Tenebrae does not know where Boudika’s thoughts go when she stands beside him, warming the air between them, setting his nerves alight where they touch, skin to skin. If he knew, he might wonder if her sign of love is truly not to ever touch, to deprive themselves of that. He would dare to suggest that it was an ill kind of love. Tenebrae is young and untried in love, yet he learns. He is sure love can be grounded in touch, that kisses are healthy too.
Shall I never kiss you again? He would ask her, the question curling over the shell of her ear.
Tenebrae thinks he knows love, and maybe he does. But his love is still a wild and untried young thing; an unbroken colt. He is green in this field of love. The man needs to grow roots and mature with the frigid winter pain of an ending relationship, then bloom into the flowering of a new, spring love. The monk needs to leave the field altogether and neither sow, nor reap its fruit.
I can’t She says, not in words at least. Boudika smiles too and tenebrae know he has spoken, acted wrong. The fever of romance has left her. There is no joy in her smile. It is something primordial. The boy, drunk in love slips away at her look and the warrior slips in. The warrior who remembers how he looked at her as just an adversary that very first time. An adversary to spar with, a girl with a wicked, bloody smile and a trident in her grasp.
It is perfect for you Tenebrae had breathed, for Elena taught him to dance and he knows now how much like war it is. The grace of fighting, the push the pull the proximity, the skin upon skin, the need to move well. It is primal and deep and sinks into his flesh as if he has always known how to dance. But his answer pushes her away, her crimson eyes grow dark and cool as maroon blood. He has extinguished the fire within her and he breathes his confusion across her skin.
Boudika touches him, her muzzle running like silk along the muscle of his throat, his shoulder. Her tail rubs, feline, across his ankles. For once Tenebrae does not yield, he does not reach to return her touch. He stands as he had once, when her touch was a new and strange thing. But his body knows her, his skin cries out its remembrance of the familiarity her touch brings. It sends a rocking shiver slipping down his spine. She affected him then, she affects him now. Even as her unempassioned smile extinguished the heat in his eyes as his touch, his words extinguished the heat in hers.
Tenebrae watches her, his ears twixt to capture every word that tumbles from her lips. It was this, it was always this. He knew, he warned her, he fell and dared to dream without consequences as only children do. The monk dared to think he could succumb to this burning need for her and not be forced to reap the consequences. She makes him heed them. Oh bold, wild, Boudika presses into his ears the things he does not wish to hear.
“Is that what you wish?” Tenebrae asks at last, “For me to be your lover?” The question is acid in his mouth. He watches her. No longer a love drunk boy, but a warrior as if ready to go into battle. He is no longer reckless. Tenebrae knows what she has cost him and it runs deeper than the scars across his throat.
There is ire bubbling within him. It builds like embers reigniting. He moves to her as he had once, as he had so many times before they fell punch drunk, before they succumbed to their primal attraction. She has turned to ash before him. The taste of it is upon her tongue, it hurts him to see it in her gaze. They stand close, her words heavy between them. She reminds him of the moon and the sea, drags him back to that cave where his throat was pulled open by her teeth, where she told him of others.
How has Tenebrae made her turn to ash now? Her eyes grow round as a pool, as a tear drop threatening to fall from glistening lashes. The monk drinks her in as he stands before her, his posture dark, dark, dark. “Do you love me, Boudika?” Tenebrae breathes, responding to the ultimatum she lays between them. The words graze themselves past his lips and press themselves hot and sharp upon her cheek, her ears. “Because I see you as the waves, the salt, the sea. But my brothers will not. They will see you as an obstruction to Caligo, not part of her magic, her world. I am in your blood, Boudika...” His lips trail the path of the artery that thrums in the side of her neck. His ascends until it pulses, pulses beneath his lips. “...But am I in your heart, your soul? What you ask of me demands a hefty price. I am willing to pay it...” And oh how his throat closes at the last, knowing the pain, the cost of being found out. “You said everyone leaves you. I won’t - yet I will only do it for mutual love.” He thinks of the new scar upon his throat. “Is this love Boudika, or just animal attraction?” Tenebrae tips up his chin, until her scars upon his neck catch the moonlight filtering down between the trees. “Do you still just want to claim me, turn me?”
|| "Speech." || @Boudika
when is a monster not a monster?
oh, when you love it
