<i>baruch attah adonai</i> - barret

[Yael]

Breathing is only hard when the sun goes down; when loneliness wraps her in its arms and starts to squeeze, compressing her heart into her lungs. The sun manages to banish it all. If she could fly around the world with the daylight, if she could stay forever in its warm rays, she might abandon all else without a second thought.

Their hard part was in the beginning; once they gave in, the world came alive.

She already saw the colors of time. Every grain of sand held a multi-faceted portal into the past, into the moment they first laid eyes on each others to their hissed, fang-drawn fights and their passionate reconciliation. She saw it all. She saw it over and over and over again, and she would until the end of her days. Whatever came afer Vanquish would pale in comparison; she knew that at some point she might love again, at some point she might find reason to bear another child and give her heart away. With time. With patience. With years of mourning. How could anyone ever compare to the mighty oak, the dark dragon, the Nightwalker? Would she feel him in another’s touch? Would she cry out his name while lying in the embrace of another?

Even the sparse clouds haunted her.

This kingdom was his playground and his graveyard; it was her paradise and her first circle of hell. How could she leave? How could she stay? Why else would she hand over her pride and joy to two other women? The Desert always came first - it came before her children and it came before her love. If there were ever a choice to make between the two, they both knew what she would have done. They both knew she was the primary ruler and he the secondary. They both knew. It was a part of their life. Who could understand the balance between the two?

Could he?

No. He threw away his responsibilities. He forsook the Falls. He was trapped in a way that she would never be, for all she wailed and wept and beat her breast. She would always climb back up the ladder. He would always fall back down the chute. That was their lot in life; that was the fate they never dreamed they could escape. She is content for now - with content being a very loose, incorrect term to describe anything. She hides it all too well, behind a polished mask of decorum and practiced pleasantries that spring out of her mouth in reflux. Muscle memory can be a godsend, until you can’t shake it to face the truth.

She is more vibrant than she has ever been, all gold and silver and gilt edges that jut out a little more than usual. Her steps, however, are as weary as the corners of her mouth. Where once the weight of the world lay atop her shoulders, there now is the softer, spiked mantle of grief. It stings, and will burn forever, but she no longer feels as if her bones are being compressed in quicksand, and she only struggles to breath in a different way. Her gaze lands quietly and without pretension, despite being able to see the gray that radiates from his coat in an invisible cloak of despair. He has come as many do - to escape, to sleep, perchance to dream. To disappear into the rolling dunes and walk into the distant sea, or add their bones to the hundreds that already lay buried. To seek salvation. To forget.

“You ahr lost,” she says simply. He knows she speaks the truth.

Yael, guardian of the desert

[Barret]

I love you. Don't you mind, don't you mind? There are lines that connect them, even if neither of them realize; they are two flies with wings caught in intricate silk webbing, and there was a time in both of their lives where if one moved, the other felt the vibrations – even if they never knew. He feels them now, the thrumming of bodies against ropes, the pulse of her presence long before he looks and sees her standing in the sunlight. ‘You are lost,’ she says, with a curl in her tongue that reminds him of Ciel and sends a pang of regret that rings through his heart (an ache that he had thought buried under the weight of all his newer losses). Their accents are not the same, but it has been years since he has noted anything similar enough to stir her memory. ‘You are lost,’ he thinks, and he wonders then if there has ever existed a moment that he has not been. Some claimed him a restless adventurer, and others a hopeless philanderer, but lost is so much simpler. Lost is so much more true. “We all are, aren’t we?” he says, and somehow that crooked flicker of a smile will still find his lips – somehow, even if the last thing he is thinking of is smiling, even if it’s been so long and far in between that he has thought he’s forgotten how. Somehow, it’s there, and for a fraction of a second he won’t look ruined, like a relic reconstructed, as though the seams along his edges are not torn open; sutures broken, and innards spilled out. But only for a fraction of a second. After, his sad, worn eyes will find hers, and they’ll spill his secrets like he’s spilled ruin. “I’m looking for someone,” he will tell her then, because he is always looking for her, because he will never stop looking, not truly. There are words then that will fall against his lips, but he’ll swallow them down before they smuggle through the gaps between his teeth. He doesn’t tell her who. He doesn’t tell her that he’s always looking, or that he sees her face on every horizon, and just before every bend he turns. He doesn’t tell her that he will look until he dies, and then after. He doesn’t tell her that he has crossed worlds before to find Margaery. He swallows it all, and it feels like glass inside him. The memory of her bleeds him dry. The memory of her is a plague that eats him alive from the inside out. barret ---

[Yael]

Those strings are now mere cobwebs, easily displaced by the winds of time. Her lover is dead. His lover has forsaken him. Some might find it a cosmic conspiracy against the two, but Yael is no stranger to fate. Fate burned her past and brought her here; the irony of the heat of the Desert is not lost on her. Nor is the coincidence of whatever situation brought him to her proverbial feet. When all is said and done, the ones that are left must soldier on and seek others that are left.

Sometimes Fate is cruel. Sometimes Fate is kind. Sometimes Fate doesn’t give a flying fuck.

He says we all are aren’t we?, and the golden woman must pause to think. Is Yael lost? Does she wander like the twelve tribes, seeking salvation in a Desert from a God that turns a blind eye? She knows exactly where she is and what she is supposed to do. She has responsibility and a family and a kingdom to watch over. She couldn’t possibly be… lost. And yet somehow he knows, with his worn eyes and sutured wounds, with his heartscar tissue and his drowned lungs; like calls to like.

He can’t hide from her. Not many can.
Does she want to hide from him?

The walls were built ages ago. But perhaps - perhaps she can carve herself a peephole and put a candle in the opening. Perhaps one day that peephole will give way to a window, and a window to a door. Perhaps one day she will step through it again; but that day is not today. A candle, perhaps, is enough.

“She ees not xere,” she says. She never will be - she will always be one step ahead or one behind, but never where he’s searching. Her scent will linger and he may imagine her shadow just around the corner, but the truth they both know is that he will never kiss her again. That plague that eats at him is just enough to keep him writhing, yet alive.

“But you ahr velcome to stay for avile. Barrett.”

She knows. He should know that she knows.

Yael, guardian of the desert

[Barret]

I love you. Don't you mind, don't you mind? She can see inside of him as though his skin is made of glass rather than flesh; as though his writhing, screaming, blackened innards are all a piece of some ornate and obscure fine arts display, as though he sits under stage lights in a gallery that no one’s heard of, by an entrance to an alley that no one steps in and a burnt out ‘open’ sign. On the plaque beneath his prison walls would read: ‘The Nature of Existence’. “She is not here,” she says, while looking through his skin, past the yellowed fat and bone. She is not here. She is not here, but he must know this already. He should know it. He should feel it in his bones that she does not exist nearby. He should feel it in his flesh and his muscle and his organs. He should feel it in the air when he moves, how it feels to live life without gravity, but he doesn’t. Or is it just that he doesn’t want to? There is more in the stranger's dark eyes though than those four terrible words. There is more than she is letting him see. She is not sparing him devastation. He has crossed that bridge a long time ago; it gave way under his feet and left him stranded in fire and ash. He thinks she might be kind, anyway, and is reassured of it when she says: “But you are welcome to stay for a while. Barret.” It’s a mistake, but she doesn’t seem like the type for them. It’s a mistake, but she does not falter. It’s a mistake, and maybe she’ll realize it later when there are more bones in his pyre and notches on his built, when he ruins the deserts like he ruined the falls. It will not go any other way. Ruin is his destiny. Ruin is his fate. Margaery saw through his skin once, too. She never looked back. “I don’t remember you,” he says. “Who are you?” He knows who she isn't already. barret ---