I
f Elena’s anger is cleansing, then Boudika’s is transformative. She is so tired.
She is so fucking tired. Perhaps it is the indecency; that this is simply one injustice too far. She cannot swallow it. It had taken Boudika so much to be vulnerable again; he had made her hopeful, genuinely hopeful for the first time in recent memory—only to dash that gentle, tender dove on the paving stones.
And here is the secondary culprit. Here is the woman who knew, and has the nerve to speak to her in such a way; has the nerve to come to the edge of the sea to mourn.
Perhaps it is the water horse in Boudika; perhaps it is the innumerable animals that have woven themselves into her soul. She had never had the pride of a lion; she had never had the fierce regality of an osprey; she had never had the determination of a leopard seal on the hunt. But now, she is all of those things and more. Now, she has bled the life from creatures weaker than her. Now, she has survived the unsurvivable, and at last—
It is too much.
The cracking happens when Elena calls her by name.
It begins when she speaks almost chidingly, when she has the nerve to lie, clipped, overtly rational. There is no room for ration in these affairs. Boudika does not know what the lie is—only that it does not feel right, only that these are matters of the heart. And no one can speak of them so cooly and have ever felt anything at all. (She knows she must have—she knows that Tenebrae would not have become involved with her if she were so cool, so disimpassioned).
Boudika’s lips twitch; too quickly, the expression becomes a sneer. Her eyes are too sharp. There is nothing soft left in her. There is nothing but a ravenous hunger. It is not for flesh.
It is for revenge. It is for even scales.
“It doesn’t matter?” Boudika repeats. Her voice does not sound, exactly, like her own. “You’re right, Elena. It doesn’t matter that you lived a lie that could hurt someone else. It doesn’t matter at all, does it, because as far as you were concerned the truth may never come out? I was never meant to know about you, because you were going to pull him away. You speak of a daughter—but I am not here to care about that. I don’t care what lies you are living with. I only care about…about--” Her voice is a lash. “--How the fuck my life, my emotions, don’t matter?”
The fury wanes; it wanes into disbelief, into hurt, and returns to rage. “You—did you never think of what you would do to others? How you could hurt them? Oh, it isn’t you alone—I understand that.” Boudika laughs; cold; humorlessly. “No, you were not alone. He is just as guilty. But how—how could you know, and do nothing? How could you know, and not condemn him?”
How could she know, and let Boudika suffer for it?
There is a moment when it feels as if, all along, she had been the inside joke. The one on the outside. The one kept in ignorance. They had both known.
“The truth doesn’t matter to you. It does to me. So Elena, tell me. Was it worth it? You owe me that.” It takes all of Boudika’s restraint to not step forward; it takes all of her strength to keep from becoming wolf, lion, bear. It takes everything she is to remain woman, trembling, her tail lashing against the sand furiously. Her lips coil back in a wordless snarl; and those eyes flash. Boudika had lived a lie too long to waste any more time on them. She adds, in a voice like fire: "The truth... it can be monstrous, can't it?"
Then, abruptly, Boudika becomes cool. She becomes the placid sea. She becomes the lulling waves, the siren's song. The only place the fire remains is in her eyes, when she says, quite cruelly: "The truth, it can hurt. Do you know what he said to me? Do you know what he promised? He said, I would leave the Night Order for you. He told me that he never promised you that."
If jealousy is a poor look on Elena, then hatred is a poor one on Boudika. It is wicked. It is stark. It is as merciless as the sea in a storm.
Time, time. It's time.
The business of Troy has long been done.
Achilles in lreuke has come home.
And soon you too will be alone.
