Your Ashes Under My Skin

Link to article: Your Ashes Under My Skin.

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[[include component:preview
text=An ancient Scottish warrior-maiden grapples with her closest friend and greatest rival. Her every action is haunted by the absence of her other half, and by her presence.]]
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[[include :scp-wiki:component:author-label-source start=--
|name=Anorrack & DrGrimoire]]
(1479 words)

Dedicated to our wives, Anorrack's of two years and Grim's soon-to-be. Happy International Lesbians Day!
-- Anorrack & DrGrimoire

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I remember how we play.

The salted wind rips down the bare coast and tousles your hair as we joust and spar, with lengths of ash cut from the only tree in leagues of the broken and forlorn castle upon the island of Skye. Scáthach judges as we play, from her seat in the courtyard, her tattoos glimmering in the noonday sun, shimmering and enchanted and suffused with the magick of her own soul. Tattoos made to mimic the ancient secrets whispered by Cú Chulainn as payment for her teachings. She wears them proudly, the marks of the Warrior Maiden.

She stands and calls out my stance, kicks at my feet so out of form, slaps my face as I mouth off against her teaching, and praises you in equal measure, lauding your perfect form, your graceful stance, caressing your cheek as you bask in the radiance of her approval.

I feel a hole in my gut, a knot of anger and rage and spite. She favors you more, you with your flaxen hair, you with your unblemished skin and your long, graceful limbs. You who have never been scarred by the claws of famine or the teeth of plague. You…

You, with your comely, even face, your smiling eyes of emerald and growing grass. You, with your toned arms and legs, padded thick with fat even in the leanest nights when even the moon is starved and thin.

You, who are so, so beautiful.

I find you, later that night, in your room, pretending to be asleep in the dark. I find you there.

You find me there.

We find each other, we find our fingers roaming over each others’ bare skin, yours tracing lines down the scars lacing across my body like the tight knit of a crone’s craft. Marks of lessons I never seem to learn. Pocks of childhood scabs, kisses of the red plague and the pale raised ridges of skin stretched too tight by hunger, snapped back after famine’s end.

Your lips find my ear in the consuming dark, your uneven breath as loud as a summer storm, blanketing out any other sound. You call me beautiful, that night.

I will never forget it.

-----

I remember how we fight.

We are like fire, like lightning. We are weapons sculpted of muscle and flesh, every curve, every line perfected by years of harsh training, measured only against each other. The others never intervene, never compete, for how can they? How can anyone compete with you but me?

We clash with the sound of armies against each other, spear on spear and flesh on flesh, close as lovers, closer even, close enough to taste. Blood and sweat and spit on coy lips. A little ending at your hands, a little ending at mine. Blunted weapons, leaving cuts just deep enough to be a lesson. Songs written on our skin, of growing, of hating, of //wanting//. How often do we dance this dance? How often have we pressed ourselves against each other, bare-chested or in mail or furs, you striking at me, me at you. How many times have you won, and how many have I?

Who can say?

I can. Even as I rage at Scáthach, for choosing you over me, her eldest student, first of her spear-maidens, I understand it. You have always been the better part of us. You have always been her favorite, and mine too. I admit that to myself a year after I leave, carrying nothing but my spear and a blanket that still smells like you and me making war on each other, heavy with the scent of iron and smoke. I roam the world, aimless, seeing the legions at march and the midnight sun, the white cliffs of chalk and the deep green forests. Anything to fill the hole left by the absence of you.

Before I go, you call out to me. You call me selfish, that night. It’s a blow that hurts more than any you landed on me before.

I will never forget it.

-----

I remember how I cry.

I return with my spear, battered yet strong from battles hard fought and won, with my blanket which no longer smells of you, carrying my pride like a banner held high, like I had made a name for myself, like I had marked the world bloody with my spear, dealing it a blow it would never forget. Like my leaving you had been an adventure to be immortalized in song and passed on, mother to daughter, for generation on generation on generation. I tell myself, on the long walk back, over and over like a mantra, that those are the reasons I come back to the lonely castle on that lonely isle, that I come to boast, to brag, to sing.

But that’s not why I return.

I can never stay away from you.

I will always come back to you.

I will always be too late.

Your lips, blue as the sky above Skye, your skin as gray as the slate and sea. I remember how you lay there, so fragile when you were strong, so pale when you were vibrant, Scáthach’s tattoos still fresh upon your flesh, the mantle barely worn. Your students, now, with Scáthach long gone, your students tell of how you fell. You, struck down by a coward’s blow.

How I hunt them down and avenge you, stalking them through field and fen, tracking their lumbering steps fleet of foot, ceaselessly, tirelessly. How I break them, with the arms that held you, with the spear that clashed against yours, how I weep as I take my pound of flesh for what they did to you, you who were always the better half of us. You who were the better half of me.

I feel your spirit, in the space between spaces, in the void where no void should be, staring out at me with your eyes of coin and your hair so sparse and brittle. I feel your voice like an autumn breeze, whispering in my ear, so low I can scarcely hear it. You call me by my name, my true name. The name I have told no one but you. You call me Warrior Maiden. You name me heir.

I will never forget it.

-----

I remember how we touch.

Your skin, burnt to ashes and rubbed into open wounds that trace the curves you once caressed, with fingers now sharpened by knapped flint, driving the ink that was you into my flesh.

You pierce me, over and over, and I feel you, stronger and stronger, with each stick, with each stab of your sharpened bones, etching all that is left of you on every inch of me, all that remains from the funeral pyre, your charred flesh mixed with that of ash boughs, from the same tree our sparring sticks were hewn.

I don the mantle of Scáthach, and I don you through it.

Over and over, the last bits of you drive into me. Over and over, we get closer and closer, together, total and inexorable and burning in a way beyond the animal heat of sex or the soft warmth of love or even the cold sear of death. All of you, burned forever into all of me, a brand I will carry until my own passing, one I wear proudly. Shamefully.

You haunt my steps. You haunt the spaces I do not go, the corners where no mortal trods. I can feel you, staring at me, judging me for the things that I do not do, loving me for the few things I do. You are so close yet so far, separated by the skein of our worlds. A wall of ash and salt and blood. I feel you in my sleep, in the witching hour where monsters dwell and spells are cast, you are there with me while I sleep, brushing your fingers across my tattoos of you, across my scars of blade and pox, touching my auburn hair, making me ache with absence and pleasure and pain all at once. I wake to your whisper, at the edge of my hearing, and I fall asleep again dreaming of your coming.

Your spirit haunts me. I wear it as you wear my body, channeled into me through the tattoos of Scáthach, granting me your speed, your grace, your strength.

Granting me your memory.

Sometimes I think I can hear your voice once more, as clear as the day I lost you, when I am alone on that forsaken isle, when my students that dance in your footsteps have departed, when the wind howls through the empty windows and empty rooms, when it is the deepest night of Samhain, I hear you call out to me, I hear you call me lover.

I will never forget you.

Your Ashes Under My Skin

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