tenebrae
let everything happen to you, beauty and terror, just keep going, no feeling is final
He hears her coming, that uneven gait - of a body that has known so many years, done so many things.
Patiently he waits, for the moment he knows will come, for this is how they have always been: she presses her muzzle to his neck. He feels her breath and it is another wash of familiarity, another gasping moment of remembering.
Tenebrae turns into her. His body wrapping about hers. It is a returning.
I always come back, she says. And he smiles, small and crooked and warm.
"Then we are the same in that." Then a moment, a pause, as if gathering as if - "I have missed you."
And when love was gone. When hearts were torn and ragged and broken apart, what was left but friendship? Lu and Moira, they were who he returned to. Like the moon dalliances with the day and yet returns to the night.
His shadows reach for her, Thia there, pressing the darkness into every dip between his friend's ribs, every stretch of twilight skin. Across her face the shadows trail like fingers, remembering, redrawing her in his mind. Over cheekbones, down the slant of her nose, into the dips of her temples. He remembers it all, Thia breathing it through his conscious.
Tenebrae does little more than smile at her confession.
Sovereign.
"Forgive me, your majesty." He says whiskey rich, soft. It is earnest, for he has always been that. Forever would he be loyal to Denocte. "I always knew you would do well here. I am proud of you."
And you?
Ah, she speaks of love. He laughs, low, rough, coarse as the stone at their feet. It is a sound as bruised and ragged as his heart is, as his back is for all its whip scars. "I am glad you have found love, Lu, but there is no love in my fate."
