"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
while collecting the stars, I connected the dots. I don’t know who I am, but now I know who I’m not.
She is up with the dawn, the near-copper of her rich apricot skin reflecting the sharp pinks and oranges that stretch across the waking sky. In the fading dark, she rises from her slumber with a soft, sleepy sigh, stretches, and slips out from the cover of her stone and earth den in the belly of Tephra. Her wings unfurl at her shoulders, spreading wide and full, all soft shades of indigo feather.
Without a word she takes to the skies, settling up where the fog and mist meet to diffuse the morning light across her skin, up where she is nearly invisible to a world that still sleeps. She follows a route that is almost painfully familiar - a sweeping curve down through the field and across the meadow, and then shifts towards the forest and its tall, reaching trees. Though she does not think about it, will not look this truth in the eyes, there is a face in particular she searches for as her wings carry her low enough to feel the treetops whisper past her heels.
There was a man she met here once, a man who, despite being gone, has never truly left her. She cannot help but to wonder where he is, if he’s well and happy, if he’s moved on with his life in the time that has since stretched between them. Wonder, more selfishly, if he thinks about her the same way she thinks of him now. When it is dark and the night is lonely, when the morning brings little relief from it, does he remember how they lay curled together waiting to greet the sun?
She finds a place where the meadow reaches out to stroke the edge of the forest, where she can land without tangling her wings, where the branches are few and the grass is soft and gold, and pushes the thought away before the barbs wrapped around it can dig tighter into her heart. There is a path waiting here for her, as familiar as an old friend, and she steps onto it with a quiet sigh as her wings fold obediently to her sides.
The world within the forest is at once bright and beautiful, with leaves of ruby and topaz clinging to slender, reaching branches. She fits well in this world, a deep copper to match the trees - only the indigo on her legs and face seem out of place as even the feathers in her wings shift to match the colors of the autumn leaves overhead. Her strides are even and unhurried, those emerald eyes half-closed as the path widens around a bend into a small forest clearing, and her wings stretch wide from her withers to fill the new space.
The points of his horns are unusually sharp and the shape of his face is rougher, older. Time has not been kind to him but neither has life been kind to him overly much. What kindness it has given him has been in the bountiful crops of foals he’s sired and in the singular most memorable love of his life.
Skin the color of fruit and just as sweet to taste and touch.
He still remembers.
Honestly, how could he forget?
But life kept them apart. Others came. Warmed his loins for a night or two. Then he left because none of them were her. None of them had ever made him leave the earth to try flying. He’d never been so close to the sky and the stars than he’d been that time with her. She gave him more than just love - a beautiful set of twins, that memorable flight, and most of all, the chance to love again despite how gruff he always was. He tried to deflect her emotion away from him but it hadn’t worked. The only thing that worked was how she’d gotten in under his skin and pierced his heart like a thorn he never wanted to work loose.
The thought of her is what keeps him up at night. He doesn’t need sleep. It comes and it goes but never the picture of her face that his mind holds more precious than water or grass. Her face is what makes him go on, get up off the earth and force down the things he needs to survive. Even the dawn finds him awake and staring up through the canopy of leaf and branch in hopes that he might spot a winged silhouette. He has before, but they’ve never turned out to be her. Not a single one. Still, when he thinks the disappointment ought to crush him, her face comes to mind and he is rejuvenated in his desire to find her.
Except he never leaves the forest. Not once. Not in years. Not since that flight to Tephra and thereafter. He lingers, growing as wild as the woods around him. Grows into a thing of horn and fur and branch that snarls somewhere in between all of that. He remains hulking and gruff to those that come to close to his patch of forested earth. More often than not, he just chases them away. But this dawn feels different. He can’t figure out why but he has been awake to greet it which is not altogether unusual for him to do. His black eyes take in the brightening sky through breaks in the limbs and leaves above him.
Someone goes flying by but he dismisses it. So many times he’s looked and hoped against hope, against the better sense in him that says it was just a sweet time for a sour soul but she’d done something to him - healed something in him that had been broken so long ago by a first love that no longer means much to him beyond a memory of stupid youthful sweetness. What he’d found now (or then), had been more lasting and it bubbles back to life in him again despite the years of sludge that he slumbered beneath. Awakened, feeling a strangeness in the air that he cannot place, he begins to step away from his part of the wood that he has claimed for himself.
Mandan’s pace is slow and without rush despite the sensation in his blood that today is just different. He cannot place how or why the day feels that way but it does. So he listens to it, because he has never been one to outright ignore the murmurings of instinct though for so long the voices of long ago have been dormant in him. Now they raise a ruckus and he reacts, walking through the woods until he comes to the edge that meets the meadow. The grass is long and golden here, causing him to turn his heavy horned head to consider the trees. When did the leaves lose their greenness?
He blinks, a bit stupidly as he realizes the seasons have gone round again in their ceaseless circle. Then he sniffs. There is a scent that teases at his nostrils in the last of the autumn. Not a scent of leaves ripening or grass dying but a mare’s scent, and not the kind of estrus and sex. It is the scent of dawn and dusk, of magic and healing. The kind of scent that love would have if love could have a smell to it. He sniffs again, pulling a deeper headier draught into his lungs until he holds it there for so long that his lungs protest bursting. Not that he’d mind. He’s thought of dying enough just to get one last glimpse, one last touch, one last anything of her.
Now he has it and memory is cruel, but both the wood and autumn are crueler for the trick he thinks they play on him. Instantly he is sour, growing surlier by the moment as he plods down the path that picks its way through the trees and to a clearing. There in the clearing she stands though, and he mistakes her for a mirage at first with the way her wings stretch out in defiance of the open space. “Exist.” he mumbles before he’s even aware the word has left his mouth. There is no synchronicity between brain and throat. He’s said her name and cannot take it back, but he here is speaking to visions of her in the forest when she cannot surely be there.
Her scent is stronger, more alluring. He denies the truth of it as much as he denies the beautiful heartbreaking sight of her. But there he goes, mumbling again to ghosts and loneliness. “You’re not real. You’re not really here.” and there is a forlorn note to his brusque voice as he takes but a single step forward, towards her, towards the only salvation he’s ever known but never said. There was so much he’d always wanted to say to her but never did. His throat always closed up on the words and he choked them back down, knowing that she couldn’t possibly love him the way he loved her.
No - pined for, that is much better than just plain old love. He pined for one look from the eyes that he remembered as stark and emerald. So he takes another step to dispel this cruel enchantment the forest and the dawn have laid on him. Why have they taken up arms against him and used this for their trickery?! His lips draw back from his teeth and he thinks to bite at the vision before him but again her smell hits him and stops him dead - spells don’t have smells and she smells all too real, even gives off a heat that only a horse can. “Are you real?” he whispers, afraid she’s not.
while collecting the stars, I connected the dots. I don’t know who I am, but now I know who I’m not.
She catches it too, that familiar musk. More than damp earth and deep forest, more than the cloy of leaf cover underfoot. Her breath catches in her chest, frozen and still and trapped inside a body that has suddenly forgotten how to work. There is a beat where she does not do anything more than stand there - nothing more than close her eyes and breath it in for the peace it brings her, for the ache it unfurls in her chest like a dark flower born to wither. It more than reminds her of him, it is him, just exactly as she remembers him in her dreams.
Three, four, five seconds she waits for it to fade, waits for the absence of him to undo her again as it has so many days and so many nights before. But the scent lingers. It tangles in her mane and settles in the copper curves of her body, traces the edge of each serrated feather before coming to rest against her skin. "Mandan." She breathes, she breaks, she closes herself off to the ache of him not beside her.
But there is an echo that answers her, an echo in the gravel of his voice (she'd know it anywhere). Exist. Except echoes are for repeating, for mimicking, and that is not the word she spoke.
Those wild emerald eyes fly open, her wings serrating along the edges as they try to understand the rush of adrenaline that pours through her trembling body. "Mandan." She says, so soft and so hoarse, his name a familiar prayer on her lips. He is almost exactly as she remembers, dark and so wild, so beautiful - though, older now, just as she is. But he is the same, he is her Mandan, and she cannot help the quiet smile that etches itself across her mouth when she notices the surly way he scowls at her. Except something is wrong, because he darkens, goes so faded and weary at the edges when all he should be focused on feeling is the heat of her skin beneath his wandering lips.
You're not real. You're not really here.
She is frozen now, fighting to unravel the wild threads of thought that are suddenly tangling in her mind. His name is on her lips again, aching to beckon him closer, to press kisses to his nose and his jaw and the hard line of that beautiful, wild face. Mandan. But all she can do is watch with those emerald-bright eyes as he takes one step to close the distance between them, slow enough for her heart to live and die a thousand aching uncertainties in her chest. Another, and she finds she can hardly bear it.
Are you real? With his lips pulled back in that snarl she remembers so well.
"Are you?" The question is so soft, just the whisper of her wings as they soften and fold to her sides again. But she isn't waiting for him to say, isn't waiting for him to understand this madness he has found in the agony of her absence. "I am real." She closes the distance between them in just a few strides, doesn't pause to give him time to push her away, to tell her no. She is so selfish, so greedy to feel his skin beneath her lips again, to trace the lines on his chest all the way down to the heart that beats inside, a sound so familiar it might break her.
"My Mandan." She says, so gentle and so possessive, ducking her head beneath his neck as she comes to lean against his beating chest. Her lips lift to his chin, touch those dark whiskers and the velvet of the skin beneath, shift higher to trace up along his jaw. He is so much the same - wilder, perhaps more wicked now, but each touch is a memory, the scent of him so familiar. She closes her eyes, rubs the side of her indigo muzzle against the curve of that dark jaw, settles more deeply against him as though it will be enough to turn back time to a point where he might’ve loved her if only she had insisted.
She knows better now, knows what it is to be without him. Knows that it feels like a waste of a life to spend it wanting. “Stay with me.” The words are so soft, as fragile as spun silk, unraveling the moment they’ve left the safety of her mouth. She hesitates, opens her eyes again to touch her lips to the corner of his mouth, to taste the weariness he keeps so well buried in the hollow of his bones and pull it free, to push life back inside him with only a faint flicker of blue between their skin to indicate anything is happening at all. “I don’t want to miss you anymore.” Just a whisper, but she presses it like a kiss to the soft of that weary mouth.
10-03-2018, 04:20 PM (This post was last modified: 10-03-2018, 04:22 PM by mandan.)
One slow stupid blink. Then another.
He’s still disbelieving that it could be her but the longer he stands there with his heart thrown hard against his chest in the morning light, hoping against hope, that it just might be her.
Unknowingly, he’s lived every moment since the last for this one right here. This painfully stark and beautiful and achingly raw moment. It stuns him; he can feel the truth of it scour his bones clean as if their love had been grains of sand fallen from the fingers of time itself. He’s loved her since the moment they met. Even after promising he’d never love again after that first foolish fling his heart had had in his youth.
(it’s taken forever to get over being forgotten by a queen who preferred her kingdom and its king to him. he almost doesn’t feel the sting of it any more)
He is staring breathlessly at skin and hair that is all copper and dark night blue. Remembering: how she smells, how she looks and most of all, how she feels against him. She could become all the food and drink he requires if he could but taste her on his lips one more time. Just one more painfully beautiful time.
(Mandan realizes there is as much pain in loving someone as there is pleasure)
Until she breathes his name into the air —
He shatters from the frozen shock of seeing her there as a thousand emotions run through. Except he holds himself back from touching her - not yet! He’s close but not close enough to let himself do that right yet. Let the slow burn of her just being real sink in a little further. Then he’ll touch. No - too sweet, too simple; he’ll devour her in all the best ways possible.
His name exiting her mouth again and that quiet smile settling in its place is enough to smooth the scowl from his handsome but older face. He’s not yet brought himself to touching her as she throws his question back in his face and a smile tugs at the corners of his gruff lips. It doesn’t matter if either of them is real or not because she insists that they both are the moment she pushes against him a dm sends all his senses reeling out into the ether.
Only she grounds him as much as she makes him spin out of orbit. She claims him in a breathy tone of possession that he fails to shrug off or ignore. The truth of it is too strong and holds him there fast and sure. He can feel every inch of his skin come alive as she reclaims him bit by bit from chin to jawline. Still he’s not let his mouth stray all over her though a hunger to do so builds in him.
She snuggles into him - apricot and indigo to his dark and wild bay - and his resolve crumbles. He noses deep into soft springy mess of her hair against her neck. Giving off small snorty inhales as his lungs fight for her scent to be plastered all over them. Her scent alone could replace air and he’d be just fine, he thinks. His resolve gathers itself again and pulls his face back to hers just as she asks him to stay. This is delicate - a wrong move, a wrong word and everything could be shattered in a heartbeat.
That same heartbeat swells inside him and forces out his answer as her lips find the corner of his mouth and magic happens - her magic. Her particular gift of life and healing that fills him just not as completely as the mere sight of her does or better yet, the press of her against him. “Forever.” he vows instantly in the wake of that small blue flicker and the movement of her lips against his. “Forever,” he promises more vehemently as he drags her closer with his neck until they’re skin to skin and fit snugly together.
“I don’t want to be without you any more.”
He admits, thinking the admission would be painful but it wasn’t. It was liberating and he hid a smile in her hair as he buried his face there until he couldn’t smell the world any more - just her, just his lovely wild Exist.
