b e x l e y
oh honey darling, i'd love to kill you, load up my shotgun, you kill me too -
Y
es.She wants to pray. Dear God, I waited for you, and you gave me a girl. The girl—the one with the gold and the powers and the heart that does not ever stop. You gave me a girl and you killed her, and she came back, and I don’t care if it was you or if it was the Devil or just the roundabout way of life on the earth, you gave me a girl and she died and came back, and now we are going to kill together. Because the man we are going to kill deserves it, and because I know justice comes on the blade of my own perfect knife. Because he killed me, he killed my husband, he killed Rhoswen, he killed Solterra. Something brought the girl that you gave me back from the dead. And I am not going to let this opportunity pass. I am not going to let her die again without justice, blood-red or dark-blue. Justice comes on our shared tongue. Because I know what it feels like to kill. And she knows what it feels like to kill. And we both know what it feels like to die.
Bexley realizes she is smiling. It feels foreign on her face, and good, like living. There is a matching one on Seraphina’s dark, dusty lips; it splits her terrible, beautiful face into a facsimile of something pleased, like a painting gone horribly wrong, but it doesn’t matter, Bexley sees it for what it is. Sees her for who she is. Alive and dead. Alive again. They match. And they have matching scars now, too—
Oh, there is nothing but fate that could have done this, coincidence, a cruel god. Bexley curls a lip and feels the tight, plasticky movement of the closed gash against her cheek—they match in scars now too, inflicted by crows, infected by anger. Solterra’s gold and silver girls. Bexley has never been a queen, not quite, but she could be. And Seraphina has always been a queen, but often without knowing how. (Bexley loves her more for it.) They are previously-perfect dolls passed through funhouse mirrors, passed through terrible worlds: where Seraphina turned silver Bexley turned gold, where she turned hot Seraphina turned gold, and here they are, against all odds, the culmination of a world that cannot decide whether they deserve to live or not.
She blinks, dazed, and magic is still in the air. Heavy as humidity. Seraphina’s white hair swirls around her in crashing, shimmering waves, and her hooves hang oh-so-slightly off the sunbaked ground. For the first time Bexley is aware of the atmosphere. The sun watching incessantly from overhead. The way it burns a sigil into the curve of her back, melts her bright hair into something like soot. Her own magic is alive now, twisting and flickering, gnawing at the inside of her mouth, and she is not quite sure what it is doing except it is hot, hot hot like the rage boiling in her chest, heat building exponentially until it sounds-feels-hurts like an explosion.
Her ears ring. She thinks of the cave.
“We are hurt too, Seraphina,” remarks Bexley, the most obvious thing in the world. Her eyes glitter like ice. “The difference is—“
And the pause hangs in the air for a long moment, too long, until it becomes less about thought and more about drama.
“—he’s a cunt,” she finishes finally, and bursts into a howling laughter that racks her a little too long to be normal. The nausea in her stomach begins to subside. Solterra’s golden girl throws her queen a huge, wolfish smile, says “Whenever you need me,”, and then turns back into the canyon, a golden speck in a golden chasm.
@Seraphina | "speaks" | notes: <3
