BELOVED
bane x talia
A/N: the song lyrics used are adapted from "Seven Devils" by Florence and the Machine.
Of all the invaluable things he teaches her, she holds most precious the names of the constellations she can make out through squinted eyes at night. As soon as she is old enough to understand and remember, he begins tilting her chin up to the heavens each evening at twilight, and gesturing to the cosmos with calloused fingers, whispering legends into her ear first in English, then in her native tongue.
Her favorite is the story of the warrior maiden born in darkness and immortalized in starlight, which he tells with such surety that she will feel astonished, almost betrayed, when she learns years later that he made it up, for her. He gets into the habit of repeating it every time he shaves her head, while she sits abnormally stiff and quiet between his legs, and the one time she cries quietly in fear—she is too old by then for silent tears, but the bloodstains on her rags and legs mean that it doesn't matter any longer.
…
Holy water cannot help you now
A thousand armies couldn't keep me out
…
Of all the invaluable things he teaches her, she holds most precious the names of the constellations she can make out through squinted eyes at night, even though she knows, of course, how foolish this is—a waste of words, when he had an allowance of only so many before they tore his throat apart and stole his voice.
He uses all his words up on her and for the short bitter span of her life she will feel the weight of this sacrifice, more than any of the others. He teaches her to bind her hands and feet before the climb, even though she makes her final ascent under threat of blood and there's no time for the skill in the end. He teaches her French, English, German, scrapes words into the earth with his fingernail and makes her repeat the sounds over and over until her throat is raw and she cries out at him in wordless fury. He is stoic, unmoved, because he knows she is destined for a world of refinement and education that will chafe her to her very soul.
…
I've come to burn your kingdom down
And no rivers and no lakes can put the fire out
…
She is a creature of darkness, of fire, with ice in her heart and flames in her eyes.
Although he calls her pure, precious, innocent, she is an angry child, irrational, refusing to bind her scrapes and cuts even though she is almost wiped out by infection more than once. She does not speak until she is nearly four years old, and even then it's due to him, his refusal to give up even as she spends years insisting on communication through glares and yells of anger.
In her early years, she is a coward at heart for all her rage, and she will never quite understand, looking back, why he chose her, molded her into his weapon of mass destruction, although this will be the lesser mystery compared to how he ends up loving her, this creature born of the place where passion burns so bright that love and hate become one, indistinguishable from one another. True to her birthright, her adoration and detestation burn with equal fire, the recipients of both turning to ashes in her passion.
She is a creature of stunted expressiveness and heightened emotion, the contradiction tearing at her. In all the languages she knows like her own there are no words for her, her fierceness and her constriction, so she speaks with rage and fire instead of words.
And through it all, he loves her enough to whisper stories in her ear.
…
They were there when I woke up this morning
I'll be dead before the day is done
...
The first attempt is too careful, too controlled. It is preceded by an hour with her arms held awkwardly away from her chest while he binds her body into a carefully designed harness that she knows from the drawings he spent weeks scratching into the floor, planning and refining. He binds her hands, her ankles. Wipes the grime from her face. Fastens packets of bread crumbs and rags soaked in water to her belt.
Lithe and sure and practiced, she makes her way up the sheer rock face, reveling in the way her muscles burn. She is strong from consuming rations meant for two.
Just before the most frightening jump, she looks back. It is nighttime, of course, with everyone asleep and oblivious, but in the dim silver glimmer of the moon she can make out the hard lines of his cheekbones, the shadow of his eyebrows, the outline of his shoulder, the glint of his scalp, hairless from a fever before her time.
She looks back, not out of fear, but out of something she can't name—love, for her, is her protector ripping open the skull of an attacker while her mother screams in the distance. The shadowy figure with glistening eyes she can't quite see—that isn't love, only a foreign ache in her chest.
She looks back, and deliberately lets herself fall.
…
And now all your love will be exorcised
And we will find you saints to be canonized
…
He rails at her, slams his fist into the cave walls until blood runs from his knuckles. She watches him, stiffly, unblinkingly. He weeps brokenly, turned into the wall so that no one else will see, and at that point she crawls into his arms and presses her hand with its slim fingers and tiny perfect nails against his chest, feeling his heartbeat echo through her bones.
Neither of them sleeps that night. Her fall woke the others, and they circle like vultures just outside their door.
…
It's a battle cry
It's a symphony
…
He agrees to sing to her, after years of her asking, on the day she turns from child to broken youth, tall and wide-eyed and decidedly feminine, on the day that she is too consumed by fear to ask as she normally does every evening.
It is a simple four notes in quick succession, with words too choked to be heard. Before he can get any further, she interrupts with a single word.
Ready.
…
I save your heart
I take your soul
…
This time, he says goodbye with a kiss to her forehead and a German word, heavy and awkward on his Eastern tongue. Leb'wohl.
She feels illness settle over her like a cloud. A chill coats her bones and she shakes too much to make it even halfway up.
He does not believe her when she says that this time, the fall was an accident. That she really tried. That she's—
She doesn't say sorry. Because although she will never speak the words, they're clear: trust in me. Live through me. Die for me.
…
In evil's heart
In evil's soul
…
The third time, there is no looking back. No time to prepare, no time to deliberate. No time for a kiss. No time for tears. Only a single broken word on his part—goodbye. And on hers, a nod and eyes fixed onto the horizon.
…
They can keep me out
Until I tear the walls
…
After all the years he spent fighting for her chance at life, she would like to say that she never gave up on him as he fought for his. But the truth is that she runs from the infirmary, leaving him for dead, as soon as her father's henchmen drag in his ravaged, bandaged form on a stretcher. If she could do it all over again, she thinks later, that's what she would change—she would stay by his side and take his hand in hers and coax air into his lungs and never let him go. But she doesn't. She runs. She hides. She does not scream and she does not cry because something has changed within her and she is no longer the child he knew and adored.
Even when they tell her that he claws determinedly at the surface of consciousness she does not go to him—until she accidentally catches sight of the light of the stars reflected onto her bedroll, and remembers that of all the invaluable things he teaches her, she holds most precious the names of the constellations she can make out through squinted eyes at night.
…
Holy water cannot help you now
I've come to burn your kingdom down.
...