when is a monster not a monster? oh, when you are the reason it became so mangled
How, he wonders, why? he asks, and the puzzlement is simple: they hurt one another. Their pain comes from a great and terrible well, the type of well that only exists when one—or both—of the offenders understand pain has no depth but, is instead, depthless. Boudika would answer him, that, those words. She would curl her lips back into a terrible smile that is, in no way, a smile, and cry out; I hurt because it is all I have ever known.
If there are many lives we live, Boudika is still falling from a black, black cliff after two men she would give her heart to. She is still giving her heart, it is still gone. Bou— he thinks to calm her? He thinks to explain? Boudika is inconsolable. Boudika is the sea that rages, and remembers, and never forgets. Perhaps she is no longer seeing him in her rage and in her apology; perhaps she sees only blue eyes and green eyes, and all the men that had come before. Perhaps she only sees her father’s devout stare and the smell of whiskey on the wind.
Boudika realises, beneath the lightening and within the furious sea, that Tenebrae wears her crown of thorns. When he took his lashes, it was not only for his desire—of which she knows little—but, instead, her old sentiments.
Boudika!
She shouldn’t come back.
She should let the sea become a salve, she should let it swallow her into the storm. She was never meant to be a woman, no, and that is what her entire life has told her, what every man has ever said—
yet the magnanimity of him draws her back.
In her mind remains the girlish hope that not all of them are the same, that some men are good, and worthy, and—
BOUDIKA!
At last, his true self.
Her vision is not obscured by the darkness; the lightening cracks, and whips, and illuminates the both of them. Do not threaten me.
If only that is what she’d intended.
They are brought together again, in a fierce collision of knees, chests, jaws.
She is tired, now. She wants the sea to take them, and she wants Tenebrae to go. But he cannot. And she cannot leave him in the battering waves. Boudika recognises just how far they’ve drifted from the land and, strong as the Disciple may be, to fight the swell of the storm would be nearly impossible. He looks statuesque with the dim storm light; his face has become all hard angles and the glowing sigil at his brow.
I knew a man, she wants to say.
With a sigil like yours, burned into his skin with gold and copper. It shone with blood—
But she doesn’t.
We have much to discuss, and as he says it, Boudika realises, they don’t even know one another. They are strangers, pulled by some affinity she cannot explain. Where he is darkness, pride, anger, Boudika is now soft in the way a tigress can, sometimes, be soft. Tired, languid, a beast with eyes that deepen, deepen, deepen, and burn.
I can match your wild, savage soul. It is a challenge she would like to meet.
Then, Tenebrae undoes her.
Then, Tenebrae shatters the feral self-confidence she has erected. In one fell swoop, with a blow silent but unrecoverable, he says: But for now, I repeat, show me this safe place you said you knew. That is all I asked of you.
Her throat burns with what she hopes is salt water, but knows to be tears of embarrassment. Even a month ago, Boudika would have stammered out, I didn’t understand, I thought you meant—I thought you meant—
Of course he already knows, what she thought he meant.
She turns her face from him to stare at the sea and steels her breathing. Hot tears burn in her eyes but refuse to fall, and, besides, they seem to be nothing besides sea water. She closes her eyes. “No more tricks.” Boudika promises. Her voice emerges strangely tense, with the sort of brittle fragility of one with a storm of thoughts on their mind.
“I… this is not meant to be a trick. One last time. To get us to… safety.” The thought of transforming again nearly undoes Boudika a second time. She is weary in a way she has not been weary in years; her body aches with the stress of changing shape; but once more, Boudika becomes a crocodile.
This comes slower, more painfully. It feels as if she is forcing herself to fit into a shape, now, not meant for her. The only reason the transformation is within her limits is because of Caligo’s light breaking, briefly, through the clouds—it gives her one last burst of power, and then, then Boudika explains carefully.
It is too far for you to swim. It is better you conserve your energy. I will help you; I know it is a lot to ask, but I will not use my teeth on you again. I know you are hurting, but… I would like to talk. I have words. She swears it in her own mind, inaudible to him. Boudika turns her body so it begins to break the waves, and offers her neck for him to drape a limb over. Her tail, long and powerful and wicked, will propel them more quickly than even her kelpie form.
She does not yet say, I am sorry, but she finds her penance in the rough treatment of the waves and in the way that, as the storm deepens, even the sea seems to punish her. The journey is not an easy one.
"Speech." || @Tenebrae
here is your humble offering, obliterated and broken in the mouth of this abandoned church
