Hotaru
nothing's fair in love and war
There’s a strange dichotomy between the two of them then. The younger woman musing on love and heartbreak, and the older carving into the carcass of a beast felled by her own hand. Hotaru isn’t poetic enough to draw allusions and metaphors from the contrast, but she can feel it like a hysterical laugh creeping up her airways only to be choked back to silence on the battlefield of her tongue. Maea may feel she can speak freely of these times, of this man, but Hotaru cannot say the same. Her own vulnerability is hard-won, and already Maea has earned more of it than many others. What Ru went through, how she felt…that is for only her and her empty bed to know, these days.
It doesn’t mean she can’t listen at least. Bearing witness to Maea’s losses, numerous as they are, as if holding a silent vigil will in any way ease the burden from the woman’s shoulders. It’s laughable.
She does it anyway.
The admission seems sincere, but Ru’s lopsided, closed-mouth smile is a dagger turned inward. “Maybe.” But what if’s are just words, and none of them can turn back the clock. Lifting her eyes, she seeks out the only hint of color in Maea’s face as she rocks back onto her shins, hands pausing bloody and thoughtful in her lap. Head tilting in a golden cascade of consideration. “‘This’ is merely a vessel. Changed, yes, but in the same way I was changed when Frey Attuned me. Am I not still Hotaru because I have claws and magic both now?” The self hatred is unexpected, but perhaps it shouldn’t be. Turning back to her kill, wondering if she’s being too presumptuous in assuming how Maea might feel about her Ascension, the Valkyrie quarters the meat slowly. “Did you come back for him?” Because if Ru had died before everything - the fire, the fallout - she can’t say she wouldn’t do the same.
