I was hoping you might make an exception for me. In the dark alcove, she wants to. She smiles and her boldness from before is replaced by something tentative, and shy—there is a moment when the night in the cave comes rushing back to her, and Boudika wonders how ephemeral this all is.
How can she make an exception for him, in something even as simple as a dance?
And still—Boudika dances for him. The rituals of her people; the archaic practice of calling storms, or fair winds, or summer warmth. All in summoning dances; all wrought into the tempo of her tapping hooves, until the dance has ended (as all in her old life has ended) and they are nose to nose, breath to breath.
She wants him.
She wants him with a sudden, voracious hunger. And it is a hunger that scares her more than her lust for meat. He showers her with kisses and they do nothing but fan the burning embers of her want; they are dancing and that seems to her to be a new, binding contract. If her people believed dances could summon storms, calm terrible winds, or change the seasons—what does it mean when two nearly-lovers dance? A monk, and a monster?
I remember.
Does he? To be caressed by the waves?
Boudika closes her eyes; she swallows against the welling desire in her throat, uncertain of her own sentiments. She feels strangely girlish, and uncertain; her heart is light, elated, in her chest. I remember.
If he thinks she has not heard him, he is wrong.
It is part of the reason she tears away so forcefully; it is part of the reason she cannot bear to stand beside him any longer.
I remember, he says.
And so does Boudika. The tearing of his throat beneath her teeth; and the press of their bodies later, in the cave, and how she wanted more, more, more.
When, she wonders, will it be enough?
Is this enough?
It is a question she cannot yet ask.
And so Boudika lets the thrill of the chase steal her thoughts and her voice to question; with each long stride she becomes heartbeat, breath, power instead of thought, fear, lust. She is beyond him at first, and down the stretch that glimpses the sea; but then they are beyond it, into the trees, and he begins to close the distance with the dogged tenacity of a wolf on the hunt. Boudika is no longer accustomed to being chased and it sends an electric thrill through her; she laughs, high and bright, when he tugs the ribbon fluttering in her hair. It only entices her to kick up faster; to stretch her legs a little longer—
Then he bites at her neck; her throat; the tender, light scars that lay across her jugular like a string of pearls. Boudika laughs a different laugh; deep, dark, the sea turning over stones in its grip—and she does not slow until he has marked her again and again with the pressure of his teeth, small claiming bites that say to her and her feral soul you are mine, mine, mine and when she stops in the deep shadows of Denocte’s wood, Tenebrae seals the sentiment with a kiss.
Boudika does not yet wonder if he understands the severity of those love-bites; the way they spoke to some primordial corner of her soul and said, yes, you and I are one. And, too, she does not yet question the way his touch evokes a deeper necessity, a more primal want than any she has known before—
It is nearly dizzying; nearly intoxicating. Boudika smells and feels and sees only him; and when she pulls away it is to gasp for air.
“Do you know—“ her voice is coy, playful. As she speaks she drags the words out across his skin with her mouth; she stops crooked beneath his chin, pressed into the hollow of his throat beneath his neck. “Do you know, Tenebrae, the things you do to me?”
She is more woman than she has ever been here, before him. She feels a nakedness she has never known in their gods’ moonlight; a strange and freeing fragility.
There had been barriers between her and everyone she had ever loved. An unforgivable lie between her and Vercingtorix; and then an unforgivable betrayal. Prison bars separated her from Orestes, and guilt, too. Amaroq had been too wild, she thinks now, for a girl just beginning to learn to be free—
But she is bare before Tenebrae. Bare of lies, or guilt, or uncertainty. She is more herself than she has ever been; but Boudika is choked on these words, choked on these sentiments. She does not know how to express them. And instead she draws away to smile simply at him; a smile that radiates the affection she feels, suddenly, for who and what he is.
“If you were not a monk, Tenebrae, what would you be?” she wonders aloud. She adds, perhaps to soften the question: “When I was no longer a soldier, I decided to become a dancer.” The foolish naivety strikes her, at times; why had she done that, when she could have gone on to be anything else? Boudika knows now it was because she had seen so much ugliness. She had wanted the chance to bring beauty, to create it; the chance to make something.
She cannot help but see him and his dark facade, the shadows that dance about him, and wonder what he would have been without Caligo's touch.
"Speech." || @Tenebrae
tell me how all this, and love too, will ruin us
these, our bodies, possessed by light
