"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
Ilka had long since abandoned the Gates. The last time she had been there was when the kingdom had still been rebuilding, finding order in the chaos that seemed to drown them in shadow and grief. It had been when Ledger shifted suddenly into a polar bear and his claws had buried themselves in the skin down her neck and across her chest. Even now after so much time, the scars were still narrow streaks of puckered pink skin buried in the satin black of her dark fur. It had been a very long time since the wound had actually hurt, but sometimes she still woke from a dream, gasping as a pair of white clawed feet carved her heart out of her chest.
The guilt in Ledgers face when he shifted back into a horse had been unbearable, the pain and blame and self-loathe. It had driven her from the quiet, ashy kingdom just as soon as the jagged wounds had healed. Ilka could not bear to be a constant reminder of something he had never meant to do.
It was easier to leave.
She was good at running away.
But the escape she found, the purple stallion who had been blue at first with chocolate brown eyes and a face she trusted, was not the escape she had been looking for. She was still not convinced that she hadn’t imagined it all, that he had ever been anything other than purple and wolfish and dangerously sharp. Cold like silver stars hung in the sky, cold like their children, her two beautiful independent magicians. It was impossible to think that they could be any part of her, but they were. Bone and blood and everything that mattered, they were hers.
All but love.
She could see it in their stone sharp little faces, in tiny eyes as bright as stars and filled with entire universes, heaven and earth. It was the way someone might look at their reflection. That is mine, only mine. It will never be yours, but I do not love it. I do not need to. It was a knowledge she felt constantly, like a blade wedged in her chest and she could barely remember how to breathe around it.
The forest was unrelentingly cold and snow fell through the leafless branches of bare, skeletal trees. In some places water had pooled around the bases of the trees and ice raced bright and slick across a nearly enameled surface. She continued further still, disappearing into the shadows of vast pine trees whose needles refused to acknowledge winters bite. It was here that a shape seemed to bleed out of the dark, blue with chocolate eyes and a face she trusted. She could feel her breathing change, a tiny shudder of uncertainty sending puffs like ghosts into the cold air between them. Seconds stretched into days and she refused to blink in case the purple seeped from impossible cracks in the mottled blue of his skin. But nothing happened, no purple, no wolf, just the same pair of eyes she had sunk into so readily so long ago in the meadow.
“Shah?” She asked quietly, anchored in place despite the growing need in her belly to be tucked back against his chest where everything was safe and right and nothing hurt. But instead she watched him with those bruised gold eyes and a tremble racing along her jaw. “This world isn’t what I thought it would be.” She inched forward one single step, her words crumbling at the edges.
All things are possible, even the worst of things.
He is a failure. So much of his life has consisted of one failure after another. He had blithely continued on through his life, oblivious to those he had left behind, happy to be simply content. But then everything had changed, his entire life had been turned upside down, the innumerate failures shoved in his face like a gauntlet. Only he hadn’t taken up that challenge, he had fled. Like a bird before a windstorm, he had simply run away and hidden.
And even his once famous affable determination cannot save him now.
The only thing he hasn’t left yet, hasn’t failed, is the Deserts. His chosen home. Even in the face of his torments and fears, he had forced himself to return. Forced himself to face the demons he knew were waiting there, only to find the demons nonexistent. This had surprised him. Heartened him, even as it worried him.
What if everything he thought he knew had been a lie?
But he refuses to think of that now. He simply cannot. Not when he is finally, slowly, picking up the pieces of his once happy life. He still isn’t sure how he will put them back together. Still isn’t even sure he can, or that he wants to try.
The forest has become a refuge, a sanctuary for him to brood and wallow in his misery. The shadows adore him, welcoming him like an old lover might. He has stopped fighting them, stopped trying to resist their magnetic pull. He had finally realized just how futile the fight had been. Besides, it seems they are the only solace left to him now.
He doesn’t see her at first, isn’t even paying attention. His brown eyes are unfocused, head dropping low, the ever present shadows still and quiet for the first time in ages. He doesn’t register her approach until his name slips into the air on a quiet exclamation.
He blinks, focuses. Chocolate eyes fix upon her familiar dark form, a sight for sore eyes. One of the few he has not yet managed to fail so spectacularly.
Ilka.
He breathes her name in disbelief, unnameable emotion filling that single syllable. For a moment, he is afraid she might be a phantom, whisked away by the next breeze. But then she takes another step forward, soft words laced with heartache and sorrow. He could no more resist her than he could resist a typhoon. He closes the distance between them.
She is real and solid, her presence soothing an ache in his chest he hadn’t known was there. He presses against her, crushing her in a desperate embrace. His muzzle falls softly against her dark skin, eyes squeezing shut to hold back tears that suddenly wish to fall.
I know.
His words are quiet, fractured. He does know, perhaps more than anyone else.
Her name on his lips, one word, two syllables, just an exhale of sound catching in the wind and she can feel her heart trembling in her chest. It beats and aches and batters at the confines of her ribs like a bird trapped in a small cage. She blinks once and time seems to slow down for a moment. Those dark eyelashes like spiders racing across her skin, the sound of his hooves in the loamy forest floor echoing each pounding beat of her racing heart. Still she does not move, but she does not have to and suddenly Shah is wrapped around her in the warmest embrace, though there is the hint of something urgent in the way his nose dances across the crushed velvet of her skin. She feels it too, like the static and steel trembling in the air before a storm.
“Shah.” She whispers again, her voice soft and tremulous, and oh, how her heart races for those shadowy forgotten corners in her chest. But even as she holds it fast, doubt seeps like poison staining everything in purple and regret. She tenses and untangles herself from his embrace, those bruised gold eyes flashing uncertainly to his steady face. There is only mottled blue and black, only those quiet brown eyes that seem a little heavier somehow. But she blinks and like an echo, like a memory cut out of the past, she sees the purple stallion. Her breath catches and her brow furrows but like the tide against the shore, she crumbles back against him. “Shah.” She says again, just one more time, tracing the curve of muscle along the slope of his shoulder with gentle lips. But where once the gesture had been quiet and innocent, wide-eyed and curious, she was certain he would be able to trace the desperation seeping from each touch.
Maybe they were just two sinking souls not entirely sure they wanted to stay afloat, but wholly certain they did not want to sink alone.
It feels like forever that she stays crushed against his chest, willing that long-lost sensation of belonging to tattoo itself like a brand on her heart. But forevers always end too soon and slowly she is pulling away from him again, tracing her lips against the curve of his jaw and down the narrow slope of his chin before pulling away to watch him with shadow and secret like a stain across her delicate face. There are a dozen things she could tell him, a dozen thoughts bouncing around like dropped beads in her head. But only one thought ever makes it past the ice and uncertainty.
Her face softens with an unnameable emotion, those impossible golden eyes half hidden beneath the uncertain furrow of her brow. “I should have stayed with you, Shah. I should have stayed. I think I’ve lived a whole lifetime since the last time I saw you and none of it was right.”
All things are possible, even the worst of things.
For a single, perfect moment, she melts into his embrace, her warmth against his, two pieces of puzzle meant to fit together. But it cannot last. He knows this. Even so, when he feels her stiffen against him, feels her draw away, the urge to pull her back, to crush her against him and never let her go, is nearly overwhelming. Once, such a thought would never have crossed his mind. Once, he had been a kind and selfless man. He is no longer that man.
But, in the end, he lets her go. Just as he had let her go all those long months ago.
She doesn’t leave him though, not really. She is still there, her comforting warmth only inches from him, her luminescent eyes filled with far too much sadness, his name heavy upon her lips. She gazes up at him for long moments. He can only stare back, his eyes filled with too many emotions and his throat seized with too many unsaid words.
And then she is against him again, her delicate frame supported, cradled, by his sturdy strength. Her lips are tracing his shoulder just as his own press into the velvety skin of her withers, warm breath fanning her dark coat. The desperation in her touch matches his, an unwitting echo. The memories rest too heavily upon his mind, ones she knows nothing about. Ones he should not burden her with.
But he is too weak. He has always been too weak, though he is only now realizing it.
She is pulling away from him again, her lips moving softly against him. He leans into her touch, unconsciously savoring every bit of affection she is willing to offer. A drowning man clutching at the tiniest piece of driftwood. But then her touch is gone and his gaze latches upon delicate features shrouded in shadows and secrecy. He wants nothing more than the draw those shadows away, to remove every ounce of pain and uncertainty she is feeling. But alas, these are shadows he has no control over.
So instead he draws the shadows around them, surrounding them in a cocoon of safety and privacy, ensuring that the outside world will not intrude. Ensuring that this delicate moment will not be broken.
Her words cause the breath to leave his lungs, cause his heart to seize in his chest. In that moment, he wishes she had stayed. Wishes they were both still so bright and innocent as they had been when first they had met. Wishes that things had not happened the way they had.
Ilka...
Her name is wreathed in sadness, that single word speaking far more than the hundreds of others he might have said. He leans into her, muzzle pressing softly against her dark neck, cocoa colored eyes falling closed.
Tell me.
He breathes the words softly into her skin, not a demand, but a plea.
She is like an injured bird in careful hands pressed close to the ache and thrum of his beating heart. It is in this place, in a moment that seems scooped out of time, cut away from the rest of the world that she finally feels a sense of quiet diving through the marrow of her trembling bones. “Shah.” She whispers again for what must be the hundredth time, melting readily beneath his greedy touches because for once she feels needed, for once she feels wanted and it is undoing the ice and steel and stone she wrapped so clumsily around her broken heart.
When her eyes fall on his, shining like twin gold bruises too full of hurt and uncertainty to be recognizable, she flinches. It is an imperceptible motion, the tightening of muscle beneath gleaming black skin darkened with even blacker dapples. She sucks in a quiet breath realizing that of course he would notice and of course he would know, and worse still was that even though she saw those same shadows lurking in the bottoms of his brown eyes, she still ached to tell him everything.
But she couldn’t.
She felt that indecision like a quiver that started in her chest, rippling outwards through her ribs.
She would not add to the weight that seemed to be crushing him already, an entire world he tried to carry on his shoulders.
But her name is on his tongue and his mouth is pressed to her dark, trembling neck. His eyes close and the weight disappears and for a moment, just a split second, he is just as she remembers. She cannot help but stretch her lips to his face, to touch the absence of his smile and furrow of his heavy brow. “Why are you here, Shah?” She thinks back to that day in the meadow and her heart thumps in her chest, but she remembers that they had both been there to hide from their personal demons. Looking at him now, at the tension in his neck and remembering how his touches had been just as greedy as hers, she cannot help but wonder if they are both hiding from the world again.
The forest was already dark and shadowy with the sun being chased off by the branches and pine trees and thick undergrowth, but even as her eyes trace the shape of a face she finds so devastatingly perfect, the forest darkens further. She turns her face from him reluctantly to notice the darkness seems almost complete now, like hours had passed without her noticing and nighttime had sunk from between the stars to mix with the murky light. Her brow furrowed as she turned to look back to Shah, but his expression seemed to remain unchanged so she buried her uncertainty in the dirt beneath her feet.
“I-” her jaw tightened and her gaze dropped to trace the shape of the grass crushed beneath their feet, “I’m a mom now.” Her eyes didn’t lift to his, not now, not yet, she didn’t trust her face. But this felt like a compromise, an easy truth. He didn’t need to know she had thought it was him at first, that magic at been at play. Nor did he need to know she wasn’t remotely ready to be a mom, but there was a small part of her that wondered if he would guess at that anyway.
All things are possible, even the worst of things.
The feel of her flinching against him hits him like a physical blow. An ache settles into his gut as he knows an intense longing to wipe all fear and hurt from the burnished gold of her eyes. He thinks that perhaps in this small way, he might too be able to alleviate all of the pain and anguish that echoes through him. That in one small, impossible act, he could make everything right again.
But he cannot make everything right again. Nothing can ever be made as it was. He cannot turn back time, cannot erase what had happened to them. And one small, shameful part of him would not want to. That small kernel inside of him that understands everything he had gained could only have come from his loss. It has begun to take root, to blossom into a terrible understanding of what was and what had to be.
But still, he wishes. He wishes for impossible things.
He can see the indecision upon her features, can almost taste the truth that she wants to spill. But she resists, an action for which he cannot fault her. He resists too, holding tight to words that he longs to spill into ears that would hear and soothe, to engender an embrace that would act as a balm to his wounded soul. But he wants to, so badly. He is a selfish man.
Why are you here, she asks. And for a moment, he is rendered still and speechless. He had never paused to consider why he still lingers here, even though he knows the answer. The words are there on the tip of his tongue, even as he wonders. But of course she had known. Why had he ever been here?
”I’m… hiding.”
He answers her honestly, incapable of doing anything else. If there is anyone who would know of the need to run and hide, it would be she. She is the only one he could confide such a shameful secret to, the only one who might understand. Even as he says it, the shadows draw closer, enveloping them in a soothing twilight, wrapping them in a cocoon of silent warmth. He presses closer to her, eyes sliding shut as though to block out the shame of his actions.
Her next words bring him back to reality, stunning him far more than her last words ever could have. Though, why he should have been surprised, he doesn’t know.
His dark eyes fall to hers, tracing the curves of her face even as she stares at the grass beneath their feet. The barest hint of a smile touches his features then, the curve of his lips almost wistful. He had always loved children. In truth, he probably should have been a father long ago. But fate has always had a funny way of intervening even with the best laid plans. His plans, unfortunately, had never been laid that well.
When he finally regains his senses, speech coming back to him in a burst, he asks the only thing he can think of.
She does not miss the way her question presses a stillness into his bones, into the quiet of those dark eyes. For a moment she wonders if maybe she’s pushed too hard, if she is forcing unwilling secrets from him. Her brow furrows quickly and those pale gold eyes flash as she stretches her nose to his cheek. Her lips brush the soft blue of his jaw and follow the slope of his chin to the corner of his lips as though she is trying to coax a smile from the quiet way he considers her.
He answers and she pulls away to let the cold air fill the shallow space between them. “Will you hide from me?” She wonders aloud and her voice is like the sound of glass breaking on stone. She can feel worry thread itself like a snake along her spine, can feel her bones bending and her chest caving in at the idea that Shah might disappear from her world again. But it feels selfish to make him stay, to let him see the way this idea, this worry, tears at her tattered heart.
Instead she watches him uncertainly, her face carefully blank as she considers what a life without him would be like. It felt wrong somehow, as wrong as blue sky beneath her feet and rolling green meadows stretched around the sun and clouds. Still, she says nothing even as the bruises in her bright gold eyes darken.
But the shadows around them deepen again, they press closer and so does he, closer still, and she crumbles against him. “Shah.” She breathes and it is like a prayer and a plea and an apology, it is everything she cannot say, everything she needs him to know rolled into one single word, his name, and she wills him to understand even as she knows he cannot possibly understand. “I want to hide with you forever.” She confesses into the curve of his shoulder, in a voice so small she doubted he would know the shape of her words.
She feels him stiffen again and she pulls away to watch his face as he works his way through the idea of Ilka being a mother. Whatever she had been expecting, it was not the soft curve of an almost smile or near-warmth flickering in the depths of his eyes. In an instant she could feel the knots in her stomach untying, could feel the bones in her chest relenting in the way they had seemed to tighten around her aching heart. “Really.” She confirmed, and her mouth softened with something that might’ve been the echo of a smile, the memory of warmth.
And then with gold eyes that drift between his face and the impossible darkness around them, she paused. “Are these yours, Shah?” She inches closer to the cocoon of shadow, stretching her nose to draw it quietly across the absence of light. “They must be,” she amends softly, not waiting for his answer, “because they make me feel safe, like I don’t have to worry about anything out there.” She pauses and her eyes lift honestly to his perfect face. “And that is exactly how I feel when I’m with you.”
All things are possible, even the worst of things.
If there is anyone that he holds no secrets from, it is she. Granted, he has few secrets, nor has he ever been very good at keeping them, but with her, there are no faces he needs to wear, no truths he needs to omit. Nor could he ever. She engenders too much feeling in him, too much trust, for him to ever have a hope of keeping a secret from her. So when the question is wrenched into the air, breaking against his eardrums with resounding wrongness, he cannot help his reaction. Drawing back, his velvety brown eyes find hers, wide with surprise.
Never.
The word is uttered with astonishing force and vehemence. There can be no question as to the honesty of his answer. He presses back into her again, longing only to pull her close, to share with her the truth that mere words cannot portray. He might be many things, but he could no more abandon her than he could lie to her. For a moment, he thinks on the vagaries of fate, on how she had come to be so much to him in such a short amount of time. Perhaps it is fate, or perhaps it is simply circumstance. Regardless, she had somehow managed to wedge herself firmly into his heart.
He had thought his heart to broken to let anyone else in, but she had proven him so very wrong.
A soft sigh escapes his lips when she settles back into his embrace, his relief at her acquiescence palpable. For a moment, he had feared she might draw away, might foster distance between them. It is a thought he simply cannot countenance. Her words settle his fears, drawing a smile to his dark lips.
Me too.
He whispers the words against her neck, soft and full of wistfulness.
Me too.
His smile deepens when she confirms her motherhood, his dark eyes seeking out hers, a faint hint of his old self sparkling within those immeasurable depths. His delight is followed by a sudden and intense longing, causing his smile to fade slightly. He has always wanted children of his own, tiny creatures who he could play with and tutor, but never before had he known such a deep desire for that seemingly distant dream. Perhaps it is simply the mention of her own children, or perhaps it is because he had finally found someone he could envision as a mother to not just her children, but their children.
He is momentarily absorbed in the turmoil of his own thoughts, his own desires, when she mentions the shadows. His shadows. His first instinct is to withdraw in alarm. Those shadows had been his enemy for so long. It is only recently he had learned to embrace them, had come believe they were not merely a symptom of his stained soul. But she eases his fears in that way so uniquely hers, drawing him back in with her unwitting absolution. He relaxes against her as her golden gaze caresses his face, the corners of his lips turning upwards once more.
When he finally speaks, responding to her open warmth and honesty, he says the first thing that comes to mind.
Ilka. I… I want children.
The moment the words leave his lips, he mentally kicks himself. For a man who had once been so silver-tongued, he sure is having trouble saying the right things.
