"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
08-26-2021, 04:40 PM (This post was last modified: 08-26-2021, 04:41 PM by revelrie.)
She had hidden herself from him the moment she was sure what their dalliance meant, that this fullness in her belly was more than the result of an unordinarily lush summer. She wasn’t sure if it was denial or cowardice, or if it was just the only way she knew how to deal with the turmoil of worry building like a tempest inside her chest, but she had never sought him out, never told him that he would be a father soon.
She is sure that she had meant to, had laid quiet beneath a trillion stars each night and thought of ways to tell him, but on the rare nights she had found the resolve to go to their place beneath the storms, he had not been there waiting. Of course he hadn’t, though. The only way in which she belonged to him was through the bonds of their home, through the Pampas themselves. This feeling inside her chest had been wholly one sided, this thing that was more than affection, more than curiosity, but not even half enough to be anything like love. She had allowed herself to be misled by her own naivety, by the thrill of a beautiful stranger who did not want her to face death alone, by his willingness to face her demons with her.
By their sameness and their differences.
By the pull of his gravity.
He felt like home, he felt like storms, he felt like a piece of her heart that she would never choose to surrender - even in his distant impermanence.
And she had meant to tell him about the life growing inside her belly, because a child is not something you hide from their father, just as fatherhood is not a choice she would ever rob Obscene of. But when pain finds her in the night she knows she waited too long to tell him, to find him, to give him this choice before he ever had to look into the face of his child and decide what it was he wanted.
(And it feels like a wonder now that she had ever doubted him at all, as she remembers his story of a boy left to fend for himself, a wild and feral thing without parents who loved him well enough. She knows, realizes, that their child would never know that kind of loneliness, that whether Obscene had expected this or not, he would adapt.)
There is only one place that she can think to check, only one place close enough for her to reach amidst growing contractions and this tempest raging beneath her skin. It is their place above the Pampas and beneath the indigo-black sky, their place where storms come in to kiss their faces and leave tangles in their hair. Their place in the inbetween. “Obscene?” She asks, and pain is a beast that mutes her voice to something soft, too harsh though to be a whisper. There is sweat on her neck and her shoulders, in the hollow of her trembling flank as another contraction stills her with a groan she muffles against the curve of her own dark chest. “Are you here?” She lifts her eyes to the dark to find him but it is a starless, empty kind of night.
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
It wasn’t that he hadn’t looked for her. He had in the beginning. There had been plenty of nights when his worries began to close in on him and he had found himself no longer looking for storms but looking for her. Each time she evades him, all he finds are traces of the ghost he had come to know. A ghost that flew into storms, that sighed beneath the thunder of his embrace, a ghost that had stolen a small part of him that he hadn’t known existed. He knew that he would not find her if she didn’t want to be found and as the days grew longer, as the issues arising around the Pampas began to unfold, he found himself looking for her less. Between the traveling, the conflict of the East, the uncertainty regarding the two mares who had firmly rooted themselves inside of him, and a growing Pampas…. It wasn’t that she was any less important than those things but time seemed to slip through his fingers and hold him hostage from that place on the cliffs.
At times he wonders if she had only been a dream, a figment of overindulgence, and then he will catch her scent on the wind, a reminder that all of it had been real.
They were two ships constantly passing in the night. For months they merely glided past, always just narrowly missing each other. Until tonight when fate twisted its hand and let them collide once more. Star-crossed lovers that had always been doomed from the start and yet every cloud has a silver lining. Every storm eventually ends and in the aftermath is a rebirth. Here is where theirs begin.
The night is dark and cold, unforgiving, when he finally finds a moment to himself and stands near the spot where they had once jumped. Fools, he had called them. One of the most honest assessments of himself he had ever had. He is scowling at the empty blackness of the sky, disappointed with the lack of moonlight, when he hears her voice. Instantly he knows that something is wrong as he turns and seeks her in the inky blackness, his red eyes catching a flash of her glowing tattoos. He can already smell the salt of her sweat (bringing back memories of the last time he had seen her) and he doesn’t hesitate to move closer to her as she emits a muffled noise.
“I’m here.” He confirms gruffly, not waiting for her consent as his muzzle finds her neck. She is trembling and he huffs in concern, a soft golden glow emitting from where he connects with her. There is no doubt that she is hurt in some way and for a moment he shows the signs of the leader he could be. The King behind the Prince. His muzzle glides down to her shoulder in a soothing motion as he tries to connect with whatever illness or injury that’s befallen her. He is lost in his self-loathing of not making it a point to find her sooner when he finds it.
He finds the source of her pain.
And he jerks his head back sharply as he stumbles slightly in his panic.
Aela had told him that autumn was a game of chance and he had guilty suspected that perhaps he would end up being punished for his wandering eye. When all remained quiet he had shaken the notion from his mind, living in blissful ignorance. As his crimson gaze darkens and his heart thunders in his chest (even the snake seems shaken and can’t get a foothold in this mess of feelings), he can’t help thinking yet again that maybe Cheri had always been right about him. As Revelrie groans and trembles, he can’t help but think that he is a monster after all. Look at what he had done. Look at what he had done to her.
He was no better than Offspring.
No better than either of his parents.
Despite the wild frenzy of his heart and the crushing weight of consequence, he reaches back out to her and lets his healing touch kiss her skin before delving beneath the surface. Trying to help ease some of her burden, of her pain. Pain that he had caused. It was one thing to slash at someone with words. But this… This had never been his intention. “I’m here.” He murmurs to her again, a grim determination hardening the features of his gilded face. He had jumped through a storm with her once, he would do so again. Except this time the storm is of his own making and there was no escaping it.
She is not ashamed of the relief that floods her chest like cool springwater at the sound of his gruff voice. “Good,” she says, and she’s reaching for him even as he comes close to search her damp skin with the dark of his muzzle, “then I’m not too late.” Her voice is already something weary and tired, something that is both soft and heavy as she falls quiet again because she had not realized until now how much she needed this closeness with him, this quiet contact. She is a whisper in sound and glance, in the way her own nose searches his skin, her lips the caress of starlight against his midnight black.
“It’s okay, I’m alright.” She whispers, and her eyes are twin pools of sapphire light, bottomless and clear and furrowed softly with pain she does her best to keep hidden from him. Except his movement stops with a suddenness that has her feeling regret - not for coming here, not for finding him. But for keeping this from him for so long, for not giving him any time to learn how to live with these new truths. When he jerks back from her, there is a split second where she wonders if he will leave, if he needs some time with this, needs all the time she robbed him of. But then he’s reaching for her again, and when those velvet midnight lips brush over the stormcloud grey of her skin, she knows only relief. “Thank you.” It is a murmur, a gasp, something ragged and mortal, something like the tattered wings of a wounded moth fluttering helplessly against his skin.
She cringes again, forgets to breathe, holds her breath until the sound is a whimper she pushes back down with a stubbornness that comes from the storms deep inside her. I’m here. He says, and her eyes fly to his face, landing against the dark like falling stars as she searches his face again for anything that will tell her what he’s thinking. If she’s hurt him. “I’m sorry, Obscene.” She says, and her voice is so soft like it hurts to speak, like this pain in her heart would rather she not say anything at all. “I didn’t mean to keep this secret for so long.”
She would’ve said more, explained that she didn’t know how to tell him something so big, something so infinitely important, but another contraction sends her reeling to her knees, to her side, groaning in the grass beneath a silent sky and her legs writhe against the pain.
It is hard for her to understand what happens next, hard for her to keep track of the minutes that shatter into seconds and fall away from her like stardust through a broken sky. There is pain, a kind that she is unfamiliar with, a kind that blinds her and leaves her digging long furrows of dirt with her hooves in the grass where she lay. There is sound, ragged and groaning, sound that she cannot shut out because it is her, because it is inside her head even when she closes her mouth and tries to lock this pain away somewhere deep inside.
And then there is relief.
It comes all at once, sudden and bright, like lungs that can expand fully. But she is still for a moment, exhausted and weary, unaware of the small, dark colt that now lays in the grass beside her. He is the same color as his father - the profound black of a pupil amidst a ring of color, the vastness of the space between stars. But there is gold on his legs and his face, gold etched over the tips of his ears and in the lines over his shoulders and down his spine - and buried amidst every spot of gold is a swirl of stars, an infinite tangle of constellations unique only to him. He is every perfect piece of both of them, and when Revelrie eases up onto her shoulder to see him, she is lost to the wonder of it. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything more perfect.” She whispers, and she cannot tear her eyes from this newborn’s face long enough to let Obscene see the love in her eyes for him too. It’s there though, like wordless gratitude for the way he stayed, for the way his healing had trickled in to gentle what it could.
She reaches for the boy, surprised that the instinct to care for him is something so strong inside her chest when she still feels so young herself. But that urge to draw him in and shield him gently from the coolness of the air with a single steel and gold wing is something she does not fight. She cleans his face and those tiny molten ears, cleans his neck and his body until the edges of his little downy hairs are soft and drying and trying to lift in the almost-breeze. She cannot get enough of the way he smells, the way he looks so much like both of them. They way he nuzzles into her warmth and bleats softly and she knows in an instant there is nothing she wouldn’t do to keep him safe. “What do you think of the name Obsidio?” She asks, and it is then that she finally looks up to search Obscene’s face, and there is nothing to shield him from the affection she thinks she’s hidden carefully out of sight. But it’s in the gentleness of those clear blue eyes, in the way they cannot help but trace over a face too beautiful to be real. “We’re starting to make a habit of jumping together into the unknown.”
She meant to smile, to reach down and touch the boy’s goosedown mane, but it is pain that flares in her eyes and in the hard line of her mouth, pain that flattens her to her side again with a groan she does not manage to smother. "Obscene -" It is his name that falls from her lips, his name, though when she speaks it it rings with the sameness of help.
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
No matter how much she tries to soothe him, he cannot be calmed. She tries to reassure him (even thanks him) and he grimaces but not because of her. No, it's because he doesn’t deserve her thank you’s. Not when she’s only in this position because of him. His need. His selfish desire to covet her when he was unable to give her anything more than lust. She searches his eyes and he wonders what she sees there. If his guilt is written all over his face. Her voice is soft but there is no mistaking the apology and he is quick to try and cut her off. “Don’t.” He says hoarsely, his word sharper than he had intended. She continues anyway and he would shake his head but he doesn’t want to remove the flow of healing that radiates from their connection. “You have nothing to apologize for.” He finally says through a clenched jaw, sounding angrier than he wanted but unable to hide the rolling waves of his emotion.
It’s not her that should be apologizing. It’s not her he is angry at.
There had been a mare once he had found in the forest, close to death after childbirth. He was still discovering his powers when he had brought her back from the brink, something that had taken all his energy and left him shaking afterwards. This is different, the child isn’t already here and her pain is his creation. This child is theirs. So it takes something else from him this time, more than the golden light that he emits when he touches her and tries to ease her contractions. The wild blue of her eyes becomes hazy the further it carries on and for a moment he wonders if he has enough power in him to keep her here if she starts to fade.
When she can no longer stand, he slowly falls with her. Doing his best to support her body so it doesn’t crash to the grass below. Never before has he felt so helpless, even more so than when he was merely mortal. All he can do is thrust that golden light beneath her skin when her eyes glaze over, when she kicks out in pain, when she groans with frustration.
And then something magical happens, a sort of magic he has never witnessed before.
Despite all the ugliness of childbirth, there is a rare and raw moment of beauty. The foal slips from her and he hears it before he scents it, before she grows quiet and still. The night is still unrelenting in its darkness but then Light comes, as if the Wisp had been waiting all along for just the right moment. The glowing orb shines over them all, giving them just enough brightness for them to both look at what they had created from their storm. He is still as she whispers and he says nothing because she is right. He glances down at her as she looks up at him, sees that feeling in her eyes, and loosens a breath he hadn’t realized he had been holding. His nerves are still jumbled up inside of him, mixed with the slithering of the snake that seems confused on how to proceed.
She reaches for the child and he can see him better now, this child of dark and light. A son. He is silent as she cleans him, as instinct comes naturally for her, and he can’t help but try to remember if Tantalize and Offspring had looked at him like this when he had been born. He swallows hard as he tries to reach for the vague memory that’s just out of reach, as he looks at the perfect blend of stars and gold and black. Just as he had looked like his father, this colt looks rather like him. That lump in his throat remains firmly stuck, because he doesn’t want to fail him, doesn’t want the past to repeat itself.
For the second time, just as he had done with Cheri, he takes off another piece of his armor and lays it to the side. When he had done it for Cheri, he had done so willingly. A choice. But this… This is something that he just feels he needs to do. There is no choice to make, only the rightness of correcting a long overdue wrong. The hard lines of his face soften slightly and he offers the colt a rather uncertain crooked smile when the boy finally looks at him from the warm safety of his mother. He is drawn back to her as she offers a name and he can’t deny that he is touched by how she honors him in such a choice. “Obsidio.” He rumbles the name back in agreement, still in a state of shock and disarray at how quickly this night had turned. That he was a father. That he had a son. “How many more storms shall we weather?” He asks her with a surprised laugh, the red of his eyes suddenly brightening with a sensation he’s not sure he’s ever felt before.
He thinks it might be joy.
He cannot miss the affection she carries, however discreetly, in her gaze and he returns it with a soft caress of his muzzle to hers. And then something changes in the air as he recognizes the pain in her eyes and that joy doesn’t last for long as she flattens back out and he wonders if he should move the boy in case she starts kicking again. There’s no time to truly think and in the end the colt stays by his mother as he presses more golden light into the mare, pushing past his tiredness and the feeling of depletion that was slowly creeping over him. And then he finds it. “Another one?” He says aloud in both agitation and surprise. Two. There were two.
This pain reduces her to a tangle of thought and feeling - all of it short-lived and unresolved as she writhes in the grass beneath a black, sleeping sky. She thinks of their son, Obsidio, of the way he is so perfect when both of his parents are entirely broken pieces forced back together in a mask of fortitude. He is so whole and so without flaw, and just the very image of his dark, delicate face bobbing gently in her mind behind the blackness of closed eyes is enough to make this pain somehow more bearable.
Another one? She is aware of Obscene’s voice, though she has no energy to open her eyes and search for him in the dark - she can feel him there anyway, curled around her back like a mountain range shielding her and their son. It is a comfort she does not try to name to have him here, a gift that he stayed, that he nearly snapped at her apology to stop. It didn’t feel unkind though, it didn’t feel like fury or anger or wrath directed at her. It felt like the tangle of pain she had been trying to unwind in her own chest for months without him, and she cannot help but wonder now if it would have been easier to do it with his help.
She wasted so much time, so much opportunity, and it’s as if in the haze of birth she cannot remember that he is more than the man who faced death beside her so that she wouldn’t face it alone, more than the father of the boy curled so near her belly. She forgets that he has purpose and place, and that none of it is her. She forgets in her exhaustion, what this is.
It is that change in his eyes that she clings to now as she battles her own body, that flash of red brighter than any fire, like a lantern in the dark to guide her back. If she were someone more arrogant, she might’ve even thought that look to be something like happiness, a glimpse past the wards he maintains so well.
Revelrie groans, and her steely skin is so dark with sweat that it looks almost charcoal in the starless night as she strains. There is nothing that feels different than it had moments ago, nothing to warn her of the pain that waits with fading eyes to greet her as she gives one last heave to bring a second child into the world. There is joy in her chest, a feeling of fullness and elation, of exhaustion but not depletion. It feels fitting that she would have twins, that like she and her own twin, these children would have a mirror in life to share everything with. A someone, no matter what.
She is smiling when she tries to rise, dark with sweat and sides heaving, but a light in her eyes that better matches the ancient silver of starlight. Except as she turns to meet their second, a little girl grulla like her mother and gold like her father, she realizes something is not quite right. Revelrie struggles in the matted grass, careful not to jostle the boy who is suddenly so still, his infant face turned to his sister like a flower towards the sun. For a moment their daughter is mirror to their son, her head lifted and her face turned to his, a stillness that is almost peaceful flowing between them.
And then.
And then.
There is a sound that shouldn’t be there, a ragged little gasp, a wet sound that Revelrie cannot make sense of until she sees their little girl go rigid where she lay. “Obscene?” She asks, and her voice is the soft that comes before panic, the whisper before the horror that unfurls so readily inside her chest. Their girl rasps again, and again, until the sound is a constant wheezing that forces Revelrie unsteadily to her feet, stepping over Obsidio to reach for their girl, to touch her face and her neck and that pulse in her chest that hardly beats at all. Her wings unfurl with an audible snap, the flash of molten under-feather like some strange golden aurora gleaming above their twins.
“Please,” she says, because even though she cannot fathom what this is, she knows innately what it means, what will happen, “please, I’ll do anything.”
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
The cycle repeats itself and they are both slick with sweat by the time the last child comes into the world. And this one is a perfect replica of her mother, marked in his own finery. A filly. His daughter. Twins. Completely perfect in every way. The girl turns her head to her brother and he thinks he senses a different kind of magic here. And then she turns to him as her mother begins to move, a soft rattling gasp, her eyelids fluttering open to reveal the even more perfect shade of red beneath. The grin that spreads across his dark lips is a rarity, something raw and warm and soft.
But all good things can’t last and suddenly fear flickers in the child’s eyes as she begins to gasp as if the cold air was choking her. He hadn’t caught that first sign but now here it was, a rattling call that echos of nothing but tragedy. It is a mad scramble to reach for her because he can taste it in the air. He can feel it on his back. Death. It was death. And it wanted his daughter. His muzzle presses hard against her small throat but the golden light merely flickers and pure panic washes through him as he realizes that he had pushed himself too hard. Time seems to slow, Revelrie’s cries and pleas warping into static as the ugly truth sinks deep into a withered heart that had reached out and felt. He had used all his magical energy on Revelrie…. leaving none for her.
“No.” He barks to the dread that surrounds them, refusing to give up, refusing to think that this wasn’t a battle he could win. That he had already failed at the start. The filly squirms and fights, he can see how hard she is trying to fight, but no matter how hard they both try, how hard he attempts to push past the limit, the golden light sputters and fades. And then the brightness blinks out of those beautiful red eyes. “No… I…. Rev….I can fix….” He glances at Revelrie, pure dismay and confusion flooding his handsome face. Unclear if he’s calling to her or the dying child before them. He can’t seem to stop trying even when her ribcage fails to rise. He tries and he tries and he realizes then the curse of Immortality. It wouldn’t always extend to all those he cared for. It wouldn’t save the ones he loved. And he would have to eventually watch their frail mortality wither before his very eyes.
This is his fault. This was all his fault. He should have known when he had first sensed her pregnancy that there had been two. He should have known, he could have held back. He should have known.
Everything he touches seems to always turn to ash.
He is trembling by the time he finally pulls back from her. He stands over the filly, not really seeing her, not really aware of anything. There’s a loud buzzing in his finely tipped ears and he doesn’t realize that he is gasping for breath as something raw and feral begins to claw its way up from his chest to his throat. And then he looks at the child’s unseeing red eyes again.
Looks at them and completely shatters in a blinding tidal wave of grief, anger, and scales.
It feels like time is coming undone, like she’ll never be steady on her feet, steady in this place, steady with this pain like a stone inside her chest. She can feel herself breaking as she watches Obscene fight with the magic he has long since spent on her, pulling on reserves that were already empty. Her eyes never leave their daughter, not even to notice the way Obsidio is a ghost in his stillness, in some horror she cannot see. She is too busy memorizing that shade of grulla, like storm clouds and wet stone, and the gold points a shade absolutely stolen from her father. She has stars on her face, an irregular marking on her delicate brow, and when she opens her eyes they are like twin rubies.
She is watching those eyes when the light finally goes from them, watching that delicate body when it slumps sideways into a silence she cannot break. “My fault.” She claims the burden as she staggers forward to kiss that starry brow, letting her lips learn the angles of a face she vows never to forget.
Outwardly she is as still as her daughter, with eyes that match. Cold and quiet and unseeing as she gathers up this pain between them and drags it to herself. “This is because of me. Had I told you, we could’ve been more prepared.” Maybe talked to another healer, or even a magician. A fortune teller, someone who could have warned them, could have prepared them, could have kept all this from happening.
There is a hole inside her chest now, a vast cavern of loss, of emptiness, a cave-in she doesn’t want to fill. It is a hole large enough for a ghost, perhaps, for a stormcloud girl with shining garnet eyes.
It is only when Obscene shifts, that sudden explosion of fae into snake, into scales and writhing darkness, that something in her sparks past this pain trying so desperately to drag her under. She steps in front of Obsidio, blocking him from his father, the snake, and when her eyes fall on Obscene’s face, they are forever changed. The blue of tears, of sorrow, of a pain too deep to bear.
“Go.” She says, and despite the iron in her voice, it is not a command, not a rebuke. It is acceptance that this is the form his pain takes, that this is what his heart needs. She is not sure at all if he is still in there or if the man retreats past the snake - especially now when to be man means to face such unbearable pain. But she also thinks that even at his worst, even held hostage like this inside a form that is not his, he would never harm his son. Even so, her wings flare wide again, shield both children from this change, and when she speaks again, not knowing whether he understands or not, she says, “I will give her a name, and I will keep our son safe. I promise.”
REVELRIE
it feels like falling, it feels like rain, like losing my balance again and again
![[Image: Obscene-Pixel.png]](https://i.postimg.cc/fTkjKh9Q/Obscene-Pixel.png){kind=tracking}