"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
I tried to sell my soul last night Funny, he wouldn't even take a bite
He wishes he could hate her. Desperately wishes he could hate her as she imagined he hated her. It would have made everything so much easier. Would have saved him from knowing she could be both his heaven and his hell. It’s infuriating that one creature could have so much power over him in the only ways that mattered.
But of course he could never tell her that. It would serve only to hurt them both, and Ashhal is not that kind of masochist.
In the end, as much as he wishes he could hate her, he cannot. Instead he is left with his own anger and inadequacy - a toxic combination serving only to infuriate him further. Fueling the venom he spits at her. Kindling his rage as he tries to blame her even when it becomes increasingly clear he cannot.
Until she reminds him just how long they have known each other. That she is the only living creature who might remember him when he had been a different man, before the bitterness had claimed his life. He hadn’t been better then, but he had had purpose. A purpose that had long since faded, leaving behind only the echoes of who he’d once been. Of the man she’d once known.
In the end, none of it matters anyway. As the fury fades into confusion, he can only stare at her as she explains it had been her daughter masquerading as her. Confusion, because he believes her without question. Confusion, because the explanation of how her daughter’s power works lays bare that which he has been trying to shove deep where it would never see the light of day. Confusion, because it is almost a relief to have his one genuine secret exposed.
He had always been so successful in his determination to care about nothing or no one - except for her. She’d slipped beneath his defenses eons ago, and he had accepted then that they would never be. It was easier that way.
He knows this would change nothing. As much as he had always denied it, she had always been it for him. But he would never be it for her. And he is far too selfish a man to accept that. He would rather die in agony a thousand times than experience the far greater pain of her giving herself away piece by piece while he watched. For the first time in his life, he was finally able to admit it, even if only to himself.
And just like that, the anger is gone, leaving only the hollow emptiness that always seems to be waiting for when it goes. And as his jaded gaze catches hers, he realizes her daughter had seen something Ryatah never had. Realizes too that there remains only one way to keep from battering himself against the wall he’d been running into for ages.
“You’re the only one with the power to break me Ryatah.” His voice is low, agitation creeping back into the grating tone. “I don’t have very much left that isn’t already fucking broken, but you could change that without even trying.” His breathing is steady, but his dark eyes grow hard. As though he could shield himself from her answer. “Have you ever imagined spending eternity like that? Because I fucking have.”
— there's something tragic about you, something so magic about you, don't you agree?
So many times she had wished that he would let his guard down just a little bit. So many times she had wished that he would show her the barest glimpse into what might lie beneath that indifferent stare and the flippantly spoken words, but when it finally happens—just the smallest hint of the dim light seeping through the cracks of stone—she is afraid it will break her.
He lets slip some of the truth, and his words feel like a spear into her chest, lodged between her ribs and piercing her heart. Guilt rises up like a wave in her veins, rushing through to drown out everything else.
She didn’t want to be the one with the power to break him.
She didn’t want to be the one that constantly let him down the way she did so many others, and yet she had done it without even trying.
“I’m sorry,” she whispers again, but the sound is choked in her throat as her eyes close and she tilts her face away. She is almost grateful for the way his tone again sounds irritated and angry, because it is easier to withstand than the emptiness she had just seen. She is used to anger—she knows how to bear the brunt of disappointment and irritation, but she has never been familiar with sorrow other than her own. “I’ve never wanted to hurt you. And I know you won’t believe that, because I don’t think anyone would ever believe it if I told them that. Not with the things I’ve done.”
Her wings fidget restlessly at her sides, casting strange shadows with the pale light that still radiates from her, brightening her face but only to spotlight the pain and regret that resides there. “Tell me what to do, Ashhal,” she begs him quietly, her pleading stare locked with his. “Tell me what you want me to do, even if it’s disappear, and I promise I’ll do it.” The light of her aura makes the space between them feel larger than it actually is, and she wants so badly to step close enough to bring him away from the shadows and into her light, but something keeps her rooted where she stands. That uncertainty of not knowing if closeness will only hurt them both, that maybe this distance that is wedged between them is there for a reason. “Tell me how to save the last parts of you.”
there's something wretched about this, something so precious about this, oh what a sin —
I tried to sell my soul last night Funny, he wouldn't even take a bite
He'd never shown himself before because nothing of him was worth showing. The cracks she was now peering through revealed only the blackened depths of whatever remained of his soul. He'd never admitted to love because he wasn't even certain he was capable of it. Even now he's not certain that's what she truly stirred within him rather than something darker, something far more base.
Ashhal has never exposed quite so much of himself before, and he is surprised to learn that rather than vulnerable, he suddenly feels more free than he has in ages. As though releasing everything he'd repressed for years had lifted an immense weight from him.
Perhaps that is why it is hard to feel guilt for the pain his words had caused her. Or perhaps it's simply that he's glad she finally understands. By that same token, he believes her when she claims she never meant to cause him pain either. It seems they had that much in common.
His own wings lift in response to her agitation, jaw working as he tries to formulate a response. To his surprise, the anger doesn't return as he had expected it to. Instead there is only acceptance. The unexpected realization that he wasn't the one that could decide for her what she wanted to do.
"I can't," he finally replies in a low, almost fatalistic tone. His eyes jump sharply to hers, his jaw tightening. "Your blind fucking obedience is never what I wanted."
And it wasn't. Even if he could trust a choice he made for her, he knew it would never give him satisfaction.
"There's nothing left of me to save anyway. You're wasting your time trying."
— there's something tragic about you, something so magic about you, don't you agree?
She can tell that she has failed him, even if neither of them had realized it when it was happening. The divide between them had always been there, a careful construct meant to keep the line from being blurred into romance; to make sure that any real emotion did not stand a chance of getting by. He had always been better at never crossing it—had been the most adamant of anyone she had ever been with that there was no hope of them ever being anything that would last, always cutting her off and showing as little interest as possible.
It didn’t matter how often they returned to each other, or how their flirtatious banter led them to the same place every time.
It didn’t matter that he had managed to lure her away from the first real love she had ever known, that she tore it apart to its core and didn’t even look back at the wreckage just for the sake of the thrill of being with him.
But she had overstepped their imaginary boundary the day Noel was born in Nerine, asking for things she had no business asking for. She had sent them into this tumultuous gray area they couldn’t seem to escape by trying to force them to look at the guards they both had kept up, the guards they had been pretending didn’t exist. And it would be so easy to blame him for it all, to say that all he had to have done was stay that day, that without the barrier between them everything would have fallen into place.
The truth of his words is another bright pain inside of her chest, though, and while she could cut herself on the edge in his eyes she does not look away, letting the realization of all her flaws and mistakes settle over her. “I never could have been what you wanted me to be,” because she is nothing but blind obedience, imprisoned by her past and unable to shake loose all the things so deeply embedded into her bones and her soul. There is a reason she has always attracted a certain type—Dhumin and Trashlip, Carnage and Atrox, and all the shades of darkness that fell in between them. They tell her what they want her to be, sometimes directly, other times in ways that are far more cryptic, but she is never left wondering.
She doesn’t know how to be anything other than that same painfully compliant girl that the dark king from the Dimension had shaped her into all those years ago, and for the first time she is faced with the realization that no matter how many times she broke herself down, she could never rebuild herself into what Ashhal would have needed her to be.
“You’re wrong on that last part, though,” she says with a sad, small smile, still trying to find him through all the darkness and space that keeps building between them. “There will always be a part of you worth saving. And even when you shut me out I will always be foolish enough to keep trying.”
there's something wretched about this, something so precious about this, oh what a sin —
I tried to sell my soul last night Funny, he wouldn't even take a bite
He had never tried to give her hope - not on purpose. He had known from the very beginning there was nothing redeeming in him. If anything, he could not be what she had needed, not the other way around. He would have made demands she could not hope to obey. Would have insisted on impossible things. Not because he would have wanted her to be something she was not, but because he would have wished her to be exactly as she was.
She couldn’t twist herself into what she imagined was the perfection he wanted because there was never anything about her he wanted to change.
And so when she speaks the words, claiming she could never be what he wanted, a harsh and discordant laugh escapes his lips. He cannot do anything but laugh at the absurdity of that statement. But she had released the demons inside him, and now she would have to be the one to live with them. “That was never the fucking problem.” His words are harsh, a harshness he doesn’t try to temper. “If I’d wanted you to be anything else than what you are, it would have made never seeing you again the easiest goddamned thing in the world.”
She’d been the only one who made it through the tiny chinks in his armor because she had been the only one who could have ever hoped to understand him. The only one who hadn’t demanded he change.
Until she had demanded it. Until he’d thought that maybe he did want to change.
What a dumbass fucking notion.
They are so close that he can feel the heat of her, the whisper of every tiny movement she makes. For a moment, he closes his eyes. It would be so easy to imagine this was years ago. That at any moment, he would take his rage and shape it into something far more carnal with her. And it’s tempting. So goddamned tempting he can nearly taste it.
But she had made him vulnerable when he never wanted to be. Had exposed the worst and most raw edges he has, and in the moment, he’s not sure he would stop if she said no. He already has enough regrets to carry around with him for the rest of eternity. He doesn’t need one more.
So, instead, he steps back. She would never know how much that simple action cost him. Would never know how it spoke of the regard he has for her.
“You’re wrong,” he says, a finality in his tone. His gaze sharpens, a hard and bitter edge to it, filled with unacknowledged heartache and regret. “You would be far better off forgetting I ever existed.”
— there's something tragic about you, something so magic about you, don't you agree?
She is still confused by what he says, is struggling to wrap her mind around what he says he had wanted her to be and what she had imagined he wanted her to be—she is used to being wrong, so that is nothing new. But no matter how she tries she cannot get his words to match with his past actions, and she can feel the frustration and exasperation beginning to tighten in her chest. “You only ever came back to me for one thing, and it’s the same thing you can get from anyone else,” she begins, and though her voice wavers with the ache in her throat it remains otherwise neutral, doing her best to not feed his own irritation further. “Which means that is not why you always came back and you were too stubborn to admit it.”
There is so much more that she could say, and for a moment, it seems like she is going to. The brief silence is taut with her unspoken words, how she wants to tell him that she would have done anything to make it work between them if it was what he wanted, and how he also could not fault her for moving on once he made it so clear that he didn’t want anything else.
He steps away from her, then, and as someone that has spent her life overanalyzing every move someone makes towards her, that single step feels like an entire ocean is suddenly between them. She does not know all that he wars with inside of himself, but she sees such a seemingly simple action and magnifies it to find all the hidden meanings her mind could possibly conjure—that he cannot stand to be close to her, that the harshness in his voice comes from a disdain for her that she will never be able to reconcile.
She is not surprised when his gaze grows even sharper, but she still wilts beneath it.
It stings to hear him say that she would be better off forgetting him, and her jaw tightens as she swallows away the bitter taste of tears that touch the back of her tongue. She is quiet for a long moment, but in the silence that builds there is the electric buzz of her racing thoughts, until finally she cannot keep from asking him in a pained whisper, “Were you happier when you didn’t remember me?”
there's something wretched about this, something so precious about this, oh what a sin —
I tried to sell my soul last night Funny, he wouldn't even take a bite
He had never exposed himself like this to anyone in his life. Never peeled back the layers of his own reticence to reveal the raw edges beneath. And he had never realized how goddamned freeing it could be. Never realized how much it had hurt to keep them wrapped and hidden away. And Ryatah, damn her, was the only one who could have ever made him do so. She could damned well deal with the consequences. The inconsistencies. The most awful parts of him that she once imagined she wanted to know.
He sighs when she replies, her voice wavering and thick with emotion, his own jaw clenching until a tick jumps in the pale lines of his cheek. “I came back because it was you,” he growls, his voice low and harsh with his own ruthlessly repressed regret and self-loathing. “Because even though I fucking knew you would never choose me, I couldn’t make myself stay away.”
Even now, he couldn’t seem to make himself stay away. He had run and run and run again, and always, somehow, he always ended up right back where he started. He could not fault her for finding her own happiness, even if he hated it. Could not fault her because she never would have found it with him. He had always known it to be true. His life had always been cold and cruel and brutal. The future would bring only the same, and even as crass and selfish as he is, he had never wanted that for her.
But there are no words he could find to tell her that. No way he can explain that is what had made him run. That that is what made him abandon her and their newborn daughter in that cave. No way to tell her that he hated children not because he didn’t care, but because having him as a father would be far worse than having no father at all.
Though it shouldn’t have, her question catches him off guard. His ears flatten against his neck, a visceral response to the sentiment. He had despised it when he realized his memories had been stolen, even if it had made life so much simpler. Still, it would be so easy to lie to her. To tell her he had been happier. But the truth is so much darker than that.
Lips tightening into a familiar scowl, his dark eyes find hers, a blistering despair hidden by forced stoniness. “I have never been happy,” he snaps, finding it a surprisingly hard thing to admit. “No, that’s a lie. I was happy once, and it wasn’t even fucking real.”
“You don’t know who or what I would have chosen, Ashhal,” comes her mildly exasperated response, and this time she does not mask her frustration as well as she had before. Sometimes she wonders if he is purposely impossible just to spite her, to ensure they never get any further than where they have already been. To keep them on this endless carousel that doesn’t stop but neither of them ever step off of.
She is bristling now with a rare kind of tension, not the kind that begs her to be ripped apart but the kind that makes her want to self-destruct. It simmers beneath a tranquil surface, only showing in the way her impossibly dark eyes flicker when they watch his face. Maybe this is what needs to be done—to push him until there is nothing left of them, of this, of anything that had been real or imaginary. He had said that only she had the power to break him, and maybe she wants to see what happens if she tries.
After all, she is always stronger, always more brilliant, every time she is broken and remade.
“You have pointed out several times the men I chose to spend my time with. The ones that make it easy to walk away,” she recalls his words from Nerine, trying to not flinch at the way they feel like a fresh blade on her tongue to have to say them again—to have to remember him saying them to her, an insult that has stuck with her through the years. “You were just like them, just like all the rest. Until—” her words stick in her throat, her breath trembling in her lungs as she tries to steady herself, apologetic and relentless all at once. “—until someone actually made it impossible for me to walk away.” Until Atrox chose her, and let her choose him.
Until finally she was not just someone’s entertainment for the night or the day or the month.
“There is nothing that says it wouldn’t have been you if you had only given me the chance,” she continues, quieter now, turning her nearly black eyes away from him. “You don’t have any idea how I might have loved you at the time because you were so busy making sure I never could.” When her eyes return to his face there is a smile, small and melancholy, though she expects her own softness to be met with his cold anger. “I suppose any kind of happiness for you and I was not meant to be real, then.”
I tried to sell my soul last night Funny, he wouldn't even take a bite
He can feel his own frustration rise even as hers does. He should have known it would be impossible to expose a century's worth of repressed emotions like this. Should have known she wouldn’t really understand. Should have known she couldn’t possibly understand. He had always known this would change nothing. Would serve no purpose beyond allowing him to finally release the poison he’d kept inside, burning holes in his heart until he wasn’t certain there was anything left.
But he’s not like her, not really. He never had been. If he broke he would not be remade. He would be left hollow. A shell that goes through the motions of life because he is forced to. He can already feel the cracks spreading, the faded memories of what he’d become. The man who had lain and starved because there was no point to life yet unable to die, being born and born again in that same spot as the cycle repeated.
He doesn’t interrupt her as she speaks, doesn’t interject. Instead he stands like stone, obsidian eyes glittering as he regards her with ill-concealed disbelief. It isn’t until the end, when she softly declares that it might have been him had he only given her a chance. He does stir then, shifting closer, the anger catching on his tongue. But he doesn’t yell or rage. It wouldn’t change anything after all.
“Do you imagine that a hundred years of rejection could be so fucking easily undone in a few short years?” he growls, accusation in his tone. “You used to run as fast and far as I did, and you damned well know it. Or have you forgotten how many times you’ve fucking rejected me too? Was I supposed to believe you’d suddenly changed your mind?”
There is cruelty in his voice now, but he can’t seem to help himself. “Isn’t it fucking ironic that had you only been a little more patient, I might even have started to believe you when you said you loved me?” He steps closer - so close he is nearly pressed against her now. “But it was never me, only the version of me you wanted me to be.” He laughs then, bitter and humorless. “I don’t know that I’m capable of love either. But if I am, it’s you. You as you are now, as you were then. As you were a decades ago when I first fucked you.”
Then, because that is an admission that could never see the light of day - not really - he closes his eyes. “But that won’t change anything, will it?”
He knows it won’t, but foolishly, he waits for her reply. And when the ‘no’ inevitably comes, he will make sure she remembers nothing of this conversation. It would serve neither of them any good.
She can feel the hopelessness of it all the longer the conversation continues.
Hopeless, because it feels as though they are both drowning beneath the surface, and even though they can see the light up above it never seems to get any closer. She cannot speak for him, but for her, it is crushing. It crushes her chest and collapses into her lungs, it crushes her hope and drowns her with despair. There is nothing she can say to him to get him to see, nothing she can do to amend whatever he feels had been wronged.
But she tries, because she is eternally a fool that only wants to please, that only wants to rectify all her mistakes.
“I never meant to reject you Ashhal, I was afraid,” she can feel the anger that radiates from him and his voice, but hers does not ascend to match it. No matter the frustration that knots in her chest, she cannot bring herself to stray from the quiet that she always is, even if she can feel her resolve begin to crumble. If she could press every emotion and thought directly into his veins so that might understand, she would, but all she has is a string of nearly incoherent thoughts and emotions that she tries to put into words. “I never expected you to just blindly believe anything, but you never gave me the chance to show you.”
She does not flinch beneath his cruelty, even though she wants to. She is resolute and silent, her dark eyes locked with his until he is finished. She is not always as strong as she liked to be, and it would so much easier to fold beneath his stare, but for once his words glance off of her rather than burrowing beneath her skin.
She shakes her head, closing her eyes for a moment with a sigh.
She opens them, looking at him with a soft kind of sadness.
“No, it will never change anything. Nothing will ever change between you and I, because Atrox did not force me to be patient. He did not punish me for my past, he did not hang every mistake I have made over my head as an excuse of why he couldn’t love me, and I showed him the same grace that he showed me.” She pauses, stepping back as she does so, preparing to leave. “I love Atrox, and there is a reason that no matter how hard I tried, nothing ever worked with anyone else. Including you.”
