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  • Beqanna

    COTY

    Assailant -- Year 226

    QOTY

    "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


    let me steal this from you now, nev pony
    #1
    i'd break the back of love for you.
    She hasn’t been home since the Chamber welcomed her as its queen and devoured her gift as an offering. But this would always be home, the place she came crawling back to when she couldn’t find herself anymore. Her heart aches for Kerrigan but she knows it’s only a matter of time before the twins find each other in a grateful embrace once again. For now, she has to bide her time and keep herself busy doing… who knows. Something will come along.

    She slithers along, forked tongue sampling the air with her dark green head weaving through the meadow grasses. The moon casts a glowing light that shimmers across the smooth scales of her long body until she begins to change. Her coat erupts from beneath the scales and her legs unfold from her spine until she’s walking, head held a little too high. A few scales remain scattered across her skin like freckles though they gather mostly down the curve of her spine or the angles of her cheek bones. She blinks and her pupils return to normal.

    She tastes the air one last time before her tongue remains inside her mouth as it should. Khuma has switched between each of her shapes so often that she sometimes forget what she actually looks like. She’s almost got it right today, though, as her bay overo coloring takes over her body. The serpent girl is just below average height, petite and delicate to anyone who might be so foolish as to trust appearances. Her doe eyes have never managed to betray the callous girl behind them.

    She blames each of her parents. Her father was as cold-blooded as her while Anadil was about as loving as a brick wall. The only kindness she ever found in herself was when Tatter gave her a son, when being a mother was her entire world. A slow sigh escapes her but she says nothing. She knows her boy had to leave the nest some time.

    It smells like it might rain soon.
    khuma.
    Reply
    #2
    wane

    Wane watches the skies grow even darker with the promise of rain. He breathes the smell of ozone deep, as though he is keeping it all for himself. Like Lanai, he loved the rain, so when the first drops of it fall from swollen clouds above him he doesn’t shy, or head to leave. He feels the rain on his back as it does what it can to erode holes in the skin that it finds there and leave it aching, and he blinks softly through the drops of water that bead and fall from his dark eyelashes.

    And then he sees her.
    Or rather, it at this point, slithering through the moonlight a brief distance ahead.

    He watches her transformation with vague interest, snickering quietly to himself when her forked tongue makes one final appearance. When it is over he sighs breathes deep one final taste of ozone in the quiet, and moves himself across the meadow towards her. The scales might have, in separate circumstances than these,  meant that she didn’t fall into his usual archetype. However, the meadow was empty tonight, and then again, it had always been a rather broad category anyways.

    He could thank his father for that - his unfaltering love of women. 

    While Texas had fathered more than his share of children, he hadn’t raised any. Wax and Wane had held the privilege of joining him on that particular adventure. The effects were not devastating, but as expected; Wane grew up with an affinity for pretty things, and an ego large enough to withstand more than a few knock-downs.

    “Hey,” he says, casually sidling up next to her as though they are old friends.

    If he were smarter he might offer her some distance, it being well past midnight and all. Instead, the space between their bodies is minimal, and he can almost feel the heat off her skin. He gestures, then, by swinging his head toward the scales, illuminated by the moonlight, gathering at the base of her spine, only half-heartedly discovering the slope of her hips as he does so, and says:  

    “You missed a spot.”



    @Khuma
    Reply
    #3
    i'd break the back of love for you.
    Khuma never learned how to give her heart away and she never felt the need to start. Why bother when she could keep it close and keep it safe within her own breast? What could anyone offer her that she doesn’t already have on her own? The girl is convinced that no one can show her a life any better than the one she has now and so it isn’t worth the risks to change things up. Being delicate and kind is a sort of weakness that she despises and so she remains content with her solitary predator life.

    But she likes to pretend.

    She turns her head when he speaks and she blinks slow like a housecat signaling its affection to its owner. Other may sidestep from such an invasion of personal space but she does the opposite. Khuma bridges the gap and presses her side to his when he gestures at the scales marking the perfect slope of her spine. At the meeting of their bodies, a shiver runs down her spine and it is marked by a ripple of scales across her skin that quickly give way to her splashed coat again. Her chin tucks low in feigned meekness. She watches him through long eyelashes when he speaks again. A half-hearted laugh escapes her like she’s somehow embarrassed by the markings.

    (They are a warning, a caution sign of what she is within.)

    How silly of me,” she says with a smile like summer nights. Her voice is hushed as though she dare not disturb the rhythm of the rain on their skin. Still, hearing her speak is like trying not to drown in a river too swift to swim in. It seemed fine at first but now the current has a hold and it’s too late to hope for the shore. May god be merciful enough to allow at least a few more seconds above the surface.

    I’m Khuma. Who are you?

    Her voice is so sweet you could almost lick the honey of it from her lips. Briefly, she thinks of tearing out his throat because his voice is too much like home, like Father. But she reminds herself she needs practice before she tries to worm her way back into society and so she keeps her fangs hidden away for now. Kerrigan would roll her eyes to see her sister up to her old ways despite the times.
    khuma.
    @[Wane]
    Reply
    #4

    maybe you were the ocean

    When he had approached, Wane had not carried with him many expectations. But her gestures (the slow blink of her eyes to let him recognize how endless they are, the way that she intentionally moves against him so that he can feel the burn of her skin against his, how she watches him, softly, from underneath her dark eyelashes) are exaggerated, if not formulaic, and for a moment they do leave him considering the ease of this interaction. Wane, however, is not overly complex. He is just self-involved enough to recognize that the opposite sex have always come easy to him, and so rather than question her motives long he instead plays right into the palm of her hand, assuming (as he is apt to do) that today he is just more charming than usual.

    So, when she addresses (no, coos) her embarrassment and tells him her name, and everything is punctuated by an appropriate giggle, or sigh, or raspy breath, he does not linger on it long and obligingly cranes his head to gingerly lip at the soft patch of skin behind her ears for a moment or two. The reality is that in this meeting she’s proving much smarter than he is, or in a twist of irony and despite her scales, more evolved.

    “Wane,” he answers when she asks, grinning into the eyes of a viper.

    The rain around them sounds like static in the otherwise silent meadow. It’s heavier now, and water pools and collects at his feet so that when he shifts his weight and cocks a heel the newly dampened earth squelches here and there while sucking at the bottoms of his hooves. There was something violent about a spring storm; the way the rain could barrel down to hit the petals of wildflowers and knock them from their stems into the earth, how it could change the ground itself by boring trenches into it. It made him feel powerful - sent something ancient burning through his veins.

    He wonders if she’s come to revel in the feeling, too.
    He decides to ask.

    “Why are you out here alone?”

    The sentence itself is clumsy, full of insinuations that certainly are not applicable in her case. But Wane, effortless and egotistical all at once, doesn’t seem to notice his faux pas, or if he does isn’t dwelling on it even a second.

    Wane
    and i was just a stone


    @[Khuma]
    Reply
    #5
    i'd break the back of love for you.
    She used to be so soft and delicate, so trusting that the world wanted only the best for her. Khuma wandered freely and laughed so hard it hurt her cheeks. Sometimes she even kissed Tatter on the cheek. God, her cheeks used to burn so hot after and she felt so embarrassed to reveal her emotions. But then, one day, fate stopped smiling upon her as a favored child. It turned its attentions to another and left the snake girl to drift through the rest of her life alone. Her sister and her king were gone.

    And so she watched life pass by.
    She picked apart the gestures of those more fortunate than herself.

    These days she’s nothing but a patchwork of all the wretches she’s ever envied, stitched together with a callous sort of disregard for others. Even now she’s pinning the pieces of Wane to a corkboard like an insect. Later, she’ll pick her favorite parts and add them to the monster she’s become and leave him as a fraction of who he was before. But for now she’s got to drag her fingers through the thick of him so she can dig up all those tender areas he thinks he keeps hidden.

    Wane,” she breathes softly. Her voice is all lilac and lavender, sleepy and smooth by the time it leaves her lips despite the rain. But then he’s offering up a question for her to consider and she smiles like a naïve girl fresh into adulthood, like the girl she used to be. “I’m not alone if we’re together.

    Already, it’s ‘we’ and she sidesteps his question with all the grace of a practiced prima ballerina. He doesn’t need to know that she was on the hunt before he stumbled across her and she has no intentions of telling him. Instead they are now one and her smile is the sunshine the meadow is missing in the midst of the storm.

    Where do you live, Wane?” she asks with a light tilt of her white and red head. She wants to follow him to where ever there are more like him, more faceless bodies to take from. On to the next already, then the next and the next. Khuma forces the innocence into her eyes as a veil over the clinical emptiness with which she regards him. To anyone who trusts appearances, her pupils dilate as a sort of love begins to blossom. To anyone who’s ever seen a predator, it’s the beginning of the hunt.
    khuma.
    @[Wane]
    Reply
    #6

    maybe you were the ocean

    Wane’s life has always been comparatively easy. It read like a storybook, because Texas and Lanai loved each other. They had loved him and his twin sister, Wax - likely, still did. They’d had equal hand in raising their children, and although some may have questions some of their father’s lessons of choice, he had been a rock, an island, for them. There were no earthquakes. Nothing split them into halves, or shattered them into pieces. Wane hasn’t suffered. He hasn’t endured trauma, by any stretch of the word - in fact, Wane is quite likely as sheltered as they come.

    Which in part is why he can’t see her for what she is.

    But it doesn’t mean that he doesn’t have his own defense mechanisms; walls he’s built stone by stone from misplaced laughter and jokes that sometimes felt more like barbed wire. He didn’t often think beyond his own needs and wants, and his sense of morality was borderline at best. So if she is choosing pieces of himself, which is she deciding to keep?

    Let her have them, then, if there are any she likes, because with the way she says his name next he wouldn’t have cared anyways.

    “Wane,” she breathes.

    The meadow is suddenly hushed, because he likes the way his name sounds on her tongue; like she’s savouring it, drawing out every letter as though they are flavours she can taste individually. She’s feeding him lines like delicacies, and he’s a glutton, leaning into her body, silently thanking her for taking the time to spit venom in his direction.

    And maybe it’s the violence in the rain that makes him reckless, or the way she lets him nibble at the soft patch behind her ears still, but just like that she has him. He isn’t willing to admit it, to say it aloud - but it’s there, in the simple lines of his body, in the nothing-space between their skin. He has found his match, he thinks.

    He’s never met a monster before.

    When she asks where he lives he lifts his lips from her ears, watching for shivering chains of glittering scales. It’s likely she wouldn’t like the real answer - that he is a nomad, that there is no power to take, nothing to leech from. Wane doesn’t know this, of course, and so he answers earnestly.

    “With you, I think.” A joke, paired with a smile that oozes charm like she oozes disease. He is definitely more charming than usual today.

    “Although I’ve been spending some time in Nerine. You?”

    Wane
    and i was just a stone


    @[Khuma]
    Reply
    #7
    i'd break the back of love for you.
    She nearly purrs as he continues to kiss and tease at the soft skin behind her ear but the sound never escapes her throat. Khuma is never one to show appreciation because then he might think she’s satisfied with just this. What a terrible lie that would be. But then he stops once she asks her question and the little circle of skin is cold, immediately met with rain in his absence. The scales rise from her skin to protect the area from absorbing more rain before she brushes them away.

    Inside, his joke ignites a burning rage that has slumbered quietly for ages. How dare he not allow her a new kingdom to infest. But still she smiles and even leans her head against him as though he’s paid her a compliment of the highest order. She listens to the delicate rhythm of his heart while he mentions Nerine. Behind her eyes, she imagines tearing that heart from him. The meat is too tough to enjoy, she knows, but she wants to ruin that perfect piece of him all the same.

    Maybe we could stay in Nerine together then,” she says against his neck. The words are like spun sugar, so sweet and fragile that even the air might weight them down. Her lips find his cheek then but the kiss doesn’t inspire any warmth within her as Tatter had. Still, she seemingly laughs at herself and turns her face from him all shy and coy.

    Khuma supposes that if Nerine doesn’t serve her purposes then she can leave in the dead of night. Wane is warm, though, and she knows winter is looming in the distance. A snake left in the snow will never survive. But never mind all those worries and what if’s for now, she thinks. Today she will just have to see where life takes her and how she can twist it all to her advantage. The cruel lines of her true smile – sharp and cold – ease across her face then as she continues to face away from him.

    Take me home with you, Wane,” she says when she finally turns back to him and presses her cheek to his neck once more. “Keep me forever.

    A heartless joke, to let him think he could own her. But God, don’t they love it when she says it?
    khuma.
    @[Wane]
    Reply
    #8

    maybe you were the ocean

    The rain is building cities on their bones; empires rise and fall in the time that they stand with it beating down across their backs. Wane would stand here happily watching civilizations for eternity if it meant that she would always swing her hips the way that she is doing now. “Maybe we could stay in Nerine together then,” she croons, and if he’s honest with himself he’ll admit he isn’t really listening while he nods along in encouragement.

    She’s saying words against his skin, weaving futures for the two of them, but the poetry of her body touching his is louder. It’s a mistake he’ll learn soon enough, because her show is spectacular, and she tangles him up in it before he ever knows what’s happening when she says:

    “Take me home with you, Wane. Keep me forever.”

    The truth is that he would let her teach him lessons in anatomy, or biology; that he likes the curve of her hips, and the slow cadence of her voice, and absolutely the feel of her lips signing morse code against his skin - but he doesn’t want to keep her forever. It isn’t in his nature to keep anything for long. Like his father (at least in his youth), he much preferred a catch and release program.

    So here, in the pouring rain, with her lips against his body and her dark eyes, full of expectation, gazing up at him from the bottoms of her long eyelashes, he finds himself in an uncomfortable predicament. He is much too charming today.

    For a moment he lets an uncomfortable silence fall between them while he navigates the maze of his brain trying to work out a reason that they could not actually live together forever, but then a gentle breeze smokes itself through the meadow then, and on it comes a single yellow maple leaf, and the clean, crisp hint of fall (and with that all the promises that autumn with a woman brought).

    He could make this work.

    “After you,” he says, gesturing with his nose to the meadow’s edge that he had come from. At least he could enjoy the view on the way to what was surely bound to be an inevitable disaster.

    Wane
    and i was just a stone


    @[Khuma]
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