"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
05-10-2021, 03:06 AM (This post was last modified: 05-10-2021, 03:08 AM by Islas.)
You think I'll be the Dark Sky so you can be the Star? I'll Swallow you Whole.
She was afraid to trust the return of peace and a predictable rhythm to her life. She did not trust the sun when it rose in the sky, and she did not trust the stars as they blinked innocently in the velvet-dark of the night as if they had never been gone. She did not trust Tiercel’s presence even when he was warm and breathing next to her, because she did not understand how to cope with this newfound fear of losing things that she loves when she has already seen them be taken from her.
She had known that to live a mortal existence like this meant that nothing was permanent; things down here died so easily, and while she had always noticed this, she had never had the capacity to care.
She can’t figure out if it’s better or worse now that she can.
She can’t decide if having it all is worth the risk of one day losing it, again, because she is so sure that the next time Tiercel is gone he will not be coming back, and she doesn’t know what happens when an earth-bound star dies of heartache.
These are the thoughts that keep her awake tonight, her eyes open and staring into the moonlight that she can see illuminating the entrance of the cave. Even though they no longer needed to hide the cave felt like a sanctuary, especially in these frigid winter months, and even though Kamaria likely didn’t want to, Islas managed to convince her to spend most of her nights here. Islas was not afraid of the night, or the dark, but she was afraid of losing her daughter, though the rational part of her mind knows she cannot keep her close forever.
Having Tiercel and Kamaria both here was usually enough to abate her worries, but tonight they have taken on a life of their own. The racing thoughts, compounded by the restlessness of the twins that now seemed to constantly fight for room inside of her (she hadn’t been surprised at all to learn she was pregnant again, just as she is sure it hadn’t surprised Tiercel—she isn’t always the best at voicing how she feels, but she is good at showing it), agitated her enough to inspire her to leave the warmth of the cave.
She stirs from where she had been curled against Tiercel’s side, doing her best not to wake him. It didn’t seem that he slept often either, and she can feel the faintest threads of what she has come to know as guilt tighten in her chest. She does not entirely know all of the things that haunt him, or what he went through in the underworld, but she understands enough. Enough that she does not like to be away from him, even if it is only to step outside the cave for only a moment, but another kick against her ribs—hard enough to make her suck in a quiet, sharp breath—reminds her that she will disturb him more by constantly fidgeting alongside him.
The great expanse of the starlit sky is what greets her when she steps out, and though she is mere steps from the mouth of the cave it is enough for the tension to slowly ebb from her with the sigh that she exhales. The sky is surprisingly clear for winter, alight with stars and moonlight, and the flowers spun of starlight nestled in the long strands of her mane seem to shimmer brighter in response.
A sound from behind her causes her head to turn, and when she sees Tiercel she offers him a small, apologetic smile. “I tried not to wake you,” she murmurs into his neck once he is close enough, before letting her pale nose trail down to his chest where she breathes another sigh across his skin. “I couldn’t sleep.”
05-19-2021, 04:35 PM (This post was last modified: 05-19-2021, 04:37 PM by Tiercel.)
stifled the choice and the air in my lungs;
better not to breathe than to breathe a lie
He sleeps fitfully, haunted by the effects of the eclipse. It’s been hard for him to explain the Underworld to Islas; every time he begins to work up the courage to tell her, flashbacks and a choked throat convince him to stay silent. The memories are too painful, and Tiercel has begun to think that they are better left unspoken, where only he can feel them. He’s seen the flashes of guilt in her dark eyes (guilt that is entirely hers, not coming from him or their gifted daughter), and he knows the retelling of his experience will only make her feel it more.
So Tiercel spends each day keeping Islas close, praying over Kamaria’s wanderlust mind, and dreading the moment the sky begins to darken. The sunlight gives him opportunities to forget, to lose himself in his role as a father so the memories of the Underworld become hazy. He can focus on the tasks of protecting his wife and their growing children and monitoring Kamaria from a distance. He even feels comfortable wandering off alone for a few hours at a time, walking through the familiar winding canyons and thinking harder about what family has come to mean to him. But when night draws close and the sun begins to sleep, the ghosts of the Underworld start to chase his mind.
The pair have both become fidgeters, but for different reasons. Islas shifts her position alongside him when the twins begin to bicker from within, when their weight becomes a little too much to bear, when he thinks her mind might be racing with thoughts of worry. Tiercel feels himself shiver and sweat when the rolling eyes of the pegasus flash, when he can feel his heart get pulled from his chest with a sucking sound, when the thousand-eyed guardian levitates over his slowly-dying body and asks if he wants pain (the answer is always no, and he always gets the pain).
It’s another restless night when he feels Islas pull away from him. Tiercel doesn’t recognize her disappearance until a bloodcurdling scream jolts him into consciousness. His eyes catch Kamaria’s growing body in the corner, the stones on her face glittering from the soft light cast by her stars. The dun confirms she’s sound asleep when his daughter snores, and he moves toward the mouth of the cave quietly.
Islas’s touch is warm where the winter night is bitter, and Tiercel relaxes into it. “You didn’t,” he admits quietly. The bend of her head into his chest gives him a clear view of her body, and his cerulean eyes trace her familiar curves. He feels a rush of affection at the way her belly swells with the twins, and he wraps this emotion around the pair of them. His navy mouth follows the slope of her neck, and he places a handful of kisses against her withers. “I can’t shake my nightmares.” He’s certain she’s felt him twisting at night, and he’s even woken himself up with a true yell of his own. “I can’t let our family down again, not like I did with Kamaria.”
You think I'll be the Dark Sky so you can be the Star? I'll Swallow you Whole.
She had never known what it meant to want to be with someone. To crave having someone alongside of her, to want to feel the warmth of his body flush against hers, to understand what it means to be able to be herself without the worry that she was failing at simply existing. It was something she had wondered about, but only in the very basic way that she used to wonder about everything else. She did not understand why everyone else seemed to need it—why they could not be alone, why they broke and they died and they bled for someone else. It was an unfathomable thing to her, this idea that you could care for someone else, and that they would care back.
She understands it now, to an extent. She cares for Tiercel and Kamaria in a way that is unmatched, and she understands what it means to be willing to die for someone—and to want to live for someone.
The captive star in her heart was so much quieter these days, leaving room for other things.
She relaxes into him as his lips follow the path down her neck, curling closer at the feel of his mouth on her withers. The same guilt from before stirs in her chest when he mentions his nightmares, and she does not move from where she rests—purposely unable to meet his gaze—when she says softly, “I know. I feel you.”
And she is helpless to stop them, just as she had been helpless to save him.
It is only the last part of his statement that causes her to draw back, but just enough to find the familiar blue of his eyes, her own eyes dark and reflecting the sorrow and sympathy tightening her chest, though her tone is firm. “Tiercel, you didn’t let anyone down. Especially not me, or Kamaria.” She had never faulted him for being gone; she had missed him, but she had never blamed him. She knows, though, that she can tell him that over and over and it still would not convince him to forgive himself; she only hopes that perhaps being here for the twins from the beginning will allow him to start.
Pressing her lips gently to the corner of his mouth, she follows by saying quietly, “You can tell me about them, you know. You don’t have to bear this by yourself.” After all, wasn’t that how they had started? With he, teeming with too many emotions, and her, entirely stark and empty?
Running her pale nose the length of his neck, beneath the thick mess of his mane and against the warm skin beneath it, she adds earnestly, “Tell me how to help you.”
Tiercel can’t deny that she’s been a comfort to him since he’s returned from the Underworld. It’s true that he lasted through those dark days purely because of her; he had gotten his energy from the memory of her face and smell, and her voice was constantly in his mind whether in wakefulness or death. Yet having her with him now, real and warm and swollen with their children — the relief of her reality doesn’t compare. And she centers him, pulling him back from the haunted edges of his mind that shimmer with white light and blood-stained walls.
With his mouth touching the slope of her withers and her neck bending closer to him, Tiercel can hear the screaming fade away. It echoes off the caverns around them, bouncing through the empty spaces where red dust blows quietly in the nighttime breeze, and then disappears where it will hide until the next nightmare shakes him awake. He tries to lean into Islas’s words, focusing his attention on the sympathy in her eyes and the firm tone of her voice. Although she tells him that he isn’t disappointing anyone, he can’t shake the feeling that he’s still guilty.
He’s spent a lot of time in his life feeling guilty. It’s a cancerous emotion, one that eats away at his insides and consumes his thoughts until there’s nothing left. Tiercel had shaken his guilt once before; it wasn’t until he’d seen Gale’s adult face, unblemished by the volcano’s flames, that he’d felt free from the criminality he felt. He still thinks it’s his fault Gale had supposedly died that day — after all, if he wasn’t caught in the brambles, then their mother could have spotted his young body flying over the volcano’s mouth and swept him away before it was too late.
And now it absorbs him again, making him blind to the ways Islas (and even Kamaria, however begrudgingly she does so) opens herself to him.
His heartbeat increases even thinking about telling her about the Underworld, and the pulsing lights up the ground below him in a soft red shade. “It’s so hard to explain.” How could Tiercel untangle the memories so they formed a cohesive explanation? Once the novelty wore off (once they realized the guardian would punish them for saying their own names or crying out to their loved ones), the pain made each period of torture blur into the others. It became one long chain of waking and feeling agony in countless ways and then dying.
He thinks it would be easy to say even this, to tell her that his memories bleed together and make it difficult to understand, but he chokes on his words. Islas’s touch soothes him like it always does, and his ears tip forward to catch her plea. “You’re doing a great job at helping me already. You bring me peace.” Tiercel can feel his pulse slow, and the glow’s rhythm decreases with it, visible evidence of the way her touch calms him. “I just need some more time. I… I experienced death so m-many times, it’s hard to really explain.” It’s the most he’s ever said about it, and it’s just about all he can get out now.
The dun shifts his weight, turning so he can glide his mouth down toward his wife’s swollen sides. “Enough about me. How are you feeling?” Tiercel knows her first pregnancy had been difficult with the stars gone and the eclipse heavy around them, so he hopes this one has been better, even if there’s double the children to grow.
You think I'll be the Dark Sky so you can be the Star? I'll Swallow you Whole.
She does not often think of all the ways she still fails at being everything Tiercel would need, mostly because it is not something with the ability to cross her mind.
Learning how to feel the most basic of emotions had taken years, and it was only recently that she had developed what she thought of as real emotions, even if they were limited to just Tiercel and their daughter. She could look at him and feel the warmth of love flood her veins and had learned to recognize the way being alongside him felt like home, just as she could look at Kamaria and feel her heart squeeze with pride. But things like insecurity, or the ability to get lost in the tangled web of her own mind until self-doubt has twisted reality into something unrecognizable, was not something she was familiar with.
It’s why when doubt first begins to spread in her chest she does not fully see it for what it is and does not understand why it begins to unfurl like shadows when he tells her his nightmares are too difficult to explain.
She does not realize that that gnawing at the far reaches of her mind is her wondering if he would be more open if she were normal—if she knew all the things to say and all the ways to act if she knew how to be softer.
The doubt is only there briefly, blown away like smoke on a strong breeze, and though the remnants of it might linger, it is easy enough for her to ignore.
“I understand,” she says with a gentle touch to his glowing chest, trailing her nose mindlessly back to trace the shadow of a rib in its fading light. And she does understand, she thinks. She is not the best at explaining things either, which is why she so rarely does. It is a miracle Tiercel ever understands anything from her, truthfully, though she supposes his affinity for emotions comes into play. “I would take it all away from you if I could,” she tells him once she has turned to level her dark eyes with his again, a heavy sincerity weighing down the usual silvery, if somewhat monotonous, tone of her voice. And she would if only there were a way; if she could carry all of his pain in her own heart, or if she could trap his nightmares into starlight and send them away into the sky, she would.
She would let it rain nightmare-infused stardust onto some other land if it meant bringing him peace, and his touch against her side is the only thing that drags her from getting lost in crafting a plan to do just that.
“Somehow things are both easier and harder than last time,” she tells him with a small smile, tilting her head just enough to take in the large curve of her barrel. The world was normal, and she did not feel the crushing exhaustion that the eclipse had caused, but carrying twins was still no easy task. It was a strange thing, to do something so entirely mortal—to carry children and to birth them, to raise them without them ever knowing what it means to live in the galaxies above them. To have one child was a situation she had never envisioned herself being in, but to go through it all again—and with twins, no less—was even more surprising, yet she finds that she does not regret it in the least.
“I’m fine, though,” she reassures him, catching his eye with another faint smile. “Just restless.” She is certain that it won't be much longer, though she cannot ignore the faint pinpricks of anxiety at the thought of that. Kamaria had been born under unusual circumstances, and she can only assume that level of panic and adrenaline was not the norm. Leaning into him once more, with her pale shoulder resting against his and her nose tucked into his chest, she reveals quietly, “And I’m glad that you get to be here, this time.”
