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    COTY

    Assailant -- Year 226

    QOTY

    "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


    [private]  Play my chest like a xylophone
    #1
    There's a peace in the forest that she doesn't try too hard to question. The trees rise like pieces of ribcage, but they have always done that, and the jubilant insects that turn the air to fairy dust where the sun's rays filter golden through hungry, joyful, branches don't look any different to her eyes. They've never hidden their skeletons and the normalcy of them and of the forest's quiet shadows pull her in ever deeper, deeper, to where she doesn't need to be reminded of things changed in the darkness. Only the shyest animals live in the places she frequents, grey fox, woodthrush and occasionally, white deer that freeze as soon as they catch sight of her. These are her least favorite moments, her coffee-dark eyes as stuck to them as a tongue to a lake-ice, lost in the delicate curls of their bone and the hollow, dark spaces where their liquid eyes should be.

    She doesn't know they're white; you can't tell by a skeleton.

    The deer are rare, though, and the rest never leave the skulking shadows, hunting beetles and berries in the understory. She has left the lion behind, chewing bitterly at bark and the tender shoots springing up in the sunlight, taking advantage of this brief space between the long night and the leafing out of the branches above. She has pressed the lion deep into the darkest recesses of her heart because even though food grew dull and scarce, she could not bring herself to gnaw at invisible meat. She can still smell the accusing blood of the doe she left to rot at the river's edge months ago, blood that poured hot and copper across her tongue while the creature died, a pile of bones gasping and desperate and doomed. A pile of bones for everyone to see, now, not just a monster for Beryl as the snow melts away around it, but for the world.

    But with every second that ticks by, Beryl loses herself a little more, cares a little less, and it's almost a relief. It's a relief to feel the concern falling away from her heart, to feel the freedom of apathy. They are all already bones and she can't care about bones drying in the sun. She can't care about Brennan or Lilliana's girl, she can't care about Leilan or Eurwen, and if something in her chest twinges oddly when she thinks those thoughts, she knows it is only her imagination because there's nothing between the bars of her ribs to twinge or break, just light as golden as the skin she forgets she had.

    She presses on - there's a clearing nearby, though the path is difficult to pick out - and she imagines that branches pluck at her mane, and how - if she still had it - it would be knotted and wild from the feral existence she leads among the tulip poplars. It's almost funny, and she barks a sharp, strange, laugh out to patchwork trees to think how she would look if the whole world hadn't been turned to a graveyard. It's a laugh hard as a crow's and it ricochets off the humorless trees like a stone until it finds a wandering ear, and Beryl might be angry that he, particularly, is there to overhear her except that she doesn't recognize the haloed skull peering at her from among the bushes. The sharp edge of her sinuses draws in breath with a great rush of sound in the silence of the deepwood and for a moment, she wonders why she bothers to keep breathing - the habit, like eating, is too hard to break -  then she clicks her teeth together, embarrassed and angry, at the way the skull tilts, at the way it has the audacity to seem amusued. The lion claws at the back of her throat but she swallows it down.

    We are bones. What can you do to someone that is already dead?

    Image by ratty


    @[Cassian] hot mess girl delivering hot mess words
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    #2

    He would be lying if he said he hadn’t hoped to see her again one day. It didn’t matter that during their last encounter she had tried to shred him to pieces. It was the moments after that stuck in his mind. The face of someone who desperately needed a friend.

    He’s not good for much, but he is good for that at least.

    Cassian had not expected that today would be the day he ran into her again however. At first he only notices the shape moving in the distance, pale against the trees, when the sound of harsh laughter rings out. It catches his curiosity, just as it would any bored horse of his particular mindset looking for a distraction. But when he peers closer and recognizes the shape he sees, a queer sort of delight bubbles up in his chest. He shouldn’t be delighted, but he can’t seem to help the wide, impish smile that curls his lips as he peers around a tree to avoid losing sight of her.

    When she catches sight of him, her teeth click together in a familiarly irritated way, and laughter begins to rise before he quickly pushes it back (though perhaps not quickly enough). He frequently forgets the halo now ringing his dark head, but when the light glances across the rough bark of the tree, disturbing the shadows, he is reminded that she had never seen him with it. Perhaps she didn’t recognize him.

    Or perhaps she did. Hard to say, she had found him very annoying the last time too.

    “Couldn’t stay away, could you?” he quips easily by way of greeting, warm dark eyes crinkling in amusement at his own teasing. Moving around the tree, he approaches with a distinct lack of caution despite their… turbulent history. Plucking a twig from her tangled mane, he discards it at their feet before offering her a boyish grin. “Is it because you missed me?”

    Cassian


    @[Beryl]
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    #3
    If a halo could sit jauntily, that is how she would describe the one above his head, crooked and wry, laughing at some half-remembered joke, but the smile on his face is no different than that of any other skull - crocodile wide. Beryl is vaguely aware of her own halo, a shining light that fills the forest darkness, its warm glow full of false hope. It can't heal the shattered feeling that wells up sharp against her breast-bone.

    For a moment, she only stares back at the eyeless thing that watches her with its graveyard grin, and she is tempted to say that she does not recognize him at all. Only the Bodach sits easily in her mind with his black bones made of dull shadow, but the rest? Recognizing a skeleton takes so much more attention to detail than she can stand to give it, staring at them makes her angry. It makes her nauseous and horrified and sad, and she balls it all together into a hard little ball of venom and poisons herself with it a little more each day.

    So she wants to tell him that she doesn't recognize him, because it's easier to add to her collection of hurts and self-hatred than it is to admit that as soon as he speaks, she does, and that, maybe, she had missed him too.

    And that he is one of the last horses that she would have wanted to see, would have wanted to see her.

    Like this.

    She hadn't realized her own vanity until he's there, laughing at her like before, as if they aren't all monsters, all just dead things pretending they're still alive, and she's left wondering how her heart could possibly feel as if it's dropped into her stomach.

    "Cassian?" She knows it's him, but she questions it anyway, "You survived the Eclipse."

    To be honest, that is something of a surprise.

    If you can call this living," she says, gesturing bitterly to the bony plate of her shoulder.
    Image by ratty


    @[Cassian]
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    #4

    A laugh bubbles up his throat at her words, though it is more than a laugh. It is a thing that hides uncomfortable truths of his own, though he has always been very good at brushing them aside. “It would take much more than a few monsters to kill me.” His reply is easily spoken, filled with the light-hearted humor that masks any uncertainties he might have. Then he continues, a falsely put-upon sigh leaving his lips. “I seem to have developed the bad habit of always coming back.”

    He’s never quite certain if he always will, if perhaps this time might be the last. For a man with so few insecurities, this is perhaps one of his greatest. There’s a strange sort of uncertainty in not being able to die.

    But as with everything else that makes him uncomfortable, he brushes it aside. A problem to be dealt with at a later date. Always a later date.

    Her next comment strikes Cassian as oddly curious however. He tilts his head, features quizzical as his gaze roves her entire form, trying to determine what she had meant. As far as he could tell, she looked perfectly alive to him. Although, perhaps she had encountered some trouble during the eclipse. This notion, much to his surprise, draws a flutter of concern from the pit of his belly.

    “You seem perfectly alive to me.” he quips back lightly, though he can’t quite hide the note of disquiet. Shifting forward, he reaches out to touch the shoulder she had indicated, muzzle gently brushing the galaxy skin there. She feels as solid and real as she had last time they’d met (though he must say this is certainly more pleasant than teeth). After a moment, he withdraws slightly, brown eyes lifting to hers. “Did something happen to you… during the eclipse?”

    Cassian


    @[Beryl]
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    #5
    She might have to agree with him about his bad habits. Even though a minute ago Beryl was thinking that she might have missed him, her mood shifts too easily to irritated - patience has never been her virtue and now that the world is dead and its people no more than animated bones, it's easier than ever to be indifferent. She almost doesn't feel bad for it, but there's a hitch in his voice that catches against her ribs and stops up the unkind words on her tongue. There's plenty of reason to assume that Cassian would joke with her, that he would lie about the way the world has changed while darkness set across the land. There is every reason to believe he would find away to pretend nothing was happening at all, but she can't find the sense in the game. Instead, it annoys her. Is he joking?

    She won't be able to stand it if he's joking. The anger feels like fire running up her spine. In what world is this perfectly alive?

    "I don't--" He reaches out touch her shoulder and she freezes, tension washing over her, waiting for the dull clacking of bone against bone, for the chill of nausea to come, but it doesn't. It feels like whiskered lips on skin and the skeleton girl growls softly, bitterly. Memory is an inveterate liar.

    Bite, says the lion, feeling the weakening of her grip, Bite, and rend, and crack.

    The thoughts make her mouth taste sour and she steps away slightly, just out of reach of those grinning teeth. Did something happen?

    "Don't make fun of me, Cassian." There's an edge to her voice, something between a growl and a sob, "It's not okay. I don't want to live in a world of bones."

    She exhales sharply, exasperated, furious, grappling the cat so desperate to surface from inside her, to pick apart the empty bones and show him why he shouldn't tease her. The loosening hold comes with the appearance of long canines but she pulls the creature back, swallows it away again, though it claws the whole way down, leaving her raw and glassy-eyed. It leaves her voice cracked and discordant.

    "You can't just pretend this away! The Fairies may have gotten the sun back but look at us! Skeletons? Am I the only one that's not alright with this?"
    Image by ratty


    @[Cassian]
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    #6

    He may have been tempted to tease away all her frets and worries, but this does not feel like a teasing matter. To a stallion who had met the worst and most raw edges of life with determined humor, it is a unique experience. He would like to claim it is the memory of tooth and claw that make it so, but those are the furthest things from his mind at the moment.

    As the smile that she can’t see begins to fade, Cassian eyes her curiously, unaware that the slight head tilt might make his haloed skull appear to tip just a bit more jauntily than normal. But the seriousness of his words when he speaks belies the unconscious lightness of his form. “I would never make fun of you Beryl.”

    For all his lightness of heart and bantering manner, Cassian had never wished to inflict harm with his teasing, never intended cruelty with his words. It unsettles him that she had found them so. That suggesting she is alive might somehow appear a mean-spirited trick in her eyes. And for the first time in his life, he is at something of a loss for words.

    He had always used humor as his armor, always teased away the pain and hurts of the world as though that might make things better. But this is something he hadn’t encountered before. Whatever she sees in the world now is as real to her as her golden features lined with raw pain and despair are to him. And as much as he wants to tease those lines from the corners of her eyes and chase them away from the tight edges of her lips, he knows levity is not the answer.

    “I’m not… pretending anything away.” Cassian begins slowly after staring at her for several long moments as understanding dawned. A small, wry smile quirks the corner of one lip as he continues. “I don’t know how to say this gently, but… we’re not skeletons.” He steps forward, nose reaching out hesitantly to touch her cheek, unsure if she would let him. “Did you know get lines in your cheek when you clench your teeth?” His nose moves down a few inches, skimming gently. Even now, he can’t seem to help the note of humor that enters his voice. “And your nostrils flare every time I make you mad.”

    Cassian


    @[Beryl]
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    #7
    She stays still, frozen like one of Leilan's ice sculptures, and the deadweight of his words crushes her. It can't be true. But she feels her heart leaps at the hope that they offer her, even as she stares at the heartless, pale lines of his bones, the white, seashell of his skull reaching out for her own. The feeling of his lips on her cheek might send her reeling if she weren't already far away, on another (dark) day with another dark stallion. This one was not simply black, though, not flesh and blood, but shadow over bone with eyes red and burning. She'd thought him one of her shadows, but his darkness had flinched away from her when she'd tested it.

    And then, in a blink, he'd become a blackened skeleton, like bones left to char in dragonfire, and some madness had overtaken her that she never questioned it. She didn't search for the truth, she simply ran away. Running had never once served her, yet she falls back to it again and again. She fled the river's edge and found the forest, the lifeless forest, and she never thought to ask anyone else if they saw what she saw. It was insanity to do what Beryl had done, she could see it now.

    He could be lying. Doubt bleeds into her thoughts, jolting her back. He could be lying, he could just be repeating memories from... from before. She remembers the taste of his blood and the way it had made the air sharp, mingling with the smells of sweat and the smokey scent of autumn.

    She doesn't want to believe that he might be lying. That hope twists in her heart, threatening to turn sour.

    shadow, the shadows whisper in their deadleaf voices, skin

    She's been trusting her eyes all this time and ignoring everything else, ignoring touch and taste and the thrum of blood in her ears. She never even asked her shadows, though they swirl at her feet like fond hounds.

    "I..." Her words break across her tongue, catching on sharp teeth slowly melting back to their usual shape.

    "Can I? Would-- Would you mind?"

    But she doesn't pause to explain. Instead, she pulls away once again, evaporating from his side with the fluid ease of a cat and the soft billowing of the forest's shadow reaches out in her wake. Cool tendrils catch up around the cream-colored shafts of his cannon bones until, at least to her lying eyes, they are black and dark, as they should be, until the face looking back at her is Cassian's, though the eyes are yellow. Not quite right.

    There's no shine to his skin, this way. In that respect, he resembles the Bodach more than the laughing rogue she remembers, and noticing it reminds her of how easily she had forgotten sense at the riverside. Curled ears turn askew, troubled, and she feels the way they move in the feral sea of her pale mane now that she's paying attention, and she thinks that she has no response for him because it's rare anybody wants to know the intricacies of their own bones - more intimidating than intimate - so she says nothing. Heart in her throat and tongue pressed tight between her teeth to stop up the traitorous thoughts, she reaches out hesitantly across the gulf of her own foolishness.

    And when she closes her eyes against the light, she can almost pretend everything is normal.
    Image by ratty


    @[Cassian]
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    #8

    She doesn’t reject him when he touches her, doesn’t push him away or recoil in shocked horror as she has last time they met. He takes hope in that, a small smile returning to the corners of his dark lips. It isn’t until heartbeats later that she draws back, unsteady words exhaled from an uncertain throat.

    She doesn’t wait for his approval, but neither does he retreat from the shadows that begin to coil around his feet. For a moment, he can do little more than hold his breath as they crawl across his skin and blanket him in an endless pitch. He can’t know that his eyes have gone yellow in the embrace of her shadows, but still there is an undeniable kindness behind them, humor curling the edges, as irrepressible as he is.

    When finally the shadows have settled, he offers her a crooked grin, head tilting as he eyes her with banked laughter. “Is that better?” he asks lightly, voice crackling with the edges of amusement he tried so hard to hide. If this is what it takes to make her comfortable around him, he would gladly allow it. Not that he would have much of a choice if she pressed the issue, but Cassian brushes that aside as easily as he would a dry autumn leaf. He has spent his entire life surrounded by horses vastly more powerful than he. In that respect, she is no different than even his own twin.

    She doesn’t say anything in the wake of her shadows embracing him. He wonders for a moment if she can feel them in the same way he can feel the soft and almost imperceptible brush of them against nearly every inch of his skin (though he’s not quite foolish enough to ask).

    He’s not quite certain how he recognizes this for the olive branch it is, but he does. Perhaps it’s the way she seems to close her eyes and surrender, at least momentarily. Or perhaps it’s merely an overactive imagination. Whatever the case may be, he closes the distance between them once more. His lips find her jaw again - the one whose lines have now all but disappeared - as a smile grows. And when he speaks, his words are soft, escaping on a warm and wispy breath. “Do you believe me now?”

    Cassian


    @[Beryl]
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    #9
    He asks if it's better.

    "Almost," she replies, studying the yellow eyes of the shadows she's knit across his skin, eyes lacking the warmth and laughter of his. That second skin clings enough to give her a sense of the smile on his lips, but its edges are soft and she dares not make them harder.

    And in the dark paths of her memory, she is thinking that not very long ago this exact smile had baited her to attack him, the battle in Nerine and the loss of Brennen still so fresh, a papercut across her heart, and this smile was like salt blown in her face. Now, he's found her again, found her with new hurts, new tears burning her eyes and anger like fire in her throat, found her with the same hint of laughter in his, and that same puckish grin.

    It's the first one she's seen in a year. The first face. And it is laughing at her, no matter what he says, but she can't even care because she's too relieved to see it.

    When he reaches out again, her eyes flutter open, but she doesn't pull away again. Golden light fills the copse despite the way her shadows plucks at the edges, day and night collide. The feather-soft shadows on his skin are cool to the touch, and it's her turn to press forward when he asks her if she believes him, burying her face and her lying eyes in the evergreen smell of him.

    "No."

    No, because what she knows and what she sees are so different and she'll forget as soon as he's not there to remind her. As soon as she does something awful that makes her run away again. Could he find her a third time? Would he bother?

    "But we can pretend. For now."
    Image by ratty


    @[Cassian] midnight phone post when I should be sleeping you're welcome
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    #10

    “No,” she says, and his heart unexpectedly aches for her. By any standard, Cassian should be as lost and angry as she. He has experienced hurt after hurt, even died twice in the bare decade of his existence. He has known loneliness, and he has known times where despair should have filled him. Despite all that, Cassian has never been able to find it in himself to be angry at the world.

    If he were a more reflective sort, he would say it is because there is already too much anger in the world. The world did not need his adding to it. But he is not the reflective sort, and so instead he simply lives each day by choosing to find the things that make him happy. By remembering the good rather than the bad. By filling his heart with love instead of hate. A foolishly naive sentiment perhaps, but one it seems he wouldn’t grow out of.

    So when she buries her face against him, he reacts by instinct, neck curling around her to hold her close. In that moment, he wishes he could do more, could be more. Wishes that he could take all of her hurts as his own. Wishes he could let her know happiness as he has known it. He might not know the details of her history and the pain it wrote across her skin, but he can see the truth of it clearly in every line of her.

    “For now,” he agrees, soft voice barely more than a rumble in his throat. Pressing his lips to the galaxy winding over her shoulder, he traces a rhythmic trail along the slope, doing his best to show her, in one small way, that she is as real as the trees around them. “And maybe one day we won’t have to pretend.”

    Cassian


    @[Beryl]
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