My eyes turn down to my hands, blackened with dirt and gore.
I am a warrior now; I am a woman of your own way.
You come to me, stern, still terse from battle, hair matted and dirty, every step steeled and measured.
I look up at you from my small post on the ground, kneeled amidst the corpses of our quarry.
You offer your hand to me, a gesture that elicits both fear and comfort in the base animality of my human soul. I accept your extended limb and am towed upward, eyes drawn shoulder level with your muscular form. A small grace. For as much as I love you, I do not like to see you in the moments after a kill. The darkness of slaughter still riming those eyes, those steel flints flecking the icy blue flames beneath your brow. I feel your shoulders relax; see your breasts settling into the firm embrace of you armor. And I know we are safe, for the moment; your demons have told you the men have gone from here, be they in the embrace of the now all-too-hot sun or the arms of the gods. Only now do I feel safe to look up into your face, to seek the pearls of your eyes from the mask of death you don all too easily at a moment's notice.
And you weakly smile at me, lips curled asymmetrically in that sweet crooked way. They gather and plant themselves on my forehead, the small kiss blooming where my third eye should have been. We walk away from the carnage slowly, your eyes still sorting through the bodies, brain still processing their attacks, their cause, their style of motion and breathing. I disengage myself from the crook of your arm to reach down to gather our discarded packs, surprised at the numbness of my own digits after holding fast to my sai in the heat of the kill.
When we arrive at the rippling stream, we slide into the water, its ever-pressing essence peeling back the integument of the mantle of murder. I slide crude soap over my hands, pulling away blood seeped deep in my calloused palms after hours of travel. I discover my hands are not alone in their filth, for they descend from my face stained with a fresh cast of violence, iron red life streaming from my cheeks, my chin, my breasts. And I do not know what is my own and what is that which I have taken.
But then you slide over to me, using skills drawn from lifting eels from their home beneath the rocks time and time again. I feel your skin against my back, body heat easily quenching the chill the water had steeped into my bones, and the texture of the folds of your nipples, the hair of your groin that protects that which you now share solely with me. Your breath is hot on the nape of my neck, and my throat grows tight, anticipating the suffocating liberation of living in the moment, of being encapsulated in every second of time with you. And when your lips brush the faint little hairs that line my every surface, my stomach clenches, my heart hastens, and my eyes slide shut, lubricated by the pain of desire. Desire for you, desire for release, desire to live only in this one uncorrupted moment, unfettered by the regret of losing myself to the will of the All.
You clutch me, arms slipping, serpentine, circumventing my abdomen, my scarred breasts, my muscled thighs. Fingers straying about my body, seeking purchase on each mark lain upon my flesh during my travels with you. Your fingers slide across each scar as though you had etched them into my once unmarred skin. And then you part the veil into my center, seeking forgiveness with those strangling hands. And I abide, letting you take me, for you owned my very soul from the moment your eyes gouged those of the slavers, from the moment your now abandoned stained white shift hang between my hopes and your fears.
For you are my Way.
To Be Continued?
FGG