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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


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    [private]  I'm going to try but I'm scared as hell
    #1
    I can see through you, see your true colors
    Cause inside you're ugly, you're ugly like me
    When it came to Aela, he had started to break.

    The plea in Revelrie’s voice and the soft rattling death toll of his daughter had been too much. He hadn’t known that he had more left to break. How it shattered so peacefully, falling like snow until it hardened and sharpened, carved into his cruel shield and left him gasping.

    She had smelled delicious, that still warm crumpled heap behind the winged mare. Such easy prey, these newborns. The snake had loomed above her, hungry eyes searching for a weakness to exploit. And she, the unstoppable storm that she was, had stood her ground and faced it. ”Go” She said, steady and firm. It was what she said next that somehow found him beneath the folds of scale and sinewy muscles, that heartfelt promise that sinks beneath the darkness and wraps around him in all that pain.

    It is enough.

    The snake backs down, hissing, but looking a little less hungry. It seems to be deciding something. Then, with a snap of retractable fangs, it turns and slithers into the rocky grounds leading far from the Pampas.

    He had been gone for days.

    When he returned he was instantly submerged back into the ever growing tornado of kingdom politics. There was too much on the line now. In a few days, this place may no longer be the breath of fresh air they had blown into it. He can feel that grip within him tightening, squeezing, as the scales across his coat grow in number and rarely fade. It seems it’s all going to lead to something.

    He thinks it might be war.
    He’s not sure he even knows the purpose of it. What it would even gain. A small chance of something? Or completely pointless, entirely avoidable?

    When he is not being frigid in the company of his estranged family, when he is not looking at the golden Seneschal and still feeling the bite of her rejection, when he’s not dreaming of the Queen of Loess, he plans for what was to come. And finding her is part of it. He tracks the ghost and recognizes the new scent that now mingles with hers. His trepidation grows the more signs of them he finds but eventually… He finds her. Knowing it’s only because she wanted him to.

    For awhile he can only stare at her, knowing what he should be saying but unable to actually say it. I’m sorry, he thinks. “May I join you?” he asks. He steps a little bit closer, his expression hard. "How are you?" he asks. Thank you, is what he means.


    obscene


    @revelrie  Heart
    [Image: Obscene-Pixel.png]
    #2
    She had felt every moment of Obscene’s absence as though each one were a single briar placed inside the cage of her ribs, inside this gaping cavity of her chest. Beside a heart that felt too broken to beat and too stubborn to stop. She had thought she understood what loss was when Nikkai did not come back with the sun, but it is one pain to lose your mother, and another entirely to lose your daughter. A perfect soul without flaw, a piece of her own heart made real. A life she had spent so many months imagining only to lose within those first few minutes.

    Every moment there is a weight inside of her that threatens to pull her beneath a dark ocean, a thousand stones that want to drown her beneath waves too black to see through, in a world with no surface and no ocean floor. It feels like falling in perpetuity, and the only thing that keeps her from surrendering is the boy she left with her family this afternoon. Obsidio is every perfect part of both of his parents, everything she does not know how to be. He is quiet and earnest, gentle in the way he curls against her belly at night when they sleep. But she is afraid of the moments she finds him staring off so silently, afraid that there is some kind of dark inside him too. Something bred from his parents, from his birth, from the loss of his twin. So she is careful not to let him see her in the moments where her heart caves in, careful not to let him see the tears that follow the metallic gold tracks down her face.

    He deserves so much more than her sorrow and her pain.

    It is the only reason Obscene finds her now without their son, the only reason she can ever find the resolve to leave Obsidio with his aunt and his grandfather. She is glad to see her child’s father, finds relief in the familiar angles of this dark face. “Always.” She says, and there is no lie in the easy answer as she reaches out to touch her lips to his neck in quiet greeting. For a moment she is lost in him, in the velvet black like deep midnight, in the flecking of gold sparkles that are dusted all throughout. There is something there now that binds her to him, some frankenthing of love and loss, of desire and pain. It makes her close her eyes for a moment to hide it from her gaze. “I don’t think I’ll know the answer to that for a long while.”

    She closes any distance between them with a few easy steps, pressing her cheek to the curve of his neck in a way that reveals how truly soul weary she is, and perhap how much he has come to mean to her. That his closeness is enough to pause that sensation of falling, that unraveling inside her soul. “Obsidio is doing well,” she says, lifting her cheek from him at last but making no effort to move away from the stallion who has become an impossible kind of friend, “he is with my family right now. I just needed a moment.” She doesn’t try to elaborate further - if he wants to understand then all he need do is look at her face and see the damp tracks of tears drying beneath those glacier blue eyes.

    “I,” but then she pauses because these words are like a punch to the chest and she knows her ribs are already too broken to keep safe the heart inside, “I named her Revna.” Her eyes are suddenly damp again, tears that well against the blue but do not yet fall. She thinks she might be empty of them soon. “I found a chlorokinetic to build a garden around her body, it felt more right than just leaving her there.” She is quiet again, remembering how the plant manipulator had cocooned her tiny body in grasses and flowers and marked the place with a single tree that grew large white flowers. “I thought it might be a place you’d want to visit again.” She touches his neck again, gentle and brief, an acknowledgment of this pain they will always share together. “How are you, Obscene?” And again she thinks how no name could ever fit this man so poorly as that one does.

    REVELRIE

    it feels like falling, it feels like rain,
    like losing my balance again and again

    #3
    I can see through you, see your true colors
    Cause inside you're ugly, you're ugly like me
    The worry that she might chase him away, might send him packing (which he rightly deserves for what he’s done), fades with her soft "Always.” There is also a strange relief that Obsidio is not with her, the boy who he already owes a massive debt. For a moment he fears that perhaps the colt had been lost too but his scent is strongly mingled with hers and he bites back his alarm, knowing she would have found him if things had gotten worse. As he comes closer, she reaches for him and he does not pull away from the soft touch that lingers against his neck. He tries to find comfort in it but all he feels is the same self-loathing that’s been following him everywhere he goes. When she speaks again, he is still beside her, but inside he winces at his stupid question. Of course she wasn’t ok. How could she be?

    She moves closer and his eyes close as she rests her cheek against him, settling beneath the crook of his neck. He drapes his head over hers, trying to find some relief from the heavy weight of guilt that he carries, but it continues to evade him. Obsidio is with her family (where are these relatives, why has he never asked her?) she says quietly, easing away the lingering worry that something had happened. He simply moves his head a little, a nod, above her. Not needing to see the grief on her face to know what she means. 

    There had been no time to collect his thoughts, no time to mourn his grief. There had been nothing but anger and unrelenting hunger, the continious tasks awaiting for him from the growing territory, the pressure that was mounting regarding the decisions he had made (for better or worse) in the political game he had inserted himself in. But as she speaks, he can feel his muscles flexing and tightening against her. Bracing himself for what was to come. Revna.

    Obscene has never cried. Not once. Not even as a child when his parents had disappeared, not when he had been teased and harassed, not even out of happiness. Not once. He had learned very quickly to not appear weaker than he already had been (mortal, trait-less) and so he had learned to seal his emotions somewhere they wouldn’t disturb him. A place deep inside of himself where they were trapped and dormant. He had thought having a heart of stone would serve him better in life for what could feelings do but bounce off a boulder? Then Cheri had taught him what it had felt like to hate and the flames of his hatred had felt better than the coldness of stone around his withered neglected heart. So he allowed anger to seep in, enjoyed the warmth of it, and thought it was all he would ever need.

    He hadn’t realized that by letting in one, the rest of them would follow. Slowly, oozing out of that dark pit he had made for himself. She tells him of the grave she had managed to construct for their daughter and he can feel that sharp shredding at his chest as he grits his teeth, a muscle jumping in his dark jaw. And when she asks him how he is, what comes out isn’t something he planned on saying at all. “I’m sorry.” Two strangled whispered words with no wriggle room in their truth. He’s never meant anything more. He is sorry that she had buried her alone, that she had been left to clean up his mess, that he hadn’t been able to save their child, that he had lost control. He was sorry for failing them both. He was sorry for the monster he had become. His face remains dry when he pulls back to look at her but the pain and regret is there, shimmering in those dark conflicted eyes despite the hard expression on his face. There are some things that even he can’t hide from ghosts and she is one of them.

    He looks at her and realizes that he has never truly been vicious with her, had never really had a desire to cut her down, and all he can wonder is why. The same with Aela, now that he reflects on it. Why was that? When had he started feeling so much? When did he start to care who he hurt or not?

    obscene


    @revelrie
    [Image: Obscene-Pixel.png]
    #4
    She is certain he does not understand what it means to her when he leans down in that silent way to embrace her, just the resettling of his head over hers, but it is enough to be held against him, to feel this weight on her chest lessened by the way she knows he carries it with him too. It seems like all of their time together has happened in moments and glimpses, more often apart than together, but it is in all these strange collected moments of together, all these glimpses of a man she can no longer count as a stranger, that she has come to care for him so deeply.

    There are moments when the pang of missing him leaves her wanting more. More than she has, more than he has, certainly more than he can give her. She remembers the way her father had looked at her mother, and it is nothing like the quiet way Obscene has ever looked at her. And there are moments where this feels strangely close to loss, where to see him is to spark an ache inside a chest so full of broken things she isn’t even sure how her heart still manages to beat. But these moments pass, these aches and these pains and this desire to be more than a wildling who haunts the cliffedge beneath the storms, and she is learning every day that these moments are not made less just because he does not love her in the way her heart wants to love him.

    These moments are special, this glimpse of togetherness while their shared pain threatens to pull them apart entirely.

    She is sure he does not need more pain, that those burning red lantern eyes so hard and cold and filled with a mirth he wields like armor will have to crack at some point if this weight becomes too much. So she does not show him the depths of her feelings, does not trap him with a love he does not feel. She keeps these secrets in her heart, keeps her heart buried in her chest, buried behind a quiet smile and gentle eyes that will always lie to him for as long as it keeps him safe.

    “I wish you weren’t.” She tells him quietly, soft eyes like blue starlight, a mouth too tired to smile but not too tired to reach out and place a kiss at the corner of his dark, velvet mouth. “You used every part of yourself to make it right. It wasn’t that you didn’t try, there was just nothing left to give. Please don’t be sorry.” But she knows that is an impossible request if only because she is similarly crushed beneath the weight of her own apologies. When he pulls back to look at her she does not try to hide the quiet way she searches his beautiful face. At the surface his expression is hard and almost cold, but he has always reminded her of stone in this way that he is so silent and resolute. But his eyes are the piece of him that bleed his deeper secrets, and in them she is sure she can see his pain and his regret if only because they are the twin-pairs to her own eyes.

    “I couldn’t have done any of it if you hadn’t been there with me.” She says, and that voice is something whisper soft and yet not at all fragile as she looks up into his dark face. “I still don’t understand why you forgave me for not telling you, I didn’t deserve that. But you stayed with me and you kept me safe, and because of that we have a son who will be able to grow up and discover these Pampas of yours.” She pauses for a moment, turning to look out across a world of green and brilliant wildflower, a skyline of blue and wispy white. “I know we lost a piece of ourselves that night, and nothing will ever fix that. But we also found a piece, and it was you that kept us safe.” Her gaze returns to him, quiet and searching, gentle in a way that she is only ever so bare for him. “I would forgive you if there was anything to forgive, Obscene. But I can think of nothing that warrants it.” She reaches out again, touches her nose to his with a tremulous exhale. “Though, in the same way, I am sorry I wasn’t strong enough to keep them both safe. You had to do so much.”

    Pain is a flower that blooms inside her chest.

    REVELRIE

    it feels like falling, it feels like rain,
    like losing my balance again and again

    #5
    I can see through you, see your true colors
    Cause inside you're ugly, you're ugly like me
    As always, she holds him with her quiet strength and determination, not dismissing his apology but acknowledges it before setting it free. He doesn’t feel the release (not from his guilt, not from his failure, not from being able to stop something he should have been able to control) but he looks into her gentle eyes and gives a slight nod if only to give her peace. The kiss she places is feather light and sweet and it makes him ache all the more. This is another way in which he has failed them, failed her. She has always been a creature that’s deserved more than he had been willing to give. What he had taken so selfishly. But what she has taken from him is something that most others have to claw their way for.

    To Revelrie, he gives freely his undying respect and that is not something that comes easily or lightly.

    His long pointed ears twist towards her as she speaks and he slowly shakes his head. “There is nothing to forgive.” He hesitates. “I should have been more careful with you.” In what way can be taken in several different contexts but he doesn’t doubt that she will see through all of them. She continues and he shakes his head again more vehemently. “Revelrie…” He murmurs quietly as she presses her nose to his, moving his muzzle beneath hers to raise it up and force her to look at him again. “I have a son because of you. You gave me something I didn’t even know I wanted.” And despite his fear, despite his uncertainty and worry, the presence of Obsidio had loosened something within him. Something that had been lodged, stuck, for a very long time. “There is nothing that warrants your apology either.” And perhaps neither would believe the other but he at least cannot say things that are not true.

    He pauses for a moment, releasing her as he glances away. “Will you show me where she is?” He asks solemnly before looking back at her, the emotions that had once been reflected in eyes of crimson hidden once more beneath their glittering surface.


    obscene


    @revelrie
    [Image: Obscene-Pixel.png]
    #6
    In the puzzle of his cryptic words, she finds the meaning that hurts the most. The one, perhaps because of the state of her heart so cracked and fissured and falling to pieces, that makes the most sense. I should have been more careful with you. Eight words to unlock the dark inside her delicate chest, eight words to steal the ground away from beneath her feet. Eight words that, when they settle like ash against her listening ears, sound too much like a kind of quiet regret she cannot unhear.

    I should have been more careful with you.

    It feels at once that these bones inside her skin are made of rock or lead or the weight of entire words, because suddenly she is too tired to do anything but look up at him with that secret brokenness in those aching blue eyes when he forces her gaze to find him. He says her name and it is pain that flares like broken light in the backs of those almost glacial eyes, pain, because she is sure now that he must wish they had never come together in that way that brought them this hurt, this brokenness, these awkward fractures of affection. Even if it also brought them Obsidio, a son he never knew he wanted, a son she knows he loves.

    He would have had this son with someone else. Someone strong enough to not hold him like a secret, like a hostage from a father who might’ve loved him the very instant he knew his boy existed. Some strong enough to bear not one but both of the twins growing inside her belly, who wouldn’t have lost something so precious and irreplaceable. In this moment it is impossible not to agree with him, that he should have been more careful. He deserved more than this brokenness she gave him, more than this curse of loss and pain that seems to follow like a shadow at her heels no matter how hard she tries to be free of it.

    But she will not keep him from his daughter, from the place on a hill beneath the Pampa skies that might become like a sanctuary from the strange garden that grows there now. “Of course.” Just two words, soft and broken, but she wears a smile on her mouth that is small and bruised, soft because she is so tired of being the thing that hurts him, hurts their son. Of being not enough for their daughter, sister, to survive.

    She doesn’t reach out to touch him again, but it is the same love that now keeps her at a quiet distance, protects him from the ruin that loves her so. She says nothing while they walk together, does nothing but stare quietly ahead and disappear to the darkest parts inside herself where she will be too trapped to wound him in some way she cannot bear. When they arrive to the place where Revna rests in eternal sleep, a gentle sloping hillside that seems almost unrecognizable from that night without the starless dark to cast such deep shadows, Revelrie draws to a stop with her eyes drawn to the tree and the tangle of roots beneath it that had grown like a cocoon around their daughter. There are wildflowers growing around the roots, ivy climbing over the bare wood like streaks of forest green, and all of it smells like the newness of spring flowers. Like life and rebirth.

    She is still silent when she turns finally to look up into Obscene’s face, to see what reveals itself in the shape of his expression and in the ruby of those lantern eyes. But as she does, a handful of petals come loose from one of the white flowers nestled overhead in the branches and fall like giant snowflakes into the night of Obscene’s mane. The urge to reach out and feel the softness of those petals is something that unfurls like a need inside her chest. But in this moment she only knows the stillness and the quiet and the way these fissures run through her like cracks in the frozen surface of a pond. Like she will always be a thousand incomplete shards of whoever she was meant to be.

    “This is her place.” Her words come quietly, like raindrops from lips too tired to smile, too weighed down by the frown that clings to her like shadow. “Would you like some time alone here?” And even she doesn’t know if it is for him or her that she asks, because suddenly it feels like the only thing she can do to make things better is leave from here and set him free from the shadows of this pain.   

    REVELRIE

    it feels like falling, it feels like rain,
    like losing my balance again and again



    @Obscene




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