"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
Delicate things are pretty - cute, even, but you are not delicate. You are wild and lewd and unpredictable. You are breathtaking. You are beautiful.
Oh dear. She seems to have gotten herself turned around again. Quite by accident. It’s tricky, this time thing. Subtle and shifting and, well, not quite straight. It had started ages ago (or was it only yesterday? Hard to keep track sometimes), when she’d tried to escape Taiga. And that horrid magicians sticky fingers. He’d tried to keep her there, but she is not made to be kept. She is made to be free and roam and see everything. She is meant for the world, not one small, greedy man.
But, well, she hadn’t gotten it quite right. Practice, she keeps telling herself. All it will take is practice. So she keeps trying.
She’d lost the twins somewhere in there. She only wishes she could find where. Now, before you go start thinking she’s a horrible mother, they had been rather rambunctious little babes. Always wandering too far off and exploring things they shouldn’t. Besides, they’d been old enough to fend for themselves by the time she’d, erm, misplaced them. Though, truth be told, she thinks little Emerald had something to do with it. Her pretty green girl seemed to have the habit of making things go a little wonky. She couldn’t blame her, of course. She’d been born that way (and, well, Giohde isn’t quite aware enough of her own faults to consider that it might very well have been her).
She’d find them. Soon. Hopefully. But at least they’re together, she thinks.
Suddenly, the air pops around her and she stumbles into the stunning vista of brilliant rose hues and satin yellows of a morning sunrise. A rather beautiful one, she thinks, pausing to admire the lovely horizon. She blinks (three eyes, though she has long since forgotten her oddity. Until someone comes along to remind her, though she would hardly mind. She rather enjoys it, truth be told) before peering around the meadow, a sigh escaping her as she does so. It’s summer, the grasses long and swaying in a slight breeze, the faint scent of warmth and sun and dust lingering in the air.
The real question however, is when? It’s easy to lose track, you see. Regrettably easy. Perhaps one of these days she’d get it straight.
He risks it all by coming here today; exposure and his own self-proclaimed omnipotence (a facade, a fallacy at best) unravelling in a sea of blood and groans should the contagion take hold of him. Today, however, he feels like gambling; testing theories he ought to leave well enough alone. There is something about the danger in it that attracts him (like a manic, seeking out another high before the fall). Or, perhaps, he is more simply pouting — reeling from the cold and quiet assaults of one small mare who shouldn’t affect him in the ways that she seems to. One small mare who somehow has become an ideogram for all of the rejection and adversity that life had thrown him that then, over the years, putrefied and festered like rot under his skin and left him gangrenous.
The latter seems more likely.
The meadow is still quiet, and sleepy. There are no songs spilling out of the heavy boughs of oak and maple trees yet, and while a gentle breeze combs through the long-grass and thistles like waves of an ocean its beauty is lost on Elektrum, who breaks the stalks of wildflowers as he trundles carelessly through beds of the wild things. Even as the fragile morning light drapes across him like a veil, and refracts off the silvery strands of his mane and forelock as they play in the wind he does not stop to wonder about the magic of these quiet moments.
He is a god, isn’t he?
He’s seen a thousand sunrises more extravagant than this one. There are worlds that exist with so many different scales and types of them, some with a brilliant kaleidoscope of colours, others still with multiple suns. It can’t be his fault that earth became so much uglier when you saw so much more. And so here he waits, a festering sore amidst the striking scenery, until the distinct crackle of atoms splitting echoes in the silence and then on the breeze comes the smell of sweat on her skin tangled with something he knows and appreciates better than wildflowers and sunrises; time.
As soon as the sigh escapes her lips he is beside her, in his wake a desperate mess of broken stalks and weeping flowers, bolder with every breath he takes.
“I see you,” he says, intentionally vague. These are the kinds of things he loves. Let her interpret what he is seeing, be it the bend of her hips, her unusual character flaws (the eyes, he notes with a pang of disgust), or the way she dabbles with time like they are old friends. Let her wonder what he knows that she thinks is secret. Let her think him as powerful and eternal as the tides, or magnificent, like the mantarays who hunt bioluminescent krill in the night through waters so lightless and without end that it looks as though they’re flying through the cosmos swallowing stars, unconstrained by the trivial and mortal matters of gravity or physics.
Because, in a way he is.
It’s a shame that she is not meant for safekeeping, or one small, greedy individual.
It’s a shame that she has fled one danger to find herself before another.
Delicate things are pretty - cute, even, but you are not delicate. You are wild and lewd and unpredictable. You are breathtaking. You are beautiful.
She has never been terribly aware of the danger she always somehow manages to place herself in. It never occurs to her that she had even put herself in harm’s way until it is far too late. It is the way of things, for this who think too much of themselves, isn’t it? But then, she has always been particularly good at squirming out of tight spots. A rather unique ability of hers, even before she had become a master of time (well, perhaps master is too strong of a word, but you’ll never convince her of that).
Still, no matter how much she might believe otherwise, she is not truly infallible.
There had always been a wanderlust that ached inside her soul, something she hadn’t realized unfulfilled until she had begun to meddle with the ringing echoes of time that allowed her access to things she’d never thought possible. But once you’ve had a tiny taste, it’s never enough, is it? Even now she’s realizing this. So oblivious in some ways but far too insightful in others. She thinks perhaps this could be as much a prison as the magician’s grasping fingers had been. A slave to her endless desire for more. But she tries not to dwell too hard upon it. It’s a rather depressing thought, after all. And she doesn’t care for depressing thoughts.
She is distracted from the loveliness of the sunrise by the man that had crashed almost heedlessly beside her, crushed flowers and bruised grass the only evidence of his passing. She blinks at him, unafraid. Foolishly perhaps, but there is too much curiosity, too much acceptance for her to know fear. She had known it once, and it had been a fleeting thing. She does not care for fleeting things either.
“I see you too,” she replies easily, finding nothing terribly odd in his greeting. She should, of course. But then, she has always been exceedingly odd herself. It would take a great deal more for her to take note of it’s abnormality. She had been born for the unusual and strange and unseen in the same way that he had been born for time and space. “Am I not supposed to?”
And now he is close enough to feel the heat as it radiates off her skin before it’s lost somewhere between the dew and morning mist, close enough to do with her what he wanted if he only chooses to want it. The knowledge alone is enough to carve the beginnings of a rakish grin of satisfaction across his lips and through his otherwise solemn expression. It’s always been the feeling of control that he liked best, and so in these few quiet seconds he flexes the hard line of his jaw as he admires his own good standing while thinking that the way his face hardens with every clench must make him look even more commanding, and powerful, and in control. How long, he wonders, before she realizes that she’s in the presence of greatness?
They are parallel in more ways than one.
He wasn’t always what he is now. Power, control, was in its own way a blossoming contagion. Once he was only a boy damaged by the ruin that was his mothers’ love story. All he had wanted then was his family made whole, his life made stable — but he kept wanting. He wanted and wanted and wanted, and took and took and took until the things that had meaning once lost it; until he wanted everything and nothing was enough. It became a vicious cycle and a self-fulfilling prophecy and here he is now: A god and a wreck all at once.
I see you, too.
He can tell by the way that she says it (obtusely oblivious) that she doesn’t. She can’t see the staccato hum of power that reverberates through every inch of muscle and fat on his body. She can’t smell that he, too, reeks of time and worlds and dimensions. If she could, he assumes, her mouth would be wide agape with her wonder instead of the straight underscore he sees now.
Am I not supposed to?
Here he smiles, and then he tilts his head as though in careful consideration of her question though every piece of him already knows the answer (not that he will oblige her with it, though). Glossing over her question Elektrum shakes out his silver mane with the casual swing of his head and a few minutes of silence he allows to span between them until he is ready.
“What can you do?” he says, turning his interest now towards the extra eye nestled in along her forehead, nearly hidden by unruly wisps of forelock that fall across it here and there. In spite of his ego there are parts of him that yearn to know why she wears time like perfume, dotted carefully against all her pulse points. Perhaps she would be useful to him.
