"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
After his conversation with the fae stallion that leads this land, Reave had fully intended to take his immediate leave. But, as with many things, his curiosity had gotten the better of him. At the beginning, Obscene had mentioned the strange and cryptic mutterings of the creature Reave had been eyeing upon his arrival. Reave has always been rather fond of curiosities and incomprehensible madnesses, so it would likely come as no surprise he chooses to seek out the creature.
As promised, there is no sense to the things it mutters to him, but nonetheless, Reave is delighted. Anyone looking on would see only the strange beast chanting to himself, a trick of sight hiding Reave himself from their spying. Of course, based on the memories that swim around this creature, there are many who had come before him seeking its dubious wisdom. Many who would no doubt be entirely unsurprised to find this so-called Steve muttering madness to nothing but air.
He grows bored easily enough however, and so turns to take his actual leave.
And he might have, had he not spotted the dusky gray and gold girl lingering in the distance. There is something in the history that seems to trail her, something that draws him. He knows immediately she had been something to the stallion who leads this place. Even if her own personal wash of emotions had not been enough, that would have intrigued him enough to reveal himself and approach.
She feels like the point of a knife, her past blazing around her with a razor’s edge. And Reave, who had always been drawn to dangerous edges, grins. With the glow of his own bones washing his features, he must look a sight (frightful to some, morbidly intriguing to others). But the wicked gleam of his bright blue eyes behind the mask is unmistakable.
“Do you always wear your anger like armor?” he asks as he nears, lips twitching his amusement. Of course, he doesn’t need her reply to know the answer, but he is curious what she will make of his question.
He finds her in a tangle of thought, chasing rogue ones like drifting leaves while outwardly she simply frowns at the flowers while they sway in the wind. She doesn’t notice him at first, there is too much to see behind her eyes, so much that she is overwhelmed by it. There is this thing like a secret, a point of joy and horror, and it sits inside her just exactly like a seed.
Maybe it is the way the wildflowers swish as he passes through them, or maybe it is the weight of those curious blue eyes so much like hers, but she turns her face finally to see him. He is someone entirely unfamiliar and it draws an even deeper frown to the angles of her refined face. Furrows in her brow and along the curve of her jaw, tension in the corners of unsmiling lips like velvet stone.
He is so odd that she would very much like to stare openly at him, to let her gaze travel the topography of his skin as though those glowing bones are meant to be trails for her to follow. But her pride doesn’t allow it, perhaps wondering if he will interpret her attention as something more than brazen curiosity. So she keeps her proud gaze trained on his face, letting her eyes settle on his and their mirrored blue sameness. It is only in her periphery that she notes how extensively the bones covered his copper and white figure.
“Do you always mistake contemplation for anger?” She asks back just as easily, finding that spark in his eyes and narrowing her gaze at him so subtly. “Is it because you have the depth of a puddle?” At that there is a smile that flashes in the corners of her mouth, a light in those sapphire eyes that is there and then gone again in an instant as she turns her face from him and towards the sun as if to bask in the watery golden light.
Then, with eyes closed against the sunshine and a faint, relaxed smile softening the corners of her steel grey mouth, she says, quite conversationally, “Shouldn’t those bones be on the inside?”
REVELRIE
it feels like falling, it feels like rain, like losing my balance again and again
She can’t know of the secrets he pulls from her very skin, the ones surrounding her like a fine mist. Neither does he enlighten her with his strange question. She can’t know it is her memories where he finds all her cutting edges. The razor tongue that delights him even before he hears it cut the air between them.
She cannot possibly know any of that, so the biting rejoinder is everything he had hoped it could be. He laughs, unable to help himself. He has no doubt she had wished to find a tender place on him with her insult, but Reave has little in the way left of shame. And perhaps it’s true, what she says. Perhaps he is little more than a shallow puddle spread before her in which to wet her hoof-tips.
Or perhaps it is what he wants the world to believe.
“Do you always frown at flowers?” he asks in return, his voice light and redolent with the laughter still dying in his throat. He meets her gaze with a bold grin, matching eyes crinkled instead of narrowed. He tilts his head, shifting as she raises her face to the sun as though she were one of the aforementioned flowers following its light.
His curiosity is not dimmed by her dismissal. Instead it is piqued by the way her features seem to soften, her voice losing its edge when she continues. He nearly laughs again at the question. Strangely, it is not one he has ever been asked before. Reave has watched others flinch away and stare in horror. He has watched them dismiss it as though it were nothing, pretending away whatever discomfort seeing it brings them. As though one could forget the sight of bone rupturing flesh like it had been cracked in half and pushed through.
There is no comfort in seeing something burst from skin that would spell death for anyone else.
“If they are, no one bothered to inform them of it,” he replies with a wicked grin. “Why? Do they make you uncomfortable?”
“Always.” She says, and there is a flicker of amusement that worms its way into her spirit, into those mountain water eyes, into the quiet line of a mouth too weary to smile. He has her attention now, and she isn’t sure if it’s just because she’s resigned herself to this conversation with a pushy stranger, or if it is because there is a dark inside of her deeper than any night and he has a light inside of him that beckons her nearer. It is absolutely not because of the way he laughs, or the way the sound is something that drags her from the bog of this vastness growing inside of her.
A moment ago she wouldn’t have cared if the bluntness of her question prickled at him, but a moment ago he hadn’t shown her bright eyes and warm laughter and a general immunity to the dourness of her mood. So she is glad when his face doesn’t darken, when instead a grin trips all the muscles of his mouth to watch her. “A shame for them to be so ignorant, I’m sure.” She says, but there is an absolute lack of cruelty in her tone, and even that dour mood lifts a little at his easy wit.
“I’m not sure.” She answers him honestly, taking it as an invitation for her to drift closer and examine the places where bone erupt through his skin like glaciers in the ocean. “It seems like it should make you uncomfortable.” There is only curiousness in her voice as she reaches out like she might touch the skin where it is red and raw, an open wound against bone stained murky with pink. But then she pulls away again, not in horror, but with the illusion that she has any manners at all.
She of course has very few.
“I don’t like the way it smells.” She decides, and she moves to stand where she is watching his face again instead of the topography of a body that looks as though it must be in constant pain. “The blood, I mean.” She does not tell him why or what it reminds her of, what pain that scent dredges up inside of her. “So,” she says instead, turning from him to walk the path down to the nearest shore, intent on bringing him to soak in the warm waters of the Pampa ocean, “what does it feel like to be inside out?”
She doesn’t pause to ask if he wants to come, or explain where it is she intends to take him - and maybe it is part defense mechanism. Creating this moment where he has the choice to follow, or to excuse himself. But she isn’t sure if it’s for her sake or for his, can’t possibly explain to this stranger that she is cursed. That eventually everyone in her life finds suffering.
REVELRIE
it feels like falling, it feels like rain, like losing my balance again and again
He can almost taste her amusement in the air between them, made all the more heady for the rarity of the memories strung through it. It has always been one of his favorite things, eliciting the unexpected from others. The motive that keeps him moving forward. It hardly matters whether it is humor or rage, so long as it is not what they are used to.
An addict always seeking his latest fix.
The grin widens across his mobile mouth, delight gleaming in the infinite blue of his gaze. She imagines him bursting with light, but it is only partially true. It is not a kind light. Instead it is the way the sun burns ones retinas if one stares up too long when it has reached its zenith. It is as harsh and sharp and damaging as he is in his worst moods. But she, clever creature that she is, seems to know better than to stare.
“Would you feel sorry for me if it did?” he asks softly as she shifts closer, inspecting the ragged edges of his bone-split flesh. He cannot quite keep the humor from his lips, leaving a question that might have elicited pity feeling like a dare instead. Of course, he doesn’t need her sorrow, sweet as it may be.
As she withdraws, distaste rolling off her tongue, Reave can’t seem to stop the laugh that breaks past his throat. He had long ago forgotten the scent of his own blood, common as it is on his skin. He can imagine it though. The tangy copper mixed with the salt of the northern sea. A barbaric scent, if ever there was one, fitting for a creature like him.
He says nothing however, though his amusement makes it clear he takes no offense. And when she turns towards the ocean, Reave is left with a nagging curiosity that drives his steps forward. It’s a novel experience, to trail in another’s wake. He is so often the one in the lead.
As he follows her however, he finds he can’t complain about the view.
What does it feel like to be inside out, she asks, and Reave nearly trips over his own surprise. He laughs again, a full and hearty sound. She continues to surprise him, and Reave has always been a fan of surprises. It could so easily be a taunt, given bite to make him feel somehow less. But from her lips, it feels genuine. Like the curiosity he is so familiar with rather than a tormenting question meant to make him squirm.
But there is no good way to describe it so she might understand. He is silent as they near the waves. She is not moving swiftly, so he draws easily alongside her. His gaze is focused on her rather than the impressive view of the rolling surf. But then, he is used to impressive views. She is something new altogether.
“Like rage,” he finally replies, subtle smile pulling at the corners of his mouth, “that makes your skin tight and prickly.” He pauses thoughtfully. “And like fear that slices ribbons across your insides.” His eyes are sharp on her. “And unforgiving. Inevitable.” His smile grows. “Is that what you imagined?”
“Likely, yes.” She tells him, again making no effort to hide secrets in her words or the curious way she studies these changes of emotion in his face like ripples across a pond. “But I would almost certainly lie to you. Pity is worse than the pain itself, I think. It is meant to be a kindness, but it traps you inside an expectation of what someone else thinks you should be feeling.” She finds it easy to be honest with him, perhaps because it does not seem like he is making any effort to hide things from her either. She cannot possibly know the way he is silently siphoning away pieces she would rather keep buried.
When he laughs this time, she merely studies him in her quiet clearwater way, trying once again to decide what it is that drives him. Light like the sun? Certainly. Or perhaps more like a flame that she should be wary of being burned by. “Are you always so easily amused by strangers? Or am I particularly entertaining.” The question is light and inquisitive, and though there is a hint of steel in those impossibly clear eyes, there is no distinct ire. He has not been unkind in any of his laughter, and, if anything, he has buoyed her in some strange, unexpected way.
This next laugh though is one she cannot help but to react to, and it feels like such a gift that he cannot see the smile that pulls itself across the dark of her quiet mouth. It is a sound so genuine that it pushes warmth into her chest, pushes back the dark that swells inside her like a forever night. For the first time since meeting him she finds herself wondering who he is and, more cautiously, if he plans to stay. There are very few bright, or stubborn, enough to break through the thunderclouds inside her chest. It would be a shame to find one and lose them again so quickly.
She glances over at him when he draws alongside her, and she does not balk at knowing he will see the remnants of her amusement, the mirror of his mirth drawn so carefully among the metallic golds and storm grays of her face. Perhaps it is his to see, his that he earned. But while his gaze remains fixed on her in a way that coaxes a shy heat to the surface of her skin, her gaze swings back to the path to watch their steps. He can see her mirth, but she is not ready for him to see that he has any kind of lingering effect on her.
Like rage. He says, and it is in her nature to be suspicious that he is deliberately picking things he thinks she would know intimately. His description commands her attention back, and those quiet eyes fall like stars across his face. “No,” she tells him simply, and there is something soft in the way her eyes wander over the armor of his face. “I imagined you would tell me it chafes.” She smiles then, something impossibly subtle that only barely upturns the corners of her mouth. “But your answer is good too.”
She is still considering what he said when they arrive at the shore with the waves that lap almost sleepily against the rocky sand. “Do you ever find relief from it?” Her gaze had moved to the ocean again, but now it swings back to watch him and there is a quiet furrow in the dark grey of her brow. “Do you even want to find relief from it?” She wonders suddenly if it is something so normal to him that he hardly notices it until someone asks about it. So instead she says, “Would you like to swim with me? The sharks are only a problem if you are the slowest one in the water.” This time when amusement shimmers across her face, she makes no effort to dampen it down.
REVELRIE
it feels like falling, it feels like rain, like losing my balance again and again
“I’ve never cared for pity.” He grins, eyes fever-bright behind his mask. “But then, I never cared much for kindness either.” There is something liberating in her honesty. A freshness he hadn’t known his life was lacking until this moment. He can only repay her with a little honesty of his own, even if it isn’t a very flattering truth. Still he smiles recklessly in the face of it. “I suppose that doesn’t say too much about me though, does it?”
He enjoys the way she can’t seem to help but react to him. And though he almost certainly should not, he enjoys her reactions. Perhaps a little too much.
She challenges him on it. Her light tone belies the ruthlessness of the words and the sharp edges in her clear gaze. The thrill of it rolls through him. Hitching up his chin just a notch, that tempestuous smile on his lips, he offers her even more truth. “I am always easily amused, but you are particularly entertaining too.”
There is no kindness in the fire she had imagined in his gaze. There is only a man of wanton disregard and devilish certainty.
The mirth in her normally shuttered features is kindling to that flame. He doesn’t need her to wear her emotions so plainly to know what she feels, but he rather likes watching the way it plays across her pretty face. It’s a gap in the wall she has been so steadfastly placing between them. A slip that shows her armor isn’t nearly as impenetrable as she wants it to be.
His own features crease in amusement when she informs him she had thought it would chafe. “Oh, it does, but the chafing is the least of it,” he replies blithely. She hadn’t been asking about chafing though, no matter what her pithy response might imply. There is too much hiding beneath the surface of the still pools of her eyes. A depth not yet plundered.
Not by those in her past, and not by him. Not yet at least. But Reave has always been adept at plundering. After all, isn’t that what barbarians do?
Her thoughtful question causes the grin on his face to slip. It’s another thing no one has ever asked him before, and he can’t help but wonder why she asks now. It’s not inspired by any great depth of feeling, or the pity she claims she would have given him and lied about. When he finally does reply however, it’s not clear whether it is if he does find relief, or if he wants to find relief.
“No.”
She would not pity him now, regardless of what she believed of his denial.
The grin finds his lips once more when she dares him to enter the water with her. It’s almost as though she knows he would never decline such a brazen offer. As though he physically could not decline such a thing. His own humor is a perfectly wicked mirror of her own as he takes a slow step into the water, his eyes never leaving her face. “I’m torn between asking whether you just want to see if I’ll sink beneath the weight of my bones,” he pauses, grin shifting into something more devilish, eyes burning bright blue, “or if you’re trying to find a way of telling me I need to bathe.”
“It doesn’t have to say too much about you though, does it?” There is something almost mischievous in the way her eyes sparkle like crystal blue starlight to match the mirror of a half smile crooking in the corner of her mouth. “Not when you say so entirely much yourself.” But when she glances away again she is busy wondering what these truths mean. She can understand not caring for pity - it is a wasted empathetic response if ever there were one. But to not care for kindness either? She cannot be sure that there isn’t a question in her eyes when she steals another frowning glimpse at him as they walk.
She had thought that she’d captured a sense of who he was by his laughter and his wit and the way his eyes twinkled merrily at her words. But now she finds herself wondering if it is a mask of sorts, and if not a mask at all, then is she simply seeing the kind of someone she needs right now? Something with more levity than this dark inside her chest, more mirth than the silence of all these broken ribs around her limping heart.
She is probably staring more than she ought to be now, and that crease in her delicate steel brow is fast becoming a constant as she tries to pry apart these layers she had not initially noticed in him. It is a feeling of sudden doubt and even more sudden mistrust, but it is echoed by an ache of wanting to be mistaken.
He saves himself in his answer, in the way he gives her one single no to a question with two parts.
“Ah, now you start being sparse with your answers?” She asks, and there is a glint of that familiar steel in the lash of those beautiful stone blue eyes across his masked face. “No.” She says, and the way the word leaves her lips is something contemplative, the sound paired so perfectly to the careful way she is suddenly studying his face for a hint of secrets he hides beneath the planes of exposed bone. “I think it is the same answer for both questions.” She decides, almost softer, but she waits a moment to see if he will tell her she is mistaken.
When she wades into the water, she does so without waiting to see if he’ll join her. It is half because this ocean is home, because the waves that touch her skin as she holds her wings aloft are the same waves her mother introduced her to as a girl - and it is half because his wicked smile is a thing that causes strange stirrings in her chest until she forces her gaze away. Impossible boy. “Mmm,” she says, and there is a pleased smile on her lips as she keeps her back turned to him, venturing further until the water starts to touch the lowest feathers, “well as soon as you feel brave enough to hear the truth, ask, and I’ll tell you.”
There is something in her eyes when she turns her face to look back at him. Laughter and a moment of levity, mirth, and a hint of the wildling girl who had leapt from the edge of a cliff with a beautiful stranger, into the storm, into the sea. “You should be glad though,” her wings lower to skim the surface of the water, but the traces of outgoing ripples are distorted by the incoming waves, “the last man I took out on a date had to jump off a cliff with me. At the time, neither of us had wings.” Her head tips delicately in a way that is almost inquisitive and entirely charming, and she cannot help but to expect he’ll think she must be lying. “You, at least, likely know how to swim.”
REVELRIE
it feels like falling, it feels like rain, like losing my balance again and again
He cannot keep the mirth from stealing across his features just as he cannot keep the teasing response from his lips. “As opposed to saying so much without actually saying anything at all?”
It is a dare, that question. A challenge he wonders if she would rise to meet. She presses him for answers while giving so little of herself away. And Reave, hungry creature that he is, would be satisfied with nothing less than all she has to give.
He knows how easily others get caught in his levity, but like the bone that shields his features, it is little more than a bright mask. It shields the grief and anger that has driven him since he was young, masking the darkness tucked so carefully into his ruthless ambition. It’s easy to mistake his laughter for lightheartedness. But there is something far deeper and far more dangerous that drives him. Revelrie has only just begun to scratch the surface.
He laughs at her pointed quip. But then, he has always had a talent for talking exactly as much or as little as he needs. Some points could not be made with a soliloquy. Even now, when she subtly prods at him for his abrupt reticence, he doesn’t try to explain. She admits her belief that the answer is to both questions, and she would be right. But even if she hadn’t said so aloud, he suspects she would have known.
In the end however, it is an unpleasant truth. And Reave has never enjoyed lingering on unpleasant truths.
So he follows her into the water without replying, the waves splashing against his pale canons as they move in their rhythmic push and pull. Instead he turns the topic to something lighter, and to his delight, she responds to his teasing in kind. He chuckles, inordinately pleased with the turn of their conversation. “You do know how to go right for the ego, don’t you?” he quips, voice rumbling with his amusement. If his were a fragile thing, he might have been tempted to prove his bravery by asking the question even though he already knows the answer. Instead he forges ahead, drawing into the surf alongside her, eyes sparking as he watches her intently. “Lucky for you, I am a far better swimmer than a flyer.”
Tilting his head, he allows his grin to widen, his vibrant gaze shifting into something positively devilish. “A date though, hmm?” He nearly purrs the words. He has been enjoying himself immensely, but that little slip of the tongue had just shifted his perspective on this encounter entirely. “If I survive the sharks, does that mean you’ll agree to a second one?”
“It’s a gift.” She says, and the way her mouth curves with an amused smile is in such obvious contrast to the way her eyes flash from clearwater blue to something almost glacial, a warning that he should not pry for more lest he find things he regrets knowing. "Though, I would argue that I say just enough. Perhaps it would be better to wait and see how you fare with the sharks before you surrender yourself to darker depths." It feels like even that is saying too much, sharing too much, showing too many of these jagged pieces she has grown so good at burying beneath the surface. Parts of her that no one would see and choose to stay and know.
So she turns from him in favor of the water, using the sensation of the waves against her skin as a way to resettle the prickling of her nerves and drag those walls back up to heights that will better protect her. She isn’t watching to see if he will join her, but the splashing sound behind her is enough to know he has. She has no reason for the smile that appears on her mouth again - something soft and quiet, a genuine kind of satisfaction that this stranger has chosen to stay for at least a little while longer. “Another gift.” She says, but this smile comes without the echo of a warning as she turns in place to watch him again. “It’s luckier for you than it is for me, don’t you think?” Amusement flashes in her eyes, tugs at the smile on her mouth as touches her lips to the sparkling surface of the water.
There is something shameless about this stallion that makes it entirely too easy to be around him, this feeling that no matter who she is or what she is made of, he will not be sated until he knows all of it. It is in the laughter and the smiles, this endless, easy delight and the flashing amusement in his bright eyes. It is in the way he has followed her here even with the threat of sharks, the way he stands beside her close enough to touch even despite the barbs of her tongue when his glimpses of her reveal too much. But as sure as she is of his curiosity, she is also sure how quickly it will wane once he has discovered every last one of her dark corners.
“You are entirely too pleased with yourself.” She says, though there is something in the tone of his question that makes her wonder what it might feel like to have his lips tracing the constellations of stars that stretch across the gold of her face. It is just a moment of gentle curiosity that softens the lines of her face, just a moment and then gone again as she remembers herself and her guards and that she wears this armor for a reason. She thinks of Obscene now; if the cliff had been their first date, then creating the twins had been their second. Their final.
“I don’t do second dates.” She tells him, and her eyes are hard and clear as any sky, brittle and bruised and filled for a moment with blame that has no home except herself. “So if you survive the sharks and I survive your ego,” with every word the dark fades, with every moment of watching his face there is new levity in the pit of her broken chest, “we’ll have to skip ahead to a third date instead.”
She wades in until the water touches the base of her wings and tugs at the gold and dark of the lowest feathers. This is where the brown algae grows, the kelp she can remember her mother using like bandages over superficial wounds she received playing as a child. She plucks a piece from the water between her teeth, frowning at the salty taste, and then carefully lays it over a wound on Reave’s shoulder where the bone ridge rises from skin made raw and welted and a shade of red too angry to remind her of any dawn. “Better or worse?” She asks when her gaze returns to his face, and for once there is something bare and vulnerable in that aching blue of her quiet eyes. Something dangerously like trust.
REVELRIE
it feels like falling, it feels like rain, like losing my balance again and again
