[private] i hide with the skeletons in my bed;

[brigade]

I was a poor boy; you were a bright light
I was a sinner and you were a snake

Brunhilde has none of her mother’s softness—none of her coyness—and yet there is something about her that always reminds him of Kensa. Something that strikes at him like flint whenever he is near her, whenever he studies her openly. He isn’t able to quite put his finger on it, but it exists there between the spaces of his ribs regardless, an itch that he can’t scratch and yet persists, constantly biting at him.

He is not surprised when she nearly runs into him, she isn’t difficult to see coming after all, but neither does he move out of her direct path. Instead, he raises an invisible brow, his face stuck in that same stormy expression that he always wears, his wings folded dark and red over the wide expanse of his back.

“Me again,” he says for not the first time and certainly not the last. He catches the blood on her leg and the scab that has recently been torn away, but he doesn’t mention it. From their few encounters, he has been able to surmise a few things about the mare before him and none of them led him to believe that she was the type who eagerly accepted unrequested advice. He certainly would have several pieces of it for her—including, perhaps, most urgently that she cut ties with the man he had met with her before.

But it’s not his problem and he has little habit of taking them and making it his own.

So he just shrugs.

“Luck or curse, I guess.” His voice is dry and husky, running through his mouth like river stones tumbling over one another. “Why do you always feel the need to make a man feel so welcome?”

This at least accompanied with a ghost of a smile, although it leaves before it can fully perch.

shook like some old souls when our bones broke
swallowed the sickness, a fever, a flame

BRIGADE