you could break my heart in two, but when it heals, it beats for you
She watches her beloved’s face as he speaks and tries to read the emotions that drift beneath his skin but finds that she cannot. So as he speaks she just listens, though she longs to lovingly soothe him, to kiss his cheeks and banish the history of sorrow from around his eyes but instead she is still. In her stillness she respects his story instead of easing away the discomfort of hearing how he has suffered by distracting him with her affection or her body.
He tells her of Cattail Lake, of a childhood she’s never heard of before. “No my love.” She murmurs fondly before he continues, letting her eyes shine with her adoration of her handsome King. Then he continues, and though she should have expected something like what he tells her next it still hurts to think of him suffering.
Kensa imagines Litotes, small and lean like Kelynen, muddy and cold. She sees the weight of the sadness she has always felt in him on the shoulders of a little boy and it makes her physically ill. It strangely makes her want to hold their yearling son who she has wanted so much to love and yet never found the spark a mother normally does.
Of course she does not know if he is like his father, but she cannot imagine this man behaving so that one of his children thought him cruel. “What happened to him?” She has known so little unkindness that Litotes’ unknown father looms large in her mind, she wonders what he must have done to make his son wish not to be like him but she will not ask for things Lie is not ready to give her.
He asks about her beginnings in turn and there is very little to tell, or so she believes. She thinks of her mothers, her fathers, the family that raised her from rambunctious, inquisitive terror into willful intelligent woman and she misses them terribly. Would they have loved Litotes as she does? Would her children bring them all the joy they have brought her? Certainly. She should not even wonder. So instead she smiles gently, carefully, not wanting her beloved to think less of her for the ease of her beginnings. “It was different, but simple. I had a large family. Mothers enough to keep me out of trouble and two fathers to keep trouble out of me.” This joke, off-color as it might be, serves to lighten the mood a fraction. “I might have stayed but I wanted to know a place like this one, with beautiful and dangerous places and people. I’ve always just wanted to savor the world.”
Kensa
@[litotes]
