"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
08-17-2020, 01:06 AM (This post was last modified: 08-17-2020, 01:16 AM by Aislyn.)
She is sent away from the mountain with a task, and she can feel a frustration building in her chest at the thought of it. Not because she was expected to do something in exchange for her request – she never assumed she would get something for free, especially not something like this. No, frustrated simply because she was not sure how she would accomplish it. To find someone that had once tried to model themselves after someone else – she imagines that is just about everyone, the issue being that no one ever wants to admit such a thing.
Everyone that she has met has seemed so hesitant to admit that they admire someone else, that they might want to model themselves after them. She isn’t sure why. She has no issue with telling anyone that might ask that she wanted the same panther trait as her father because she admired him.
She would rather be like him than anyone else that she has met.
The trees that border the meadow have already begun to change, their leaves an array of crimson and gold. She winds her way through the pale trunks of the trees, dipping her head to avoid tangling her antlers in the low hanging limbs. It was late in the morning, the fog still lingering lazily in the trees, but it is out to the open expanse of the meadow that she looks. She takes them in her brightly colored eyes, a sigh breathing from her chest.
She has always despised small talk, but it looked as though she was going to have to make a lot of it in order to finish this.
Aislyn
she set fire to all the things that held her back and from the ashes she stepped into who she always was
Aislyn is questing to express her panther shifting (to be like her dad) and she needs to talk to someone that has tried to be like someone else. This is open to anyone that thinks they can help with her quest <3
It has been so long now since he returned to the meadow that it almost feels foreign.
Such a peculiar sensation, considering how many dozens of years he has spent here. Outside of the Tundra, it was the only place that ever felt like home. A feeling compounded by how drastically things had changed when he’d returned after so much time away. The meadow the only thing that felt familiar.
And yet.
Heartsick, the world looks different.
Around the blur of the gold leaching out of his eyes, there are so many things he does not recognize.
He drifts, driven by his want for it to feel familiar again.
A relic of the past that he is not ready to relinquish yet.
Perhaps all that sickness in his chest has made him nostalgic.
He happens upon her by accident. And he stops and the gold pools at his feet, an endless stream. He wonders where it comes from sometimes, why it never stops. How peculiar a color it makes when mixed with the blood that sometimes drips down his forehead.
He does not immediately speak, for there is nothing to immediately say. Instead, he exhales a wavering breath and turns those eyes -- such a stark blue against all that gold -- on her.
“Hello,” he says, “I’m Jarris.”
He does not know why he introduces himself. Or why he has stayed his restless feet at all. Except that the conversation was part of it once, so many years ago.
She does not expect anyone to approach her, and when she turns her antlered head to take him in, she cannot shield the surprise from her face. Her eyes are instantly drawn to the golden rivulets that run down his cheeks, gathering in a gilded pool at his feet, glittering against the blades of grass. He radiates melancholy, and she wonders if that is what seeps from his eyes. She is unfamiliar with such emotions; she wonders if it takes a certain kind of sadness to turn tears into gold.
Her curious nature makes her want to reach out and touch it, to see if it feels like tears or something else, but she refrains.
He is silent, and she is too, as she stares at him in a way that suggests she is trying to dissect him -- still hung up on the golden tears. Her eyes are too bright against her dark face, lending a false sense of amiability, despite how reserved she had actually become, but her lips reflexively lift into a dim smile when he speaks.
“Aislyn,” she returns his introduction with one of her own, and for the first time, she seems to notice the thorns that crown his head. She wants to ask for his story, but she decides not to be that forward. “Does it ever stop?” Is what she asks instead, referring to the streaks of gold. She realizes that maybe that was an impolite question, too, but she does not offer an apology to soften it.
Aislyn
she set fire to all the things that held her back and from the ashes she stepped into who she always was
It has been so long since he last crossed paths with anyone outside of the home he has built with Plumeria that he has almost forgotten what it felt like to be seen for the first time.
He wonders what she sees. What he must look like.
Withered, maybe. Wilted.
Not at all the man he had been once. But perhaps this is for the best. Perhaps it is safer this way. For he feels no overwhelming urge to reach out and touch her. He does not huff a soft breath in her direction, sidle close enough to smell her.
She is beautiful, certainly, but there is no distant murmuring in his chest beyond the pulsing sickness that has lived there since he emerged from some dark place some years ago. Spit back into the world a shell of the man he had been once.
“Aislyn,” he echoes, a faint, faint smile tying up the furthest corners of his dark mouth, too. The most he can manage these days. Anything else makes the heart spasm and twinge. Makes his vision dim with the pain of it.
He studies her a moment. How vibrant she is when viewed through the lens of all that gold. He shakes his head but he does not allow himself to be mournful, though he aches to. Everything in him bleeds with sorrow, but he will not let it out now. Dams it up in his throat.
“No,” he tells her, just that simple. “This is my reward for trying to be a hero.”
Aislyn is not really in the position to judge anyone else, not that she ever has been, or that she ever did. When she had been younger and kinder the thoughts had never crossed her mind. Now that she was older (not by much – she was still young, especially in comparison to a land that was so old) and a little more battle-scarred, from her own trauma had sprung more empathy than what she had been born with. It didn’t show much on her closed-off face, but internally she felt something similar to pity.
He reminded her of an echo; like he was empty and just the remnant of something else. She wonders what he had been like before whatever happened to him – whatever turned his tears to gold.
“It doesn’t seem like much of a reward,” she says a little dryly, though she assumes he already knows that.
Her eyes soften a little though the longer she looks at him, and she notices that beneath the stream of tears he is unusually handsome. That wasn’t something she often noticed about anyone, and certainly not someone that was dripping with sorrow. She wonders if this is some sort of trap – to be unnaturally attractive but also streaked with golden tears? It sounded like the perfect way to lure in someone sweet and unsuspecting.
Carefully masking the suspicion from her face she asks him, “Who were you trying to save?”
Aislyn
she set fire to all the things that held her back and from the ashes she stepped into who she always was
He had never been a hero, Jarris. He had begun to understand - only recently, perhaps too late for it to make any difference at all - that he had been born a villain. Even if he did not have the teeth to show for it. Even if he did not look the part and never had. He had begun to understand, too, that maybe that was worse.
The greatest pain of all comes in acknowledging how many hearts could have been spared if only he’d been born to look like the monster he would become. Plumeria’s especially, for she deserved the heartache least of all.
But he makes no mention of this. He doubts she has any interest in hearing an old man recite his regrets. So, he is silent instead. Silent while the gold pools at his feet. He looks down at it, watches the edges spread. Watches as it reaches for her feet, too. He wonders if someday it will simply drown them all.
He looks up at her question. “My daughter,” he tells her. He does not hesitate in answering. But there is a pause that comes after. As he remembers. How he had tried to save her and how he’d been forced to kill her instead.
“I’m afraid it wasn’t as simple as it looked on the surface.” He rolls his shoulders then, flinching against the pain of the thorns shifting on his brow. He draws in a thin, shuddering breath. “But I have come to find that things are not always as they seem.”
She does not know why her heart twinges inside of her chest when he mentions trying to save his daughter, but it does.
Maybe because it makes her wonder if her own father would do the same. She does not think that he would.
It makes this entire endeavor seem rather foolish, and barbs of irritation begin to prick at her mind. If there was one thing in the world she hated it was to be made to look like a fool. And what a fool she had to be to wish to be like someone that she isn’t even entirely sure cares.
There is a part of her that knows that is wrong. She knows that neither of her parents are what could be considered conventional, but they still care. But being faced with the stark contrast of someone that is the polar opposite of them – a man that would risk everything, openly – opened the doors to uncertainty.
She was interested now, though, enough that even with her own self doubt reaching like spider webs, she still wants to stay. “No, they are not,” she answers him, the weight of her antlers suddenly feeling heavy at the memory of how they came to be. Her bright-colored eyes linger on the thorns on his brow, but she does not ask about them. Instead, she asks him, “Did you save her?”
Aislyn
she set fire to all the things that held her back and from the ashes she stepped into who she always was
There is something heavy about their interaction, he notices. Some gravity to it that he does not fully understand and does not seem to have anything to do with the golden tears that puddle and pool at his feet or the truth of what had happened at the Mountain. Although this weighs heavy on his heart, despite the fact that Plumeria had assured him that the Mountain does strange things to the minds of those who dare venture there. Her insistence that their daughter is out there somewhere still, alive and whole and untouched by the things he’d had to do to her beneath the earth’s surface.
He shifts his weight and studies his companion through the gold haze of those tears that cut rivers down his cheeks without relent. They do not even slow. And when he tilts his head, the thorns cut deeper into his poll and he grimaces, peers down at the gold newly shot through with deep red blood.
“No,” he answers, quiet. Perhaps he should have lied, painted himself a hero. She is a stranger, the dark girl stood beside him. He could be anyone he wanted to be. Someone who could save those he loved instead of killing them all. Someone worthy of their love in the first place.
“I shouldn’t have gone in the first place,” he murmurs, turning his gaze to the horizon. He stays very still for fear that he might further disturb the thorns. “I’ve never been a hero,” he continues, uncertain why he is spilling all of this on her. Perhaps because she has no reason to try to convince him otherwise and there is something cathartic in that. “I had no business thinking I could be one.”
It is heavy; she notices it, too. But she cannot remember the last time she had an interaction that wasn’t. It is all she knows, now, but she should not be surprised. She had been born in the middle of a firestorm, and it had been foolish to think the lull that came after that—the quiet of her childhood—is how her life was meant to be.
She should have known, based on the stories from her parents, that life was tumultuous and unfair.
She should have known, too, that it was unfair for everyone. Aislyn was not alone in living this endless cycle of despair, and even as she watches the blood drip from his forehead and the golden tears coat the ground at their feet, she is not naive enough to think, better him than me, because she knows the next time it very well could be her. She is not immune to the cruelty of fate, but she thinks, so far at least, that fate has been kinder to her than to him.
Her sharp eyes soften a little at his answer, a shadow of sympathy darkening her face a little as she drops her head just slightly. “I’m sorry to hear that,” she says gently, though the natural flatness in her voice seems to dull her condolence. Clearing her throat, she finds herself reaching out to just barely brush her dark nose against the storm-gray of his shoulder—something she had seen her mother do, and though such warmth did not come naturally to her, she has learned how to fake it when necessary.
“For what it’s worth, I think the fact that you tried at all would make you a hero,” she says with a half-smile. “Not that I’m the expert on things like that. It’s just my opinion.”
Aislyn
she set fire to all the things that held her back and from the ashes she stepped into who she always was
He had been wrong in his assumption that she would not try to change his mind about the truth of it. The truth of who he is and who he’s always been.
It is a kindness he does not deserve but he does not immediately have the heart to tell her so. Instead, he lets himself be who he is for a moment. Just the space of a breath. The amount of time it takes for her touch to ignite something feral in him. The thing that had fueled him for so long that it had been a wonder that he’d been able to force it into dormancy at all.
It is the bastard heart and all its want that begins to stir in his chest. But he swallows it down before it can swell something dangerous. Buries it as it should be buried. Because he is happy -- or at least as close to it as he’ll ever get -- and that is the thing that matters. He cannot let the kindness of a beautiful stranger be enough to sway him, not anymore.
So, he smiles something mournful but he does not shake his head in disagreement because he cannot bear to unseat the thorns again. It is a plague that has taken the fight out of him, the blood and the golden tears and the puddles that pool at his feet. Not that there had ever been much to begin with, but it is gone now and he cannot remember the last time he saw it. Down in that cave, perhaps. When he’d been forced to do something he’d never thought himself capable of.
“That’s very kind of you, Aislyn,” he murmurs, “although, I don’t know if I agree.” There is some dark humor in this, the most he can manage with all the sickness in his heart. He wonders if her opinion would change were he to tell her all of the reasons he should never be considered a hero but cannot find it in himself to test the theory. For the moment, it feels good to know that there is someone out in the world who thinks him worth something. Even if they’re wrong.
