heaven help us, says your unholy mouth, your hands on my hands
I don't know where the darkness ends and you begin.
I can’t help it, the sea in the rain has always captivated me, a wild, reckless thing.
Her response tells him everything he needs to know of her. The sea has Touched her, as it touches many women, and now she must be watched and guarded for the rest of her life, lest the sea call her to it. He remembers his mother one night, bewitched—he had been so, so young—during a midnight storm not unlike this. The Khashran had been singing to her, as coyotes do to dogs; she had stumbled from their home in pitch black and made it all the way to the beach. Torix’s father had saved her, but she had never acted as though she were saved, only cursed. How dare you come after me she had screamed. How dare you take me from the sea!
After many years, it was easy to pretend it had never happened.
But it had. And he remembers: if a mother would leave her sons and daughters for a siren’s song, then perhaps she was born cursed.
Somehow, Torix remembers where he is at. This is Novus; and through careful observation he has come to understand the residents of the country do not think the way he thinks. The tremble in her voice is something he discerns easily enough; and he lets it soften each and every hard edge of him. “I didn’t mean to be so crude,” he apologises.
Besides, I’m not alone. You are here, aren’t you?
His eyes are alight with something akin to amusement. “Yes,” he says. “But you have no idea what kind of man I am.” Vercingtorix says the words lightly enough they do not emerge threatening. Yet, she is so brave, it seems. She approaches him as though to comfort a broken stranger. And who, he wonders, stands in rainstorms besides the broken?
I really hope you aren’t looking to cause trouble. Terrastella is my home.
He smiles again; but it is less wicked. If anything, the gesture is charismatic, crooked. The smile of a man accustomed to his own handsomeness. “What gives you the impression I’m a trouble maker? Perhaps I’m only easily surprised and worried about a stranger approaching me in the rain alone. You could be dangerous, after all.”
Vercingtorix’s voice is coy.
The thing, he thinks, about men like him is that the lies begin to feel like truths. He is no longer alone and so the dark reaches of his Soul struggle to surface. With a witness, there are so many walls to erect, so many masks to present. With a witness, there is no opportunity to show himself, as he is.
No, Vercingtorix has been wearing other faces since the day he was born. His father’s expectations had demanded that from him, the smooth compliance of a man capable of interacting in any social setting. He was a man’s man; a commander of soldier’s who was not so different from the enlisted; personable and communicative; bright and humorous. The only person who had ever seen him—bare-faced, beneath the lies, beneath the expectations—had betrayed him.
“Why,” Bondike had asked, after a particular altercation with Torix’s father. “Why do you let him treat you the way he does?”
“Because it’s who I am.”
“No,” Bondike said. He stood so close, upon the cliffside. It was beneath the villa of Torix’s house, a narrow crook of rock ledge that was difficult to reach and hard to find. Bondike knew of it, however. They were young, then—so young. Bondike’s red eyes were alight with concern and the whisper, too, full of love. “I know who you are. You are brave, and bright, and kind—and your father tries to strangle all those things from you.”
He wishes the feeling he felt now is sadness; but it is too complex, too jagged. It feels like his guts are full of glass.
But he does not dwell on it long, with the rain against him and the water horses lost to the sea. No, Torix will dwell on it again, when he is alone and staring into a storm. He steps closer to her now, neither warning nor invitation, a gesture that simply is. She is small beside him, small and gold and plain, and the sea sings to her in a way he cannot understand. He knows only broken people come to the sea in a storm and so he asks, remembering the break in her voice: “And what brings you here, besides the sea’s siren song? I know enough of life to know only the weary, heartbroken, or young stand in rain.”
"Speech." || @
prophets sang of you, molded in your father's image
i'm not sure when they stopped; heaven help us, but no one is answering.
