"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
I can see through you, see your true colors Cause inside you're ugly, you're ugly like me
He had not seen her since he had shed his fur for scales and landed with a heavy splash in the churning dark waters of the sea. It was hard to tell if one had been avoiding the other since that encounter and perhaps he did justify his reasoning of not seeking her out behind a myriad of excuses. Political trips, the never-ending rivalry with Cheri, the relationship between he and his Seneschal which had quickly blurred the lines from their professional relationship into something else.…Something more.
However it is shame and fear that share the cold space with his shriveled heart and that is why he truly avoids Revelrie since that storm on the cliff. At first he hadn’t even been sure she had lived, that she hadn’t plummeted with him into the dark recesses of the ocean. Part of him had wondered with dread and guilt if perhaps he had done something to her, if the serpent had taken her for itself. He had prowled the rocky shore after, looking for signs of death or evidence of her passing. It was only when he caught a fresh whiff of her scent amongst the tall Pampas grasses that he breathed a little easier. That he allowed some of that guilt to fade.
She was as elusive as ever but the signs of her remained if one knew where to look.
As summer fades and the days grow colder, he finds himself alone more often. Aela had started to distance herself from him, coy as ever, focused only on business instead of pleasure. Of course this confused the young immortal who did not understand the importance of the seasons. The fae that had looked after him had never gone into depths about sex education, perhaps figuring he knew enough. He did not. What he knew went as far as what Aela had allowed him. There had been another when the golden mare had started to withdraw, a mare who he hadn’t even caught the name of, that he had turned to in rather a fit of spite and loneliness after a particularly nasty run-in with Cheri. There had never been any set “rules” between him and Aela, no definition of what exactly they had become. Regardless, he hadn’t liked the feeling of a one night stand and the pressing emotions it left and so he simply waited. Waited for Aela to set her sights back on him.
But he thought often of the smoky mare and her gold markings. The brightness in her eyes and the way she had pressed a kiss to the corner of his lips before diving like a madwoman off the cliff with lightning flashed around her. It is the middle of autumn when the skies cloud over again with gray and rain drizzles in the late afternoon as he finds a familiar place on that same cliff and watches the storm breaking on the horizon. He watches and he waits. Waits to see if perhaps today he might finally be able to see a ghost.
They had both leapt and fallen into different hellscapes. Him to the bottom of the ocean all armored in soft scales and writhing muscle beneath, a prisoner to a creature he had not known lived inside him. Her to the shallows as wings had erupted from pewter shoulders to keep her from being crushed against the rocks. They had both made their way to shores, wet and exhausted, Reverie dragging sodden wings that kept her from plummeting but had also tried to drown her. But it had been different shores that they found themselves on, opposite sides of the same cliff with only roiling water between that she was too exhausted to try and brave to find him.
She had stayed long after the storm passed and the sun set, long after constellations climbed into a sky that matched the markings on her delicate face. She had stayed and hoped and cried and wondered if her recklessness had cost a stranger his life.
But maybe he had never jumped at all.
She had gone first, after all, so she wouldn’t have seen if he made the leap too.
Eventually she had caught sight of him, though it was entire weeks after they had met and lost each other. She had almost gone to him too, but something, the kiss, held her back. She hadn’t forgotten the one she had pressed to the corner of a mouth so impossibly soft it might be velvet, hadn’t forgotten the way he had turned into her to kiss her back so lightly. There was nothing romantic in it, nothing of the fire she thought passion was supposed to have, but it was nice and it left her curiously wanting to try it again.
But those were feelings that scared her.
It was fall now, and with the days growing shorter and mildly cooler, she found herself with the faint stirrings of boredom blooming inside her chest. She hadn’t seen Obscene in a long while now, and though that was alright, she did miss him. It was an odd kind of realization, one that made her eyes a shade of blue like shy morning skies, made the line of her mouth something soft and unsure. She spent entire afternoons among the ocean of wildflowers, lying beneath the quiet sun and wondering why. Why him, why he had let her kiss him, where she had even gotten the idea to kiss him first. It is an easier daydream to slip into, these idle wonderings about a beautiful, arrogant stranger that often leave her smiling with quiet amusement - easier than the pain of thinking about her mother, her losses, this immovable ache inside her chest.
But maybe she wonders too much or for too long, because she finds herself on a path she hadn’t travelled in so many weeks, the one that guides her to that place overlooking the ocean below. She knows that it is because she wants to see him again, remembers how he had told her it was one of his favorite places to wait for the storms to come. But she pretends it is because of the storm she knows brews along the horizon. She can smell the rain and hear the distant rumbles.
He is there too, and it makes something warm in her chest, a kind of pleasure she cannot name or does not wish to. “I thought I told you this place was mine.” She says by way of greeting, though there is no venom in the secret way she half smiles and comes to stand beside him. Her eyes wander his face, but it is so brief and then she is looking out across the water to the flashes of light along the grey horizon, ignoring the way she hadn’t lingered too long on his lips, remembering. “Well I didn’t die.” She says, and then she does steal a glance at him, searching for something in his expression to tell her if she needs to put up walls, to protect this heart that wants to know him. “You must be terribly disappointed.”
There is a light behind her eyes now, some kind of quiet, unspoken joy that fills her like sunshine as she returns her gaze to the clouds. It is something soft and muted, a warmth like morning sunshine half-hidden by the haze of creeping fog. But for a moment it is there and it truly is just for him, because of him, because it is nice to have a friend. Then the wind catches beneath her wings and she lets them lift a little, allows the dark feathers to rustle and reveal the flashes of gold hidden underneath, the currents of static lightning that leap from one feather to the next. She wants to say something about them, explain how they had erupted from her shoulders mere seconds before she struck the water. But when she glances back at his face again she isn’t sure he even wants to know. So instead she says, “Did you jump too?”
REVELRIE
it feels like falling, it feels like rain, like losing my balance again and again
I can see through you, see your true colors Cause inside you're ugly, you're ugly like me
When she finally comes up the path, he is careful to keep his red gaze to the sea so she cannot sense the moment of reassurance he has that it's not been her actual ghost he's glimpsed these past months. He hides the small smile he gives himself for guessing correctly that she wouldn’t be able to resist the pull of the weather either. “I believe I corrected you last time but I’m happy to do so again.” He drawls in his lazy indifferent way before finally looking at her. It’s impossible to miss the new feathery appendages that lay across her backside and it is a wicked curl of amusement that momentarily softens the hard lines of his face. She had tricked him and he is delighted as only a Fae could be.
“No, you didn’t.” He observes with that smug smirk that pulls at the soft corners of his lips and twists them into something villainous, that wickedness in his eyes that hide his relief. Glittering rubies in dark sockets linger on the crackling lines along the outer ridges of her feathers. “You must be terribly disappointed.” He simply grins at her because the only thing he can say is no and even that simple word would leave him feeling more vulnerable then he would like. No, he’s not disappointed that she had managed to live. That she had pulled wings out of thin air and let him plummet to an almost certain death below.
He remembers the snake and his grin fades slightly as he turns to watch the lighting cracking in the far distance, as if calling in solidarity to the light that dances along Revelrie's feathery appendages. Out of the corner of his eye he can see her watching too and he steals that moment from her, that moment meant for him, when he finds the softness in her eyes and a joy that hadn’t been there before. It was nice to have a friend like her and he would die before he ever admitted such a thing. He would find a way to set the snake within him on the throat of whoever might foolishly mention that it touched him somewhere in that coldness inside him. That he cared about her, just a little.
She unfurls her wings and he is drawn to look at them again as she asks if he had jumped too. And it is with pure mockery that he acts as if he is thinking as the red of his eyes glitter dangerously at her. “Hmm.. Let me see. You know I think I did.” His voice is sarcastic in all the right places as he tears his gaze from her and that smirk falls back into place. He stares out past the place they had jumped and remembers. “Luckily we both had tricks up our sleeve.” He says, amused and assuming that she had (unfortunately) witnessed the thing he had become on his flight down to the sea. Perhaps she had stayed up there, had simply flown in a circle and landed back on the cliff without him. Taking her favorite place back and outwitting the prankster in one fell swoop and was here now to tease him for his stupidity. Once more he feels that thrill of delight run along his spine and it registers in the crook of his mouth.
On the subject of their insane plummet from the cliff, he snorts softly, still in disbelief that they had done something so insane. “What fools we are.” He says quietly to himself and then laughs because if he said it then it must be true.
“Happy to do so again.” She says, repeats, and her dark, delicate mouth is the shape of mischief as she lets her gaze flit over the indifference of his expression. “Happy, hmm.” She turns her face to him more fully now, and there is a quiet kind of light trapped in the backs of those blue gemstone eyes that makes them flash in some shining, faceted way. “I’d have to see it to believe it, I think.” But there is nothing of that glacial coldness in her from their first meeting, nothing of the sharp edges and careful barbs. In fact, for a moment the only thing that fills her immediate thoughts is a sudden curiosity at what happiness would look like on her companion. Almost certainly alien - he is too rigidly beautiful, the lazy sharpness of a predator who perhaps doesn’t realize exactly what they are. Except that there is something inside her chest stubbornly reminding her of the wildling who had leapt from a cliff beside her - into the ocean, into a storm, into absolute uncertainty.
“Did you like it?” She wonders, and the suddenness of her question, of the change in conversation leaves her slate grey and shining gold face bare and vulnerable for a moment. “The jump, I mean.” For a moment she feels young again. She feels like innocence and naivety, like wild earnestness and unbroken trust. She thinks about the moment she jumped and the way it felt not like falling but like flying, the way she had felt free for the first time in so long that she had not immediately recognized the feeling. But she also thinks of the moment that flying had become falling and she had reached out in the tumultuous storm-dark for someone to help, to catch her. Had she reached for him? For the magic of the Pampas, of her mother? Or had she reached inside herself and found these wings so soft and gossamer, dark like storm clouds and gilded beneath in the metallic gold of lightning.
She had felt joy, complete and unmatchable, and then the emptiness of its absence as joy became fear and faith was replaced with rational thought.
Three seconds that had felt like an eternity as she realized the only thing she faced was a meaningless death.
“I’m glad you were there with me.” She says, and her face is a beautiful frown, her brows a furrowed line of delicate uncertainty. “You let me be the storm.” Wild and unpredictable, violent in temper, beautiful, maybe. “I think I needed that. Needed to let it out, maybe?” She shakes her head and her gaze drifts from his face again back out to the storm along the horizon.
Her thoughts are a tangle that pull her from him, thoughts that explode from her like dandelion fluff to disappear in a thousand different directions, stolen away by the storm gale. It is the sound of his laugh that draws her back in, the shape of the words he says so quietly. She shouldn’t have heard them, shouldn’t have noticed them in her drifting thoughts, but there is a gravity in him that keeps her tethered. She isn’t wise enough to be afraid of that. “Better to be fools together.” She tells him, and there is a firmness in her voice as her gaze settles against his, a collision of red and blue, of fire and glaciers. A smile slips across her serious mouth, a light in the backs of those sapphire eyes that glow with the same feeling of late summer nights, of stargazing instead of sleeping, of realizing the sun is the thing that is glowing beneath the horizon instead of the moon. It is simple exhilaration, easy joys, secrets.
“Then again,” her face is something unexpectedly radiant, like the way morning light is when it spills like pale, watery gold over sleeping flower petals, something almost tentative and yet entirely certain, something honest, “who watches someone jump off a cliff and thinks, hmmm what a good idea!” Amusement dances across her curved mouth, and there is warmth in the way she watches him, gratitude. She thinks about moving closer, settling beside his shoulder where she can reach out and touch the gold stardust shining in his skin. Instead she quiets. Her smile, her eyes, the laughter in her face. She becomes something more gentle, something besides the wild girl he had found in a storm, fueled by the pain and fury of every regret living inside her chest. She becomes the clouds heavy with rain, pale and gray and drifting, still but for the promise of what is to come. It isn’t like sorrow, isn’t some new kind of pain. It isn’t fury or impatience, or even the counterbalance of relieved elation.
It is the doubt of asking a question she knows he will not answer directly, the desire that he will do it anyways. “Why didn’t you just leave me up there? What made you stay.”
REVELRIE
it feels like falling, it feels like rain, like losing my balance again and again
08-09-2021, 10:30 PM (This post was last modified: 08-10-2021, 12:55 AM by Obscene.)
I can see through you, see your true colors Cause inside you're ugly, you're ugly like me
He is savage gold and sharp edges, serpentine smiles and jagged uncut rubies.
She had cut herself against him just as surely as he had pricked his finger when he had ran it carelessly across her broken exterior. ”Did you like it?” She asks, and he is silent. A hint of darkness that follows the storm of thoughtfulness that crosses across a tide of red. Had he? There had been a moment in the falling, a wild unleashing of freedom in the release of knowing that he was no longer in control of anything at all. That nothing in that moment had ever mattered. Perhaps that’s what some might call the “thrill” of it all. “I don’t know.” He answers honestly enough, his tone low and brooding.
He thinks he had tried to reach for her once. He’s not sure why, if it was because he wanted to drag her down with him or try to break her fall. He might have remembered if it hadn't been for that endless hunger which consumed him from the inside out as he became something other then himself. If she had seen the serpent she seems strangely unfazed and he wonders if perhaps she hadn’t caught his fall from grace. Had somehow missed how he was casted from Eden and plunged below, how the ocean waves parted to swallow the snake back into the pits of hell where it belonged. He is lost in this remembrance, something shadowy flickering behind the endless sea of red.
Her voice breaks through the smoky fog, calling him back beside her as he is drawn to the uncertainty written across her pretty face. She was a storm, wasn’t she? Not like the ones he associates with Cheri… Revelrie is a different type of tempest. One he can never, would never, be able to fully understand. He is quiet in the wake of her musings, allowing them the space that they needed. Still she orbits around him, a star refusing to streak across the sky. Fools. Yes, they were both fools. Both who had carelessly plunged into a storm.. for what. To seek…what exactly? Behind the streaked sky and pelting rain, what exactly did they hope to find?
There is something in her gaze that reminds him of the way moonlight casts shadows on a summer starlit night. Of the first petals in the greeting of Spring. Something delicate, something fragile. She could be so easy to break but he finds he doesn’t want to. He wants to keep her pieced together, keep her from flipping herself off a cliff just in case her parachute failed to open. She is taunting him again and his predatory grin resurfaces as the Dark Fae becomes distracted by her humor. A wickedness in the curve of her mouth that he quickly matches with his own. “Who indeed?” He murmurs huskily, a flare of desire suddenly coursing through his veins. A want, a need, to be closer to her. A memory of Aela comes to him then (as well as the familiar ache that he’s come to accept with her absence) as the ghost of her kisses whisper along his skin. His crimson gaze lingers along the constellations blazed along her skull and wonders if she tastes of otherworldly delights too. Something delicate, something he has never tasted before.
Something shifts in the air, something changes in her demeanor and he watches her carefully, sensing something important was coming. He doesn’t answer her right away, studies the delicate intricacies of the patterns that make her everything she is, follows the gentle curves of her jaw that leads to that soft tempting smile. His gaze is not on her when he finally answers with raw and rare honesty. “I didn’t want you to die alone.” He had not doubted that he might live through the encounter. The ghostly remains of his mortality lingered just enough to give a jolt of fright when he had hurtled over the edge but there is a fearlessness that comes with immortality and he had never truly feared for his life. Not really.
He had cared though about her. Had cared if she had gone to meet her maker afraid and alone. It had mattered to him quite a lot. He didn’t know why. It just did. There is a sudden flash of uncertainty in his usual callous gaze, a young immortal out of his depth. He doesn’t like not feeling in control now that he was back on land with his hooves firmly planted to the ground. He needs to fix it, needs to center himself and he does so by suddenly closing the distance between them. His lips hover at the crook of her neck, as if inspecting her for wounds, but the truth is that he wants to know what it might feel like to make one so fearless as she tremble against him. “You play some dangerous games, Ghost.” He whispers in a smoky voice as his lips just barely graze the tip of her ear. He wants to do more, wants to see if she will taste of the salt of the sea (he highly suspects she will) but simply watches her carefully for the signs of her acceptance. That she wants this, that she would willingly jump into another storm, one that they had created together.
![[Image: Obscene-Pixel.png]](https://i.postimg.cc/fTkjKh9Q/Obscene-Pixel.png){kind=tracking}
