They ought to be an analogy for gravity; for fate; the way that objects collide. They certainly collided, and could not have been more different. But that collision, she knows, had sent them spiraling apart. The gravity of their attraction had not been strong enough to survive the damage of the impact. The rest, however, she is not certain of: the emotion he evokes when she sees him, far below, does not seem like fate. Only like force. Only like something she cannot fight.
And for these reasons, she does not mean to find him. She does not want to find him, or she would have long ago. For once, she does not come from the sea; but Boudika can see that he is there to find her, or at least to reminisce. She stands at the precipice of the cliffs above, staring down, watching him as a god might, with feigned apathy.
From this high, he is small and dark and tragic. Boudika surprises herself at the familiarity of his body; the way she can remember, with vivid sharpness, the exact hardness of his shoulder when she pressed her face against it. She can even remember his taste; sweet-strong, sweet-warm, vivacious and full of life.
He does not seem as if he would taste that way now.
Perhaps it is because, before the sea, he hardly looks like a man at all. He is a silhouette of her past, one of the many men brought to his knees by the churning expanse before him. The mother sea is a gleaming jewel, too bright to look at. This is the most light she has ever seen him covered by.
The season has been turning from winter to spring; but it is still too early for the dead things of the cold to come back, for the buds upon the trees and within the brittle yellow grass to bloom into new life. The only thing to suggest anything turning, anything changing, is the way the sun glints blade-sharp from the surface of the Terminus Sea.
And there he is.
Small, and dark, and sad, and swallowed by light.
Boudika wants to turn away.
But that force remains, that gutted sense of hunger, of wanting. Perhaps it has gone from lust to knowledge; from affection and hope to understanding.
He was something she had never deserved, she supposes. Boudika feels more a fool than ever for having cared so deeply for him, for wanting to love him. (Even now, she cannot confess love, because the question of whether she cared for him that deeply remains a wound in her heart, an unfinished story, an unanswered question).
But Boudika had wanted to love him. She had wanted to, very badly, and that is the wound that stings the most. That is what fills her with tragedy. After everything, after every hurt she had ever felt, she had wanted to try again. She had thought, she had believed, that... there could be more. She had thought—so foolishly thought—that perhaps, in spite of everything, despite everything, she might have found happiness with someone new, someone other, someone who did not tie her to the anchors of her past to drown.
She wants to say that before she thinks better of it she descends the cliffside, and is beside him. But to do so would be to tell a lie, mostly to herself. The descent is not easy. The descent is long and treacherous and haphazard, so that the sun dips down in that sapphire sky toward the even brighter sea.
No.
Boudika has the entire day to think about it. To think about what she will say to him.
To think about turning back. To think about becoming an osprey, or a monster, or a wolf. Her magic is strangely quiet, as if all those great beasts within her watch upon the peripherals of her uncertain heart, eyes gleaming. At any moment, the wolves might bay. At any moment, the lions might thrash and cry aloud. At any moment, the shark might rush through the current, jaw agape.
Then, all that time is gone. The creatures she can become are silent within her. And she is standing behind him, looking over his shoulder, toward the too-bright water.
Boudika does not say anything. She only watches him. She traces his shoulder with her eyes, his haunch, the ridged scarring that covers his back from the Disciple’s whips.
Why, she wants to ask. Why do we hurt each other so?
Is this what love is?
It seems, to Boudika, anyone she has ever cared for has hurt her. Or vice versa.
She does not want to see his face. She does not want to meet his eyes. And so for just a moment longer, she refuses to. She waits for the sun to begin to set, and for the sky to go into the colors of a death throw, of oranges and reds and pinks so vibrant it must surely mean the end of the world.
It is then, and only then, when the horizon is too terrible to look at any longer that Boudika says, “Tenebrae.”
Just, Tenebrae.
Always, Tenebrae.
§
So tell me how to be in this world
Tell me how to breathe in and feel no hurt
The work of the eyes is done. Go now and do the heart-work on the images imprisoned within you.
~Rilke
They stand, she above and him below, both lost in their remembering. She sees and he… does not.
Boudika studies the shape he makes upon the sand. A smudge of charcoal.
Tenebrae listens to the sea. It has mocked him all day. Sung to him like a siren all day. Hissed angrily at him all day. Beat upon the sand like an osprey’s wing upon the air all day.
He has not moved, not even an inch. Only his shadows shift, like smoke furling and unfurling, lazily, restless. Now it is not just that darkness surrounds him. It is within too. His punishment has left him, eternally black, locked away within his body. Locked away within Caligo’s black because that is all he should and ever should be focussed upon. So they said.
But he is still here, upon the sea edge, just beyond her reach. She crawls, slick, upon the sand and he hears her coming and prays she might touch. But the moon always pulls her back at the last.
The Moon.
He is not here for the sea.
The pounding of its waves are all day Boudika’s osprey wings as she ascended like a god. (He does not know that as she ascends within his memory, she descends the cliff in his present). She slinks to him and it is a blessing he cannot yet hear well enough to learn her footfalls across sand. If he did, he would mourn how he could not see her, to drink the sight of her body (even filled with ire and hatred as it is). Even angry, the sight of her in his eyes would be like water across his parched tongue.
His head hangs low with the shame of his sin, but it drops lower still with the weight of his love. It is a blessing she left him. A blessing his last sight of her was a bird ascending, beautiful, free. He does not know how he has chained her, kept her tethered in the cage of their want and his love. Tenebrae does not know how the tether pulls her down, down to the beach and to his side.
Stripped of his sight, the white, dirtied bandage tied about his eyes, he does not know how long Boudika watches him, studies him. He feels the static of her presence, the touch of her eyes that prickles electric across his cheek, his shoulder, the places that she had touched, that still remember her.
His eyes are shut beneath the bandage. He does not know how they look, now their sight is gone - are they black? Are they still white, just, simply, sightless? Or are they cloudy and so utterly wrong? No matter what his eyes are now, his ears struggle to make up for what they have lost. They listen to a fountain of sounds and his mind tries to piece them together with the stories his eyes once told them. Stories of a girl as bright as a tiger, as wicked as an alligator, as sharp as a shark.
Above him the sky mourns. It is a painting of their relationship: bruised and bloodied, beautiful and catastrophic. Even if he cannot see it, the monk feels it in his heart - the tissue there, bruised and bloodied, beautiful and ruined. Even in the eternal darkness of his punishment, the darkness in which he can focus only upon Caligo, not even the Order would believe he would still hold his love of Boudika, like a light within which he wards off the darkness. That light, he knows, is an eternal thing and it will never relent to the darkness.
Tenebrae. She says, when the sun’s light goes out and the sky dies (like his love will not). He startles, surprised by her voice, so close, so loud. He is darkness within, darkness without, but he turns to her, his light. The Disciple knows only the side of him that she stands, he knows not exactly where. He fills his mind with the memory of her looks. From her voice, her tone he paints the lines of her face. He wants to touch her face, to know if his memory is anything close to the truth. He has drawn so many emotions from her over their time together. Her bites at his throat throb for her nearness. His scars twinge with the ache of how he broke for her. The monk belongs to her more than he does to the Night Order. He pushes the thought away and pretends he can see her brightness through the dirtied bandages about his eyes.
“Boudika.” The monk breathes, her name still sounding like salvation upon his lips.
Yes. Boudika thinks she should feel anger, most of all. The pain is fresh in her mind; that, at least, has not faded. She remembers the wrath his betrayal evoked; she remembers how the rage settled in her belly like iron. Suddenly, it was impossible for her to eat, to sleep, to drink. Boudika remembers flying until she forgot her own name; she remembers the hoarseness of the osprey’s cry, and the way that when she at last became a woman, her voice had been rough from misuse. These memories are sharp and jagged as glass; they are raw as fresh wounds. She cannot escape the way they make her mouth taste like salt water.
(Not from the sea, but from her tears).
And yet, inexplicably—he is as beautiful as she remembers, standing there next to the thing she loves most. The posture of his body reminds her of a tumultuous sea, despite his stillness. Even the ocean before him is calm. Even the sea. The tumult, the chaos, resides within them. It is electric in the air.
(This is the moment Boudika wishes her heart did not soften around the sight of him. This is the moment she tries, with desperate fierceness, to hate him).
The wind teases his hair. The sea-borne gusts billow it out in long, tossed strands. He starts when she speaks. She stands apart, the distance between so physically large—but somehow, still insurmountable. Tenebrae breathes out her name, as he always has.
(Between them stretches the voids love digs; the pits it carves; the way it fills and then, in absence, leaves such cavernous recessions. She cannot close the distance. She cannot forget the elation in her heart, crippled. This is when she nearly turns away; when her heart reaches her throat; when she knows the distance between them is the worst kind, the distance made greater by a closeness once shared).
He does not turn to regard her. In some ways, that is a blessing. Mostly, it makes her teeth ache. Boudika knows, when he does not look at her, that something irrevocable has changed.
(It would be so much easier to hate him).
Boudika fears the moment she will see his face, and so she lives a little longer in this fear. She can pretend, if she does not see it, that nothing has changed; but the pretense is as much torture as the actuality. Her imagination takes flight. You do not deserve to look at me. She knows what she will find when he turns, at last, to glance at her.
(I hate him, she thinks, as her heart swells with painful affection, with sharper regret, with a compassion she does not want to feel).
“Do you remember the island?” Boudika asks. Her voice is a girl’s voice, a voice that says, once upon a time… “The last thing you had said, before I had left you, was: ‘I won’t hurt you.’ You were speaking of me; confident that I wouldn’t, or couldn’t, hurt you. I think I might have laughed—”
(She does not laugh now).
She is breaking. She is breaking as the sea does upon the rocks of a cliff-face—again, and again, and again. But what wears away more, what wears away first? The cliffs, or the relentless water? She closes her eyes, because the anticipation is killing her. Would it be worse if he retained his sight? Would it be more gruesome if the eyes were pitted? Slashed over? Tightly bound? Boudika has never been a coward. And she cannot be a coward now. She exhales and then, with gentleness that is surprising, she steps forward. She pauses. And then she steps forward again, and again.
Her legs carry her until she is beside him, and then beyond. Once knee-deep in the water, she turns to regard him.
When Boudika’s crimson eyes meet his bright, unseeing ones, she does not cringe. She does not exhale sharply. She does nothing but rest a moment more in silence.
(This is when: she wants to hate him. The pain already blooming in her heart would be tolerable--unnoticeable, even--if she hated him. The sentiment would act like unconsciousness after an amputation; an act of mercy. I hate him, she thinks, again).
But how can she?
The woman who has learned to love her most hated enemies, who forgave the cruelest of betrayals, who loved an unlovable father, who gave everything to an undeserving nation?
It is not in her nature.
And Boudika can be nothing but herself.
“Tenebrae.” Her voice is barely audible. “I would like it if we could stop hurting one another, now.”
§
So tell me how to be in this world
Tell me how to breathe in and feel no hurt
The work of the eyes is done. Go now and do the heart-work on the images imprisoned within you.
~Rilke
She is gravity.
He may have lost his sight, but he feels her. Feels the way everything moves toward her. She pulls in the sea, the stars, his shadows. He turns to her, not because he can see her face any longer, but because she is a feeling. She can fell his heart and it will always fall down to her. Tenebrae does not know exactly when Boudika became the center of his world but he feels her there now, a force he can no longer escape.
He imagines her. The red of her body, like a flame, there to steal his oxygen. There to consume him until nothing is left. He should fear her for it, but all he can think his how he has finally realised the truth of his being: he is nothing without her. So let her spark light him up like a torch.
She brings him to the island. Takes him back to that place that was only them, like here, like now, it is only them and the sea, the sea, the sea. Yet the difference between then and now is that he knew nothing then. He was a foolish monk; a young and blind man. He may be truly sightless now, yet he sees more clearly than he ever has. The truth of him, of her, is laid out in the distance between them. Their relationship is a chasm he fears he cannot breach. Yet it is the narrow slit of papercut’s slice. It stings Tenebrae’s body. It is sharp and exquisite agony and the more he thinks upon it the more it becomes indomitable. The more it becomes unbreachable. Boudika feels gone and he does not even know that she has stepped into the sea. The sea does not let him know that it has her up to her knees. It does not let him know that she stops and looks back.
If the Disciple knew how she stands a second from plunging into the sea, disappearing beneath the waves, he might beg, beg her to stay. But she talks to him of the island and all he knows is where the wind says her voice is. He turns to it, imagining the shape of her lips upon every word. Art and memory combine in his mind. Boudika becomes a living, present thing within his mind. She is, beautiful and untameable, there with Tenebrae in the black tomb of his body. But the girl he sees, she is nothing like the kelpie who stands before him. Already his mind has forgotten how nature perfected her. He is only mortal man, afterall, imperfect, dysfunctional. Nothing can replace the living sight of her as welcome to his eyes as water is to a parched throat.
She is breaking over the words they once shared, words that seem at once shallow when they first said them and yet a terrible irony now. “I felt broken by you, changed, even then.” Tenebrae says, remembering that moment. Boudika, younger, mortal, a trident in her grasp and a warrior’s smile upon her lips. A sadness sweeps in, that he does not recall her colour right. She is redder, he thinks, redder than his memory serves and her stripes starker too.
Tenebrae does not dare say how she has hurt him. For the pain she causes him is only what he has inflicted upon them both. A part of him wishes to go back to what they were, fighting in the sand, dragged down to the bottom of the sea. His skin torn, the beach, the water stained crimson by their passion. It was all they knew then, the fight, the struggle between them. Yet this is a new struggle. The struggle of falling apart and falling together, of grasping and letting go.
Tenebrae, I would like it if we could stop hurting one another, now. The wind tries to steal her words away. But the monk is greedy for the things he should not have. He catches every word and covets them, even as they flay him open before her. Can she see how he bleeds, how agony lies in the parting of skin and sinew. She teaches him how to suffer for love and chastened he heeds her.
“Me too.” He turns his head toward her voice, and though they are bandaged, though they themselves are utterly sightless, still his eyes seek her out, as if the sight of her is enough to undo their blinding. “I cannot promise to ever hurt you again, Boudika. Because a love that never hurts is no love at all. The love I have for you is the most expensive thing I own. And I will pay for it with the pain of grief and tears and heartbreak. I will pay for it with my heart and my soul.”
As if he knows (he does not) that she stands, ready to leave him for the sea, the monk steps forward, one, two, three small, hesitant strides. The sea stops him when it laps at his ankles, bubbling, laughing, daring him to enter it more. It spits sea-spray at him, upon his chest, his throat, his limbs, it loathes him for what he has done to her girl. Tenebrae’s ears twist to catch a sound of where she might be, until, until he remembers how she is the center of his everything. Gravity turns his head to her and he groans, “I was a fool then, Boudika. You are the most dangerous creature I have ever met but I will pay whatever price to keep you.” And then, then, “I am sorry,” He says as the waves shatter like seafoam hearts upon the beach.
oudika does not spare herself the pain of looking at him fully; of taking in his changes, his punishment. Boudika does not spare herself the knowledge that, in some capacity, she caused his fall from grace. It had never been her intention, she knows—she had never thought to tear him from the Order, to steal his sight.
But, there had always been a tangible pull between them. An inescapable gravity. If love were a language, rare and untranslatable, they spoke the same one.
Now, standing across from him, the end seemed inevitable. There had been no other option, at some point; perhaps it had been when she first held his throat between her teeth, or when they met at a bonfire, or when they shared each other’s warmth and secrets in the cave.
Boudika cannot help, now, how she stares at his face; she memorizes it, and remembers her own cruelness. She had stolen from him the opportunity to immortalize her in his mind; with his confession, and his promise, she had flown away. It had been too much for his eyes to stake claim upon her flesh; to write and rewrite each curve, each supple arc, in memory and memory again. Boudika wonders if she should regret it; if she should have stayed longer, before his blindness.
No, she decides.
She doesn’t regret it.
This truth blooms for her with the vibrance of a spring flower. Boudika regrets none of it; she never has. Not Vercingtorix. Not Orestes. Not Amaroq. Least of all, Tenebrae—because, if she had not met him, would she have ever learned hope again at all?
This doesn’t change the taste of pain. This doesn’t change the cavernous hurt held within her, a wound that cannot be nursed, an agony with no remedy.
I felt broken by you, changed, even then. His words sound a repetition of her own soul’s. They are an echo to her own thoughts. The sound of his voice reminds her of fire and pomegranates; of the mourning sea; of lips pricked by thorns.
Boudika says nothing. She rests behind his blindness like a phantom; like a ghost. She closes her own eyes, so perhaps in this, for a moment, they might be made equal. But as he attempts to reminisce her features, Boudika attempts to erase his: the militant physique, the bandages on his eyes, the silver of his body. She lets him become nothing but his voice, and the sea, and the way her heart somehow cannot decide whether to be leaden or light.
Me too. I cannot promise to ever hurt you again, Boudika. Because a love that never hurts is no love at all. The love I have for you is the most expensive thing I own. And I will pay for it with the pain of grief and tears and heartbreak. I will pay for it with my heart and soul.
There has never been a man to make such a declaration to her. Where before his words held no weight, no meaning—the sacrifice of his sight, of his beloved Order. It moves her.
Her ears flick to the sound of his steps against the sand. She knows he is nearing her, and this sets her heart to beating again. Part of her wishes to flee (and, chidingly, bitterly, Boudika thinks the part with self-respect). But another part of her wants to listen; she wants to close her eyes against their tragedy and, instead, hear the promise of a future.
I was a fool then, Boudika. You are the most dangerous creature I have ever met, but I will pay whatever price to keep you.
A pause—a pause full of the sea, and the gulls, and the lingering warmth of day.
I’m sorry.
Boudika’s eyes open.
The space between them remains large; he has stepped only so far into the sea. The hesitancy of those steps returns to her mind’s eye; she had not witnessed them before, but now she imagines them, and they break her heart. He had never been hesitant in that way; he had never been unsure of his own footing.
Her silence is the epitome of tension. It is a vow unspoken; a prayer unsaid; a sentiment unrequited.
Her silence is the epitome of eternity. It seems to hold within it not only seconds, but hours, days, weeks, years. There is a lifetime in this magnificent quiet.
(Beneath it dances another small eternity, one of betrayals—beneath it dances all the times she has loved before, and felt the pain of unrequited affections, of not being enough. Beneath this silence exists Vercingtorix when he turns away from her confession; beneath this silence Orestes’s words reemerge, when he tells her that she can only be what is in her nature; and Amaroq, wild beneath the water by the island. Beneath this silence is every time she has ever felt alone).
There is something different, however, in his apology; perhaps it is because it comes with a piece of flesh; perhaps because he has been changed by his love for her, and Boudika does not think any man has been changed by it before. Boudika steps forward, as he had; hesitantly. More hesitantly than she has ever stepped forward before, it feels.
And then, suddenly, they are nearly touching. She stands before him quiet and small. She says, “But Tenebrae, I do not want your love paid for in pain or grief, tears or heartbreak. I do not want it to be expensive.”
There is something urgent in her tone. “If you are to love me, should it not be as light and free as a bird above the sea? As moonlight on water—“
Boudika pauses. “We have both already paid so much. What if rather than continuing to take, we begin to give?” Boudika wants to curse her own optimism; she wants to turn from it, distrustful and cold, but somehow—somehow, forgiveness does not feel so wrong. “You hurt me, Tenebrae—you hurt me. But—“ and this is a desperate thing, a girl’s wish on dandelions, a shooting star dream. “—but, I want to believe you will not hurt me again.”
Finally, Boudika touches him; it is the gentlest of things. She moves to unwrap his eyes so, so hesitantly. She must see what they have done to him; what his penance has been.
“I want to choose to give in joy, and laughter, and love. Not to take in pain, and grief, and heartbreak.” And at last the white bandage falls away, and they are eye-to-eye again. "If you must make new vows, Tenebrae, than promise me to be loyal, and honest, and brave in your feelings. Promise me that from now on we do not wager in pain but in hope."
§
So tell me how to be in this world
Tell me how to breathe in and feel no hurt
The work of the eyes is done. Go now and do the heart-work on the images imprisoned within you.
~Rilke
She might be the wisest creature he knows.
Boudika steps toward him and closes the rest of the distance (that space which Tenebrae’s hesitancy could not cover). The sea attempts to hide the sound of her moving, it works, except that he feels her proximity. Of course. Tenebrae’s body has learned her more intimately than even his faith and the bite of his whip.
She warms the air with the heat of her skin - its colour too, warm as lit coal. The monk feels the heat of it. He feels how the air stirs against his nose, his lips, as she breathes.
The monk prays.
He prays to Caligo that he will not reach for her in that moment. He might dare to pray he never will again; but he is weak - did you know that, Boudika?
Though close, though so near he can reach out and kiss her, she feels so utterly beyond him. There is nothing he deserves less than this wild, free, brave and bold woman. She is the girl he was never meant to have and yet the one that has claimed him: heart, body and soul. No part of his body or life remains untouched by her. She is everywhere now, in everything.
Does she know how she moulds his soul with every word that pours from her lips?
Does she know how she has not stopped touching him since the moment they first met?
And now she is stood before him...
And she might be the wisest creature he knows.
The kelpie’s words lie upon him and he frowns. He does not understand their meaning, let alone how they feel upon him, within him, in the place where his heart lies wounded, in the place where his soul feels shattered. It feels like the words should bind him back together, but he cannot see how.
Boudika takes the monk apart, his soul, his heart, his everything.
His ears twitch, his breath slipping out in a sigh, as if to loosen the knots of unease that have wound themselves tight with her proximity and words.
Tenebrae still wants to touch Boudika. He still wants to pledge himself to her, but she does not want his love in the way he said…
“But that is all I know, Boudika.” Tenebrae pays for things, he always has. The cost of his life was the loss of his parents. The cost of becoming brothers and with that the cost of loving Caligo, was paid for by turning from any other life and pledging himself into a monastic life. He has paid for Boudika with blood and pain and his sight.
Though he does not understand her, he longs to. Tenebrae clings to her words, as if they are salvation - a salvation he does not yet know how to earn or how to live by. “Teach me how,” He says, his voice breaking like seafoam over rocks. “I have seen those in love, how they argue, how they weep with hurting one another - even the smallest of arguments.”
And then he stops. She has been unravelling the bandage from his eyes. His sudden silence, as the bandage slips away from his changed eyes, is almost like he now sees…
His eyes are newly black. Black as deepest night. Black with the swallowing, writhing and consuming darkness of Caligo’s matter. There is no light left within him. He cannot see out beyond it, to where Boudika stands framed by the bruised, setting sun sky. Setting, falling, ending; like them, he might tragically think, if he could see.
No. He does not fall silent because his eyes see. He falls silent because he sees the truth of her and the truth of him. He sees a foolish man, broken and confused by a love he can barely begin to understand or comprehend. He is young and foolish, he sees now. Tenebrae sees his own foolishness. His untried youth and naivety. He seeks to compare them as a couple; but they are nothing of the sort. The monk dashed their relationship upon the rocks and it shattered, fragile as a shell. He does not know how to glue the pieces back together. He cannot understand the process of it - not in the way she does.
But.. gods... he wants to.
Hope.
“I will.” He says and again, “but please teach me how.” His head droops and the new born stars cry their first light upon him. “Payment for redemption is all I know, Boudika.” Tenebrae’s head twists, away from his pain, away from his shame. “I will wager in hope,” the Disciple says as his head lifts, his muzzle coming near to hers, until their breaths mix in the fading light. “But is there any hope left for us? Do you love me?”
And he realises that her answer might be the truth to his everything.
have been here before, Boudika thinks. Those are the words she wants to say, as she closes the distance between them, as she examines the stoicism of his face and the hardness of his body. His posture is militant, tense, and this too she recognizes. I have been here before, she nearly whispers into his ear. Let me help you. Let me guide you back.
When Boudika had first arrived in Novus, she had nothing left. She had given her life, her soul, her body to a cause that no longer wanted her that, in the end, betrayed her. Boudika had lost everything that had made her herself. She had thought there would be no salvation from that; no return.
“Tenebrae,” she says his name so, so softly. “Have you ever thought that, perhaps, because you have paid for everything in pain that you were not on the right path? Life—life doesn’t have to be that difficult. It doesn’t have to be so full of loss.”
She is soft against him; warmth and empathy and a question, in the back of her mind, that wonders why, why, why. He does not deserve it—and yet he has apologized with the whole of himself. He sacrificed something essential and, more importantly—he told the Order the truth.
I have seen those in love, how they argue, how they weep with hurting one another—even the smallest of arguments.
Boudika might have smiled, but he cannot see her. Her touch is gentle as she removes the bandages, and she makes no change when she takes in his eyes. She had expected them to be white with blindness, or gone entirely. Somehow, this is worse. They possess no light and hardly any life—staring into them is the same as staring into pitch blackness. But she only reaches out with a telepathic hand to stroke his cheek, to hold his face and not shy away.
Boudika, she can bear this. “Maybe we can learn together,” she whispers. Her voice barely rises above the crash of the sea behind her. “Not everything has to be that way. Love does not have to hurt.”
There is silence for a moment, and then he says: I will, but please teach me how. Payment for redemption is all I know, Boudika. “First, we can never lie to one another. Not again. There’s redemption in trust.” There is a moment, briefly, when Boudika wonders when he turns away if he is going to reject her. If this is too much—if his betrayal of the Order has broken him beyond repair. Then, he says: I will wager in hope. Their breaths mix, and Boudika closes the distance between them enough to brush her nose against his cheek. She leans her weight into him, so that they are nearly chest-to-chest. The space between them becomes a pact of quiet, of promises.
But is there any hope left for us? Do you love me?
She does not want to answer. She does not want to answer, because the last time she told a man she loved him he broke her in all the ways someone can. He betrayed her truth; turned from her; let her die. She does not want to answer, because despite her words there remains a part of her that believes love a lost cause; that understands people hurt one another no matter their best intentions.
And yet, she has not been able to stay away—she has been unable to think of anyone else and so when she answers, her voice holds tears and pain and an inevitability. It would be easier, she thinks, if she could deny it.
But Boudika does not have the strength; and if she is to wager in hope, she can not begin with lies, or apathy.
“Yes. I do, Tenebrae. I love you as the sea loves the shore.” Ebbing, flowing, pulling away and then rushing back—and yet, inevitable, inescapable, a fact of life.
§
So tell me how to be in this world
Tell me how to breathe in and feel no hurt
