"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
He had not meant to be gone long. Not that it mattered any. Not that anyone was keeping track. But it had taken him days to recover from the effort it had taken to summon the first portal. And then days to recover from the effort it had taken to summon the second, failed portal. And then weeks to walk back to Pangea.
Weeks because he had to stop frequently to catch his breath, to rest the sore muscles, to lay down his weary head.
But he is here now. Here, where there are precious few shadows for him to be lost to. Here, where he must seek out the darkness. And sometimes he wonders if perhaps he might be better off someplace else, someplace where the darkness could always find him. Someplace where he was not reminded constantly of his strangeness.
It has been days since he returned. Days since he tucked himself away in a cave not unlike the one where his mother gave birth to the twins and slept. And slept. And slept.
He emerges now, some days later, and blinks into the sun.
He has grown accustomed to all that light. Absorbs the heat heat of it until it feels like burning alive. Until it’s almost unbearable. But he is darkness, something like an idea, and though he has a heart he is not convinced that he can die. How can he, when he’s already a ghost?
He sees her. She is hard to miss. His antithesis. And he moves toward her, much like the first time they’d met. And, much like the first time, the breathing is shallow and labored by the time he reaches her.
“Beyza,” he murmurs and he smiles his cheshire cat smile, steadily meeting her gaze. Unlike the first time, when it had burned so terribly just to glance in her direction that he had spent the entire interaction staring resolutely at the red clay underfoot.
Of all the figures Beyza might expect to approach her as she moves through Pangea, Jamie would not have made the list. She had not seen much of the shadow since their first awkward meeting as young foals, when they both happily seemed to focus on Livinia instead. Even now, she sees him and immediately wonders where his sister is but the question doesn’t come out. Liv who was filled with more life than either Beyza or Jamie seemed to be, the girl who needed fangs to feast and who gained her sustenance right from the beating heart of another animal. Sometimes Beyza wonders if she would feel more alive if she did the same but the desire to try has not found her yet.
The starkness of blood against her white-as-white-can-be coat reminds her too much of the day she almost lost her own beloved sister.
Like the last time they met, soft tendrils of white smoke curl around her legs and cascade down her sides as she watches him approach.
Unlike last time, he meets her gaze.
That combined with the grin he wears encourages a wry and surprised smile in the crystalline eyes of this porcelain girl. “Is it?” Her own gaze is as sharp and unblinking as ever as she states simply. “I don’t think you cared for me very much the first time we met.” Beyza remembers feeling guilty that the brother of her new friend wouldn’t even look at her - as if she had done something wrong just by existing. This is already a vast improvement, though, so that guilt is not currently rising up to choke her just yet.
A fair question, certainly.
The darkness had consumed him the last time he’d seen her.
He had spent so many weeks in the shadows. He had been so much weaker then. (Still weak, of course, but he has grown and the exhaustion does not fit him the same way it did then). And then grin remains, all sharp teeth and an ink black mouth, as he meets her gaze steady. Still so much brighter than anything he’s used to, but he no longer fancies himself a coward. He will not cower, not like he did then.
His fog looks dirty compared to her white smoke. Smoke that reminds him of his sister and of the first time the three of them had convened.
“I hope you can forgive me,” he murmurs, the voice thin as all that fog. Weak. Hardly more than a whisper, just as it had been then. “For my actions the last time we met.”
He tilts his peculiar head, blinks those big yellow eyes. He remembers what he’d asked her the first time they’d met – where had she gotten all that magic? But he does not remember her answer, if she’d even offered him one. He is curious still but he does not ask again.
“I had spent most of my time in the darkness,” he explains, “I was weak then. Looking at you was like...” He pauses, casts a glance around that vast desert, the black mouth pressed into a thin line. So thin that the mouth disappears altogether. “Well, I suspect it was like looking directly into the sun.” And there he grins, all teeth.
She does not correct him but Beyza knows that it is her sister, Caledonia, who truly shines like the sun - not herself. This youth feels like the moon in comparison, like she is just reflecting the warmth cast from her twin. It is not with bitterness that she feels this way, just a sense that Caledonia is alive in a way she is not. Much like Livinia. She is not sure she could ever try to explain that to someone but it is a truth that has settled into her heart.
Beyza feels guilty about how she had been such an eyesore the first time they met, which tumbles into a cycle with annoyance because she does not think she should feel guilty at all just for being herself. “I would have obscured myself with a cloud back then if I could have.” She looks down to see the mist swirling gently at her sides and knows it does little to diminish the sheer brightness of her entire self. There is a part of her that wants to shine all the brighter - but for whatever reason, she cannot quite grasp her magic from that cold and petty place. It will not react to the desire to do someone else harm, even if it’s only to their retinas.
But she also does not offer to darken her colour to make it easier on him. She’s not yet decided on whether she will forgive him for the way he had made her feel last time.
Instead, she just smiles faintly, her white eyes looking up to the sky for a moment as she speaks aloud another train of thought. “I have never found looking into the sun to be painful, but perhaps I am too much like it for it to burn.”
Can fire burn other fire?
Her gaze drops, her blinks few and far between and she finds herself tilting her head much like he is - unable to deny that she is very curious about him. “Have you been spending more of your time in the light, then?”
06-29-2020, 07:33 PM (This post was last modified: 06-29-2020, 07:34 PM by jamie.)
from the destruction, out of the flame
He smiles.
And he means it, but there is nothing kind there. Not with the way the teeth are so sharp and the mouth is so deeply black. Not with the way the expression on his featureless does not change.
He smiles, but it looks more like pain. And perhaps it is, because he has had two constant companions from the moment he was born: the fog and the pain. Everything he feels is filtered through the ache, comes out sideways, hard to translate.
“I could not have asked you to do that,” he wheezes. And thinks that, had he thought about it, he could have used his fog to obscure her just as easily as she could have obscured herself. How it would have pained him to have her think him rude, though. Ruder than she already thought him anyway. Rude for the way that he had been unable to meet her eye. Rude for the way he had been unable, almost, to even lift his gaze from the ground.
He watches her turn her gaze skyward, as if to shackle her focus directly to the sun herself. It turns his stomach, tightens up his windpipe, makes his breath rattle. And he wants to reach out and touch her, draw her focus back to him. But to touch her would surely accomplish nothing, because he is nothing but vapor. He has learned that, though he had thought he was once, he is not real like they are real.
“That must be it,” he agrees, breathless. Shifts his weight to ease the aching in his knees.
She looks at him again and he feels, quite curiously, like she is the center of the universe. Yes, she is the sun. And he some hapless planet caught in her gravity.
“Yes,” he rasps, “though I think it is about as fond of me as I am of it.” There another specter-grin, head tilted all peculiar. “It does not love me the same way it loves you.”
07-01-2020, 07:54 PM (This post was last modified: 07-01-2020, 07:54 PM by Beyza.)
She smiles back at him, finding herself warming up to this sharp-grinned shadow despite the lack of pleasant memories. Maybe he wasn’t quite as bad as she had been thinking this whole time.
“I wonder if it still counts as love,” she muses out loud “if there is no choice.” The light loves her, but she does not imagine there’s anything sweet about it. Not like the way her twin seems to be warmth incarnate. “But perhaps I can win over the shadows, one day. They are… elusive.” Beyza wonders, belatedly, if that is an odd thing to say to someone that is an embodiment of shadows but the mist rolls off her back as though emphasizing her point. Even her fog is filled with light while Anaxarete and Jaime both seem to belong to completely.
What is it like to disappear?
Her edges begin to fade and blur but she snaps herself out of those thoughts and back into the present with the faintest trace of a frown.
She thinks now of the way he shifts and rasps out his words - and she can feel the tingle of her magic as it reacts to her desire to help. It is an effort not to just send it forward in cool, soothing waves. Instead, she sends words.
“Are you in pain? I can help relieve it if you’d like. Give you a break - at least temporarily.” She’s wary about using her magic without permission or approval now and her overuse of caution makes her voice quiet as she prepares to recoil at the rejection she has come to expect.
The closest he has ever come to it is the flicker of something warm in his chest when Livinia is near. Their parents are aloof, cold. But even if they had not been, any affection would have been wasted on him. To touch him is such a fruitless endeavor. He is tangible, certainly, but he is not solid. The edges are too soft, he cannot feel them any more plainly than they can feel him.
He studies her a long moment. “They are funny things, shadows,” he muses, rasps, wheezes. He blinks those bold yellow eyes at her, “they cannot exist without light.” He has to pause to draw in a labored breath, shift his weight in an effort to alleviate the ache pulsing in his knees. “But they cannot exist with it either.”
Certainly he is the only shadow that does not elude her. His darkness too compressed to be scattered by all of her light. There, the glint of a lopsided grin. Not insincere, but there is nothing overtly genuine about it either. There seems to be something lurking just beneath the surface.
“They elude you because you are light,” he wheezes, “they cannot help it any more than you can.”
Nothing in him anticipates her question, her offer to help. He blinks his surprise, makes no effort to conceal it. It puts a new ache in his chest, though, to think of help so within reach.
“Ah,” he rasps and tilts his head to glance down at his own legs. “I am not certain if the pain is real or imagined,” he murmurs. “For some time I believed that it must be real, that I must be real the same way that you are real.” Again he pauses to catch his breath. “But I am no longer so certain.”
you need a villain, give me a name
Jamie
@[Beyza] because you know i don't know how the tagging system works and wouldn't have seen the tag anyway
She hears his words, and later she’ll wonder if they are like the elements they represent - if she and Jamie cannot exist without each other or with each other either. Now, though, it’s hard to focus on what he says when they are mixed with the rasping, laboured breaths that punctuate his sentences.
When he responds to her offer to alleviate the pain, and she understands the feeling of not knowing whether something is real or not. “The more I learn about myself, the less certain I am real.” She tilts her head and there’s a smile there. “So maybe I’m not the best measurement for that.”
Her story, the things she can do, does not fit with what else she sees in the world. The only thing that calms that sense of otherness is all the oddities she has surrounded herself with and run into - Anaxarete and her darkness, Liv turning into a lion after visiting the mountain, Celina with her crocodile smile, and of course the boy made of shadows standing before her now.
He doesn’t agree but he doesn’t tell her off either so it feels more or less like a win. Whether or not it was in his mind did not seem to matter - either way it was affecting him, making him uncomfortable in his own body, and that seemed enough to warrant a little bit of help. She takes a small step forward, her gaze focused on him - hoping the smile that lingers isn’t totally lost in her marble eyes. “But let’s see if we can find out about your pain.”
And when she exhales, her breath ushers forward a grey, shimmering fog (the surprise at seeing something not white from her powers almost shocks her enough for it to fade right then and there). If he will allow it to touch him, it will feel warm and soothing on his aching limbs - seeping into his muscles and relaxing them, feeding them strength. She watches carefully for his reaction, never breaking focus, ready to recoil at the slightest sign he was unhappy.
He wonders, but does not ask, what it is that makes her feel as if she’s not real. He wonders, but does not act on it, if she would dissolve should he try to touch her, too. Are her edges soft like his? Is she compressed light in the same way that he is compressed darkness?
He almost reaches out to make good on his earlier impulse to touch her just to see. But he does not, just smiles a shark-tooth smile. It is enough, for the moment, to think that perhaps they are not so different after all.
And perhaps her eagerness to help means that she has forgiven him for the way he had turned his face away from her, hidden behind his sister’s shoulder. And he wonders, in some abstract way, if it matters. While his lungs rattle and he thinks about that phantom ache and how desperately he wants to lie down and sleep, he decides that it does not.
But he watches, quite enamored, as her magic snakes out of her. A real and tangible thing. So much like his fog, his sister’s smoke. He almost shies away from it. If he had a flank, certainly it would tremble. If he had a flank, certainly he would swing his tail against it as if the magic that comes for him is something to be discouraged.
But he has no flank and he is no coward, so he stands still, resolute, as he receives it. And he feels it. The warmth of it. Unlike anything he has ever felt before. The knees go weak with the relief of it as he exhales a wheezing breath. It chases away the exhaustion, the aching, the throbbing. It does not matter if it is real or imagined when it’s gone.
The eyes fall heavy closed a long moment, reveling in the comfort of it. He even manages to draw in a long breath that does not rattle or rasp. For the space of this one breath, he is almost normal. Certainly as near to normal as he will ever be.
But he is no fool, Jamie. And he uses what strength she lends him to cast himself out of the reach of her magic. The pain is prompt in its return, almost immediate, if not slightly less than before. Still, he smiles that same shark-tooth smile, tilts his peculiar head in her direction. “Thank you.” The rasp returns but he feels no urge to sink back into her space, lest he become addicted to the feeling of all that freedom.
Her eyes do not move from him and there is an almost violent sense of pleasure that floods through her during that brief moment when he accepts her help, accepts her magic. It responds to her desire to help, to do what she thinks is right, and she hungrily watches him breathe easily knowing that she caused that ease, that relief.
And then he moves.
Hurt flashes across her expression when he steps away from her and out of the healing fog. Those silver mists retreat back into her, recoiling from what she very easily interprets as rejection. He thanks her, though, with a smile, which only confuses Beyza. She attempts to sweep away her hurt and offers a small smile of her own in response.
“Anytime.” The word is spoken hesitantly but it is still filled with a large promise - to offer a reprieve whenever he wished it.
She tries to tell herself that this is different than before. That his rejection of her this time is not the same as his inability to even look at her, as though she was something horrid. If light and shadow cannot coexist, does that mean the pair of them cannot touch? Is this as close as she will ever be able to be to him? Does he perhaps recognize that, either consciously or not, and maintain the space out of instinct?
There are too many thoughts creating a tempest inside of her mind and in the midst of it, Beyza takes a step forward again, reclaiming the original space between them. Watching, testing, to see if he will retreat again. Why wonder something, when she can simply act and find out herself.
“Why did you step away from the fog?” The quiet question surprises her - she had not actually meant to put it into words but it is as though it slips from her mouth of its free will.
jamie
