“I hope that was worth it,” Heartfire had once said to her when she had thrown herself to her possible death in front of a man she had never met before. Elena had stared up at her from the pit she had fallen in with her own reckless nature. And despite herself, she had smiled. Was it worth it?
She runs to the sea because it is where she feels alive, stands on the rocky shore like she is perched on eternity. Snow blankets down, cold, and it coats her skin like scales of ice. Night fell in Terrastella, and the whole world seemed to become varying shades of inky black, fading into pale silvers as the moon washed down across the land. Her golden coat seems almost insignificant under twilight as opposed to the daytime sunshine. She knows behind the clouds, far above in the sky, there were stars everywhere. Pinpricks of flickering gem-bright colors you could make out the longer you stared, but looked plain and cold and silver at a glance. She closes her eyes, wishes those clouds away and she fills the sky with them as far as she could see. They are stunning. She wonders if there were ever once a time when everyone was not enthralled by the starlight. She wonders how long ago it was. Maybe at the beginning, way beginning, when darkness still swallowed the world.
She is dreaming of people far away. Of Lilli and her blue eyes, of her mother and what she would have thought seeing her own smile reflect in that of her granddaughter’s. Of her grandmother, who sits in Windskeep, alone, but not quite. She dreams of her godfather, and whether he still holds that kingdom up with both hands, or if he has learned to let go for the sake of his family.
Elena is still dreaming of them, shivering, standing beside the water, not far from her home. She should go back inside. If Elli woke she would be worried, she would go find Nic in the spare bedroom and awaken the young solider and both would be out here and freezing, slipping in the snow. This was no place for children. It was no time for children.
She is thinking of a star man, who she likes to imagine was not born, but shed from the night sky. Her own piece, her own star, made just for her. It is a selfish thought, but one she thinks all the same. Even if she shouldn’t, but Elena, lately has been doing so many things she shouldn't do. She continues to stand in the cold, so close to the sea that it sings icicles into her lungs with every breath. She should be going back to bed, back to her daughter, to Nic. She should be going back. But she looks to the sea and to winter and those blue eyes burn like glaciers.
oudika dreams of sinking ships; she dreams of sails full of water, and captain’s quarters with the tea table still set, the atlas with courses plotted and reeling compass spinning through the deep. Which way is north, underwater?
She dreams, more specifically, of drowning. Of what a scream tastes like when it becomes nothing except for bubbles of air, cascading toward the flittering light above. Of what life tastes like gritted between teeth; wrapped softly in wave after wave, in froth, in the absence of light and wave and sound and thought. There are days she thinks she died, long ago, in the storm. And there are nights, lately, when she wished she had.
Perhaps it is her loneliness. It gnaws on her as winter does the world. The sights she had once seen in full colour seem grayscale; the joys of her recent past transform from happiness into contempt. How had she been so happy? How had she been so foolish?
Do you know what else she dreams of, in her grayscale world, full of contempt and loneliness?
Sbe dreams of eating men.
There was one, two nights ago, she lured from a party in Denocte to the sea. He was a sailor, from a foreign land, and in all the ways that mattered she knew he would not be missed. Come away with me, she had whispered like molasses to the fly. Come to the sea with me, she had coaxed.
And once there, she had thought of all the ways she could kill him. How she wanted to bleed him out in the sand, or take him dancing into the sea. It would have made her feel more alone, she had thought. So why not undress him from his skin, coax from him something even more savoury?
Virginity, she’d been told, had always had an aura of value; of pricelessness. She had heard boys whisper of it in the academy; of the taking of it, like another conquest of war. Vercingtorix had told her how he had lost his; and she had held her jealousy between her teeth like a seed that could crack them if she bit too hard. And Tenebrae had said, there is another girl.
It would have made sense for her to find Amaroq, and seduce him, instead of some sailor with golden hair and blue eyes and a softness that reminded her of sand in the sun. It would have made sense for her to find someone that would placate the bitter pounding of her heart; to suture the jagged edges of her broken heart with the softness of their empathy. Not a man that tasted like cinnamon and rum, almost too sweet. Boudika hadn’t even know his name. Only that he said, after, you’re striped like a tigress.
She had hoped it would have felt more like taking her destiny, and her heart, back into her own power; she had hoped it would make her feel free instead of caged, powerless. Instead, it made her feel even more foolish, after; cheap and easily discarded. It turned her hardness brittle. It turned her sorrow into splinters.
It made her dream of sinking ships.
And those are the thoughts in her mind when she sees the palomino on the beach. Those are her thoughts when she remembers how Tenebrae’s face had shifted when she’d become a palomino mare; and Boudika knows this one cannot be the same one, whoever she was. Boudika knows--and yet the feeling in her stomach is the same one she had felt every time she has ever sunk to the bottom of the sea.
Boudika emerges from the winter shore with the heat from her body steaming into the cool air. Her mouth is long and garish; her mane tangled and full of seashells and seaweed. She cannot remember the last time her lungs filled with air instead of water.
It burns.
When she approaches, she is monstrous; she is a lashing tail and a body gaunt with the winter sea. She smiles; but it is not a smile.
“Elena.” The voice rasps out. Water rushing over rocks. Water rushing back into itself. There is something cruel when she asks, “Do you know a man named Tenebrae?”
She laughs.
It is more like an osprey’s shrill cry, or a shark’s teeth slicing flesh.
“Better yet, did you keep the wolves away?”
§
When is a monster not a monster?
Oh, when you are the reason it has become so mangled.
Here is your humble offering,
obliterated and broken in the mouth
of this abandoned church.
The months, the years, have not been kind to Elena.
She can feel it—the way that they have all accumulated on the shores of her heart. She can feel the bruises and the lacerations. She can feel the way that it has eaten away at the core of her, leaving her hollowed out, her very bones turning to dust beneath the pressure of it.
She felt pieces of herself falling away, crumbling each day.
Elliana is her saving grace, and Elena worries she puts too much weight on the child. She would never know what to do if something happened to her. She knew the knot in her stomach would stay there forever, that it was what it meant to love and be in love, to care about something so much that you would spare nothing to protect them.
It was the most beautiful burden.
She comes from the waters, and Elena can taste the sea on the air. There is a part of Elena that beats like wild wings against her chest.
There is part of her that wants nothing more than to throw herself out into the wild wind that is the sea and ship life and live for years. She wants to lose herself into the winds and the seas and then discover who she is in the crossfire. She cannot find the source of it within her anymore. There is something lost, something forever changed. There’s something that has melted and reformed and left her alone—alone. Looking at Boudika now, she can almost feel it. She can barely brush her fingers against the edges of it and taste the normalcy of it. When she was just a girl, so assuming, just an orphan, play beside a glistening lake, with towering oak trees and tender willows. Before she swallowed galaxies and was lit afire. Even all of the drama and complexity, even all of that was simple.
So simple compared to this. “Tenebrae,” she repeats, mulling it over in that detached voice of hers, letting her eyes wander to the horizon and beyond. “I do know a man named Tenebrae,” she admits. “Quite well in fact.” And she doesn't know why she says this. No, she knows, she does know, she just hates to admit it, it is far easier to feign ignorance. “The wolves are not away as much as in Denocte.”
She can smell salt on her skin, and feel the way she is the feral, feels the recklessness inside Boudika. Elena feels jealousy and want and a wild, persistent longing. Tragedy looks beautiful in the blue bruises of Elena’s eyes. She can feel it then, the power she has that Elena had not been sensitive enough to notice before. Shape shifter, skin walker, face changer. It was all the same. And Elena did not trust it, did not understand how Tenebrae had been able to. Aletta said it all came back to the basic law of Magic: that if something was taken, something had to be given. If they took so many shapes, what was left?
Elena looks at her with pale blue eyes and she wonders, what is left of Boudika?
And then she feels like she is on fire and blue eyes ice over to be as sharp as winter.
She should not blame her for any of this, she should blame Tenebrae, she does blame Tenebrae. But she is the woman, not even the other, she is the woman, (Elena is the other) and Elena imagines that Boudika could drag the monk away from her with a single glance, with a roll of her shoulders. Her tongue silver, her words like honey.
“Boudika.” The Champion of Community breathes, in between something sweet and feral. She would be lying if she said she had not thought about this moment, had not considered it, but playing scenarios and walking into them are two entirely different things. And she isn't sure what she should say. “Why are you on the shores of Terrastella?” She asks, planting those feet firmly in the sand beneath her feet. This was her soil, her home, her love. And it is in this moment that she no longer thinks of herself as Elena, the girl from Hyaline, the girl from Windskeep, from Paraiso. She is of Terrastella, from Terrastella. She is Dusk. And it gives her a sense of pride she may not deserve, that she may not have earned, but pride all the same. “What duty could Night Court’s Champion of Community possibly have here?”
ost, if not everyone, realizes at some point they are not who they were meant to become. Something, somewhere, went awry. A decision wrought unforeseen consequences. The truth carries itself away, a leaf down a stream, a fish flashing briefly in the turbulent current. Somewhere, the path becomes overgrown; the brambles thicken, the way no longer clear and easy. We fall to the wayside; we fall astray. We lose who we were meant to become, brief and flitting and bright as dust motes in the sun.
This truth pierces Boudika as deftly as a blade.
I do know a man named Tenebrae.
The words should not be enough, but they are, to solidify the suspicion Boudika has founded on nothing aside from a glimpse flitting across Tenebrae’s face. You do not deserve to look at me, she had spat.
No. Instead, Boudika became the base of any woman in the world: chestnuts, grays, blacks. Tenebrae’s face only twisted when she became as gold and bright as the sun, as innocence, as light on water.
Is it you, Elena?
The other woman?
Once, it would have been enough for Boudika to pity her. Once, it would have been enough to evoke anything other than this apathetic, dull numbness.
No, Boudika thinks.
This was not who she was meant to become.
She closes her eyes; the cool air makes her feel light, nearly baseless. She could become anything other than woman, if she wanted. A tigress or a wolf or an eagle or a fish. Anything, to not feel like this. Elena is speaking; the shores of Terrastella; Night Court; words that mean nothing. Nothing. It is her voice. It is the way she says Tenebrae, the way she says his name. The way she hardens to Boudika's presence; the way she changes the subject, begins to assault her with words, questions that could quickly become accusations.
Those are not the reasons Boudika is here.
She opens her eyes. They are not cold.
They are nothing. As placid as glass. As serene as still water.
“Did you know?”
She does not care about politics. She has hardly been Denocte’s Champion of Community for years; since Amaroq; since the sea took her. No. Is that not one of the many brambled paths? Is that not where she was once led astray? Boudika’s soul is clamoring; it rises tumultuous within her, a thousand shapes, a hundred possibilities: all of them say run, run, run. Somehow, she remains steadfast. Somehow, she remains calm. The sea is there, behind her; somehow, that resolves her.
There is no pride to Boudika when she asks, her voice at first steady and then quivering, “Was it worth it?”
When she asks, she does not know if she is asking Elena or herself.
“There is no one who will ever mean as much to me as you do.” Vercingtorix’s voice was soft. It surprised her from her idle dozing; she had thought he had been asleep. It was one of the first days after he had regained consciousness from his fall; he was still hospitalized. It jarred Boudika awake. Her attention snapped to him.
In that moment, she almost told him. Sometimes, she wished she had; it might have spared her the pain of falling for him more deeply, more irrevocably.
Torix’s voice broke when he added, “You are so much more than my companion.”
He would never admit his love; they were brother’s in arms; comrades in the most intimate sense of the words. They had shed blood together; they had saved each other in all the ways men could.
That was before he started the innumerable affairs; that was before Cillian. That was before she told him the truth about the Old Magic, about her father, about her lie.
Boudika had not known what to say. Eventually she confessed, “I know.” Because there was nothing else to acknowledge.
Now:
I know it wasn’t.
Now:
Nothing about this was worth it.
Boudika feels embarrassment; she feels foolish, to have thought it had meant anything at all. She remembers the cavern by the sea. She remembers the way he had always returned to her. But perhaps it was only because she was some untamable beast, an unclimbable mountain, an unconquerable sea. Were men not drawn to such conquests, such feats of daring and power?
Standing across from Elena, she begins to draw comparisons: how Elena is soft where she is hard, how she is light where Boudika is dark, how she is gold and bright and beautiful where Boudika is scarred and masculine and worn. She looks gentle.
It is not easy for her to forget Tenebrae’s heartfelt confession, his desperation when he had said, I would not leave the Order for her.
But it does not matter. Because Boudika, and all that she is, was not enough to fill him. She was not enough to bring him happiness, or assurance, or—
And she knows she can go on with all of the things she was not enough of.
Her mouth is dry when she says, “I am on the shore because all the shores of Novus belong more to me than to you.”
That, at least, she can say.
That, at least, is true.
A hunger—an envious, volatile hunger—begins to grow in her. She recognizes it for what it is: bitterness, anger, regret. Just because she recognizes does not mean she will stop it.
“Do you ever think,” Vercingtorix began, earnestly. It was one of the few times he glanced at her with such raw expression. “Well… do you ever think, we can be more than those who raised us?”
She had laughed; young and joyful and invincible, the whole world was whatever she wanted to make it. “Of course,” she had said. “Of course, we will be. We have each other. We will make sure of it.”
Boudika’s father was the loneliest man she had ever known. He did not share sentiment; he did not confess love; he died alone, with few to grieve him.
When she dies, she thinks, no one will grieve her.
It makes standing across from Elena all the more unbearable. But rather than want to crack, to break, to scream, to shout—
She only wants to burn. She only wants to consume. To make the whole world feel this raw hurt, feel this burden of wasted potential, of not being enough.
“What could Terrastella’s Champion of Community have to do with one of Caligo’s sacred monks?” Boudika’s voice is sand, salt, storm. Boudika is every bitter whip of wind stinging against her face; Boudika is every ship ever sunk in the sea. Her tail lashes and her lips draw back nastily from her teeth. The expression is a mockery of a smile, sharp-edged, predatory. “What duty could she have had, I wonder.”
Then, that cruelness breaks. Boudika asks, rawly: "Did you know? About me?"
§
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.
“I think it's a lot to ask, to belong anywhere." Michael had told her before a crab scurried across the shore. ”I think some places want you, and some don't, but I don't know that a person ever belongs.”
Some places want you. Terrastella wants her, Elena reminds herself. She can tell in the way the people here smile at her, can see it in the way even the smallest residents ask for her at the hospital to fix the cut on their knee. She can tell in the way she has not felt so happy in a place in so long. Terrastella, from the hospital, to the swamp, to the sea, to the grassland, it wanted her.
And some don’t. She can feel every inch of Boudika, every emotion passing over her, under her, beside her, through her. It is emotions she herself has felt, and it tastes (burns) like a white hot iron down her throat as she can no longer tell where Boudika’s emotions end and hers begin. When the knife strikes against her, Boudika, as sharp as only truth can be, it may as well be Elena’s heart it stabs against.
There is a song through the sea, a discordant and disharmonious melody of corrupted static and white noise that rises in pitch like a scream… that pierces the very waves and depths, that stretches across the foamy shores and all the grains of sand. Bubbles in the blackness begin to rise and like boiling waters it grows and grows until all the sea is raging and stirred. Waves ebb and flow and pound against the stone and sand: against rock and boulder alike.
There is a song through the sea.
It sings like a warning, like a bullet, cutting into the woman on the shore.
Did you know? She asks.
And suddenly it is that day in the hospital all over.
She struggles to breathe—to find the ground beneath her. She feels a rare anger that is cleansing. It is so white hot that she can tell herself that it is pure. It burns through the paper thin gossamer of the old her, the old old her. Even in this new life, with so much of her sealed away, so many secrets, she feels that sorrow and grief that feels like fury in her mouth. It leaves the normally calm, steady woman vulnerable to a turbulent fire within her breast.
There is too many sicknesses in Elena for her to count—too many diseases both natural born and earned that crawl up her throat and clog her mouth. They are cotton on her tongue and sludge in her veins, and yet she finds that she does not mind. She makes her home amongst the monsters of the world and sings her love; she picks up the shattered pieces of glass and holds them to her chest even as her fingers bleed.
To be anything but a woman. Elena’s answer would so mirror something from her childhood. A tree, to touch both above her and below her. She would have no need for men and their shadows and their secrets. Of course, she would still have Elli. Whatever she may be, a permanent flower growing on a branch far above her.
Was it worth it?
Had any of this been worth it? She thinks about her answer, if she had been asked the night where she had fallen to pieces, she might have said no, but ask her any night after Elliana was born and Elena would say it was. All of it was worth it for her child, her beautiful, perfect, sweet, intelligent, creative daughter. Whose face passes Tenebrae’s shadows across it, whose shoulder is marked with Caligo’s marking even if she is Dusk’s child. “Boudika,” her voice is steady and she punctuates the sentence with a nearly clipped version of the name. Was it worth it? She would plunge a knife into her own heart time and time again if it meant she could keep Elli, would endure all the agony for entirety like her own wretched purgatory if it meant she always ended up in the same fate where she woke to see Elliana’s bright blue eyes every morning.
The fury that fills Elena when she stands there and listens to Boudika is holy and direct and it slices fire hot through her as she narrows winter blue eyes at the Denocte girl. Envy ricochets around the women on the beach, kicking up sand, startling oceans, and darting like sea birds. Jealousy has always been a poor look on Elena, she has never worn green well.
What did she have to do with Caligo’s monks?
And then again, did she know?
She wants to be cold. She wants to be able to remain closed off and frigid, but she remembers something, something that turns her blood hot with shame and sorrow.
She was never enough.
Not enough to share everything with.
Not enough to view as a partner in life.
Never enough.
Still, she doesn't want to show this weakness, not to Boudika, not to her. So she wipes the sadness from her gaze, instead gulping in air as she breaches the ocean of her thoughts. “It doesn’t matter if it was worth it,” she lies, because she wants it to not matter. She wants to not feel so much pain at the memory of it. “If I loved him, if I kept him, my child, my daughter, would be his, but she isn’t.”
Such a lie.
But she wants to tell it because she thinks it means she has moved on, and she leaves both Tenebrae and Boudika behind, as the tide rises. (In truth though, Elena is not so far ahead of them, she is drowning in the undertow.)
“He had me fooled,” this time a truth exchanged, her heart rattling in her chest. The words come crawling up her throat. “I knew there was another—but I did not know who,” she slips a further truth onto her tongue. “I thought maybe I could be enough to pull him away.” Like she pulled him into the dance of the fire, like she pulled him into the ocean, and like how they were both pulled into the lake, into sin, into love—into Elliana.
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.
In times of high emotions, of turmoil, Elena thinks about the women in her life who have influenced her most. Different faces come to her at different times, but today, she knows who stands at her left and at her right without even having to turn to see them.
Aletta on her right.
Lilliana on her left.
The mare who was once dappled when Elena had been young is as silvery and white as a full moon. She is beautiful, and the wisdom coats her face like frost. “Own up to your mistake, Elena,” she says, in that tone that is so familiar, the same voice she used when Elena first ran after Aerwir, when she was so steadfast to become a fighter for all the wrong reasons. “This was not one of your finer moments, but we are mortals and therefore prone to mortality.” But Aletta is not so aware of the immortality pumping through Elena’s veins.
Lilli rests her head on her friend’s shoulder, she has been through this herself, has loved a heart that loves another, has been the other woman. Has hurt and torn apart a relationship for the sake of her own love. “All hearts love differently,” she says to Elena. “And in different ways.” She tells her and it sounds as if she is really here, beside her. “Your love is no less valid.”
Elena, they say.
And disappear.
He did not cherish her love, but she could not stop herself from giving it. Elena loved—easily, fiercely, completely. Loving had changed her, had made her better. She would not trade it for the world, not even to spare herself the heartache of their separation. She has a lifetime of memories to sustain her, it was all there in the face of her daughter, their daughter (because deny all she likes, Elliana is still his by blood, even if she is Azrael’s by bond). But it had hardened her, that loss, making her into the creature that stands here today.
For a moment, she watches Boudika, studying her. Elena wanted to hate her just for who she was, who she was in Ten’s life and who she, would never be. Boudika was beautiful, fierce, strong and in many ways, she reminded Elena of Rishiri, her raven haired aunt that she has not seen in so long. She had that same fire to her eyes, that same steel beneath her gaze. She admired that, wished she could have the same, but she didn't envy her in that way. Could not bring herself to envy her for that. It just wasn't her lot of life to be that stormy of a sea.
And she was content with it. She would never be as wild as the sea nor as strong. She was like the reckless waterfall, throwing itself over the cliff side.
She reaches out with her empathy, lets it kiss upon the crimson woman’s brow and then sink into her flesh, work through her veins and muscles, root out whatever emotions may be there because there had to be more than this anger, this hatred for Elena. And then it comes back to her, curls into her palm and then her chest. And there is a part of her that wants to rip Boudika apart. Her frame might be narrow, her stature slight, but it would be a mistake to believe her weak.
Elena will never realize that this fight, this energy, this passion, is one thing that her and Boudika both hold. Perhaps, in that one small respect, they are similar. Perhaps it is that very similarity that had attracted his attention in the first place.
She burns with shame and anger.
It had been reduced to smoldering embers.
But they flare now and they lick at her ribcage, the underside of her tender heart.
They pool heat in her cheeks and her eyes burn in a way that has nothing to do with tears.
She has never actively wanted to be invisible until now. She has never wanted to disappear until this moment.
She should know better by now, but of course she doesn’t.
She should have learned to keep everything inside the same way she always has, should have known by now that nothing good ever comes of revealing anything sincere. Boudika is barbed wire to anything soft she tries to show her, and she cuts Elena before she has the chance to retreat back inside of herself. Elena remains quiet, as if willing herself to fall into the backdrop.
Her brow furrows and then she wipes it clean. Part of her, some distant part, wants to shout, to scream, to ask why she was never enough—to demand answers. But the other part of her is defeated and tired, so tired. She cannot imagine this, cannot imagine what he said to her. She cannot survive it.
She takes care to not reply immediately even though the answers fly to her lips. She wants to lash out, it would be so much easier to speak in hatred and scorn. But Elena can picture what she looks like right now, what she would sound like if she spoke such a way, and she hates herself for it. So the voice that comes is one that is feather soft, with the lightness of paper caught in a breeze. “Stay as long as you like in Terrastella, Boudika,” the anger, the jealousy settles in her bones and it aches. He teeth rattle in her mouth down to her jaw, but she smiles anyway, and it surprised they do not shake loose when she speaks. “The West opens its arms to you.”
Elena departs, and this is the first time, kindness has ever tasted as bitter as saltwater as it crashes like waves down her throat to settle against the tender stained glass of her heart.
etween them, many differences become evident. Their emotions. Their expressions. The way they deal with their hostilities. They are connected, irrevocably, but a man that they both loved—and in that, there is another difference.
Boudika does not love easily. Boudika still cannot even say the words. She knows this apprehension comes from Vercingtorix and how, when she loved him, it broke her. Fundamentally, her love changed who she had been and would become. His betrayal did not turn her callous; but it turned her weary, and afraid. Boudika does not love Tenebrae.
But she wants to. Oh, she wants to. If given the chance. If he were to only give it the time, the hope, to grow—
And now?
How she ever be able to? If Elena fills with shame, Boudika fills with embarrassment. They turned her into a fool and Boudika’s pride flares too large, too hot, in her breast. She has never been a fool and will not allow it, will demand—more from them, from them both. They cannot hold themselves accountable, that is clear. Someone must. The casualty they created in the crossfire of their poor decisions. Selfish, she thinks. So, so selfish.
The sea shushes in the background. The day might have been beautiful, if not for the way loved has turned to something cruel and painful. The day might have been beautiful, if not for the hate and pain and shame.
Boudika watches Elena’s valiant effort to keep her expression clean. There is something in it that reminds her, inexplicably, of Vercingtorix. This is how he had looked, she thinks, when she told him. This is how he looked when she had said, I am in love with you—but there is something I must tell you. The way he had gone impassive, the way his eyes had wanted to trust her and then tightened around the edges with something that was not quite grief, but a more intimate kind of pain.
She does not care she hurt her. Boudika wanted to. She wanted to and she hopes the truth destroys Elena, as it destroyed her. The malice surprises her, but she cannot take it back.
Stay as long as you like in Terrastella, Boudika.
Boudika’s expression tightens again. Her brows furrow, and her lip twitches. “Coward. You are a coward, Elena. Do you not want to face the truth? You can’t even answer my question—” Boudika turns away as Elena does, and the contempt she feels has not faded. If anything, it grows. She cannot understand how, even when confronted, she shies from the truth of her actions—she cannot apologize, she cannot answer, she can do nothing but speak inconsequentially.
Coward, Boudika thinks again. She does not care for the West—and she turns back to the sea and slips quietly inside.
She had thought that she would feel at least a semblance of closure. She had thought if she confronted the other woman, something would release within herself—the pressure would escape. Instead, she feels empty and that emptiness echoes within her.
Boudika is still alone. Nothing has changed.
§
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.
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