"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
She moves to eradicate the space he’d wedged between them.
But the magic does not reach for him now, so he does not retreat further.
The question is simple, justified. She had offered him kindness and he had shirked it. He is not built to receive it, he knows, has always known. It is not a matter of morality – though he understands, even as young he is, that his own is questionable – but a matter of biology. He is a shadow thing, he is Darkness. No light – not even a light as potent as hers – will ever change that.
But this is not the explanation he offers. He shifts his weight to relieve some of the renewed aching in his knees. All that phantom pain, a constant companion. A thing on which he has heavily relied, it is ingrained into his DNA. He is not him without it. And perhaps he does not trust himself without it. It keeps him tame, the pain. He does not want to entertain the idea of what he might be capable of without it, not yet.
“I cannot afford to become addicted to the feeling,” he wheezes, tilts his peculiar head, flashes those shark teeth in a stilted kind of grin that reads more as a grimace with the way he averts his gaze. It is his burden, he has learned to live with it.
“Did my mother teach you that?” he asks and there is some edge to his tone. It comes out sounding almost like an accusation. It only compounds all that pain to think that his mother could have relieved it, could have saved him from it.
It annoys Beyza now, to watch him shift his weight in obvious pain, knowing that she could alleviate it. She tries not to let this frustration show and hides it behind her continuing confusion. It makes no sense to her why anyone would choose pain, choose limits when they could be free and wild without them.
She, who had bested death when she was very young, did not believe that limits existed at all.
His explanation does not ease her confusion or the sense of rejection, her mind translating it to mean he does not want prolonged exposure to her. No matter that this help is there for him, that it would be easy for her to give - they just needed to be around each other now and then. His response is not really a terrible thing at all, but her common sense eludes her for a little while longer and conceals that his reaction is natural and filled with the sense she is lacking at the moment.
He looks away but her gaze remains fixed on him, as though staring will help her solve the riddle of Jamie’s mind.
His question has a bite to it and would feel like an accusation more if there was any other answer than the clipped syllable she responds with quickly, tossing it back. “No.” One of her too-few blinks clears her gaze before she continues. “Your mother did not teach me how to heal. Our lessons were more… destructive.”
Her answer is swift, short. But he finds no comfort in it. Because he has already planted the seed of bitterness. He knows that their magic is comparable, Beyza’s and his mother’s. It is up to him now to decide if he will let it make him resent her. He slides his gaze back to Beyza’s face as she continues, speaks of destruction. It is not the first thing that has made him wonder if his mother created him by design. Built him out of her darkness. But it is the first time he has wondered if this is the life she had wanted for him all along. If she had wanted him to suffer.
He trembles with a new ferocity. But he does not succumb to his bitterness. He is weak, certainly, but he is stronger than the impulse to succumb to his temper.
He studies her a long moment, but he does not ask for details about the things his mother taught her. He knows enough of the shadow magician to have an idea. He knows the creatures she keeps, the way she commands them. He knows enough of her thirst for ruin.
He drags in another rasping breath. And, instead of asking her to elaborate about her lessons, calling his unwillingness to allow her to heal him back into focus. His magic pales in comparison to hers, certainly, but he understands the mechanics of facial expressions well enough to know that his explanation had offered her little insight.
“To become addicted to the feeling,” he pauses long enough to catch his breath, “would almost certainly mean becoming addicted to you.” There, a shark-tooth smile. “I would not wish that on you.”
Jamie tries to explain, making Beyza wonder if she wasn’t so practiced at concealing her emotions as she hoped (she is, in fact, not very good at it at all). His words still don’t clarify the problem for her, however. All she can think is the idea of someone being addicted to her didn’t sound awful - there was a temptation to that future. It was an intoxication of its own, the idea of being needed so intensely by someone else.
Would it give her the same high every time she used her magic to soothe away his pain? To watch him move and breathe without struggle or pain?
“Well, I don’t think that would be so bad.” And though she’s certainly serious, she softens the intensity of her gaze with a smile that matches his shark grin - not thinking to be embarrassed by the implications of her words. She’s a young mare that speaks frankly on all matters. “My magic it… likes to help others.” She pauses, trying to find the words to describe what she means as she continues to study his face. “It felt good to relieve your pain. Really good.” Still with that simple, almost-clinical manner of stating these emotions that feel like facts. “I don’t think you’d be the only one to get addicted.”
Her naive mind thinks that their addictions would cancel each other out, stop the exchange from being unhealthy. It sounds ideal, even - a partnership. So why does he hesitate?
He is so rarely surprised, Jamie.
But she surprises him.
Were he capable of expression, perhaps it would register on his face. But it is only darkness as he peers back at her just as plainly as she looks at him. There is nothing flirtatious in the way she says it. Nothing coy about the look she wears when she says it.
And yet.
And yet something dark coils itself neatly into the pit of his gut.
He is no monster. (Or, at least, this is what he tries to tell himself).
But he looks like a monster. And, in that moment, he feels like one, too.
It is just as empowering for him to think it as it is for her. The thought of someone being addicted to him. And he’d said it himself, hadn’t he? The shadows cannot exist without the light. He had meant it quite literally. Shadows could not be created without sunlight. But perhaps there is more to it than that.
He studies her a long moment before he sinks closer. All that rattling in his lungs, the wheezing in his throat when he reaches for her. There is some foolish hope that she will dissolve when he touches her, too. But he is the only one who goes soft at the edges when he skims his mouth across her shoulder. He is vapor and she is solid.
He comes away disappointed.
Blinks at her and then tilts his peculiar head.
“The pain is a part of me,” he sighs. “I don’t know what I’d be without it.”
If she had thought to, she would have dulled her edges when he reached for her. Would have turned herself into mist so that he would pass right through her. But she had not been expecting it - even as she watched him approach. Even as she felt what it was to be touched by a shadow - her breath hitching a little upon contact that was not quite contact. Like walking from bright sun to the relief of a forest, like the arrival of night after a long day.
She does not register his disappointment at her - and perhaps they are better for it. His words hold her attention instead, her heartbeat picking up ever so slightly at their newfound proximity. In reaction to it, her fog churns around them - not the healing silver mists but the white vapours that she unconsciously uses to mimic shadows until they swirl around both of their legs.
He doesn't retreat from her again and it makes her bold. Desperate to change his rejection into acceptance - whether of her magic or just herself it didn't really matter. Either would do.
Beyza considers his words, her bright gaze finally shifting from his face as she reaches out to touch him in turn - blurring her edges as she does so that when their vapours meet it is a blending of light mist and deepest shadow. Her words are soft against his not-skin, as she dares to breathe just a touch of cool relief into each as it might ripple across his shadow self like the surface of a pond.
“We could find out.” There's a wariness to her - as she pulls back and looks into his eyes again, as she feels her entire body tense and remain on edge waiting for his reaction. She tempers that dangerous (thrilling) proposition with softer words, spoken into the space between them. “It is part of you, but it doesn't have to be everything.”
It is a dangerous game they play.
If it can be called a game at all.
But she touches him with soft edges and they turn each other murky. Light and dark at war in their soft edges. And there is nothing left of his disappointment. He is delighted in his own peculiar way. But it makes him greedy. He wants more. He wants to move to the very center of her, let her swallow him whole. Or, perhaps, the other way around.
He can feel it, too. The warmth that charges through him when she speaks into all that vapor. It does not eradicate his pain completely, but lessens it just enough to notice. He breathes without the aching in his ribcage. The knees do not tremble with all of the effort it takes to keep him upright.
He takes one step forward, deeper, until he is shoulder-deep in her. This is perhaps the closest he will ever come to feeling. Mist and shadow. Neither of them tangible, but he can almost breathe her in. He does not come away empty. It fills him up. There is nothing here that he is missing, nothing to ache for.
And then she is drawing away. He feels neither cold nor heat without skin to absorb it. But she draws away and he feels quite suddenly doused in ice water. Even despite what she says, that they can try, that he does not have to let the pain define him.
He meets her gaze steady while the tremor returns to his knees, the rattling to his lungs.
He exhales a tempered sigh and looks away. He studies the terrain to offer himself a brief reprieve before he shackles his focus to her face again.
“I’m afraid,” he admits, wheezes. Subtly shakes his head. “I’m afraid of what I might be capable of without it.”
He drags in a shuddering breath. “I fear that it is the only thing that keeps me safe.”
Beyza remembers what it was like to have Ghaul touch her when she was half-there, the not-feeling of the simple touch. She expects the sensation of touching Jamie while they are both vapour to be the same, but it’s different. She feels and not-feels him everywhere - when he moves into her it feels illicit.
It feels good.
If only she hadn’t been so afraid, she might not have stepped back. Might still be feeling the cooling sensation of his body as it ghosted against and within her. She regrets the distance as much as she regrets that wheezing breath and tremor in his legs that appear when they are apart. She also wonders what he would be like without the pain. Stronger? A force of darkness akin to his mother? Beyza wants to be the one to draw that out of him, to show him that there’s a beauty to letting go of inhibitions.
She moves back to him again and though she wants to pass through him entirely, to see how deeply they can possess and coexist with one another, she settles for closing the gap - not touching, but close. So close.
“Fear of the unknown is natural, but I do not think you have to fear yourself. Fear this.” Beyza had never felt limited in the way he is describing, had never not wanted to see what she was capable of. She does not believe it would change anything about him - surely being free of pain would suddenly bring out malice or cruelty.
Her voice holds no pressure, it is calm. “Isn't there curiosity too, with the fear?” When she exhales at the end of her question, her body surges forward - her edges entirely dissolving as rolling over and through him like fog across water before becoming the vapour mare again on his other side where she grins. “Once you see what you can do, you can learn your limits. How to stay within them. And who better to test those limits near than me?” Whatever was unleashed from him when the pain was gone, it could not harm her. She was absolutely and blindly certain of it.
There is much to fear, he thinks.
Because he knows his mother, at least as well as one can know his mother.
Because he knows that there is a monster inside of him.
He has felt how desperately it has wanted to come out.
He has felt it in his gut and in his teeth and at the base of his throat.
He cannot ask her to understand, this magician, not when she has nothing at all to fear.
Not when he seems to be the only one left trembling when she passes through him, materializes on the other side of him. Not when she is grinning the way she is.
But she’s right. There is some curiosity, but it is dark. It is twisted and it is wicked. It is a curiosity that yearns to know just how far he could go. Just how dark he could be. It lives inside him, too. And it is this curiosity that the monster feeds on. And the monster delights in her insistence. It makes him weak.
It takes everything in him to swallow down the urge to let her do with him what she will. Heal him, make him something he has never been before, turn him into something that is less of an idea, something closer to real. The monster does not have a voice but it has desire so potent that he can scarcely breathe around it.
He watches her, the yellow gaze steady. He blinks once and then finally turns away.
“No,” he says. The tone is neither cold nor dismissive but resigned. As desperately as he wants to, he cannot indulge her. “I don’t expect you to understand,” he wheezes, heaving a rattling breath. “I don’t think a magician could.”
For one breathless moment she feels so close to uncovering this secret, to setting him free, Beyza is almost drunk on the possibilities. She’s blinded by her curiosity so she does not notice how he trembles when she passes over him like fog. It is only when he speaks that reality slams into her.
His words sting, and she slides up a blank expression to conceal her hurt as best as she can. But she does move from him, retreat far enough away to give herself space. How many times can she be rejected by him in one way or another? She can't imagine this being anything other than a personal slight, even though his mother is one as well. Anaxarete wasn't here, speaking words of encouragement and offering promises.
Although there is anger, burning white-hot, she turns away for a moment to gather her thoughts but not before she bites out a few words. “You’re right, I don’t understand.”
There is so much that she does not understand about him, about his thought process. Monsters aren’t such terrible things. They’re just called monsters by those who don’t understand. And Beyza wants to understand Jamie, wants to see what lurks beneath - wants to see if it has teeth that can sink into her.
She suffers the disappointment of his continuous rejection poorly. But like so many things in her life, Beyza takes a breath and packages it away with a little more of her ability to feel. She'd leave if she knew how to retreat.
Her voice is calmer again when she speaks again, her white gaze finding its way back to his face as she tries to force herself to be rational even though she just wants to shock Jamie out of whatever apathy he has settled in. “You’re keeping yourself chained for no reason at all and I will never understand that. Not when freedom is available.” Another calming breath, and then something that could be a smile appears. Something like kindness warming the chill of her gaze.
Although the words are spoken kindly, they are chosen carefully. “But. You’d only need to ask, if you ever change your mind. It's the least I can do for Livinia's brother.” A reminder (for herself, mostly, though she won't deny the small jab) that his twin is all they have in common.
jamie
