"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
Help me out before I drown Save me now before I give up
His new heart flutters with uncertainty, a wild thing that beats a quicker rhythm as his anxiety begins to rise. Of course there is hope that stirs in its confines now, something that he only managed to snatch in small handfuls before it bounced off the glass shell that kept so much out previously. Now he can feel it, a bright ball of light, that seems more powerful then the anxiety. He had never thought he would be able to feel his heart stir for another again, had never thought it possible to rid himself of the one made of crystal. If that was possible, then maybe this too was possible.
She is so eager and it is hard to not ride the wave of her enthusiasm. “Ok.” He finally says, still hesitant. Still nervous. It couldn’t be too bad could it? “But if something starts to go wrong, it stops.” He says firmly, the gold flecks of his eye bright as he hardens his resolve. The bear within him shares his uncertainty but seems to grumble it’s consent all the same. He’s not sure what this will feel like, what it might unearth. He had lived with his ghosts and demons for so long, so very very long, that he doesn’t know who or what he would be without them.
Perhaps that terrifies him more than the trauma he holds close to his heart.
Who was he really beneath the darkness?
Taking a steady breath and closing his eye, he gestures to her with his muzzle to get on with it. “Better do it now before I change my mind.”
Cheri may have grown up from her childish behaviors, but she still clung to that desperate belief as the years dragged by. A late bloom herself, she always wondered when her time would come: would there ever be a moment all her own? A power she could wield that had the ability to affect others the way her siblings always seemed to do?
In time, maybe. In the present, she had the capability to change one horse’s life and she was determined to help Ledger at a pace that suited him best. His acceptance of her offer was only met with a quiet smile, and then Cheri carefully, deliberately extended her black nose toward the broad angle of his pale golden forehead once he’d closed his eyes.
This interaction … It reminded her of a similar occurrence years ago when she’d been a filly. She remembered wandering into Tephra on purpose during the eclipse, hellbent on practicing her craft even when the circumstances of survival were so risky a thing to tempt by toying around with fate. Leaving her herd had been a deliberately stupid thing to do, but it had led her to meeting a rather curious creature along the way, and she remembered the manticore in the dark - Sorren - with a grin.
Her nose made contact. Instead of a sparking light, her healing came to life more like a soothing wave. It had warmth to it, mentally and physically felt by the afflicted (She’d been told), and she pushed the small wave very carefully and very softly into the spirit of her patient before withdrawing again. Targaryen had usually been the recipient of this “revival” healing, and he liked to tell her it reminded him of waking after a restful, deep sleep. She hoped that Ledger might feel similarly.
But the truth of it for her was a much more different feeling. Cheri had depleted an incredibly small amount of mana in the exchange, not trying to exhaust herself. For larger acts of healing she might feel anything ranging from a headache to an entire depletion of her own energy, and when she’d first discovered the ability by saving Targaryen’s life it’d nearly given her a blackout. Each time, she also felt something reflected back.
A darkness. It’d taken her years to realize that the color she associated that feeling with was something that had no physical shape at all, but to her patients it was very real and incredibly damaging depending on the size and depth. Her dam Amarine had been most knowledgeable about the matter when Cheri presented her the problem, and had originally given her daughter an idea that soon became a close study. The horses she worked on … each of them had something they were harboring, be it loss or misfortune, and Cheri had always wondered if she could bend her powers to healing those as well as the physical injuries that ailed them.
If she could, what a marvelous discovery it would be. To help not only the body but the soul, and by effect restoring a horse to the best of themselves through her care. It was a refreshing hope to bolster.
But what she felt reflected back at her in Ledger was something Cheri wasn’t exactly sure he could’ve prepared her for, even with his careful warning. The young healer sighed after the contact was broken and waited with baited breath for her ward’s response, troubled deeply by the darkness she’d felt just under the surface. Ledger was permeated by it: there was no gentle way to put it. His trauma’s were some of the deepest and most heavy she’d ever felt, and they’d grown inside of him after so many years of repression.
“How’d that feel?” Cheri suppressed the urge to shudder, knowing good and well that she would need ample time to think over what she’d felt and how best to approach Ledger’s long-rooted pain.
Help me out before I drown Save me now before I give up
It is with reluctance acceptance that he lowers his head for her to press her dark muzzle in the space between his eye and where the other should be. He closes the one he has left as the warmth of her touch begins to spread and sink somewhere deeper within him. It is not unpleasant, not at first. It is much like slipping into the warmth of the hot springs, the steaming waters relaxing muscles and enveloping you in a soothing watery blanket. He finds himself unwinding beneath her magic as the wave washes over him and there’s a sense of calm as he exhales slowly.
A calm before a storm.
Her magic merely brushes over those broken and shattered pieces of him before dipping just a little lower to discover the darkness that seems to cling to every shadowy corner, including the place where the bear is attached to him. It is an infestation, deeply rooted, and only expanding and multiplying with each year that it had gone unchecked. Each new traumatic event had fed it and given it room to grow and manifest into something he couldn’t fully comprehend. His hooves shift into paws uncontrollably, a reflexive response, as claws sink into the earth beneath them, churning the sand in agitation. He can feel the way that darkness shies from her light and the memories of past events seem to swarm through his mind unbidden. His jaw spasms as he grits his teeth in response to the familiar onslaught on his mind, as he feels every second from every moment.
It is not painful in a physical sense but it does cause this new heart of his to ache and quicken. This heart had not experienced the trauma firsthand but it clearly feels its residue. There is a moment when he starts to recall not knowing what was real and what was not as if he was visibly living it all over again and then she pulls away and the images behind his eye start to fade.
Where Targaryen felt restful, he feels immensely tired.
He’s surprisingly relaxed, his body still loose from the warmth of her healing touch despite the way his pulse thrums with anxious intensity. “Interesting.” He admits, as he opens his dark eye to look at her but there is still a tightness in his voice that tells that it hadn’t been entirely pleasant on his end. However he has grown use to replaying these scenes, ever so vivid, awake or asleep and is more interested in what she had learned with her touch. “So what’s the verdict doctor? Am I a hopeless case?” He tries to tease but already resigned to the fate of being unfixable.
