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    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


    I see your face in the reflections of the moon; adaline/laura pony
    #1

    It's a bit of a miracle, that he’s still alive.
    By all rights he shouldn’t be, this glassy thing, achingly frail in this body and dreadfully aware of it. Some predator or monster should have made an easy meal of him, or he should have fallen, shattered, pieces of him scattered to the earth.
    (He did die, once, under a wolf-queen’s insane hooves, but powers he doesn’t know brought him back.)
    But he persists, through luck or magic or other powers he doesn’t know. He grows older, though perhaps no wiser, and he survives.
    It’s not much of a life, though. It’s existence, dull and repetitive, and somewhere along the way it became isolated, too. He stopped seeking company, in part from fear (he is so easily destroyed) and in part because he stops finding joy in it.
    He stops doing a lot of things.

    (Does he stop thinking of her? Sometimes. There are hours – maybe even days – when his mind is almost blank. It’s peaceful, to not have his heart twist in that particular way it always has when she crosses his mind.)

    This is a deviation, his trip to the meadow. The crowd, scattered, feels too pressing, suffocating. Yet he had been drawn here, compelled. He doesn’t know why, he knows only that his joints ache from walking so far, paper-thin wings folded to his back.
    He’s waiting. He thinks he’s waiting.

    contagion

    be careful making wishes in the dark



    @[laura] <333
    Reply
    #2

    I'm wasted, losing time; I'm a foolish, fragile spine
    I want all that is not mine; I want him but we're not right

    She has spent so long spiraling out by herself.

    Perhaps it is not surprising that she has finally met the storm that would be her undoing. Perhaps it is not that surprising that her mind has finally shattered. Just the right amount of pressure in the right place and she is made anew and broken apart all at once. The world around her is not her own and yet it is the only one that she has ever known. She breathes in the poison and marvels that she can keep breathing at all.

    She walks until she sees him and when she does, her dual hearts, her greedy hearts, clench in her chest. She wants to run to him. She wants to break her legs until she is crashing into the glass edges of him, letting him cut her open. She wants him in all the ways she never should have; she wants to know that he is the same, that they are the same, and these new memories are false. That she is still Adaline.

    But she restrains.

    She feels these new shackles of a life that is not her own rise up and grab her, leaving her quiet and subdued. She walks to him slowly, wings folding over her back, her pink eyes delicate and wide. When she is near enough, she pauses, aching to reach for him. “Contagion,” she says his name and even that much feels like too much—the heartbreak threatening to rip her delicate body open finally.

    “Did you know that my name is Charity?”

    She asks it suddenly and her face is awash with grief, with confusion.

    “I have a daughter.”

    This is more difficult to admit, more impossible to believe, but she does, she does.

    He had said her name was Charity and, oh, it is so easy to believe it.

    “I don’t remember her.”

    Her face crumples slightly as she closes her eyes, her breath coming in gasps, her slender chest heaving as she tries to find her bearings. “I don’t know what I remember anymore. I don’t know, I don’t know.”

    in the darkness, I will meet my creators
    and they will all agree that I'm a suffocator

    Adaline


    @[contagion]

    HI ILY. she's losing her mind a little it's fine.
    Reply
    #3
    For everything he’s been though, he knows little of madness.
    He’s been near it – loved it, maybe, if that’s what lay in the wicked gleam in the wolf queen’s eye before she lay waste to him. Was it madness? Or was it simply who she was, and he was too blind to see?
    He’ll never know. He doesn’t even know if he loved her – if that’s the word for it – because the feelings are all mixed up in fear and sadness and death, and it’s all muddled, and when he thinks back to that time his chest aches for too many reasons, and there’s no name for it.

    You’d think him an easy target, the way he’s drifted, but he has stayed sane throughout. The idle emptiness is what crept up instead, hours of blankness, and maybe that’s it own kind of madness, those stretches where he cannot remember, winding up in places he has no memory of walking to.
    And he thinks himself mad, for a moment, because surely this is a vision.
    Surely the glass woman who approaches, who looks so like him, whose heart beats in time with is, is a hallucination. A thing sprung forth by a mind that was empty for too long.
    Perhaps this is the end, he thinks, and he only feels gratitude.
    She speaks, and her voice is as clear as her skin, and his very hair stands on end, because he knows his imagination is not so vivid as this, he could not recreate her in such detail.
    “Adaline,” he breathes, saying her name after she says his, except –
    Except she says it’s not.
    Charity, she says, and he blinks, as if she’ll change form now, and this all was a hallucination, and he’ll apologize to the stranger, and be on his way. But she doesn’t. She is perfectly, exquisitely, Adaline.
    “You’re not-” he chokes on the word. He only wants to touch her, whether she’s a ghost or a stranger or a vision.
    “You’re Adaline,” he insists, and whether he’s trying to convince her or himself, he doesn’t know, “you’re Adaline. My sister.”
    Reply
    #4

    I'm wasted, losing time; I'm a foolish, fragile spine
    I want all that is not mine; I want him but we're not right

    He feels so real—so perfectly, achingly real—that the rest almost fades. Her vision almost goes soft and blurry on the edges and her breath nearly catches on the edge of it. She wants to fall into the truth of it and pretend that the rest doesn’t exist; she wants to take it all back and pretend she said nothing at all.

    But she can’t—she can’t, she can’t.

    There is a girl out there (a woman, is she alive?) that is her daughter. She has born children. She has made a family and she can remember none of it. This other life is mapped somewhere across her fractured skin, beating out in the purple of her veins, and she just has to run fast enough to catch it.

    She can’t just turn her back to it now that she knows.

    She can’t. She can’t.

    But he looks at her the way that he always has and her chest tightens. “I had a daughter,” she repeats and her voice is a little stronger even though everything within her wants to curl into herself. “I think that I was loved,” she says and her voice is softer on this—almost too soft to be heard.

    How pathetic for her to clench so tightly to the idea that she would be loved and yet how could she do anything but? All of her life she has been starved for it and then Jarris came with his sad eyes and his bruised heart and he had told her that they had a daughter together. It doesn’t matter that he doesn’t love her now (it does, it does) but the fact that he loved her at all? That he could bring himself to care?

    It is the only thing that she needs to let the hook sink into her heart.

    “Can you believe that?” she whispers, mostly to herself because it is too difficult to look at him, to study the features that she knows so well. “Can you believe that someone would love me?”

    Tears on her delicate cheeks and she shakes like autumn.

    “I’m Charity.”

    in the darkness, I will meet my creators
    and they will all agree that I'm a suffocator

    Adaline


    @[contagion]
    Reply
    #5
    He should have never left her side, he knows, though the circumstances that had separated had been beyond his control.
    Because he can’t argue all her points. He doesn’t know if, in these years, she’s borne children, or loved, or been loved. He doesn’t know what has transpired, what kind of life she’s lived.
    But he knows it’s her. He knows her name because he’s murmured it a thousand times, because it haunts him, follows him. He knows her skin, the odd translucence matched in his, the horrifying delicacy of her existence.
    But how does he convince her of a story to which he only knows part of?
    (Your name is Adaline, and I love you.)

    Her question breaks his heart, because belief isn’t the word for it. He has no need for belief, for faith, because the knowledge of his love for her (however it might manifest – this, he does not delve into) is a bone-deep thing, it was formed in that dead woman’s womb as their limbs tangled inside her, and the love never left. It changed, maybe, took a shape that it shouldn’t, but at the core of it, it’s love, it’s love, because she is Adaline and he loves her and he will always love her.
    But that’s only part of the story.

    “Of course,” he says, “Tabytha loved you. Garbage loved you.”
    Their brief, stupid parents – giving them life only to walk into the ocean and end theirs. But it was love nonetheless.
    “You are so easy to love, Adaline,” he says. As if maybe he could say her name enough that she’d believe it.
    He is close to her but he does not touch her because he does not trust himself, he is shaking and confused and if he started he might not stop, and that is not the point here, the point is she is Adaline and he doesn’t know this other name, Charity, but he knows it’s wrong.
    “Please,” he says, begging, though what for, he can’t say, not really.
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