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]
