[private] I craved to get back that feeling I’d known; luster

[fenris]

you know, I think it was born of a feeling that I got when I left from your home

then it turned into something repeating and I couldn’t let it alone

She was dangerous.

Not because of teeth or hoof or anything that would normally make a soul dangerous in this day and age. No, she was worse. She was dangerous because her doe eyes would be what you dreamt of. Her soft voice would be what follows you during the day. He would stand on the precipice of each day and know it was her waiting for him on the other end, regardless of what would happen. She would be there when he went to rest his head and night and the memory of her curled against his chest would feel like a bruise.

Because it was stolen moments with a heart that was never his own.

It was stolen moments where he was nothing but a stand-in—a placeholder.

It burns the back of his throat when he remembers, which he rarely does anymore. He has gotten so good at letting it fall away. So good at letting himself slip into the rhythms of a life lived on his own. He doesn’t do anything but keep moving. Fenris. The son of no one and nothing. The man who had no titles to his name, no family to speak of, nothing worth mentioning. He was a ghost in this world.

He almost doesn’t notice when he walks into Beqanna again. When the world comes into stark relief. When he follows a scent that burns. He nearly walks into her and his eyes go a little wide when he sees her finally. He swallows hard, the memories of her crashing down with a startling weight. He has gone so long now without thinking of her that he can hardly stand underneath the reminder of her.

“Little bird,” it escapes him before he can stop it, and he curses himself at the way his voice sounds so startled, the rasp of it, the grit and the gravel from disuse. There are other things that he could say, he knows. Something to come across more in control. More practiced. Less caught off guard.

But nothing comes.

who’d have known that I’d ever be reeling simply from being on my own

oh, I craved and I craved and I craved and I craved to get back that feeling I’d known

[luster]

come to me in the night hours, i will wait for you

She keeps each part of her past on a distant shelf in a faraway room, keeps that room locked away behind a door with no handle with which to open it again because she knows that these broken pieces in her chest can withstand no more of the ruin that seems to love her so. Each beautiful face, every single happy memory she had once looked back upon with a lightness dancing eagerly beneath her skin, they’re all locked away because each one hides a blade within itself made solely to cut the threads still holding her together.

These days she has too few to spare.
Any fewer and she would be little more than dark hollows beneath her eyes and deep valleys between her ribs.

So she distances herself because it is easier than remembering how to be the girl she used to be. The girl who believed in love and the purpose of all things, in belonging, in family. It hurts to remember that girl, because she had trusted so readily, loved so easily. She had given all of herself to the wrong one every single time she tried, until finally when her eyes opened again and she felt the gaping emptiness in her chest, it was her own sister that held the pulp of her very broken heart.

It was betrayal like she had never even fathomed, cut through her so deep that it poisoned her to the core.
Forever changed.

Family is not what she ever imagined. Dad and mom are either lucky or liars, because love like theirs just doesn’t exist. Only her children have ever been worthy of it, worthy because they are hers, and because in that they are perfect. She does not consider anyone else, not Dovev who would always own some vital piece of her heart, not Stillwater who taught her what it was to feel love for the very first time. Not Kharon, a boy but so much kinder than she deserved, so gentle with all those broken pieces until his heart carried him elsewhere. Certainly not Fenris, handsome and steadfast, who had only ever built her up when the world tried to tear her down to her rivets, Fenris, who she thinks might have loved her in secret while she was too busy falling on the same blade and wishing for change.

Lies, of course, she relives all of them endlessly. In the dark, and in the night, whenever there is no light to chase the deep shadows from her heart.
Like now, and always.

So it is with a surreal sense of disconnect that the words in her memories suddenly find her here in this place, and that they find her wearing a voice that is exactly as it should be. Odd, isn’t it. She blinks, and as always it is a battle to will her eyes open again, a war waged against a kind of exhaustion that feels corrosive down to her bones, a poison that changes her even now. But when she does open them again, there is a face, a man, that makes her wish she hadn’t. “You can’t be here.” She says, to him and at him, to herself, so quiet the sound could be muted by the whispering of butterfly wings.

But he is here - she can smell him, though the scent is only vaguely familiar now, changed by time or memory. She can feel the heat of him too as she looks up into a pair of eyes that look almost as startled as hers (comforting, somehow). She takes a step back to be free of the warmth of him and the old ache it coaxes back to life inside the stone of her chest. Her face is harder than he’ll remember it being, her eyes cold like shining stone instead of soft and molten. The girl he remembers is dead, and he doesn’t even know to mourn the loss of her.

“Others have been drawn to my light, but you were always drawn to my dark.” She tells him quietly after a pause, remembering how she had found him first with a fresh wound on her neck, her heart as raw as her injured flesh. How he had held her despite his hesitance. “What do you think of me now? Not even the night has known a dark like me, what with her moon and her stars. I am only me, and only the pieces I have been allowed to keep.”

Luster

     i can't help but love you
even though i try not to

[fenris]

you know, I think it was born of a feeling that I got when I left from your home

then it turned into something repeating and I couldn’t let it alone

She is onyx and flint now. Something steely and cold where once there had been softness and pain. It startles him more than the abrupt finding of her. Knits his brows together and pushes his own shields up. The rebellious glint in his eyes, the hardened palms and apathetic air of someone who was used to living on his own—who was used to finding the road empty and vast. It’s an easy defense to fall behind.

“Who is to say I am drawn to either?” he says with something like a drawl, although he knows enough to know he could not hide behind such a flimsy lie. His desire had never been a hidden thing. His attraction never well hid beneath the storm clouds of his eyes. He had told her, once, that he was a terrible friend, and he has done nothing but live up to it. He had never stuck around, even when she had needed him.

He had returned to the vagabond lifestyle.

Returned to his rootless existence.

But he stays now, the odd kindness only she capable of drawing out finding its way to the surface of him. “Who’s to say I am not drawn to both?” The question softens his hardened features just a little, lights a light in his simple brown eyes as he shakes the cream of his mane out, letting it fall heavy down the sides of his neck. He shrugs, elegant and quick. “I don’t think it matters much. They are one and the same.”

He could no longer separate the light from her dark than himself.

He listens though, trying to discern the meaning behind her words. Trying to understand what has made her so sharp-edged now. There is a piece of him that whispers that he should leave. That he should let her go her separate way, but he has always been helpless before her—and this new version is no different than the hesitant, wounded girl he had met so many years before. “I think of you as I always have.”

A laugh—a mistake, perhaps—as one corner of his mouth lifts into a roguish smile.

“Although perhaps you would be the one to leave my neck gouged this time.”

It would be worth it, he thinks.

who’d have known that I’d ever be reeling simply from being on my own

oh, I craved and I craved and I craved and I craved to get back that feeling I’d known

[luster]

come to me in the night hours, i will wait for you

The existence of him fractures her, reaches deep into her chest to wrap fingers of ice around a heart that never seems to stop bleeding. She can feel herself coming undone by him, feel the yawning chasm as she is torn in two, those careful halves she’d sewn together ripped apart as though she were made of paper and not bone. He is everything she does not want to remember, everything she isn’t sure she can survive thinking about. That he is here at all, and just exactly as she remembers, feels like coming loose from time and slipping into the past.

Except the past is nowhere she would ever want to be.

Her eyes are so hard on his face, not stone but ice, and the danger is in the way he is fire. The way he makes her feel safe enough to thaw.

She nearly turns from him, embracing distance instead of the closeness she had once always reached for. She imagines turning away into the trees where she knows, with time, she can erase this new fragment of memory, this moment he reached out and wrapped a hand around her ankle before she could fall away into an oblivion sky above a world with no gravity. The only thing that keeps her feet rooted in place is the knowledge that this would be the cowards way, and though she is many things, and so little of it good, she is almost certain that she is not a coward.

The ice in her turns to fire, a heat that roars to meet his as she resolves to stay. There is an odd kind of accusation in her eyes, and it shines through in the cracks of her brokenness as clearly as if the emotion was veined in gold throughout the brown of her irises. She isn’t even sure what this accusation is, but it is fueled by a pain that eats her up as though she is little more than dry kindling. “If they are one in the same, then why do I feel changed?” The question comes in a whisper, a sound only in the same way the wind is when it breathes through the trees.

But there is something in the way he doesn’t leave that makes her soften again, something in those brown eyes that makes it impossible for her to be anywhere but here. He shackles her with a glance. “Not your neck.” She says, and she doesn’t share his laugh, her voice is still the empty nothingness of sound remembered after waking from a dream. “There are worse places to leave scars than the places you can see with your eyes.” It is neither a threat nor a promise, but the teetering edge of brokenness and madness which she balances on so precariously.

For a moment she merely watches him, thinking and wondering and worrying at what it means that the world has flung them back together again. She wants to curl in against his side and let him hold her close as he had before, let him soothe away her jagged edges with the balm of his eyes and his lips. She wants to bare her teeth and chase him away until he never looks at her this way again, until he can see who she is now, and who she isn’t.

Desperate to be saved, and desperately afraid of her own brokenness.

“Fenris,” she says, whispers it as her eyes search his face, as her feet carry her close enough to reach him. Her lips touch the corner of his mouth, shy and unsure and exploring the contours of his jaw and his cheek like she has any right to do so. And then, abruptly, she pauses, her lips pressed like a kiss to his cheek as she whispers hypnotically, “You’ve just realized I am a stranger, and now you want to leave.”

And it is a wonder that she ever thought she was not a coward.

Luster

     i can't help but love you
even though i try not to

[fenris]

you know, I think it was born of a feeling that I got when I left from your home

then it turned into something repeating and I couldn’t let it alone

She could swallow him hole in the vastness of her pain, he thinks. She could drag him down into the endless depths of it until there was no beginning, no end—nothing but the pain and the wholeness of it. He wants to walk away because it hurts to stand here and feel the daggers of her existence bury to the hilt into his chest, but he remembers how it hurt to spend so long away from her too, and he remains.

Remains even as her eyes sharpen and she does not yield.

Remains even as she whispers her question in the space between them.

“You can change and remain the same,” he says, angling his head just slightly. “The ocean remains the ocean, even in the storm and the tempest, even in the calm that comes after.” He wants to reach for her and feel that heat against his chest—that fire, that blade—but he holds himself apart. “So do you.”

But he does not need to wait for long, because her breathy threats are followed by her closing the distance herself. His breath hitches—he cannot help it—and then she is there. her mouth against his. Exploring him and the ridged muscle that jumps beneath the flesh as he clenches his jaw.

He doesn’t fold around her, although he considers it.

He lets her explore and he remains still.

Even as she presses her treacherous magic against him.

Fenris stiffens suddenly, the dark desire leaving his eyes like a candle snuffed. “I’m sorry,” his voice is a husky growl as his eyes focus on her again, trying to study her. Why did she look so familiar? “I don’t think I know you,” his lips twitch into a shadow of a smile—something flirtatious and shallow.

“And I should probably be taking my leave.”

who’d have known that I’d ever be reeling simply from being on my own

oh, I craved and I craved and I craved and I craved to get back that feeling I’d known

@[Luster]

[luster]

come to me in the night hours, i will wait for you

She wants to ask him how he can be so certain that she will be herself again, how he can know that this tempest inside her heart will ever end, ever release her. She does not feel like an ocean, deep and vast and same. She feels like the sand beneath that moves and shifts and disappears in the wild currents that come to tear her away from everything she once knew. It is an unsteadiness that leaves her constantly exhausted, constantly at odds.

She is dissonance.

But she cannot ask him, cannot know his answer in case the words are not enough to make her believe. In case he is wrong, but not as wrong as she is. It is like he cannot see that if she is the ocean and this is her storm, he must let go of her lest he be drowned inside her discordant fury.

It is good that he does not reach for her when she touches him, good that his body does not move to fold around her, because she feels certain that she could not have gone through with it if he had. She could never pull herself from these arms if they had been bold enough to drag her close. It is love, even if it is mangled and broken and wholly unrecognizable - or at least the seed of it, ready to be buried someplace deep inside the cave-ins of her chest.

It’s good he does not reach for her.

When her eyes lift to his again, she nearly flinches at how different they are now. Emptier in a way she had not been expecting. It makes her chest ache suddenly, makes her feel like there is a knot she can only just barely breathe past. It is so like loss. His eyes sharpen a little, and she does not look away, daring him to try and remember what it was she took from him. But his words erase any chance of that, and when he speaks it like a tether between them comes undone.

“You certainly don’t.” She agrees, but her words are made softer by the tiredness in her tone as all the defensiveness drains from her. It is easier now that he does not have the ghost of her in his memory to compare her against. He is handsome like this, with his dark eyes and flirtatious smile, and for a moment she considers letting him get to know her for the night. Just one night, and then they would both be gone with the rising dawn. But she thinks of the way his eyes had burned for her, the way her name had sounded on his lips, and she knows that anything less than him knowing her would just be hollow.

It is another loss, and by her own doing, but she would not undo it.

She remembers back to the first time they had met, and her eyes drift to the place she had buried herself against, the deep curve of his chest. Her dark eyes blink, then travel back up to his face, to his smile, to his beautiful lying eyes that don’t lie nearly as well as hers do. “Of course, but be careful out there.” She almost smiles with remembering (it sits like a ghost in the corners of her mouth), can almost hear these next words in the sound of his voice again, “There are things that go bump in the night.”

Luster

     i can't help but love you
even though i try not to

@[fenris]

[fenris]

you know, I think it was born of a feeling that I got when I left from your home

then it turned into something repeating and I couldn’t let it alone

There’s something missing that he can’t quite put a finger on. Something wrong with the picture but the ache in his chest does not help him quantify what that is exactly. Instead he feels it distantly, like something that bubbles in his throat but never reaches his tongue. Something that scratches the back of his mind, disappearing the second that he puts his actual attention toward it. It is fleeting and painful and he frowns a little as he wrestles with the loneliness that suddenly floods through, the pain acute.

Realizing that he had been quiet for several moments, he shakes his head.

“I’m so sorry, my thoughts are strange today,” his smile comes back again, so easily charming—crooked in the corner, his plain eyes sparking. “But I suppose they usually run away when I meet someone pretty.”

Not that he had ever met anyone quite as pretty as her, he thinks, and that strange twisting in his gut happens again. Had he met her before? He couldn’t remember. His eyes sharpen on her, study her face more intently and there is a second where he feels like he may recognize her, where something important is just outside if his grasp, but it slips away from him again and he’s left empty-handed and frustrated.

At her warning, he shakes out his mane, laughing a little—the sound throaty and dark. The sand around his feet begins to swirl just a little, but he puts no real power behind it. It’s mostly just mixing patterns that lash around his legs, abrasive but not an actual storm. It will die out soon enough, he knows.

“Maybe I am the thing that goes bump in the night,” he ponders.

Then, with an inclining of his head, “But I think that you may be instead.”

who’d have known that I’d ever be reeling simply from being on my own

oh, I craved and I craved and I craved and I craved to get back that feeling I’d known

[luster]

come to me in the night hours, i will wait for you

She cannot tear her dark eyes away from the quiet story of his beautiful face. He remembers, she realizes, watching his mouth curve down into an unfamiliar frown as the silence between them builds to a crescendo with no end. He remembers that there is something to remember, knows enough to realize that something is amiss, just slightly wrong. It is because he is clever, she thinks, and not because she meant anything to him in any significant way. Certainly not that.

But the possibility is a pinprick of pain that she knows she will ignore until it grows and festers and consumes whatever is left of this paper thing inside her chest.

He smiles, and she is immediately, and oddly, jealous of the way he smiles at her, a stranger. Her brow furrows beneath her forelock, her mouth tightening until the corners shift downwards ever so slightly. And then his eyes sparkle in a way she is not entirely familiar with - they had found each other almost always in dark times, and the levity in his face now is something new that had hardly fit their prior encounters. Still, she considers him, inclining her head to search his face more closely. “Are you always so charming?” She asks, and there is an odd note of tension in her voice that makes her sound too brittle to be the pretty someone he speaks of.

She is wholly unprepared for the torrent of pain that rips through her. The realization of why she had done what she had done, and the horror that maybe she made the wrong choice. In the moment, it had been easier to erase whatever connection had grown between them, because she had learned those connections only ever hurt, only ever broke. She had learned that even at her best, she was never enough, and that it would be no different here either, with him. He would leave her as everyone had, and she would have nothing but the broken shards of a shattered heart to protect herself with.

But what if he had been different, what if there could have been more. More than hurt and pain and a loneliness that ate holes through her faster than any disease. More than broken faith and broken trust and broken promises. More than pain.

She needs to hide her face from him, she knows it must be a tapestry in progress, a map of all the wild leaps her thoughts keep making in his presence. But there is nowhere to go except away, and away is a thorn inside her chest and pressed against the beating of her poisoned heart.

Instead her eyes fall to the sand at his feet, watching the patterns turn and swirl and then die again against the dark of his legs. “That was what I was afraid of.” She tells him without looking up, tells him with those dark eyes fixed firmly away from his face and his gaze and his crooked grin. “That you were the monster.” Then she’s forcing her gaze up, a little wild with the pain and uncertainty burning through her like a fever. “But it was me. It was me all along.”

Things are bleeding into one another now. Past Fenris and present Fenris, and she is not being careful enough, not building walls with her words and keeping these two versions of him safely apart. There is too much regret inside her now, too much sorrow and disgust, too much hatred of this thing she has become. This creature who burns with darkness. “I don’t want it to be me.” But she’s backing away now, feeling like things are too broken to fix, like who she is does not deserve the affection of who he is. “You know me, Fenris.” She says, and the sound of her voice is without starlight, without softness. It is hollow and defeated, something so brittle it is a wonder the words don’t reach him in the same unrecognizable fragments she's reduced his memory to.

Luster

     i can't help but love you
even though i try not to

@[fenris]

[fenris]

you know, I think it was born of a feeling that I got when I left from your home

then it turned into something repeating and I couldn’t let it alone

The moment is confusing in a way that he can’t quite name. It’s like being torn apart by something that you can’t name—feeling your own mind twist out from underneath your grasp. He tries to reach for each different fragment of a memory but they swim away the second that he touches them. The moment that he can feel them is the second that they dissolve and he’s left empty-handed and empty-chested, aching.

Her face changes, the emotions shifting with the seconds, but he can no sooner name what he is seeing than he can put a name on the massive holes in his own mind. So he just sits still, doing his best to think around it with each new breath, trying to piece together this strange experience with fresh eyes.

“I am only charming when it suits me,” he says with a grin, wondering why it felt like effort to pretend that he was feeling so flippant. Why he wanted to frown at her. Why he wanted to shake her and snap out of this moment. He shakes his own head instead, the faint buzzing not leaving—the headache beginning to form behind his eyes and crawl up his skull. The tension grows there and he feels his stomach sour.

But she continues to morph and his vision nearly strobes trying to keep up.

“I don’t think you’re a monster,” he says with a certainty he can’t explain. The frown comes then, pulling at his lips as he take a step after her as she retreats. He opens his mouth to say more—to try and keep her here so that he can pull apart this moment further—but what she says, her voice so hollow, unlocks the memories that she had temporarily pulled from him. They rush back through him with a vengeance and he sucks in a breath as they slam into him, as he tries to process everything that suddenly fills him.

Another shake of his head, the headache spreading, the ache in his chest worsening.

“Luster?” her voice is a question as he finally opens his eyes, searching for her.

who’d have known that I’d ever be reeling simply from being on my own

oh, I craved and I craved and I craved and I craved to get back that feeling I’d known

@[luster]

[luster]

come to me in the night hours, i will wait for you

It is an unnameable pain that rises up inside her chest as she watches the pieces of him fragment in the same way she had reduced his memories of her to ungraspable dust. She watches the frown on his lips, watches his feet carry him closer even though they should be taking him somewhere away from her, somewhere safe. She watches his mouth open, watches thoughts swimming like fish in the backs of his eyes, and she is watching the moment her words return what she had stolen.

But she is still backing away from him, choosing the escape that he had so foolishly denied himself when he could’ve finally been free of this. Of her. Of the dark that runs through her in tangled veins, bleeding her until she is little more than poisoned shadow.

Luster? Her name on his lips would’ve been enough to halt her escape, but when his eyes open and search for her, she is suddenly shackled to him.

“I am not who I used to be.” She says, and though every part of her wants to turn from him in shame, those dark eyes never leave his face. She owes him this, at least. “And I am not sure that who I am now is someone worth knowing.”

She inhales, and the air in her chest feels ragged somehow, or maybe she is what’s ragged. Cautiously she steps closer again, close enough that he can see her in the dark despite the starless sky and thin ring of light like an imposter moon. “I don’t know if I am already broken or if I am still breaking, but I don’t want to hurt you. And that is what will happen if you stay.”

She shouldn’t, it’s cruel, but she reaches out to touch him, to let her nose brush the side of his cheek and further towards his neck, letting that be the thing that draws her closer still. It is a closeness that eases some of the ache inside her chest even as new pain takes root. A realization that this is someone worth knowing, and that she is certainly not. She is close enough now that she could tuck in against his chest and, for a moment, feel safe against the dark and warmth of him, but she cannot bring herself to do so lest she poison him with this corrosive kind of love.

Instead she closes her eyes and presses her cheek to the side of his neck, allowing herself a quiet moment to remember back to when she had been whole and bright and he had held her like she was something worth holding onto. It feels like an entire lifetime ago. “I am the worst thing you could have found in this ruined world, and I am sorry.” She would never take from him like that again, not ever. But he would be wise not to allow her a second opportunity.

Luster

     i can't help but love you
even though i try not to

@[fenris]
@[The Monsters] please mess with her shadow camouflage