"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
Thomas had found her and told her that he was following her mother to Pangea, that there was another child on the way. How sweet her father had been to ask her to come along, how terribly sweet to want to protect her still. And Hourglass, too. But he had not seen her in some time and neither had Clementia and she would not go without her sister.
So Thomas had gone to Pangea, as fate had always known that he would and Clementia had stayed where her sister could find her in all of that terrible darkness. She stayed rooted like a beacon, a light to guide her home.
But it has been months now and Hourglass has not come. (She does not worry as the father worries, though, because she would know in her heart if some catastrophic end had befallen her sister. She would feel it in her bones. The soul would know if its twin flame had been snuffed out.) Still, she stays. Dream-eyed and wandering, half-breathless and listless.
She thinks of the things she has touched. The beautiful things that have flitted into her reach, the things she has tasted. To think of such devastating beauty does wonders to combat the crippling effects of this unending darkness. And she wanders down to the edge of the river where she caught sight of these creatures. She thinks of the girl with honey in her hair, bees crawling across her lips. She sinks into the water until it licks greedy at her knees and then she calls it to her until it curls up her sides, fashions itself into wings that she does not try to use.
There is nowhere to go, not now.
She dips her glass mouth into the current.
It is cold just as she is cold. She exhales, disturbing the flow, oblivious to the things that teem beneath the surface.
i’m lost in the light, i pray for the night
To take me, to take you, too
@[The Monsters] please mess with her immortality and her water wings!
He has made the river itself his home, despite that he is not made to last beneath its waters. It is the way it sounds, the way it drowns out the song of death and dying so long as he stays by its side. It is the way it always smells cold and fresh, reminds him of open skies and mountain peaks and things that feel just like freedom. It is the way he can lose himself in it, and the way it always changes, always takes him somewhere new. It is never stagnant, though so much of this world is now.
He misses the sun. He misses the light and the warmth, misses Spring because this is not that. This is bleak and brown and murky, there is no new life to find when everything is so busy just trying not to die. He misses mornings and sunrises, misses evenings and sunsets. He misses the stars and constellations for which he has no names, but certainly vows now to learn them. If they ever come back. But he isn’t sure he has it in him to miss the moon, because that halo in the sky is like two crescents pieced together and he wonders if it is the moon that watches them all suffer below.
But he is not someone made for resentment, and even this small shard of it sits ill inside his chest, so he forces his thoughts away from it lest it fester and make him rotten inside. Instead he moves to the water, drinking from it quietly and completely unaware of the company he holds until he lifts his head again and spies a girl on the bank opposite him.
“Oh,” he says, the words as reflexive as the crooked smile tugging at the corners of his dark mouth, “you know, I’ve had dreams like this before.” His smile is something more now, reaching all the way up to the warm honey of his eyes as he wades in up to his chest and stops again, studying her in a gentle way. “But I certainly do not recall falling asleep.” Yet there is something incredibly unreal about a girl in the river with skin that reminds him of a midnight sky all strewn with stars that almost seem like they are shining. It is too dark to see anything in any real detail, but the river is the only place that seems to catch any light - something he had thought was singularly unique, until now.
“My name is Web.” He says quietly, though his eyes have wandered to the shape of the wings at her shoulders that he is only now just realizing tremble like the surface of the river, like water. “I cannot decide if you are a fever dream, or something else entirely,” an amused smile, warm across the gold and navy of his face and growing because he can see the faint shifting of color around her now, an aura that means she is as alive as he is, “though I am most certainly feeling weak in the knees.” A laugh, though he half turns his face away from her so she cannot see that glimpse of pain that lances through his chest. This lightness felt wrong in a ruined world. “Would you like some company?”
WEB
@[The Monsters] please mess with his sabre-toothed cat shifting and super senses
@[clementia] listen, i don't know why he's so weird
It is not a shadow thing that finds her but something else altogether that comes swimming out of the darkness. And what a sweet tongue this thing has with that sunlight smile and his talk of fever dreams. She is a thing built on dreams, Clementia, and it has never been hard to make her swoon. There are clouds and galaxies and stardust trapped under the glass of her skin and these things make her prone to whimsy and he is just another beautiful thing for her to touch.
There is something like relief in her smile when she lands those galaxy eyes on him, as if he is everything she has been searching for. Even as the water bleeds from her sides back into the river and she sighs something so dreamy.
“Web,” she says as if she has known his name her whole life, as if he has not just told it to her, as if her tongue has been crafted to say his name alone.
“Do you have to ask?” she asks, the voice like bell-songs. She tilts her fine head and moves deeper into the water, reaching out to touch him with the cool glass of her mouth. It does not occur to her to ask him for permission. She is his fever dream, surely she does not need permission. And he is another beautiful thing she has touched.
“My name is Clementia,” she tells him, though he has not asked. She wants him to have it. She wants him to store it away in his chest. She wants him to remember it. His fever dream had a name. She was not only galaxies trapped in glass. There was a heart there, too. A heart and a name. She smiles and touches his shoulder with her wet mouth, leaves it cool.
“Do you dream of meeting women at the river often?” she asks, whimsical, almost a sigh. And then she smiles and turns away from him, makes for the shore. Water beads on the surface of the glass and drips into the dark mud as she emerges from the river and turns to face him again.
i’m lost in the light, i pray for the night
To take me, to take you, too
@[web] i love him
@[The Monsters] please mess with her stone hooves and wind exhalation!
She repeats his name with such a sense of easy familiarity that he knows he is in trouble. Even her smile reflects the relief that swirls in pinks and teals through the wavering cloud of the aura clinging close to that celestial skin. She is something entirely unreal, something entirely impossible and he is sure that if she were to claim that she was of the midnight sky, or the stars and distant milky way, he would not doubt her for a second.
“Well it seemed polite.” He says in response, his honey eyes alight with the smile that reaches from one corner of his navy mouth to the other. “I do occasionally like to pretend I have manners.” He cannot steal his eyes away from her delicate face, from the shining glass and that dreamy way she watches him as though he is anything like the marvel wading towards him. He is not unattractive, same as most, but though there are points of jeweled navy over his nose and his ears and the points of his legs, he is still merely plain in the lackluster gold of buckskin and white.
But he is not too proud - or too foolish - to spurn the way she reaches for him anyway.
“Clementia.” He repeats even as the cool smoothness of her mouth moves across his skin with the same curiosity of a river current. He would be sorry for the way his voice sounds almost dazed, for the way his warm eyes lid at this unexpected closeness. “Clementia.” He says again, and his voice is something more solid now as he takes his own steps to close the distance between them, letting his dark mouth trail over the glass of her curving neck before he pulls back to study her with a look of restrained curiosity. “And who is Clementia, with stars under her skin and a touch like the first whisper of spring after a long winter?” He cannot keep the smile out of his eyes, but it is something so quiet now, something subdued by the serenity of this girl he will certainly never forget, never have the fortune to keep.
But when she speaks, he breaks this quiet built as precariously as spider silk, laughing at the question she poses to him. “No, but I certainly will now.” He says, and he is still laughing softly to himself when she turns away and he finds in himself a brand new reflex to follow her. She had said she wanted company, after all. So he follows without a word, and when she pauses on the shore he can only just barely pull his eyes from the shining curves of her sparkling body, from the water that beads over her like captured rain touching all the places he cannot.
When he is abreast of her he does reach out again, tracing his lips along the curve of her jaw so briefly as though he has any right to reach for her like this. But it is like he cannot fathom her realness, as though he needs to reach out and feel the solidness of her glass body beneath his lips if only to be reassured that she is here at all.
“Do you -” but whatever he had been about to ask is gone in a moment as pain like nothing he has even known rips through his golden body, reducing his form to a sabre-toothed cat and his cry of pain to something like a strangled snarl. He staggers from her blindy, and then his roar is transformed back into the cry of a man again as he finds himself restored but with large wings that unfurl from the muscle of his shoulders with a loud snap.
He forces his body still again, forces his mouth to close over the strangled pain that rises from him like a burning dawn. But when his eyes lift to search the dark around them, the warm honey color is something wounded and wild. There is nothing here but them, though, and he can see from the way her aura is unchanged that Clementia had nothing to do with whatever kind of magic this is. In his periphery his own aura swirls in reds and oranges and yellows like an unseen dawn. He grits his teeth and tests the wings that now lay quietly across his back as though they’ve always been there, but they only lift and settle again despite the pain that feels like fists buried in the meat of his shoulders. Otherwise they are mockingly still.
“You are quite sure this is not a dream?” He asks finally, quietly, his expression made more guarded by the pain and confusion welling inside his chest when his eyes return to the shores of her shining face again.
The beautiful things she has touched have all been similarly soft.
(Save for the one dark thing that had disguised itself as something sweet, even as he’d thumbed so freely through her thoughts.)
But he is different, isn’t he, Web? His sweetness is saccharine, obviously artificial, and there is something in this that is so terribly alluring that she has no hope at all of denying it. She is powerless to turn away from it. Powerless to do anything but bat her lashes at it, simper dreamily, watch him with those galaxy eyes and hope that he might find himself equally as taken.
(And he seems to be, doesn’t he? With the way he watches her with those golden brown eyes. As if she is the finest thing those eyes have ever had the privilege of seeing. And she is not arrogant, Clementia, but she allows herself to believe that she is. Because there are entire galaxies that shift ceaselessly beneath the glass of her. Milk-white at the center, pale enough to get lost in.)
He says her name just as easily as he’d said his own, as if the two were meant to fit together. Her father had told her the name meant mercy, though she has none when she reaches out to touch him. (Could this touch not bring a man to his knees? Though he does not buckle beneath it but rather reaches for her in return, as though she had begged him to do it. Had she? Perhaps she had.) She touches whatever she can reach. She will commit what she can to memory of this stranger who has to pretend to have manners, who says her name so practically, who touches her and speaks poetry into existence.
Is this romance?
Or is it truly a dream?
What a heavenly sigh it is that leaves her.
Who is Clementia? She will be his dream thing, galaxies trapped under glass. She will be his spring after winter. “I will be your dream,” she tells him. So gladly she will be his dream. She will wrap herself so greedily around him and she will not think of honeybees or how it felt to have her most private thoughts exposed.
But she makes for the shore and perhaps she only does so to see if he will follow. (She is not a coy thing, Clementia. No, it is not a test. She will not be disappointed if he stays there in the water, she will not punish him. But even she cannot deny the delicious thrill in the pit of her gut when he does follow, when he sidles up beside her on the shore. When he reaches for her again, touches her like something precious, something unearthed, like she belongs to him.) It is quiet there on the shore, when it is just the two of them and the water that collects on the surface of their skin only to drip down into the mud at their feet.
And he speaks, or begins to, and then he doesn't.
And then. And then. And then.
This is her first real taste of confusion. It all devolves so rapidly that she does not have time to comprehend it as it happens. Only when it is still again do the pieces fall into place and she stares at him as he stands there, the wings unfurl and then curl against his back again.
In this peculiar stillness, her heart continues to beat something frantic, startled. Such a stark contrast to the whimsy she wears so well as she studies him now. “No,” she answers plainly, “I don’t think I’m quite sure of anything anymore.”
Her expression softens as she moves toward him then, eliminating the space he’d wedged between them in the chaos. She touches her cool mouth to his furrowed brow. “Are you in pain?” she asks.
i’m lost in the light, i pray for the night
To take me, to take you, too
