"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 will commit my soul to your door tonight, and I'll last 'til the gas fumes float on higher
All of the fear erupts in her chest and manifest into fury.
Fury at the small, strange boy who now snaps at her, who opens his mouth and sends flames shooting in her direction. It doesn’t matter that he is a child and she is an adult. It doesn’t matter that she should have some level of control here. She feels the heat against her chest and the cold-blooded thing within her nearly snaps with pain and hatred. She clicks her teeth together, vision going thermal, jaw unlocking.
If Beth and her daughter have to see her like this, so be it.
She snakes her head out, snapping her jaws together. “I am the nothing that will devour you whole, little boy.” Her voice comes out cold and vicious and she manages to hold herself together just enough to not sink her teeth into his neck, although the thought does cross her mind. “Come near my daughter again and see how quickly I swallow you and leave nothing but the bones for the birds to find.”
When her daughter speaks up again, she snaps her head toward her, nostrils flaring. “You are doing no such thing, Gospel.” Her voice is cold, finite, and she barely registers that she has lashed out at her father, let alone made contact with him. “Tell your friend that you are saying goodbye and leaving.”
Adna grows still then, her sage green eyes glittering and hard, as she studies her daughter.
“I am not asking this time, Gospel,” her teeth click. “I don’t think you’d enjoy watching me drag you back by your tail, but keep pushing me on it and that’ll be the happy ending you’re begging for."
in a dying love I'm nothing but a stone cold liar but, oh, I got an iron in that fire
do you think God stays in his heaven because he, too, lives in fear of what he has created?
When the woman comes closer, snapping her own teeth, he has the audacity to step closer. Let her bite him. Let her try to pierce the armored scaling of his throat and find how weak she is against him. His smile is all crooked little fangs that peek from behind his lips and he laughs when she says she’ll pick him clean. It thrills him to enrage her, and his giggling comes out with no rhythm or pattern to it. It changes every second like he has no idea how his own laugh should sound. When Gospel is caught in her father’s grasp, his head turns to watch.
His blood boils beneath his skin and flames lick out between his teeth, up his lips and face as he snarls in Bethlehem’s direction. But the girl is quick to kick him and free herself, returning to the boy’s embrace where he hugs her tight with a webbed wing. The woman is commanding against and the dragon child finds the sound of her voice grating, unbearable any longer.
“You are worth less than rat shit,” he spits, watching her heat signature with disgust and curled lips. “I will crush even your memory. Everyone will fear to even whisper your name because I will chew out their tongues for it!”
His thin tail whips back and forth, clawed little feet digging into the dirt as he prepares to face her. He has decided that Gospel belongs to him now, that she is his prize for this entire ordeal, and he is not keen to release his treasure. Ghaul curls his head over her neck and keeps his teeth bared as he watches her parents now. Would they die slow, like Bible, or would they wilt all at once if he tore at their throats? What does a last breath sound like, on the outside?
“Gospel is free now. Get away from us or I swear you’ll die slow and alone,” he says, and the irony is lost on him that she has simply switched hands now. But she is his glittering little jewel, his priceless treasure to keep down in his lair until he’s bored of her. None of the details really matter much at all.
you're capable of such beautiful dreams and such horrible nightmares. you feel so lost, so cut off, so alone, only you're not. see, in all our searching, the only thing we've found that makes the emptiness bearable, is each other.
This is the first time in her young life that her loyalty has been tested.
How fiercely she has worshiped her mother.
Her beautiful, vicious, impossible mother.
A loyal daughter would have kicked herself free, snarled and gnashed her teeth and sunk her fangs into whatever flesh she could find until she’d made her way back to her mother’s side. A loyal daughter would have believed without question that that was where she belonged.
But he makes her feel like a wild thing. A feral thing. And all she feels when he hisses his vile venom at her mother is a faint stirring in her chest. Oh, but how she delights in his darkness! It rips another giddy giggle out of the long column of her throat as he tucks her against his side.
For her, it is a game and she revels in it. The eyes burn as she glances between the two of them – warring over her! Her grin is dark, twisted. Even as her skin quivers with the sticky waxiness of the wing cast across her back. She dips her head, drags her fanged teeth across the scaled surface of his shoulder and swallows down another trembling breath of laughter.
She peers up at her mother as he drapes his head across her neck and she cuts her tongue on her teeth and drips blood from her mouth. Her grin is bloody. She is free!
“Kill him first,” she says, pointedly turning her gaze to shackle it to her father’s. Who stands there so useless and dumb! How dare he come here, as if he could prove anything by being here at all! As if her mother needed him at all. He is staring back at her, a peculiar kind of expression on his face but he does not say anything.
There is nothing to say, Bethlehem knows. He has lived enough to know that the situation will not be diffused with words alone. He is certainly powerless to coax their daughter back to them as she seethes with her hate for him. He is powerless altogether, really, powerless against whatever dark force birthed this boy and it pains him to know his limitations.
But he does not look away from Gospel. Does not glance plaintively in Adna’s direction. He just goes on staring, jaw clenched.
