of your own longing;
your need grows teeth
Anandi sees the smile. She sees how quickly it snaps shut, and it sends a tickle of delight down her spine to think I did that. To think, that was for me. It feels like a gift- like an offering- and she treasures it accordingly. And then follows her egregious compliment, and the desired effect: Apolonia blooms, face scrunched with pleasure, and Anandi can’t help but grin.
Toward the bonfires they flutter, like mis-matched moths, yet they linger toward the shadows where Apolonia’s lip at the hip could be mistaken for the velvet night’s embrace, and Apolonia’s cheek might as well be her heart itself, red and warm against Anandi’s shoulder. When you are a goddess of the hunt, a pulse is so much like a prayer.
The kelpie does not visibly respond except in one way: her tail swats at her velvet-skinned companion playfully, knowingly, recognizing: hello there. I see you. I feel you.
It is only the tension, teetering towards the point of snapping, which makes Anandi break the silence with her question. But when Apolonia answers, she wonders if maybe it wasn’t better to stick to the joy of company quiet and soft and wanting.
“I’m sorry.” It’s sincere. She’s sorry for the girl with a dead father, a grieving mother, and- perhaps the most unimaginable for the emissary- a family without siblings. Sorry because every day is a struggle to keep herself from creating more dead fathers, grieving mothers, stick-thin family trees. Sorry because she knows it’s a losing battle- and one of these days, probably soon, she’s going to crack.
And who could ever love someone like that?
She takes the question, which makes her heart tremble, and she tells herself it never crossed her mind. She tells herself it doesn’t matter. This is not about love. “My family is… different. Brace yourself.” She laughs drily, because really Apolonia seems unshakable- surely capable of handling Anandi’s familial oddity. But that damn nervousness is still there, that sense of vulnerability chafing like a collar. “So. Daddy is a misogynist, but I love him anyway.” There’s complete conviction in her voice, but also the barest suggestion of sorrow- It’s difficult to love someone who on a fundamental level doesn’t respect who you are. It skews your self image. But Anandi, stubborn as all hell, put her head down and strove, again and again, for the impossible dream of his approval. (The thing about Anandi that’s important to realize: she believed approval was close enough to love)
“My mother is also my cousin. She’s alright. I don’t think she likes me very much, but...” She trails off with a shrug and an impish grin. That’s her problem, isn’t it? Anyway, the way the Minns were raised was different from how it was on the surface. Rearing a child was a communal activity- and as such the kelpies all shared a sisterly bond, even between mother and daughter. Anandi and her mom bickered like siblings, and held each other with the weary regard of two impulsive predators who never knew when the other would lash out. All in all, theirs was a very natural relationship, for a Minn.
Finally she smiles and her voice grows warm. “And I have six sisters.” Half sisters, technically, but her peopl never used words like half when it came to family. Minn is Minn, you are or you aren’t. (Leto and Lucinda are a different story, a new complication Anandi had never learned a place for. But that’s a whole nother story.) “Four of whom have never in their lives seen dry land.”
The disappointed tone of her voice says it all. Can you imagine? Never seeing- feeling-smelling- all this? To never know the sun, the moon, the chase of hare and deer… it’s such a shame.
Anandi wants more than anything else in the world- more than power, more than violence, more than Apolonia- for her sisters to join her. That longing is exaggerated in every long line of her body, the strain of it visible in each exasperated step that seems to dig defiantly into the earth. The restlessness in her stride, it’s different from the hunger that often seizes her. It’s worse. “It’s so peaceful tonight. I shouldn’t, but I just want to ruin it, you know? Set something on fire that’s not a stupid scrap of paper.” She laughs, girlish and self-indulgent. “I'm the worst emissary ever.”
But here I am anyways.
@
some say the loving and the devouring are all the same thing
☾
