I don’t know what to do.

I can’t seem to do anything right anymore. Her words are my broken mantra, placed at her lips. Her words are the truths I have already learned, have already accepted. Why else do bad things? Why else allow my mortality to slip, thread by thread, until the entire tapestry of it had unravelled? I close my eyes, and… Try to be anywhere else, for just a moment. I do not confess such things often, and this contemplation will never pass my lips: she is stronger than me. I cannot imagine this golden girl becoming immoral, or callous. I cannot imagine the way this pain will cause her steady descent into apathy. It is this that reminds me I am alone in what I am. Strangely, Damascus’s absence seems more aching, more judgemental, than his presence. I can feel the void of our Bond, the giant questions looming between my sins and I, but I fear reckoning with them. 

Instead, I focus on this: the salt, the sand, the sea. 

Always, the trinity of my religion, my demons and my gods.

I will give you no promises. Good. And then: I love you. You are in my soul. 

The baptism of pain is complete. The lies are upon her lips. Your turn, she adds.

Oh, Elena.

Do you know the secret to lies? The way to tell them like promises, like truth? I know she doesn’t; I know because of the slight quiver, the too-tense resolve. My smile is sad, but languid. My smile is slow, but genuine. The trick is to create a fantasy. To step directly into a storybook of your own making, to pretend that the lie you tell, is the truth. And so when she asks, I step into the story: I know she is not thinking of me, and I do not give her the courtesy of thinking of her. 

Perhaps she already knows. Perhaps that is why there is an ounce of truth, a softness to the word love. But when I draw away, it is to force her to look at me, to retreat from the false warmth of intimacy; it is not as if I am pretending to be a lover, it is as if I am. I draw her chin up, up, up to look at me; and softly brush the remnants of the tears in her eyes. 

“I love you, too. You are more than in my soul.” I have learned sometimes it is the unstated that leaves the most impression: what can be more than a soul? the statement suggests. A life, I think. Because when I confess those words, I am not confessing them to Elena and her sad blue eyes: I am thinking instead of crimson tides, of a chestnut mane in the surf, of striped haunches, and running, and running, and running. I am thinking of long black beaches, and the smell of an infirmary, and burying my face into that hair just once, just once, to say, You are more than my companion. 

That is the closest to confessing love I ever truly got; and all those emotions swarm now, into my lie, into my confession, because behind my eyes rests the silhouette of the one person I can never confess my love to, the one person who has taken all that I am and gnarled it up. Perhaps it is what Elena deserves to hear, however; perhaps she deserves a man to flay his soul open for her, and reciprocate what she had offered, the whole of herself. Perhaps she deserves to see just a flash of truth in my sentiment, a truth not for her but for someone else entirely, and then--

It is gone.

The rawness, the lie that sounds more like truth than falsity. The genuine, tortured expression I wore, like a lover who held his fading love. It is gone, behind the sliding curtain of my memories. It is Elena I look at now; it is Elena who turns away, and gives me the permission I need to be myself, gnarled and loveless. I will ask you to promise me something, someday, Torin. Don’t give it to me. The storybook is closed; the lie transformed to truth. I smile again, but it is my smile, devoid of sentiments, hardlined and blade-like. “That is an easier thing to ask,” I admit, softly. I have long-since fallen out of the business of giving. I have long-since only began to take, and so--it does not seem so wrong to promise that, to promise not to give. 

I turn from her. I do not watch her steady journey back to Terrastella, or wonder what strength (or lack thereof) our encounter may have given her. I do not think about these things, because I do not care. But I do think about the sentiments the encounter dredged up. Damascus finds me again, and together we haphazardly walk to within seeing-distance of the cliffs. 

They are too lightly coloured, I think, to remind me of home. The beaches are not long and straight and narrow; they are not black. They are sand, or stone, or the edge of the continent giving way to the sea abruptly, with roots jutting out from the edges of the land. Elena reminds me of this, as well. She is too lightly coloured to remind me of home; she might feel of sand and smell of the sea, but there is an otherness to her that separates her from all I have ever known, all I have ever cared about.

I do not sleep that night. I think of Bondike, when we had been preparing to graduate the academy, dressed in our finest regalia. He had been so handsome, I remember, with that close-cropped mane and those spiraled horns adorned in gold garnish. He had laughed, you are lucky you do not have to bother much with our paint and I had said, I wish I had to. I had often felt separate from my peers, which he had known. He had drawn the metallic paint out and on my inner ankle had drawn a secret mark, above my one gold hoof. I hadn’t looked at it then, but after--after the graduation ceremony, after we had left and gone to our separate homes, I had paid closer mind--

It had been a symbol for marriage, I remember. I had thought it charismatic and bold then, a testament to the wild undercurrent of our shared attraction. I had thought it was a sudden surfacing of old nostalgia for when we had been younger, and our only cares had been for one another, from sheltering each other from the burdens of our fathers--

Now, I know differently.

Now, I know it had meant everything, and so had his careful whisper when he’d said, at the end of the ceremony:

Vercingtorix,

Promise me something. 

Promise me you will never let me become someone I am not. Promise me you will never watch as I allow the politics of our world to consume me, as they did my father. Please--you know me better than anyone.

Promise me, you’ll help me stay true to who that is.

I promise, Boudika.