SkyBlue

birdasaurus:

All That Remains Love

“Well it meant something to me.” The words hang between them, tepid and petulant in the airless summer afternoon. He’s already lost her, he knows that. This is the after. 

Somewhere, both distant and near, the grasping rumble of a push mower starts up, but it doesn’t register, not really. He watches as her mouth moves, as she chews silently on the words, any of the words, that might fold him neatly into the floorboards and out of her life. Out of sight, out of mind. 

But her eyes slide right past his in the end, the trajectory of a melting popsicle beginning its inexorable slide down its wooden mount, and so he knows that there’s nothing then.

It’s not a surprise, not really, when she turns away.

He doesn’t care how tired the sentiment is–his chest aches. Her hand is so close to his on the floorboards, her long fingers with their bitten nail beds, but he knows better than to try and reach for her. 

She’s so far away.

The taste of fall is cool and sweet on her lips, caramel apples and small children on hayrides. A nostalgia made sharper in the phantom presence of unyielding stress brought to bear on her neck, painfully vivid in the gasping breaths she must take daily now to keep pace with demands.

Because now and more and soon are rapidly losing their meaning in the crush of urgently phrased requests.

There’s so very little left of herself to give, and she’s only just begun this journey. She almost chokes then, the most recent litany of requirements to fulfill coming due all at once and crashing in a violent wave against her meager reserves.

She closes her eyes to the sight of leaf scattered tracks then, feels her body sway ever so slightly on the wooden planks as she untethers herself from the past and tries to ground herself in the present. 

But she’s long past the point where such a trick might work. 

(Source: heartbreakhur, via orionfalls)

She’s not sure who she hates the most, him or her. Him for pretending to be one and the same person long enough so that she believed him, believed them. Because let us not lie, this was never about him alone when that omnipresent string of ghostly boys who came before refuses to fade. 

Or her, maybe it’s herself she should hate the most. For being drawn in again, one more time, it’s never going to be the last, by another boy who promised sunny skies and laughter but held only festering detritus in his hands, leaking slimy rot where he couldn’t quite seal the cracks in his palms.

She doesn’t profess to be the bastion of honor and grace and goodwill. That’s not the point. It’s the part where he’s worse that stings the most. The sudden doubts peeking out from behind every smile they shared, every quick turn of his head to check that she was laughing at the jokes he told. As if he was mocking her the entire time, that poor little naive girl who believed she was enough to warrant his attention. 

That gullible stupid little girl. 

(Source: itsjustvaleska, via sh1re)

She finds Roratiel standing on surface of the frozen lake they thought to camp by the night before, morning still far off but not as much as it once was. The last remnants of the city are no longer visible in the distance, needle-like spires and twisting columns rising up to shatter their peace of mind, but that doesn’t seem to stop him from staring back in the direction they came from.  Very little seems to.

A stray breeze blows hair across her eyes, brisk air surging into and through her lungs when she breathes in. But where the fresh breath of cool air is a matter of indifference to her, Roratiel’s shiver is obvious. Her lips tighten and twist.  They’re too far south for this to enter into the equation. It’s too soon.

But not unexpected.  Not wholly.  She is of water as he is of fire, and the cold was guaranteed to have an adverse impact on him at some point. The tightness in her chest squeezes again, and she bites her tongue to distract herself from the sight of her carefully laid plans unraveling.

She can’t take him North, not now.  Not when a whisper of a breath of cold air is enough to make him shiver.  He’ll never survive in the northern ranges with True Ice breathing down their necks and turning exposed skin blue-white with frostbite.

South, out of the question.

West. For a long second she toys with the thought, tempting only because the leftover option is unappealing.  But warring tribes mired in civil war are no place for deposed royalty, even when the royalty in question is handy with a blade and tan enough to blend.  They aren’t that desperate, not yet.

Their options narrow and twist unpleasantly, the portend to a net closing in around them.  East then.  Back to her people.  But home is not an optimistic thought this early in the morning with the sun creeping ever closer and pressing for immediate action.

Roratiel pinwheels his arms in a sudden motion then that has her hand reaching for her sword.  He grins at her with a waggle of his eyebrows a second later though, and she realizes with a flush that when she fixed her eyes on him, she never looked away. 

East with the displaced prince of fire then.  

She bites her lip and moves to join him on the ice.  The thought’s not an appealing one, but then, so very little is these days.

(via e4rthy)

If there was a way around this he’s certain he would have at least glimpsed the contours of its shape in the past month.  But he’s played his cards all wrong, and the wispy girl beside him is still looking up at him in askance.  As if he has some measure of control against the entire might of a first family breathing down his neck.  The only way around this, it turns out, is through.

And she stumbles beside him as he starts the descent down the marbled stairs with an unexpected jerk and not a graceful step.  A bad omen, the spectators below will hiss with tightening lips and flickering eyes, eying the family of the bride as they sharpen their bloody teeth with iron nail fillers.

But there’s already blood in the water, and the tempo of the churning waves doesn’t deviate.  It’s his own blood of course.  His family’s.  His five remaining brothers are arrayed tightly in a line at the base of the steps, the remnants of a name brought so low and then lifted up so high by the same family for their own convenience. Davante’s grey eyes, so similar to their father’s, curl their hooks deeper into his skin as they burrow, finding purchase with the sentiments they call up. Loyalty won’t be enough. Not to survive the fallout that’s washing over them now and will continue to come.

He’s stopped without being conscience of the change in motion, and only the tug on his hand reminds him of his recent failures to perform as expected.  This pause, this curious pause, is not in the script.  The patriarch of the family he’s marrying into won’t appreciate this deviation. But Davante pins him there with his stare, the last one he expects to exchange with his eldest brother.  Soon, no matter its track record, family loyalty won’t be enough to survive, and they both know it.

Renounce us, Davante’s phantom words murmured quietly in the hours previous rise up from beneath the surf and stand between them now.  And he closes his eyes before nodding once and turning to face the sharks with their bloody teeth and grasping jaws. Loyalty won’t be enough to survive the coming days, but that doesn’t mean he can’t bury it deep and hold it close.  Watch, wait, and, one day, if all goes to plan, revive their name in a tidal wave strong enough to shake the foundations.

(Source: darcydrakes-blog, via mint-tea-and-honey)

It’ll be an adventure, she had told him with an incredulous look when he asked, as if the makings of a horror movie were the sort of thing he was supposed to glory in and search out with the zeal of an over-eager kamikaze pilot.  But he doesn’t want to die, and it strikes him as particularly stupid to go exploring an abandoned farmhouse at dusk.

The only defense he can give is one of context: the dilapidated house set in a cornfield with everything gilded in gold is probably less charming when an axe-murderer is chasing you through it.  But she’s already out of the car, trampling everything in her path as she practically skips up the creaky front steps, who skips to abandoned buildings with the intent to go inside? and he groans aloud with his palms on his forehead before following her in, already formulating his will even if he’ll never get to set it down on paper.

(via moments-of-breaking)

The boardwalk’s wet under her heeled boots as she clomps across them, skirts swinging.  "You don’t even know where you’re going.“  Hayden grumbles as he strolls beside her, not so much a complaint as unnecessary commentary.

"You don’t either.”  She points out, slowing enough to level a disconcerting stare in his direction, her eyes wide and unblinking.  He hates it when she watches him like this, he’s pointed it out often enough before that he doesn’t even bother commenting now as he scowls and looks past her.

“Perhaps I have a destination in mind that I haven’t told you about.”

“Like?”

“Need to know basis only.”  He smirks as she swats at him, picking up the pace to dodge her assaults.  "And you don’t need to know.“

(Source: cripto-grafia, via geniusofthehole)

The door is open and then she’s gone, slipping down darkened gilt hallways with mirrors that distort reality.  Running, not so much as away from him, but towards something darker and greater than any possibility he could ever represent in the daylight hours of his youth. 

Maybe he’ll follow her, maybe later, maybe he is doomed to grasp at her trailing straws until the end of time.  But his arm is still aching and seeping red from earlier when he slashed it on broken glass so she might not break but definitely enter, and he can’t help but think he's done chasing this gone girl.

(via thefullerview)

They’ve had so much to drink that the world is slanting in and out of focus without her really understanding why.  And she wants to tell him to stop wasting perfectly good fuel for her psychosis but the words aren’t forming in her mouth correctly.

She’s leaning against him, unbalancing him.  When did that happen?  She’s the one causing it, the waste, she realizes in some divine flash of clarity that lasts much too long.  She must not have drunk enough. 

And the wine takes the color of cranberries in the snow.

(Source: jewist, via xyloboned-deactivated20141219)

The air conditioning’s out and it hasn’t even been a full day.  Aided and abetted from the strain of moving boxes into her new place, the oppressive early summer heat is already starting to eat at her skin, pulling sweat to the surface. 

It’s a start.  She swipes the back of her hand across her forehead and surveys the less than artful splay of her belongings in the too warm, too still room she claimed as right of first roommate present.  Good enough for now. 

She kicked open all the windows and doors to catch some breeze when the air conditioner first gurgled to a stop, but it’s a silent heavy sort of heat the neighborhood’s afflicted with, and the house sits hot and stagnant.  She really ought to close the doors now.  She’s unfamiliar with the neighborhood, and that documentary on serial killers and rapists her mother forced her to sit through last week springs to mind.

But she’s just remembered the boxes of kitchen supplies still awaiting her attention (the one with spices exploded mid-move, another complication), and she still has to dig up her bed frame and headboard from somewhere, and it feels like any effort to be responsible comes with too much too soon and–her pillow’s miraculously cool against her face.  

She’s getting dirt on the clean sheets.  But the residual coolness of her bed is temporary in this heat, and she ought to savor it, she decides, drifting into a heat-induced coma without any real conviction in her logic.  It really is too hot for the serial killers and rapists anyways.

(Source: adayinthelandofnobody, via florair)