He is drunk upon her kisses, drunk upon her affection. Boudika paints her words across his skin with lips drenched in salt and hot as a volcano’s core. Tenebrae burns beneath her. She makes him feel like Icarus. She strips from him his shadows, she looks deep into his soul and then she sets him on a course that brings him too close, too close to their love that glows bright and dangerous and wild. He falls, like a foolish man. His feathers melt, he tumbles down and down and down. If he rises Boudika is there, if he sleeps she is there too. He is sure in death she will be there, a phantom at his back. He would always look for her, in the way he always turns toward the sea and looks across it expectantly.
Tenebrae will always seek her out. She has laid her marks across his skin. She had branded him in ways not even Elena has. He does not regret how she has changed his body, how she works his heart and his soul like a sculptor does a slab of stone. She turns him into rough beauty with the way she smiles at him.
She is breathless when at last her body peels itself from his. Her smile is the wild ocean. He still tastes the salt of her mouth upon his lips. She holds waves in the corners of her smile. Ah that mouth could ruin him, she could end him with the smallest downturn of her lips. Do his kisses haunt her like they haunt him? Does she rouse at night to the memory of them? His skin remembers her teeth, there is no part of him that does not know her and is irrevocably changed by her.
Tenebrae is still too foolish. He has not yet pushed too far. He does not recognise all the ways he loves boudika, how she changes him deeply. The memory of her, the need for her is already settled deep within the fibers of his being. She has reached places within him he did not know existed. He does not feel them yet, but he will.
Boudika is bare before him, but his foolishness shrouds him as his shadows do. He loves, he loves too deeply, too foolishly. He is drunk upon it. A man condemned to never love and yet so desperate to he has fallen for two. But he does not even know what love is, he cannot scrawl it down on paper or draw it in the sand. He thinks he knows, but he does not. He feels love and yet he does not recognise it. He will not recognise it until it is, maybe, too late. Until his deeds are done, his sins committed, his foolishness and pride and want and need clear like the clouds after a storm, only then will he be able to read what true love is, etched in clean air across the devastation of his stormy pride. He will feel the damage first. He does not mean to commit the crime and unleash the storm, but there is no forgiveness for ignorance.
Boudika asks him, girlish, sweet and wild in the way she stands with her coloured ribbons. He thinks maeve who stood before him with her ribbons, only hours before. She has so much growing up to do. He tried to make her braver. He hopes she might have all the bravery of Boudika and yet more.
The kelpie is a siren call and he goes to her. Drawn across the wood to stand before her, close and not yet touching. Does he know all the things he does to her? No. But he wants to know them all. He wants her to paint them across his body until he knows, he understands. “No.” He breathes. “Will you tell me?” He asks, small with eyes so wide. Tell him Boudika. Tell him so he might understand when he has pushed too much and realised how far he has fallen. Tell him so he will feel what love is and how it hurts and obliterates.
What would he have been if not a monk? It might be in that long moment after she asks, before she softens her question with her confession, that reveals how little Tenebrae knows of anything outside the Order. He has not thought for a moment what he might be, what else he would have done. Before Caligo called him he was an orphan boy fighting for scraps of food to live off. Before Caligo called Tenebrae was, simply, waiting. Waiting for his goddess. He was made of a Stallion who Swallowed the Sun. His fate was made then. Tenebrae was made to serve Caligo, he knows nothing else. He has never considered anything else.
He smiles, that moment of confusion covered with the smile as drowns himself in the memory of her dance. She drowns him in everything, always. “It makes sense.” He breathes. “There is nothing more perfect for you.” The monk says, honesty blatant and stark in the way he watches her, bathes her, cradles her in his starlight-bright eyes. “I- I was made for this role. I cannot think of anything else I would do.” He breathes in the darkness, his shadows reach for her, beg for her. “What would you have me do or be, Boudika. If I were not a monk?”
And he knows he would give her everything.
|| "Speech." || @Boudika
when is a monster not a monster?
oh, when you love it
