Boudika retreats. Her departure, from where they had been pressed together so closely it was as if they were one flesh, is almost agonising. Made worse by the way she says his name.
Tenebrae.
He has never heard his name spoken thus. It is chastising and yet as coy as the smile that curls her lips, wicked, sensual. He feels the cold where she had been. His nerves are electric, his body bereft. He moves as if to follow, but her gaze, crimson and hot makes his limbs like lead, as if vines rise to tangle about his ankles. She holds him there with just a look.
It is bliss. It is sweet, sweet, agony.
Tenebrae is so out of control. There is no part of him this night that feels holy or righteous. His monkhood is obliterated, it lies in tatters in all the forgotten corners of him. She is veiled, by strings of ivy, but her eyes watch him. He feels them predatory, wanton. His darkness billows suddenly seeping in. It unbanishes itself, or maybe he allows his shadows’ return. But they come to him, fleeing in surrounding the Disciple and his girl of the sea. Their courtyard is hidden, but he makes the darkness around them total, even as his eyes never stray from where she restrains him with a simple look.
“I was hoping you might make an exception for me.” The monk breathes, low, low like port, like whiskey slipping through his veins blissful, obliterating.
All that has gone before him, all that weighs upon his mind, it is all forgotten when she begins to dance. Not even the ocean can make her more beautiful than here, in the moment. Tenebrae wonders how he could have ever sworn to become a monk and think he could live a life without women, without Boudika.
She dances before him, tribal each step is instinct, each step is a savage beauty that drives desire deeper and deeper into his breast like arrows and daggers and broadswords. Her dance is frenetic, she moves with wild abandon, swirling around and around and around him until suddenly she stops-
They breath, their breath tangling, like their souls, their hearts, their desires, their-
Her ribbons tremble against her cheek, her nose, her eyes, her lips. They are a veil that he sweeps from her face with his lips - a kiss, a dozen and a dozen more. She presses her shoulder to his, her neck reaching over him. Boudika moves him. It is small, elegant, movements yet to the Disciple it is an earthquake. It shatters his foundations. Boudika leaves no building standing with her dance - with their dance. He is complicit in razing to the ground all he has ever built, all he has ever known.
Together they are sea and divinity. The temple scents of incense and candles moke are upon him. Upon her is the brine of the sea. He commits sins as he moves with her, yet how can this feel so holy, how can the sound of her breath in his ear, so much like a wave, be like a psalm?
She draws him to her beloved ocean and he goes. It feels inevitable and holy, holy, holy. They sway becoming the ocean tide, the rolling waves of the sea… Her breath at his ear, her teeth along the shell of it, biting, grazing. Tenebrae is unravelling beneath her touch. Oh Boudika what of this monk will you leave? Or will you not rest until every part of his vow is stripped from his skin, his blood, his bones?
“I remember.” He murmurs and he does. She tells him what it is like beneath the sea, held, cradled, moved but even in that moment where she pulled him down, down into the black depths of the ocean where she released him, they paused. They remained still, for a moment, staring at each other, held by the sea, cradled together, hidden. Until his earthbound lungs begged for air and forced him up, up, up.
“I remember.” He says again, more forceful. There is no smile upon his lips and he thinks she has not heard him, has not heard the seriousness of his answer, his revelation, his-
Boudika has left him, peeled herself from his body again. Always wild, always untameable, uncontrollable. She leaves him laughing with a voice as sudden as shattering glass. He does not startle, but her loss is as agonising as cuts from a thousand broken shards.
You were made to fly, Tenebrae, She told him as she left, running, laughing like a nereid.
No.
No.
He thinks, he was not made to fly. Not any more, not when she had drowned him and loved him like the ocean loves the moon. No.
By Tenebrae does anyway. He chases her through the night, flying through darkness and starlight, over sand and sea. She reaches the trees, disappearing within and he follows her. Catches up until they are shoulder to shoulder, hip to hip.
Together they fly, away from the ocean, away from the holy shadows of the Order. They run, they run until at last he reaches for a ribbon fluttering in her hair. He tugs it, once, twice. But it is not enough to stop her. He reaches, laying teeth along her throat. Bite after bite, for it is the only language they know, gentle and firm, sharper and softer. He draws her back to him until they slow and stop cocooned in the deep of the woods, so far from the sea, illuminated by the rays of the moon.
And there he kisses her.
|| "Speech." || @Boudika
when is a monster not a monster?
oh, when you love it
