrifice, of the idea of having to give up in exchange for that which she wants. But she does now. She does because she cannot deny that, for the first time, there is a part of her that wants him. That wants to keep a piece of him for herself. That wants to understand it.
She doesn’t move toward him.
But neither does she move away.
Instead she sinks into the feel of his shadowy touch, the nothingness and weight of it. “More than you think,” she finally answers with a small smile, her lip tilting upward. “More than you know.”
Perhaps he is merely biding his time.
The child is none of his business, certainly. But that had not stopped the sharp stab of something dark and possessive. It had not immediately dampened the flicker of something cruel at the very center of him either.
He had not asked, but that does not mean he won’t.
She is such a beautiful thing that it softens the edges of his vision. How kind the sunlight is to her. And the water, too, as it rolls in rivulets down her face. He wonders what it feels like, the wet. Even when it rains, he does not feel it. There is nothing for the wet to stick to, nothing to absorb it.
He is not cruel.
He is no monster.
But she sinks into him as far as she can – regrettably not as far as he’d like for her to – and he can hear the smile so plainly in her voice when she answers. He wants to belong to her. He wants to be the thing she dreamed up.
His shark-tooth smile does not soften. The mouth is still ink-black, the teeth the only thing that catch the light. He draws away from her then so that he might peer at her with those freakish yellow eyes, his peculiar head tilted.
“Who does the child belong to?” he asks finally, the voice scraped out of the bottom of his chest, all rust. He moves quiet to her side then, presses his mouth to the swell of her barrel. But, as always, his edges dissolve where he touches her.
Perhaps the true weight is not in what he’d asked but in what he’d implied by asking it.
Evia has not always been great at picking up the nuances of conversation. It is not so much a limitation of intelligence that causes it, but rather the strangeness of her upbringing. The moments that were meant to sharpen such understanding blunted by the quickness of her forming, the rushed aging process. The fact that she been sheltered away from the rest of the world since then has only served to hamper it further.
So she does not immediately pick up on what he is asking.
Instead she angles her painfully beautiful face to the side, a frown plucking at the edges of soft lips as she thinks about the question. “To itself, certainly,” she finally answers, all silver bells. She can’t imagine that a child would belong to anything else, even in a life where she had become so close to property herself. She muses and looks back to the river, to the pull and push of the current against the banks.
“If it is anything like my other children, then the water.”
This softens her expression as she continues to stare into the rippling surface—to think about the things that she loves beyond it. Would Jamie recognize such things? Would he know what it is like to dance around the coral or swim amongst the otters? Would her aquatic world feel as foreign to him as he to her?
She draws back to him though, feeling that strange gravity, and her silver eyes brighten with just a touch of understanding as the question settles further into her subconscious. The darkness of him reaches out to her and she leans a check against it, feeling her scaled sides shiver in delight at the ghostly touch of him.
“Do you mean who its father is?”
There is a pause as she tries to find the words—as she thinks of how to explain it.
“Ivar,” she finally goes with the simplest answer. “He is the father of all my children.”
To itself, she answers, a sentiment that he does not understand.
He has spent his entire life trying to determine exactly who it is that he belongs to. Autonomy is as foreign a concept as rigid edges. As an idea, it is almost impossible for him to understand what it must mean to belong to oneself.
But he does not ask her to explain the concept to him. He will merely dream about it later.
And perhaps it will be easier now that the pain has gone. Now that he can move freely without the crippling exhaustion that has plagued him since birth. Perhaps he will have no trouble understanding it now that he is not searching so feverishly for someone to blame.
The children belong to the water as she belongs to the water, as he belongs to the darkness, as Beyza belongs to the light, as his sister belongs to smoke, as his mother belongs to the shadows, as his father belongs to death. This he understands. This he has always understood. But he does not nod or flash ehr that ink-black, shark-tooth smile. He offers no indication that he understands. No, he waits for her to answer her question in the fashion in which he’d asked it.
And she does, finally. Ivar. He does not know the name, though this is not surprising. He has spent so little time near the water. It does not call to him the way it calls to her. He wonders how many children she has birthed him but does not ask.
“Ivar,” he echoes and studies her face a long beat. “You love him,” he says. It is not a question but an observation.
Just as he does not understand autonomy, he does not understand love. Or the absence of it.
The second question, although it is not quite that, is even more difficult for her to understand than the first. There is a moment of confusion, crossing across her delicate features like a storm cloud and then lingering, furrowing her brow, darkening the silver of her eyes. She sinks into the depths of the word, into the very meat of it, trying to burrow under the surface as though she would be able to find meaning there.
Love.
Her father had gifted her so many different things as a child. Given her this love of the water and a body that does not quite shift to become it but has adapted to it well enough. He gave her the knowledge of the world and a maturity enough to rise and meet it. He gave her freedom and independence.
But he did not give her love.
In truth, he barely gave her an understanding of it, perhaps because he had felt it so little.
“I do not love him,” she finally says, after minutes had passed in quiet contemplation. Her face remains trapped in her confusion, but she shifts her gaze back to his, searching his face. “He was…” she tries to search for the word, “Ivar.” A roll of her shoulder. They had understood one another from the very beginning—even as the kelpie had done his best to try and figure exactly who, and what, she was.
“He kept me on the island and, in return, I gave him children.”
It was the only way she could try to explain the arrangement. That it was part home and, at times, felt like part prison, even though there was part of her that knew she could step into the water and slip away. That having the kelpie’s children was both wanted and not, both burden and gift, and at times neither.
“Is that not common?” she asks, a sudden uncertainty seizing her.
jamie
