If she is intoxicating him, he is sobering her.
No, he says. Will you tell me?
Their undoing is in his voice; dizzyingly, it sounds like whiskey tastes. Rough, uncut; heady. There is a moment he looks at her and Boudika is not in Denocte, is not in Novus at all, but is instead transported to long black beaches.
It is true Tenebrae had been her first kiss; haphazard, nearly accidental.
But he had not been her first everything. He certainly had not been her first love and now, with his eyes full of her, Boudika wonders if she does love him; or if she hates her loneliness.
The girlish shine in her eyes is devilish, now; the innocence that ought to soften the expression is gone, replaced with a nearly malicious sharpness. She is not a girl. She is scarcely a woman, anymore, and how can she tell him that he excites not only her romanticism (something she thought long dead) but a more primordial urge? An urge to make, and unmake? An urge to lay claim to something more definitive than blood, than the mark of scars along his throat that she gifted to him like a necklace.
Tenebrae does not know love.
But she does.
Boudika knows the intimacy of it, of how boys first learn to love one another in the quiet darkness of their insecurities, and learn to love one another more fiercely in a bond of brotherhood wrought of pain and suffering. Vercingtorix had never kissed her, not even when he had thought her a stallion--but it didn’t matter. What mattered was his lack of kissing; was the restraint. She knew he laid with men and women alike; she knew he took them to his bed and burned thoughts of her from his skin with the imprints of their kisses. Boudika had always known, and it had never mattered, because Vercingtorix had always looked at her with such fierce love, and never kissed her. She had been apart from those affairs; placed upon a higher echelon, a more noble affection. He had not wanted to kiss her, no, even when she had been a stallion, because he had loved her too much.
She knows, now, it is also why he hated her so fiercely when she betrayed him. Boudika’s answer is too long in coming; her mouth twisted up in the corners, not a smile, but a reminder of her heritage. “I can’t,” she whispers, because her attraction itself is a tell to what she means. “Not in words, at least.”
Boudika wonders why he believes it had been perfect for her; and in wondering she nearly asks if he knows anything about her, at all. They had met at a strange time; and she does not know why not his intimacy and affection is souring in her mouth. Boudika does not turn away; instead she relishes the warmth of his skin. It is so different from the wet chill of the sea; but what does he know of her, beyond her teeth, beyond the blood in her mouth and the flowers in her hair? The ribbons catch the wind; the gold paint gleams.
This is what I used to wear to war.
Boudika does not say it, she only listens. She might have said the same thing, a lifetime ago. Now there is a small, sad smile to her mouth. She had thought--well, they were ignorant thoughts, belonging to an ignorant girl. She closes her eyes and steps toward him. In the darkness, she doesn't know who she is for a moment; she runs her nose down the slick muscle of his neck, and traces it up the powerful arc of his shoulder. A warrior’s body. Boudika keeps her eyes closed. Her breath is soft along his ribs, and comes to rest at the hip. That leonine tail of hers flicks out, brushes his ankles.
“If you were not a monk?” she repeats. Her voice is rose-petal soft. “I would have you be yourself, but I am not sure you or I know who that is, without the title of monk to hide behind.” There is no barb of cruelty there; only honesty. Boudika finds this is her own hamartia; to be fickle, and coy, and flirtatious, and turn on both herself and him. Because ultimately, honesty is cruel. Boudika opens her eyes, glancing toward him over his own back.. She adds, “Tenebrae, if you were not a monk, I would have you be my lover.”
And there is softness there, softness like a veil of death. She brushes past him now, from the warmth of their intimacy, toward the dark and foreboding trees. The words taste like salt, and sand, and she thinks she has heard them before, in another life--
It had been Vercingtorix, when he healed in the hospital. He had said, If we were not bound companions, we would have been lovers. She had said, maybe we already are.
She is struck, suddenly, by an incredible sadness. The flippant joy from earlier--from their dance, and their chase, and being the wind--has made Boudika turn to ash. They cannot be, and she knows it. Tenebrae cannot become the sea, and she (despite their words shared in secrecy, in their cave) knows she cannot be his goddess. She turns to smile, the smile of autumn, of fall, of all things ending. “I meant what I said, Tenebrae, in the cave about the sea and the moon. Do you think you will ever believe it?”
"Speech." || @Tenebrae
tell me how all this, and love too, will ruin us
these, our bodies, possessed by light
