I SAY: I AM AN OLD DOG LICKING ITS SORES JUST AS THEY SCAB OVER.
I say: I want to be raw flesh and no hurt.
She follows her where she leads, her chest knotting with some strange mixture of envy and desperation. Envy at all the ways that she is warm and she knows that she can’t be, and desperation to be – anything but alone. (And then – an equal desperation to be alone and decaying. She is, most often, a mass of ugly turmoil.) The woman tells her that she is glad for company of her own age; she spends most of her time with her daughter and her ward.
For a moment, she wonders what it would feel like to have a family. Children. She has never thought about it.
(She crushes the line of inquiry almost immediately.)
“I see,” she says, finally, though she doesn’t really see at all. How could she? “I’m glad that I could provide some company, then.” She wonders where her daughter is, and her ward; but she doesn’t ask after them. She has never been good at things like that. (It barely even crosses her mind that she probably should.)
As they reach the water, she cleans out her wound, and, if it hurts, it does not show on her face. She watches her work in silence, and she does not say a word until the woman asks a question that she has no idea how to answer: “Tell me a story that has not happened yet. If you were brave enough to do anything, what would you do?” There is a pause, and then she adds, “Be brave.” Her eyes are terribly blue. Like a clear sky.
The coast is covered in storm.
She hesitates. When she finally speaks, she stumbles over her words. “I don’t…know,” she admits, still softly, unsure of what to say. If she were brave enough to do anything – if she were brave enough to do anything, she would have tried to escape as a girl, or done Viceroy in herself; she would have been a better queen, she is sure, less tolerant, less hesitant; she would have fought back against every indignity and disgrace, every betrayal by her people, every slap across the jaw (literal or metaphorical); she would have told the people that she loved (in every way that she has ever loved anyone) that she loved them, but the words have never left her mouth, and now they are gone from her; she would have killed Raum herself, run him through to the hilt of Alshamtueur, and she would have felt no remorse for it; she would have replied to so many unopened letters; she would have spat in Solis’s face, refused any paltry consolation a god had ever offered her; she would have returned home, when her work was done, and shown her face again, crawled back from the grave that sought to hold her. But Seraphina has never been very brave, and, even more than that, she has rarely been granted the freedom to choose.
(But maybe that is just a lie that she tells herself because she does not want to admit to the truth of the most painful things that she has done, the worst and most self-imposed losses that she has incurred. She is lonely, and it hurts like a knife in the throat. She wishes-
She just wishes that once, someone had stayed even when she had tried to run. Even when she didn’t want them to, or when she did but felt too guilty to let them. But that is too much to ask of anyone, and she knows it.)
Her gaze steadies on the woman, and she licks a thin coat of salt from the dark curve of her lips. Her mouth tastes unbearably dry. “What would you do?”
Her voice is soft, and uncertain – she doesn’t know what to say, or how to answer.
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"Speech!" || "Ereshkigal!"
I'M IN A ROOM MADE OUT OF MIRRORSand there's no way to escape the violence of a girl against herself.☼please tag Sera! contact is encouraged, short of violence
