T
here is a stinging in her throat that feels like swallowed tears. It opens itself in-between the quiet of their breaths, the slight pause between the inhalation and exhalation. It is true; they have never needed words between them, as she had always needed words as a barrier between herself and others. Before Amaroq answers (and how is it Boudika already knows the answer, in her heart and hearts, a truth wedged there like a blood clot waiting to kill?) the silence between them stretches, stretches, stretches. Rather than growing taunt, it simply grows. It is full of all the things she loves about the sea, and sky, and stars.
They are this, and this alone:
Skin. Salt. Air, between flesh. The restless current of all the world’s oceans, the life teeming beneath the surface. She knows that together they could dance beneath glaciers and into caverns of the deep; they would feel no fear, and their silence beneath the surface would resonate with the beauty of a whale’s song. Boudika holds the feeling; she holds the feeling back with the tears in her eyes and already the rage is eaten up by the greater other, already she is past it, a storm in the open sea.
We did not trade names. He was big, and black-faced, with horns not unlike yours.
But, sometimes, storms take unpredictable courses. Sometimes, they make land. Sometimes, they wrap doves up in their winds and waters and send them out to die over the open ocean.
She does not know how she keeps her face impassive; how she lets the silence grow into her own armour, how the surprise is not a surprise at all but instead only the blood clot rupturing.
“Let’s talk philosophy,” she had said one evening over their studies, rather wickedly. They had been young, then, and brazen in a way that experience would weather.
He flicked his eyes at her, over his parchment papers. They looked hard green in the dim light, instead of their stormy teal. “Oh?”
“If you have to die, how do you want to go?” She leaned closer, to whisper conspiratiously.
The laugh Vercingtorix gave was languid. “There’s a poet who says, ‘find what you love… and let it kill you.’”
“He… is a ghost I know.” Salt, and salt again. Her mouth feels full of it. She stings of it. But rather than dwell, she fixates:
On the smile that is nearly a smile at the edge of his mouth.
On the fact that he is alive, and Vercingtorix did not succeed.
(The fact that Vercingtorix was alive, and in Novus, and how that felt both like fear and elation and disdain packaged into one)>
It is a blessing when they shed the city block by block; when they make their way to the sea. Boudika misses the island; the sentiment overcomes her so briefly she nearly does not recognise it. The magic of it. The wildness.
It isn’t good to be alone.
Oh, Amaroq.
Do you know the way the words wash over her, a baptism of pain, of becoming?
No, she thinks.
It isn’t.
But--there is a certain resolve to accepting one’s fate. How many legends of exile exist, of goddesses and nymphs imprisoned to islands, caverns, cells?
How many times has she awoken to the same?
Boudika knows some are meant to be alone.
The longer she lives, the more she believes it is her due.
But, tonight, she is not. Boudika turns to face him with a sudden, hopeful brightness. Her eyes are bright as fire; the sea is a song in her ears; tonight, they are not the last of their kind. Tonight, they are not alone. “No.” Boudika agrees. “It isn’t.”
He surprises her, then, with the renewal of his promise. It sets him apart, inexplicably, from any man she has ever known before. The integrity of it awakens within her a fierce appreciation; something like love, but woven a bit truer. Boudika presses close again; her nose dips to the vulnerable alcove beneath his throat, the soft center of his chest, where when she stills she can feel his heart beat, beat, beat a beautiful rhythm.
Boudika closes her eyes. The ocean shushes. Denocte crackles behind them with fire and light and life, and other pains seem far and forgotten. “I found him.” she says. “He is not the same.”
It seems noncommittal.
Boudika adds, raising to press cheek-to-cheek. “But neither am I.”
The girl who sought and lost and ran upon the shore so long ago. No. She has grown, too, into something other. And that other stands pressed before Amaroq with wild hair and wild eyes and a vivacious thrumming beneath the surface, a thrumming of life like a song. Boudika smiles; perhaps a little shyly. She steps away from him, and away again, until she is ankle deep in the winter sea. With a lash of her tail, she splashes him with a fan of water. "Amaroq..." Boudika's expression flits coyly. "We are not alone, anymore."
this is who we were, before bones, before dirt, even before light
this untameable expanse, this blue mirror of god. this heaving,
churning proof that we have always been deep, restless souls.
