"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
Sometimes he fears he is going mad with the pain.
But isn’t that what he deserves?
The thing that had cursed him had seen through him, seen what he truly was. And though he knows now that the things that had happened on the Mountain had happened only in his mind, he knows that he has other crimes to pay for. There will never be any shortage of reasons that he should be punished.
But he has stayed. For the first time in his life, he has been wholly selfless. He has felt the need to wander, certainly, but he has kept himself rooted firmly to her side. Because her happiness, he knows now, is the only thing that matters. And it has been years now since they last brought a child into the world. A child who has gone off into the world with the rest of them, their Keepsake.
And he worries about her the same way he worries about the rest of them in this darkness. Endless darkness that is neither day nor night. He has heard rumors that the darkness descended when their grandson, the shadow thing, had emerged victorious in the Alliance. But he does not know how to believe that their son could have sired a monster, cannot make it make sense, so he chooses instead to ignore it.
The darkness further distorts his vision, which is already blurred almost to the point of uselessness by the liquid gold that cuts rivers down his cheeks. He remains largely idle these days. Not only because he stays for her but because the stiller he stays the less likely the thorns are to dig into the tender flesh of his brow. He is so tired of bleeding.
He exhales a careful sigh now, peering blindly into the shadows. “My darling,” he murmurs, “do you think the sun will ever return?”
I WAS READY TO DIE FOR YA, BABY
DOESN’T MEAN I’M READY TO STAY
i ain’t the strongest hickory that your ax has ever felled
but i’m a hickory just as well, i’m a hickory all the same
He is here all the time, and she feels guilty.
Her entire life has been spent trying to convince him to stay, without ever actually saying it. She has spent almost all of her nights and all of her days turning over all the small things she has done wrong or the ways that she could be different—ways to be enough that he would not want to leave. It had hurt most when they were younger, but she learned to live with it. The pain beat in her chest right alongside of her heartbeat, until she wasn't sure she would know what to do if it ever left.
And yet for all the ways her heart has broken for him, her love has never once wavered.
If anything the desperate hurt had strengthened it, because she loved him more than she loved herself. She loved him enough to know that he stayed at her side only because he had nowhere else to go, perhaps having finally drained the world dry, or too inconvenienced by the golden tears that trail him wherever he goes. She loved him enough that the thought made her feel guilty, and that she would give anything for him to be himself, even if it meant he was gone.
She is alongside him now in the dark, her copper skin flush against his. The warmth that she felt to have him so close all the time lived side by side with her guilt, but it was easier to forget about it when she could feel the gentle inhale and exhale of his ribs on hers. “I don’t know,” she answers him, her voice just above a whisper. Ever since the dark had fallen she found herself afraid of being too loud. She was sure that sometimes she heard the rattled breathing of something alien and strange, the heavy presence of something that did not belong here. “But I hope it comes back soon,” there is a tinge of worry that lingers in her voice, but she tries to chase it away by pressing her lips to the familiar slope of his shoulder, “I miss being able to actually see you.”
There are so many things he wishes he could have done differently.
He wishes that he could have dissolved himself into her bloodstream so many years ago, lived out his days in the network of her veins, buried himself in the chambers of her heart, burrowed his way into the marrow of her bones. He belonged there. She has been his home for as long as he can remember but he has never known how to stay put.
She has always deserved so much more than he has been able to give her.
How terribly he has made her suffer.
He can feel it, even now. Even when he stays.
There is so much hurt that pulses between them and he is responsible for every bit of it. This is why the heart twists and spasms and twinges so dreadfully in the cage of his ribs. This is why the gold cuts such thick rivers down his cheeks, why it pools at his feet. Sometimes he lays his cheek against her neck and studies the patterns it leaves on her skin. He wonders if it scalds her the same way it does him.
Despite the terrible heartsickness, he smiles. How sweet she is, how lovely. How desperately he loves her, always has, always will. How wonderful that her kiss should still steal tremors down the length of his spine, even after all this time. “I promise that I look just the same as I always have,” he murmurs. He wants to say just as miserable but he does not want her to think that it’s the staying that makes him miserable. He does not want her to think that his misery has anything at all to do with her. It is the pain alone, the bitter sting of the gold that streaks relentlessly down his cheeks.
“Besides, between the two of us, you have always been easier to look at,” he assures her gently. Sincerely. Especially now. Especially with the way he bleeds and weeps without pause now.
“Do you think the children are all right?” he asks, though he doesn’t want to. Not because he doesn’t wonder but because he fears the answer might be anything other than a resounding yes.
I WAS READY TO DIE FOR YA, BABY
DOESN’T MEAN I’M READY TO STAY
i ain’t the strongest hickory that your ax has ever felled
but i’m a hickory just as well, i’m a hickory all the same
There had been a part of her that had always known that in the end, it would be them.
It was why she had bore every heartache in mostly silence, why she had watched with a clench in her heart as he repeatedly chose to chase fleeting romances over staying. She had done her best to hide every bruise and every crack, had endured the kind of pain she had not thought it possible to survive. And only because she had been so sure that the ache was not going to last forever. He always came back, she would whisper to a heart that was still struggling to beat around the breaks and the fragments clinging together. He always comes back, she would remind herself for the countless lonely night and a seemingly infinite amount of days.
And he did—he always came back, and he always came back to her, and her alone.
If someone had told her all of those years ago that when Beqanna plunged into dark that it would be him at her side, she would have believed them—because there was no other outcome possible, in her mind.
“That’s why I miss seeing you,” she says with a small smile in the dark, reaching to touch her lips to his gold-stained cheeks. The feel of the dampness reignites the hurt in her chest; she hated knowing that he was like this, hated even more knowing there was nothing she could do to help him. Knowing that there were thorns digging into his skin, that the tears never stopped. “You’re my favorite thing to look at,” she finishes with a gentle sweep of her lips along his jaw.
He asks about their children, and she pushes down the worry that threatens to bubble up her throat and into her words. “I’m sure they’re fine,” she says, even if she doesn’t believe it. Their children were grown now, even if some of the younger ones that did not seem possible. She had to believe that they were fine, because that was a pain she was not ready to bear.
In the silence that settles between them there is a sound—a distant rattling of breath, the soft swish of grass as something moves through it. Her heart quickens, the icy pinpricks of fear rippling down the ridge of her spine as she presses closer to him. “Do you hear that?” she asks him, her mouth against his neck, afraid that if she speaks even above a whisper that it will draw attention further to them, even though she is so sure her pounding heart is going to give them away.
It is some wild wonder that she can bear to look at him at all.
Not even just since his fateful trip to the Mountain.
But in all of the years their hearts have been irreversibly tethered.
It’s true that the crown of thorns makes him weak, small, lesser. But he’s never understood how he has not always looked this way to her. He’s never understood how she could bear to look past his indiscretions and find something worthwhile underneath. He will never understand (and he will certainly spend the rest of eternity trying to understand) what it was about him that she thought was worth waiting all those years for. How it makes him ache, still, to think of all the life she has wasted on him.
(Alas, he is so horribly selfish and unwilling to let her go. He will not try to convince her that she deserves more than this. He will savor whatever time they have left together. He will not leave her again.)
The heart flutters and aches and throbs with its sickness to hear her speak so sweetly, to feel her kiss him so tenderly. Sometimes it feels like the heart will burst right out of his chest. Sometimes he wishes it would. For now, though, it pulses urgently against his ribs and he lays his head against her neck and lets her assure him that their children are fine and he believes her. Aren’t they strong and clever and resilient? Again, he shoves away the encroaching thought that their son might somehow be indirectly responsible for this terrible darkness, refusing to lend a voice to it.
He is on the verge of relaxing (as much as he is capable of relaxing anymore) into this corner of quiet, the closest thing to a safe haven they have found in the crushing shadowland, when he hears it, too. Immediately, he tenses, acutely aware that the sound of drawn breath had been distinctly not equine.
He answers her question with a faint nod, not wanting to speak and risk drawing more attention to them. He lifts his head to hook his chin over her neck, anchoring her to his side. He has not fought in what feels like decades, but he will do what he has to.
I WAS READY TO DIE FOR YA, BABY
DOESN’T MEAN I’M READY TO STAY
i ain’t the strongest hickory that your ax has ever felled
but i’m a hickory just as well, i’m a hickory all the same
She can feel the way his heart beats against his chest, and how even after all of these years her own heart quickens to keep time with his. It isn’t a mystery to her because her heart has never beat for anyone else. It had been his from the very moment they met, and everyone else in her life became hardly even an afterthought. Her heart loved him more than it could ever love anyone else, even broken into a thousand pieces.
He pulls her closer at the feel of something creeping in the dark, and through the fear there is the familiar flood of warmth that his touch brings.
She almost forgets to be afraid.
Tucked against his side and with her face into his chest, eyes closed, it is easy to forget that darkness presses all around them and does not exist just behind her eyelids. With only the smell of him in her nose and their hearts beating against each other she forgets that something is coming for them—for her.
The shadow-tendrils that reach for her are so light, so delicate, that she doesn't feel them.
She doesn't feel the way they snake up her legs like vines, wrapping around the middle of her and around her neck.
She doesn't feel it until all at once they tighten and pull, ripping her away from him with a strength that takes her breath away, silencing the scream in her throat. It pulls her straight into a mass of something darker, something larger, and maybe it is a mouth with teeth but she isn't looking at where she is being pulled to, she is looking for Jarris.
She tries to scream his name and she thinks maybe she does, because she can feel the shape of it in her mouth before it is filled with shadows, and then all at once, she is gone.
