i used to pray like god was listening
i used to make my parents proud
The nights are long, and dark. What cold wind howling in from the coast that doesn't land fruitlessly against the dark rock of the cliff or the walls of the city blusters its way into the capitol, flapping the shudders of a large and cluttered workshop lit only by the orange glow of a wide, round coal fire and a lantern or two swinging lazily from their chains on the ceiling.
Overall there is the sense of warmth, and comfort, and sleep about the workshop--and not only because its craftsman is draped belly-up over a sturdy wood table, snoring quietly into a pile of leather scraps and thick, rusted bolts with one wing lolling off the edge far enough to brush its tips on the floor. The forge is napping with him, quiet though its coals glow so bright, puffing black smoke through the chimney as if snoring, itself.
(He calls her Angel, his devoted bride, in bars, knocking back pint after pint. Sometimes he laughs a little too hard at it. Sometimes he doesn't laugh at all.)
Outside the city is humming with life, strung with lights and boughs of evergreen though the festival has either not ramped up or already passed--he cannot quite remember--but in here it is only the creak of the swinging lanterns, the slap of the shutters, and a knock at the door.
Hugo frowns, without opening his eyes, trying to bat away sleep. A knock at the door. He rolls off the table in a sudden boom of sound, scattering parchment and scrap metal and bolts and tools and graphite. A knock at the door."Hold on!" he says--more urgently than he'd expected--scooping as much of the mess as he can into his good wing and dropping it back on the table before stumbling through the fog of waking toward the heavy wood door, simply built and braced in cast iron.
A knock at the door. Before it, Hugo closes his eyes, takes a deep breath, and tells himself: you're okay.
The door swings open at Hugo's behest, and Marisol is on the other side, orange as his feathers in the glow at the heart of his workshop. He smiles, something that seems so very at home on his face. "Commander," he says, "it's a dangerous time to go leering through doorways--there's mistletoe on the loose this time of year." He tilts his head back, to look at the door frame and, seeing nothing, shrugs at her as if to say maybe next time, before stepping back to invite her inside.
"Are you aware it's late?" he says, and it really isn't--past sundown, sure, but sundown is so early this time of year--but his grin somehow widens anyway, the tip of one wing against his chest. Hugo gasps. "Did you bring me mistletoe?"
hang on to your dreams
until there's nothing left of us
Marisol doesn’t mind the dark as much as the cold. She is hot-blooded and thin-furred, not made to withstand the chill of the wind as it sweeps sharp off the water, unaccustomed to the way it feels to shiver under the light of the moon. As soon as she steps out of the body-heated warmth of the barracks and into the frigid streets, she is trembling, wracked with a shocking wave of cold. The hairs on her spine rise; her short mane bristles. With narrowed eyes she steps further into the alley.
All around her the city is still and dark. The nights have become basically endless. The only light to illuminate the streets is the cool stream silver shed from stars overhead, and in certain places, a bumpy, almost threatening yellow cast on the stone streaming from the flickering lanterns that sway like dead branches in the breeze. As Marisol goes stalking through the streets, she slips in and out of visibility. Her skin shifts: earth brown, bright orange, blurry filigrees of silver. But none of this light is warm. None of it makes her feel any more secure. Instead it sinks its teeth in, and pulls until she feels too vulnerable to bear.
She is full from dinner and should be sleepy, but the chill has knocked the fatigue from her bones. Now they just hurt.
At the end of the street, Hugo’s forge is alight with a warm orange glow. The heavy thing which was sitting in the pit in Marisol’s chest begins to rise—relief tingles, a mild electric current, from her heart down her legs and then into her spine. Already she is quickening her pace. With long, fast strides, she pushes headfirst against the wind on her way toward the tent; the breeze nips at the thin skin of her muzzle until she thinks her nose might be running.
She debates trying the door herself. Hugo is probably asleep, or drunk, or both—why not just let herself in? But even Mari understands the concept of privacy, and so with a little sigh of resignation, she raps against the heavy door. Knock knock. From inside the forge, there is the sound of a dull crashing, and Marisol doesn’t know whether the laugh or wince, so she does both, suppressing a dryly amused smile. Hold on! comes Hugo’s voice, and then there is another stumbling-noise. Marisol has been waiting longer than she’d like to by the time the door finally opens.
Hugo looks back at her, backlit by the orange of the smelting fires. As usual, he is awake in a kind of dizzy, half-tipsy way, the unnerving violet of his eyes glinting bright, wearing a shit-eating grin as he curls one striped wing toward his chest and gasps in mock surprise, did you bring me mistletoe? His smile is more than mischievous.
“In your dreams, Arkwright,” Marisol drawls derisively, and with an amused roll of her eyes shoulders past him and into the forge. “I’m glad I caught you… awake. If that’s what we’re calling it.” She pauses mid-step, glancing down at the central table, which looks like a tornado has blown through a suit of armor, then turns over her shoulder to look at Hugo.
One brow arches, as if she is accusing him of… something, though not quite in the bad way.
i used to pray like god was listening
i used to make my parents proud
She looks at you, in the way many people do. For a moment you feel bitter, a bile that rises in your throat and sits behind your teeth. You hate when people look at you like that, with the raised brow, a question that demands the answer. You don't know the answer. You've never known it. Just another one of those things that slips through your fingers even as you stretch your hands toward it because you're-- what? Depressed? Burnt-out? Something altogether else that cuts as sharp as one of your perfectly balanced blades?
You swim through the fog of sleep and bitterness toward the surface, ears ringing with the weight of it. If your smile is mirthless it is surprisingly well-hidden except for a quiet strain tucked into the corners, where no one can see and especially in the shadow cast by the glow of the coals as it hits your back.
In your dreams, Arkwright, she says, and it feels simpler now. Marisol never asks much from you except what you're good at, and that is creation. Rickard said you were an artist, like he never quite was. Rickard said you loved it in a way that few people can, like you breath molten steel and your body is sustained by making and doing. He had just never told you what to do when the fire runs low and your bellows huff fruitlessly in your chest.
But it is still simpler, and all the bitterness drains out of your face as she speaks. It is still sitting in your heart, like an animal, but it is a quiet and sleeping one.
You will use it, later. Fold it into steel and iron. Make it into something beautiful and simple and almost holy. As you do everything.
"Who's 'awake,'" you joke, "I've never met her." The table is a mess of scraps and tools and malformed ingots laid over the plain, rough Oak top. You look from her, to it, back to her (that question again, that offends you for reasons you can't quite place-- because it's warranted? Because it hurts in some nameless way to be seen not working? Because you should be working but you're gripped by a fear that says what if it's not enough? so many times that you hear it when your hammer strikes?) Without saying anything, without dropping your smile, you start to put things in their places, pulling out drawers and dropping rivets into them, hanging your tools beneath their respective shelves.
It seems easier than anything else. It is easier than anything else. "Anyway, you're glad you caught me awake?" you say, stacking templates in a way that feels pristine and neat but really isn't, to the outside eye. There is some big black hole in you, yawning. It, not you, is what turns back to her and waits.
hang on to your dreams
until there's nothing left of us
The forge is a gaping mouth, a black hole lit from the inside out; and Hugo makes a strange, dramatic figure against the warm orange-yellow glow that seeps out from it, looking even taller than usual now that he’s backlit. Almost imposing. Behind him the half-organized workshop looks sort of like a dollhouse. Marisol does not think often about the way he towers over her, or the breadth of his shoulders, or the way he might become a warrior—that is a fantasy best left to another Commander, and he is a man best thought of as a maker, not a warrior.
Right?
He is staring at her, with poisonously purple-blue eyes that have grown dark in a few places but still glitter with infuriating mirth. His smile is an easy, half-cocked thing with more crudity than should really be allowed, in a professional sense. And when Marisol brushes past him into the workshop, her shoulder bumps his playfully and she is overcome with the smell of leather and smoke, and she feels… small.
Small. It shocks her. She does not feel small often. And most of the time it is a feeling that irritates her. But today it is almost calming—as if right here, and for now, someone else can take her spot on the front lines. Mari ducks through the door. Finally the crawling, prickling cold of the wind outside fades away, replaced by a creeping warmth that presses forward, inch by inch, and drags along a cloak of firelight to cover her dark skin.
Who’s awake? asks Hugo. Never met her. Mari manages to drag half a smile over her lips. But she is distracted by the need to watch him as he shuffles around the edge of the forge and begins to put things in their places. It’s fascinating. She follows his movements with dark, narrowed eyes, with focused thoughts, and still cannot quite comprehend the pattern in which he tosses his tools into drawers and boxes, or the rhyme or reason to the piles of ingots on every surface.
It is all beautiful in a very uncomfortable way. Like she is watching something she loves crash and burn.
His voice sounds out again. Mari turns over her shoulder to look at him; her mouth twists thoughtfully, and for a long moment she is silent, contemplative, maybe even a little too serious. Those gray eyes glint in the firelight. Finally, she asks: “Did your family ever work on Prudence?”
i used to pray like god was listening
i used to make my parents proud
It’s interesting, that she would look at you and think of a weapon–not the creation of one but the weapon itself, sharp and poised and ready–when you have never felt like this tall, jagged mountain she wants. You have only ever felt small. Weak. Empty.
You are small, weak, empty - and though your bones rebel, though they stretch and grind and ache as you grew, you will only ever be small, weak, empty.
To echo: right?
She smiles like you might smile if you weren’t paying attention, as if she only halfway knows how. You know this look well, wear it day and night, and it drags something like sympathy out of you, a feeling that begs you to rest a wing on hers, tell her it’s alright, and never quite say just what “it”is. Instead it just tucks that one corner of your mouth in a little tighter, draws your brow together almost imperceptibly, puffs your cheeks out as you breathe through pursed lips the second she turns her back.
All your things are in their places now, or close enough. The clutter, you know, is just clean enough to settle your frayed nerves but still messy enough that you fold yourself back into it if you need to, run and run and run until you are buried in the calming clink of metal or the wooden shuff of drawers opening, and drawers closing.
The silence is prolonged. Marisol is still looking at you like that and it sets your teeth on edge, sends your wings shuffling themselves over your back, folding and re-folding in an attempt to find a comfort that you have never quite mastered. The silence makes you wordlessly wish for your body to dissolve. You are privately wishing you could stop your heart just by wanting it badly enough up until the second she draws a breath to speak.
Did your family ever work on Prudence?
Your lips purse. Your wings shuffle again. In spite of your best efforts your body still stubbornly refuses to dissolve.
That one corner of your smile untucks itself. It is perhaps the most sober you’ve looked in years. “I’d assume so.” you say, a sentence that falls out of you like a rock and clatters at it hits the ground. The only thing that outweighs your sudden and unbelievable grief is your curiosity. “Whyyy?”
hang on to your dreams
until there's nothing left of us
Of everyone in her court—at least, of those she knows more than just as an acquaintance—she might worry about Hugo the most.
How fragile is he, how irredeemably sweet? Marisol has seen enough of the world to know a smile like that is never made from just happiness. It comes to him so easily the only explanation is practice. Practice grinning—not only what it should look like, how wide, how bright—but when to flash those teeth, how to turn away other people’s concern, how to deflect even reasonable worry.
Mari’s learned the same tactics. She’s just not quite as good at remembering to use them.
Sometimes she thinks they are too similar to get along. It is nearly impossible to love someone who is just like you, Mari feels, unless you are, at heart, a narcissist. And they both worry too much, about all the wrong things. They’ve argued more than once about the use of the forge, Hugo’s haphazard organization, the direction of the unit and its armor as a whole; they’ve butted heads in front of cadets, training officers, citizens, Vespera and everyone. Yet still Marisol finds herself ridiculously, inexplicably fond of him, for reasons she doesn’t understand or even want to acknowledge.
She watches the blacksmith with narrowed gray eyes. He seems off, more off than usual. Nervous. The black-barred wings keep shifting impatiently; the feathers shuffle with the sound of rushing wind. Suddenly the forge seems dark, oppressive, far too crowded even with two bodies, and the fire sets her dark skin to sweltering.
In the brief space between her posed question and his answer, Marisol’s breath catches in her chest. Her eyes fix on his, asking and asking and asking. Fire roars and crackles in the belly of the forge. White light plays like glitter off the sheafs of polished metal. And really, she is not sure what she wants him to say; none of the options are all that enticing. But then they never are.
I’d assume so. Whyyy?
For a heartbeat Marisol closes her eyes. In her chest and up to her throat, her pulse has grown louder and louder and louder until it nearly blots out the sound of rushing blood in her ears. Her body feels like an incoming piece of wreckage, a ship about to crash, hot and cold and then almost completely on fire. “It's back,”she says, softly, finally.
And the thing she does not say—I don’t know what to do.
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