[P] separation brings us awfully close

[Marisol]

“He who wants everything loses everything.”

I enjoyed the history lessons of Vespir and Cleopatra. What do you think happened to them? Do you think Cicero and Seneca really killed them?

Marisol stares.

She is not offended, exactly. Isabella is as entitled as any other Terrastellan—more so, maybe—to ask these kinds of questions. (It is, after all, what her family is known for.)

But Marisol has always known the Fosters to be slyer than they are straightforward, more reserved than they are willing to show their true colors, and the unexpected, though refreshing, bluntness of Isabella’s questions catch the Commander almost off guard. Isn’t this a party? A place for dodging the obvious, a place for speaking in tongues? (That’s what she’s always thought of them, at least. Parties are worse than battlefields; there are more ditches, more pitfalls, more mines to avoid. The path is strict and narrow.)

Marisol stares.

She is not offended, exactly, but she is intrigued. And another, younger, more paranoid part of her is afraid to answer, so suddenly and strikingly afraid it makes her blood run cold as ice, because—

Because she knows. She knows the answer, all of its terrible facets and all the parts of the story that don’t make sense, even now, years later. And what kind of leader would she be, laying the weight of that knowledge on the shoulders of some schoolgirl?

Marisol stares. Then, suddenly, her senses break to the surface. She blinks, shakes her head abruptly as if there is water in her ears; and then, finally, she clears her throat with a nervous almost-laugh. Not as though the question itself is ridiculous—but an almost laugh that says, don’t you already know?

“I know what I think,” Marisol answers. It’s a response of truth and confidence. “But you’d be better off asking Vespir than me.” Her lips twist in a wry expression that is almost-but-not-quite a smile. In tandem with the sudden seriousness of her eyes, the iron set of the rest of her face, it implies with some gravity that, despite its seeming ludicrousness, this is not a joke.

Then her whole expression turns to solemnity again, a flash-freeze that even the most oblivious of company would find hard to overlook.

The mood has changed a little. Maybe the room between them is a touch less wild, just a little more restrained; maybe the air has grown a degree colder, such a slight shift it shouldn’t be worth noticing.

But it is. Marisol straightens up. She pulls back her shoulders, draws her posture into a perfect, rigid line. The look in her eyes is not cold, not closed-off, but it is almost a little wary; it begs the question, why would you want to know? And it is a testament to the life she lived growing up that Marisol cannot think of a single inconspicuous reason.

“Ah,” she remarks, “just what a leader wants to hear. That her kingdom’s best historians like keeping secrets to themselves.” Her voice is light again, having lost some of its strain now that the subject has been turned from Seneca and Cicero; in fact, she almost sounds amused, as if this answer is a dare.

If pressed, who would Isabella choose? Her country or her family?

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aimless | kokovi