She had grown to love their time together, even in the wake of a war that had changed everything. But change, as it were, did not always have to be bad. Slowly the land healed, families were reunited from their various corners of the island through whatever portal they had escaped, and she had learned more of the storm grey man who seemed to care for her like no one else before him had dared try. There were more days and more nights than she would’ve guessed, more moments and touches and soft smiles when he glanced away for a moment and her heart overflowed with gentle joy.
But he was a wild thing, she had known that from the very start. Beautiful and boundless, in that way that all winged creatures are meant to be free. So it hurt when he leaves, hurts more in the night when she remembers the way they had sometimes slept tangled and so together, but she reminds herself of the wildness in his heart. Brigade is the same in that way. Wild and gone from her, but she knows one day the wind will carry him back to her again.
Sometimes it is harder though, when Choke is gone exploring and her only company is that strange reflection staring back up at her in jagged pieces from the rippling waves. She is reminded how entirely strange she is, how she lacks the soft comfort of a woman, how though her skin is bright and beautiful like copper ore, it is also mutilated with bone and wound and blood that falls in tears across the chestnut and the white. Even her face is ruined by it, even her brow covered in the bramble of antler - though, recently, and for reasons unknown, small pale flowers have climbed in vines to tangle among the bone. In the safe secrets of her own thoughts, she finds them almost beautiful.
She and Choke stay in the place Nightlock had first found her, and while she would readily admit that it is because this corner of Tephra feels like hers, feels like home, the quieter truth is that she wants to make sure he can find them again. It is a thing that maybe should not matter to her as much as it does, but her heart feels tethered. To here, to him.
There are weeks without him, too many days where her eyes catch on a distant shape in the sky and she pauses long enough to wonder, long enough to see as it flies closer that it is only a bird. Until, at last, it is no bird at all. Her heart catches in her chest, tripping and stuttering and tumbling across her lips in a faint, crooked smile she presses to his beautiful steel neck. He doesn’t reach for her immediately, but he is so stoic and so stern that this doesn’t surprise her.
She is neither.
She has learned to be vulnerable for him, to reach when he is less sure, to press her cheek to the warmth of a dappled neck and close her eyes so that she can know only him in such moments. No sky and no ocean, nothing but the heat of his skin and that wilderness smell, the flex of sinuous muscle as he undoubtedly clenches his jaw. He often catches his thoughts there between his teeth, working them over until he is done with them.
He says her name and that smile falls to pieces on her mouth, so shy and so crooked, so unsure when she hides it against his neck. She is careful not to catch him with the tines of her antlers, careful not to smear bright blood over skin the color of steel-bellied storm clouds. But then they’re apart again and her eyes are on his mouth, on the words that don’t make any sense when they reach her ears because they imply something more than she deserves. He’s sorry, sorry for leaving, and she’s trying to understand it but there is some stubborn piece of her heart that just won’t let her believe that, maybe, she matters to him.
Her eyes are so soft and so unsure when they lift to find his gaze, to settle against that shade of dark she missed so much. “It’s okay,” she’s whispering, reaching her nose out to brush against his, “you came back.” She aches to slip beneath his neck and feel him drag her close against his chest, aches to feel his lips wander so gently over the edges of her wounds in that way that only he soothes the ruin of her flesh. But she is so unsure, so desperately trying to ignore that whisper in her heart urging her on, because he hasn’t even said if he’ll stay yet. Hasn’t reached for her.
But she does.
She steps closer, reaches up with a new kind of tenderness to smooth the tangles of his forelock with the soft of her nose. Hesitates for only one thump-beat of her unsteady heart before she presses a kiss to his brow, another to the soft skin above the corner of his dark mouth. “Stay longer this time, okay?” The request is so gentle, so soft as her lips brush over the corner of his mouth and hesitate there for a beat, not even sure if she has any right to ask this of him, “I don’t want to have to miss you anymore.”
i am brambles but i am tangled in your love