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    COTY

    Assailant -- Year 226

    QOTY

    "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


    [private]  feels like a lifetime, este
    #1
    selaphiel
    these days i don’t pray when i close my eyes
    He is young, Selaphiel.
    But he is tired.
    So dreadfully, inescapably tired.

    Because the smell of death is trapped so bitterly in his sinuses, because the stench of it had chased him away from her for so long. Because he could not hold his breath long enough to curl himself against her side, to lend her some of his warmth, to let her heartbeat orient itself around his. 

    He is young, Selaphiel.
    But he is sorry.

    Because he had not been stronger. Even now, he is not strong. Because the light is too bright and the eyes are weak and he sticks to the shadows where he belongs. Because he is a light thing but he believes he must have been made for the dark. A thing made for death. This must be why he can smell it, why it is trapped in the sinuses. Why he cannot escape it, even with the sun hanging fat and proud overhead. 

    He has scarcely been able to breathe since the day in the hills when Mazikeen had told him about the twins, about their father. Still, his eyes burn with the tears that had sprung up there. How strange it had been for the truth of it to crash down around him so suddenly. Why hadn’t he been able to smell it on her earlier? 

    And now he wanders, adrift. Sick with shame.
    Aimless.

    He looks for her, for Este. For refuge.
    Though he is haunted still by the death he smelled on her, too. Haunted by his inability to stay. Haunted by his weakness. Haunted by this shame, too. 

    (Has she forgiven him? Should she?)

    When he finds her, he does not speak. He simply lies down near her. He makes himself small, this angel carved from ice. He lies down his weary head and he turns those glacial blue eyes up to the sky. The crevasses carved in his skin glow that same glacial blue. He is a thing made of so much cold. How gently the halo rests on the ground when he exhales. 

    He blinks once, slow. He does not want to open his eyes again.
    But he must.

    Do you think suffering is eternal, Este?” he asks, so quiet.
    It is not self-pity. It is not pity at all, but curiosity. 
    Will they always suffer?


    I just bite my tongue a bit harder



    @[Este]
    #2
    este
    If she knew he felt that he needed forgiveness, she would have given it to him freely.

    But Este, whose life was mostly fever-dreams and death-like sleeps, did not know enough to see why he would ever think he needed to ask such a thing from her.

    She had missed him when he was gone, but she had no sense of how often he was gone. She knew her mother was there more often than he was, but that made sense, didn’t it? It made sense for a mother to hover worriedly over her ailing child, but it did not seem that her twin, just a child himself, should be subjected to the same thing. He deserved to have a life and a childhood—only, she is learning it was not all the things she romanticized it would be. While she was sleeping and dreaming and dying, Sela was dealing with his own demons and nightmares, and if anything, she feels guilty for not being there for him.

    It’s why when he finds her it is a cautious kind of smile that she offers him, even though her body seems to visibly glow with a warm excitement at the sight of him. She could harbor light, she was learning—could tuck sunshine away and call upon it whenever she wanted, but it had a way of radiating from her, uncontrolled as if it was just as excited to see her twin as she was. As if she could wrap him in light and warm the ice from his bones, to show him all the things she does not know how to tell him.

    When he lowers himself into the grass near her she shifts closer, until she is curled alongside him, her soft, dappled body just behind his. She does not mind the ice of his skin, because she has learned to associate the cold with the comfort of him being near, and instead she presses into it gladly, her cheek resting against his back. “No,” she says softly, “I don’t think anything is eternal, though. Not even happiness.” She does not know which she would prefer. She thinks suffering might be the easiest, or maybe that happiness is just a version of suffering. It was always going to end because everything was meant to end; she isn’t sure if you could truly enjoy such a thing, knowing it isn’t going to last.

    WHO COULD EVER LEAVE ME DARLING,
    BUT WHO COULD STAY?


    @Selaphiel




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