"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
and I'm the kind of love it hurts to look at, but once I was enough to make you try now, I'm underneath the rubble, trying not to feel the trouble.
He does not wander far.
He is neither curious nor brave.
He has no want to venture anywhere on his own.
He is so careful. Sometimes he shakes with the effort it takes to navigate rough terrain. Because he does not trust the glass not to shatter. Because he does not trust himself not to trip and fall. Because he does not know what will happen should the glass chip or splinter. He does not know how to be fragile except to be careful.
But he does not want to be afraid. He does not want to carry his fear like a marble between his teeth. He wants to be warm like his sister. Soft like his sister. Sometimes he presses his cold, hard mouth against the soft length of her throat and revels in the feeling of life that pulses through her. He touches his mouth to his own chest and feels nothing at all except the cold.
He is staring hard at the ground as they walk now, hip to hip. He catches his tongue between his teeth in concentration as he carefully chooses where to put his feet. He is acutely aware of every peak and valley in the topography as they venture away alone.
“What do you think the world is like?” he asks, distracted. It’s a far away kind of question. A sad one, too. Because he cannot help but feel like his sister will see more of it than he ever will.
I make mountains out of stones and with that timber, burn a hundred fires
Tessa tries to not tell him about her wanderings.
She waits until he is asleep to flare her wings and take to the sky. To test the limits of the muscles that begin to grow lean and strong beneath her dark coat. She waits until he is deep in the ocean of his own dreams to find the skies and the water, skimming over the surface of the ocean and sending the waves arcing over her back and then fluttering next to her in the shapes of all of her wildest fantasies.
Perhaps he notices that she sleeps longer each day.
Perhaps he notices that she sleeps until the sun is nearly hung in the middle of the sky.
But Tessa never bothers to ask. Instead she just smiles and walks with him quietly, content to keep this pace, her wings sore from her exertion last night and tucked over the dark expanse of her back.
She watches him out of the corner of her pink eyes, the only thing she truly inherited from her mother, but she says nothing. She doesn’t go overly slow or pity him for his fragility but just feels the way that her heart expands in her chest with the love she has for him, that fierce protectiveness that flares within her.
At his question, her heart aches to tell him of everything that she has seen so far. To tell him about the way the ocean looks at night—like a poem with its endless blue—and the sea creatures that rise to greet her or the way it feels to soar over a mountain when the dawn has just begun to brush the sky golden.
But she bites her tongue and just frowns a little, rolls her shoulders.
“I imagine it is magnificent,” she says in her silver bell voice. “We’ll see it all together one day.”
and I'm the kind of love it hurts to look at, but once I was enough to make you try now, I'm underneath the rubble, trying not to feel the trouble.
He knows that he holds her back.
He also knows that she is too kind to tell him as much.
But he is grateful for the quiet, patient way she falls into step beside him without him having to ask her to. He is grateful that she is soft and lovely and that she instills a new kind of confidence in him just by walking next to him. He should be her protector. He should rage against whatever injustices befall her, gnash his teeth at anyone who casts a sidelong glance in her direction. Instead, she is forced to protect him. From himself and the world at large.
The silence is thick but not uncomfortable. It settles around him like a warm blanket. It does not occur to him that the heat has anything to do with the season, happy enough to blame it on the warmth that spreads through him any time his sister is near.
She speaks and he nods without tearing his focus away from the ground unfurling ahead of them. He swallows thickly, allows himself to imagine all of the things she will see someday. With her brilliance and her wings and a thirst for life he’s certain she swallows for his benefit.
“I think you’ll see more of it than I will,” he says, quiet. And he’s all right with that, he thinks. Because he can live vicariously through her. He can listen in breathless wonder as she tells him about all of the magnificent things she’s seen. He’ll smile and his heart will swell for her because she deserves it. She deserves the whole world and everything in it.
“I can’t wait to hear your stories about it.” He smiles then, chances a glance at her before he shifts his attention back to the next place he’ll put his feet.
I make mountains out of stones and with that timber, burn a hundred fires
His words are daggers in her breast and she swallows the venom down. She lets the pain take root, and she doesn’t fight against the way that it spreads in her. Because maybe he would be okay with her going and having her own adventures, but it has never stopped the guilt that flourishes in her veins. It has never stopped the way that she feels a stone in her chest when she flees in the middle of the night.
She swallows it down and tries to not imagine all of the different ways she will never forgive herself. The way that she feels more joyous when she flies beneath the moonlight and more sorrow when she returns.
But such things never rise to the surface of her expression because she can feel nothing but the warmth of her love for him consume her. She feels nothing but the way that it spreads through her chest and flutter against her ribcage. “We’ll see as much of it together as we can,” she affirms quietly, reaching over to press the velvet of her nose to the curve of his neck, the sweep of his jaw. The glass is cold to the touch but it reminds her of home, of their mother, and she would never find anything but comfort in it.
They continue to walk side by side and she flares her aching wings and then settles it over her back again.
“There won’t be many stories to tell because you will have experienced all of them.”
She laughs, rolling her shoulders, as they continue.
and I'm the kind of love it hurts to look at, but once I was enough to make you try now, I'm underneath the rubble, trying not to feel the trouble.
He wants to believe her.
So fiercely he wants to believe that some day he will expand his horizons beyond the meadow or the playground where he made a friend once.
But he knows they are nothing more than pipe dreams.
Even if he had the ability to travel, he would never have the courage.
He smiles now and he nods. He allows himself to buy into the fantasy. He and his sister, taking on the whole world. He imagines plunging himself into the sea and sinking like a stone. He imagines clawing his way up the sides of mountains. He imagines galloping, carefree, across vast meadows. He smiles and he believes it. Just for now.
She touches him and he revels in her warmth. The softness of the mouth she presses against the cold edge of his jaw. He closes his eyes briefly before he forces them open again, anxiety twisting in the pit of his gut at the thought of a misstep that might make him shatter.
She laughs and he laughs along. It is not teasing laughter, but mirthful. He laughs and it sounds like relief. They will see the whole world together. He can do anything with her by his side.
He tilts his head, gingerly stepping over a divet in the ground. “The ocean,” he says and he glances up long enough to conjure a small whitecapped wave on the turf in front of them. It crashes into the earth and is immediately gone. He laughs. “Do you think it’s warm or cold?”
I make mountains out of stones and with that timber, burn a hundred fires
He asks her questions that she already knows the answer to.
She knows what the ocean is like because she has spent so many hours testing her youthful limbs while skimming the top of it. She knows it because she discovered her gift with the white caps and the squeal of the dolphins and the storms that turn something so beautiful so dangerous so quickly.
But she cannot confess such things and so she lies, not for the first time.
It is an innocent lie, she tells herself, because it needs to be said.
But it still tastes bitter on her tongue and finds that she hates herself for how quickly it forms there. How easy it is to wave together and how she does not even flinch when she looks at him as she says it.
“I imagine it can be both,” she hedges her bets, even though she knows it best when the cold is bitter and can bite through hair and flesh. “I think if we went right now, it would be sunny and warm.” She tips her delicate head back, her pink eyes closing against the sun that washes over them both.
“We could go and lie on the sand and let it warm us down to our marrow.”
She flinches then, a sudden and passing moment as she wonders if he even has marrow.
Or whether he was glass all the way through.
Smoothing it over, she presses another kiss to his cold cheek.
and I'm the kind of love it hurts to look at, but once I was enough to make you try now, I'm underneath the rubble, trying not to feel the trouble.
He does not allow himself to fall back on his guilt.
He swallows thickly and steels himself against it.
He will not let it consume him, not now.
Now, he will think about lying on the sand and letting the heat warm him from the inside out. It doesn’t matter that the sun is powerless to sink any lower than the glossy surface of his skin – or what’s supposed to be his skin, he thinks. It doesn’t matter that, beneath that surface, he has never been anything but cold. He does not allow himself to dwell or pout because he refuses to rob his sister of this, too.
“That sounds amazing,” he whispers, breathless. Impossible, too, but he feels no overwhelming need to say this. He wants to believe and he wants to let her believe it, too.
He grins, color pooling in his cheeks – a pale pink against the fading copper – when she kisses him. He casts another glance in her direction and nods. “I would go anywhere with you, too, Tessa,” he vows. Even though he knows it’s not true. Even though this is a lie of his own. Because he knows that there are so many places that he will not go. And when the time comes for them to acknowledge that they’d both lied, he knows that he will smile and send her on her way with a heart bursting with pride.
He shifts his focus back to the earth in front of him but a beat too late. He does not see the hole that he steps into up to the middle of his shin. Surprise and primal terror rip a gasp out of his throat and he merely stands there for a moment, staring down at the place where the bottom half of his leg disappears into the earth, too terrified to try to pull it out for fear of what he might find.
