[private] my bad habits lead to wide eyes staring at space

[Nashua]

Nashua is visibly tired when he lands from another trek from the Isle. But as the last days of autumn roll through, he comes more determined to make them. Soon the journey will become too frigid for Nash to make and even if he does, there is the chance that he could get trapped on one side or the other.

He wouldn't mind being kept in Taiga, but what if something happened on the Isle?

Though there are very few residents who live there year-round, the Freyr remains dedicated that he be accessible to them. That he be there in case something should go wrong (though it never occurs that it could happen in Taiga, not when it is protected by brother. There is no other that Nashua trusts as he does Yanhua). He doesn't know that he ventures towards the part of Taiga that houses Noel and their children that something is wrong. The sunlight streams down from above in gilded ribbons, making the day look deceptively warmer than it was.

Only the presence of a gust of arctic wind reminded the striped pegasus of the encroaching season. More months of being sequestered away from the rest of the North and the Freyr had wanted to make sure that his family - that those in Nerine and Taiga are provided for. Under Reave, Nash had little doubt that his brother and whoever resided there would be taken care of. The young stallion was descended from the former ruler Heartfire (as he was but Nashua has never met the blue roan woman) and if there is anything that the Northerners proved themselves to be time and time again, it was resilient. Nerine would sit well with Reave and he with it, the chestnut pegasus thinks as he continues to wander the Taigan trails.

His thoughts turn when he does, drifting away from the cathedral parts of the Redwoods that his family usually kept to. Had Yanhua encouraged them to seek shelter in another part? It had become increasingly hard to find his horned brother and with time already precious between his treks between his two homes, it left little to search for him. Nash had to trust the words of Amarine, that his brother was still adjusting to the changes that had occurred with the return of the sun. The loss of their mother. The weight of a crown.

But there is no sign of Yan. Borderline and Ama aren't usually far from him and yet Nashua can't track them down either. Taiga had once been a bustling place full of laughing children and happy families. Some are still here but his concern grows with each step as he can't locate his. There is a dark figure ahead (finally) and the Northern leader wonders if he has found a member of the Shadow clan. The sunlight still comes streaming down through the canopy and as Nashua increases his gait, he realizes that it isn't the light that is refracting off her skin. She is the best of the two worlds that Taiga has to offer: the depth of its shadow that protects so many and the shimmer that comes shining from above, illuminating those same secrets.

"No Name?" he calls out, increasing his pace to catch up with her. "Wait. It's me. Nashua." wondering if she had already forgotten the stranger she had once saved.

@illuminae

[illuminae]

At first it had been impossible to go more than hours without picturing his face, his smile, the laughter in eyes so green they put emeralds to shame. To wonder at his kindness and the way he had seen the cracks in her chest, her heart, had seen the way she hurt to be so physically fragmented and made himself match her, promised her it wasn’t odd. She wasn’t odd. He had called her the inspiration, and though she would never admit it aloud, he had looked beautiful in some strange way. Fractures of light and gold collided with the dark. It hadn’t looked as broken as the way it felt inside her chest, like one whole that, in her, could never be united.

But as time had passed without any new encounters, she found that the shade of green in his eyes was getting harder to picture. She knew it had reminded her of raw stones buried in the earth, of summer grass after a rainstorm. But when she closed her eyes and tried to remember, the only thing she saw was green. Vague and vibrant but absolutely just an echo of the shade she’d thought she would never forget.

After that the rest of the details had started to fade too - and while none of it was entire, nothing erased completely, she knew the loss for what it was, felt it like an ache inside her chest. A fear that someday she would forget all of it, everything but the name and the memory of what it felt like to want someone. To want to know them, want to be the reason for one more of those twinkling smiles, want to know what had made them who they were. It had been too little time together, and she was foolish to have dwelled on it for so long as it was. She could be certain that he didn’t wonder about her in the same way, not when he had a life and a family and children.

So she forced him out of her mind, and though she did her best not to wonder, the memories visited her at every flash of chestnut she glimpsed through the trees, every muted rumble of distant amused laughter.

But it was good that they had not found eachother again, because as much as the memory of him continued to change, so did she. It had started with a halo hanging like a pale crown above her ears, glowing and silent and beautiful in a way that made warmth blossom inside some secret place in her chest. It made her feel as beautiful as her mother, as good and lovely. It dredged up old feelings of wanting to be an angel when she was just a girl, things she had buried as soon as she was old enough to realize the impossibility of it. But this, this had sparked a flicker of wonder again, of something like hope that kindled inside her.

Then a second halo had appeared, this one dark and crooked, overlapping the first on only one side as it hung unevenly above her head. She had stared at it for hours in the reflection of a small, dark pond, not understanding why or how or what it meant. She had hoped it would just disappear, and while she had understood that it was an empty kind of hope, it had still crushed that spark inside her chest when instead the changes grew worse. Or more. Maybe both, she was too numb to tell.

She hadn’t noticed the dark aura inside the shadows of the forest, but when she next ventured out into a small spot of sunshine, the dark had remained around her like a hazy black and grey fog too fond to let her go. Even her wings had changed, those metallic golden under-feathers now stained and smeared darker, tarnished by whatever this new dark inside her chest was. Whatever had changed her so quietly, so quickly. So completely.

There were other changes too. Moments where she had been walking in one place and disappeared only to reappear several yards away and markedly more tired. Instances where others seemed to know her fury and her pain, seemed to know more than they should about the things she was so careful to keep from her face. The shadows had remained though, darkness that pooled and simmered at even the slightest urging from her. It felt like only the good parts, the parts from her mother, were the ones that had abandoned her. Like the healing. The healing had gone, and once when she quietly took a wound from a child who had hurt themselves while playing, she had been shocked to feel the wounds erupt across her own knees instead.

She is lost in the reflection of whoever this thing is that she’s become, busy tracing the twin rings of light - one dark, one bright, one crooked, one right - when a voice finds her as if out of the haze of a dream. She doesn’t realize she’d done it, but the moment her mismatched gaze of black and gold lift from the surface of the small pond, she blasts him with the emotions that rise strangled inside her chest.

Shock.
Relief.
Affection.
Wariness.

Then the emotions are quiet again, receding like a tide inside her chest as she turns in the half-dark of the forests of home to greet someone that feels like a ghost. “Hello Nashua.” Of all the times she’s wondered about him, never once did she ever allow herself to imagine what she might say or do. So for a beat she is quiet, made so quiet by the wariness that feels like a rock wedged between her ribs, this giant cold thing she cannot breathe around. Then she takes a few steps closer, stopping before she thinks he’ll be able to make out the aura of dark or the tarnished gold beneath her wings. There is nothing she can do about the halos though.

“All this time and you haven’t managed to come up with something better than No Name?” The dark pain in her eyes recedes, pushed away by the faint warmth of amusement as she shamelessly studies his face and those eyes and that specific shade of chestnut like burning copper ore. “Well?” She says, and there is a note of expectancy in the delicate quiet of her whisper-soft voice. “Did you manage to keep up your end of the bargain?” Her eyes drift from his face to the places his wounds had been, careful in their silent study before moving on to take in the rest of his decidedly unmarred body, perfect wings. He looks so different in this half-light of day. His chestnut is brighter, the gold stripes less distinct but somehow more a part of his body without the dark to disembody the light of them - and she can see the detail of wings that are tawny and brown and deep mahogany, almost flaxen underneath in their lightness.

She blinks, and her expression is something both soft and guarded as her eyes return to his face, and because he hasn’t answered yet, and because this silence feels suddenly precarious, she asks, “Are you well?” Because she has no way to heal him now except to take his wounds, and she is quite sure that if this is the purpose for his visit, she will do it without question.

ILLUMINAE

we can't dream when we're awake,
or fall in love with a heart too strong to break

@Nashua

[Nashua]

He can't help the smile he gives her.

It's the same one that he's worn his entire life (his grandfather's smile; though his is far more mischievous than any smile Valerio ever wore). It's the one that he has given Yanhua when they had played foalhood games, when his excursions had taken him too far and he was relieved to his brother again. It was the one that he gave his mother, always hoping to lift her smile so that it might finally reach her eyes again. He has shared it with his half-siblings, with his extended family, and strangers alike.

And yet, he has never considered this woman who never gave Nashua her name a stranger.

Perhaps, he hopes as his smile tugs to one side, his smile might be enough that today she finally tells him.

Nashua continues to approach her, noting the changes since the last time that he saw her. (Though part of him wonders if it might have been the Endless Night or the beast that ripped his chest open that made him miss the twin halos above her head.) His green eyes linger there a moment, studying the double rings that spiral there. The first one is thin and Nash -  who has always been too quick to jump from one thing to the next - almost misses it. But the silver sheen of it (like the moon) catches his attention and then his head lifts to consider the darker one that hangs at a different angle.

(If he had known how the second tormented her, Nashua would have told her everything can only exist in balance. There is no sun without the moon. No light without the dark. And in his eyes, she becomes what he had first thought: a perfect existence of light and dark, like the two colors now shining on her skin.)

The pegasus only slows when he feels something. For a moment, Nashua stops because the only similar feeling he has to this is when his sister - Aela - had come to Taiga and hurled every painful emotion she could at him. She had even shared a particularly hard memory of their mother and his pale lips had curled back in a sneer, warning the palomino to never step foot in his presence again.

There were many things that he could tolerate but the way that she (she! The only full sister that Nashua and Yanhua have, the child that Lilliana asked them to keep their distance from and allow her to be fostered out because of their father, had grown up to be as terrible as their notorious sire) had intentionally created and crafted grief had been an unforgivable act for the Northern king. Not when their family was already so rife with it.

So when the mare that saved him does something familiar, Nash comes to an uneasy stop. He feels them - the shock and the relief, the affection and the wariness (though the winged horse thinks that the last emotion might be genuinely his).

"I -," he starts and then glances down to the haloed creature before him. "I'm not very good with names." Nashua finally explains quietly.

She is full of questions and Nashua is grateful, since he seems to be at a loss for words.

"Still standing," he offers to one of them as he watches the black-and-gold woman study the parts of him that she had healed. The wounds had healed up nicely and were only visible under certain angles of light. Nashua had gotten good at presenting himself that the zig-zagged scar across his chest blended in with the plethora of colors on his copper hide. It was just one more thing to look at - like his flaxen mare or his gold striped or speckled wings.

Are you well? she asks him and something tightens in Nashua. He doubts that she would want to hear about his troubles as King of the North. About how his Thane has recently suffered two injured legs or that there is a widening chasm between he and his youngest child over his shifting. About how something dark seems to be afflicting the mind of his twin brother and how it makes Nashua so angry that he wants to lash out at the entire realm of Beqanna.

"Tell me how you've been," Nash counters to his companion instead, taking another step forward. It'd be nice to think anything else for a few moments. His green eyes glance up at her halos and then he looks back at her, "Was that you...," he prompts, curious about the empathic exchange from earlier. "All that.. feeling?"

@illuminae

[illuminae]

There is a change that unfolds inside him, a moment where that easy, beautiful smile falters and disappears, where his path to her slows and then halts and she wonders at that subtle shift she sees inside the summer of his meadow eyes. She watches him with a kind of silence that touches her tongue and her eyes and the line of a mouth made for frowning, would touch her heart and make it stone except that (as always, when he is around) it is a thing already in wild turmoil.

He seems different in this moment, maybe, like a man unsure or subdued, and she finds it suddenly hard to hold his quiet gaze because she wonders if he can tell that this sense of wrongness comes from being so close to her. “Then maybe I should wait to share mine with you.” She says, breaking the silence inside herself. “No Name seems easy enough to remember.” She smiles, but it is something small and shadowed, something that flashes like flint in the wounds buried behind the colors of her eyes. “Or,” She doesn’t move any closer to him, doesn’t reach out to touch the shining ore of that sun-burnt copper color. “Or, you could call me Illuminae.”

It feels wrong to give him her name, feels like she should’ve already done it, feels like she should have held onto it longer. It is just a name, just a collection of sounds that she wants to hear whispered in the quiet of his voice, but it also feels like a tether between them. Something that binds them even in the simplest of ways.

Ghosts don’t have names, so she will always be someone to him now.

She doesn’t miss the way he opts not to answer her question, and it draws a sharp kind of suspicion into the contrast of her white-gold and black face. “I asked you first.” She says, and it isn’t a scowl exactly that etches itself across her face - it is something spun of worry and intuition and this strange affection that keeps trying to watch him with her eyes. It is concern in it’s most ragged form. But then he steps closer and it is like his nearness is a weight against her chest that makes it hard to breathe, because suddenly she is holding her breath and searching his face, counting every second that passes between them in weighted silence.

“I don’t know.” It is a whisper, an exhale when she finally answers him, and the aura of darkness around her skin thickens as it feeds off her uncertainty. “I haven’t felt myself recently.” She is vulnerable for a moment, worried eyes soft instead of wary, pain etched like gilded gold throughout her mismarked face. She reaches for him and pauses, pulling her nose back in again towards the gravity of her own chest, to the racing heart inside it. “What were the feelings?” She feels laid bare beneath the green of his gaze as it wanders to the twin halos above her ears and back down to her face again.

ILLUMINAE

we can't dream when we're awake,
or fall in love with a heart too strong to break

[Nashua]

There is the start of a small smile, and Nash lifts his blazed face to better see her own. Her features have always seemed made from stone (at least to Nashua), her expression already set. She is a striking woman, but when she smiles, it is the most captivating thing about her. He likes the way that it tugs free, the way that it breaks lose and lights up her two-toned face like the dawn he imagines she is.

She who is Illuminae. His grin softens, letting the knowledge settle in his mind, in a place where he will never forget.

Nashua would be content to just stay here, at the start of a conversation without pressing all his troubles and worries on her. It doesn't seem fair, not when she has existed in a separate part of his mind. Sometimes he had wondered if she had really existed at all - instead of a figment of an imagination run rife with pain - and now that he knows she does, he doesn't want to burden her with his painful realities. It somehow seems selfish, though he wonders if wanting to keep his own plights to himself is also selfish.

I asked you first, she says and Nashua lowers his head, sighing softly; trying to push away the storm swirling in his chest.

"My son was taken," says the winged horse. Nashua is angry - and he certainly feels the hatred burning towards Gale and Mazikeen, the ones who took him - but he is most angry with himself. He should have been here. "While I was out on the Isle. My family was here and I failed them." He looks away from Illuminae then, unable to look at her and see his own failings projected back at him. How it had felt with Noel.

He thinks of his youngest son - Bolder - back in Hyaline. With monsters, and the memory of blood staining his child's lips rages through him. He is glad to be tucked away in the shadows with her, where nobody can see the way that his copper coat becomes brighter and brighter, bleeding out across his hide until it was the same color as the fallen animal that Bolder had slain. An accident, is what Mazikeen had called it, while his half-brother had looked on with a delighted expression that turned Nash's heart to stone.

Illuminae comes forward and touches him.
Nash closes his eyes.

"I feel too much these days," he tells her, trying to even the pace of his pulse and still the rise of his temper. His flaxen forelock covers most of his pale face until Nashua looks up, as his normal coloring starts to come back to him. "Surprise," Nashua says at first. He hadn't expected to see her. The Northern-born stallion wasn't even sure that she had been real before this moment. He had felt the wariness, too. But that wasn't uncommon for this part of the forest.

Not when he knew the shadow-dwellers were nearby; they protected their own.

"But I'm glad to have seen you again, Illuminae."

@illuminae

[illuminae]

She is not expecting his words to carry such weight when they land against her chest like thrown stones, leaving invisible bruises behind as she carefully schools her face blank again. It is not the reminder that he has a son, a family while she is so promised to her solitude, it is the way he burns with his truth, the way he transforms into someone that feels subtly new to her. There is a reflex to reach for him, to touch his skin and draw him back to her and away from this anger, but it feels wrong to take him from something so well deserved. To have his son taken from him, to have his family wronged like that, she can’t even imagine it. Would her own dad have noticed if she went missing?

“How can I help?” She asks, and those mismatched eyes never wander from his face for an instant, not even when his own gaze leaves her. She traces his profile with eyes that are suddenly soft without an audience to watch her, following the curve of his jaw to his tense, quiet mouth and then back up again to a glint of eye greener than any emerald. It is there that she settles again, watching thoughts swim like fish in those green depths while he works up the will to meet her gaze again.

“Nashua?” His name is like a kiss on her lips, soft and warm and leaving an ache inside her chest that she is so glad he’ll never see. “The only one you’ve failed is yourself, and that’s just because you’re too biased to see things clearly.” She shouldn’t and doesn’t and won’t reach for him, except suddenly her mouth is at the curve of that deep red jaw and she is coaxing him to look at her again with eyes that have stayed gentle and just a shade of vulnerable because this ache she thinks she sees inside him is worth her own heart being hurt a little. “I was here wasn’t I, do you blame me for failing to keep him safe?” Her question is something so gentle, and there is her own shared ache reflected back at him from the furrow of her bicolored brow. “Or is the answer no because I couldn’t have known it was happening.” Just like Nashua hadn’t known, she is sure.

Her lips fall from his skin as she remembers herself suddenly and takes a single step back to allow him the space she should have given him in the first place. It isn’t a sudden change that takes her face, it is a slow realization of her gentleness laid bare to him, of the vulnerability she knows she needs to be more careful of lest he notice what else sparks for him inside the black and gold of her quiet gaze. “You let me fend off a literal demon inside you,” she reminds him, inclining her head to search a face so ancient with its burdens, “I’ll fight figurative ones for you too. I am always willing to share this weight with you.” Her words lack the fire of passion, but there is an edge of steel inside the promise that glints in the stubborn shine of her mismatched gaze.

She watches the red bleed out of the chestnut, draining to the shade she remembers from that first time in the forest. For a moment she is lost, dragged away to the memory that brings a gentle smile to the corners of her quiet mouth. Of him and her in the bleeding dark, of death following at their heels while they ignored it in favor of better company. There is a pang in her chest when he tells her he is glad to have seen her again, and she feels the tug of me too where it sits on her lips too heavy to speak. “It would be more worrisome if you felt nothing, I think.”

Her eyes trace his face again, furrowed gently and searching, almost unsure behind the black curtain of her forelock. “Do you know where he is? Your son.” Her wings shift at her shoulders, the rustle of movement and feather the only giveaway that she is restless to help find him, help ease this fire inside him back down to a bearable smolder.

ILLUMINAE

we can't dream when we're awake,
or fall in love with a heart too strong to break

[Nashua]

"Is it wrong of me to want to keep you from it?" comes his ragged voice, sounding like the fatigue that had settled between his winged shoulders. The exhaustion that came from ruling the North, from trying to keep his remaining family safe, and Nashua isn't impervious to the pain behind the Curse. He mourns the loss of Gale, just like he grieved for Lilliana and Yanhua and Bolder.

He has to keep a fastidious mask for the Northerners; there are already rumors that he is troubled and distracted by his losses.

"It's brought so much darkness." He tells the angel beside him, trying to find some semblance of his old humor and failing. Nashua's green eyes are heavy with the troubles that he carries and he can feel gravity wanting to drag him drown, even as he lifts his gaze to look at Illuminae. The Freyr has told the story a few times now - first to Ciri and then Noel - but the striped pegasus tells it again (the story of how his father had been a violent man, that his fury had been felt across Beqanna, that his mother had been one of Wolfbane's favorite targets) to her because he wants so badly to keep Illuminae safe.

And then at the end of it all, Nashua says: "But it is my fault. I was the one who tried to foster relationships with my siblings. I was the one who invited Gale and Mazikeen to the North." If he had only done what Yanhua had - giving their fraternal brothers and sisters a wide berth - perhaps the North would have been overlooked. Perhaps the resurrected Curse wouldn't have looked towards the woods that housed his mate and his children.

Nashua thinks again of the disappearance of his twin, of Amarine, and feels the fault settle there as well. Just like there hadn't been the chance to check on Maze during her first pregnancy, there hadn't been the time to discover what had happened to them.

There have been so many wrongs committed, and the Freyr thinks they have to land somewhere; why not settle with the man who had failed his kingdom and his family?

"Hyaline," Nash explains, finally calming the storm inside him to look down on her lovely face. He thinks of that day, when he and Noel had flown to retrieve their youngest child. They had come empty, a corner of their next that stood as a physical reminder of his shortcomings. "He has family there. And I don't think he's in real danger." The pegasus goes on to say, "but my brother Gale knows that this would -." Illuminae's warmth beside him steadies the growing anger, stifles the way that Nashua himself might have taken another coat color, made his wings wider, become bigger than the problems manifesting in his life. "Bolder is a shapeshifter, like him." He says tersely, quietly, as level as he can, though he can't keep the full contempt from his voice. "Like our father was."

The man that had caused so much suffering, as his Cursed brother did now.

Nobody has understood Nashua's pain where it regards the ability to change skins or shapes as easily as a horse could blink. He's tried to explain and yet, it feels like (to him) that nobody has listened. Not her, not Ciri, and even his niece Cheri seemed to harbor her own doubts.

"They all go mad." He tells her flatly, turning his blazed face towards her so that their halos graze against each other. A silver moon stuck that gets suck somewhere between Illuminae's shadowed grace and the hell that Nashua is currently living.

@illuminae

[illuminae]

“You can want it, but the decision is mine to make.” She tells him quietly. But the raggedness is not something she was expecting, not something she is sure she can withstand for any length of time when she knows there is little she would not do for this man. It is why when she reaches out to touch him, that she uses the ability she lost in the change. Healing, except that it is something different, something darker. She isn’t even sure if any of this raggedness in him is physical, but if it is she takes it for herself without even a word of warning. She is a hypocrite, of course, to make claims about things that are her choice to make and then take one from him in the very next moment. “Then I suppose it’s a good thing that the dark has always been a part of me.”

Whether it is to remind him or to give him privacy in his grieving, she draws on the shadows beneath her skin until there is a wall of darkness around them on every side and theirs are the only eyes that will see anything. It is as inexplicably reflexive to protect him now as it was in the first moments she had stumbled across his dying body.

She is quiet listening to his story, to these truths like constellations that make up the night of him. There are moments where she knows there is shared pain in her patchwork face, moments where she is too slow to school her face and hide the sudden flashes of fury that glint like the edge of a blade inside her eyes. She wonders how a father like that could have any part in the creation of a man like this, thinks instead that his mother must be someone incredible. That Nashua is more than he ever allows himself to believe. “It’s hard for me to blame you for trying to make things better.” She tells him, and her strange, beautiful face is a frown and scowl and thing of obvious frustration. “You tell me this story and I don’t blame you for trying, I blame them for not trying.”

A breath, another frown, a pair of mismatched eyes that flash and glint like swordsteel. “The fact that you are not like them would have made you a target even without you trying to mend things.” She does not know why she is so certain of this, but her conviction is like steel even as frustration surges beneath the clash of color of her skin. And then it dissipates at the name of her mothers home. “I have family there too.” It is irrelevant and she does not know why the words drift like snowflakes from lips suddenly too frozen to frown or smile. “I could go there and make sure he stays safe.” She does not mention that although she has family there, a mother she loves desperately, Hyaline has never been home to her.

But Nashua is not quite finished with his truths, and when he speaks again she looks nowhere but into those beautiful, stormy eyes. There is a seed that plants itself inside her chest, a thing that his words water until it finally blooms and she recognizes it for what it is. Fear. She can clearly remember the moment he had shifted his skin to look identical to her. It had made her heart ache a little to watch him be so kind, to see her worry and turn it into something beautiful. But now she cannot look back on that memory without wondering what his kindness had cost him. He’d never said anything about his father then - understandable since she had been nothing more than a stranger.

He turns his face to her, and he is so close that she can see in the periphery where their halos overlap. Close enough to touch, and so she does. Her lips find the soft skin at the corner of his mouth, lingering for a moment but never shaping into a kiss. “When we met, you saw how it hurt me to be so different, and so you changed yourself to look like me.” She whispers, and her mouth wanders higher to trace the line of a bone in his cheek before the ache inside her chest begs her to stop. “Do you worry that it's part of you too?” She hates to ask it, hates that this question might wound him. But it feels like something she needs to know, like a truth she needs to be able to look in the eyes.

They all go mad.

ILLUMINAE

we can't dream when we're awake,
or fall in love with a heart too strong to break

[Nashua]

He breathes out softly, billowing the air between them as Illuminae answers him. "I'd never want to take that away from you," he tells her, appreciating her honesty as much as he appreciates that she is something separate from all the sorrows he has recently known. She wraps them both in a cloak of darkness, and Nashua understands that they are hidden away from the world. (If his mind had been on other things, he might have realized that this was the same magic that kept the secrets of the Shadow clan.)

"You are not this kind of dark," he tells her - thinking of Gale and his father, thinking about the Curse that they had both inherited. Thinking about the lives it ruined, about everything it had taken, and all the devastation that it had left behind in its wake. It had taken his son, possibly his brother and his mate, and now the thoughts consumed him about who it would claim next. His other children? Those of Yanhua's who remained here? What about Noel? Illuminae?

Illuminae might be able to wield shadows - might even be a part of the dark - but Nashua was certain that there was light at the heart of her.

"I thought -," Nash continues on to tell her, and he's tentative with these words. If she had grown up in Taiga, had she heard the stories about the monster that once roamed these woods? Some Northerners did, but most recalled the rape and attempted murder of their Khaleesi, Neverwhere. And the striped pegasus had grown up under those accusing stares, once they had learned who his father had been. He hadn't known about the Curse then - the way that it traveled through the male line of his family like wildfire - but as he turns his blazed face to the tri-colored one of Illuminae, he braces himself to see those accusations again. "How else do you overcome something horrible like that?" he asks flatly, "I thought that if we could come together, there could be a way to overcome all that evil."

Nashua nearly spits out the last words, realizing now how foolish that dream had been.

But then her words catch him, and for a moment, Nash stands suspended. She had family in Hyaline? "It's dangerous," he tells her in a low voice. Bolder was safe, Noel had assured him of that. "Especially for those that can't shapeshift." The thought of Illuminae going there makes his stomach curl; she can't shift. Mazikeen would try to turn her to ash and Gale would -

No.

Her touch grazes against his cheekbone, and the green of his eyes darkens where she casts a shadow. They are treading a fine line, and Nashua tries to be careful of it. He breathes out again, carefully. "You saved my life," he says hoarsely, "You spared me from Death and then acted as if you hadn't done something kind." Those memories are hazy, dulled from his injury and bloodloss and the Eclipse, but he remembers this clearly enough: "Like you weren't someone kind."

The way he determinedly turns his head to meet her mismatched eyes says that he would never be convinced otherwise.

"Isn't it already?" he finally asks, feeling the ability to change his color, his height (and possibly more) surging beneath his skin, threatening to drag him under.

@illuminae

[illuminae]

“You don’t know me well enough to be sure of that.” There is a weight to her words that darkens the light in her mismatched eyes, a weight that hangs heavy in the corners of her frowning mouth. “I could be the kind of dark you hate, I could be what you despise.” She isn’t sure how it is that he stubbornly refuses to see what is in front of his very eyes. That she is shrouded in shadow that hadn’t been there before, this aura of gauzy dark that never leaves her anymore - and even if he had chosen to disregard that, there is still a black, crooked halo sitting lopsided over her ears. A pair of wings once molten gold and now a strange, burnished shade as though soot clings to the feathers even now. “As a girl I always wanted to be more like my mother. But now that I am grown I can see that I am more like my father.”

There is not a single ounce of accusation in her eyes when he turns his face to look at her, not a single ounce of anything but stubbornness and a growing sense of loyalty. And pain, pain because she can see the way this constant strife is carving holes inside his chest large enough for these vital pieces of himself to fall away through. “Maybe they aren’t who you need to come together with.” She tells him lightly, and this time her eyes are soft with a shared kind of pain as she imagines what it would feel like to have this kind of a rift between herself and her own sister, Radiance. “It sounds as though, for the moment, until they choose otherwise, they are now part of the evil that needs to be overcome.” She touches his shoulder lightly, offering a kind of support that feels unfamiliar to her, a kind of loyalty the goodness of his heart has won a thousand times over.

“I’m dangerous.” She says, and though she is arguing, her voice is something like a whisper when it slips past her dark mouth. “You underestimate me because I helped you.” Spared him, he had said, from the wrath of death. “But maybe I just knew somehow that I would need you later. That I would need you to ground me.” She is challenging him now, and though it comes softly, there is a new intensity in her gaze as she watches him. “I have never saved anyone but you, Nashua. If I am kind, it is only because you exist for me to be kind to.” A truth, and a lie, maybe. It’s true that she has only ever saved him, but he is also the only one she has ever had the opportunity to do so with. And likely now she cannot, not when the wounds she heals reappear on her own body. Nashua is the only one outside of her mother or her sister that she would ever be willing to sacrifice for in that way.

She meets his eyes, feels a kind of electricity in that gaze like there are sparks arcing inside her veins leaving her aching and on fire. “If it is a part of you then I will keep the madness at bay. I vow it.” She closes her eyes and steps forward to press her brow to his in promise, to feel the warmth of his blazed face against the dark of hers. “But I have only ever seen you use that part of yourself for goodness. So if there is madness inside your chest, I do not think it is yours to keep but rather the burdens of your siblings.” Her eyes open again, that gaze mismatched and steely as she pulls back a few inches to gaze at him. “Set it free, Nashua.”

ILLUMINAE

we can't dream when we're awake,
or fall in love with a heart too strong to break

@Nashua