I've hidden memories in boxes inside my head before. Sometimes it's the only way to deal with things.
This is the reckoning that she has been waiting for.
The secrets that have boiled in her chest, simmered and spit and bit at the back of her mind. She thinks of it every time that she looks down to her beautiful daughter—so beautiful, inquisitive, and bright. She thinks it between the self-hatred she feels blossoming in her poisonous chest. All of it boils and bites and she can barely hold it back.
But when she sees Boudika stalking toward her, she doesn't know it.
Oh, but it was time to meet it.
She can feel the pressing and bruising of listening to Boudika’s venom. Does he know, does he know? She asked Elena. She just shakes her head. “No,” she chokes out and her voice cracks painfully,
But it doesn’t matter. She knows that.
It doesn’t matter because she knew and she didn’t say.
She stayed hiding in Terrastella and pretending that she could be happy with that crown on her head. But Boudika found her anyway, but Elena has never been good at escaping the past, escaping her choices. She was so terribly selfish and her heart clenches in her test and her teeth grit together. “I couldn't tell him, I—.” Words no longer come. Maybe this is what it means to be weak.
Maybe this is the final breaking of her spine underneath her own foot. Because Boudika rages at her and she has no defense. She has nothing that she can say to make this better. To make it right. It doesn’t matter that she didn’t actively try to steal a man away from the shifter. That she had no idea of the connection until her heart had flooded with thoughts of him.
It didn’t matter because she had known and she had stayed silent.
She had known and she hadn’t been brave enough to tell them both.
So she accepts Boudika’s vitriol and swallows it down. Takes the venom inside of her and lets it light her up like a torch. “I should have told you the second I realized,” she finally manages, her voice quiet, the tears silent and steady on her cheeks. “I should have tried to make it right. I should have done anything.” She hates her heart for the way it swells and then clenches in her chest. Hates her heart for loving him, even now, even with all she knows. Even though she knows he does not and cannot love her. Even though she knows that he was Boudika’s before she even knew his name.
Her heart does not care.
It does not occur to Elena that perhaps the reason she cares for Vercingtorix so greatly is because like calls to like. And those with fractures, those who are broken, find one another. Tell him, tell him or I will. “Please, no, don’t. He cannot know. Elli cannot know,” she says and her voice doesn’t feel like her own. It feels alien in her mouth, echoing and strange and she shakes her head as if that would help. “I’m sorry,” her breath catches and her throat burns with the words. Elena turned from her then. “Please go,” she says and can still feel Boudika’s shadow. “By order of the Queen—leave me, leave Court,” she seethes at the woman, and she goes and Elena—
She feels alive with an incredible agony.
She swallows and buries it; she pulls the poison into her belly and lets it simmer.
Queen of the Dusk.
Indeed.
She stayed inside her castle for days on end. She did not think if they whispered about her, about the new sovereign that they saw was crowned and then it has been a week, at least and they have not seen her again. But Elena felt like she could not move— and then, the lead that has been anchoring her feet suddenly disappears.
She goes not to Court, but to the swamp, where he stands there waiting for her. No, he isn't waiting for her, but Elena refuses to believe anything otherwise. “Torix, you look—well,” she greets him evenly, too tired to find a way to put an amused light in her eyes. She doesn't know how her words will land on him. She had healed him, brought him back from wherever he was going before. She approaches him with the grace of sunshine, but the ease of summer breezes. “A change of scenery can be good for the soul, let us explore today,” she says to the vagabond who feels more and more like hers every day (though she would never tell him this, though, he must feel it.) “Besides, some movement could do you good,” she says with a smile and places her cheek against his shoulder for a fraction. “You are still my patient,” she says. You are still mine, she thinks. “I think that means you have to do what I say,” she grins then, reckless and wild, and never has she looked so impish before she send swamp water in his direction, laughter as bright as droplets.
to get born, your body makes a pact with death; from that moment, all it tries to do is cheat.
I will never recover from living.
As I walk through the swamp among the cypresses and reeds and milkweed, the earth squelches beneath my hooves. Around me, the chorus of birds and frogs seems deafening; alone, the clicks, chimes, and songs are ethereal.
And yet; I am not haunted by the shadows that dance between the cypresses, but by the life I walked through as a warrior, a man, a ghost. My mind fixates not on my surrounding, but other, less tangible thoughts. I think: the afterlife, when she comes for me, will not be a veil of darkness or sleep. And when she comes—yes, Death is a woman, sweet and tender or volatile and scorned—she will not deliver me peace, judgement, or justice but the breaths between days, the void of what was spoken and what was meant, what was acted upon and what was felt.
In a woman’s way, I am sure Death knows the only punishment I am worthy of. And that is to exist suspended between who I am, and who I should have been—what I want, and what I can never have—what I believe, and what I act upon—what I think, and what I feel—what I say, and what I do—
Elena did not save me from anything. I hear her well before I see her. No one else would look to find me; no one else would succeed.
I wonder if she can feel me from miles away. If I am a black hole her sunshine can be devoured by; if the echo of my anger, discontent, and numbness is something that acts as a salve, or a wound.
I am already dead, between all these heartbeats, thoughts, wants, needs, failures, triumphs.
Torix, you look—well.
The swamp responds in a chorus of crickets and birds and a sordid summer heat that feels alive.
Elena never brought me back. (Not the pieces that mattered). What is left turns to regard her.
A change of scenery can be good for the soul, let us explore today. I let my face smile, but it doesn’t reach my eyes. Even when her cheek presses against my shoulder (this is a moment, an intangible moment, gone before truly felt; a moment I will recollect, and remember, and come back to as if it belongs elsewhere, to a novel, a newspaper, a poem, a diary).
Not to me.
Never to me.
And then she grins, wildly, and flicks droplets of water in my direction. I narrowly dodged them, ignoring the sharp twinge of pain in my neck and shoulder. The wounds, though jagged, have been sewn and kept clean. They are healing, though nothing else is.
“Queen Elena,” I say, in a voice both playful and snide. “Why order me as my doctor when you can order me as a Sovereign?”
I do not hide the way my teeth come to fine, bright points in a smile that belong’s to a wolf’s mouth.
“Walk with me then,” I say, half challenge and half invitation. I turn from her, to continue down the trail where I had lost my thoughts so readily.
I glance at her, coy and sharp. “She asked me to run away with her, you know. The girl I loved. Boudika.” I laugh; a raw, rugged thing. “I had sentenced her to death and—when I visited her the night before her condemnation—well, she… she asked me to run away with her.”
I fix her with my eyes. The truth is something I never promised her; but I wonder how I can continue to live in this life without facing it, without, at least once, looking it in the eyes. “And I would have. That’s the thing; I would have, if she had been someone I could love. If she had been a man.”
The milkweed around us is blooming bright purple; and on the narrow trail, we are shoulder-to-shoulder, her warm against my sea-chilled skin.
“I guess that’s just the way of it, you know? I just don’t think—I just don’t know how to move past those moments, the ones where your entire life pauses, where your entire life takes a breath and holds it.” I glance at her then, a mirror of the expression she had worn only seconds before; all wild, all mischief.
And a little bit unhinged. A little bit past giving a fuck.
"Would you run away with me, Elena? If I asked? Leave all this behind?" As if to seal the question, I use my leonine tail to flick water up and at her.
The fine spray catches the light; and I see her, all gold and her eyes, all blue, and I wonder if this moment is not already dead. Already gone. The droplets hit. The water breaks apart.
I've hidden memories in boxes inside my head before. Sometimes it's the only way to deal with things.
“Look Mama,” Elena says, standing with long foal legs splayed, and her teeth grinding together. “I’m a dragon,” she says and exhales loudly, and surely had she been, fire would have leapt from her throat onto unsuspecting enemies. Back when she did not believe monsters could exist. Especially not inside herself.
She is not a monster.
She is broken, but she is not a monster.
She is not a monster.
She is not bloodstained, but she feels that way, like she is marked in a way for them all to see, a scarlet letter drawn across her chest, a proclamation that there is something wild and dark inside her. That the girl who once lay quivering with heartbreak has since grown fangs.
She is not a monster.
No, but the things that kept her mortal – her lover, her children – they have felt so distant, and she has felt so alone alone. She is alone with her terrible thoughts.
She is not a monster.
Ah, but gaze too long into the abyss and the abyss the also gazes back into you.
He is not dead, he would not feel as he does if he were dead, Elena would not be able to feel him if he were dead. “You look well, but tired,” She asks him, taking a step closer. “Have you been sleeping?” She asks, as if she is not guilty of the same action. The sharp pain cuts from him to her and she tries to ignore. Instead, her smile is kind as she regards him, her laugh breathy. “I know better than to think a crown on my head could cause you to listen to a thing I say.” Despite the cool ice in her voice there is a bemused smile tugging at the corners of her mouth. She is silent for a moment as she takes her place beside him, but she breathes deep and asks him a question. “It is that resolve and strength that I ask you to become my Warden—when you are well again,” she says and pierces her blue eyes into his own. “I need those I can trust around me,” she says. And that Torix, is the closest Elena will ever come to saying she hopes you’ll keep her around forever.
It is his turn now, to speak, to tell, to talk. Elena knows when to listen. But the name that passes from his tongue pushes a shot of irony through her veins. Boudika. Of course, it was Boudika. It wraps like a vice around her heart. Of course, her friend, one of her best friends, would some how be connected to the shape shifting girl. Her one ounce of freedom from the reminder is suddenly snatched away from her in an instant. It is difficult not feel anger (at Boudika, at Tenebrae, at Vercingtorix) in this moment. As unjustified as it was. Was this always how her story was to go? Was she always meant to be reminded again and again, how other’s affections extend beyond just herself? To be continually reminded of how she was not enough? She swallows, feeling shame at the greediness of her heart, of the selfishness of her thoughts. She has so much in her life. So much love and life and joy—was she really going to keep this from a friendship with this man? Was she really going to make this moment about her and the shattered heart in her breast?
Because in the end, could she really blame Boudika for loving that man they shared and all of his darkness? She fights back all of the other emotions that collide in her breast, that wage war against one another. She loves him, she thinks, but he is no longer hers to love and she lets that go, lets that fade in her chest until it is just an echo of something. And she is fully here—with a man she met on a stormy day beside the sea.
The simple truth of the matter was that she loved him, a piece was in there that still did, that always would. It was the kind of love they write in constellations. But it had not been a painless endeavor. Although, she supposed, she only had herself to blame for that. Their love had burned bright, and it had singed them both. It had both splintered their bones and then knit it back together again. It was the kind of love that was too hot to hold for too long, and they hadn't been able to—only finding peace for moments before the turbulence tore them apart again and, eventually, led them to their demise. “You still could have gone.” The words fell hard and solid between them, the thump of iron at their feet.
Would you run away with me, Elena? If I asked? Leave all this behind?
“What you are asking of me sounds dangerously close to a promise,” she says to him, blue eyes narrow like clouds obscuring a summer sky. But then water jets against her skin and she turns that blue eyed gaze away from him. It is there, ahead that she feels it. A thrum in her chest, and suddenly her veins are on fire, but it doesn't hurt, it burns, but it doesn't hurt. “Torix,” she says under her breath. And she takes off, splashing through the water, her skin burning hotter and hotter and hotter. Her chest pounds so hard and she realizes that it is not her heart racing, but her soul.
Then silence.
She pears down in the water, and what sits there—an egg.
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