i never said that i would be your lover
i never said that i would be your friend
i never said that i would take no other
Kensa would never harm a child, even her anger at Draco’s meddling outburst is short lived. She has been a mother too many times, and feels too much love for even those that do not belong to her to ever feel any unkindness for long. It doesn’t matter though, Litotes has already seen it, another sin for him to count.
She cannot find it in herself to believe she was manipulated by Starsin, the two of them together had been as honest as anything. Yet all that time ago, a year at least, (more?) Starsin had wanted it hidden from Lie, had known that it would hurt a man that did not belong to her as much as it might the one that did. What had the chestnut woman thought could exist between them anyway? A sneaking secret affair that only occurred in that grove beside an uncharted length of the river? She cannot indulge in Starsin and come away unchanged. In time it would have consumed her… but that is irrelevant now.
Kensa watches her words break over Litotes and at first seeing him hurt is a twisted victory, a blow landed in another impossible battle between them. How juvenile their fight in the meadow seems by comparison.
She doesn’t want to love him right now. Not because she is angry of feels cheated. Kensa wishes she felt nothing because even when she is the one to hut him she suffers and her chest is already too tight.
Though she knows the words are coming they are still a slap across her face with a firebrand and she recoils. Her head twists to side and she strafes to the left and back again, beauty in the severity and agony writhing through her frame. To hear he loves Starsin, that enough has passed between them to birth not just children but love makes tears spring to her eyes, angry and hot. Not for Starsin, not now. She too walks a fine line towards this betrayal but Litotes has gone over before her and though she cannot hate him for it she feels the weight of every secret moment between he and the other woman he loves, everything given to Starsin instead of her. It burns away her guilty moments with Brigade but in doing so leaves a scar.
“You love her.” It is perhaps not what he thought she would say, soft and wounded but she is staring at him, dragging herself back into place. “You love her.” Though it hurts her, she sees how unmoored he his by the revelation that Kensa and Starsin had laid their own foundation of secrecy beneath the love he has for both of them.
Litotes tells her of his guilt, wonders at the duplicity of these two women whom he loves, and finally, with his shadows climbing up around him tells her he will go. Their eyes bore into one another, all of them reddened and wet and miserable. Her fatigued body shivers and Kensa has no defense at all for herself. “I would make her yours if I could.” It is not a cutting, strange version of “go be with her instead”, though he might just take it to be. She yields because she has never asked him to love only her, never expected that he would forever be satisfied by her no matter her beauty or charm. “I didn’t know.”
He does not understand her, her ravenous heart is a limitless and generous heart. It may be too late to make him see...and even now she does not want to take back what transpired between herself and Starsin. So Kensa faces his renewed anger with nothing but honesty. “I love you. I’m going to love you until I’m dust. I wanted her, and when I want something I make it mine. You. Hyaline. Our family. I don’t need you to understand me. I played a game with you today and it was wrong but there is no…” No taking it back. No stopping his loving her. No life in which they will be able to pretend themselves back to the blissful ignorance of their youth. She moves closer, knowing in doing so she invites the glittering teeth and the strangling shadows. “You love her and I want her, if one of us needs to stay away it is me.” Kensa sets her jaw though, refuses to pretend anymore today, and her voice is low and severe when she says, “But you should know that I wont.”
@[litotes]
