"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
The afternoon is growing late and this black mare is not looking forward to when night comes. While it had once been when she had come alive, once been when she had thrived and hunted, now she stumbles through the darkness - flinching away from the tiny lights that surround her. She does not recognize them as stars, she assumes they are souls - and even though there are only a few with her in the daylight hours she feels the weight of their presence all the same.
They are haunting her and she deserves it.
Although unskilled in conversation, she is looking for company in the meadow - looking for a distraction. She is discovering the uncomfortable weight of thoughts and though she has gotten a little bit better at being able to sort through them, being able to push aside some and focus on others, there is still a lifetime’s worth of skills she is catching up on. Talking to someone else gives her one single thing to think about, and while it’s not often pleasant it’s better than letting her thoughts swarm her. Better than watching the stars spin around her and better than thinking about how inanimate objects have the tendency to move around her.
When she first spots him, she thinks he is just a ghost. Somehow his soul has detached itself and is manifesting in solid form - a sign things are getting worse. She knows him immediately, as she knows the faces of all her victims. She remembers what it had been like to tear him apart.
Remembers how he had laughed.
Her stars move around her in their orbits as she looks at someone who she had thought was among the souls that were haunting her. How can he be here, walking around? Curiosity is not something that comes naturally to this mare but she finds her body moving forward - finds that she places her body in a position to be in his way so that she can tell him in her rough voice “You’re supposed to be dead.”
For the first time in perhaps his entire life, Cassian finds that his existence is not quite so meandering and unpurposed as it had once been. It is a strange feeling, to know that he had helped make something. To find happiness in such small, perfect faces. But he is happy. Delighted, really. He had always liked children a great deal, and now that they are his own, he finds he likes them a great deal more.
It almost helps him forget that if he hadn’t been quite so dogged in his determination to find Beryl again, he might never have known. But then, he’s always been particularly good at not dwelling on things that make him uncomfortable (wonder where he gets that from?). Still, if he weren’t convinced that she might try to eat his face again if he annoyed her too much, he’d still be there right now. In the interest of saving his own skin however, he had decided that leaving, at least long enough to tell someone (probably mom, because let’s be real, who else would he tell), would be the better part of valor.
As luck would have it, he finds himself in the meadow, moving rather slowly, lost in his own thoughts. He doesn’t notice the dark mare approaching him with curiosity and confusion written across her form until he speaks. When she does, he whips his head around to peer at her in surprise, features illuminated by the soft glow of the halo perched slightly askew above his ears.
He doesn’t recognize her of course, but then, last time they’d met she’d sported bony spines, a knife-like tail, and razor teeth inside an unnaturally elongated skull. So it should come as no surprise that confusion also weaves heavily across his brow as he stares at her, trying to place her. But Cassian, being Cassian, can’t seem to help the slightly cocky grin that begins to creep across his lips. “Am I?” he asks, his voice surprisingly chipper in the face of such a dark subject. His amused grin is almost apologetic now, in an unapologetically teasing way. “I’ve heard I have a bad habit of not doing what I’m supposed to.”
His smile needles the memory of his death further, almost even inspires a growl out of her. That had been her reaction last time, his laugh had fueled their frenzy as they had sought to stop it - to tear out his throat so the sound could cease. Now she stares at him in confusion, feeling detached from her violent memories but haunted by them all the same. The instincts no longer exist in her, the ones that tell her to hunt and kill whoever she can get her teeth into, she is just left with the memories.
“I remember what your heart tasted like.” She tells him in a low accusatory voice, but the blame is not directed at him - it is focused inwards at herself. The guilt that haunts her does not ease up in the presence of someone she thought was dead - the gentle movement of the stars around her is her reminder of the souls that she had helped to take. That even if he survived, there are others. There will always be others and she can never be free of them.
Her black eyes are narrowed in her confusion as she stands there, trying to remember how to string together the right syllables to form an apology. As if an apology could fix anything. Instead, she thinks of her mother and how there had been two of them together that day as there always had been. A matching set until the eclipse came, until she had changed.
So a warning comes out instead of that apology. “The other will try to find you if she catches your scent.” Although this mare does not feel that all-consuming anger anymore, she can remember the bitter taste of it in her mouth. She knows that the monster that was her dam would not stop until she killed him again and again and again if she needed to.
It’s not often that Cassian has felt true fear in his life. The first had been when his twin had been ripped apart before his very eyes by some strange magic. He had, ever the fool, rushed into to try to help despite his spectacular lack of any true abilities. And he had been ripped apart too for his efforts. That was the first time he had discovered their mutual ability to come back from the dead. As children, but alive nevertheless.
The second time was when they had found him and torn him apart. He hadn’t really known he would come back again, but there he had been, hours or days later (hard to say for sure), a child in the carnage they had left behind.
It takes him a moment to realize what she is implying when she says she remembers what his heart had tasted like. Of all the strangest things, something Reave had said to him when he’d visited Nerine trying to find Beryl comes rushing to the fore of his memories. The odd comment he’d made about him being tasty. Suddenly it makes perfect sense.
He blinks at her, unable to stop the shiver that races down his spine. But Cassian, doing now as he had then, cannot help but make a joke of it, though his grin is a bit strained now. “I hope you enjoyed it.”
He’s not quite sure how she is standing before him as a woman rather than a monster. Nor is he entirely sure he wants to know. He also isn’t certain she wouldn’t suddenly change and try to eat him again. But he remembers quite clearly how well running had worked out for him last time. He’s not certain if it’s even possible to die with dignity, but he’d at least try this time if he had to.
When her warning comes however, his confusion is compounded rather than relieved. It seems odd that someone who had once killed him with such glee would now warn him instead. He stares at her for a moment, not quite sure how he is supposed to respond. Finally he asks, “Why would you warn me about her?”
There is enough common sense in this still-learning mind that she does not tell him that she had, in fact, enjoyed it. That it wasn’t often her mother, the other, allowed her to take the heart for herself and that it had been a special pleasure - an honour - whenever it happened. A sign that she had done something right in the hunt.
These thoughts rise up and they twist her stomach. The stars around her seem to grow more excited in their orbits and Nostromo feels their mocking, believes that they are entertained by the distress that rolls through her.
His confusion over her warning is understandable, though she grieves for it too - uncomfortable with the knowledge that she is not someone to be trusted because she does not deserve to be trusted. Certainly not by him.
The answer to his question comes easily though, one of the truths she knows for certain. “I do not want it to happen again.” This mare has learned a lot since having her mind unlocked but the name for some emotions elude her. She does not know that it is guilt that plagues her, for example. Does not know that is why she finds it hard to breathe, or why she flinches when she catches sight of the starry souls that orbit her. The feeling is there, thick and all-consuming, but just as she could not figure out the right syllables to string together an apology, she does not know the easiest way to explain to answer his question.
But she wants to answer him, so she tries to get as close to describing the feeling inside of her as she can. “I am… I do not like that it happened the first time.” Her dark gaze doesn't stray from his face, so desperately full of hope that these words make sense. Though she knows better than to hope that they will absolve her of what she's done, regardless of whether he is alive or not.
If he were a better kind of horse, he might have noticed her distress already. Might have quit the topic they found themselves on and saved her from her misery. But he is not. Even now, when he finally notices her discomfort, he doesn’t interrupt to say any of the number of things he might to release her from having to explain. Instead, he finds himself curious how such a transformation had come about.
If he had been a worse kind of horse, he would have found it so easy to blame her. He likely wouldn’t even have been wrong to do so. But if ever there was a single virtue Cassian could be said to possess, it would be forgiveness. It is a thing he does easily and without thought, like breathing. Even in light of the pain and terror he had experienced at her teeth, he can’t seem to find it in himself to hold it against her. Not now, when her regret is so clear.
He is uncharacteristically quiet as he watches her, features nearly unreadable. The lights scattered around her disarmingly normal frame flicker and tumble in time with some impetus he can’t quite discern, distracting him even as she flinches from them.
He’s not entirely sure he has the words to adequately respond to her confessions however. He has never been a wordsmith, and now less so than usual. “That’s… reassuring.” Even to him, the words sound inadequate. With a faintly sheepish grin, he continues, “If it’s all the same to you, I’m not sure I’d want to... repeat the experience.” He pauses then, grin slipping from his mouth as his brow furrows. “But, what changed? I mean, you were,” he gestures vaguely at her, haloed head tipping, ”very different looking. And… well… which one were you?” He laughs abruptly then, shaking his head. “Not that that part matters too much I suppose.”
07-15-2021, 02:23 PM (This post was last modified: 07-15-2021, 02:24 PM by Nostromo.)
This black mare has not yet learned some of the more subtle arts of conversation so she takes words at their face value. When the stallion tells her that it was reassuring to know she did not want his death to happen again, that she had not liked that it had happened, she believes him and nods once in understanding. It is good that she was able to reassure him - though she feels no true relief from the horrible feelings weighing her down.
“Something in the darkness. We were fighting a shadow beast and it…” She shakes her head, unable to accurately describe what had happened in the woods. How one moment she had been her past self, filled with nothing but rage and the joy of a fight along two of her kin - the honour of fighting with two queens while she was less than they were - and then she had been as she is now. A soft-skinned mare filled with fear, knowing only that she needed to get away before she became the next meal.
So she simply tells him. “It changed me.”
And then, though he had said it didn’t matter, she tries to answer his question - which one she had been. “My head was smooth, with no crown. I was the smaller.”
After a pause, where her dark eyes remain fixed on him, it's her turn to ask something - a frown on her expression as she does “How did you... come back?” She almost says survive but she knows he hadn't. She knows they had been efficient as they always are - and yet he was alive before her now.
Despite everything - the turbulent history they share, the memories of sharp teeth tearing his own flesh apart - Cassian finds himself curious. Not only curious but almost sympathetic, in a way. No, not sympathetic, really. But he finds that he rather likes her. Without her accordion mouth and alien skin, she is almost familiar. Like they might have found their way to being friends if their past lives had not entwined as they had.
He listens to her story though, fueled by that curiosity. Nods his understanding. The darkness had been a terrible thing, the shadowy beasts that lurked within even more so. Somehow, miraculously, Cassian had avoided the worst of them. But at the end, he too had come out changed, if only slightly. Before the darkness, he had been almost as normal a horse as a horse could be. After the darkness however, he had emerged sporting the slightly crooked halo that even now crowns his dark ears.
Not a change like hers, but certainly enough.
A smile flickers at the corners of his lips as he quips, “Would it be awful of me to say I’m glad you changed?” He’s not sure if she is ready for his teasing yet, but he can’t seem to help himself.
He nods again when she describes herself, remembering almost too vividly. He has no easy or ready response this time. He’s not even sure why he’d asked. Knowing which one she’d been would change nothing. But when she frowns at him, question hovering in the air between them, Cassian tips his head, his smile widening until a laugh manages to escape his throat. She had just managed to find the one thing that had made him only slightly different from other perfectly normal, perfectly mortal horses.
“I can’t really die,” he replies with a faint shrug, as though it were the most normal thing in the world. As though the one thing he’d inherited from the father he’d never met were seen every day, rather than in only him and his siblings. And perhaps some other siblings out there he’d never met. Who knows what his father got up to in his spare time. “If I do, I come back,” he continues with another laugh. “At least, I always have so far.”
She doesn’t know what it’s like to be teased - this is the first time it’s ever happened. She shakes her head in answer though - because no, it is not awful of him to be glad. She had moments where she was too, and they had been coming a little more frequently. It is very easy to miss what she was because there had been a bliss in being unknowing, unthinking. She had just followed her mother and their master wherever she was bid to go, feasting on whoever they caught or were told to chase.
There are so many thoughts now, so many memories that drag her down, it would be a relief to escape them.
But she is glad, sometimes. There is a freedom in what she’s become, even if it means being haunted.
Her frown doesn’t clear until he laughs and then she feels like she should smile so she does. “Oh. That’s good.” Hopefully, he will always come back. If it should ever happen again. If her mother finds him. Her scattered thoughts focus on the topic of death and her voice is thoughtful when she continues. “I almost died, I think. When I changed I was injured… but an angel saved me.” Her black eyes flick upwards to his crooked halo though she knows it wasn’t him. It is a comforting sight for her all the same.
Though he cannot understand what it is like to suddenly become one thing after spending one’s entire life as another, he can understand what it is to feel apart from everything. It’s strange to think being normal is actually to be the odd one out, but here we are. He has spent his life in the shadow of power. Spent his life seeing the undeniable truth of his own vulnerability in the face of those far stronger than him.
Perhaps that is why he resorts so often to teasing. To laughter. Or perhaps he is merely a fool. Hard to say.
His grin widens in response to the smile that appears on her. He cannot help but be delighted, knowing he had put it there. Cassian does not have much to his name, but he has that at least. His interest is piqued when she mentions an angel however. Head tilting, he eyes her almost thoughtfully before replying, “You know, my mom’s an angel.” His grin slips into something wry, brown eyes twinkling. “Hard as it is to believe I might be related to one.” With a chuckle, he adds almost as an afterthought, “Wouldn’t it be funny if it was actually my mom you met?”
It’s a rhetorical question of course. Who could have ever imagined it might actually be true?
Now that they have managed to fumble past their first awkward reintroduction, Cassian finds himself wildly curious about this mare who wasn’t always a mare. He undoubtedly should keep his questions to himself, but true to form, he finds one spilling from his lips anyway. “So do you like being less, uh… monstrous?”
