"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
He had touched her and it had been both the beginning and the end.
Because she had so desperately wanted to believe that when she had confessed to him, I am yours, that he had known it meant forever. That he had known it was the kind of promise that Despoina did not make lightly—did not make at all. She was too acutely aware of all of her shortcomings, of all of the things that made her wrong, to ever think that she would belong to someone and be kept.
She was the thing discarded. The thing abandoned. The thing left in the dark.
And he was the dark, but not the one meant for her. He was the dark that she chased. The one that she could never catch. That thing upon the horizon that would always, forever, be out of reach.
(But how she chased him still. How she longed. How much her foolish heart tried to dream.)
So although they had two beautiful babies—as dark as him, peering out of the shadows with their curious eyes—it is not enough to mend her broken heart. She does her best by them. Gods, she tries. But she knows when her attention wanders. She knows when she slips into a hellhound at night to trail the monster lurking in the woods that there is something terribly, irrevocably wrong with her.
And when she only leaves upon finding the worst, she is afraid to know what it says about her.
(Pathetic. Unwanted. Fool.)
So tonight she leaves the shadow children.
Tonight she becomes the creature of hell once more that prowls through the woods. She feels the darkness slip against her impossibly black form, her red eyes sharp, and she cries out as she rushes forward.
It is a sound of the netherworld, and as it cracks through the night, she feels herself crack too.
I guess the sound of your voice in the aching will just have to do
YOU'RE WALKING IN THE SHADOWS OF YOUR FEAR AND YOU'RE HEADED FOR THE GALLOWS, SIN AROUND YOUR THROAT AND NO ONE'S NEAR
He avoids her, because he knows that he has made a mistake.
He had made Despoina his, and let himself belong to her, even though he had known shadow was impossible to keep. He was going to slip through her grasp no matter how tightly she held and no matter what he promised her, but the way she made his heart swell inside of his chest, he could not imagine telling her anything else. In the moment he had been so convinced that he could do it; he had been certain that he would be able to ignore pangs of want, that he could soothe them by consuming fear and anger instead. He remembers the hurt that had flared in Despoina when she had found out about Breckin, how it had caused all the parts of him to go to war with each other—how he had wanted to gorge himself on her sorrow, but that heart of his only wanted to make things better.
He loved her, it was undeniable.
But he should have known—no, he had known—from the beginning that he was going to destroy her.
He should have let her go, should have not been selfish and let her find love elsewhere, with someone that wasn’t going to find such literal satisfaction from her grief.
Finding Beryl in the forest had never been his intention, because he had learned from their previous interaction that if anyone could loosen that already tenuous hold on his self-control, it was going to be her. In the aftermath he would wonder why it had never crossed his mind to walk away, why he had been so eager to step directly into the minefield. He shoulders the blame for it entirely, and there is no excuse for what transpired after; how he had dug his hole even deeper by seeking out two others, as if that would somehow assuage the guilt, or maybe it was his sick way of making sure none of this could come back as being misconstrued as Beryl's fault. It isn't her—it's him.
When he finds Despoina in her hellhound form, he does not shift to match her.
Instead he only stands, a wavering image of dark and shadow, his ruby-red eyes locking onto hers. “Despoina,” his voice surprisingly soft given the nature of him, and beneath the shadows of his skin he can feel tension begin to build.
She knows. He can see that she knows.
“What are you doing out here?” he asks her, feigning ignorance as if that would actually work, and refusing to reach and see what storm of emotions he has created in her chest.
If she were to know the true extent of his abilities, she might laugh until she could no longer breathe. She may actually break in half over the irony, the cruel humor. That he who feasted on negative emotions would ever find himself near her who was practically sorrow manifest. He could gorge on her sorrow every day. Feast on it until there was nothing else to fill his swollen belly. And she would still have more to give. She could show him her throat and he could drink eternally, a well that would never run dry,
But of course she doesn’t know such things.
She doesn’t know why the longer she is near him, the more she loves him and the more it pains her. Is it another twist of luck that his presence brings such a bad omen of it? Is her bad luck to love him?
She doesn’t know. Can’t know. Would never think to guess.
So she lives instead suspended in the pain, that acute agony of loving something forever out of reach.
She twists her wolfish head when he approaches and there is so little of her in that look. The eyes that narrow when he doesn’t shift. It is easier to find the anger in this form. Easier to succumb to the darkness that is her birthright, and she finds the she likes the anchoring feeling of wrath. How much more empowering to be furious than to despair. How strong she feels when she gnashes her teeth in rage.
“Trying to not think of you,” her usually melodic voice is harsher when coming through her canines, her tail hanging low behind her. She can almost convince herself that it is not her speaking. That she is someone else who is not broken by the thing in the shadows who finds other things more fitting.
She grimaces and pulls back as if she could escape the shadows that pull forward on the ground.
“I am being largely unsuccessful.”
Once, she would have applauded herself for being so direct. For being so forward. Once, she lived entirely in the darkness and was content to be meek. To be invisible. But the truth is that she knows this is short-lived. She is still weak. The truth of her is not this hellhound that she clings to and the strength that exists only within it. The truth of her is the sad blue girl who will chase after him even if she drives him away.
I guess the sound of your voice in the aching will just have to do
YOU'RE WALKING IN THE SHADOWS OF YOUR FEAR AND YOU'RE HEADED FOR THE GALLOWS, SIN AROUND YOUR THROAT AND NO ONE'S NEAR
He does not shift for the exact reason that she has shifted—it is easier to be angry in that form. And even though she has done absolutely nothing to earn his anger he is afraid it would become impossible for him to see that should he let that feral side of him take over. He does not want to imagine the cruelties his tongue could speak, does not want to find just how hard he would twist that knife into her simply to make sure she didn’t hurt him back. He has already done enough damage, and it is a miracle he is not stupid enough to make it worse by turning this into an all out fight.
So he stands there, watching her with eyes such a harsh color that even when dimmed with sorrow they still appear sinister. He doesn’t think that she can see the pain that hides there, or the regret. She will never understand how much he wishes he is not the way that he is, that he had never gone into the underground and turned into the beast that he is.
Her words sting, but he deserves it. If he could wipe her clean of him he would do it, he would release her from this infinite cycle he has trapped her in and let her go. But he is far too selfish for that. Even now when he watches her tremble with an anger that is so unlike her, with a voice so much harsher than the whispering lilt he had grown to love, he knows he cannot—will not—let her go.
He is destined to break her over and over, until she finally gets the strength to walk away, and there is nothing he can do to change that.
“I told you,” he begins, his voice still a quiet rasp in the dark, “I told you I couldn’t promise that I would never hurt you.” He can’t stop the way that towards the end the words grow sharp, but he catches himself, realizes it is unfair that he is shifting the blame onto her. So he settles back, reins back in the darkness that tried to creep into his mind and voice. He swallows it away and turns his eyes back to hers, daring to take a step towards her. “I don’t love anyone else,” because he doesn’t; there is only her, has only ever been her. “But I fucked up.”
She wishes that he would shift. That he would attack. That he would draw blood so she could focus on something other than the constant ache that spreads in her chest, an unyielding kind of pain. She doesn’t know how he can manage it. Doesn’t know how he can possibly be around her when she knows that there are so many others to warm him at night. Why even bother with this? Why even pretend?
The rolling pain snaps her attention, the hellhound in her latching onto the anger that rises instead.
“You told me,” she affirms, repeating the words in a voice that breaks upon the rising crest of hurt and fury. She falls down on either side of the emotion and they war in her red eyes that match his own, her body crackling with an energy she can’t disperse. “You don’t love anyone,” she manages and wonders at how the hound keeps its voice so steady when she is splintering on the inside. “How could you?”
Her lips peel back over her teeth and this is the creature who hunted any who dared to touch him. This is the creature who knew what it was like to sink teeth into flesh and flood her mouth with that metallic taste. She is not the sad creature who shadowed Draco around Pangea. Who lived with the pack of wolf puppies and pretended she belonged. She is not the sad girl that even Torryn met so long ago.
She is her father’s daughter.
She is the hound Sochi would have wished she killed when she had the chance.
“Why even pretend?” she finally voices her thoughts aloud as she stalks toward him, her coat bristling. “Why even feed me the lies that you cared?” Her eyes break on the question and she trembles with everything else she wants to say. “I don’t understand,” she manages, her voice thick, but it’s a lie.
She does understand.
She knows.
She just wishes she didn’t.
I guess the sound of your voice in the aching will just have to do
09-09-2021, 07:48 PM (This post was last modified: 09-09-2021, 08:06 PM by Torryn.)
YOU'RE WALKING IN THE SHADOWS OF YOUR FEAR AND YOU'RE HEADED FOR THE GALLOWS, SIN AROUND YOUR THROAT AND NO ONE'S NEAR
He hadn’t been looking for it, but he tastes her anguish now.
It is spilling off of her and he breathes it in without having to try, it assaults every part of him and he wants nothing more than to drain her dry of it, to let it coat his tongue and fill his gut until he can’t take anymore. But there is nothing to savor in having hurt her like this; her sorrow tastes like poison, bitter and repulsive, and he nearly gags on it. It takes every ounce of his strength to not let it show on his face or in his eyes, to not let her see how she is drowning him because he is so afraid it will drive her away.
“I love you, Despoina,” he tells her but his voice is dull, because he recognizes how foolish it sounds. She has no reason to believe him, not after how he had hurt her again and again. “And if I could be different than I am, I swear I would be.” It is not lost on him that she is still beautiful even when she is furious, when she is showing those teeth that he is sure she would sink into him if she could. He would let her, if it meant she would have an ounce of peace. If she needed to avenge her own broken heart by leaving him dead, he would offer her his throat if it meant she would move on from him, from this.
“None of this has been a lie. Nothing that I have ever told you about caring about you, about wanting you to be mine — it has always been real. It will always be real.” He takes a step forward, the shadows of his body trying to twist toward her, but they are forced to be contained by his shape. “If I could change myself back into the man I was before that underground hellscape turned me into this, I would do it in a heartbeat, because I promise you, that Torryn would have never hurt you.” There is a desperate kind of energy to his voice, a frantic need to get her to understand, but the more he speaks the more it just sounds like stupid excuses. The Torryn that he speaks of doesn’t exist anymore.
“Shift,” it is nearly a command, but the sharpness in his tone is cracked, trembling like it is on the verge of caving in on itself. “Shift so that I can actually talk to you.” Beneath the roiling shadows his own beast is growling impatiently, begging to be let loose, but he refuses to unleash it on her.
He is saying words that she has spent her entire life waiting to hear.
Words that she once spent long evenings imagining being said to her.
She had cherished the idea of it. Held it so close to her breast. Dreamt of what it would be like to have someone tell you that they loved you. That they would change for you. That they wanted her.
But not like this—never like this.
It is enough to cause another growl to rip through her chest, brimming to the surface in a savage sound, her teeth clicking together. “Don’t lie,” she grits between her teeth, the fangs showing against pink gums and impossibly black lips. “Stop. Stop lying to me.” She wants to reach for him and tear him apart. Wants to pull apart all of the pieces of this Torryn who stands before her and feeds her such pretty lies.
But he commands her to shift before she can even try that fool’s errand. He commands her and there is enough of that broken little girl in her that she doesn’t even try to deny it. She just listens obediently, shifting back into her normal form, shedding the fur and the claw. And when the dust settles and it’s just her again, she drops her iridescent head, the tangles of her black forelock falling down her forehead.
There is nothing but silence as she focuses on the pattern of her broken breathing. Just silence and the ragged sound of her trying to stitch herself together again. When she looks up again, there is no fight in her anymore. It bled away from her with the hound and she’s left with tears in her eyes and no defense.
She has nothing to say.
Nothing except her hurt and her shame and her guilt at the way she acted.
I guess the sound of your voice in the aching will just have to do
YOU'RE WALKING IN THE SHADOWS OF YOUR FEAR AND YOU'RE HEADED FOR THE GALLOWS, SIN AROUND YOUR THROAT AND NO ONE'S NEAR
She obeys, and he feels guilty.
He should have just let her continue to be angry, should have just let her rage at him until she had nothing left to say. He tells her to shift thinking it will be easier to get through to her this way, and for what reason? Because as badly as he wants her to forgive him, he also knows that she shouldn’t. She should walk away, should tell him that there are no more chances, because he knows he doesn’t deserve a single one.
Because a large part of him is so afraid that this won’t be the last time, and that they won’t survive this again.
But he asks her to shift and she does, and he realizes he would rather have her fury than this broken sorrow that she is now. He would rather see her strong and enraged than see her wilting before him, like a flower he had carelessly trampled. The way she drops her lovely head, and how he wants nothing more than to brush that black forelock from her eyes and press his lips to her skin—it compounds the guilt and the grief in his own chest until he is sure it is going to split him apart.
Against his better judgement he closes the space between them, until he is close enough that the tendrils of his shadow mane nearly brush her cheek, close enough that she would not have to strain to hear his quiet voice. “I am a monster, Despoina,” he tells her, and it is only then that he lowers his head, gently using his nose to brush under her chin to tilt her gaze to his. “And I don’t mean just because of what I did to you.” He slowly pulls away from her, his jaw clenching tightly from beneath his shadowed skin. “I wasn’t born this way. Maybe if I had been I could control it better. Or maybe I would be worse off, I don’t know.” He takes another step back, and he no longer notices all of the emotions that spin around them, can no longer taste or smell any of it.
He is too busy watching her, knowing exactly what he needs to do, and knowing too that he won’t have the strength to do it.
“If I could change anything about my life at all, it would be that I could have met you before any of this happened to me. So that I could love you exactly the way you deserve.” He pauses, and for a moment his face is utter darkness as he closes his eyes, and when he opens them the red somehow seems dimmer, shadowed entirely by a sorrow that he is not sure he has ever felt before. “I don’t know if I am ever going to be better than I am right now. I don’t know if I will ever know how to not hurt you.”
Another pause, and he forces himself to look at her.
She isn’t sure. Her chest nearly caves in when he closes the distance between them and all she can smell is the spice of him, that rich scent that permeates every shadow and every darkness that falls from him. She makes a soft sound when he reaches for her and she allows her head to be lifted, her black eyes peering out at him and trying to find the core of that which writhes in the inky waves.
Her heart cracks in her chest because she knows the answer is no.
She couldn’t walk away from him—not now, maybe not ever.
She isn’t sure if that makes her pathetic or makes her strong, but she knows that the second he steps away, something vital in her calls out to him. So she doesn’t run. She doesn’t fight him anymore. She just stands quietly, listening to him spill out so much truth—so many things she isn’t sure she is ready to hear.
And when he grows quiet again, she doesn’t accept his apology or point any more daggers at his chest. She doesn’t snarl or show her teeth. She just studies his face, those red eyes and shadows. The darkness that he embodies, that swallows him whole. She studies him with a fierce kind of intensity, as if she could finally understand him. And she realizes that she wants to. Desperately. She wants to know all of him.
“Tell me about what happened,” she asks, her voice once against soft, a whisper between them.
She looks at his gaze and holds it.
“I want to know everything.”
I guess the sound of your voice in the aching will just have to do
YOU'RE WALKING IN THE SHADOWS OF YOUR FEAR AND YOU'RE HEADED FOR THE GALLOWS, SIN AROUND YOUR THROAT AND NO ONE'S NEAR
He has never spoken of what happened that day, but then again, no one has ever asked. Outside of his family there had been no one else he was close with, no one to notice what a drastic change the blue roan boy from Taiga had undergone. And even they had known better than to ask—it helped of course that he avoided them almost entirely, afraid for them to see the warped, almost demonic thing he had become.
He had grown up in the shadows, but he was nothing like his father.
Whatever curse had befallen him was not some granted wish to be like the rest of his family, and he had realized that immediately.
But she is watching him so intently, asking in her sweet, soft voice, and it burrows underneath his skin until it can slip between his ribs and cause his heart to twinge painfully in his chest. If anyone in the world deserved an explanation, it was her.
“There was this cave,” he begins his story, reluctantly returning to the night he had followed the fallen star that would lead him into this nightmare. “And from inside of it I heard my mother’s voice. Only once I was inside and I found her I started to realize that something was wrong. She kept telling me to follow her, but it didn’t sound like her, and the further we followed the maze of tunnels I kept hearing more voices, like my sister.” He doesn’t realize that his heart has started to beat faster, that with each memory that he had shoved down his pulse thrums harder, and he can’t look at Despoina anymore. “It wasn’t her. I don’t know what it was, but I killed it. And everywhere I went inside this underground maze everything kept getting worse.”
His jaw tightens, his shadowed brow twisted into a frown. “There was a room, and inside was my entire family. My mom again, my dad, all my siblings. I just remember them telling me what a disappointment I was, because I wasn’t born like them; normal shadow creatures, like Caelum and Racine,” there is a strange crack in his voice, to say their names—their children, those beautiful, perfect babies that she had raised, and he repays her by breaking her apart. “And when they walked into the mouth of the monster in the cave, I followed them. I followed them, because even if they hated me they were all I had, and I didn’t want to be alive without them.”
It is only when he has finished that he looks at her again, and he can’t explain it, but he doesn’t feel like the shadow-beast anymore. He feels like the broken blue roan boy he had been, the boy born from love that still felt like an outcast in a family of shadow manipulators. “I was spit back out like this. Changed. Like a shadow creature, but not, because this is something so much worse.” There is a weighted hesitation, because he is afraid of what he is about to tell her; the full depth of how treacherous he is. “I need negative emotions to survive. I crave them, and I feel weak without them. And if I can't find them, I can make someone feel them.”
His voice lowers, looking at her so closely, as if he stares at her hard enough she will believe what he tells her. “I don’t want to be like this to you. I would rather starve than keep hurting you.”
