tenebrae
let everything happen to you, beauty and terror, just keep going, no feeling is final
She is drinking.
Tenebrae can barely remember how they got across the ice to here, to the point at which the simper left her lips and was replaced by glistening alcohol. She throws her secrets at him in between drinks. Each one feels like an arrow, but they are not striking him. For once, the pain of secrets is not his to bear. These are not his secrets.
Yet he has secrets like them.
The monk listens and darkness seeps. For every drink that slips between her lips and down her throat, darkness descends, thick and total. It breathes between them. If Tenebrae knew what was to come, he might recognise this as one of the moments in which his shadows began their change.
They press across the Dusk girl’s lips, as if they can mop up the residual drops that sit there. The monk knows it would do nothing for already there is a reservoir of alcohol within her. He is sure it will already be numbing her nerves and addling her mind. He never answered her when she asked if he drank. But his lips are still dry and he holds her with his sombre gaze. That is answer enough.
Maybe he should keep his secrets to himself. Maybe he should not reveal to her his own pain, yet his compassion is bleeding out of him. Her pain has already cut him. The stare of her blue eyes is a dagger pressing along his skin.
One.
“I am a terrible monk and an even worse brother to my fellow Disciples. I will be punished for my secrets.”
Two.
“I wish I was not a monk and yet I never want to leave the Night Order.”
Three.
“I am jealous of my friend’s family because I wish it was my own.”
He wonders which is worse, secrets delivered with alcohol, or those driven out with all the abrupt violence of three nails hammered into wood. One. Two. Three. He did not drink once, he did not swallow or even blink as her served out his secrets in a guilt soaked answer to hers.
The monk takes a breath and he feels like his laughter only a few moments before were actually a lifetime ago. The monk has almost forgotten what it felt like.
Of her third secret he says:
“I think love is the most painful and violent thing I have ever known. It is both wonderful and awful.” And he knows how unwise he is this moment.
Of her second secret he says:
“We always want what we cannot have. If you had wings, you would not be you and everything would be so different. You might not be any happier than you are now.”
Then, of her first secret he says:
“Then are you too afraid to voice or act out a complaint, Bella?”
And the monk tilts his head and feels the way his whip-scars pull across his back. Sometimes, if you are not made for something, you cannot help acting out against it.
