[html] http://i144.photobucket.com/albums/r173 ... header.jpg) no-repeat #ffffff top center; width: 377px; border: 1px solid #000000;"> August 12th
The world felt a little slippery under her feet as she followed Laurel's word to the pair of shacks nestled into the land that she would soon orient to as home. The smell of disease shook her senses, urged her elsewhere, anywhere, but the sight of the small wood shack overruled, although not with anything more comforting. Sick, hostile, delirious and tied up in a box, her thoughts reviewed as if preparing for a test, hoping that she wouldn't panic when she sat down with the paper laid out in front of her. Her heart and stomach felt like they were tangled up together when she arrived at the doorway, slowly gripped the handle and pulled open.
"Ahren?" she whispered, blinking as her pupils gasped open, adjusting to the shadows.
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In the darkness of a dreaming world, Ahren wandered through a barren city. The ground was ash gray and the sky was nuclear orange. He could smell fire, atomic fusion, devil grass and dry rot. If he tried, he could probably taste these things too. What he did taste was smoke, as if his mouth was full of it. Under his feet he felt a hum, a vibration, as if a piano chord had been struck and reverberating under the concrete, deep in the subways he had explored in his younger years. In his dreams, Ahren sometimes managed to catch glimpses of himself—those times, he realized he was not entirely whole, or as he appeared now. What exactly separated him in this world and the other he could not name.
A familiar voice, soft and concerned, drew him half from this world. Ahren’s eyes opened but the scene barely changed; he was still in the city, though he could not move his arms and his back felt like it was on fire. Somehow she had slipped into this half-life, and he saw her as she was, though in his dream, the light behind her was her own and she was as beautiful and terrible as the dawn. “Hello Titania,” he said, grinning half-mad and still laying on his side like a broken prisoner.
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His greeting immediately ricocheted her mind back to the last time they had crossed paths, weeks ago now. Broken twilight streets, myths of word and pen, Ahren was some kind of will-o'-the-wisp that evening, startlingly present and magically alluring at the same time. Now, with her eyes allowed to soak up the sight of a bound and broken man, crazed by the half-light, he was anything but such a tale. Her chest tightened and pulled towards him, bringing Poe to kneel down before him there.
The jingle of colourful plastic beads hanging from several angles along her body looked and sounded far too childish all of a sudden, with the severity of the situation settling into her flesh. One hand silenced the worst of them, and she lifted the other to touch his shoulder. "Oh, Ahren," she murmured softly, maybe even regretfully. "What happened to you?" The door groaned as gravity slowly leaned into it, saved only by an outstretched tail.
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In his mind, the shed was nothing and he was instead laying on a street corner, feeling the stale air of a ruined world and listening for the vacant sound of crumbling buildings and cicadas. At night those noises bore into his mind and he could not sleep. He didn’t know if he was sleeping now or not. She didn’t seem to be real, but she never had been. She was some sort of magic all her own. Even her touch set his body aflame, though it was not as painful as the others had been. It was almost as if being touched by a sunbeam, moonlight, neon and arcane flames.
His eyes shut and he tried to move, but found it useless. “The sky opened up,” he said quietly, seeing this happen in his mind. It split apart like someone was ripping it in two. Then fire poured out and rushed to the ocean, as it had been destined to do for eternity. Then his eyes opened, but the vision did not fade. Instead it was where they were, except this time she was at his side. “A dragon came,” he went on, seeing but not seeing, watching a shadow against the black sky. “It was a star eater. He blacked out their light and swallowed them whole.”
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She had watched a friend run the course of a bad acid trip before, at his side while he shook and muttered, screamed into the trees and curled up at their roots. Like weak company, a couple of sooty embers in a fire pit on a chilly night, she could do nothing but follow and watch, grasping to the hope that something was better than nothing. As his tale began to spin and his eyes followed images that were not on this plain, she drew a line between that summer night two years ago, and this dull afternoon.
Only Ahren truly owned these hallucinations, and there was no clock to will onwards and sweep the self-imposed toxins away. This was fever and disease, without explanation or expectation, and Poe found herself eagerly gathering his words, like bread crumbs in a dark forest with no path. They had to lead somewhere, didn't they? Her hand absently slid down his arm until it disappeared behind his back, unwillingly linked to the other. The physical contact seemed important to her then, in the way that it often did, a desperate grasp for connection and grounding, so her hand hung on the side of his ribs, searched out a heartbeat inside that cage.
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This was not the first time that Ahren had hallucinated. It was not the first time he had been in such pain that he wished to die. Heroine was a terrible drug, and it was this drug which had controlled his life for nearly three years. He had hidden it, all right, he had hidden the marks and the needles and the source, but it had always been there. The dragon had been alive long before Ahren had inherited it, and the opiates had been crawling in his blood the more Damian tried to smoke his pain away. Sometimes in those nights, where the rust-red smoke would fill the rooms, Ahren would dream of these things.
He knew this story all too well. “A star eater,” he repeated, started coughing violently, and grimaced. Pain laced through his body and he curled up as best he could, though he felt remarkably exposed. His body was trembling and his breathing pattern had changed, as if he was starting to hyperventilate. “I don’t want him here, I don’t need him anymore, I told him, I told him, I told him—” Ahren’s voice cut off and he choked back a sob, shaking at the sudden chills sending ice through his blood.
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Although their lives had crisscrossed many times in many ways, there was far more to Ahren that was well beyond the D'Angelo girl's reach than within. And no matter her whimsical, romantic nature, this was a fact that had always been very present, from their first encounter in the now-ruined city over the mountains. There was mystery and magic, both good and bad, in the spaces between them, tangible and respected. His story was followed without hesitation or doubt, to search for meaning in the shards of sense that he spat out.
The cough threw her hand from his body and drew her up to her knees, braced for an action that she wasn't even close to being certain of. His breath picked up, and his voice followed the ragged ride, dragging his body in the wake. Her immediate urge in the face of his panic (legitimate or not) was to unbind his wrists, offer him a small hint of freedom in his cornered state. But Laurel's caution pointed a heavy hand at whatever thin stream of logic managed to flow through her thoughts in these moments.
"Hey, hey," she whispered soothingly, crawling closer to him and allowing the shed door to slump to a close, further darkening the scene. "No one else is here," she continued softly. "Just you and me," her voice grew with gentle certainty with wide, earnest eyes that danced over his face, trying to catch his gaze.
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She was completely right, but she didn’t see the things he was seeing. The monsters were all too real, and they were always there. Both of his eyes shut and he pulled his legs up to his chest, trying to will away the pain, and there was merciful darkness. Except when he opened his eyes again, to look for her comforting face, he saw the dragon. It was right behind her, a shadow within the shadow, but there were eyes and they were on him, they were his, they were vicious and demanding and it was going to swallow her whole.
“NO!” He screamed, desperate, and his feet flew out, hit the ground, and he scrambled viciously against the dirt. He moved like a man possessed, and struggled with that wiry, sick-man strength and began to cut through his fur with the leather belt around his wrists. He needed out, he needed out because he needed to get the monster away from her. “Don’t you go near her!” He screamed again, and succeeded in cutting his wrists to the point they were bleeding. Perhaps worst of all was the begging desperation in his voice, the terrible fear that he could not save her.
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Under the sheet of darkness, it was Ahren's screams and the scent of fresh blood that clasped around her bones, shook them up and sent her so quickly after him. He was tearing himself apart under the weight of his delusions, something vicious and predatory behind her. seen with such vividness that her pulse seemed to believe him. It pushed hastily through her veins and egged on her limbs as they scrambled over Ahren's ill form to take hold of the belt binding his wrists. A poorly chosen move, it was quite possible, what with Laurel's confrontation with him so nearly passed. But there was a tightly knit collection of thoughts, both rational and irrational, that wholeheartedly rejected the possibility of Ahren (whether it was the Ahren she knew, or a broken fun-house mirror distortion of him) ill and enclosed, fighting and bleeding in binds. So Poe moved surely against this imagined race against devils and time, bracing herself half overtop of his wrecked body, and took hold of the belt. A trickle of slick, warm blood greased the old leather, making her thumb slip as she pushed and pulled at belt through its clasp in a practiced fashion.
"There," she said through a sharp exhale as the belt was pulled through with a long slipping noise and tossed against the furthest wall. Her gaze, still wide against the unsettling situation and shadows, came to find Ahren's face again, trying to gather his state and find direction from there. Just riding out the stormy waves of the Atlantic, and hope they don't capsize before the next one came along.
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Though her weight was light, it was enough to remind He keas moving. He kept snarling at the shadow, and kept his eyes dead-locked on it, now foaming at the mouth. Only when she released him did he move, scrambling onto his feet, crouched low, ready to pounce. Despite the shadow flickering, he knew it was there. It had always been there, that black dragon, the boogyman and the serial killer in the alley. It was a beast that looked like him, except the version he saw was terrible and wicked and his true nature in whole.
So Ahren stayed, hunched over, right up until she looked him in the face. Then he reached out and pulled her into an embrace, using his body to shield her from the thing that was not there. He kept his eyes on her, focusing on her alone, and ignored the voices in the darkness. “I won’t let anyone take you away,” he whispered, red eyes fever-bright, drool and foam still glimmering on his mouth. “I won’t let anyone hurt you ever again,” he promised, his voice thick.
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[html] http://i144.photobucket.com/albums/r173 ... header.jpg) no-repeat #ffffff top center; width: 377px; border: 1px solid #000000;"> Delayed fini?
Preparing herself for the worst in the world through Ahren's eyes, a sudden, strong and comforting embrace came as an shock to Poe. Her arms flexed and eyes rounded out when he took her, resisting in halfhearted instinctual confusion. But his strength and conviction outweighed her by far, and she quickly softened against his body, tilting her dark head up to stare through thick hair at him.
"I won't let anyone hurt you ever again," struck a chord deep in her gut, some piece of an inner child that wanted so completely to believe him. To close her eyes against the foam dripping down his chin, the manic eyes and the stench of disease that was braided into his scent she knew. She could curl up in with him, in the great arms of this brother or lover or friend (a distinction that didn't matter in her fairytale or her heart), and they could protect each other for the rest of their days from all of the bad things that had bit and barked and outright tortured.
It was a fairytale at best, that was very certain. A mysterious disease was gnawing away at Ahren's body and mind, and Poe did not doubt that there would be plenty of pain in her own life, that Ahren would be unable to shield her from. Perhaps she even knew, somewhere deep down, that it would even take her away. But Poe was still a child at heart, and her love of this man was too wide to allow a distance from those crazed words and firm grasp. So she smiled at played the fool, believing if only briefly that he spoke the truth and that she could reciprocate them just the same. They would carry each other through this storm on a feather and a thread, fending off personal monsters from both sides. A happy ending would be short-lived, but a flicker could go a long ways in pitch darkness.
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