"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
This dark is different from the dark he has always known. It is more than summoned shadows, more than the culmination of all the rot that lives inside his chest. More than wickedness, more than wrongness. At times he cannot tell if it is an evolution into something more or if it is a devolution, an unraveling of everything that he is into something less. Why else would dark seep from him like black fog, drifting from his skin like he is night bleeding away into night. Can he bleed like this forever? It is worse that he does not know what to wish for. He is not ready for death, and yet it does not feel as though he has any idea how to live.
Night drifts around him - a true night, the same that finds everyone when the sun slips beneath a waiting horizon. But it seems somehow nearer, the colors somehow more vivid where he walks. There are shimmers of dark indigo and even darker violet, a navy so deep it is almost indiscernible from the black night it clings to like a swirling iridescent sheen. There are colors where there should be only a lack, and yet when he turns to face them directly they reappear elsewhere, gauzy in his periphery. The stars are less shy though, reduced to a silver dust that flickers red and orange and gold at the edges. They drift about his ears and through the haze of his indistinct silhouette like they are welcome there.
They are not, but so far they do not seem to listen to him.
There is a quiet kind of frustration that sharpens in his eyes and draws lines of tension along his jaw that no one is near enough to see beneath the haze of black. When he glances behind himself he is unsurprised to find that path of lingering stardust in his wake, a midnight trail always pointing to where he’s gone. It has an ethereal kind of effect that often leaves him swearing beneath his breath for the way it makes strangers look at him with softer gazes than they ought to. It is dangerous to be beautiful when the dark inside is something far more vicious, more volatile.
In an instant he is gone, teleporting back the way he had come so quickly that he thinks he can see the after image of where he had stood a moment before. It is a smear of night darker than the rest and illuminated faintly with twinkling stars, and then he blinks and it is gone entirely, and he wonders if he had merely imagined it.
There is a sound somewhere to his left, and though his initial instinct is to ignore it entirely, there is a different kind of weight to the gaze he can feel settle on him. His wings lift and resettle, suddenly restless or perturbed, and for one second the burn scars along the arms of his wings are bared down to the glowing seam where an angel had healed them. He turns his head and those eyes are cold and hard, bitterness like a sneer on his mouth when he asks a question that should not sound so much like an accusation except that he had crafted it to be. “Stargazing?”
And then he finds a face in the dark, two golden eyes that are bright and beautiful in a way his have never been, surrounded by a face like molten silver ore and crowned with a single gold horn. She has the kind of ethereal beauty that he has never been impervious to, a kind of delicate radiance better left to the stars. His jaw clenches with a sudden distaste, a sudden disgust that is directed only inwards at the dark that had rushed up inside him so eagerly. He does not soften and his gaze does not seek her again, but the image of her quiet eyes still linger in his mind long after he’s turned away from her. “There are better views for that than this one.” There is no barb on his tongue now, just a heavy kind of quiet that settles over him while he thinks about that delicate starlight face.
Youth was beginning to bleed away from her the way that the darkness carved away the moon. It was a gradual process but one that she felt all the same—the knife’s edge of maturity beginning to peel away the childish layers to reveal the truth of her underneath. It chipped away the soft roundness of childhood. It lengthened her limbs and sharpened her cheekbones. It brought a somberness to her full mouth, a wonder that she kept alight in her slender chest—a deepening love for the muted hours of the night.
Her night, she had come to think of it.
A possessive thought softened only by her love of sharing it from afar.
It is a soft thought indeed tonight though, with the moon hanging high above her. The darkness has faded from her body entirely, the skin underneath once again glowing a pale, persistent silver. With it, she feels the pieces of herself beginning to fall back in place as though born anew. The change got worse, she thought, over time. With each new moon, she felt the rut of change becoming deeper and deeper. The waning moon brought with it a sadness, a loss that she felt more acutely—a more pointed sorrow.
But the counterpoint was a deep, abounding joy as the full moon hung above her.
She tips her horned head back, wings flaring slightly over her back, and then angles it toward the creature that approaches her. The words leave her. He is the night sky. The darkness that swallows the moon. The darkness that buoys it. He has no beginning. No end. And something within her chest rings in response.
The moonlight around her intensifies, washing down and spilling over itself. “I do not look at the stars,” she finally answers, unsure how to handle the sharpness in his voice and the accusation in his eyes. He is not as gentle of a night as she has known and she wonders how many layers of it have existed just outside of her. “I look at the moon,” she follows it up and wonders how she could possibly explain what it is like to look up and see yourself reflected back down. To know you’re separated from that which makes you whole. Would he know? Could he understand what it means to be a heart carved from the chest?
She flinches from the disgust on his face and draws her wings closer, feeling exposed.
“I like this view,” she says quietly, drawing her gaze from his face and focusing upward instead.
He had vowed not to look at her again, to instead let her feel the ire in his dark expression and allow her be pushed away by it like tides in reverse. Surely she would have no interest in staying when all he offered her were clipped words as cool as the frost on his feathers and a scowl that made his face disenchantingly dour. Only Ryatah had ever stayed long enough to find the seams in a mask that was not quite a mask, but also not entirely him. To find the cracks in his armor and witness the secrets that lay smothered beneath.
It is easy at first because although her voice is something delicate, something like starlight, he is well versed in knowing such things do not exist for him to taint with his darkness. But then in his periphery he can see that change overcome her, the subtle deepening of the moonlight he realizes does more than just pool and reflect from the silver of her skin. He turns to her again before he’s even made the decision to do so, and his deep gold eyes are something dark and searching. He ignores her words, and so the frown on his mouth has nothing to do with her answer but rather the realization that there is something in his gut that draws him to her like gravity.
When he takes a few steps closer he has forgotten his vow entirely, might’ve never remembered it at all if not for the way she flinches away from. He pauses, teeth grinding, and when his gaze returns to her face again his expression is hard and unfeeling. It is the mask he hides behind as though the way her wings tighten to her sides don’t make something inside him - whatever last ounce of good he possessed - roil in a disgust that tastes like bitter bile on his tongue. It is a desperate, basal kind of desire to be something more than the dark others recoil from.
He doesn’t move again, though the gravity of her is something that makes his bones ache, makes his soul burn cold inside his chest. She looks back up to the sky, and he swears that the moment her eyes reach the moon the glow spilling from her skin turns even more molten. Would it do the same if she looked at him like that, with something not unlike desire breaking apart in the gold of those angel eyes. “As do I.” He tells her, though his gaze never wanders further than her face, than the way she is the brightest heart of night. His utter opposite.
He reaches for her without meaning to - not physically, not with steady steps that close the distance between them or with the cool touch of his mouth against her glowing neck. He reaches for her with whatever this night is that lives inside him, with stars and dark and moonlight that is only a whisper of what she is. He reaches for her with the gravity she so carelessly, so unknowingly, has him tethered by. “Why do you look at the moon instead of the stars?” His voice is quiet but his eyes are burning bright, the gold almost completely overtaken by that thin ring of silver around the pupil. “Do you dislike the stars?”
