"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
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
If there is one thing in her life that she does not regret, it is her children.
She has loved them wholeheartedly. Even when Bela and Rupture had been born, and she had cried into their fuzzy necks, she had never regretted them. Regretted that she could not give them a happier life or that she could not be a better mother, but never once regretted their existence.
They were bright spots of joy. Beautiful and fierce and so undeniably perfect.
So it has not crossed her mine that she would regret it.
Even when she was alive with pain from the missing of him—the massive hole that he had left in the very center of her—she had not regretted their time together. So it cuts through her when she hears his words. Her breath whistles out of her and she finally looks up, studies his face, her green eyes overly bright.
“How relieving to hear you do not regret me,” she says with venom on her tongue, mistaking his words as cutting. Her ears flip back and she takes a step toward him instead of the direction she had been heading. Her anger is such a volatile thing and it is easier for her to grasp onto it then feel the full depth of her pain, her longing. It is worse, now, looking at him then it had been when she did not know where he was.
It is worse to be so close and yet still feel that chasm yawning open.
So she grows angry. She lets it settle onto her like armor and she lifts her chin defiantly. “I will make sure to tell our child that, Bethlehem.” His name almost sucks the anger out of her in a gut punch but she keeps going because the only way through the fog of misery is to burn it down.
He exhales.
He is not an immovable force.
He has never considered himself an especially patient man.
But her anger comes spitting out of her hot and fast and mean -
and he does not react.
He does not rise up to greet her. He doesn’t not gnash his teeth and flare his nostrils. He sighs a patient kind of sound. Or perhaps it is defeat. Some kind of bitter resignation as he shakes his head.
“That’s not what I meant,” he says, the tone even.
He knows that the well of his patience is shallow, that if she pushes him hard enough he will snap. If only because he has never taken kindly to being misunderstood.
“I wasn’t sure if you did and I felt it important that you know that I don’t.”
Perhaps he is digging himself a deeper hole. Maybe he should have stopped himself before he’d even begun. He has never been known for his eloquence, his ability to concisely say whatever’s is on his mind. And now, this. As if he needed further proof.
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 wishes that she could get a rise out of him.
But like the last time they met, it is an impossible task.
It is impossible to bait him and trick him into falling into this vicious anger that swells in her throat so easily. Again, she finds that she rails against him—coming undone and showing all the ugliest parts of her. Again, she finds that he just stands there, observant and quiet and not sinking down to her level.
Hatred and a painful ache beat bruises into her chest.
“Of course I don’t,” she says with tears in her eyes. They fall hot to her cheeks. “I never regretted it for a second—not even when you left,” she says because the truth always burns the back of her throat, so ready for her to spit it out. She closes her eyes and swallows, wishing she could wipe these tears from her face.
When she opens her eyes again, they glitter with her pain.
“Is that what you want me to say? That you were able to get up and leave the next day, move on with your life and I couldn’t? That I haven’t been able to do anything but think about you and m—“ her voice catches in her throat and she has to swallow again, the knives of it burying deep, “miss you?”
She laughs, tears on her cheeks.
“Congratulations, Beth. You win.”
She shakes her delicate head and takes a step back, something like panic rising in her as she realizes how much she has told him. How vulnerable she has become—and how it was all her doing. Always hers.
Whatever impulse rises in him, he swallows.
Buries it, if only because he does not understand it.
He is neither comforting nor sympathic. Such softnessis beyond him. So rarely is he moved to tenderness that he rages against it in the fleeting moments where it consumes him. He gnashes his teeth against it. Fights it tooth and nail. He is not built for it and yet -
And yet, something shifts in him when the tears gather in her eyes and then cut rivers down her dark cheeks. The sigh that comes in the wake of her word she is not exasperation but defeat. Because this is a fight he cannot win. Because it does not matter what he says, she will undoubtedly find some way to twist it until it is something cruel, something vicious, something with teeth.
Congratulations, she says and the tenuous grip he has kept on his patience snaps. It does not snap in spectacular fashion. There is no explosion, merely a faint simmering beneath the surface. His expression darkens, muddied by the frown that furrows his brow as he considers her.
“What have I won?” he asks. “I didn’t want you to say anything. I didn’t ask anything of you.” His nostrils flare as he drags in a shuddering breath. “I’m sorry that you think so little of me that you would think I could be so casually cruel.”
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
Maybe the problem is that she doesn’t understand him.
And how could she?
He keeps everything locked away beneath feet of granite and concrete and gives nothing but the smallest of clues to his thoughts. She studies him, so eager for even the smallest piece, the smallest glimmer of his innermost feelings, but she so often comes away empty-handed. She walks away just hungry and alone.
The second that he sighs, she realizes her mistake again.
She realizes that she has continued to trod on the same ground—having the same outbursts and somehow expecting for him to react in a different way. But even knowing this, even knowing that she is not going to win and the reaction she so desperately is hoping for won’t come, she can’t stop herself.
“You never do, do you? You don’t ask anything of anyone,” she spits, feeling the way that the cruelty wraps itself around her throat, letting it linger on her tongue. “Least of all me.” This stings her more than it would him—this reminder that he would never turn to her, never reach out, never give an inch.
She swallows it down easily with the rest of her pain.
“Maybe I don’t think anything of you,” she lies and wishes it wasn’t so obvious, wishes that the tears on her cheeks would go away and she could be cold—as cold as him. “Maybe I don’t think a thing.”
This time his anger has nothing to do with softness.
It has nothing to do with the quiet comfort he’d found in the way she had lain her head to rest on the ridge of his spine.
This time his anger has teeth and he does not try to fight it.
He does not swallow his impulses now. Instead, the expression goes even darker still. She snaps at him, all vitriol, and, for the moment, he merely stands there and takes it. He lets it pool in the valleys between his ribs. He lets it fester in the pit of his gut. It nfssts the delicate architecture of his lungs.
He does not speak until he is certain she is through. There is a beat of silence that passes between them as he grits his teeth until his jaw aches.
“What do you want from me, Adna?” he asks, almost demands it. His throat is tight and the vise grip tightened around his windpipe is obvious in the tone of his voice. He drags in a shuddering breath. “What the fuck are you so angry at? I don’t owe you anything. I don’t deserve the anger you seem to think me so worthy of.” It is not an inability to accept responsibility but rather an inherent inability to determine exactly what he’s done wrong.
“I don’t know why you’ve decided to take all of your anger out on me but I’m not your fucking punching bag and I never agreed to be.”
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
Finally—finally—she gets a hint of his anger.
And then, the storm of it.
It takes the wind out of her sails and leaves her silent, her serpentine eyes widening slightly and her jaw snapping shut. Part of her almost rises against it again—almost lashes out because it is the only thing she knows how to do—but she remains quiet. She takes in all of his rage and pulls it deep into her chest. She lets it sit there, lets it rot, because she knows that she deserves it. She knows that she has earned it.
But nothing stings more than when he tells her he doesn’t owe her anything.
Because he doesn’t.
Not her—not this child.
For a second, she drops her head, the curls of her forelock dropping down to skim her nose, and she hates herself for the few more tears that fall. Hates herself for the weakness in how quickly she folds.
Hates herself for not walking away from him—leaving him alone—when she had the chance.
“I’m sorry,” she says, her voice small, and the tremors racing up her spine. She doesn’t know how to even begin explaining to him why she is the way that she is so when she looks up, all of the anger has bled from her face and in its place is just shame, just grief. “There is something very broken inside of me.”
How could she ever explain the marrow-deep misery she felt in his absence? How terrified she is of the feelings that swell in her when he looks her way? How it is easier to drive him away than try to face it?
She can’t and so she doesn’t even try.
“I don’t know what I’m doing,” she admits, feeling the faintest stirrings of life in her.
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
She folds like a child scorned.
He resents this, too.
Because it makes him the villain.
Because, suddenly, he is the bad guy when she is the one who pushed him until he broke.
His heart adopts a new, frantic kind of beat as he watches her. Watches her bow her head, watches her hide behind the tangles of her forelock. It makes his vision strobe to see the tears continue to streak down her cheeks.
He is not immune to anger. Certainly no man is. But this evokes in him a rage he has only come by a handful of times before. Because he did not ask for this. Because he’d been minding his own goddamned business when she’d injected herself into his life with all of the vicious anger he hadn’t deserved then either.
“No,” he snaps, tries in vain to steady himself. “No, you don’t get to spit all your anger at me and then play the fucking victim. You don’t get to push me until I break and then pretend like I’m the fucking bad guy here.”
The muscles twitch and tremble beneath the surface of his skin. “I did nothing to deserve your hatred, Adna.”
He grits his teeth, desperate for some way to rein in his anger before it slips too thoroughly out of his control. “I tried to be nice. I tried to be patient. But you weren’t happy with that. Are you fucking happy now? This is what you wanted, isn’t it?”
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
Her apology isn’t enough. It isn’t enough.
Because it doesn’t slow down his own rage but instead throws gasoline on the fire of it.
He continues to scold her, and at first, she takes it. She bows her head and swallows it because she deserves it—he’s right. He hadn’t done anything to deserve it other than exist. Other than leave like she had known that he would. He hadn’t done anything except be exactly who he was.
But the words don’t stop. He doesn’t stop.
“What else do you want me to say, Beth?” her voice getting heated again, unable to not react to him, unable to just sit there and let him pour his anger out on her silently. “I told you that I’m sorry.” The word has considerable less softness behind it now as she weaponizes it—as she throws it his way.
Her sage green eyes still glitter with tears but she lifts her head, straightens her shoulders. She bites down until she thinks she may bleed, her jaw growing sore with the pressure. “Do I look happy to you?” There is something like incredulity that nearly breaks her features, crackling across it like electricity.
She swallows hard, trying to bite back the words that rise in her, the truth that bubbles up. “I haven’t been happy since the second I woke up and you were gone, Beth. I have been miserable. So I am sorry I am not a bundle of fucking sunshine after having spent months missing you with a daily, growing reminder of you.” She trembles, takes a step forward and then stops, breathing hard. “I don’t know what I want.”
This a half-truth.
She knows what she wants; she’s just terrified to say it.
I can get there on my own. you can leave me here alone.
And then, before he can stop it, the inevitable guilt.
Because she had said she was sorry.
But she had said it with tears in her eyes and it had felt like an attack.
Another complex part of whatever game she had dragged him into.
But she lifts her head now and she straightens her shoulders and there is some glimmer of life in her eyes when she looks at him. No, she doesn’t look happy but he knows it’s a rhetorical question and he swallows whatever answer alights on his tongue. A resounding no, certainly. Neither of them is built for happiness, he thinks, though he believes that she could find it if she looked hard enough. If she walked until her knees ached and she thought her spine might begin to disintegrate. If she walked as many thousands of miles as he’d walked, certainly she could have found something to restart her heart. But it is not him and it never was.
She takes one singular step toward him and he thinks he should meet her halfway. Some peace offering, perhaps. A truce of sorts. Forgiveness, at the very least. But he stays where he is because he doesn’t know how to navigate this unfamiliar terrain without guidance and so far all she has had to offer him is anger.
“I was never worth missing, Adna,” he murmurs and he looks away, swallows thickly, steady losing his grip on his anger as he drags in a shuddering breath. “I was never worth your sadness.”
He smiles then, another rueful thing as he tilts his head. “I’m sorry that I made you suffer.” .
BETHLEHEM
I'm just tryin' to do what's right. oh, a man ain't a man unless he's fought the fight.
