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I'M SO SORRY I COMPLETELY FORGOT. D:
It was snowing again, gently, lightly, just like that day that should have never happened, but whose corresponding night he wish could have lasted forever. It had been so long now -- two years, right? Two years since the weight of an unwanted leadership had been hoisted onto his trembling shoulders and two years since he had first admitted to something he sometimes wished wasn't true at all. It was the only evening that had never faltered in his memories, even when everything else had begun to fade and die. And the snow always reminded him of it, especially on nights like these when the sky was clear and the fog was low to the ground, curling around his toes as he made fresh footprints through the forest. The silence danced in and out of his ears like a dead man's symphony.
It had been more than a year since he had visited the graves, but he still did not plan on facing them any time soon. Ghosts could probably see him no matter where he went, but something about going to those two tombs was like revealing what he had become to the two women that had reigned before him. It would be like shoving the fact that he had failed them in their faces. So he sat on the bridge instead; it was perhaps the only accomplishment he had made during his two years in power and it was easy to hide. There was a fresh layer of white on it. He walked to the middle and looked over the side, leaning against the wooden rail. The water was rushing along as it always did -- not too quickly, but not too slow. He didn't know what he was thinking about anymore. The moon was at half mast and he felt like he should be doing something. Anything at all.
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[html] Seasons held such sway over her life; even her moods were bent by the narrowing of days. Amid sweer summer winds she was all easy words, a ready comrade for those that marched the night hours. Winter brought a chill that snacked on bone-marrow and bad-thoughts, and introspection ruled all minutes and moments passed without dialogue-distractions. A creature could get mired in her mind – and all to often, Luz Cresceno did.
Tonight, for example, as she made tired trails in her new home. Though her den lent warmth to an aging skeleton, the sap had risen in her again (as it always did) to leave, to be out and so abundantly about. Had she not stumbled on a shape surprisingly familiar, the sensation might have inspired her legs to stagger, tumble, rove and ramble until that mist-laden land lay far behind, a distant recollection of leaden hearts and memory-ghosts. (So many of them not even her own!) She was not so fortunate. Luz espied a lupine-shaped something on the bridge, and it tugged on certain strings until she found her feet on the same wooden structure, urged forth by the most dangerous of sensations: deja vu.
Proximity revealed a familiarity with this beast (dressed fetchingly in copper colors and brass shades) and a half-recalled conversation brimming with parries, small word-plays, flimflam banter. Curiously enough she found no name, lurking amidst other dusty details in that memory, but it did perturb her greatly. His body played traitor, now; his thoughts were not light ones, or else his stature lied better than the best of silver-tongues. Another day (a summer one, fraught with butterflies) she would have turned away, abandoned him to introspection and bridge-thoughts. Yet today was not such a day. Today she was older than she’d ever been, and her bones were like fierce ice below her skin, and her eyes were but gem-intimations below a curl-tumble – a testament both to the trying winds and the odd privacy of her thoughts. “Hey there, familiar,” said a voice amid the diamond-dust winterland, revealed by process of elimination to be her own, “you look so down.”
Her posture didn’t exactly exude the sort of saintly kindliness that might have coaxed a confession of bad-day incidents, perhaps even a bit more. In the stead of various other poses, she elected to remain absolutely herself: chin lifted, shoulders slack, hip oh so slightly tilted, hands curled in disuse at her sides. (These are the things that Luz Cresceno is made of.) Only her face seemed out of place. Those amethyst eyes hadn’t altered a bit from their usual low-lidded, long-lashed regard – yet her mouth wore no lopsided smile, no suspiciously askew grin. It was a simple line, and like all lines, it could go either way. | |
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Idle hands were the devil's playthings, but even the devil had run out of things to do here. His fingers were curled loosely into his empty palms as he leaned, his weight and warmth melting the snow away from the railing and chunks of white fell to his feet, eventually sliding through the cracks and into the lazy river. And his thoughts were like the snowflakes, small, drifting, and dissolving instantly when they touched the surface; thus he was unable to hold on to them for long and they were mere glimpses at the tangled world within his skull, where both more intricate ideas and memories lurked and played and laughed. He preferred the former to the latter and so standing there so cold on the brown and white bridge, there was a sad sort of peace to everything. Nothing tangible, nothing at all.
A tattered ear flicked at the voice and the rest of his head turned slowly. She was not a familiar figure at all, but he knew his memory was very fuzzy around the edges and that the edges extended in far more than they probably should. And there was, of course, also the problem of that other side of his brain which he wished would stay where it was now, apparently dormant, however temporarily it would actually be -- it was inaccesible, in either case, and if it was the monster that had met this woman, then he wasn't sure he wanted those memories anyway. But she did not seem particularly troubled by the sight of him and so he only sighed. Familiar? he echoed with a breath of mist, M'afraid I can't say the same. He gave a mirthless chortle, halfway forced, Maybe that's why I'm so down.
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[html] This is shorter than I would have liked, and blech quality. Forgiiive. __________________________________________
Perhaps there was an insult in that statement, though none of the words bore barbs intended for her. Luz loved to be recalled, with or without a sour aftertaste, and pressed sharply to memory – yet she found too often that she was branded bad company. “So be it,” said her slack shoulders, said the slightest curve of her mouth when she met with distaste, said the hard amethyst eyes when others looked on. She elected not to digest that statement too deeply; she let the sentence slip by.
“To be fair, I don’t know your name, either,” said the she-wolf, who a silver-shoal in the stead of a more pleasing palette, although she was mindful that there was likely little comfort in those words. Although expectation demanded it, she didn’t follow her sentence with an immediate introduction. She simply took small strides up the bridge (making noises of wood-anguish as she did) and clasped her hands behind her. One hand, the left sibling, cupped her chin and lent its elbow against the railing. The effect was a travesty of thought, so thinly coated on the astronomer, though she displayed the symptoms correctly enough – the faraway eyes, the odd inaction of eye and brow, the slack mouth. “You have a bad memory?” she asked, too aware that there were several different implications in the question. | |
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Quality? Please. Your posts alway make me feel small and insignificant. ;;
He had figured that by facts that made themselves obvious, he would have knowledge of most of the things his shadowhalf did, but for instances of mere hellos, for ships meeting in the night, there was not much to send the information across such deep chasms of the mind. And there was nothing here; he did not know her scent or her face, her voice or her words. A stranger of whom he had no recollection. Then again, he knew there were those that he had personally met, those whose names he had known at some point, there were some of that class that he would also fail to remember though perhaps they would strike a familiar chord at least. He had lost his mind so many times before (did he truly have it now, or did he ever?) -- wasn't it only to be expected that some pieces just stayed lost?
You could say that, the haunted man admitted, I don't forget the worst of things, so then I suppose you weren't so horrible a thing. It was an attempt to make up for the disappointment he thought he was picking up, but he had never been great at reading people now had he? Laruku Tears, he offered as well, a cursed man named for a cursed pack by a cursed and dying mother. It did not bother him that she didn't know his name, regardless of his position as her apparent alpha. They were all anonymous in the fog. How long have you been here without me knowing?
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[html] This was waay too late. And psh. Dahl, I love the way you write! __________________________________________
She caught a laugh by it’s ankle, saving all but a singular tell-tale sharp exhale; her nose wrinkled in wry humor. “Oh, do go on,” drawled Luz Cresceno, naught but darkly amused to be told that she was not ‘so horrible a thing.’ Statements, made innocently enough, had her vaulting into thought these days. How glad she was, that he didn’t stride off into the day, leaving certain she-wolves to their slant-smiles and personal entertainments. How happy Luz had become remain fixed in a moment – instead waxing pensive, pell-mell style, as was her wont in increasing age.
A name for a name. The rules of fair play had always been clear on that count. There was a power to the word that said who you were; and yet she knew, in that way we know our own patterns, she would be more wounded if he forgot it within a month than if he tacked it to some spell, as superstition insisted he might, or a bad rumor. “Luz Cresceno,” she risked, accompanied by a finger-flick, as if to indicate that it was of no real consequence. (This was a ruse.) “We’re both ell-yoo’s,” she mused, before ambling onward. “And I was here for a chunk of the summer, but I got... sidetracked.” Luz’s vocabulary failed for accuracy. What words do we have for when misery makes us take to our heels and find solace in flight – whether or not it deals with aerial artifice – to strange places? “I returned at the beginning of winter, and have been at Clouded Tears since,” she finished, eyes fixed on the small mountain-caps her knuckles became with seconds of undue focus.
She rarely regretted. Her sins were not innocent transgressions, nor were they inevitabilities, acted out by the demands of personality. Luz was simply an impulse with a name, a caprice that spoke and made eyes at girls and sometimes, if it was a noisy night, sang. Negative and positive reactions to this fact were universally discarded. Some would label this sociopath’s behavior, the assured bad beginnings of a murderer. Yet caprice directed her in different directions. Such as this particular second, when her hand reached out without real permission to his shoulder. It never touched. It simply paused there, at the borderland between touching and separation, close enough to give heat, sufficiently far to not yet be an invasion. To this motion she paired a voice, and a meeting of red and lavender irises. “I’m sorry you forget so much.” The werewolf-hand curled away back to her side, to be neatly folded into crossed-arms. “Usually, a bad memory is a great leap towards a clear conscience.” Her mouth grew half-amused, but sadly so. “But on that count, you don’t seem to catch a break.”
Luz Cresceno could dwell on others’ troubles. Perhaps it would save her from her own, and earn acquaintance in the mean time. Maybe Laruku would forget her name before the end of the conversation, in which case it would earn minute’s laughter and a reintroduction of herself as ‘Sally Peachbottom.’ (She suddenly found herself hoping he would.) | |
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The superawesome poetic way you write makes me want to hide! Dx
Ell-aiye, he corrected quietly, shurgging. There isn't much worth elaborating on -- there are better things to talk about than me, anyway. He was certain that this was true, though regardless of that, he had had a hard time settling his thoughts on anything other than his own sad circumstances for many months already. Thoughts were selfish, but they were meant to be that way. Theoretically, so much attention to himself would have conceived some sort of solution or at least a compromise, but emotions got in the way of general logic, even for months and years after the facts. He held in a sigh, not really wanting to seem as depressed as he was.
It's easy to get sidetracked, the hybrid continued, There're lots of places to go and see -- why stay here? It was mostly a rhetorical question, but he wouldn't have minded if she had chanced an answer. Most people could cite their reasons, even if their reason was that there was no reason at all. These days, Laruku liked to dance back and forth between several of them, though he wasn't sure he really believed in any of them. They were the reasons that should be, but he wasn't sure what he was really thinking anymore.
Luz Cresendo then, he said deliberately, as if forcing himself to remember it, You must like something about this place to come back, hm?
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