tenebrae
let everything happen to you, beauty and terror, just keep going, no feeling is final
Hope.
That is what they said he had given both Elena and Boudika. But all Tenebrae would think is that, in his foolishness, he has deprived them all of hope.
It was a precious thing, as rich and golden as his fae-girl’s skin.
His fae girl.
His.
Elena was, no longer, his. Had she ever truly been? When she lay with this monk was she also not with Azrael?
The monk hopes she loves Azrael more. That when she whispered I love you against his skin, upon his lips, it meant something different. He hopes.
He is a fool with his gold that is not gold at all. He squandered hope like he squandered love and in so doing he sold a part of himself into the slavery of sin. Now Tenebrae is incomplete. He flounders like a sheep fallen from a cliff and washed out to sea. He was never supposed to be in this environment of love. Caligo was his shepherd, he should not have strayed. That’s why there were vows for men like him - for monks.
Elena looks to him with her wide blue eyes. They are filled with all the things she does not say. He can see them, feel the way they press upon her tongue and the way the weight of them in her gaze is like a fingertip upon his pulse. He feels his blood thumping, thumping. Tenebrae does not know the words to her questions. Neither her thoughts that press down upon him, upon her. The thoughts that want a tongue to cry them out. Tenebrae would pull them from her tongue, if he could. ANything to relieve their shared agony and this terrible parting that comes with the teeth of betrayal and the claws of departing.
But Tenebrae does not know the venomful bite of betrayal. Not yet. He does not know that when Elena says, Elliana, she speaks the name of his daughter and hers. Instead, all he feels is the venomless bite of jealousy, shallow and vapid in his veins. The monk wants a chance at a family. It is a thing he should never hope for.
Tenebrae looks to Elena and knows that they are love and loss, hope and destruction, contentment and jealousy. They are pure and yet tainted. He wants from her all the words she does not speak. Still that dangerous part of him wants to press his lips to her cheek and beg of her, speak, so that all may be well.
Ah. He is such a fool.
They hold each other and he wonders why it feels so much like clutching.
It feels like need and remembering and grasping onto all that might disappear when they part, when time sweeps in to smooth over the dunes of their love and render their love life lost. Or maybe, a vain and dangerous part of him hopes, it might never be lost at all. Maybe their love was a river that carved out a valley through their being and irrevocably changed them…
Me too.
The Disciple stares at his fae-girl.
Did she speak of her regret like his? Or her wish that Elliana was his?
Now it is Tenebrae’s turn for his eyes to be so heavy with things unspoken, questions unanswered. But some, words are never meant to find the tongue, the teeth, the voice or even an answer. So he does not speak. Just as Elena did not. They do not speak the things that matter most.
And then she is leaving. She is turning towards a girl that calls her Mum, and finds shells upon a beach. From that voice, like bells, like angels, the monk hears a girl he wants to meet. She becomes so real he could touch - could see on the last day that he sees anything at all.
He turns away as Elena leaves.
A monk will content himself with only a voice and only a name. He does not need to see the girl.
Only he does and yet, he does not know it. He will spend an eternity regretting not turning to the daughter who calls out for her mother in that moment.
