"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
06-06-2020, 07:18 PM (This post was last modified: 07-27-2020, 09:12 PM by Anonya.)
when you're dreaming with a broken heart
The mountain shook, and the flowers in her mane and tail blossomed, and still she remains alone.
She has not moved from the spot she had been in when the dust first found her, though dawn had since broke across the sky and the sun was now warming the hidden meadow she stood in. There had been a moment, briefly, where she had felt something that wasn’t exactly happiness, but perhaps a moment of contentment. A rare flutter of her once dead but eternally broken heart, a fleeting feeling of peace, and the idea that perhaps hope still existed.
Perhaps hope could bloom the same way the flowers had — unexpectedly, and out of nowhere.
The enormity of her grief crushes on top of her, though, heavier than gravity, because it is all she has ever known. When she had first been released from the afterlife it had still been present even if she had not had a name for it, even if she could not place why it existed. But the longer she was alive, the more the haze of death began to clear.
The memories came back, one by one.
Her father and the way he cruelly stolen the last of her innocence from her, in some twisted romantic display of being unable to cope with the death of her mother.
The blind child of incest born from it, the one that no matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t love. She named her Wretch, so that the girl would know without her ever having to say it. That made it better, she thinks. To not actually say it.
She remembers finding love — twice — and having it ripped away both times. She supposes that is karma. If she couldn’t love her own child, incest or not, it made sense that she did not deserve love at all.
The feeling of contentment is gone just as fast as it had come, and she remains alone in this corner of the meadow, flowers woven in her hair, like some kind of mockery of who she had once been.
When he had first come through the gates—when he had first breached the shores of Beqanna once more—he had felt that strange clarity burst in his chest. He had felt the joy of it—the unmistakable way that it had radiated from his very core. To be alive again! To find a home with Agetta once more.
To, through some miracle, raise children with her.
It was almost too much to bear. Too much to ask for and impossible to show the full depth of his gratitude. He had felt something like shame when he had woken up to the heavy weight in his chest. When the joy began to feel stained with something else. At first, he chalked it up to some kind of remnant of death. As though the bleakness of it had somehow followed him into life. Had someone found him.
But it had not gone away.
And he had not been able to claw his way back to the simple, clear-eyed joy of his first days. That is not to say that he does not feel joy. He does. (He does!) He wakes next to Agetta and presses his face into the brilliance of her white hair. He watches Beyza and Caledonia grow with each day. But he cannot shake the otherness that follows him. The doubt that creeps without root into the back of his mind.
It is that dread that brings him here today. That has him walking, eagle wings folded over the width of his back, through the meadow as he did countless times in the years of his first life.
Which is, of course, when he sees her.
Something like shock races through his system. Followed by joy, and guilt, and a million other emotions that he cannot name. It paralyzes him for a second before he walks toward her as if almost in a daze.
“Anonya?”
The name comes to him so easily, as if he had said it but yesterday.
“Is that really you?”
PLUME
but my heart, it don’t beat, it don’t beat the way it used to
She cannot remember the last time she heard her name. It has been so long that she is slow to react, thinking it to be some trick of what is surely a mad and addled mind (souls are not meant to live more than once — death was not meant to be temporary, and she is so sure that every time her heart starts to beat again that irreversible damage is further inflicted). His voice comes again, though, and it is then she angles her fine head, her dark eyes turning to take in a face she did not think she would ever see again.
It’s been so long that she doesn’t remember if he was the first or second to tear her apart – she can’t remember if her father raping her or Plume leaving her happened first. In the end, lifetimes later, it didn’t really matter.
She almost laughs at the obsurdity of it all. That life insists on breathing itself back into her, but only so that it can reopen every wound, only so that it can remind her of everyone she has lost.
Reminding her that dead or alive, peace didn’t exist.
“Yes.” A single word, dropped like an anchor between them; heavy as it seemingly hits the ground, but also signifying that by responding she is not leaving, though that had been her instinct. She could have not answered and disappeared, let him think he had seen a ghost. Although, the idea is not too far of a stretch. She is, in nearly every aspect, a ghost. She looks at him with haunted eyes, with a weariness that comes from too many lifetimes of letdowns and heartbreaks — with a strange realization that she doesn’t have the energy to be happy or sad or angry at the sight of him. Just the same indifference she has felt since ending up back here.
“How are you, Plume?” She says his name with a forced neutrality, makes herself say it and makes sure her voice does not waver when she does, even if inside, her false strength is trembling.
Perhaps it is death that cloaks his mind from the damage that he has done in past lifetimes. Perhaps it is merely a survival instinct that protects him from experiencing the full depth of wounds that he has inflicted. It leaves much of his former life behind a veil—trapped beneath the fog of remembering. He can only remember the softened angles of it and not the sharp edges. He remembers enough though.
Enough that her heavy voice, the haunted depths of her eyes, spear right through him. He flinches a little, his handsome, weathered face bearing the brunt of her distance. He recoils a little, but doesn’t physically step away from her. He can hardly blame her for not greeting him with warmth.
He’s not sure that he would if he were in her position.
“Ah,” he starts, his voice nearly hoarse. He stops and clears his throat, shakes his head a little as though to clear his thoughts and then pauses, staring at the ground for a moment. He takes another shaky breath and then flicks his gaze upward, the simple brown of his eyes finding her own. “I am okay.” It feels like a dull response, hollow, and his mouth tilts into a self-deprecating smile. “I have not yet found my feet again.”
He frowns.
“It is strange to find yourself alive and still have to convince yourself of it every morning.”
The words taste bitter though, and he feels an immediate wave of guilt for feeling anything but appreciative for his second chance of life. Guilt that pours through him once more as he looks at her and realizes how much his introspection had kept him from the more important subject at hand: her.
“And you, Anonya? How are you?”
PLUME
but my heart, it don’t beat, it don’t beat the way it used to
She feels guilty, too, but it is hidden behind a face of almost marble. She feels guilty that she has forgotten how to smile, she feels guilty that she is not the wild and carefree girl he had known and at one point loved, and sometimes she wonders if maybe he had known this part of her existed and that was why he left. And she feels guilty for thinking that; feels guilty that there is still a bitterness that creeps at the back of her tongue when she thinks about him, because if someone couldn’t have loved her at her best, how was anyone ever going to love her now that she was at her worst.
She had thought she had gotten over it. Thought she had accepted it and moved on, because she had been given a second chance at life, in a land completely separate from here. She had found someone that loved even all the broken parts of her, she had let herself dare to heal and feel whole.
Now she wonders if that was all just a dream. Are dreams possible when you’re dead? She isn’t sure if it’s possible to wake up from a dream into a nightmare.
“I don’t think I feel alive yet,” she confesses to him, and this time the heaviness is weighed down by a palpable sadness, lacing around every word like a noose, building itself into a knot inside of her chest. “I was alive again, once, but this isn’t it.”
He asks her how she is, and she doesn’t answer at first. She angles her face away from him, staring off at some gold-lined hill in the distance, ignoring the way the breeze toys with the strands of her mane and the flowers that bloomed there. “I’m not okay, but I will be,” she says quietly, and it is an affirmation to herself as much as it is an answer to him.
He isn’t sure that he remembers anymore. Isn’t sure of anything of his former life except that Agetta had glowed so brilliantly in the center of it. He knows that he carries the heavy weight of guilt in his chest though. A stone that he could never quite rid himself of. Because no matter how much his love for Agetta had warmed him like the sun, he knew it meant destruction for others. He knew he had hurt her.
The truth of his betrayal, regardless of the how and the why, sits bitterly on his tongue. He wants to hold her close. He wants to tell her that she is still beautiful and that the world could be beautiful for her too, but he lost that right so long ago. He lost the right to be anything, say anything. He doesn’t deserve it.
“It takes a while,” he says, even though she knows. He flinches at her honesty and he tucks his eagle wings in closer as the wind picks up. Fights the urge to shield her with them, to warm her as he once might have. “I’m so sorry,” because this is the only thing he can give her now—this guilt, this apology.
The silence stretches between them again. Awkward and unyielding. Difficult to traverse as he realizes that the space between them is so much more than these few feet. Than the simple air that they breathe.
“What can I do?”
His voice is quieter, nearly hoarse with his need to try and help. To try and fix this. Perhaps he cannot figure out the root of his own unhappiness, his unsettled heart, but he could try and help with hers.
“Anonya,” he hates that her name lingers, “let me try and help.”
PLUME
but my heart, it don’t beat, it don’t beat the way it used to
She thinks there must have been a time when she had wanted this – them, together. She is sure that at one point she had dreamt it, prayed for it, begged for it. She is sure when her heart first broke she had thought he would be the solution to fix it; that if it shattered apart because of him, that he would also be the only one that could piece it back together.
She isn’t sure when she realized that would never happen – that you can’t heal a wound using the knife that created it.
That trying to create love where it no longer existed wasn’t love at all.
He apologizes, and she wishes he wouldn’t. It makes her chest feel tight, makes her heart feel like it’s trying to claw out of her ribcage so that she might not have to feel anything anymore. That she would not have to see him feel guilty for something that wasn’t his fault, because it’s not his fault he stopped loving her, and not his fault that everything continued to spiral after that. “Why are you sorry?” She means for the words to sound sharp, she wishes for them to carry an edge, but instead there is only a tired kind of softness, looking at him with melancholy lingering in her eyes.
“You don’t have to do anything,” and without realizing she takes a single step towards him, ignoring the chill of the wind that stings against her cheeks and incites a shiver that crawls across her skin. “You don’t…owe me anything, Plume.” There is a heavy silence, one burdened by a sad kind of tension, before she slowly, carefully, says, “I know you weren’t happy with me, that something was missing, and you found it in someone else. You don’t have to apologize for that.”
Her words cut deeper than he would have guessed. The years have not softened the blow of his own failures and there is no quicker way for him to face it than standing here, her looking back at him. He wants to look away. Desperately wants to cast his gaze to something else, but he forces himself to stand there and watch her. Forces himself to stare into the sun that is the destruction of his own making.
He doesn’t answer her question though—not right away. He just lets it simmer between them because he doesn’t know how to put words to the way that he feels. He’s not even sure that he has the right to it. Why should he be thinking of how this makes him feel? Why should her pain cause him to focus on his own?
Because he is utterly selfish, he knows. Weak.
All of the things he had known in his first life cast into stark relief.
The silence remains, stretched between them, and he finishes closing the distance between them. He curls around and flares his large eagle wings up and out, settling them over her back. “There is nothing missing with you, Anonya,” he says, his voice strained. “You have always been far too good for me.” He can’t help himself—cannot stop the way that he leans over to press his muzzle against her cool cheek.
“Perhaps the thing missing has always been in me,” he confesses, hating himself for making this about himself again. “Agetta felt it too.” It’s the first time he’s said it aloud to anyone but himself. The first time that he’s admitted he came back to life for a love who was not his anymore—not wholly.
He shakes his head, disgusted with himself but hoping it could at least provide her some relief.
Let her see how much better she was off without him.
Everyone always was.
PLUME
but my heart, it don’t beat, it don’t beat the way it used to
06-21-2020, 01:47 AM (This post was last modified: 06-21-2020, 01:49 AM by Anonya.)
when you're dreaming with a broken heart
She can feel that this is a mistake. A mistake because she isn’t strong enough to withstand him, is not strong enough to step away from him when he fully closes the space between them. He touches her, and if it were not for his wings across her back to anchor her to reality she would be convinced she was dreaming. But even then, she cannot remember the last time she dreamt of him — his presence alone is enough to remind her she is awake. She had clung to him for so long, to some ridiculous, foolish hope that he would change his mind and come back. For years all she had of him was dreams and watery memories, until eventually they faded. Until she died, and finally in death the fragmented pieces of her heart learned to entirely let go of him.
His words, and his touch against her cheek, breaks something inside of her.
“Don’t,” she says, and though it is meant to be a command, the word is spoken around a throbbing ache in her throat and it comes out choked by the tears that suddenly fill her eyes. She shifts away from him, trembling with the effort it takes to swallow the emotion and heartache that threatens to unravel her. The last thing she wanted was to fall apart in front of him, but with her heart hammering in her chest she isn’t sure she has that kind of control anymore. Tears streak her face before she can regain composure, and she tilts her face away from him as she sucks in sharp, unsteady breaths.
She looks back at him, finally, and suddenly she feels like the same weak girl that was so easily overpowered by her father, and the same stupid, foolish girl that ever thought anyone could love someone so entirely damaged.
She is quiet for a long moment after what he says, and though her eyes are now empty of tears her face remains damp, and she does not look nearly as stoic as she sounds when she says dimly, “I’m sure she still loves you. Everything always works out the way it’s supposed to.” She looks away from him again, her voice nearly a whisper when she adds, “It's just a storm, and storms don't last forever.” A lie, but it's a lie she has told herself a hundred times. Her storm has lasted several lifetimes now, and she has little hope for this one
Plume knows all about mistakes. He has made so many of them—built his life on the foundation of them. He knows that this is another one, but still he runs headlong into it. He is blind with his sorrow, still gnashing his teeth with the pain the reverberates through him, and she is there. Sweet Anonya. His sweet, kind Anonya who he had torn apart with his own hunger, his own selfish heart.
He has the chance to do right by her—to send her far away from him.
But he does not.
His face is open and sorrowful as she tells him to stop, as she whispers ‘don’t.’ He knows that it could be a command, knows that he should listen and step away, but he remains there. His wide brown eyes just stare at her, studying the way that his own heartache plays across her delicate features.
She is so beautiful.
He is in so much pain.
“I don’t know how anything will turn out for me,” he whispers, and he takes a small step forward again, although not enough to completely close the gap between them. The ache in his chest is a canyon and he feels as though he could pour his anguish into it for the rest of his days and it would never fill.
He wants it to stop. Wants anything to distract him from the memory of Agetta telling him the truth. The million ways he has imagined her new life—her new family. The failures that are branded on him.
“I don’t want to be alone,” he confesses. “Please don’t make me leave, Anonya.”
A plea, this time, as he studies her face.
As he tries to find forgiveness in the delicate lines and sorrow reflected back at him.
PLUME
but my heart, it don’t beat, it don’t beat the way it used to
