"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
jupiter's by my side and we watch galaxies collide
It is not hard for her to leave.
It is not hard for her to wander.
It is, in fact, the easiest thing in the world to just go. To let loose of her grip on the here and now and instead let herself fall into the wind’s path—to let the storm rustle through her like broken leaves until she is nothing but its resounding howl. She simply closes her eyes and she can feel herself disintegrate into the fog, into the rumbling thunder, into that thing which bites in the night. She closes her eyes and she is no longer Aios, made of storm and fury. She just is that thing which defines her. She is nothing at all.
So it is not surprising at all that she had gone.
It is, however, surprising that she has returned.
She is much the same as she was before—her body a thunderclap amongst spring showers, her eyes a roiling ocean, the lightning flickering beneath her skin—but she is also something more. Youth has been bled from her, slowly and then all at once. Anything that was once soft has sharpened, been made acute. There is beauty in her face, but it is a wild thing and only caught in the hands of a particular beholder.
For so many, her features would be too angular, her mouth too wry, her eyes too wary.
For others though—for others, she might be like looking into the eye of the hurricane.
Exhilarating.
Maddening.
Infinite.
Aios herself cares little for what others might see though, self-possessed as she is, and she walks through the little land left of her home with very little surprise, shock, or dismay on her face. Instead there is a cool indifference, a detached sort of curiosity as she picks through the carnage left behind from the latest storm. If anything, there is a thrill that runs through her at the display of power, a kinship with whatever had torn through the land and left such rubble behind, and at this, the corners of her lip tip up.
There was something strange about the storm that ravaged Beqanna, though he couldn’t quite place it.
He is learning that the magic in this land is more complex than he had initially thought. It is not just the flash of wings or even the simple manipulation of the elements, but rather, it is magic that goes back further than he could ever comprehend. Some of them are saturated with it, wielding a power that he had never thought possible: magic that made mountains shake, magic that could inspire such vivid dreams he could have sworn it was actually a memory and not something that only lived in his mind.
The tornados that sweep through, uprooting trees and crumbling kingdoms, that has a taste of magic, too, and he tries to not be envious of it.
His storms, no matter how magnificently crafted, were still not something he could actually control. He supposes there is beauty in that, too, in being able to create something and set it loose into the world and watch it choose its own path. But it would be a lie to say he doesn’t wish he could do something more than create.
When he catches sight of her—she is impossible to miss, a living storm in a way that he could never be—he could almost laugh at the irony, to have the very thing he wishes to be dangled before him.
He does not fault her for it, though.
He can’t, not when her presence seems to cause the ever-present flicker of lightning across his skin to surge in response, the storm-cloud of his wings seeming to darken.
“Aios,” he greets her as he relents to the magnetic pull that tugs him towards her, the gray of his eyes clouding the curiosity he cannot help but to feel as he looks at her. Afraid that she would see through it if he stared for too long, he shifts his gaze to the destruction around them. “Did you do this?” he asks, though his jesting tone is somewhat tempered by the low pitch of his voice. He does not think she actually did it, but he is no fool; he knows she is capable.
jupiter's by my side and we watch galaxies collide
He is a storm that she cannot predict, cannot wield, cannot tame, and her blood thrills in response to it. Her eyes flicker with the challenge and the recognition of like calling to like—to the way her very body hums as the storm of him approaches. She holds his gaze steadily as he walks toward and does not yield, does not break, even when he severs the connection.
He glances around, but she, unabashed, continues to stare at him—unafraid of the vulnerability or whatever else may stem from such blatant staring.
At his question, she laughs and the sound is like her: a little too loud, a little too sharp around the edges. It cuts across her tongue and she cannot help the swell of pleasure that warms her face that he would attribute such a thing to her. She makes a small noise in the back of her throat, neither confirmation or denial, and finally breaks her study of him to turn her attention toward the destruction around them.
For a second, there is nothing but silence that stretches between them.
Finally, she relents,
“No,” a confession that is tinged with no small amount of regret.
“Not this time, at least,” and there is the wicked curve to her lip, at the promise that perhaps the next time, it will have been her. Perhaps done from temper or perhaps from boredom or perhaps from the simple knowledge of knowing she could.
Her face turns sly as she glances up at him through her thick lashes, and her smile is slow.
“Did you, Tumult?” a velvety question as she purrs it. “Did you finally unleash that storm?”
She is just as electric as he remembers, and that is all at once a victory and a defeat, because a part of him almost wishes that he had only built her up in his memory. That perhaps it would be easier to find that she is not the ferocious storm he had let cross his mind one too many times, that he had simply been struck by the enchantment of a first meeting.
He is, of course, wrong, because she is everything he had thought and somehow still more.
“You taunt me,” he says, with a strange quirk of a smile on his lips at her slyly spoken question. He is not irritated or angered by her words, even if they are meant to be a barb; a way to needle some kind of reaction out of him. He doesn’t know her well enough to be sure if she is the type to do such a thing, but he thinks that she might be, and thinks that he has done nothing to earn such civility from her.
Yet when lightning flickers across his skin in response it is not because he is annoyed with her, but entirely the opposite.
He is, as always, intrigued—borderline captivated, though he is hesitant to admit it—by her.
Too much so to let himself poison the moment with his own insecurity.
“It would be just my luck, though, to conjure a storm that spins so out of control it nearly destroys the entire land,” he muses somewhat drily, thinking on his own tendency to stumble into situations that are above his head. “I suppose, as an outsider, that would earn myself the right to be exiled.” Would that be such a bad thing? He did not hold any particular love for this place, and is sure there must be other places far more peaceful than this land that seems intent on tearing itself apart. But he turns his storm-gray eyes to her face, and to keep the stupid, bewitched thoughts of her from taking root in his mind he says, “I assume you were born here. If you lost the place that you called home in the storm, I am sorry.”
