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

[Theodosia]

let our eyes show the 
fire in our hearts tonight

It isn’t often that she manages to catch the commander off-guard, but then, she supposes Marisol probably wasn’t expecting such an answer in return. For a few moments, instead of addressing the questions in Marisol’s raised brow, she instead busies herself with the small minutiae of the small embrace they have found themselves in -- of adjusting her wing so that it rests comfortably over Marisol’s withers, of the warm weight of Marisol’s cheek against her neck, of the way Marisol smells like sea salt and home to her.

The peace can only last so long, however, and before long the commander’s voice breaks the silence between them with the implication of a question that she has avoided answering for a very long time now. “It often is. It’s going to be a bit of a story, so I hope you’re comfortable.” Her wing wraps a little tighter around Marisol, an almost unconscious movement -- would she get to keep this, when her story is over? Would this be the last time she would stand ready to bare her heart and soul to this woman, the straw that breaks the camel’s back, the thing that makes Marisol reconsider their relationship for what it might do to her and her reputation?

There is nothing to do but dive in, now, and she does so with a sigh that sends steam curling from her muzzle.

“Where I was born, there were many Gods -- a handful of major gods that aligned with the seasons rather than Time itself, and often avoided mortal affairs, much as those here do. There were, however, countless minor gods, who walked among the mortals as though they themselves were such.” Her sire had been one of them, endlessly delighted by meddling in the affairs of the mortals to stave off the boredom of an immortal life. Even just the thought of him threatened to send sparks shooting across her feathers, and she found herself having to stretch her free wing out until it touched the dirt of the arena so that it grounded her and kept the sparks away from the woman in her embrace.

With anyone else, she might have simply left it at that, let her audience draw their own conclusions -- the strange story of her parentage and birth is one she has kept buried deep since she had come to this new land, determined to leave her past behind her. Only Florentine had known, and now she is gone, along with Asterion -- for a moment, the grief swells once again, and she has to swallow hard to keep her voice steady when she continues, dipping her nose down into the short-cropped curls of Marisol’s mane until it passed.

She wants Marisol to know, if only to have all the pieces of the puzzle laid out before her. She wants Marisol to know, because a demigod is not the same as a mortal, is not the same as a true god; caught between two worlds and never entirely of either of them. A foreign-born Vicarius was simply not done, at least according to the recorded history she had found. Marisol’s tenure was unusual, certainly, but to ask her to abandon tradition so thoroughly -- she needed to know who she was asking, at the very least, and decide if she could trust a demigod born not of Vespera, not of Terrastella, but who had pledged her heart and her life to them despite that.

She wanted Marisol to know, because some part of her will always be touched by her father’s curse, by the awful way she had been brought into being.

“My…. sire. He was a minor god of storms, often associated with opium and more… hedonistic traditions. My mother met my sire as a young man, a refugee to those lands -- my sire promised him safety, and brought my dam to work for him. Instead, my sire gained his trust, and used it to convince him to try opium so that he could take advantage of my dam.” Already, she knows, this story must sound like some bizarre fantasy, and she cannot help but glance towards Marisol’s face, trying to gauge her reaction before she continues into the far stranger part of the story.

”Somehow, the magic of those lands made it so that I was conceived from this, but it was a wild and strange magic, and while it allowed for my dam to carry me, it did not give him a way to safely give birth. He and I both very nearly died in the process, and were it not for a clever midwife, we would not have survived.” There was so much more she could tell her -- about how her sire had turned up his nose at his only demigod child, about growing up knowing that she was the product of lust and trickery, about learning how everything about her was unnatural when she was still stumbling around with oversized wings and knobby knees -- but she is bare already, scraped down to the bone and offering up the worst of her secrets on a silver platter.

It could be easy to love a cadet, a champion, a warrior, a mortal girl with lightning in her wings.

Could Marisol still love the demigod daughter, the product of catastrophe and rotten magic, with her sire’s storms embedded into her ribs like prickly thorns, a constant reminder of where she had come from?

She wonders if Vespera had known, when She had given her back this magic, what She had done.

Sometimes, she wonders if She cared.

She doesn’t know, and she doesn’t know if Marisol will be able to process the information she has given her, the secrets she has never shared in such depth, and she doesn’t know how Marisol will respond, and she cannot help but be terrified for what her future might hold in the next few moments.

credits

@Marisol