No one on the surface has ever looked at her like he does now. Like he knows her. She has been recognized before, for the darker parts of what she is-- a kelpie, a monster-- but not like this, like-- like he sees past the primal instinct and the sharp teeth and the predator’s finesse. He sees that she’s a daughter. He knows how the ocean loves her, how it cradles her. How it misses her when she’s away.
Anouk pushes into her skin, reminds her of it’s presence. It looks at Orestes. It looks and looks and looks, like trying to remember a lovely dream that was lost to the wasteland of the waking. Andi can feel the way it’s attention focuses on the king, and she does not like it.
“Lady Anandi, not all of my visitors bait me on the beach for eight days.”
Guilty as charged. Not that she looks it; Anandi just shrugs, and gives the smallest roll of her eyes. Then he provokes her, and when she snarls he just smiles, not as sharp but just as pointed. It only enrages her more. She glowers at him.
Do you think this is fun, king? Do you want to know how beautiful I can be? How savage? I’ll show you what your skin looks like, inside out. I promise it won’t be nearly so handsome, separated from your flesh.
She puts her teeth away anyway. This was certainly not the encounter she imagined-- he was supposed to offer her a tour of his court. They were to walk beneath palm trees as the heat of the day bled from the sands. He would feed her dates, watch as she licked her lips. Instead her blood is rising, not in an entirely pleasant way, as he roughly (easily) finds his way beneath her skin.
And then, before the rage can get the best of her, he smiles sadly and captivates her once again with his words.
“Too much.”
Laughter. She does not partake in it but bites her lip, uncertain.
“Not enough”
Would it be like this between her and every king? This constant cycle between anger and awe, attraction and repulsion? The violent, twisted part of her heart aches to murmur “Love is a fresh kill. Love is a split lip. Love is the wound, the pleasure, the weakness. Love is breaking, and breaking, and breaking.”
And the girl in her, naive and spun-sugar delicate, wants to say “Love is the color blue and the scent of rosemary and folding, gracefully, like a scrap of silk.”
Instead she says, with a proud jut of her chin, “A lady never tells.” And if her voice quivers, it’s only because of the weight of all the unspoken things, and the effort it takes to reign in those weaknesses before the golden king. To stand there with a brave face, when she is so very curious to know what it would feel like, to fold. (Instinct tells her he would not hurt her. But her being is one of precise balance, and she cannot let anyone disrupt that balance, or she will be lost. So she ignores instinct, and she closes her little-girl heart, and she shoves down the hunger and-- what then is left of her?)
“But-- me too I guess-- not enough.” She confesses finally, the truth squeezed out of her by the blue longing in his eyes. Heart-breaking blue. Heart-broken blue. And when he steps forward, she almost steps back. He was easier to make sense of from at a distance. More importantly, his nearness wakes up all the devils in her. The hunger focuses its dark eye on the sun king, and for a moment the wonder overtakes her-- What does a king taste like?
What sound does he make with my teeth at his throat?
She sighs, not without longing and not without disgust. It was important to keep him talking, to have something to focus on that was not the flutter of his heart in his neck or the color of his eyes or the warm glow of his skin, like the horrid sun was hiding beneath his flesh. “What’s it like to be a king? Is it as lonely as it seems?” The question is asked softly, hesitantly, as though she is not sure she wants to know the answer.
A N A N D I
@Orestes <3
some say the loving and the devouring are all the same thing
☾
