"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
It all happens so fast. One minute his forehead is pressed to her shimmering neck. Seconds later, not even before he can realize that Oceane had not recoiled from his touch, everything around them is spiraling, shifting, twisting. The canyon walls crumble and the earth beneath them shifts as Loess morphs, becomes something else. He knows where he is immediately, the black sands of the beach crunching under their hooves.
No, no this can’t be.
There stands Raaquel on it’s bone littered shore. A flaxen chestnut colt at her side (whole and innocent), a dark assassin walking towards them. He knows what’s going to happen next and even then he cannot pull his gaze away. Watches the blood spray from her head, hears the cry that dies in her throat. It’s still just as gruesome and heart wrenching as the day it had actually happened. No matter how many times this seems to happen, getting sucked into his memories either by his own volition or a Dark Gods whims, it never gets easier. Never stops making his glass heart feel a little heavier.
The memories flicker and play all around them. Kidnapped to the Dale. His lonely life and knowing family was right there but he could not reach them. The day he finally told Magnus who he was. There’s the brief moment of happiness, one of the rare ones, that peek out from the darker visions. It shows the Gates and it’s magic tree and then that tree is burning but he… He is trapped in the Mountain. In a cell.
His first encounter as one of Carnage’s playthings plays out like a movie. The taunting, the torture, the pain. He watches his fight with the bear, as it swipes out his eye. He sees himself die and then revived, as the Dark God breathes life back into his broken lungs. He sees himself kill his father. Sees his return back to the Gates, smoke and ash all around this broken stallion, bleeding and branded. The sudden rage of a bear losing control for the first time, the despair and anguish at what he had become, had been cursed with.
It shows the girl of glass and what could have been. The wish twists and bends, weaving the story of his life before them, a constant reel of film. It shows Ellyse, his first meeting with her and how illicit it had become within hours. It shows Dahmer and the gnawing feeling he had always had in the pit of his stomach. It shows a bear on the beach, happy and nervous finding out he was to be a father for the first time. It shows a one eyed man curled within the white wings of his lover, it shows the lover’s betrayal.
They are back beneath the Mountain. They are back in the cell. He cannot look away, not once, as his self awareness and sanity begin to fade before him. The way his heart visibly breaks. It shows the world that had been created for him, of all the what-if’s that could have been his life. It shows a mad bear on the dark beaches of Tephra, fighting with Ellyse, attacking Smoak, clawing at the X branded across his chest. It shows the moment he knew he was no longer fully himself, his heart stolen. Glass encased in the hollow wasteland of his breast.
He can barely breathe but Oceane stands by his side, her amber eyes wide and frightened. His face is contorted, hollow and haunted as much as he’s scared. His shoulder presses back into Oceane’s, an anchor in this hell that writhes around them.
And then it is over.
It is over and they stand, gasping and panting, hungover from the wild ride of his wish. He is trembling, his coat as dark as a tarnished penny from the sweat soaking through his skin. His stomach still churns as he finally looks to her. A huff of a laugh. “Well.. be careful what you wish for?” he manages weakly in his rough voice. There’s no humor in his tone though, his facial expression still haunted. His dark eye hollow and empty, gold flecks dim. The glass of his heart aching at its crack.
Black sands come first. They would be beautiful, so beautiful, were it not for the deeply foreboding shadow that lingers on her periphery. Closer and closer it moves, swooping in so dangerously quick on the charming scene of mother and son. Oceane's heart breaks, a gasp caught in her throat, as the woman's life is taken and the boy - young Ledger, so sweetly innocent - is left motherless.
Loess' Queen leans further into her companion with each scene they are herded into, less out of fear than sheer agony for he life he has been forced to live. The gruesome removal of his eye at the claws of a bear draws anger through her winged frame and she does her best not to hiss through clenched teeth and a scowl, worried that even in this living memory the dark god Carnage will feel her disdain for the things he has done to the man beside her. That she, too, will fall victim to his torture.
There are happy moments. Fleeting, barely there and easy to miss if she had not glued her gaze to the worlds in which they found themselves transported, but happy. A winged woman - beautiful, sensual. Oceane averts her eyes when their touches become frantic and full of longing.
She feels his joy at the prospect of being a father.
But this happiness, too, is short-lived, and soon she is taunting Ledger as she stands beside a different obsidian man. Heartbreak and torture after heartbreak and torture. Oceane is overtaken by a cold wave of sweat as they watch bear-Ledger attack a yearling, the son of his former lover and the obsidian man. She watches him bend and then break beneath the weight of his trauma, at his begging for the pain to end.
At the insertion of his glass heart.
After what feels like a full lifetime, they are returned to Loess, wish fulfilled. Oceane is damp with sweat as she leans into Ledger's shoulder and her heart rushes hot in her chest, a rapid staccato that refuses to slow. She feels his singular eye connect with her but the opalescent woman isn't able to return the gaze immediately, instead pressing her cheek tighter to his neck for another moment in an attempt to center herself.
"Let's not do that again," she finally whispers into the warmth of him before pulling away to allow for a better angle to see him with her warm amber eyes. Her heart has shattered for him, but there is nothing akin to pity that lingers in her gaze. There is only kindness, and a confident resolve. "I was right to trust you," she tells him with a small smile, "Your desire to be a good man, after all of that..." Oceane's words trail off as she gives herself a moment to feel something close to pride at her ability to see beyond what others may not have in his past. There is one thing, though, that eats at her:
"I didn't know you had the magic to... to show me that."
Help me out before I drown Save me now before I give up
The only thing that makes all this slightly bearable is her pressed against his neck and his pulse would quicken beneath his sweat soaked skin from her touch as much as it would beat frantically from what they had just gone through... If it could only beat at all. He cannot see her, she is so firmly tucked to him right beneath his blind side, but he feels her breath on his neck and can’t help the physical response it draws from him. His head lowers slightly as his neck angles closer to her, to keep her shielded against him. The bear and he are one in this moment, wanting nothing more than to protect her from the magic that still lingers in the air. When had this happened? When had that moment changed within him, when he suddenly cared (deeply) about what would happen to her? The realization that there was nothing he wouldn’t do for the vibrant Queen of Loess makes him grunt softly with the sudden ache of pain that stirs in his crystal heart.
She looks up to him and he takes a step back, not just from the sudden ache beneath the branded X or the sweep of desire that suddenly runs hot in his blood and feeds off the blast of adrenaline that had spiked throughout their terrible trip into the past. It’s the lack of pity in her eyes and the words that follow and it is his turn to look away, unable to bring himself to see what she sees. “I am not a good man Oceane. You saw… You saw everything.” His voice is steady but his words are broken things he lays before her. He cannot look her in the eye. “You’ve seen the worst in me.” There are unspoken words that are left here too. That he could easily become that shattered beast again, that the fits of madness were always lurking right on the edge of his peripheral view. Waiting.
She speaks of magic and now rough laughter escapes him with a shake of his head, forcing himself to turn the molten flecks of his eye to her brilliant amber ones. “I don’t have magic… Just a bear and a heart of glass. ” For a moment he looks confused, had Carnage left something else to fester deep within his skin? Had he just not realized it till now? It seemed like another curse, this ability to look at his past, and if he had it he didn’t want it. The bear was more than enough. He doesn’t even realize that he’s spoken about the other affliction out loud, a defect that he had never openly talked about or admitted to since the day it had been placed in his chest. With the exception of Carnage (he remembers in his madness his plea on the Mountain) it had been a dirty little secret that he carried alone.
He doesn’t want to think back on everything he had seen, everything that had been exposed to her. Her. Guiltily he realizes that he has been selfish, wrapped up in his own pain, and the look he gives her is a worried one, concern that lingers in his dark gaze. “Are you alright? Are you hurt?” There doesn't seem to be anything physically marked on her skin but he trusts magic as much as he trusts Carnage, zero percent.
Oh, how she aches at the pain she can see in him. He has refused to meet her gaze before, but not in this way. And when he claims to be a bad man, Oceane can't help how aggressively she shakes her opaline head at the untruth. "Ledger..." she starts to find her words but they trail into silence at his confession. You've seen the worst in me. She's suddenly at a loss, unsure of what to do despite the way her own heart screams to tell him that to see the man he is now, after all of what he has experienced, has only helped to blossom something stronger than friendship in the depths of her.
She opts instead to mention the magic. How else could she have been spirited away at Ledger's side, to live what he had lived? He says he is nothing but a bear and a glass heart, but never before had the Loessian Queen experienced such vivid illusionism. He has returned his gaze to her now, at least, and so she proffers a smile instead of disputing with him further. It maters not, regardless, how they had gotten there.
The one-eyed man turns the attention skillfully away from himself and to her, suddenly fretful of her own wellbeing. Oceane smiles, sheepish and warm, as she offers him a reassuring nod. "I'm fine," she answers warmly and her smile widens as he asks a second time, "I'm okay." Her molten gold eyes watch the flaxen for a moment before she decides in one swift moment that she can sacrifice decorum for today. "I just..."
She fumbles over the words, snorts quietly in frustration. "Can I just..." And before she loses her nerve, she presses her neck up against his. Her eyes close tentatively, but slowly she relaxes into the warmth of him. She finds there is nothing to say, no words that come to her easily, as she nestled against Ledger's scarred frame.
After a time, Oceane finds that a question has begun to gnaw at her. Gently, at first, but then more insistent. As if there is something within her that needs to know. "Do you wish you could have your real heart back?"
Help me out before I drown Save me now before I give up
There’s relief that whatever they had been through had left her unharmed. It’s not much but its something. The worry does not leave him though as she starts to speak and hesitates. She’s going to tell him to go, he thinks. She’s going to tell him to leave. No matter what she personally thought of him, if she even truly believed him a better man after all she had seen, she was still a Queen. Now she knew what he could become, what he could do. A threat, a risk. One not worth taking.
“It’s fine.” He starts as she stumbles. “I underst…” Then she is pressed against his neck and he freezes in the warmth of her contact. His words instantly die on his tongue as she folds into him, finding that somehow they fit perfectly against each other. She is slightly taller and to some stallions that might be off-putting, however he finds that he fits perfectly just beneath the crook of her neck and his muzzle comes to rest where her pulse flutters across her throat.
There is nothing but the soft sound of their breathing and the distant crash of waves as they both come to rest into each other, as they steady each other in the aftermath of a wish. It was worth it, to have her like this against him. Worth reliving the past over and over again if it meant she would do this every time. The realization of how badly he had wanted this resonates deep within him, a sudden weight thudding in his stomach. That sensation in the heart of crystal begins to ache with the longing to feel. To beat wildly for her, to bleed for her, to connect itself to hers.
He can’t remember what that felt like, love. If he had ever truly felt it before. Ever since the glass had been lodged in his chest he could feel some emotions. Anger, fear, pain, sadness, guilt. He could care but it always seemed to ache just a bit and that alien sensation would return, something cold yet warm. Something soft yet hard. It aches now, more so then it had before, with her pressed against him. Something else stirs in response deeper in his core, something more primitive that doesn’t necessarily need love to materialize.
She has lowered her head enough at this point that he can tuck her beneath him and he curls himself protectively around her (being careful of her wing from remembered experience), his muzzle buried into the thick lushness of her twilight mane as he breathes in all the aromas of purple that she carries. His good eye has closed as his breath lingers warm and featherlight against the skin beneath her mane. Nothing had ever felt more right but also felt so wrong. He has no heart to give her and the residual fear from relationships past are still a laceration across his mind. Yet he can’t pull away when they seem to melt into each other and the feel of her is too good, the scent of her is too much.
“Hmmm?” He mumbles into her, intoxicated by the moment. Then her question seems to solidify through his haze and he blinks back to life. He doesn’t recoil from her, doesn’t remove himself from their current entanglement. Instead his teeth find a small knot that’s managed to tangle in her violet hair and he absentmindedly works at it, as if they had been in this position a thousand times before. It’s an action meant to soothe him as much as it does her as he thinks of what she is asking him. What should be a clear answer is much more complex then she realizes.
While the glass heart was surely a curse, it had protected him (in a way) from feeling the pain and heartache that he had felt before. It numbed him to a point, kept him at arms length from anyone that could possibly hurt him again. At the same time, when he looks at her, he wonders if it could be different. If maybe… just maybe… Love could actually heal instead of harm.
“Of course I do.” He finally murmurs into the sensitive skin at the base of her mane. “But you saw Carnage take it. And the price he asked me to pay to get it back is too high.” His expression is troubled again but he finishes untangling the knot before gently, reluctantly, taking a step away from her. Just so he can find her bright honeyed gaze and once again that feeling deep in his center stirs. “The price is too high Oceane.” He searches her face, there was absolutely no way he would allow her to sacrifice herself or anyone else on his behalf. And if she was gone or heartless, then it would be pointless for him to get his back in the first place.
She’s the only one. He realizes and is startled by this notion as his eye widens slightly. If he tried to get his heart back, the only reason it would be worth it is if he can give it to her. Could he do it? Could he take someones heart if it meant being able to love her? Suddenly uncomfortable, he breaks her gaze and looks into an unrelenting sea beyond the canyon walls. He didn’t know where Oceane spent her personal time or who with. She was simply being kind, friendly, and he should not expect more than that. “Of course I wish I had my real heart back but I won’t hurt anyone to do it.” He finally manages as he slowly looks back to her, resolved to do better at not toeing that fine line between them.
Two years. Two years without the warmth of another in the middle of the night. Without a touch affectionate enough that it could make lightning dance across her opalescent skin. Without the small stolen glances throughout the day, when she'd wanted to concentrate on her duties but still couldn't get him from her head. Two years without Soran. And just the same as any loss, Oceane had forced herself to heal by throwing herself headlong into her obligations.
Until she had met Ledger, the Loessian Queen didn't realize just how much her body could yearn for the return of such affection. She melts into him now, her lanky frame pressed into his scarred one without reservation. He is warm, his strength comforting, but the absence of a heart to beat against her draws deep melancholy into the pit of her stomach.
She recalls her young adulthood and the two children who had been taken from her just after their births. She'd wished then to not have a heart. She'd wished for a swift death. But the King and his arithmancers had taken neither her heart nor her life, and though she had survived another handful of difficult, painful years with them, she had eventually found her way to freedom. Her affection for Castile and then for Soran had reminded her why she was thankful that neither of her wishes had come true. She had birthed Alcinder, and then Altum.
And for them her heart knows no bounds.
The thought of them reminds Oceane of the foals she had seen in the whirlwind of Ledger's memories. She clings to the flaxen man harder, her own empathy recreating the pain for a fleeting moment before her mind yearns to ask him the question. It's now that she murmurs it to him, fishing for a wish.
At first, Ledger doesn't answer her. But she waits patiently and allows herself to succumb to the simple pleasure of his soft maw at her mane, lipping at the tangles in the violet strands. She's nearly forgotten that she had even asked when finally he responds. The price is too high, Oceane. Her heart aches at the truth of it, but flutters at the way he whispers her name beneath his breath. She's suddenly frustrated at the whiplash of it all and very nearly pulls away from him when -
Of course I wish-
It's all she needs to hear. This time, Oceane recognizes the magic in her as it reaches for the man she is still curled against. She is confused and surprised, certainly, but she feels no fear as the entity within her gropes for Ledger's glass heart with its magic. It does not attempt to remove the thing, but instead transforms it. And where minutes before the cold crystal had sat now lives a new, beating heart. A second wish fulfilled, Oceane's magic recedes into her and she's struck with overwhelming fatigue.
"Ledger..." Her amber eyes flutter tiredly and her words grow faint as she leans into him for support. "The magic was from me, Ledger."
Help me out before I drown Save me now before I give up
”Wish”
His words die on his lips, unable to continue, as something takes hold of him. Something that infiltrates the layers of flesh, muscle, and bone as it reaches into him. Searches for something. He has never felt power like this before and he can feel Oceane’s essence in it, something gentle yet firm, that softens some of the sharp edges of this raw magic. Her compassion helps ease the pain of it but not completely.
It assaults him, this wish, as it storms into the cavern in his chest. It pries back the doors to gaze at that crystal heart that glistens just beyond. It suspends there, silent and empty. A vapid, heavy, cracked thing. He can’t stop the groan that escapes him when the wish doesn’t pause, grasping the hollow glass vessel that would be better off as a paper weight. He can still feel Oceane against him, supporting him as surely as he supports her as the power of her magic overtakes them both.
Prodding fingers graze the edges of the crack, that familiar ache returning as his eyelid flutters and closes, his breath coming fast and hot against her neck as he grits his teeth against the overwhelming feeling that follows. It hesitates for just a moment, testing the crevice made from his heartbreak. He breathes in, he breathes out, and the magic plunges through the fracture as glass begins to melt away. It’s a pain like raw white-hot fire and he stumbles away from her if only to spare her from falling beneath him. He nearly goes to his knees but somehow manages to stay standing, perhaps some strength from the bear who also roars in agony for they have always shared the same heart. As veins and arteries reattach themselves and the shattered thing that his heart turns into something new that had been hidden just beneath a glass surface.
The crystal drips clear puddles as it melts away and disappears completely.
He inhales sharply.
His heart beats for the first time.
The first time in years.
His breath comes ragged as a pulse once again thrums through his body, a wild rhythmic beat that tries to remember what sound it had made before. His head hangs low and heavy as he tries to shake the fragments of pain that lingers like an invisible ghost. She is there, beautiful twilight magical thing that she was, tired and leaning into him. Mumbling his name and he instinctively wraps himself around her on unsteady legs, his neck wrapping around hers as they stabilize each other. “I know.” He pants, his voice hoarser then normal. It takes him a moment to feel it, the way his heart beats against her chest. The way it misses a beat when he breathes her in, that strange sensation he had never been able to figure out now morphing into something more familiar. Something he had forgotten.
“It’s back.” He can’t believe it and it shows in his voice, something like shock and bewilderment, happiness and disbelief, peppered with guilt and a thousand other emotions as his heart starts to feel again. ” I… I can feel it.” He slowly removes himself from their entanglement, the gold flecks of his eye bright as he arches his neck and tilts his head to look down. The glowing X still remained, branded in the once burnt flesh. It was no longer a warning sign but now a mark... A clue that lead to treasure beneath the chestnut map of his pelt. His muzzle brushes over the raised skin there, feeling the organ that beats steadily beneath. He slowly looks to her, looks at this brilliant angel of a woman, and the moment he meets that warm honey gaze (like coming home after being lost at sea) he becomes her man (her bear), through and through. For as long as the heart continued to beat in his chest, he was completely and utterly hers in whatever way she would have him.
