[P] i can't be alone with all that's on my mind

[Marisol]

i wish i could say everything i've done and still be loved.

I thought I had asked the same of you.

Marisol bristles. Something inside her goes dark like a snuffed candle. Her chest lights up with a thorny, righteous kind of burning, her muscles tense into stone,  and perhaps if she were less awake, or less her—stoic—she would snap. But she doesn’t. I am not led, she wants to say, I lead. I am the Commander, goddamn it. I cannot be told what to do.

But she doesn’t say any of that. She only grits her sharp teeth and tries not to glower.

The night is cool and dark, burnished by wind and prickling stars, and Marisol cannot simply wait and listen. It has never been her strong suit, this kind of quiet diplomacy; even a minute of standstill is eery and unnerving, and it makes her itch to the teeth and the bones. 

With a shake of her head she starts to pace the training grounds. Her ears tip back toward Theodosia’s voice as it rings through the air, but her relentless stride continues, turning circles over the hard-packed dirt, watching her hooves drive crescents into the ground; every so often she has to suppress a shiver when a gust comes in and gnaws at her skin, when her mind unwittingly turns to Asterion, or when her heartbeat picks up speed and practically becomes airborne. There is no movement that will make her feel better, but any movement is better than none. There are no words, but she cannot sit in silence, either.

Will you come to bed with me? 

Marisol cannot—does not—stop her frantic pacing. Her heartbeat bangs against her teeth like a misguided electric pulse. The wind keeps howling, battering her legs and tossing the short bristles of her mane, and she knows she should say something but can’t; the words are stuck in her throat worse than the thorns on a rosebush, part grating and part painful. She walks a diagonal line across the dirt, right past Theodosia, then back. It feels repetitive. Mechanical. A cross-stitch she’s worked many times before.

What would Asterion think? And what will her people say, when they find out? They have too much to work on already, too much to worry about without a queen whose trysts will surely be her downfall. The castle is not private, and neither of the barracks; whoever goes to the other’s room is sure to be found out, and what will the guards and cadets think then?

“Perhaps.” Marisol draws to a stop and lobs one of the lightweight practice spears at a dummy in the distance, watching as it quivers in the hard-packed straw. When she turns her head it is slow and unsteady, and her eyes meet Theodosia’s shyly, carefully, unsure. She noses the edge of the cadet’s outstretched wing but does not lean into it, though her expression says she might like to. “Do you ever think about becoming Vicarius?”

With an invisible hand she tugs the spear from the dummy.

@Theodosia

"Speaking."

queen marisol

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