the rain that falls upon your skin
it's closer than my hands have been
Lepis does not bother to replace the façade that has fallen away, and she does not hide the quiet sigh that passes through her navy lips as she watches the rushing current. There is no need to, not when she’s already exposed her still-tender wounds. Not when Leliana is willing to share her endings, even if they are not as happy as Lepis might have wanted to hear.
She should have known, the dun mare thinks. In all endings there is some sort of sadness. In most beginnings too. Hers was no exception, and perhaps for that reason she has strived so much to make the opposite true for her own children. She wants for them everything she does not have, every happy ending she did not get. And yet, she grapples still with what those might even mean, and how she might keep up the façade even when it crumbles around her.
Already she has distanced Celina, and Elio grows more withdrawn every day. Eyas and Tiercel are gone, Gale is buried in Loess. Even Pteron has grown more dim in the last few weeks, refusing to share the origin of the shining burns he wears for a few hours. Lepis has done everything she had thought was sure to provide a happy ending, and still she has failed. Leliana’s words are wise, Lepis knows, but they are not what she really wants to hear.
“I’d rather have perfect ones,” she replies, but there is a wry twist to the edge of her smile that shows she knows her rathers are inconsequential.
Lepis is replaying those endings, spending the silence that stretches – not uncomfortably – between them with imagining better ones. The triplets, playing tag in the woods of Taiga. Marni teaching Celina to fly, Pteron introducing his littlest brother to the Ischian girl who’d come to visit. Herself, watching them all, the warm weight of Bane’s neck across hers and the feel of his satisfied smile as he does the same.
That thought - foolish, useless thought that it is – breaks the silence. Or rather, Leliana does, but Lepis is not so naïve to think the magics that swirl through Beqanna do not play a part in it. Her blue-grey eyes turn toward the red-haired mare, and a frown deepens the dark lines of her navy-marked forehead. She listens, her dark ears turned forward, silent, her expression frozen.
And then she smiles.
“It wasn’t him,” Lepis exclaims, the wonder in her voice matched by the sheen of unshed tears in her pale eyes. Not sadness, not like Leliana’s, but joy. “It wasn’t him!”
A non-sensical reaction to learning her former spouse is cursed, to be sure, but it is her true one. And yet, the reaction is short lived, a brief bit of happy realization that is crushed by the crashing wave of what Leliana has said, and what Lepis already knows. There is no cure for it. Even death does not stop it. They had fled from it, leaving Beqanna behind, and yet it has caught up to him still. It is gradual, she remembers, and the long, long absence from Taiga suddenly becomes clear. She frowns, trying to remember, and then –
The night he’d come home without his wings, smelling of death and blood and pain.
“Death can’t kill the curse,” she says, repeating words her husband had whispered to her on a dark night, curled tightly around each other beneath the stars of their hideaway. “Death can’t kill it,” she says again, more softly, and realizes she’s looking back at Leliana. “Don’t be sorry,” she tells her, and the tears of joy slip quietly down her cheeks, joyful no longer. “There wasn’t ever anything you could have done. It’s too late.”
If she’d realized sooner, Lepis thinks, if she’d pressed him rather than accepted his quiet refusal. Maybe then they could have done something, but no longer.
@[leliana]
lepis, comtesse of taiga
queen of loess | queen of sylva | queen of the south
lover of wolfbane | mother of pteron, marni, tiercal, eyas, gale, celina, and elio
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