T E N E B R A E
On my body, the grace of shadows
and in my heart: all Hells
and in my heart: all Hells
Yes, Elena is cruel.
He knew it before, he is reminded again as she steps toward him. She moves through his darkness like the sun at the dawn. Before her he had not known to crave the dawn.
She moves like a comet passing close, dangerously close and then she is gone. But always Elena returns. It is like gravity, a yearning that holds them tight, tight and always returns. She moves toward him, cruel and warm, warm, warm. He had not known the cold of his magic until she is there and the air is trembling with the heat of her skin. If she told him now she was the sun here to end him, he might believe her, he might fall to his knees and offer himself.
With her fae lips she speaks his secret back to him. She does not keep it cradled like a fragile bird. She returns his words to him. They fall from her mouth, pensive, and part of him wishes to take his confession back, to have never spoken it at all. Tenebrae feels foolish here, a boy full of want. He wants to open his lips and if he cannot bring the words back onto his tongue then he wants to tell her that he is expected to want for nothing. That only Caligo should be enough for him. But so great and terrible is the looming realisation that she may not be. Not for him, not anymore.
Elena bears his confession so simply, it holds none of the weight that his tongue gave it. From her mouth it is simple and obvious.
And she steps closer again. “Elena.” Tenebrae implores her, rough and low and warm as her skin that he dares not touch. She does not cool and snuff out beneath his magic, not like sun does. Does that make her greater? The monk thinks it might.
He looks up, he dares to take his eyes from her, from the girl who edges, closer, closer. The Disciple looks to the sun and half waits for her to touch to whisper across his skin.
It does not come and the sunlight is all that bathes him. It laughs at the Disciple, it mocks the man who thought he could ever endlessly hunt the sun and not tire.
Tenebrae’s eyes close against the deriding sun, against the disappointment that begins to form with a twinge in his nerves. He wants to be touched.
Oh, he wants.
Tenebrae has turned away from temptation and its deep yearning. It was easier when all he knew was war, when every touch was violent and filled with malice. It was even easier with Boudika, where her every touch was some sort of exquisite agony.
He breathes.
Elena is like none of those things. He swallows his yearnings down and lowers his gaze to look at the fae-girl. She is smiling and there is something of Solis in her. It makes him hungry and yet, he knows she is nothing like the sun. Even as she stands close, like an ember. He is the touch paper, she will burn him so completely.
There is sweet sorrow in the spaces between them, in the way her breath catches and he counts all the beats she does not breathe, until she does again. He thinks he can hear the way her heart races, he wonders if his is faster or slower. He dares to believe the first.
I am an orphan.
How still he falls, how wide her open heart breaks to him. Her eyes snag upon his, water across the moon. Electric blue into the white lightning of his. He wonders what planets might be blue like hers. He wonders how the sun turns its sky so blue and how she stole a piece of it. Mysterious, wild Elena. Maybe her father is the sun and her mother a winding river. How ironic that would be when his was a Stallion Made to Swallow the Sun.
The first of her confessions has him exhaling low, low for her and then the next comes. The words are small, her voice little more than petals on the breeze. The words are soft, vulnerable, the wind catches them and they are gone in moments.
Yet while her confessions fade, whilst she lays before him the things she is and the things she does not want. Tenebrae is a young child again. There is dust on the road, he can feel the way it chafes his limbs, his knees itch with the memory. In desperation and hunger, in loneliness and sorrow the child Tenebrae follows the trail of caravans praying that they might stop. Praying that this might be the day they take pity on him and welcome him back.
Yet Tenebrae killed his mother and his father ceased to exist (a god creation, made and then so utterly, unmade).
He takes a breath and it is deep with sorrow, deep with want, deep with their shared loss. He wants to be touched, he wants, he wants…
Tenebrae covers the distance she does not, all the space she leaves that offers him salvation. He presses his brow to hers until they touch brow to bridge to nose. His eyes close and he breathes, the smell of her, the sea salt breeze that already claims her skin, the wild flowers that press ther pollen into the caramel of her mane.
“I am an orphan too,” Tenebrae gives her another confession to draw them level. He gives her another confession because this one matches hers. Sun and midnight, so different and yet the same beginnings.
How long do they stand this way? Time ceases, it slows as it reaches them, seconds are hours and minutes a lifetime. When he moves, it should be to part from her, but it is not. Sinful, terrible Tenebrae. Instead he reaches up, smoothing under her mane, his breath hot against her neck. He reaches across her and stops as he holds her. Their hearts beat together as they stand breast to breast. “Did you know your parents?” the question breathes across her skin, it chases his shadows that swirl patterns across her body, sigils of crescent moons. Such sigils seem blasphemous against her sun-hewn skin. Yet already Tenebrae is already damned and so he does not move from where he holds her, where begins to learn of something other than violence.
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