"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
something has been taken from deep inside of me; the secret I've kept locked away no one can ever see.
Quietly and easily, the evening begins to fade, the frayed edges of a starlit sky giving way to the gentle light of the rising sun. Volcanic ash sifts gently on the ground below, merging with the soft and fertile soil that lay beneath and pressing firmly around the minuscule, jagged edges of each footfall. Entrenched in the remnants of another pyroclastic flow, he can feel the heat of pooling lava near the very base of the volcano, and though the stream of it is winding away from him, the light breeze carries its warmth across the plain.
Faint beads of sweat trickle across his dark, but flawed flesh, as the puckered pink scars glimmer beneath the rays of bleak sunlight that has slowly begun to push back the shadows. His powerful legs push him through the long, wavering tendrils of dry brush that lap so delicately at his skin, leaving hives along his sensitive flesh and leaving him even more irate than before.
The vivid, haunting memories of his grim nightmares plague him still, evoking an uncomfortable tension from the depths of his thick, rolling muscles, leaving an old and familiar ache within his bones. Each bittersweet memory had yet to fade with time, and only left him more weary and tired than before. He spent too many hours, too many days attempting to keep the demons that lurked within the bleak and bleary recesses of his mind, desperate to conceal the way his dark secret unraveled him from the very seams.
He could still remember the acrid, metallic taste of blood, and his heart would clench each and every time his mind recalled how sweet it had been. He could still hear the rigid, curdling screams of torment, ringing sharply in his memory. He could still feel the surge of adrenaline; he could still feel the trembling of the ground beneath him as his mind and body waged a war he had never chosen to fight.
It all remained too clear, too vivid, and so he hid away, exhausted from his constant, unyielding attempt to hide such gruesome visions from the one his heart loved and yearned for most. He could no longer envelope himself in her warmth and gentle caresses in the dead of night; he could no longer ward off the deep loneliness nor his darkest thoughts - he was weak; crippled by the intensity of his own anxiety and shaken by the distant, but dully throbbing bloodlust that simmers in his veins.
Festering silently within his own misery, his breath catches as his own burning eyes meet with hers as she remains still, the beauty of her brown eyes gleaming in the warm sunlight of morning, his heart leaping into the hollow of his throat. It hammers against the confines of his rib cage, steadily increasing its rhythm as his mind become rampant with thought. He can feel it splintering, fragments of his heart becoming fragmented and undone, a deep ache settling in between the gaps.
It is not often that he is gone so late that the sweeping grace of dawn drapes itself across the midnight sky, and never had she been awake upon his return. An unnerving dread gently thrums at his heartstrings with dexterity and finesse. A breathless, "I'm sorry," is all that he can say, his usually deep and ragged voice caught in his throat, and his dark red eyes boring into hers with regret.
wounds so deep they never show; they never go away. like moving pictures in my head, for years and years they've played.
He thinks she doesn’t notice when he leaves her in the night, thinks she does not stir from even the deepest sleep when suddenly his heat abandons her and cool air rushes in to take his place. But he is in her heart, he is beneath her skin, he is the marrow in her bones, and when he leaves, she knows, because a piece of her soul goes with him. She is splintered in his absence, picked apart by agile fingers, peeled open to her insides until all she is is hurt and pain and quiet uncertainty, laid bare for the universe to see.
But he is back before morning, always before morning, and when he returns to her side she does not stir, does not open her eyes, does not force the truth from him when he is so clearly set on hiding it from her. It is enough to be curled beside him, to be nestled against his dark and heat and skin that always smells so much like brimstone these days. But the uncertainty is cold and creeping in her veins, and each night is a new secret, each secret a new piece of glass in her chest. She does not know why he cannot lay beside her through the night, why it is not enough to drape his neck across her back and greet the darkness with her lips pressed affectionately to his temple, but it is not, and he remains ever-restless and she never quite able to sooth him.
This morning is different, though, and when she lifts her head from such restless sleep, it is to greet a morning drenched in gold and orange. It is beautiful and same, a duplicate of so many before it but for one excruciating detail; she is alone. At once she is to her feet, swaying slightly in place until all the cold and nighttime stiffness had fled her bones, and then she is pushing forward and away, deeper into Tephra in search of a face that will soothe the fear burning in her chest. She does not get far before she finds him though, only a few unsteady strides before he appears around a hill, soaked in gold and pink and the colors of the sky above them. I’m sorry. He says and he is breathless, aching. But she dismisses the apology with a quick shake of her small, dark head, moving swiftly to his side. “Offspring.” She says, she breathes, she whispers like a prayer as she crushes herself against him.
For several long moments she does not move from him, does not pull away from where she is tucked and leaning into the strength of his chest, from where her face is pressed cheek-first to the hard line of his sloping shoulder. She waits until that fear fueled fire has burned out in her chest, until her heart is a quiet, easy rhythm where it presses against him, until she can breathe without gasping, speak without a tremor in her voice. Only then can she pull away, and she does, but only far enough to see his face, to reach up with gentle lips to erase the lines of worry and tension she finds there. In every hollow she leaves a kiss, every point of bone and even the furrows on his brow. You are mine, she reminds him without words, I am yours.
But then she does speak, pulls her mouth from where it explores the lines of such a beautiful face, and asks the hardest question of all, the one that weighs most heavily on her heart while she lies awake and missing him each night. “Why won’t you let me in, Offspring.” Her voice is soft and sad, wilted at the edges like a faded blue flower, and when she eases closer again it is to press her mouth to his chest, his heart. “I know I’m in there,” a pause and a frown, though her face is still beautiful even in such exquisite pain, “so let me in here, too.” Her face lifts to him, gentle and imploring, and she reaches out to brush his forelock aside, to touch those dark lips to an even darker forehead, an even darker mind below that. "Trust me."
something has been taken from deep inside of me; the secret I've kept locked away no one can ever see.
A hollow hole has been etched into his heart, gaping grievously as old memories begin to seep from the recesses of his mind, draping him in a long-buried grief that envelopes him inch by inch. A lifetime of secrets, of forgotten memories (repressed; concealed beneath a stoicism that had become his entire essence) had begun to emerge, dredging his weary heart through the dust and sludge of time. It had taken him so much time (so many months, years, wasted to the desolation of his own heartbreak; squandered by the burden of loss) to tuck his anguish away, to swallow it down and to ignore the acrid, bitter taste it left behind. It had taken so much to forget that time is an everlasting mechanism, unyielding to his own will, charging forth with reckless abandonment.
Death was an inevitable truth, one he once craved so deeply it had almost consumed him in its entirety – the puckered, pink scars splayed across his flesh are not wounds from war fought with any other, but of a war with himself. His heart is heavy at the memory of his own deterioration, of how unraveled he became in the wake of loss – in the aftermath of the burdensome realization that in the end, it would always be him - only him, left to fester in an unwanted, loathsome existence. He had since drawn himself out of his own sinkhole of despair, but it has begun to open beneath him once again, threatening to swallow him whole.
His name is gentle on her lips, and he can feel the frayed edges of himself coming undone at the seams – and in the very same breath, she is pressed against him, crushing her fragile body against the rigid bone and muscle of his own. His dark lashes draw to a close over the fiery, burning embers of his own crimson gaze, and the broad line of his neck is soon draped over her own, cradling her closer to him as his heart begins to crumble within. At the forefront of his mind, the image of an old ally, of his closest friend weakening into a meek, frail version of the pillar of strength he had once been – seeing his lifeless, fragile body lying in a heap along the shoreline, with his forlorn lover weeping over him reminds him too of the infirmity of life.
His lips press against her withers, tasting the sweet scent of her skin beneath his tongue, and his heart aches painfully against the void of his chest. The silence is palpable; his mind lingering on the memory of her birthing their firstborn, of her cradled against his side in the dim obscurity of a carved out cave tucked within a mountainside, of his lips caressing and traveling every inch of her body within the dense tepid heat of a summer night.
Where her deep brown eyes remained vibrant and bright, the skin nearest to them crinkled with age – and though time was far from finished with her, it had left its eternal mark on her flesh – a reminder now more than ever that time is fleeting. A breathless sigh brushes across the surface of her two-toned skin, and carefully, he tastes every part of her his greedy mouth can reach, a fervid heat simmering still within his touch, but there is a tenderness within his touch that speaks more than words ever could of the tireless, undying love he has for her.
Soon, her lips are against his cheek as she has drawn away from him, seeking his tired, burning eyes. Each kiss laid upon his skin pushes the anxiety festering inside of him further down, and he is weak to her, wavering beneath her steadfast, soothing affection. When his heavy lashes finally reveal his gaze to her, it is rife with emotion, unshed tears brimming along the dark rim and clouding his vision. Her words are soft, but heavy and laced with a longing for honesty he had denied to her for too long, and when her lips press against his chest, against his heart, he is completely undone.
Trust me, she begs of him, and he does - he does, unable to bear the weight any longer.
”I have lived a thousand lifetimes, Isle,” he utters in a nearly breathless gasp, the weight of too many stifled memories crushing him, suffocating him. ”I am one hundred and thirty-seven years old –“a weight lifted, but a heavier one takes its place.”I have seen too much, I have felt too much. I have loved, I have lost, and still I live. I have no right, I have no right to more time, but it’s all I have – all I have is time.”
The broad muscle and bone of his cheek is stained with salty tears, his chest heaving from the overwhelming emotion surfacing. ”Killdare, he .. he’s gone,”dead, nothing but ash, nothing but a memory, as she would be one day, too.”he’s gone, that’s where I’ve been. He’s gone.”
A breath, shaky as he finally disintegrates before her, the stoicism, the strength fading away from his tired bones and his weary eyes. His whiskered lips press against her cheek, against her skin, tasting her again as he comes undone before her. ”I can’t lose you too, I love you,” he confesses, he pleads. ”I love you.”
wounds so deep they never show; they never go away. like moving pictures in my head, for years and years they've played.
He is silent with his lips pressed to her withers, quiet when his tongue slips past to taste the morning gold etched into the dapples on her skin. She closes her eyes and softens for him, always and ever undone by him in these close moments when they press together like this. Where his mind clings to memories from the past – the birth of Argo, their first, and of pressing his lips to her skin like a mapmaker learning his lines – she wonders at the present. At the worry in his brow and the reasons for his nightly absences, at the darkness in his face that seems as though even her light cannot reach it.
But then he is reaching and wanting, gentle as always, pressing the heat of his mouth to every part of her that he can reach from over her shoulders. There is want in his touch, she thinks, or maybe some unnamable kind of need born from the dark in him, but she arches her delicate body against him, pushing closer, closer even as she starts to tremble. “Offspring?” She whispers, asks, pushes the name against his shoulder with the soft of her lips until she is breathless and aching and coming undone against his chest.
Her lips find his cheek now, warm and gentle like the creeping sunshine around them, and she takes one small step back so that she can watch him. It is impossible to think with his lips pressed to her skin, his tongue warm and damp and suckling against all those dark, gleaming dapples. She covers him with kisses instead, quiet in their intensity, soft and affectionate until he softens and those burning eyes open to find her again. She is surprised by the emotion there, by the wet and gleaming of unshed tears that catch and tremble like diamonds along the lid. “Offspring.” She says again, reaching up to brush his forelock smooth with her lips, to leave kisses at the corners of eyes like living coals.
I have lived a thousand lifetimes, Isle, she pulls back but not away, lifting her chin to watch him in an uncertain way with her eyes dark and her brow furrowed, I am one hundred and thirty-seven years old. She is quiet until his finishes, silent until he is, too, and even then she can only watch him for a moment, only drop her gaze to trace the dozens of scars that lay pink and puckered against the smooth black of his skin. A scar for every lifetime, perhaps. She wants to ask him why, wants to know what reason he had to keep this from her so long, why this had to be a secret when he knew all of her. But when she lifts her eyes to his face and finds it dark and jagged and stained wet with his pain, the question dies on her lips.
Killdare, he’s gone. He stumbles over the words like he almost cannot say it, like it is a blade against his tongue and he is trying not to choke on his own blood. At once she is against him again, pressed to his chest and against his shoulder, trailing kisses over skin that ripples beneath her lips. She can smell it on him now – not death, but the sand and musk and, strangely, smoke. She should have noticed, should have known not to push him, now.
His chest heaves against hers and he reaches for her again, pressing his lips to her cheek which she lifts to him willingly. I can’t lose you, too, I love you.This close, his voice is more hum than volume, a sound she can feel in her skin rather than hear with her ears. “I love you, too, Offspring.” She says back, wishing she had more to soothe him with, wishing she could promise a forever like his. But it is out of her reach and out of her grasp and all she can do is press closer and against him, paint his skin and his scars with quiet kisses meant to soothe the ragged tremble of his chest. It is no secret how she ages, the crinkles in her skin at the corners of her mouth and the edges of her eyes – not deep, but enough to erase the hope that maybe she might be immortal as he is – betray the truth that weighs so heavily on both of their minds.
When she lifts her face to him it is sad and dark and furrowed, the tangles of her black forelock hiding eyes that search his painfully. “I’m yours for as long as I have – for as long as we have together.” She hides the brokenness in her chest with a soft smile that pulls at the corners of her mouth and settles shallowly in her eyes. “I’m not so old, yet. You’ll be stuck with me for a long while.” But even as she says this she wonders at the cruelness of it, wonders if it would not be kinder to pull away now and break his heart so that he can remember her in some barbed way, in such dark light. Death would be worse, she thinks, he would always remember her in a way colored by longing, let time warp his memories of her into something greater than she truly was. But she hides this from him now, hides the worry in her eyes and the furrow of her brow so that he will not see it, will not know her doubts.
Instead she softens, presses kisses to his face and his throat and the thick of his neck, runs gentle teeth along the ridges of bone to coax his mind from his worries and to the depth of her affection for him. “I love you.” She says again, so soft and quiet, dropping her nose to his elbow, her lips to that soft skin just behind it.
