"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
The seasons change but he does not. The ghosts remain, always. Following him, taunting him. reminding him of every failure he has ever made. The children (the poor children, broken and suffering from their neglect) fragments of memories he can’t decipher are real or not. He tries to find solace in soft kisses and warm bodies. Tries to stir some emotion besides the constant rage in his head and the wrath in his belly. There’s nothing but that empty vapid weight swirling in his chest. He cannot find it. Can’t find the peace he seeks, can’t find the love that evades him.
Spark. Cress. One had tried to heal his body and his soul but he was too broken, too shattered. For a brief second he had slipped into her warm embrace and forgotten…. But it was only for a moment. The brief pleasure instantly chased away by the disapproving ghosts and the memory that the one whose heart he truly wanted… (The one he had wanted to hold his) is not the one beneath him. Instead she is elsewhere….. Elsewhere… With him.
How many nights does he spend howling at the moon? How many days does he spend hiding in the dark with only the shadows and the spirits to keep him company?
Until the day he stumbles back along the path of the mountain. A dirty scrawny straggly shadow of the bear he had once been, could have been. Claws drag along the dirt as he makes the climb. Why? Where? It doesn’t matter, nothing matters. Perhaps if he climbs this mountain he can stop Addy from falling to her death over and over again. Perhaps he can make one of the voices shut the fuck up in his head.
They never stop, shouting and fighting amongst each other. Jockeying for a dominant place in his head to tell him what a piece of shit he is. How much he’s fucked up. How he’s deserved every bad thing that's ever happened to him in his life. All the death, heartbreak. You’re just a fuck up Ledger. You always have been, always will be. How could anyone love a stallion like you? Broken thing that you are. A beast, not a man. Of course she wanted someone else, someone complete. Someone to protect her from the creature you are. A monster. A monster.“Like me” Hisses Chernobyl and the bear snarls, swiping at the invisible ghosts that aren't even there.
He’s at the top, at the place he had come to years ago. Before he met Ellyse. Before he had gotten his power back. Beady eye blinks blearily around him. For a moment, a precious moment, the voices go silent. The ghosts fade. Magic still runs rampant here despite the changes of the land. Silent but not forgotten. He is still… Still except for the aching swirling in his chest.
And then the rage, constantly scorching the back of his throat as it tries to escape, explodes.
”YOU TOOK IT! YOU TOOK IT!” He screams at the rocky cliffs, the dark heavens above. To the hiding fairies and the Dark God that’s always watching. And then, just like he had that day before the deceitful lovers, he is tearing at the ugly X over his chest with his claws. Removing fur, flesh, blood. Exposing the layers of skin and sinew beneath, mad with his eternal pain. Mad with the sorrow of a broken heart he can’t even feel. ”GIVE IT BACK! GIVE IT BACK TO MEEEE!” He howls, snarls, screams with bloody claws curled into fists at the sky. Give me back my miserable life. GIVE ME BACK MY HEART.
No sleep tonight I'll keep driving down these dark highway lines
@[Officials] @[Cassi]
Soooo Ledger would like his heart back please =D
He is so bored of broken things.
There’s no fun in it, when they are miserly, when they slam upon the self-destruct button over and over again. This boy had come to his twice, each time leaving a bit worse – and here he is again. With demands! It’s almost cute, the way he storms the mountain, shrieking to nothing. As if he is owed.
The dark god considers killing him. It wouldn’t take much, or matter much – a guttural word, a twist of the neck, and out of his misery goes Ledger. The boy would probably thank him, Carnage can’t imagine his life is very good right now.
He’d be doing him a favor, really.
He doesn’t, though – even he is not quite sure why – so he settles for knocking the boy down, temporarily sewing his lips shut. A god can’t think with all that screeching.
It’s only then that he appears, a trespasser on the faerie’s mountain, a cancer on its corpse.
“Calm down, Ledger,” he says to the boy, and when Ledger doesn’t speak, he smiles, “that’s better.”
“You weren’t using it well, your heart,” he says, tone conversational, as if they were at a dinner party, “all that foolishness for a girl. I was doing you a favor, really.”
He sighs, put-upon. They were never grateful, even when he did them favors. He doesn’t know why he bothers.
“Still,” he says, “I suppose we can make an arrangement.”
He regards the boy, wine-dark eyes drinking in the bloody mess of his skin.
“Bring me a heart,” he says, “and perhaps I will give yours back.”
c a r n a g e
(please let me know if you're not okay with anything carnage did here and I will edit asap )
The gods do owe him. Misery after misery, brutal pain and crushing heartbreak. His whole life has been built on this shaky foundation. Of course they fucking owe him, they owe him something after giving him such a stained and blackened life. So he screams, yells, rips at his flesh. Can’t stop, won’t stop. Not until they hear him. Not until he forces someone to face him and answer for their crimes.
Suddenly an invisible force lifts him up and throws him back. It stops the claws from reaching at the gore and ragged flesh, with a cry flying back and hitting the trees behind him. It shocks him enough to instantly shift back to horse with a blink of an eye. Struggling to his feet, trying to scream again… But he can’t. His lips are sewn shut and even trying to pry his lips open results in a thin trickle of blood. There is anger in his one gold flecked eye as it constricts at the voice. The familiar voice.
So he has been heard after all.
Slowly he faces his enemy, the bane of his existence, the thief that holds his heart hostage. “Calm down” A smirk on the Dark God’s face, eyeing the little marks that keep his mouth clamped shut. The seething anger rolling out of the single eye with as much anger as he can muster. His only alternative when he can’t speak. Curved chestnut ears flick back and forth, half pinned flat to his skull but unable to keep them down for long as he entices him with those maddeningly seductive words. Confirming what he had known all along. That strange emptiness amongst the hollow of his chest cavity.
He glowers as Carnage toys with him, the barb of Ellyse burying within him and making him grit his teeth, causing more pain as they push against his sealed lips. It didn’t matter if he had given his heart to the wrong person. As if he wasn’t aware of how badly that had backfired, had slapped him in the face. Still, it was his. Bad choices or not, it was his to give. Not Carnage’s.
A thousand angry colorful words fly through his head as he glares at the star man, thoughts he doesn’t doubt can be heard with all his “magic”. Finally, a sigh. A thought. An offer. Of course he had not expected this task to be easy, to gain his organ back. The price to pay to regain it… It is heavy. Dark. For a moment he is hesitant. They wanted to make him into a monster, to do this…. It would make him one entirerly. But if he had his heart back, he could make amends surely. As if to press his decision, the walls of his madness begin to press in. Reminding him of the life he was living, would be stuck in.
Magnus stands at Carnage’s side. Worried, concerned. Shaking his head. “Don’t do it.” He whispers, “Is it worth that?” ”I don’t want to be like this.” He tries to whispers back, mumbled and painful against the thin threads holding his mouth together. Regret and anguish pooling in the depths of molten gold. I don’t want to feel like this anymore. He cannot die, he cannot live. Something has to give. Magnus continues to protest, the glass lover screams as she plummets once more to her death, Ellyse and Dahmer spin around him, entangled in each other.
A hardness in his eye as he looks to Carnage and gives a terse short nod. I’ll do it.
No sleep tonight I'll keep driving down these dark highway lines
)