[open] If it was up to me I would have figured you out

[Ledger]

Bound for trouble from the start
I've been walking through this old world in the dark

It’s been a lifetime. At least it feels like a lifetime but Beqanna was always funny about the limits of time. Fluid, fickle. Most of those years had been lost to madness, fueled by hate. Hate of her, hate of him, but most of all the hate of himself. The self-loathing, the anxiety, the mental breakdown. His captivity to the red eyed ghost. He had almost broken completely then. Almost turned into the thing he feared most. A killer, soulless. It would have been so simple, with that heavy glass heart that still resides in his chest. That still refuses to thump and bleed normally. But the red eyed ghost had one day, vanished. And with the last desperate grabs at his sanity and freedom on his lips, he vanished too.

And now. Now he stands on Tephra’s soil once more. The last time he had been here was after Carnage had spit them all out on the black salt stained sand, the heat from the mountain behind them glowing as fiercely as the anger that consumed him. His cracked mind, his cracked heart, his broken body, unstable shifting as he finally let the rage win. Dahmer and Ellyse. His children. Innocent, like he had been at their age when the world crashed around him. It still hurts to think about her, to think of everything that’s happened between them. Everything that’s happened since the day he was born. To realize just how badly he failed to protect his family from the very thing he had grown up to live with. He had stood there, tearing at the X branded forever over his heart. Spilt his blood and flesh on the ground before her, gave up everything that he was. Accepted that he was worthless.

But today, today he tastes the ocean on his tongue instead of sooted ash. The breeze that plays across the warm waters gently plays against his flaxen mane and tickling the empty socket that once held a gold flecked eye, fanning him as surely as the flames of his heartache that turned him into a monster that day. There are some things that can never be forgiven. There are some wounds that can never be fully healed. He had been a shell of himself, had fallen into a hole that he never thought he would crawl out of. Fully ready to accept death, just waiting for it. Wishing for it. But one day the ghosts that haunted him stopped being so unkind. The sun would start to fade and he could suddenly appreciate the beauty in the colors of twilight, the way the last rays sparkled through leaf and limbs. Slowly, one small step at a time, he started to pull himself out of the hole without realizing it. Not every day was a victory but he could acknowledge the small accomplishments when he left his sleeping place for the day. When he forced himself to eat. To bathe. He couldn’t remember the first time he laughed again, what caused it, but he can remember the realization of feeling a sense of joy again. The way his throat cracked with raspy notes of delight. It was thrilling. It scared him. To feel joy, to feel anything, was a chance to get hurt again. To experience those sleepless nights, curled into himself to self soothe, unable to escape his memories or turn off his brain. Where anxiety and depression and most of all his loneliness would defeat him each and every time. Remembering when for a moment he almost let love back in and how his heart had cracked and the physical pain brought him to his knees. What had happened with Ellyse had been a catalyst, the toxic relationship that consumed him to the point where he couldn’t think logically anymore. But it hadn’t all been on her. There was years of trauma that he had pushed down into himself, further and further within, thinking he had it handled. It had only been delaying the inevitable. It had been throwing a bandaid on an amputation. It hadn’t all been her fault.

What Ledger didn’t realize was that he was stronger then he ever gave himself credit for. He had lived through death, abduction, emotional loss and physical pain, heartache that seemed to never end. And yet… and yet… he was still here. Still standing. Still breathing. Still alive. It had been work. Hard and painful. Something he would have to work on every day. He had done it, himself. Loving yourself is hard and it was something he hadn't completely mastered. Sometimes the hard days still got the best of him. The madness would creep in. The moments of insecurity, the self loathing, the doubt in himself. It was part of him now. But as he stands here in Tephra, the gold flecks in his eyes clear, he is accepting. Accepting of everything that he is. Broken but not beaten. Monster and Lover. Bear and Horse. PTSD. Anxiety. Magnus’s son. A heart of glass that longed to beat again. A father who hoped to one day make things right. Hope. HOPE. When was the last time he had ever felt that?

A glance across the land, realizing with a jolt that he has watched his homeland literally change before his eyes numerous times. Heaven’s Gate, Tephra. The land had moved and shifted over time and yet there was always a pull that brought him home. Home? He still wasn’t certain of that. That he would ever actually have a place he truly considered home. For a moment he closes his good eye and breathes in deep. The warm salty air filling his lungs and refreshing him. A release. A goodbye to the warrior he had once loved and letting her go once and for all. There is nothing left for him here.

Purple shadows dance across the meadow as he arrives, caressing the trees and taunting him with promises of sleep and missing starlight. It seems it’s always dark now. Only a sliver of light ever seems to stretch across the horizon but he has spent so long in the darkness of himself that he no longer fears the shadows that blanket around him and smother the world. He knows tonight will be another restless one, he doubts he will be getting more then a few hours of snatched slumber. His mind is too active, all sparks and cylinders, unable to stop thinking of memories despite his goodbye. A low branch from a nearby oak grazes against his branded side, his blind side, and he can’t help but flinch. It had been a long time since he had been touched by anyone and physical contact made him wary now. He can feel the bear within him rumble, as if checking to make sure he was ok as it gauged his fight or flight response. Once he had fought against his shifting abilities, had been afraid of the creature he could turn into. Now the polar bear within him was his one true and trusted companion. They were one. They were the same. Who knew that when Carnage had taken everything from him, he had also provided him a source of comfort. He allows the bear to peek but only enough to shift his eye that allows him to see better in this new dark Beqanna.

Backing up so the tree that startled him is now behind him, trying to calm the feeling in his stomach, his anxiety peeking as he stands for the first time in god knows how long near the company of others. Perhaps being here is a mistake, coming back was a mistake. Perhaps it was too soon. The familiar threads of doubt weave into his chest and twirl around the shiny opaque heaviness he calls a heart. Another deep breath as he turns his muzzle towards the sky. Tonight he will try to count the stars through the inky clouds. He will breathe. He will seek this new path, one filled with light. With hope.

Ledger

[Hourglass]

— and how long must I stay, will I lay by your side
just to say that I'm yours and you'll never be mine —

She thinks the dark has changed her, but she can’t be sure.

Her chest aches and throbs, and there is a sorrow that has settled into her fragile bones. It flashes with pain when she thinks of Aureus and all that has transpired between them, and sometimes  it twinges with such ferocity that it wakes her on the rare occasion she is asleep. It stings with the cracks that have spider-webbed across it, like a flame against her ribcage—a glass heart for a glass chest, a breakable thing enclosed inside another breakable thing.

But this is not what she blames the dark for.
She has always known she was made to be broken, has always known it was a foolish hope to think she was meant to withstand the harshness of a world made to shatter her.

There are visions, flashes of places she has never personally been to, faces she does not know that are so clear she knows she cannot possibly be dreaming. They come to her even when she is wide awake, though in this endless dark it had been easy to convince herself that perhaps she was dreaming. It was easier to accept she was dreaming than to admit that she was seeing things she should not be seeing, but the images came with such clarity how could she ignore them?

She misses the sunlight, and secretly she has begun to hope that when it returned it would chase away the visions, too.

The meadow was quiet, as it often was these days. The monsters that lurked and hunted were unavoidable, and many spoke in hushed tones to avoid detection. Hourglass had started to not care. Perhaps it was reckless, but she was tired of the dark and the fear—another reason to be afraid, another reason to wonder if this would be the way the world would end her. When she steps through the swaying grasses it is not with bravery or arrogance, but instead a muted indifference. She looks without seeing, she hears without registering the sounds; she drifts, aimless. Sweeping her lilac-colored eyes across the landscape, she makes out at the shadowed silhouette of someone nearby. Her heart jumps, foolish as always, and hope alights in her veins just enough to chase most of the sorrow away. The prospect of new friendships always brightened her, even if she had already learned the hard way that friendships could be broken—like glass.

“They’re too hard to see,” she says in a voice that even when spoken so softly still has a lilt to it, almost lyrical in the way it slips from her glass mouth. She follows his gaze up to the sky, to where the stars have remained shrouded by dark and shadow for countless days. “I know, because I’ve tried,” she continues with a small laugh, having now slowly closed the space between them, though she watches him carefully. He seemed guarded and unsure, and maybe someone with better judgement would have seen the space he left between himself and everyone else and thought perhaps it was there for a reason. But she is still too young and naive in so many ways, and she sees the emptiness and thinks only that she should try to fill it. “My name is Hourglass.”

hourglass

— with this love like a hole,
swallow my soul —

@[Ledger]

[Ledger]

Help me out before I drown
Save me now before I give up

Shameful. Shameful that he flinches as if being struck across the face when her voice breaks through the shadow haze to reach him. The stranger had caught him for the briefest moment he had been unguarded, focused with a brow furrowed at the utter blackness above him. It was dangerous to do so, in these times, in this place, already at a disadvantage with the empty socket where his right eye should have been, the claw marks long healed into pink puckered scars. Even with the bear always at his beck and whim to call and protect, all it would take is a second to change his life dramatically forever. A lesson he had learned one too many times.

The wariness settles back on his features as she comes closer, his nostrils flaring as he catches her scent. A whiff of something that makes him think of lilacs, it seems to soothe something deep within him. A mixture of oak moss and beeswax like when one blows hot glass. Glass. She’s closer to him now and in the faint light he can make out her translucent skin. Sees through her. It doesn’t register that there are no tattered wings, the lighter shade of coloring which makes this girl of glass more translucent than the one he knew before. It’s not her but his mind immediately jumps to conclusions. His ears ring with her screams as she is pushed carelessly off the cliff. His chest constricts at the sound of her shattering to literal pieces on the hard rocks below. The crack in his already fragile replacement of a heart threatens to spread as he gasps, ”Adaline….” His rough voice cracking with misuse and dismay.

She’s looking up where his gaze once wandered and now… now he can see the differences. How a galaxy seems to twirl and dance across her chest. The lighter tone of her glassy skin. The purple hues to her iris’s. And now she’s looking at him and he can’t help but see pieces of her staring back at him. (I never should have let you go. I never should have left you. I never deserved your friendship. I should have… I should have… I should have… I should have been better. I should have protected you. Stayed with you. I should have loved you better.) It’s still vivid in his memory, of Adaline trying to comfort him when Carnage spit him out the first time. Unstable and scared of his own power. But she, fragile as she had been, wasn’t afraid of him and looked at him without fear. Once he had viewed her with pity and ignorant disgust for something he had not understood. He wish he had told her, how brave he found her. How she was stronger and more fearless than anyone he had ever met. Of course, in the alternate world that Carnage provided the second time he captured him, he told Adaline every day. All of it. And loved her completely the way she deserved as she loved him back in ways he never deserved. The lines between reality and madness start to blur again and he shakes his head violently, trying to reel himself back in and anchor himself to what was real. For once he’s glad for the oppressing darkness that surrounds them, it makes it harder to see the ghosts that he’s sure now linger just behind her shoulder.

“My name is Hourglass.” She must find him a fool or worse, with the way he’s been staring at her, mumbling names of those long gone or perhaps never existed in the first place. ”I’m Ledger.” He finally breathes, a tight smile on his lips and hesitance flickering in the gold flecks of his dark eye. He reaches for fragments of conversation, knowing he had placed himself in this situation by coming here but still struggling to remember what it was like to just be… normal. Anxiety flutters around the crystal organ that lays subdued and heavy beneath the X branded on his breast. Tucking his muzzle towards it, shifting slightly to dispel the weight of restlessness encircling him. ”How long…” He pauses, tries again. ”How long has it been like this Hourglass?” Trying to use her name to remind himself that it’s not her. Can’t be her. Will never be her.

Ledger
I just want to treat you better

@[Hourglass]