"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 wish I could take the hands of time and turn them in reverse I'd take back every long goodbye with venom in my words
He is good to his word: he stays.
But when she wakes the next morning—when her sage green eyes flutter—he is gone. It is like a punch to the gut and she feels dizzy with the disappointment, with the regret, with the pained way that her heart threatens to punch clean through her chest. She stays there for a while. For too long. Until the sun has crested and the bite of autumn cuts clean through her teeth; until she can nearly forget the feel of him.
She wonders if she had made him up, if she had some how dreamt of the evening before. She wonders if she had someone carved the granite of his jawline from the ache in her heart and if she had imagined the way that he had asked her to stay, the way that he had held her like it matter, the way he softened.
But the longer she wonders, the more it hurts.
The more she feels the vicious loss of him as a tangible thing.
Finally, she does the only thing she knows how: she builds a wall around her agony. She lifts herself up from the cold ground and shakes the leaves from her mane. She goes on living because it’s the only thing.
And, like that, the days pass.
If the colors seem duller, the sounds more muted, she does her best to not notice. If she feels more edge, her anger more ready to rise to the occasion, she chalks it up to the changing of seasons. It is only at night when she lets the memory of him slink past her defenses. It is only when sleep is just around the corner that she remembers the feel of his head pressed against her neck, his teeth on her hip—only then.
So when she sees that flash of him through the trees, she thinks that maybe she has lost her mind.
She thinks maybe she has finally lost control.
Except the shape of him is in such stark clarity that she never could have dreamt it. She feels the air leave her lungs like a physical impact and her head swims but the only thing she does is take a step forward and then come up short. Her eyes become guarded and her chin lifts in an instant defense against the pain.
She chokes down his name; stops herself from calling it out.
She feels the earth spin under her and she just waits for him to pass.
the only way to being found is getting lost at first but all I find are more bridges to burn
sometimes i wonder, will god ever forgive us for what we've done to each other?
B E T H L E H E M then i look around and realize, god left this place a long time ago
He had so desperately wanted something worth remembering.
And she had given it to him, so completely.
If only he had known.
If only he had known that it would shake him from his sleep.
That he would look for her in every face that passed.
That he would wake with the shape of her name branded on the surface of his tongue.
He moved with a purpose in the aftermath. He was no longer chasing something but vehemently running from it. Running from the warm that had spread through him when she’d laid her cheek to rest along the ridge of his spine, pressed her chest against his until he could feel the persistent flutter of the heartbeat underneath. Running from the terrible softness that had threatened to consume him.
And perhaps she is the reason for his sudden, bone-deep desire to grow roots. He has not seen her in months, though he would be lying if he were to claim that he has not looked. How desperately he has looked, delirious. There is some small part of him, too, that thinks that it was merely a fever dream. But, whatever the reason, he had wandered away from the safety of his shore and into the murky depths of Taiga and he had stayed.
He contains his restless wandering to this spit of land now. But his movement is near-constant, driven by the hum of kinetic energy in his limbs. It is in his mindless wandering that he catches sight of her. Like a phantom, just out of the corner of his eye. He stops, his pulse spiking.
He turns his head slow, as if he does not trust that she will not dissolve into the fog should he move too quickly. But there she stands, even after he has tried to blink her away. He drags in a thick, shuddering breath as he stares at her across all that negative space, the yawning chasm between them.
He opens his mouth to speak, but no sound comes out.
08-20-2019, 02:08 PM (This post was last modified: 08-21-2019, 02:44 AM by adna.)
one touch will make you so nervous you might stop breathing one touch will make you so reckless you might start feeling one touch will finally show to me what you can't hide
She is always the first to break before him.
She is always the first to crumble.
Maybe, in time, she will learn to live with it and not hate the way that her body betrays her, a slender scaled leg lifting and threatening to carry herself closer to him before she firmly plants it again . But, for now, she only hates herself for the weakness that blossoms like a flower in her chest when he looks up and catches her eye. The way that she immediately begins to tremble as the faultlines split her open.
“Beth,” his name comes out softer than she means to, so close to the way she had prayed it against him when they had finally collided that night so many months ago. So she swallows and tries again, desperately grabbing for any kind of strength. For any kind of armor.
She cannot survive him again, she thinks.
Not if she is vulnerable.
“Bethlehem,” this time she is able to feign almost indifference, almost able to pretend that she barely remembers the name. Like she hadn’t spent nights recreating the shape and feel of him. But she feels a fissure open up in her, threatening to tear her apart, and she knows that she can’t give in. She can’t be so weak in front of him again. She can’t. She can’t.
So she straightens, pulled on her mask, her features smooth and cold, her eyes glittering.
“I didn’t expect to see you here.”
A truth, one wrapped in a blanket of apathy. Adna so desperately trying to play at his own game. Her mask slips for just a second as she studies him, as she feels that dark and painful ache that grabs at her chest, but she pulls it on again, rolling a shoulder.
“I hope that you have been well.”
Maybe he won’t notice the slightest swell of her belly, she thinks.
08-20-2019, 02:53 PM (This post was last modified: 08-20-2019, 02:53 PM by bethlehem.)
It’s so simple, the name.
One syllable is all it is.
But it’s enough to knock the wind out of him.
Because in the days and weeks and months that followed, no one else had gotten so familiar as to learn his name. He had felt no inclination to share it and certainly no one had gotten close enough to form their own personal variation of it.
Beth, she breathes it like a whisper and that dark, wicked thing spits and hisses in the cavern of his chest. But there, in the furthest corner of his mouth, something quivers. Something like a smile. Something like an apparition that glimmers only briefly before it’s gone again.
Because she has realized what she’s done and she considers it a mistake. She corrects herself, says the name in its entirety. Something cold snakes through him.
She does not move to eliminate any of the distance between them and he does not either. For a moment, all they do is study each other across the expanse. She breaks the silence first, though they both knew she would.
“You are not any more surprised than I am, Adna,” he murmurs. Though he has no reason to be surprised, does he? She never truly implied that she did not have a home, only that she did not know where she belonged. He knows as well as anyone how it feels to be a stranger in their own home.
“I’ve been...,” he pauses and then looks away, “something.”
08-20-2019, 04:12 PM (This post was last modified: 08-21-2019, 02:45 AM by adna.)
one touch will make you so nervous you might stop breathing one touch will make you so reckless you might start feeling one touch will finally show to me what you can't hide
She is not certain whether she hates him more for his stoic nature or whether she hates herself for feeding into it. She wants to fall into him again. She wants to feel the rivers of his pulse under her lips and know that he’s there. That he’s alive. That he is still hers.
But this Bethlehem isn’t hers. Not like he had been.
He stands apart and she knows it’s because of the walls she so quickly put up.
She curses herself for it. Curses him for not fighting it.
But she doesn’t make a move to change it.
She feels locked into some kind of standoff with him, her sage green eyes guarded, that bare stirring of life within her, and all of the words she wants to say corked in her throat. How she dreamt of him and the scent of cedar in his mane or the way she shivers when she remembers the way it felt to have his cheek on her hip. The way she still comes undone.
Instead she just nods, like this is normal and she is okay.
“Something, huh?” she says and she cannot stop that small glimmer of humor that flashes across her delicate, predatory features. That small sign of the girl she had once been and the girl she could be again if she only let herself try. It softens her face for a second, but it is only for a moment because with the next breath, her expression is neutral again. Washed clean.
She frowns, looking into the shadows woods and wondering if they will always be destined to find themselves in forest and impending darkness. “I thought I would try looking for a home again,” she says and immediately regrets the honesty in it. The way that it calls back to their last meeting. The way she so easily coughs up her heart to him without him needing to say or ask for anything.
He does not know her.
She’d told him as much, insisted it, spat it at him.
He knows that he does not her.
But the way she battles against her baser instincts is not lost on him.
He sees it in the way a glint of light flits across her dark face and the way she immediately extinguishes it. Does he want her to smile? Does he want her to laugh? Does he want her to cross the great expanse between and press her mouth into the soft spot where his neck meets his shoulder?
Certainly he wants to touch her, to breathe her. But he does not trust himself to go to her. He is perhaps too tired to weather the storm of his own anger, the rage that swells and bursts in the cavern of his chest when all that softness spirals through the network of his muddy veins. He was not built for tenderness or love or the affection they had exchanged. He is built for nothing besides leaving.
He nods his understanding and casts a cursory glance into the shadows that gather around them. Perhaps he had chosen this place simply because it reminded him of the place where they’d met. Because it reminded him of her.
“It reminds me of someplace I’ve been before,” he says and there is a faint tendril of humor in this, too. He trusts that she will understand the joke. Or what vaguely resembles a joke anyway. He does not laugh. Does not smirk or grin, just goes on watching her, warring against his want for her to come closer, to bend herself around him again.
08-20-2019, 11:49 PM (This post was last modified: 08-21-2019, 02:45 AM by adna.)
one touch will make you so nervous you might stop breathing one touch will make you so reckless you might start feeling one touch will finally show to me what you can't hide
That steady, searching look of his should not cause such a fluttering in her belly, such a tightening. But it does and she finds that it leaves her just a little breathless. She wants to smooth the furrows from his expressions. She wants to find the velvet skin next to his mouth where the spice of him is concentrated. She wants to linger there, wants to feel his pulse thunder beneath her lips, wants to jumpstart her heart.
But neither of them are willing to give an inch and she feels the willow of her spine protest.
The storm of him—just his mere presence—whips around her and her throat grows dry.
His humor is not lost on her, nor the meaning, and she feels it like whiplash. Her breath gets sucked from her lungs, and she doesn’t say anything for a moment. She just stands there, tall and straight, her sage green eyes guarded as she looks into the shadow and reminds herself of all the different ways to hide.
“I’ve thought of a place like this before,” she confesses. It would seem she would always be the one to be the first to confess, to be the first to lay bare her sins. “Too much, perhaps.” It does not full describe just how much she has thought of it. How much she has lost sleep over it. How much she has wanted—
She swallows hard.
For a second, there is nothing again but the silence that continues to stretch between them. It grows taut and too thin and she is afraid for what will happen to her when it finally snaps.
She finally lets herself laugh, the sound dry in her throat.
“But I have always been a foolish girl.”
Something like pain flashes across her features that she chases away with indifference, with another failed attempt at apathy as she rolls a scaled shoulder and feels the chill settle into her bones.
“I should probably go,” because like she is the first to crumble, she is also the first to run.
sometimes i wonder, will god ever forgive us for what we've done to each other?
B E T H L E H E M then i look around and realize, god left this place a long time ago
Though it shouldn’t, her confession catches him off-guard.
She has never been anything but honest, has she?
Perhaps it’s not that she’s said it but that she had thought about it at all that surprises him.
He has never been worth a second thought, Bethlehem. Certainly not worth thinking about too much. He grits his teeth and nods but does not speak, whatever he might have said catching on the rust in his throat. He swallows thickly in an attempt to dislodge it but nothing breaks loose. There is nothing in the aftermath but the pulse of silence.
Her laughter is dry and mirthless and it grates down the ridge of his spine. He exhales and looks away. Foolish, she says. Does he agree? Foolish, perhaps, to waste so much time on someone unworthy of it. There, the brief glimpse of another rueful, fleeting smile as he studies the bed of ferns underfoot. Foolish, perhaps, for thinking that he was anything other than what he is. Good for nothing but leaving. Good for nothing but the sharp sting of anger, the bitter acid of it on the tongue. He will never be anything but this.
He does not shift his focus back to her until she speaks again. It is only then that he shackles his gaze to the slight swell of her barrel. He studies it a long moment, the mouth pressed into a thin, thoughtful line. And then, as he exhales, he catches her gaze.
08-21-2019, 02:42 PM (This post was last modified: 08-21-2019, 02:43 PM by adna.)
one touch will make you so nervous you might stop breathing one touch will make you so reckless you might start feeling one touch will finally show to me what you can't hide
Moments with him feel like eternity. They feel like no time at all.
She could be suspended here, hung between the spaces between his every breath or it could pass in a blur, moving so quickly that she doesn’t even have a chance to catch her breath. It is part of that strange wonder of him, she thinks. Part of that strange otherness that somehow has her on its tenterhooks.
He doesn’t say anything and she thinks for a second that he won’t.
Perhaps she has finally pushed him too far.
Perhaps he didn’t need to be pushed at all and he was just ready for her to leave. She would not blame him if that was the case. She would not blame him for wanting her out of his space. Maybe she should leave Taiga entirely. Maybe she should give him the home and let him have it.
But before she can move away (although she does take a step, reluctant and pained), his voice catches her and she stops. Her vision goes slightly blurry and then focuses as she looks at the ground, nothing but a frown pinching her mouth as she tries to catch her breath and remember that she can survive this.
She considers lying and saving him the awkwardness of it.
But for all of her flaws, she has never been good at deception.
So instead she just looks at the ground beneath her, unable to catch his eye. “Who’s else would it be?” she says, trying to inject some levity in the words but failing. Because what she is really saying is that she can’t imaging touching anyone else. She can’t imagine letting anyone else touch her. That one night has ruined her, and she isn’t sure that she will ever recover. She isn’t sure that she will ever be the same.
But these things go unspoken and live in the bunched muscles and tightness of her body.
They settle in there and she just swallows hard before shaking her head.
It occurs to him that it could have been perceived as an insult.
In asking, he could have been implying that she was frivolous with her time and her affection.
He had not, of course.
Even if he had been, it is none of his business whose company she chooses to keep.
It was merely the only way he knew how to breach the subject.
For him, there have been others. But if a child has come from any of those unions, he does not know it. Something shifts in the cavern of his chest, fractures, arrests the air in his lungs as if he has been kicked swiftly in the gut. Still, the mouth stays pressed into a thin, thoughtful line and, for the moment, all he can manage is a nod of understanding.
He wonders if she regrets it, remembers what she’d said about never being able to leave her children behind. He wonders if she resents the fact that she will be shackled with his child, too. He knows he should ask, he should offer to take the child if she’s does not want the constant reminder of them. Of him. But he is not fit to raise a child.
So, he swallows whatever offer might have alighted on his tongue and says, “I don’t regret it.”
