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
Power has brought her too much pride and she is a hot seething thing at last, her anger screaming forth too late and only because he has reminded her that she has not loved him enough. She has never loved him enough.
It is not that she didn’t feel love for her husband. She has and does but she had fallen to him because he needed her, because he worshipped her when there was nothing to worship. Now she is a marble idol shot through with gold, her beauty growing more famed by the day and she wielding it like a weapon. Her appetites increase ten fold. She is the wife of a King yes but she reaches the heights under her own power. She has always needed him, desired him, underappreciated him. And now at last he turns his back on her. She loves Litotes like life itself but quietly, letting it reside in her like vital organs or her own lifeblood, flowing through all that she is but rarely thought about.
She has failed him.
Kensa had seen his pain and had thought that her honesty could burn away the divide between his love for Starsin and for herself. Wasn’t that was what should have happened? Couldn’t he love them both? It dawns on her that perhaps he couldn’t, that he had to choose not just because Starsin likely returned to Ophanim but because Litotes wanted to be a man that belonged only to Kensa.
She had spat on him. Ignored what he had chosen and told him she would take whatever else might be his too. Selfishly she had thought to challenge him, compete with him for the woman he loves. Leveling a shotgun on whatever still made him fight for and with her.
All of this she realizes too late.
I don’t want you...I regret it. Her anger should die but it doesn’t, instead it rolls itself in tight with her humiliation and despair. Tears dash down her cheeks, heavily dropping into the dust and leaving her gold freckled cheeks glittering along their path. He takes the shape of a lion and turns away.
She misses Rune, the frozen tree, his kisses in the cold. All around her Pangea is hot and dry and empty and they are monsters.
Kensa has no words at first but she takes several steps after him, though she should instead whistle for Soothe and go home. The pain in her breast pulls her after Litotes instead. It’s wrong and so she throws herself into it, isn’t that the way it goes? Two steps more and she is lunging after him, her ears pinned flat against her skull. Her hooves strike the earth near his paws but she springs away, and arching leap dropping her just ahead and just out of reach. Her voice is broken by tears and anger. “We have been bound to one another for years and you have changed, and changed. A lion, a shadow-manipulator. A Loessian. A Pangean. A King with a Queen that you fuck your heirs into.” Her eyes are bloodshot, and flick madly across his features. “I have never complained, but I have changed too and I’m not going to apologize. I have been cruel to you and this is over and I fucking deserve it...but I will never regret you Litotes.” On the word regret her voice breaks, and with his name tasting like blood on her tongue she turns from him and runs for the river, which she can use to find her daughter and retreat with her back to Hyaline.
@[litotes]
