"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
It is the burning she remembers most vividly.
How it had felt like death, even before she was alive.
She dreams about it sometimes. How it had paralyzed her sometimes and other times it had spurred her into a frenzy. She had kicked and writhed and opened her mouth to scream but no sound ever came out.
And then she had tried to touch her mother once in the after. While her mother slept and she had come away burned again and the way she cried out had awoken her mother. How it had made her mother cry and her mother’s sorrow had become her own. Carved out all the space in her chest until she could barely breathe around it.
When she had begun to cry, too, her mother had thought it was the pain that made her cry.
She feels everything, the child. Even things she doesn’t want to feel.
She feels their grief and their anger and their boundless happiness.
Sometimes she wonders which things are hers.
Her mother lingers in the meadow now. Astra can taste her mother’s hope like it has sprung from her own chest. And she almost asks what they are waiting for, but she doesn’t want her mother to be sad again, so she doesn’t.
She just wanders as far as her mother will allow, which isn’t all that far. Because there is something different about them but she never says what it is. Sometimes she can feel a sharp spike of her mother’s fear for no reason at all. Guilt, too. Remorse so potent that sometimes she thinks she’ll choke on it.
She is drawn now by something she has never felt before. She cannot determine if it is good or bad. If she should be scared or relieved. If she even knows how to be any of these things on her own.
“Hello?” she calls into the shadows at the edge of the forest, squinting into the darkness.
08-19-2020, 07:33 PM (This post was last modified: 08-19-2020, 07:33 PM by Ridiculous.)
ridiculous
Do I make you laugh?
He was at it again, trying to control his gift. He shifted backwards, he shifted forwards, but he could never seem to shift to exactly where he wanted to be. Sometimes he stood moments before the time he wanted to, sometimes he stood hours away from the time he wanted. And time never seemed to stand still for him, even though he tried.
He stood in the Meadow, practicing his gift of time manipulation, not caring who is around him or watching. Well, that’s not true. There were several moments where someone appeared very near to where he was practicing, and every time he screwed up, he could feel his embarrassment growing, and if he were not already a shade of red, perhaps his face would have shown his mortification.
It was during a shift back in time that it happened. He was aiming for the moment when everyone’s backs had been turned, three times prior, about half an hour later than when he stood now. He shifted only an hour and a half off, further forward in time than he had previously been. With a pop, he landed in the future, right on top of the small filly. He scrambles to move his large, gangly figure off of her, both startled and deeply ashamed. This time, perhaps his face did reflect the embarrassment he felt at having landed physically on top of someone.
He scrambles a matter of feet away, stammering out apology after apology. "I’m sorry, I’m sorry. Oh gods, I’m sorry. Sorry, sorry, I’m so sorry!" He hangs his head and casts a wary glance over at the very small figure that he must have practically crushed with his overly large form.
She cries out in pain, her knees buckling under some enormous pressure. She squeezes her eyes shut, though she doesn’t know why. The ground is unforgiving, but so is the thing she is trapped under.
And she feels fear, so potent that she knows it must be hers. It swells up so dangerously in her chest that, for a moment, she thinks that this is what’s preventing her from drawing breath. She does not understand what it means to be crushed or all the way the body responds to it.
She’s never known pain like this before. A dull ache rather than sharp-white throb.
But then the pressure is gone and she can suck in a world-swallowing breath and scramble to her feet. Her first instinct is to run, but she can taste his remorse and his embarrassment. It curdles in her throat. It keeps her rooted in place.
For a moment it’s all she can do to drag in several large breaths, panting, chest heaving. She opens one eye slow, peering at him with a narrowed gaze.
“It’s okay,” she whispers, though she’s not certain it is. She knows that the embarrassment belongs to him and it tastes sour on her tongue. “It’s okay,” she says again and then swallows thick.
“We’re okay,” she adds and then nods before forcing both eyes open.
Now that he was standing away from her, he could see that she was a tiny little thing, and that made him feel even worse. She says “it’s okay,” twice, but it does nothing to make him feel any better. Perhaps if he’d known that she could feel every ounce of his embarrassment and shame, he might have forced himself to feel a bit better about it just to make her feel better, but nope, that isn’t the case. So he continues to feel completely ashamed.
She says “we’re okay,” and that seems to calm him down ever so slightly, but the embarrassment is still there. Even though she had already said that “we” are okay, which clearly includes herself, he still asks, "are you okay?" He sputters out.
He shifts uncomfortably from hoof to hoof, almost dancing, weaving his head back and forth. But he is not good at dancing. In fact, he is clumsier than a drunk skunk. So when his legs accidentally cross over each other, he manages to lock them up and trips himself so he falls flat on his long face. His weight hits the ground with a loud crash and the ground shakes ever so slightly beneath her hooves.
He scrambles back to his hooves, and once again, his embarrassment and shame is back in full force. He tries to laugh, but the sound has the high frequency that usually only girls could achieve, and sounds almost like a yelp. "Haha! Haha! Did you see that? I’m so clumsy."
She wishes he would calm down.
His embarrassment is so potent that she’s almost choking on it.
She struggles to breathe around it when he asks if she’s okay and it’s all she can do to nod. She is too thoroughly distracted by his emotion that she can’t even conjure up a reassuring smile. A smile that might say look, no harm done. A smile that might soothe his troubled nerves.
Instead, it is a vicious cycle of her trying desperately to catch her breath around his emotions in her throat. She grimaces at them and immediately worries that her expression might be misconstrued for pain, that this might compound his feelings.
She shuffles away from him a few steps, testing to see if wedging some distance between them will bring her some relief. And it does, somewhat. Until his legs get all tangled up and he falls and his emotions come back even stronger. He laughs, a nervous sound, and she tries to laugh along but finds that she can’t. She just swallows thick and shuffles away a little further.
“It’s okay,” she says again, keeps saying even though it hadn’t made a difference the first few times she’d said it. “It’s okay.”
She drags in a desperate breath. “Please, it’s okay.”
08-24-2020, 06:12 PM (This post was last modified: 08-24-2020, 06:13 PM by Ridiculous.)
ridiculous
do you think I’m funny?
She wishes he would calm down, but he does anything but, as he trips over himself and falls on his face. And, of course, being a male, he fails to recognize the agony that the young filly is in as he continues to shed embarrassment in droves, which she promptly chokes on. First he crushed the breath from her lungs, and now he chokes the breath from her lungs. What a ridiculous creature he was. Always living up to his name.
She continues to mumble out the words “it’s okay,” and he tries to tell himself that it is, indeed, okay, but the embarrassment is strong in this one. He shuffles a few steps away from her (hopefully this would help, though it isn’t his intent), and thankfully, this time, doesn’t trip over his own hooves.
After a moment, he begins to calm down. That’s the great thing about time, is it heals all wounds. Okay, maybe the trauma he had inflicted on this one would take quite a bit of time to heal. After a moment, though, he lets out a deep sigh of relief that it’s all over with and looks over at the little thing. "Are you okay?" he asks, then ”I’m Ridiculous.” He realizes that she might misunderstand that this is his name and adds, ”I mean, my name is Ridiculous, but I guess I am a bit ridiculous.” He chuckles at his own joke.
She can feel the embarrassment leach out of him.
To distract herself from the way it tightens like a vise around her throat, she imagines that she can see it running in rivers down his legs. Sinking into the ground, moving swiftly away from the both of them.
And, before she knows it, she can breathe again. Tentatively at first, as if afraid to trust her lungs not to spasm and reject the air. And then deeper, when she is certain that her ribcage will not retaliate. The relief belongs to her only for a moment, though, because she is rather quickly flooded with his relief, too.
She nods in response to his question. Even summons up a shy, slanted smile to accompany it. Better now that she can breathe on her own, now that he’s calmed down and her temples are not throbbing with his embarrassment.
“That’s not a very nice name,” she says, though the faint furrow in her brow when she says it is born more from concern than ridicule. “My name is Astra.”
She tilts her head, nudges her nose in his direction but doesn’t move any closer. “Why is your name Ridiculous?”
09-03-2020, 07:17 PM (This post was last modified: 09-03-2020, 07:19 PM by Ridiculous.)
ridiculous
do you think I’m funny?
”That’s not a very nice name.” The words ring in his ears, and he draws back slightly. Not a nice name? He chuckles softly at this. ”I guess I can see where you are coming from, but personally, I like the name. I think it suits me quite well, as I am a bit ridiculous. Like, one time, I was practicing my time manipulation, and I managed to get stuck in a time stream, jumping forward hour by hour until I landed about a hundred years in the future!” He laughs at himself. ”And then, to make matters worse, I fell into the river and couldn’t get back out. When I did, there was a fishy-mare-thing watching me with her foal and she called me food! Can you believe it? Me, food?!? I bet I’d taste rather bitter and harsh. Or at least I’d hope I would taste bitter and harsh, because I don’t want no one eating me! But anyway, when I went to walk away, I fell into the river, again, and the fishy-mare-thing came after me, but then saved me when she realized that I had time manipulation, which was a gift of hers as well! He laughs at himself, again.
She introduces herself, and he tilts his head slightly, making his large, gangly figure look quite foolish–though he always looks kind of foolish. Astra? That’s a nice name. I think it suits you, because you are nice–and pretty. He smiles a goofy kind of grin that makes him look even more foolish, and a hint of embarrassment sends a shock through him, though thankfully for her, it is only a slight feeling that dissipates quickly.
When she asks about his name, his face breaks out in a rather large grin. ”Well, mama couldn’’t come up with a good name for me, but when she realized how clumsy I am, she fondly named me Ridiculous. I guess it’s as simple as that.” He is quite proud of his name, even though she thinks it’s kind of mean. Blasphemare had loved him and meant well, despite how it might sound.
As he stands there, now relieved that he isn’t embarrassing himself once more, he notices that she is breathing quite heavily, as if she had just run a marathon. No doubt this was as a result of the overwhelming emotions she’d experienced leaching off of him, but he couldn’t have known that. ”Hey, are you okay? he asks. ”You’re breathing quite heavily.”
She thinks she can taste his amusement. The laughter comes out of his mouth, certainly, but she thinks she can feel it swell up on her own tongue. It blooms and blossoms but does not burst out of her. Had she opened her mouth, though, no sound would have come out because it did not belong to her.
She listens intently to the stories he tells. How he’d gotten trapped in some other time and how someone had tried to eat him. Her confusion is her own. The flicker of terror she feels building in her chest, dampened only by the joy he feels in telling it.
“I’m glad she didn’t eat you,” she says, briefly overwhelmed. It’s nice, she thinks, to have someone to talk to. But he has more to say than anyone else she has ever met and she struggles to keep up. Blinking rapidly as he regales her with his stories and then, abruptly, calls her pretty. It’s not something she’s ever heard before and the embarrassment that pools heat in her cheeks belongs to her alone.
“Thank you,” she murmurs, his goofy grin eliciting a soft smile in return. She likes him, she thinks, now that she can see past all of the emotions that had rolled off him in waves.
She nods her understanding, comforted by the fact that his mother had meant no harm when she’d named him. Not that it’s really any of her business. If he’s happy with it, it shouldn’t matter to her at all.
He calls attention to her breathing and her own embarrassment compounds. She glances down at her own chest, like she might see the air trapped there. “I’m okay,” she tells him, hesitating before she looks at him again. “It’s just… I can feel everything you feel.” A strange thing to have to admit.
Ridiculous gets a little thrill of excitement when Astra says she’s glad that Nilam hadn’t eaten him. He takes it as a sign that she’s forgiven him for practically crushing her, and that she likes him–which is an improvement from wanting to be eaten. This felt more natural, being liked. See, Ridiculous is the class clown type. He’s always looking to make others laugh, even if it’s at the expense of his own pride.
This feeling is only amplified when she gives him the soft smile, because he called her pretty. He had never called anyone pretty before. He felt like a kid on Christmas Day right now.
When she tells him that she can feel everything he feels, for a moment, confusion wraps itself about his head. Then he realizes what she means. She is an empath. He grins broadly at this. “Oh! You must be an empath! I’ve heard of that before. That’s pretty awesome, I’ve gotta say. If you can feel everything that I am feeling, that must make you one very happy girl right now!” He winks at her. Though the discomfort on her face obviously screams that it is difficult for her to feel comfortable in any amount of emotions, especially his potent and overflowing emotions, he completely misses that.
“I have my own abilities. Watch this!” He concentrates real hard, wrapping the magic of his ability about her so that she can experience it for herself. Slowly, the world around them begins to shift, to speed up. Horses walking in the meadow move from one place to the next with little time. The sounds fly by at astonishing speeds. He watches Astra for her reaction. Only he and her moved at a normal speed as the world moved by them quickly. The sun in the sky moves visibly from one position to another.
Then Ridiculous’s concentration wanes, and the world slows back to its normal pace. It is now late afternoon, and a chilly wind brushes past them, whispering the forthcoming arrival of evening. The large colt looks on at the filly, waiting for her reaction.
