"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
09-16-2020, 02:49 PM (This post was last modified: 09-16-2020, 02:49 PM by savior.)
tried to kiss the emptiness,
lost the line between sky and sea
It is a strange and wonderful thing, winter.
He strays from his home in Tephra so rarely, but he makes his yearly trek to the meadow for the snow. The biting cold. The howling wind. These things are not of the earth, the cold and the wind and the snow. They are from some other force, but he loves them all the same.
With some concentration, he covers himself in scales to offer some resistance to the frigid temperature. (He was not built for these temperatures, you see, he was built instead for the wet heat of Tephra and precious little beyond that.) He ducks his head against the wind and moves, as always, with a secret kind of smile. There is no telling what it means.
He glances up only occasionally. Blinking his eyes against the cold, letting them run with hot tears. And he delights in it! The misery of it. The way his teeth chatter and his limbs tremble.
And he is on the verge of returning his gaze to the snow-packed earth underfoot when their eyes catch. And he is drawn to her by forces he does not immediately understand. But he goes willingly, driven perhaps by the hope that he might siphon some heat from her.
“It’s awfully cold, isn’t it?” he observes by way of greeting. And then his smile is no longer something secret, but something to be shared as he studies her face. “Do you like the cold?”
She catches his eye, and she wonders if instead, she could just melt into the snow. She wonders if she could simply let the bright white of her blend into the snow-white of the winter landscape, let him blink and think she was a trick of the light, and watch him disappear.
That would have been the easiest thing, she knows, but she does not let it happen.
He was striking in a way that made her tongue feel dry, and her chest grows tight. Maybe it is because his colors are such a stark contrast against the white backdrop, and his green eyes find hers and hold them captive. Or perhaps it is because for a reason she cannot explain, she thinks of Badden. In the wake of those first few thoughts - the ones that label the stranger as intriguing and attractive, the ones where she finds herself wanting to stay - there is guilt that blooms inside of her chest, twisted like vines around her ribcage.
Perhaps she was more like her mother than she has ever realized because she is surprised at how quickly she can suffocate the guilt until it dies.
“Not really,” she answers him with a faint smile, looking at him from snowflake-lined lashes and bright, clear eyes. “It was always warm where I was born, but I’ve learned to get used to it.” She looks up towards the sky, watching the fresh flakes that fall, and the way they spin and swirl. “It’s beautiful, though, so it’s worth it.” Her gaze lowers again, settling on the handsome face of the stranger. There is something else about him that lures her in, something that feels familiar. It’s a peculiar feeling, and instead of being reassured by it, it feels like a whisper of warning in the back of her mind.
“I’m Casimira,” she says to him, ignoring whatever that voice is trying to tell her.
She reminds him of the snow. If not for the soft blue of her eyes, perhaps he would not have noticed her as a solid, living thing. He wonders if she is cold or if she is soft, if she might melt should he reach out to touch her. But he doesn’t, perhaps fearing that the latter might come true. He settles a few paces away, just in case.
His smile deepens at the mention of her home - or what was once her home, at least - and he casts a glance over his shoulder, as if he might be able to see his own home from here. But Tephra is a long way from the meadow. Still, the green eyes linger a beat on the snow-laden horizon before he returns his attention to her lovely face.
He watches, quiet, as she tilts that lovely face up to the sky to watch the snow tumble and plummet. He tilts his own head, dragging in a shuddering breath, trying to bury the burgeoning urge to reach out and touch her anyway. And he does not look away when she returns her pale blue gaze to his face. He feels no rush of self-consciousness in having been caught watching. There is no shame in it, he thinks, for she is just as bewitching as the soft fields of snow that stretch out around them. There is no embarrassment in thinking it.
“Where were you born?” he asks in the space between her returning her gaze to his face and her offering her name. Casimira. A lovely name, too.
“Casimira,” he echoes, testing the shape of it on his tongue, “my name is Savior.”
SAVIOR
you remind me who i was and who i want to be
you remind me that though not whole, i'm not empty
When she lowers her pale-colored eyes from the sky to find that he is already looking at her, the feeling is enough to steal the breath from her lungs. Her skin grows warm as she resists the urge to avert her gaze, and she suddenly becomes acutely aware of how hard her heart is beating inside her chest. The longer it beats at that quick, electrifying pace, the more the guilt she had previously felt begins to fade. Badden’s handsome face is suddenly harder to recall, and the life she had so desperately been clinging to feels like it’s drifting away.
She almost thinks about letting it go.
She had never once considered that there could be something, or someone, else.
She wonders if tonight she will dream of green eyes on a dark face, and fire opal burning against black.
“Savior,” his name sparks a laugh from her tongue, quiet and warm when breathed into the winter air. Not because she finds it at all amusing, but because she cannot believe the irony – that the first man she has come across that made her forget, even briefly, for the love that had slipped away from her could have such a fitting name. “I guess we will see about that,” but the smile on her lips is still shy despite the almost bold, playful way that she speaks, and she ignores the way her heart skips a beat.
“Tephra,” she circles back to his previous question, suddenly eager to divert the topic from her poor attempt at flirting. “But, I live in Hyaline now.”
He is surprised by the sound of her laughter. If not for its warmth and softness, its bell-song quality, perhaps he might have been wounded by it. He might have tucked his head and retreated, chased away by it. But it is so lovely that he finds himself leaning into it instead, hoping that he might reorient the pattern of his breathing around it.
Her remark makes it obvious that she had not been laughing at his expense, that the laughter had been a teasing thing. And he grins despite himself, heat pooling in his cheeks as he rolls his shoulders in a sort of shrug. He could explain to her the origin of his name but he refrains, swallows it down. Lets her comment linger in the air between them, lets himself think of it as flirtation. Even if the thought alone is enough to spur his pulse into a frenzy.
Her mention of Tephra is a welcome distraction from the thoughts running rampant in his head and his expression brightens even further. She is from Tephra but he has never seen her there and now she lives in Hyaline so his chances of encountering her are even slimmer. He tries not to dwell on his disappointment.
“I’m from Tephra, too,” he tells her, still grinning. Like the force of his grin might help scatter whatever shyness keeps her smile small. “I’m disappointed that I never saw you there,” he continues and then tilts his head as he admits, “I would have liked to have met you sooner.”
With this, he exhales a self-conscious sort of laugh and averts his gaze. As if he cannot bear to look her in the eye after saying something so foolish. “How do you like Hyaline?”
SAVIOR
you remind me who i was and who i want to be
you remind me that though not whole, i'm not empty
She had forgotten what it was like, to forget. To not feel the incessant clawing of that dragon inside of her brain, to not feel the sorrow that continually lingers on the fringes of her heart ever since Badden had disappeared. She had been apprehensive at first to let herself feel any kind of peace or happiness, afraid that she did not deserve it. How long was she supposed to wait for him? How long was she supposed to be a slave to her heartache, to refuse companionship because it felt like a betrayal? She could not look to her mother for guidance. Ryatah had no issue using another as a balm for every mark across her heart, but Casimira was more hesitant.
Or at least, she had been.
She is tired of being alone, she tells herself. She is exhausted from holding herself together, from always fighting every part of herself, and it is all too easy to fall into those green eyes and the way the light glints off the fire opal of his skin. It reminds her of entire galaxies bursting apart, and she imagines what it might feel like beneath the warmth of her mouth. It brings her closer, the gap between them diminishing, the plumes of her breath now curling across his shoulder. She hopes that he will not notice the smoke of it; that ash-like scent she can't seem to shake. She hopes that he thinks it is just the clash of warm breath against winter air, but she also does not withdraw in fear of him recognizing the truth.
“I did not stay in Tephra very long. I left after the first war.” She does not say it is because she died; she does not tell him that she had shattered to pieces and been reborn from a single dragon scale amid the lava-beds and scorched earth, but the secret is there, hidden in her voice. She looks away from him, again across the meadow as she says softly, “I love Tephra, but Hyaline feels more like home.” Her pale blue eyes turn back to him, pausing before telling him softly, “You should see it sometime.”
It stirs something mournful in his chest when she mentions the war. The war had been before his time, if only just barely. But he had been born from it all the same. He has never asked and his parents have never volunteered the information, but he and his sister had been fashioned by their magician mother to protect Tephra. Because it had been devastated by dragons and they had been formed in that image. Their mother’s dragons.
She has inched closer now, so close that her breath falls sweet across his shoulder. There is some unnatural heat to it, but he does not question it. He blames it instead on the frigid temperature of the air around them. He blames it on the way his heart leaps and spasms in his chest just to feel it. It floods him with a renewed warmth and it surprises him, how fiercely he wants to reach out and touch her. Especially with the weight in her words. He understands without having to ask that there is more to it than she lets on but he will not pry.
Instead, he reaches across the thin ribbon of space between them to touch her. Hesitantly at first, as if frightened that she will recoil. That his touch will send her skittering away, out of reach. And he lets out whatever breath he’d been holding, smiling gently at her mention of Hyaline. He thinks it an invitation, but only briefly entertains the idea.
He moves closer by fractions. Like he wants to siphon the heat from her to ward off the cold, even if he barely feels it at all now. “Will you tell me about it?” he asks, a murmur into the smooth skin of her shoulder. And he tilts his head without lifting his mouth to indicate that she has his undivided attention.
SAVIOR
you remind me who i was and who i want to be
you remind me that though not whole, i'm not empty
