let your fists come undone; mandan

[exist]

while collecting the stars, I connected the dots.
I don’t know who I am, but now I know who I’m not.

She feels unready when the first contractions come, when her belly tightens and her nerves scream and she turns and Mandan is not there. “Mandan.” She breathes, a whimper-sound, soft and beautiful and etched with the pain that travels through her copper skin in ragged waves. Regret is there also, a deep throb in her chest as she tries to remember why it was she had not gone looking for him, why she had not spent these last many months buried and content in the hollow of his dark chest.

He doesn’t know.

The truth makes her flush warm and embarrassed, and even now she ducks her head to hide the uncertainty that flashes bright and vulnerable in the backs of those quiet jade eyes. He must know, he must, she had grown grotesquely round in the last month, the weight made more evident by the sharp angles of a figure that was otherwise thin, avian and beautiful. Even the soft feathering of her wings could no longer hide the life that grew within her, a heat, a pressure she had come to love once the fear subsided. 

Still, he had not come to her side, nor she to his, and fear made that doubt sharp, made it cruel.
Maybe he did not want to know.

But she remembers a weight in his gaze, his mouth against her neck and the heat it had stirred somewhere deep and unnamable inside her, and suddenly she is turning deeper into Tephra, hurrying between the contractions to the places she had seen him most often. But there is no flash of deep mahogany, no rustle of feather besides her own, no darkly handsome face scowling out at her from the deepening night. His absence makes something else twist in her gut, something besides regret, something she absolutely refuses to think on for the treacherous weight such a truth would carry.

Of course she doesn’t love him, that would be silly.
And yet -

She groans at a new pain that cripples her, knocks her to her knees and then her side, presses her flat into the dirt with that copper neck rigid and her small head outstretched. She groans again, tensing, almost invisible between the thick green plants that grow up around her and the billow of mist that pours like fog from the nearby spring. She prefers it this way, she thinks, hidden away like a ghost in the belly of a green and grey kingdom that had always been home. Tucked away near the streaks of throbbing orange and gold, veins of magma that lit the night, every night, even when the stars refused to shine behind the obsidian of clouds.

In the quiet of the night, she struggles, heaving and breathless, until there is not one but three silhouettes in the hazy, silver dark. The first is a small filly, slight and beautiful, with skin like pale rust, like Exists except fainter. She moves, struggling, and Exist shifts to clean her, quieting her again with long strokes of her tongue against damp, perfect skin. She memorizes as she goes, touching every part of that small face, following the arch of her neck, the softness of downy mane – further across her withers and her back, along her hips and her legs. Everything seems good, seems well, but the blue and copper mare extends her healing light to the girl anyway, letting it fill her daughter in whichever quiet ways she may or may not need. “Praise.” She whispers, the first sound, first word this child will ever hear, and when she lifts that small head to peer up at Exist, she knows she has named her. “My beautiful, Praise.” She says again, softer, reaching forward with a quiet groan to press a kiss to that beautiful forehead.

But she is interrupted by new pain, new tightness, a new shape in the dirt behind her once the struggling is finished. She groans again, exhausted, sweat dark like bronze against her neck, her shoulders, her hips. But she does not tend to her own needs yet, will not spare the healing on herself until she is sure this second child is okay. But when she twists and shifts, reaching out to clean the wet from her, this body is small and thin, completely still beneath her mouth but for the shallow rise and fall of delicate ribs. 

She stands quickly and turns to them, laying back down so that the bay is against her chest and beneath her neck, and the apricot is tucked safely to the curve of her belly. With urgent, wandering lips, she pushes all her ability into this child, her child, who even now struggles to respond. It takes many long moments, seconds stretched into eons until time is unrecognizable, but then the girl does stir, does lift her head and find Exists quiet, worried face. “Prevail.” She whispers, she breathes, she places the name in a kiss against that impossibly small forehead, willing her. Her lips find two hard knots near those small ears, smooth bumps of something solid and, frowning, she brushes aside the forelock to take a closer look. Hard and dark, gleaming dully, they remind her of the soft knobs of antler she had seen growing on weanling deer. Exists face softens with easy curiosity, tired curiosity, wondering who in her family had given her such horns. She wondered, too, at the color.

It was easy to see who beautiful Praise had taken after, such a soft, faded apricot. She was a watered down shade of her mother’s copper, pale and perfect. But Prevail was the same rich mahogany as her father, dark and beautiful, with legs the color of blue gems like her mother – like her mother’s mother, too. 

She looked so much like Victra.

With a sigh of exhausted pleasure, a heart so full and bright that is spilled over like an ocean poured into a puddle, she drew them in close with the soft of her nose, curling around them until they found their will to stand and nurse. Until then, she was content to drown in their sound, their scent, their perfectness. This was not the future she had expected for herself, but looking at them now, curled with their warmth, she knows it is the future she would do anything to keep.

Exist

@[mandan]

[mandan]

He is not there.

Never there.

But he recognizes the ache in him that arises when she is not there. Recognizes that she had become tangled up in him somehow, in ways that he cares not to untangle or set her free - fool! It never lasts; the love and the happiness, it all turns dark and curdled in the end and he blames himself for the fall, and all the other things that came afterwards like his wings, the obedient and quiet way he launched himself after her into the darkening sky as the stars chased them across the sea and to the hot wild shore that he wanders now, and always. So in a way, he is there just absent from her side and he aches with the knowledge of it, aches in a way that he has never ached before and that scares and thrills him both.

Mandan doesn’t know exactly when he came to know that he loved her.

It might have the incredulous look on his face at the appearance of the sleek black feathers and hearty membrane that held him aloft alongside her, almost close enough for their wingtips to touch.

It could have been the way that every look was stubborn but equally telling of the love she couldn’t admit to herself any more than he could admit it to himself as a thing that each of them felt and knew existed.

Existed.

Exist.

Her name is a chant on his lips; a murmur in the glowing vile dark of the volcano as he lingers in its shadow, thinking of her and how he strayed since that moment their bodies acted as nature intended them to act. He is fearful but certain that come a gentler season, she’ll be thick with foal and possibly mad at him - he would be, if he was a mare with an errant stallion about her, errant and unattentive as he has been. It’s always like this, he’s just never around though for a time, he had been for others but only because their mothers had been just like him - wayward and consumed. None of them have ever been like her, sweet and stubborn and sure to raise her foal(s) up right. How can he seek her out now? He can’t. He doesn’t. His stupid heart says to do so but his dumb male brain says don’t. You don’t chase after snakes and bears and the things that will always end up hurting you.

Mandan listened to his brain and that was his mistake.

Stay away, it said. She’ll be mad at you.

He believed his brain over his heart, and his heart said find her, find her and tell her how much you love her and how sorry you are for leaving her.

His brain betrays him further even as his feet begin to listen to his heart and move of their own accord. It makes snide little questions about whether or not she could love him and sows the terrible seeds of doubt that slow his step even further until he stops again, considering and his face is dark beneath a terrible shadow of misgiving. So he abandons his own search for her and goes far from the places in Tephra that he inhabits and keeps back from even the parts of it that she inhabits, hoping to keep their paths from crossing for a bit until he can sort out the differences between his stupid heart and his lying brain. He fails though, and both rule him as much as the other does - hard and cruel, and the moment he makes a decision to follow one or the other, indecision mounts his back and jerks his head around until he stops, confused and awfully woeful.

He’d not have found her if not for all the soft groans and grunts that yielded up her birthing place amongst the ferns and fog. Mandan recognizes those sounds and their implication, and he visibly blanches - how could he have done this to her? She had been so small beneath him, so pliant and trusting and he’d spoiled her, ruined all that had been Exist. He almost couldn’t go to her, misses the faint naming of each twin and only dares to intrude the moment the world goes awfully still and quiet.  His long nose pokes between the ferns until he catches sight of her beautiful apricot self standing there, but she is not alone… Her wings shield the rumps of not one but two! His mouth gapes open in surprise as he counts each set of four legs that are not her own. It is not long before his throat goes inexplicably dry and all he can manage to croak out around his guilt and grief is her name - “Exist.”