FIND WHAT YOU LOVE AND LET IT KILL YOU
ALL THINGS WILL KILL YOU, BOTH SLOWLY AND FASTLY
BUT IT IS MUCH BETTER TO BE KILLED BY A LOVER
Is this the way you treat all your visitors?
Orestes does not comment immediately. He looks at her with all the wanton patience of the sea and thinks; oh yes, she is a daughter of it. “Lady Anandi, not all of my visitors bait me on the beach for eight days.” It is true. If she were here for diplomatic reasons it would have been just as easy to come through the gates of the city and meet him at the citadel, if not far easier. But this—there was an element of trickery to it, of seduction or mystery. And if he were another King the romanticism would have spoken to him in different degrees; there is no doubt he would have appreciated the break in monotony of reign. But for Orestes?
He feels distrustful and somewhat caustic, in a way that is atypical for him. She represents every aspect of his past that has abandoned him; she is a lover he once knew intimately but has lost contact with. Ah, and then—she snarls. He sees the subtle transformation just beneath the surface of her expression, the way her teeth are sharp enough to kill. He does not flinch from her. He would have been disappointed if she had not reacted in such a way; it is too easy for Orestes to imagine himself as her, on a foreign soil, entreating a strange King.
It is too easy to imagine it.
And he would have snarled too. He would have thought, no one knows the sea like I do.
He smiles, and his smile is ugly-beautiful too. He does not need the sharp teeth of a killer to remember the expressions of one.
Orestes cannot help it. His is nearly goading her and he knows it—among his people he was certainly more peaceful than others, but still. He cannot help but reminisce the times there were disagreements among his clan, how neatly teeth can cut. Orestes had been the Prince among them; sacred; nearly untouchable. He had not often had to fight; but for a moment he runs his tongue along his blunted teeth and longs for it. Trespasser. Because she is a trespasser.
However, Orestes cannot hate her. Because she asks, in a way that was meant to be snide but is not: And what do you know of love. The question makes Orestes smile in a way that is real, and true, and heartbreaking.
“Too much.” he says, but as he says it he thinks: but I know more of loss. He cannot tell her the agonising truth of his being; that just by seeing her, delicate and beautiful and fierce and perhaps a little cruel his heart breaks. Yet there is something undeniably lovely about it, as if for just a moment he walks in a dream. He softens suddenly, and laughs—the sound possess strange lightness, nearly a child’s laugh. It surprises him. He shakes his head. “Not enough.”
Orestes nears her, and it is the first time that he raises his ears. If he were still a water-horse, the sea would sing to him. It breaks his heart it does not. But instead he feels the dying warmth of the sun and he glows as if it is not dead at all. He is whisper-soft when he says, “And you, Lady Anandi? What do you know of love?” He wants to ask, and of loving a thing that will never love you? But Orestes does not. Instead, those blue eyes of his settle on her expectantly, and they are now steady, relaxed. He listens to the sound of the waves just beyond them, the repetitive crash and rush, and wonders what shape he would be called to become if he could still transform.
After a moment, he knows:
A whale.
Because the song his heart is singing is as loud and achingly alone as a whale's resonant call, deep beneath the surface where there is no light. Searching, with as much passion as a vocation. Lonely, lonely.
Orestes's eyes may look a little like that sound now, as he admires her, and thinks of all he has lost, and tries not to hate her for it.
Orestes
@Anandi | speaks | notes: this is not the reaction i expected
