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    COTY

    Assailant -- Year 226

    QOTY

    "But the dream, the echo, slips from him as quickly as he had found it and as consciousness comes to him (a slap and not the gentle waves of oceanic tides), it dissolves entirely. His muscles relax as the cold claims him again, as the numbness sets in, and when his grey eyes open, there’s nothing but the faint after burn of a dream often trod and never remembered." --Brigade, written by Laura


    [private]  we were neon in a grey crowd; starsin
    #1
    KENSA
    we were golden. we were fire. we were magic.

    In the end there is nothing to grab on to. No anger to cling to or sadness to spiral her away in madness. She is only a very small thing at the bottom of a black well where there is only wet gravel and the smell of damp.

    He had taken to the sky and the sweep of his wings carved out an emptiness in her that nothing would touch. She lay down there in the meadow and let her mind be silent. Drifting through it’s quiet prison until morning.

    A morning when all her worthlessness wells up as the sunlight spills over her ribbons of gold and she decides that she should die—before something else can break, before her daughter can learn to destroy everything she touches with the same finesse. Litotes hates her, Brigade is immune, and she cannot unsee the shape of her sins — but she can not find even enough in herself to act upon that decision.

    It is Valek who finds her, who forces her to her feet and watches over her in silence for hours until another night comes. Then Kelynen takes his place, sad and fair like his father.

    Strange that it is for this son that she breaks. Or maybe it isn’t. She apologizes for everything she has and has not been, not laying on his still young shoulders what she has done but admitting how she has failed him. The boy hears it all and in the end comforts her, the mother who has betrayed him all his life. Kensa finds at last the soul clenching affection that a mother should feel for her child. There is a light that shines out of him when he recognizes it, and that heals her enough to leave the meadow with its flowers like blood.

    Back in Hyaline proper Kensa remains close to the lake, buried deep in the center of Hyaline where nothing can touch her. Valek and Kelynen take up guarding over her, buffering their mother from the world so that she needs only to tend to Soothe, find comfort in her children’s affection, and lick her wounds. It seems a long time since she noticed how strong and tall Valek has become, and she wonders if Pangea could be convinced of his suitability to take over Hyaline in the Spring.

    Everything she has wanted up until now seems muted and far away until she wakes tearless on an autumn morning and slides into her routine like a goldeneye drifting out onto the lake.

    Valek joins his dam on her patrol, easy company though she knows he comes more because he is worried than for the practice of it. They discuss unimportant things, she shows him details he misses and she is surprised by the things he alerts on that she would not have even sensed. The work livens Kensa and before long they are creeping through the densely wooded foothills together and Kensa finds herself forgetting to be empty.

    Until her son rumbles and stops beside her in the sparsely dappled shade, and Kensa finds herself face to face with Starsin.  Kensa brushes a touch over her the young stallion’s strong shoulder and he passes between them and then away into the trees. Kensa has not considered what it would be to meet with Starsin again, and draws a deep, bracing breath. Her features are tired, vulnerable, and beautiful though she would not have them be if she could help it. “Why would you come here?”




    @[Starsin]
    #2

    and let me crawl inside your veins. I'll build a wall, give you a ball and chain.

    There were parts of her nature that she could never escape. It was still her instinct to see an opportunity for destruction and to take it. Emotional manipulation has always been second nature to her; she could lie as easily as she blinked, she could contort herself into something entirely different as effortlessly as her heart beat in her chest. She blended so seamlessly into the conniving side of her that was difficult to untangle herself from it when she needed to.

    If she wasn’t so reactive, maybe the conversation with Brigade could have gone differently. She could have extinguished that spark of jealousy before it had the chance to grow into the inferno that it did. She could have been more careful with her craft, instead of dousing it in gasoline and striking the match. But it had been so easy. He had laid everything before her, and every thought had been like kindling to her ever growing fire. She wanted to break him, and she didn’t know why.

    Him and Kensa infuriated her for reasons that she couldn’t comprehend.

    She had staked a claim on Kensa, as she does most things, but it was more than that. It was true that the jealousy had first been born because she disliked delving into someone else’s mind and seeing her there, when, selfishly, the gold-laced mare felt like hers. But the true root of it, if she could just peel back the layers and get down to the core, had everything to do with Lie. No matter how confusing things with herself and Lie were, they had both felt immense guilt because of Ophanim and Kensa. He cannot read her mind, but she can read his, and always, always, Kensa had been there. She knew it would destroy him to find out that Kensa’s newest conquest – she thinks that’s all he is, at least – didn’t even know he existed; that he had to learn about him from her, of everyone.

    Starsin could never love Lie fully, completely, just as he could never love only her, but she had thought Kensa did. And that, buried so far beneath the surface, is what her anger finds its foothold on.

    She wanted Kensa to do what she couldn’t. She wanted Lie to have someone that didn’t stab him in the back the first chance they had, someone that was just his.

    Maybe it was irrational to feel the way she did, but she always had had a nasty habit of acting before thinking. And Brigade had handed her all the ammo she needed, and like a shark to blood in the water, she couldn’t resist it. When he finally left, and he had flown in the direction of Hyaline there was no guilt to be found in her heart – only a sick satisfaction.

    She waits before she comes. She wants to make sure the poison has time to coagulate, wants to make sure most of her work had been done before she arrived.

    And what she finds does not disappoint her.

    Her eyes briefly flit to the young stallion that departs from his mother’s side, but he is not who her attention is for. Her piercing blue eyes collide only with the topaz of Kensa’s, sharp and unyielding. She was still beautiful, even with the ghost of her sorrows in her eyes, even though the lines of her face echoed with all her hurt. She wants to press against her and tear her apart, and she hasn’t decided which she wants to go with yet. And so, she only smiles at her question – a toxic, sharp simper that unfurls like smoke across her lips, and she answers with an innocent tip of her head, “I can’t come visit you?” Her chest fills with what could have been a laugh, but it never finds its voice in her throat. “You seem...upset.” The pitch of her voice lowers, dripping from her tongue as she says in a voice so ironically soft it betrays what simmers beneath the surface, “I hope it wasn’t something I did.”

    starsin

    it’s not like me to be so mean. you’re all I wanted.
    ( just let me hold you Like a hostage. )



    @[Kensa]
    #3
    KENSA
    we were golden. we were fire. we were magic.

    She cannot help but think Starsin beautiful. In those first confused moments she gazes into that beauty and wonders what in it had drawn Litotes. What features had arrested him? Was it the mocking simper that lived perpetually at the corner of the sweet little mouth? The sapphire glitter in knowing eyes? Or was it the tuck of waist, curve of hip, the dull gleam of stars on an ashen sky? 

    At first when the Starsin replies, her words barbed and sickly sweet, Kensa cannot make heads or tails of them. A pair of tired lines knit her brow, and she wonders if Starsin has come to smugly educate her on her true connection with Litotes. The Primarch’s thoughts are walled off from what passed between herself and Litotes. Except for one thing, the knowledge that he loves them both, that he loves Starsin but had wanted to choose his wife. That Kensa has turned on him, and not just in the way the grey woman thinks. He loves you. Starsin must know, and what did she do with that knowledge. What happened when she heard those words from the lips of that imperfect, wonderful, tortured man? Did she return them?

    Kensa remembers Litotes as she had found him in Pangea, listless, defeated before she’d even spit in his face. No, Starsin hadn’t returned them but he had wanted her to. He had wanted her and she had rebuffed him. Kensa’s heart aches for Lie in an unexpected way, baffling and poignant. The things she’d said to him were only fresh furrows in an already brutal wound.

    Starsin had not been with Litotes to hurt her, their own tryst had just been a coincidence. Even though it does not feel it, even though Kensa has the way it felt to be with Starsin burned into her brain. What a great and terrible mistake it had been.

    So then there is only one thing Starsin can mean by what she so poisonously purrs.

    “It was you.” The words are little more than breath tumbling past Kensa’s pale lips.

    She thinks of Brigade, her Brigade so wounded. Starsin could not know the hearts beneath what she had raked claws against. To make herself siren to Litotes and then the destroyer of Brigade. The sorrow in the sabino’s eyes turns to hard fury. “Why?! What did he fucking do, Starsin? Did you just want to take everything that was mine and grind it into the dirt?” It isn’t fair to say it, it doesn’t even entirely make sense but Kensa cannot stop herself. “And Lie? Should I go and tell Ophanim just how much he loves you? Should I break a man for you to even the score?” Kensa draws a breath, fills her lungs and moves closer to Starsin to snarl silvery knife-edged words, “Ophanim does so love when I try to break him.”

    But it cannot really be the same. Kensa has not drawn Ophanim into loving her, nor does she desire him to. All that matters is that it hurts.

    Perhaps there is her answer. It was just meant to hurt, but why? Vengeance or plain cruelty? Or jealousy like that which made her turn on Lie. Kensa’s eyes narrow because maybe she can understand after all.. She doesn’t give Starsin that though, the knowledge that Litotes knows more than enough because she too wanted to hurt someone. Could hurt someone again if she once more chose brutal honesty. Something stops her though, and she will not tell Starsin. Not yet.




    @[Starsin]
    #4

    and let me crawl inside your veins. I'll build a wall, give you a ball and chain.

    Kensa doesn’t disappoint her.

    Starsin gave her the gasoline and Kensa willingly lit the match and dropped it, and at this point, she didn’t care if they both went up in flames.

    There is nothing in her face that gives away anything that she feels. Nothing in the quiet fierceness of her eyes, nothing in the way that simper never falters from her lips. She watches, and she waits. She waits for Kensa’s beautiful face to shift from sorrow to realization to anger. She listens, as her mind tries to sort through all the why’s. But the thing was, Starsin never needed a why. She didn’t need a reason. She just needed a little material to work with, and maybe to feel a little too bored that day.

    This was a little more than just boredom, of course. This was her at her absolute worst. This was her, in all of her reckless jealousy, this was her, twisting like a tornado and not caring who she sucked up with her.

    When the clarity reaches Kensa’s eyes, when the hollowed melancholy that had previously been carved into her face becomes full with fury, it is met with a chilling laugh. “I don’t care about what Brigade did, Kensa, this is about you.” She steps forward, closing the space between them, slinking forward with an almost predatory grace. She arcs around her, the cobalt blue of her eyes clashing with topaz and refusing to break away. “Do you remember when we first met, how I knew who you were before you ever had to say a thing? Do you remember why that was?” The words are spoken with a slow precision, a surgical knife to the skin, making the necessary cuts before she could open her up. “Lie thinks about you constantly. He thought about you when he was a prisoner in Loess, he thought about every single time I saw him in Pangea – “ her sentence breaks off here, stopping to tilt her head and adding with a feigned, despondent sigh. “He even thought about you the night he told me he loved me.”

    She softens her voice, but the words are still frigid in their delivery. “Imagine my surprise when I met a lovestruck Brigade, who didn’t even know Lie existed.”

    But Ophanim’s name is like a bomb being dropped, and the shift in her is palpable. Something inside of her begins to tremble, the threat of an explosion readying itself beneath her skin. “Don’t fucking drag him into this. He may have fucked you, but he doesn’t love you. You’re another one night stand to him, so go ahead and tell him whatever you want.” Her ears are pinned flat against the raven waves of her mane, as she snakes closer to the woman she had once touched so intimately at the river. “The difference between me and you, Kensa, is I would choose Ophanim over absolutely anyone. Over you, over Lie. There is not a soul alive that could actually come between us.”

    She steps back, loosening tight curve of her neck from its previously arched position, and though the low seep of her voice had returned to normal, there is still no softness to be found. “All I did was tell Brigade that Lie existed. Something that you should have done from the beginning.”

    starsin

    it’s not like me to be so mean. you’re all I wanted.
    ( just let me hold you Like a hostage. )



    @[Kensa]
    #5
    KENSA
    we were golden. we were fire. we were magic.


    There isn’t any desire to do harm in Kensa, there almost never is. Though she has committed her violences. At the moment she doesn't want to talk to our touch Starsin enough to fight with her but she rises to the provocations anyway. The trees in which they sand are quiet and their voices bounce off of the trees and stones around them, now and then raised other times hissing. Kensa turns her head only slightly as Starsin prowls and spits at her, topaz eyes tracking but her posture carefully restrained.  This is about you.

    Kensa knows that already, but it is about Starsin too, and oh so much of it is about Litotes. There are two things that strike Kensa. First the incredible guilt and loss of being reminded of how Litotes had once loved her. It makes her look for a hollow place inside herself to hide, so she doesn’t have to recall the things he said when he realized at last that she has become so selfish, a contradiction in gold leaf and chocolate. Second, the fact the other woman with all her pride in her own loyalty cares so damn much about Kensa’s connection with another man.

    Starsin circles but Kensa remains still except for those few steps she took to put malice behind her suggestion about Ophanim.

    "Isn’t that the game though Starsin? Telling a man you have no business interfering with just what the whore he cares for has been up to? ” But it isn’t about that at all. If Starsin didn’t have feelings for Litotes it wouldn’t have mattered what had grown between his wife and Brigade. She might even have understood it. Detritus around their feet rustles, Kensa side stepping away, warning Starsin back with a sneer. “Except we aren’t whores. We’re women who take what we want. Enjoy your choice but don’t tell me I’m required to want the same bullshit fairy-tale. Even if Kensa had the option...Starsin doesn’t know what she would decide. Starsin has cast aside Litotes and it makes Kensa sick and sad and angry. She’d done it too, but never on purpose. Not really.  In her own unusual way Kensa’s love for Lie would have extended to seeing him have whatever it is he desired. Whoever. Or it would have if not for the poison of wanting Starsin herself… but Kensa’s jealousy had burned up died when Litotes had cut himself free.

    Today Kensa would choose nothing to avoid feeling all that she had in the last week. Let them all leave her the fuck alone. It is pointless to stand here and argue like she doesn’t know what she’s done, and Starsin obviously enjoys the opportunity to gouge at her. Head high, her topaz eyes widen mocking. “Congratulations. You’re the heroine.” —the Primarch hurls a thought, sad and furious into her own mind—I didn’t need your fucking help.  “ I’ve built my own hell. I watched myself lay every brick but couldn't fucking stop. Go ahead and pretend you've never been there.” Kensa doesn’t need her to admit to having gotten in too deep with Litotes, no one needs to tell her that was an accident. Not after everything that Starsin has done and said.

    ”I never wanted anyone to come between myself and Litotes and in the end I didn't need Brigade to ruin my marriage."

    A pause, a flick of her eyes across the other woman's features, the next set of words so much softer, anger yielding to pained resignation "I only needed you. And her own jealousy, the brutality of honesty, and a little good old fashioned selfishness. The end of everything born not of Kensa’s infidelities or her foolishly requited love for Brigade, but her need to lay some claim on her husband’s lover, some vengeance that she now can’t make any sense of. This said, this ironically romantic but dejected scrap, Kensa turns her face away. There is no point to this.



    @[Starsin] Hot fresh traaaaaash
    #6

    and let me crawl inside your veins. I'll build a wall, give you a ball and chain.

    “You think I said anything to Brigade because I care about what he thinks or feels?” The question is rhetorical, and while there is still an edge to her voice much of the scathing sharpness has dulled. But there is nothing kind in the way that she continues, the way the words are etched in ice and the dark blue of her eyes remain noticeably frigid. “I care about Lie. I care that he loves you, that he felt guilty for everything with me, but you did the same and he was hardly an afterthought. You had such little respect for that relationship that the consequences of what could happen with Brigade were apparently not enough for you.”

    Starsin has been known to take what she wanted, with what on the outside would appear to be with little regard for what would happen if word of her actions reached Ophanim. But the difference, in her mind at least, was everything she did was a reaction to how Ophanim made her feel. She had been fiercely loyal until she realized it was not being reciprocated. Anyone that knew her, even for a brief amount of time, would not be surprised that she sought revenge whenever she felt slighted.

    But she had learned.

    She had learned that those brief, fleeting feelings of lust and want and almost-love could never replace what she had with him. She had learned that she would rather burn and sit in her own hurt than hurt him back.

    “Honestly, Kensa,” she says on a sigh, tilting her head askew in that impossibly irritating way of hers. “If this is all it takes to ruin your marriage with Lie, I guess it wasn’t much of a marriage to begin with, was it?” She should have left it at that, and for a moment, she appears as though she is going to. Her muscles flinch in preparation to leave, but there is a pause, and she looks back to Kensa with a thoughtful expression. “I’m not sure what you expected when you met me. I’ve never pretended to be anything other than what I am.” She doesn’t think there were many that would describe her as anything other than manipulative and calculating. Her reputation preceded her, and it was the only warning sign anyone needed. “I’m sure we will be seeing each other again,” she says with a barbed-wire smile, her eyes lingering on Kensa’s topaz own, before disappearing along the path that would take her back to Sylva.

    starsin

    it’s not like me to be so mean. you’re all I wanted.
    ( just let me hold you Like a hostage. )



    @[Kensa]




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