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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


    i'm just here to fight the fire, plumeria
    #1

    i took the poison praying you'd feel it, too
    i wrapped my neck and prayed that you'd feel the noose


    It had taken him days to get here.
    All he’d wanted was the comfort of home.
    Or, more specifically, the warmth of his mother’s embrace.
    Something he had not longed for in so many years.

    And when he’d arrived, all he’d felt was disappointment. This was not the home he’d left. It was ravaged and changed, but he was, too. He was not the same wayward soul who’d left it. He was no longer the good-natured boy who’d gone in search of something – or someone – some years before.

    There is a darkness in him now. An unshakable sadness. It seems strange that his useless heart should be able to beat beneath the weight of it. Some days he’s surprised that he can move at all.

    He does not what to do but wander around the meadow, the only place he recognizes anymore. He is aimless now, focused only on what it takes to put one foot in front of the other. He does not deserve relief, he knows. Perhaps this is his real punishment – being condemned to living with this for the rest of eternity. And he’s all right with that.

    He happens upon her by accident. The shock that courses through him arrests the air in his chest and he finally gets his answer – the lungs do ache with want when he does not breathe. He staggers toward her,  gasping for breath the same way his sister had. And when he reaches her, the knees finally buckle.

    Mother,” he gasps. He’d know her anywhere. He sucks in a sharp breath and presses his forehead against her knee. “Mother,” he keens, his eyes squeezed shut.

    This is a mercy he does not deserve. That she is still here. That he can collapse beneath the weight of his grief and his guilt at her feet. That he can beg her for forgiveness.


    shattered son of jarris and plumeria
    Reply
    #2
    If she could have sheltered them forever, she would have. If she could have kept every single one of their children from ever feeling pain or fear or loneliness or cold, she would have. She would have harbored all their hurt inside of her own chest, would have carried the weight of their worries on her own shoulders if it meant they didn’t have to feel anything they didn’t want to. She would have held them tight and close for as long as they would have allowed, would have cherished them like the stars they were. 

    But their children had all been born with a little bit of wildness in their veins, some more than others. They scattered like feathers in the wind, and she could do nothing but hope that they might someday find their way back home.

    And so she waited, because it was what she was best at.

    Today she was alone, because Karina and Kade no longer relied on her, and she was never entirely sure where Jarris was. If she felt sorrow because of this, it was well hidden. She tucked it all away into the far corners of her heart, choosing to project serenity rather than melancholy. She had learned long ago that no amount of shed tears could relieve the loneliness, and no amount of pining made time pass any faster.

    But when she catches a storm-cloud gray form coming towards her she cannot deny the elated way her heart jumps. It’s not until the figure is nearly before her that she realizes it’s not him, but, when the recognition washes over her it is just as overwhelming. “Kensley?” She nearly gasps his name, and at first there is a smile that breaks like the dawn across her lips at the sight of her sweet, beautiful son. But whatever happiness had sparked was quickly dampened by the way he crumbles before her, and the sight of him splintering is enough to break her heart clean in half.

    “Kensley,” she murmurs into the top of his head where he kneels, lowering her head to rest her cheek against his neck. “I’ve missed you so much,” she breathes him in, and she cannot help but to wonder where Kennice might be, and already she worries that his distress might have something to do with her. It doesn’t occur to her that it could be Keiran. She just knows that Kensley is who is before her, and he feels ready to collapse in on himself like a dying star. “Tell me what happened,” she whispers as she smooths his forelock with her lips, “let me fix it.”

    P L U M E R I A
    the fight for you is all I’ve ever known
    Reply
    #3

    i took the poison praying you'd feel it, too
    i wrapped my neck and prayed that you'd feel the noose


    He had known in his heart that she was gone.
    That there was no way that she had weathered as many storms as he had – even more than he had – and come out on the other side.

    The relief that surges through him is otherworldly. It is absolutely crippling. It is matched only by the insurmountable grief that pollutes his bloodstream as she speaks his name and kisses his head and treats him with a kindness he no longer deserves.

    His beautiful mother. He has watched her suffer at the hands of his father, watched her smile with all of her brilliant patience when Jarris decided they were worth coming home to. And still, she has lost none of her infinite goodness. And he is so happy to see her that he cannot breathe around it.

    He wants to tell her that he’s missed her, too. But the words get dammed up in his throat and he gasps for air as everything in him splinters and breaks apart. He has not carried the truth long enough for it to have done any real damage other than weigh him down. He has moved slow beneath the unbearable gravity of it but he has deserved it. He has railed against himself, offered himself absolutely no mercy or reprieve. He has thought of nothing else but the fact that he had fought – they had both fought – as hard as he could and it had not been enough to save her.

    He’d failed both Keiran and their mother.

    He pays no mind to the tears that cut dirty rivers down his cheeks when she murmurs to him in that old familiar way, merely lays a cheek against her knee and fights for breath or composure.

    Keiran,” he chokes out, the first time he’s said the name since the moments after it had happened or ended. When he’d touched his mouth to her temple and whispered it and felt his heart clench like a fist in the center of his chest when silence followed.

    Keiran,” he coughs, “she’s gone.


    shattered son of jarris and plumeria
    Reply
    #4
    At first she cannot begin to fathom what could have struck down her sweet Kensley like this. She can’t wrap her mind around there being something so tragic and terrible that he would fall apart at her feet, but she knows that if such a thing exists, she is afraid of what it might be. She is afraid, because if it can break him, she is sure it can break her, too, and she isn’t sure how much more she can take. Her heart is a spider web of hairline fractures, and she is waiting for the day that something sends it shattering.

    It won’t take much, of that she is certain.

    His head rests against her knee, and her lips continue to trace the familiar curve of his face, gently brushing away the tears. And then he says Keiran’s name, and almost immediately, that fractured heart of hers stops. “Keiran?” She repeats her daughter’s name, and the way she says it sounds so innocent, almost naive, as if there could be some other reason that he was bringing her up. Keiran, her pretty copper colored girl who had looked so much like herself. Keiran, who had inherited all of her sweetness and happiness and somehow managed to avoid all the heartaches and hardships that had gradually dulled her own shine.

    Keiran was suppose to everything she could never be, and Plumeria had always held a secret hope that she had succeeded.

    “She can’t be gone,” her voice is but a whisper now, and she doesn’t realize that she has pulled her face away from his so that her dark, watery brown eyes could search his. “That isn’t possible, Kensley. She’s…” She’s immortal, is what she means to say, but there is a hard ache lodged in her throat, the kind that promises to dissolve into tears. “What happened?” She manages to gasp between the pain in her throat, and the tears finally escape down her face.

    P L U M E R I A
    the fight for you
    is all I’ve ever known
    Reply
    #5
    ( i swore the days were over of courting empty dreams
    i worshipped at the altar of losing everything )

    She can’t be gone.
    But she is.
    He’d seen her.

    His beloved sister, bled dry as he’d succumbed to his rage. As he’d gritted his teeth and then let out a guttural scream, a sound carved out of the darkest corner of his soul. (He has chosen to believe it was the sound alone that had splintered the tiger’s edges and then shattered them because he is not ready to confront the possibility of magic just yet).

    He knows that the word that gets swallowed up by all of her grief is immortal. And how can he  explain to his mother that he’d kissed his sister’s head and caught her blood on his tongue and then felt the gold in his own veins.

    He struggles to pick himself up off the ground, staggers to his feet, a pathetic child in the face of his mother’s pain. The knowledge that it is his fault, that he is the one who has brought her to ruin, compounds the ache in his chest.

    He drags in a shuddering breath, chokes out his apology. “I’m sorry,” he coughs, pressing his eyes tightly closed. “Mother, I’m so sorry,” he whispers, the words stilted by the vise tightened around his throat. He swallows thickly in an effort to loose it, but it remains.

    What happened?
    What happened?
    What happened?

    He forces his eyes open because he will not be a coward. He will look his mother in the eye. “It was my fault and I’m sorry.” Oh, how fiercely he wants to look away! So that he will not have to look into the face of his mother’s pain and let it erode him from the inside. “I went to see her and I was followed and I don’t… I don’t know how it happened, but I couldn’t save her and I’m sorry.

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