"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
What a fool he had been to leave her! He knows this now.
If he’d had the means, he would have shackled himself to her side. He would have trailed after her like stardust and gnashed his teeth at anyone who glanced in her direction. He would have carved open his chest and bled poetry at her feet.
Instead, he had gone home to Tephra and asked his father what love meant and the answer had left him feeling hollow. There had to be more to it than allegiance.
He’d told his father about her and his father had smiled his patient smile and told him that the ache in his chest would go away with time.
But it hadn’t. No, it had compounded. Worship could think of nothing else but the ache. He no longer dreamed of ruin but of the stars strewn across her shoulders. And when his sister slept nearby, he dreamed of Stellaria always just outside of his reach.
Then the darkness came and his parents were reluctant to let the twins out of their sight.
But now he is long and lean. He knows how to use the wings and he has not forgotten a promise he made once. Two promises, in fact. Solemn vows he made. And this terrible darkness will not stop him from keeping those promises. So he sets out in the hopes of finding her.
He starts in the meadow because that is where he found her first. And perhaps it is chance or perhaps it is fate that he finds her there again. Oh, how his heart thrashes so mightily against the cage of his ribs as he approaches her. His gaze falls heavy on her wings and his heart twinges something mournful and he wonders what other lovesick fool must have given them to her. (But oh, he is so happy for her, too!)
He reaches out to touch them so gently. And this is the first time he has allowed himself to touch her. So hesitantly, still so acutely aware that he has no right.
“You got your wings,” he murmurs. Still, he does not smile. Still, he is much too serious.
you were the boat that breached in the tale of conrad
oh, i loved you with the good and the careless of me
but it all goes bad
She’d thought of him every day since they parted. And since her wings had appeared earlier in the winter, he had been on her mind constantly. It had taken him longer to find her than she would have liked - she’d returned to the spot where they had met the very next day in the hopes that she might see his opal bright self again. But days stretched into a year and then the sky seemed to collapse.
Gone were the stars that Stellaria found peace beneath. This darkness is not the same as her beloved night, it is choking and reeks of death. She doesn’t return to the meadow as often - finding some solace with her vagabond father and the company of someone else to watch the shadows while she slept.
He had promised he would find her and she believed him. Though she wishes their time apart had been shorter it does not occur to her to worry - whether about his welfare or whether he found someone more captivating than her to speak his serious prose to. He will find her. So she keeps returning to the meadow to make herself easier to find - and one day she is rewarded. Worship is there and the rest of the world becomes even more muted as she focuses on him. Only him.
Stellaria is pleased when he closes the gap between them, when he touches her wings, and her vibrant blue eyes dance. She could purr beneath his attention if she were capable of it. She’s only grown bolder, and she moves her wings into his too-gentle touch as she greets him properly by reacquainting herself with the constellations of his skin as she brushes her muzzle against his cheek and neck while she speaks. “I did. Very recently, I woke up from a dream and there they were.” This is the truth, though she doesn't know exactly how that could have happened. She has no further explanations but she wants him to know that she didn’t, wouldn't, accept wings from anyone else.
She moves her muzzle to brush against his shoulder where wing meets flesh. They’re so close to one another but it feels so right compared to the absence of him in her life that had been just as uncomfortable as the lack of day and night cycle in the sky. She’d missed him.
“Will you still teach me?” She asks as she draws back to look at his golden eyes, a coy smile in her own gaze.
Stellaria would not accept a no to this question but she also doesn't expect one. The asking is just a formality for them both as they get reaccquainted.
They are young still but older now than they had been before.
He burns where she touches him, where she traces patterns on his skin. It arrests the air in his lungs, the restless heart in the cavern of his chest. He can feel himself caving in. He can hardly breathe at all by the time she speaks. His head is swimming so fiercely that he can barely make sense of what she says. Surely he must have misheard her. She awoke from a dream to find them there? As if it had been enough simply to want them.
It could be that easy, couldn’t it? Wanting to see her badly enough had led him to her, though he had been a dreadful fool to leave her in the first place.
She goes on touching him but he cannot bring himself to touch her anyplace other than the tip of a wing. He so vividly remembers how she’d said that no one would touch her unless she allowed it. And it had not occurred to him that the rustle of her wing had been an invitation, a siren’s call. She is too precious a thing, he will not sully her with his dirty, unworthy mouth.
“No one deserves them more than you,” he murmurs into a dark feather and he draws away his touch just as she does. She meets his gaze and all the world drops dead. It does not matter that they are still immersed in this terrible darkness. It does not matter that the world is still full of so much uncertainty. She is the only thing that matters and he’d made her a promise and he knows now just as he had known then that he would keep his word, that he would never disappoint her. That he would lay down his life to ensure her happiness.
“Yes,” he says, urgently, swallowing thickly before continuing, “of course.” Does she understand that he will give her whatever she asks of him? Should he be frightened?
“Now?” he asks, consumed suddenly by such a soft thrill at the idea of taking to the dark skies with her.
you were the boat that breached in the tale of conrad
oh, i loved you with the good and the careless of me
but it all goes bad
Frustration creeps into Stellaria’s shining mind when Worship does not return her caresses, when his voice murmurs against her dark feathers and then simply falls away. She had delighted in the way he responded to her touch, the changes in his breathing she focused on as if they could provide her enough sustenance to live off of. She wished to offer him the same, to let him see how her breathing and heart danced in tune with how she imagined his touch would feel.
She does not think to be self-conscious, to wonder if she is not enough. She simply promises herself to endeavour to try a little harder next time. Stellaria believes she’s worthy of affection from anyone she meets and the only one she desires it of is standing before her now. Her friend, and now to be her teacher.
The smile that illuminates her blue eyes when he says of course could have rivalled the sun if it was still shining.
Now? Worship asks and in her way, Stellaria responds with certainty. “Yes.” Stellaria steps back but her eyes remain on him and she unfurls her wings slightly - reading herself - before pausing and asking in a soft teasing voice. “Unless there’s something else you’d rather do?”
His father had told him what love meant but he thinks his father must have been wrong.
It has to be his willingness (his borderline urgency) to lay himself down at her feet, to flay himself alive, to bleed himself dry for her. It has to be the fact that he so strongly believes that he had been constructed for this exactly, to stand here and think that his heart was built to beat out the shape of her name. His lungs were crafted specifically to breathe the air she expelled.
And she steps back and flexes her wings and she is the most beautiful thing he will ever see. He knows that and he thinks he could die now and it would be all right because he would have seen all he needed to see. He would have experienced all he needed to experience because he had so gently touched the tip of her wing and he had spoken her name and she had touched him sweetly enough to reorient his pulse and what more was there to life than that?
He is much too serious to understand what it means to be teased in this way so he only looks at her, his brow dark and frank as he shakes his head and turns away from her.
(And oh! How coy he could have been! How flirtatious! How he could have wooed her with a charming grin and a sly remark about how many ideas he had about other ways they could have passed the time! But he is a simple boy built for worship and precious little more. He was not built for flirtation, only poetry.)
He draws in a breath. “No, I will teach you now, I promised you I would,” he tells her and flexes his own wings. (His father had taught him in the interim, though his father’s wings were somehow both draconic and arborous.)
“The most important thing is to trust that your wings will carry you, that they won’t let you fall,” he tells her and stretches his pale wings out wide, nodding as if to encourage her to do the same.
you were the boat that breached in the tale of conrad
oh, i loved you with the good and the careless of me
but it all goes bad
Stellaria makes a note to herself to be more direct with Worship in the future, her teasing doesn’t even earn her so much as a blush in response - instead, he turns away and it’s only her amusement that keeps her from frowning. She doesn’t believe it is a slight - he is simply as serious as ever and it only makes her more determined to win a stutter or a smile out of him one day with her daring and innuendos.
It is entertaining to think of the ways she can try to accomplish this goal, but she focuses on the present and the goal immediately in front of her - learning how to fly. She sobers up, taking another step back so she can more easily look at him and what he’s demonstrating. Excitement burns in her bright blue eyes as she watches him unfurl those magnificent wings of his.
She extends her own, revealing the brightly coloured feathers on the inside. The weight of them is still new to her - though they feel right, learning to balance herself with them was still something she was working on.
“I trust them.” She says as she glances at her own dark extended limbs - there’s really no other option. She’s not going to allow herself to fail at flying - it’s part of her destiny. Stellaria had been born to fly so much so that she had dreamed herself a pair of wings. So much so that she had found herself a teacher before she had found herself a friend (though they had turned into one and the same, though the word friend is unbearably casual for Worship and the feelings within her as she waits for what comes next).
He remembers, in such vivid detail, the first time he’d laid eyes on her. How she had drawn the poetry out of his blood. How he’d thought he’d never see a finer thing as long as he lived but she’s standing in front of him now testing out her wings and there’s such a strange stirring in his heart.
Would it be strange to tell her now that he loves her?
Even if she were to laugh in his face, it would be enough just for her to know, he thinks.
But he doesn’t. Because he is a fool. Unworthy. Simple. Because he had promised her once that he would teach her to fly and she had willed herself a pair of wings and it had not occurred to him to go back on his word.
He nods but he does not smile. (Has he ever smiled? Sometimes his father worried that there was something wrong with the boy. Maybe the darkness of the dreams was too much.) He had not trusted his wings in the beginning but he had not thought himself destined for the stars either, not like her. He had questioned his place in the world until he’d realized that he belonged at her feet.
He turns from her then and draws in a long, measured breath, trying to remember exactly what his father had told him.
“Just take a running leap,” he says, glancing at her, “give yourself to your wings.” He is still young, Worship, perhaps too young to be much of a teacher. “Like this,” he tells her and then lurches into a canter. His heart thunders in his throat, self-conscious, before he jumps and thrusts his wings downward, pushing himself up into the dark sky.
you were the boat that breached in the tale of conrad
oh, i loved you with the good and the careless of me
but it all goes bad
It does not occur to Stellaria that she might fail at this. That it is not possible for her to simply unfurl her wings and be excellent at flying right from the beginning. She expects that to be exactly the case - there is no room in her mind for anything else. She expects that to be the case - that she will take off after Worship with little effort, that they will soar through this choking darkness. Together.
Her bright gaze does not break from him, watching with an intensity far past her young years. Even if the entire world were bright around them, Worship would still be the only thing to exist. She loves her stars, loves her dreams, and her feeling for this serious boy transcends both of those.
He makes it look so easy, and even if this weren’t a lesson she thinks she could watch him fly forever. He’s beautiful when he’s standing still but watching the moment when his wings thrust downwards with a powerful stroke and then lifting into the air is something else entirely. She’s distracted for a moment, before she remembers what she’s supposed to be doing. With a grin, she focuses. Everything else in the world is shut out easily - it is just her, Worship, and the air.
Stellaria does not ascend into the air on her first try, but her focus now is unrivalled and her second attempt is successful. Her heart is beating wildly and as soon as her legs leave the ground, as soon as she rises with each powerful stroke of her wings, she forgets that she was not immediately perfect at this.
“Oh, Worship.” She breathes his name into the dark air, reverent and blissful - nearly forgetting to flap her wings as she steadies herself in the air next to him. She drops a little bit but catches herself. If her actions are clumsy, she does not notice.
He is no great teacher, but she does not need one.
It does not occur to him that she might fail at this either.
She, who dreamed these wings into existence.
She, who forced reality to bend to her will.
She, who caged lightning in his chest.
He remembers the dream, her dream. How no eyes dared turn upon her unless she allowed them to, so he does not watch. (How could he stomach it? How could he bear to witness the brilliance of it? And he will come to regret it, he will. Because there will never exist anything more beautiful than this, the moment she takes flight.)
And all the world stands still as they, for this singular moment in time, fly in tandem. As she breathes his name into existence and it’s as if he’s hearing it again for the first time. (It is different up here, without the weight of gravity, isn’t it? It is different amongst the clouds and the birds and the blessed stardust that still exists despite all this inescapable darkness.)
How he aches to see her clearly. How he wishes for the sun, so fiercely in that moment that he almost believes himself responsible for it. Only for an instant as the pitch blackness splinters and then shatters completely, dousing them in so much light. It courses through him like an electric shock and he searches for her through that jarring brightness as he scrambles for solid ground, heart hammering chaos in the cavern of his chest.
It does not matter how the light burns his eyes as his feet return to the earth, he searches the sky for her, oblivious to the stars that have appeared on his chest. How they glow. How they have oriented themselves perfectly into the letter S.
you were the boat that breached in the tale of conrad
oh, i loved you with the good and the careless of me
but it all goes bad
It is both everything she had dreamed of and so much more. Even though the world is in shambles, they are a perfect pair - flying together - and nothing else matters. When she is in his company, nothing else does matter. The entire world does not exist, it is only them. And for a moment it is just them and the darkness.
Until light erupts.
It is so surprising, even as magical as it is - as much as it suits the dreamlike moment - and Stellaria’s eyes are blinded as she turns her head, searching for him but unable to see anything but brightness. Her wings falter as her head spins, and she drops to the ground half out of instinct and half out of inexperience.
It is only a landing by generous standards. For all her dreams she is still flesh and blood. Stellaria’s legs ache with the harsh impact but her blue eyes are searching for Worship. She’s farther away than he intended and each step aches but pain isn’t enough to keep her away and she moves forward, pulled towards him. Unwilling to suffer a distance unless they are in the air. She is glowing too, it is faint beneath the bright sun but she isn’t paying attention.
Her eyes are on him. Resplendent in the daylight. Enough that she forgets her clumsiness, forgets the stinging pain making her gait a little awkward. Her eyes catch on the glow on his chest but she doesn’t stop to admire it. She doesn’t stop at all until she’s close enough to touch him, to run her muzzle against the colours of his neck that she can finally see clearly.
There she presses soft words. “Daylight suits you.” But it cannot compare to him. The sun is back and she should be thankful for it, but she is only thankful to finally, finally get to see Worship how he was meant to be seen.
