"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’ll worship like a dog at the shrine of your lies
tell you my sins so you can sharpen your knife
He’d never thought himself particularly broken, Before. He had not been well, by any means; he had been a plain boy, a devout boy, one who would not be missed when he was gone.
(The lattermost part of that is still true, perhaps – but he is no longer plain, nor is he devout.)
But then, in a waterfall, in a cascade, the time went missing and he awoke purple. The time went missing and he awoke with strange and tarnished memories of impossible things and impossible faces.
Time went missing and he awoke like this, a possessor, able to touch their minds.
(Save for hers. Praise be, save for hers.)
She speaks of how her home doesn’t want her there and he wants to say he understands but he doesn’t not exactly. He knows similar feelings, but not in the way she had – he has not been poisoned by the very land he once loved.
(But then, he’s never loved any land.)
“Maybe we could,” he affirms, and the idea sounds idyllic – a place to call home, where his mind stays within him.
(He can deal with the rest. Surely, he can deal with the rest.)
“Yes,” he says. Yes, it would be wonderful.
“I wasn’t born here,” he tells her. He wonders if it matters, “I don’t know anywhere except the meadow.”
sleaze
cancer x garbage
(agggh sorry for the crap my msue isn't around today)
and I ran back to that hollow again
the moon was just a sliver back then
She wonders what it would be like to live here—in the meadow. Then, she wonders if she already knows, if she has already made it her home. The idea of her being a Desert dweller seemed so natural that it was completely unnatural to view herself as anything else. Yet, it had been years since she had returned to her so called home. It had been forever since she had walked along the sand and seen her father powering through the skies and her mother in the middle of a sandstorm. Those seemed like simpler times now, and she has to wonder if she appreciated them as she should have.
But of course she knows she didn’t.
Her expression is soft when she looks at him, the sadness creeping into the corners of her eyes. “Would you like to explore?” she asks, although she herself is not sure that she is ready to leave the peace of their quiet coupling. There was a tranquility between them that she appreciated, as if the rest of the world was simply muted. Soon enough, they would have to rejoin the crowds and the noise and be subjected to the existence of other life, but for now, it seemed enough to cocoon themselves together like this.
“Maybe another time…”
Her voice trails off, and she sighs deeply. “So where were you born?”
and I ached for my heart like some tin man
when it came, oh, it beat and it boiled and it rang
I’ll worship like a dog at the shrine of your lies
tell you my sins so you can sharpen your knife
He finds himself wishing, in a strange way, that he could take her back to his first home. It hadn’t been in Beqanna, had existed elsewhere in the strange realm of Outside. The place had been much like the meadow, truth be told, but it had been isolated, quiet. He wonders if she would want quiet, or if she prefers chaos, liveliness.
He wonders why he wants to show her these things – the creek, clear and cool, the moss where he once knelt in prayer.
He’s a fool for it, for there is an air about her, a sense of royalty in her face and she’s surely seen better, known better things than he or the place that was once home.
(He doesn’t even know if he could find it, now that he is such a changed man.)
“Outside of Beqanna,” he tells her, “it didn’t have a name. Or, I didn’t know it. My father didn’t want to stay in Beqanna.”
That’s its own sordid tale, for Sleaze came about amidst ill magic, a child born to two lovers who were lovers no more by the time he’d come to term, so he never met his other father, was only told idle tales, piecemeal morsels of information - he was a magician. He was grey. His name was Cancer--
(Here there was always a laugh, embittered at the irony of the name, the way the man had loved like a sickness, virulent and pestilent and impossible.) He healed me, so I loved him.
He knows little else of the tale, for Garbage did not speak of him often. Once, quietly, he’d said you have his eyes, and somewhere in the tone was thankfulness, and somewhere in it was remorse.
(Sleaze himself had wished for bright orange eyes like Garbage, he found them beautiful.)
“I loved it there,” he adds, “it was home until dad left. And then it wasn’t.”
The place had lost its light after that, and Sleaze had lost himself to half-formed prayers.
“What about you?” he asks, though he’s worried it’s a more delicate topic for her, to speak of such a poisonous place.
and I ran back to that hollow again
the moon was just a sliver back then
She is lost for a moment in his story, eyes closing as she imagined the meadow that he talks of, and the father who seems to bring both nostalgia and unbearable sadness to his voice. She leans against him and concentrates on the shape of his words, not thinking of a response but letting herself follow the path that he laid out for her, the sides of her barrel expanding and falling in rhythmic motion as she lost herself.
There are things about his meadow that remind her of her own wanderings, although they had not been home but the place she had run to from it. They had become both refuge and prison for her, the silence both calming and maddening. She had spent time there because she had been chased from her own home by something darker than she understood, the illness leaving her body only after weeks of her absence.
Still, there is something in her that wants nothing more than to see his own meadow.
So she is sad when he is done speaking and does not bother to hide the sorrow in her own eyes at his question; it seemed foolish when they were stripped so raw in front of one another. Why bother shielding something from him when she was already so naked in front of his troubled gaze? “It was hot—unbearably so sometimes. Mother didn’t seem to mind, but father wasn’t built for it the way she was. So eventually she pulled water from the ground to create an oasis for him, a haven from the sun.”
Her mind wanders back to the desert and her bones ache with the longing. She had thought she would spend the rest of her days among the dunes like her family; she had never imagined that the possibility of it would be stripped from her. “It was easy to get lost in the sand—it was all you could see for miles. Just white-hot sand and blue skies and a sun so large it felt impossible. It was beautiful in the way that dangerous things always are and not for the faint of heart.” A sigh. “And, ultimately, not for me.”
and I ached for my heart like some tin man
when it came, oh, it beat and it boiled and it rang
