"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
When the mare who had dared spit her mother’s name had simply disappeared, the next thing she had known was the beach dissolving beneath her. The rocks tumbling. She had shifted quickly then from her massive form. First becoming a small mouse to try and escape the worst of the destruction and then a fish when she felt the water hit. It had been enough to keep her from dying, at first, but not enough to keep the rock that had split her bones in half in that fragile form. The one that had nearly shattered her in two.
She had been washed out into the sea and the rest—well, she still doesn’t know that much.
When she had woken, it had been on another beach, far from Nerine. Somewhere warmer, muddier. Her entire body had ached and her version had doubled. It had taken her hours to try and find her legs once more. By the time that she had, she had come to her senses enough to recognize that she was not in the same body she had worn before the war. So death, she thought. It was not the first time, she knew, and it would not be the last, but it made it no less jarring to look down and see a virgin body once more.
Marbling on her legs that was not quite the same.
This time, she was slightly taller—more willowy than before, more slender.
She wonders if her face was recognizable or if it was just the coloring they would recognize.
Not that it mattered.
She shook her head as she finally stood, feeling the mud cling to her pale hips, the bramble tangled into her mane. She could shift, she knows, to take to the skies and try to find her way home, but there was a bitter exhaustion in her bones and she was suddenly not certain she had it in her to try.
Not yet, at least.
I want to swim until we both begin to feel the weightlessness sink in
there’s a hole in my chest but it’s mine, baby, it’s all i got.
In another life, he would have let his heart run free on its stampede of rage and hurt and sorrow. He would have let it burst at the seams and finally tell her to her face that he cared for her so deeply. They would fall in love and start a family, and eventually retire to some quiet corner of the world away from everyone else.
But in this life, he choked the breath from his emotions and smothered his heart in its cradle. He feels nothing. He is nothing. When Yadigar lifts his head from drinking, he recognizes her silhouette despite the way her body has changed in death. Some part of him had wondered what became of her, yet the concern never found its way home in him. He approaches her just the same, however.
“You died again?” he asks before carefully combing the leaves and twigs from her mane with his pointed teeth. Of course, he hadn’t mentioned her absence to anyone else. Yadigar still preferred the idea of her ruling over the east even without his naive little heart thumping nervously against his ribs for her. He extends a leathery wing over her back in a loose grip to keep her from losing her balance.
“My father also died. Unlike you, he did not return,” he explains with a brief downward twitch in the corner of his mouth. There is plenty more he could tell her, he supposes, but he decides not to bombard her with all the news. He could only stomach so much when he first awoke, himself.
She is surprised that there are still parts of her to be found. Surprised by the endless ability of her body to fall apart and then stick itself together again. Remade from ash every time and remaking itself in the image of itself. So close and yet distorted. A mirror that never quite matches up to the original. She wonders if one day she will no longer be able to recognize her own face.
Would she recognize it now?
It is the dilemma of a girl who shifts more often than not. Who has twice died and been reborn. A body that is never quite home and a heart that instead serves as her anchor. Beating, bastard thing that it is.
He comes and she feels it thump again, painfully as though bruised, and she lifts her dual-colored eyes to study him cautiously. “I did,” she says, wondering what about him feels so different. How he feels there and yet not, pulled back behind some shadows she cannot see reaching toward him.
There is a frown that pulls delicately at her lips, plucking at the soft skin, but she doesn’t move away from the alien touch—from the way that he stands next to her with his wing draped over her back just so.
“I am sorry to hear that,” and she’s surprised to find that part of her believes it. That this man who she had hissed at and scorned. Spat at his feet. The man who had ripped her body to shreds and then gifted her a kingdom would elicit such a reaction in her, but she cannot help but mourn the dragon.
The man whose shadow cast so long.
“I don’t need protecting,” she finally answers, angling her head back up to look at him once more. “I do not mind dying.” A lie, perhaps, but also true enough that she doesn’t flinch when she says it.
“Did some piece of you die, Yadigar?”
I want to swim until we both begin to feel the weightlessness sink in
there’s a hole in my chest but it’s mine, baby, it’s all i got.
Even if the heart is frozen in some terrible scream, he remembers how it felt when it called his ribs home. This time last year, she left butterflies in his stomach and their ghosts still haunt him now. He can hear the pause in her voice when she answers and he wishes he was still the same Yadigar who walked all that way to Taiga with the witch from the west. But hadn’t Straia warned him that ducking all that pain would cost him something equally precious? He can’t even find the bitter remorse for it, now.
She says she’s sorry and he’s surprised at the chuckle that escapes his lips. Even his father’s enemies mourned the loss of him. But he can only shrug his great shoulders as he tries to scrounge up some words. “There will never be anyone quite like him, for better or for worse,” he muses as his milk-white gaze drifts anywhere but her face.
Then Breach reminds him that she is no damsel. He supposes trying to guard someone who has proven to be immortal would be rather silly. Still, the idea of her dying yet again doesn’t sit right in his mind. The exquisite agony of surviving seems preferable to that of departing.
“You don’t need much of anything, do you?” he asks with a smirk as he looks down at her. Her question makes him discard the expression, however. Yadigar considers how to answer as the seconds stretch by them. He thinks of how badly he wanted her to make him a bird so he could leave this awful world. He thinks of how he stayed there beside her even when she said she couldn’t.
“All of me but my body. The opposite of you, I suppose,” he finally says once the silence grows uncomfortably thick. “Or maybe I should say it’s all slumbering somewhere in me. But I remember how I felt before.”
And then he stops himself because the rest of it is all useless talk.
It is strange to be next to the ghost of someone you loved, she thinks.
Someone you love.
Because she does, doesn’t she?
Even though she cannot find the words to say it, she knows that she does. The same way she knew when she squared off against his father as she was rended asunder. When her last words before her first death, her final thoughts, had been of his kind face and the fates she had seen pouring from those strange eyes. The same way she had known when she had faced her murderer again to come to an armistice.
When she agreed to follow his son into a war that was not her own.
(She does love him. Does. Does.)
But this Yadigar is not the same, although the melancholy strikes the same tone, and there is something strange that echoes in her chest—something like a death throe or the cry of a lark. Something that is sweet and simple and laced up in the bouquet of a funeral. It makes her throat ache with words unsaid.
“Your body is the least of you,” her voice sounds strange to her, her voice thick, her eyes stinging. She reaches down for a moment to press lips that are not her own against his draconic chest, as thought she could feel the pulse of him—find the beating heart and know that he still lives there within him.
She pauses, realizing it is the first time she has ever touched him like this and withdraws.
Not like this. Not this echo of him.
“How did you feel?”
In the before.
In the after.
In the never been.
I want to swim until we both begin to feel the weightlessness sink in
there’s a hole in my chest but it’s mine, baby, it’s all i got.
He imagines all of his old emotions are still exactly as he left them behind the dam that holds them. His love for her is still wandering the streets of his ghost town heart, just waiting for him to come home. It paces until its path wears the pavement right down to the dirt beneath. Someday, all that dragonfire is going to eat through the frozen prison. And when it does, it will find all that devotion waiting.
But for now he lingers in the hushed air of apathy while she extends her neck. Yadigar sucks in his breath when her lips meet his skin. The warmth of her surprises him and he wonders if he has ever allowed anyone this close before. Some part of him wants to snap its teeth in warning out of old habits that linger just beneath his scales. That feral impulse is an echo of when his life revolved purely around a desperate need to simply survive. He doesn’t know how to exist in a world that bears him no ill will.
“How did I feel?” he repeats, wondering how he could begin to describe the monsoon that used to rip through him every day. His wing grips her tighter without his noticing.
“I felt awful. I felt homesick even when I was home,” he begins, stumbling through the memory. He swallows hard. “Except when I was around you. Then I just felt hopeful.”
Yadigar never permitted himself luxuries such as dreams or wishful thinking, but it never stopped that dreadful sense of longing from slipping through. It burrowed into him and never lost its hold when she was near. No, love sank its teeth into him like a dog that drew blood and liked the taste.
She feels the touch of him but not nearly as much as she feels the heat.
The closeness nearly makes her dizzy, the way she can pick up all of the subtle tones of spice and musk and the earthiness that is distinctly his own. She tastes the metallic copper on the back of her tongue, and it is a memory of when she had just crawled from her own grave. The grave that seems to hold him captive now, she knows, but suddenly he feels so very alive to her that she can nearly believe he is.
His words are individual blows.
The sorrow she has always known that he was born with—his birthright in so many ways.
His hopelessness.
His savage need to protect himself and his family.
They all war with the chains of her heart until she nearly cries out at the unfairness of it all. She wants to pull his father from the earth, drag him back from hell just to force him to stare at what he has done, but for all of her complicated emotions that revolve around Ghaul, they fade before his son.
“Hope,” she whispers, breath fanning out against the scales of him—the things that she does not trust herself to touch once more. Does she dare hope? She doesn’t meet his gaze even though her pulse quickens and her throat tightens. Although the world shrinks until it is just the two of them. Him, shelled out and emptied. Her nearly gorging on this feast he lay before her—this promise of what once was.
She doesn’t look at him, cannot bear to see the glimpse of her future in his gaze.
The promises it had once shown her, entangled and snarled around him.
The things yanked from her.
“I have loved you from the first,” she whispers, and wonders why it sounds so sad to say it now.
I want to swim until we both begin to feel the weightlessness sink in
there’s a hole in my chest but it’s mine, baby, it’s all i got.
He has often thought his life was a cruel joke that dragged on and on until everyone lost interest in the punchline. And now he’s standing here, in front of the undead queen, professing his love with a heart that has lost its way. His father is dead and he is free and yet he has never felt so trapped in his life. All the fire and the fight has gone out of him, leaving Yadigar as a damp tomb for everything he ever wanted. And now he has it all. God, he wants to hate whatever he’s become.
He watches her with a fog-filled eye as he studies her outline with uncomfortable detachment. When she confesses her love, nothing stirs in him. Nothing exhales with relief or joy or thrill. It all just festers where it is. His jaw clenches as he tries to pry some warmth from the depths of himself. There has to be some withering ember left for him to build a wildfire from.
But he has nothing to give her, now that he’s so willing to give.
“Your heart will starve if you choose me, Breach. My love is a famine,” he warns her, carefully touching his lips to her brow. “Foxes chewing their own legs free from traps are happier than I could ever make you.”
And then he kisses along the curve of her jaw because at least he can feel how warm and soft her skin is. Even fresh from the river and dusted with her own grave dirt, he’s content to taste her now.
“Say you don’t want me, Breach. Don’t let me haunt you.”
I'd bare you my heart, if I knew that it still was there I'm too nervous to look, too afraid to close the book
These kisses, this touch, should thrill her. They should be the embers burning in her belly, the wildfires starting in her veins, and yet she feels nothing but cold. Hollow. As empty as she had been when she had first awoken and stood on these new legs, death having just loosened its grip on her. There’s ash on her tongue as she listens, feeling that ringing somewhere in the back of her head—that endless echo.
Her mother, dead.
The war, over.
The kingdom, hers.
And it was all for what?
She wears a crown and holds the bloodied sword and yet the only thing that her selfish heart has ever, truly wanted lays behind her grasp. She can’t bear to look up, can’t bear to see the emptiness mirrored back at her, and so she looks downward, focusing on the exhaustion that ripples throughout her, lining the edges of her soul with its tenterhooks. It’s easier to wind herself around the core of that fatigue.
To forget all that she has lost.
All that has never been hers.
“It will starve either way,” she manages, feeling the bastard thing clench in her chest. She would beat fists against him, would howl with indifference, but she finds that she has the energy for neither. There is something like beaten acceptance—that this is the path that she must walk, alone. He wouldn’t be coming back to Hyaline with her, she realizes. There would be no home with him in it. No children one day.
Nothing but her and the pack and her mother’s dream thrust upon her.
Finally, she gathers the strength to look at him and there would be tears in the corners of her eyes if she let herself have them. Instead she straightens and gives herself this moment. She leans slightly to kiss the edge of his draconic mouth, lingering there and imagining a warmth that doesn’t exist there.
“Do not ask me to lie for you, Yadigar. I have already died for you. It would be death of another name.”
There’s a pause as she finally pulls back, avoiding the fates in his eyes.
What could they possibly show her now but the endless abyss?
so take all the wind from my lungs if you're out of air just deliver me truth, deliver me you
there’s a hole in my chest but it’s mine, baby, it’s all i got.
All his affections now are cheap imitations of the things he’d like to give her - costume jewelry when he could once afford a treasure trove. She’s broken herself open and let him see everything she has kept tucked away. Breach has an entire foreign country just yearning for him inside her, and he can’t bring himself to map even the first inch of it. So he traces his finger across the places he carved her name and tries to find the aftertaste of his adoration.
The defeat in her voice makes his face twitch. It would be a kindness to leave her here and find his way back to the Cove, back to the brood of children who look up to him now. He need never step foot in her kingdom or see her awful, beautiful face again.
And yet he stays.
And yet he lets her kiss him. He kisses her back.
The eye swirls to life in its own defiant way, but the future it foretells remains unchanged even if the world around it has bent - it shows a hundred different lives that are all engulfed in fire. And in every one, it is always her, and she is always with him. Whatever other outcome could have been is lost, now.
“Then all that’s left of me is yours,” he says as he bridges the small space she creates between them, allowing her no reprieve from this moment. Yadigar touches his teeth to her throat and it is an oath, that he doesn’t bite through. “When my brothers and sisters are grown, I will leave the Cove to live at your side.”
He doesn’t dream of a family or the way Hyaline might look, but he does try to imagine what sleeping beside her might feel like. He wonders if she talks in her sleep and says all the things she won’t admit when she looks at him.
