"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
If anyone asked - not that anyone would care to - he would say he does not remember his childhood. Not the first, not the second. He would shove it all down and shrug his gray shoulders. No, he does not recall Bible recoiling from him and telling him he was an ugly little larva. No, he has no memory of Cobain kicking him into the underbrush of a forest and telling him not to be seen. He especially doesn’t remember the way all of this made him feel hollow and unreal, or the nights he cried cold and alone until exhaustion took him to sleep.
But he will openly confess his own crimes. He keeps every sin hung up like a trophy. Larva knows that every time he finds a glimpse of happiness, he presses the knife to its throat and slaughters it like a sacrificial lamb. No one can love him, not fully. They cannot see the depth of his depravity and not step back from the edge of him.
This is why he continues to leave Echis and Ryatah. Their daughter is a pure and perfect thing and he will not permit her to be dirtied by his presence the way Darling was. Still, the remorse of having her weighs heavy in his chest when he slips away the moment she closes her eyes and her breaths grow even. Why couldn’t she have been another awful son who inherited all his vile thoughts and feelings? He wants to blame Ryatah for making her beautiful, for passing on that goodness to her. But he also wants to thank her and he will never speak those words aloud.
When he lowers his head to drink from the river, he remembers how much he hates the way his face looks - scarred and pale and hideous. The sparse hair across his temple and the pristine porcelain shade of the skin there remind him of his first death. He snorts, disrupting the water enough to ruin his reflection so he can lift his head with water dribbling still from his chin. His ears lay flat against his head as he slips so easily into his typical brooding. Larva barely moves when he hears someone approaching except to watch from the corner of his eye.
It had been a mistake. She had known that it would be, she had not fooled herself into thinking it could possibly be anything but that. And yet she was still surprised at how the bitter regret seemed to linger, a bad aftertaste that refused to leave her mouth. There was guilt, too, coiled in her gut, heavy and cold. Guilt, for letting herself be weak, again. Guilt, for working so hard to move past someone that had broken her only to let a few sweet words and heated touches be enough to lure her back. She played a stupid game and she won a stupid prize, and she is both surprised and somehow not surprised at all. Mostly, she is surprised that a wound that had once been healed could hurt just as badly as the first time, when it was reopened.
She had no one to blame but herself. No matter how badly she wanted to blame Plume, no matter how badly she wanted this sorrow to spark to rage, there was nothing. Nothing but an aching emptiness, and an icy numbness. Anger was still so hard for her to come by. It came sometimes in fleeting moments, hot and fierce, but the ashes it left behind tasted like tears, not fury.
The river continuously draws her back, and she is unsure why. She’s never felt a particular connection to it before, and yet every time her thoughts felt too loud, every time that vibration in her veins felt like too much, this was where she found herself. Maybe it was because the sound of water rushing over rocks drowned out her mind; drowned her mistakes, drowned her heartache, drowned everything. It lulled her into a strange sense of apathy, where she didn’t have to feel anything at all.
But when she arrives today there is someone else there. She pauses, hesitating, deliberating. She cannot see his face completely, since he stares straight ahead, but she can see the tautness of his jaw, and the way his ears flatten. Something tells her to walk away, to leave him to his anger and whatever else he feels, because she knows sometimes that’s all she wants, is to be alone. She also knows that sometimes all she wants is for someone to ignore the walls she has erected, to break them down despite the way she might resist.
She wants someone to save her, even if she could never admit that.
“Hi,” she says softly, not quite next to him, but close enough. A cool breeze lifts the tangled locks of her mane and stirs the flowers that blossom there, and she finds that even though she wants to be here, even though she wants to look more closely at the way the sun reflects off his green eyes, she instead focuses on the river. Her heart feels like a knot inside of her chest, and against her better judgement she confesses, “I’m sorry, if you wanted to be alone. But I don’t think I want to be.”
He thinks he hates his scars not because of the story they tell, but perhaps because of the stories they don’t. Dying and fighting never meant much to him. Not when the oldest wounds remained weeping inside, infected and festering with a sickness he could not heal. All the loneliness and anger settled like a cancer in his heart. Once upon a time, he thought himself salvageable, perhaps even in recovery. But whatever curse haunts his bones always picks the perfect time to rear its head and remind him. Larva learns his lesson time and again.
Finally, he turns his head to look at her when she speaks. Already forgetting his most recent lesson, his eyes trace her figure as he considers all the ways he could break her down. Larva enjoys the pristine white of her body and the gentle curve of her back leading into her hips. But then she’s talking again, so his filthy thoughts go skittering into the quiet corners of his mind once more. She says she doesn’t want to be alone and he narrows his eyes at the words. Why is she alone in the first place? If she running from someone else – or is someone running from her?
He steps forward, little scales emerging from the corners of his jaw and down his spine. Larva blinks, and in a moment his eyes are serpentine as he prefers them to be. Is being alone more appealing to her now?
“I’m always alone in some way. Your being here doesn’t change that,” he explains in a murmur as he takes another step toward her until he’s close enough to sink his teeth into her or kiss her lips – whichever delighted him more. But he settles on neither as he studies the shape of her eyes. She’s got the same sad stare as Anemone had and he wants to rip it from her face.
There is something dangerous in the way that he speaks, and he is not usually the kind she would seek company with. She had been raised in the darkness but she did not develop the same fascination with it as her mother. There was no high to be found in pain, at least, not for her. Hurt only felt like hurt; heartache only like heartache. She knew what it meant to be so consumed by it that it mastered all her waking thoughts and crafted itself into nightmares, and she learned she would rather be alone than to face it all again. She learned to bear her loneliness and her pain all on her own, and did not seek out others to be used a makeshift balm.
She suffered, silent and solitary.
Until she caved, recently, and now all her wounds were flayed open. Her heart throbbed and her chest ached, somehow unbearably empty and yet brimming with emotion all at once. It was too much – too much to have been reminded of the love she had had and lost, too much to feel it and have it ripped away again.
She wanted a distraction, and it was so unlike her, and though she is afraid she will regret this too, she finds that she cannot stop herself.
Her eyes follow the scales that race across his skin, and then she sucks in a soft breath at the sudden narrowed, sharpening of his eyes.
She is not afraid, though, but instead is instantly captivated. He could kill her or maybe he could love her, and she knows it won’t matter because she will end up dead and forgotten either way.
“I know,” she concedes quietly because she knows what it is to be alone more than she knows anything. She has been alone ever since her father desecrated her innocence, ever since he turned her into something damaged and defiled that would be impossible to be wanted or loved. “Sometimes it’s nice to be alone with someone else, though.” The softness of her eyes become fixated on his face, and she finds that now she can’t look away.
The pale locks of her forelock, the vibrant blossoms bathed in the gentle glow that radiated from her – somehow she takes everything that should have been beautiful about her and turns it into something melancholy, and she knows she must be the last soul on earth anyone would want to be alone with. “Anonya,” she offers him in a voice as faint as the light that illuminates from her porcelain skin, and she does not ask for his name, in case he does not want to offer it to the pitiful girl nearly begging for a stranger’s attention.
He supposes he was alone in this world the moment he entered into it. Perhaps for a glimmering second Bible loved him, the precious heartbeat of time before she laid her eyes on him. Since then, however, he has been a monster. Each moment is only a different shade of agony to him. This moment, for example, is a gentle ache in which he wishes he were someone else. Someone who could reach out and be kind instead of a hungry serpent just waiting for its next meal.
She says she knows, and her half a second he is distracted from his inner turmoils. Does she? Anonya continues and he eyes her carefully now. If she understands then she might see that ugly core of him. Larva offers a quiet snort of dismissal. He would sooner plunge himself into death’s waiting arms than let someone in again. His heart is a haunted house where every skeleton is real, he thinks.
“I suppose,” he says to humor her for a while longer. She says her name and he does his best not to remember it. There are enough bones etched with his lovers’ names here to last him a lifetime and then some. This has never stopped him, of course, but he finds himself growing uninterested in using her up. It would feel too much like kissing his awful reflection in the river behind him.
“You can come closer. I’ve no intention of harming you,” he explains because her eyes are pleading for something he can’t quite identify. Maybe she’s one of those touch starved girls who will weep on his shoulder the moment he lets her. He wonders if he would recoil from such a thing. “How long have you been alone, Anonya?”
And the moment he speaks her name, he learns that it fits quite nicely along his tongue.
She watches him with quiet, doe-like eyes, with a strange kind of curiosity reflecting back from the dark of them. He makes her forget about her own hurt, if only for a moment. She finds herself tracing the sharp angles of his face instead of thinking about the sharp shards of her broken heart and what they felt like embedded between her ribs. She watches his face in hopes of seeing the sunlight catch the sage-green of his eyes again, and for the first time in weeks, months, and maybe lifetimes, the pain in her chest feels dulled with distraction.
He is watching her much in the same way that she is watching him, like they are both trying to read each other's scars like a map, like it might lead them to the place they had not realized they were trying to reach. She wants to reach out and touch the scales that lace across him, she catches a glimpse of his sharp teeth and wonders what they might feel like against the satin-smooth feel of her skin.
She feels small embers of hope trying to kindle from the ash inside of her chest, but she extinguishes them; lets every sorrow and every letdown douse them until they are gone. He is humoring her; she can see it, and she wants to have the sense of self-worth to be angry at the idea, but instead, she is only defeated by it.
She is a thing to be pitied and not much else.
But when he invites her closer, she does not object. She hesitates, her eyes again flickering to his uncertainly, but she fills the space between them with her steps. She is close enough to see the details of his scales and the spider-web of scars, close enough that she could reach out and touch them with her lips, but she does not. She refrains, even though her heartbeat quickens at the idea.
Her gaze is cast to the side at his question, though, tendrils of forelock and mane entangled with blossoms and wispy vines curtaining most of her face. “Always,” she answers him softly, as she tries to remember the last time she did not feel overwhelmingly alone and only comes up empty-handed. “I suppose it makes no sense then that I miss something that I've never had.”
She is quiet for a breath, once again looking at him, before she ventures to ask him cautiously, “What about you?”
He wishes he could be the kind of man that a girl like her would fall for - the kind who can sand all his rough edges smooth and love her right. Larva wishes he could learn to be softer, kinder, better. But that darkness looms through the echoing halls of him. It wants to taste her throat and hear her filled with shaking sobs. He swallows nervously and hopes she doesn’t notice the way he eyes her pulse. Please, god, make this hunger stop, he thinks.
‘Always,’ she says and it pulls him from the spiral he has grown so accustomed to. He wonders how to answer her question but it feels too much like confessing the sins he keeps close to his chest. Instead, he bridges the space between them and he touches his lips to the corner of hers to sidestep her question.
She’s exactly as soft as he thought she might be, as he’d hoped she wouldn’t be. Her skin smells like the flowers caught up in her hair and the gravity of his want pulls him back under. He could never escape this black hole of his ravenous desires. How hilarious, that he ever entertained the thought. But he peels himself back from her just as he begins to bare his fangs.
“No,” he says to himself as he forces his gaze back to the river. “I don’t want to touch you. I can’t.” As if the words would make it true, as if the curse wasn’t embedded into every his cell. The fact remains, much to his horror, that touching her felt like a brief reprise from all the misery he carried across his heart. He takes a step back and tries to remember the way back to Tephra as his mind spins heavily.
She thinks, for a moment, that the war he is having with himself is just a war against her. That maybe he looks at her that way because he wishes she would leave, that maybe he finds her irritating or dull or any number of negative adjectives. His eyes keep sharpening, and the way that he shifts suggests, to her, that he would rather be anywhere than next to her.
She can’t really blame him.
She has become so lackluster and meek, to the point that her newfound ethereal glow felt like a mockery. The flowers woven into her hair were the brightest things about her, and yet it did nothing to bring the light back to her eyes. She stares at him and there is nothing but dark and ghosts and sorrow swimming there, and she cannot blame him for wanting to leave. Her demons often made poor company, and she would leave, too, if only it were an option.
In the silence that stretches between her question, he fills it instead with his body, and then a touch of his lips against the side of her mouth.
She breathes in, sharp, and there is a moment where the fog seems to clear from her eyes, and she looks at him with an all new clarity.
She catches the brief glint of his fangs, but it does nothing to keep her from stepping towards him as he moves back. “Wait,” she does not try to hide the desperation from her voice, she does not try to mask the plea in her eyes when she reaches to touch her nose to his shoulder. “Please don’t leave. I don’t want you to leave.”
She removes her nose from his side, suddenly ashamed for so brazenly touching someone that was not hers. But she does not step away, and she stands there with her nose now drawn near to her chest, her voice impossibly soft again when she says, “I want you to stay with me.”
