She waits for him in the lonely twilight, beneath a sky with no stars, no sun, no moon. Bound to the in-between.
The whispers are everywhere- in every grain of sand, gathered and trapped like dandelion puffs in the needles of the cacti plants. Gone. The King is gone. So she waits for him because she must, because she is tethered through him to this life she clings to, because pain is something she understands. It is what pulses through her veins, it is the dust settled in the cracks of bones broken too many times- it is the fiber of her being, the essence of her existence.
She has never questioned pain.
Else is not left waiting long. She is hesitant at first when he pulls from the shadows like the apparitions from which he hides, forming from thought and darkness and simple expectation. And when he comes to her and pauses like a dropped, broken thing, a cold fist closes around her heart. She shudders, and the cold sand color of her skin ripples over the tremble of sinuous muscle. She feels for him, something besides fear, and it clamors through her veins, burrowing within her bones like a frightened beast.
“Caius?” She says his name like a question, mumbled past the sluggish lips of a scarred half-face. And when that single glacial eye lifts to settle in the familiar lines of his dark, aching face, she can feel the fist tighten and then release, punching a hole in her gut as it dropped to the dirt beneath her. “I don’t know how to help you, I don’t think I can make this better.”
She inches closer, willing away the raggedness of her breathing, the pounding of old fears against tired tatters of a used up heart. “Caius.” She tries again, this time drawing her nose across the slant of his tight jaw- flinching once when the old, smooth scars of her torn face brush against his. And when that single wide eye settles in his gaze, glacial blue with flecks of snow and panic, she wonders how different their ghosts really are. Hers live in her head, they fill her thoughts and bleed chaos into her dreams. She wonders if it’s reverse for him, if he’s safe inside his head.
when is a monster not a monster?
oh, when you love it
Vanquish had been what was left, when mother left, blood dripping from her legs and a maniac’s grin tattooed across her face. He had been his teacher, guide, a solid black force who had promised to always be there.
But the stability crumbled beneath him, and Caius was a fool to believe such promises. He’d been raised on such things, twisted wrongdoings his secret heart still wants for when he lies awake.
(“I love you,” mother whispers, tearing flesh from his withers as she grooms him, lips painted an obscene red, “I love you so much.”)
Vanquish’s only misleading had been the promise of solidity, of his presence.
It shouldn’t hurt, this crumbling, it shouldn’t feel like the world is falling from under him.
(He should be used to unsolid ground, he’s lived his life on shifting sands, both literally and figuratively.)
But it’s too much, all of it – deaths and ghosts and blood on her lips when she smiled, and he doesn’t know what to do, he’s lost.
She says ‘I don’t know how to help you, I don’t think I can make this better,’ but she already helps him because she is there, she is solid and real, she’s not a ghost and there’s no blood on her lips.
And she touches him, and she’s warm, it’s not the ice-feel of ghosts (even mother had been cold, her strange limbo existence a thing defying science and reason). The feel of her scars adds to the realness of her, the strange combination of soft and rough creating grounding textures.
He finds himself wanting to touch more of her. She is grounding. She is real.
“Else,” he says in response, softly. He closes his eyes and focuses on the feeling. His neck arches, just a little.
“You’re here,” he says nonsensically – she’s only scratched the surface of his life, how it’s plagued now with ghosts, worse now that father’s joined their ranks, “you’re here, you’re real.”
He says it quietly but firmly, like he’s trying to convince himself.
c a i u s
vanquish x chantale
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(uggggh this is not what i wanted but whatever)
She never feels so vulnerable as when she stands before him, never so fragile as when she is falling into the endlessness of his aching eyes. Even when the magician had gutted her, torn out her bones to build a graveyard, filling her instead with dark magic. Even when her veins had split open wide like gaping mouths, emptying themselves into the cold dirt at her feet. She was sure Caius could hurt her more, worse- and she was equally certain that he wouldn’t, and terrified that he might.
It was in moments like these, fast and fleeting, cold as a falling star, that Else ached for the emptiness of before.
“I’m here.” She whispers back, twisted words from twisted lips. When he shifts, arches his neck imperceptibly against her touch, she is prisoner to the reflexive cringe that slithers the length of her spine. Suddenly it isn’t Caius any more, her stoic friend with the sad eyes, but a splintered memory with sneering yellow teeth and hungry, yawning eyes. His name slips over her tongue like a mouthful of slugs and she chokes on it.
For a heartbeat she balks, staring back at him with horror etched like shadow across the valleys of her pale, distorted face. Hysteria calls to her and it feels like sweet, agonizing bliss – but she knows better. Her lungs rattle and hiss as draws a long breath, her eye sinking to trace the whorls made by the wind against the sand. There is blood in her mouth, warm and bitter – familiar – from where her teeth had clenched so tightly against her tongue.
“Will you tell me about him?” She whispers at last, pulling her gaze from her feet and back to his face, that safe familiar place that unbinds her so. “Tell me about your father.”
when is a monster not a monster?
oh, when you love it
She might very well hurt him, someday. And would he love it, the way he loved the bruises Chantale pressed against him like kisses, the way he loved the taste of sour milk on his tongue – things he loved because he had no comparison. The same way he never knew the sand was soft until he ventured onto firmer ground.
She might hurt him, and he might love it, or he might know there are sweeter things that could be had.
He himself does not harm – not intentionally, at least – and certainly does not want to hurt her. He wants to cherish her, to guard her fragile body, to build scaffolding to support her. He has no idea how to do any of this, of course.
Most of his love has been warped, strange, soured.
And he certainly doesn’t know how to fall in love, only how to fall.
But she flinches back. He doesn’t know what he’s done wrong so he lets her go even as he aches for the space where she was moments ago. He aches for so much of her, things he can’t articulate.
Tell me about him, she whispers, and it is safer ground, ground he scrabbles to even if the words are bittersweet.
“He was kind,” he says, “he loved me even though he never intended to have me.”
(Chantale had all but thrown him at their feet – Caius had been her revenge, her slap in their faces. Look, his presence had said, look at how weak you were.)
“He taught me to fly,” he says. He doesn’t fly, not often – the wings have never stopped hurting since their unfurled, damp and bloody. The pain is often a low thrum, barely noticeable, but when he tries to bear heavy things aloft blood pours form the joints and the bones feel hollow, like they might shatter at any moment.
“He loved all his children. He loved his kingdom. He wanted me to be a fighter, like he was, I think. I’m not any good, but he wasn’t disappointed in me.”
A pause. He thinks back to his foalhood, how large and terrifying his father had seemed.
“I didn’t like him, at first. He chased mother away before…before I knew what she was. I know now...he was right to do so. But at the think I hated him for it.”
c a i u s
vanquish x chantale
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(abrupt ending bc i forgot i have real work but it'll do)
04-18-2015, 07:56 PM
(This post was last modified: 04-18-2015, 07:57 PM by Else.)
even angels have their wicked schemes “I think,” the stillness of her words disappear for a moment as she casts that single eye someplace along the horizon, someplace safe, “I think it’s easy to love you.” An accusation, perhaps, from anyone but Else, an accusation softened by the tremble of her lip, the weightlessness of her stammering voice.
But what did Else know of love. Else, who couldn’t remember her own family- not a mother, not a father, not even a sibling. Else, who had no memories at all of a childhood, of friends. Just Stokely, the leering creature with hungry eyes and yellow teeth. Just the magician and that crocodile grin each time he carved out her bones to make her dance like a doll on a string.
Yet-
She wondered. Was love what kept her tethered so closely to Caius, was it love that shushed the fear clawing in her belly like a trapped animal. Was it love that begged her to stay in the Desert, suffer the sand and the smiles just a bit longer. Or was it need. Necessity. Something darker, something selfish.
“Of course he loved you.” She says, breathes, more to herself than him as that gaze drifted dangerously close to the fathomless depths of his eyes. And then- “I’ve never seen you fly.” Her eye drifts to those joints, seeping and weeping and swollen, and regret blooms instantly in the pit of her stomach. She knew, of course, she can remember the way she had first balked at the stink of gore on his skin. For a heartbeat, just one single splinter in time, she wants to ask him why. Why they seem so broken. But doubt turns her tongue to lead, to stone, and the question dies before it reaches her lips.
“You fought for me.” She tells him softly, suddenly, stretching her lips to brush the soft of the side of his dark mouth. “You took me from the magician.” And she can feel the hope like an ache in her chest that he won’t ask her to explain. “He never thought I’d get away.” Even now she can feel those mazes he built to keep her trapped inside her memories, docile in her defeat. “You did that.”
Unbidden, something he had said earlier resurfaced in her subconscious, waiting there like a burr, sharp and uncomfortable. “Why did he do it?” She whispers, agonizes quietly, wondering without meaning to if Caius would ever feel the need to do the same to Else, brimming as she was with demons and ghosts. “Why did he make her leave?”
and you take that to new extremes
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