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“Is it foolish to wonder why you choose to love me?”
Petra’s eye slides open at the whispered remark.
“Mara?”
She can’t see with only one eye in the dim room, but from the sensation lapping at the edges of their mental link like gentle waves on a shoreline, Petra is sure the faintest of faint blushes dust her Queen’s cheeks.
“I hope I didn’t wake you, Petra.”
“You didn’t.” Petra shrugs her right shoulder -the one Mara isn’t resting on- and turns her head to the left, rough fabric of her patch scratching at the soft, silken pillowcase as her single electric blue eye meets Mara’s gaze. She rests their foreheads together, and a soft, fleeting, chaste kiss is pressed to the Queen’s lips like the whisper of smoke from a snuffed candle.
“Trouble sleeping?” Mara asks her. Petra shrugs her free shoulder again.
“Perhaps, but we’re not changing the subject.” She rolls over fully, worming her other arm around Mara under their sheets and blankets. “What did you mean by that?”
“By what?”
Petra sighs.
“Asking why I choose to love you. It is foolish to wonder, by the way.”
“Enlighten me, my Wrath.”
Petra’s sigh is shaped by her faint smile, and she kisses Mara again before she answers.
“I don't choose to love you. I simply do. The heart does not give choices.” She raises an eyebrow. “Unless, of course, yours does.”
Mara doesn’t seem to know quite how to answer that, so Petra lets her think.
All around them, the crystal of the dreaming city sings, an ever-so-faint sonorous hum, lurking on the edge of Petra’s non-physical perception. Made known through her link with Mara, and Mara’s link with the city and its little pocket of reality.
“I’m not sure when I no longer had the option of choosing you.” Mara’s musing comes as a murmur in the dark, her breath ghosting Petra’s lips. Her shining blue irises across from Petra are half-lidded, in their dim room they appear as nothing more than two glittering rings, set in an elegant face above a regal jawline, cast in pitch black half-shadows and soft skims of diffused lighting.
“You’re beautiful.” Petra whispers, distractedly.
“Thank you.” Mara replies, voice laced with humour like a dress laced with golden thread. “It is nice to be reminded of such a fact.”
Petra blushes and rests her forehead on her wife’s.
“LIke I need to remind you of that.”
“I did not say it was necessary. I said it was nice.” Mara laughs, softly, and Petra savours the sound, drinking it in as it hangs in the peaceful air.
Taken aback by her wife’s beauty, Petra presses a kiss to Mara’s jaw, and then another. Then more, working her way down the slender column of Mara’s neck.
“What were we talking about?” She whispers, lips hovering over skin.
“I couldn’t say when I lost my ability to choose you.” Mara closes her eyes and feels Petra’s forehead rest against hers once more. “I am hardly one for love at first sight.”
“Have I ever told you when I fell in love with you?” Petra asks. Mara shakes her head.
“No, would you indulge me?” Her fingers find Petra’s still damaged techeun implant, their touch cautious, sympathetic; questioning.
“I exist to indulge you.” Petra smiles, and Mara chuckles.
“You lower yourself, my love.”
Mara’s thoughts enter her mind and Petra draws them both into a memory.
”Was that her Majesty?”
Petra’s young voice is bright, not yet having gained the temperance of her time as a corsair, and swirling within the memories is Mara’s distant thought of how long ago this must have taken place. While not as old as her, Petra is into her early centuries.
In the memory, the muscle-bound form of Sjur Eido follows the path the Mara of the past had taken, and Shuro-Chi’s voice next to her reminds Mara that she is technically Petra’s mother. “That was her Majesty, and there goes her Wrath.”
Sjur’s face is obscured by the blur of the memory, but Mara thinks she may remember the meeting after that, she’s careful not to let her thoughts of Sjur pollute this memory of Petra’s though. This is her wife’s, and it is precious.
“Are they married?” It’s not Petra that’s spoken, although the voice sounds identical, and Mara wonders how she knows Petra wasn’t the one who spoke until she realises that little Pinar stands next to them as Petra turns, seeing her twin from the corner of her left eye.
“She didn’t sound so much like me.” Petra’s voice -older, her Petra-, corrects the memory. “I’ve forgotten mostly how she sounded, but I know it wasn’t the same as me.” Mara sends feelings of warmth as the memory keeps playing out, Shuro-Chi’s answer missed but still known.
“No, Queen Mara and her Wrath are not married.”
“I never married Sjur.” Mara thinks. She can feel Petra’s curiosity in the bond, resolves to tell her why after this, then the scene shifts, Petra and Pinar following their mother to her audience with Queen Mara Sov.
The hallways to her throne room are a bare metal blur, not committed to memory.
She can sense older Petra’s sheepish acknowledgement of her childhood excitement, and Mara finds it adorable.
It’s when Petra stands at the foot of her throne that Mara’s breath is taken away by the depth of her wife’s emotion.
The Mara of the past looks powerful beyond God. She slouches on her throne, her eyes slide over young Petra, but linger on Pinar, then flicker questioningly to Shuro-Chi.
“You loved me because I ignored you?” Mara’s question is out before she can think about it, but Petra’s only answering emotion is amusement, and a vague sense of knowing what comes next.
Past Mara on her throne tilts her head at Shuro-Chi, then locks eyes with Petra.
Mara gets Petra’s feelings through the proxy of memory. That certainty that this is Mara and she will always be IT for Petra. The most distant fleeting hint of a far-seeing eye held in that gaze like caged neon. Petra at that moment is fourteen years of age, she knows she has found her soulmate, her soulmate is her Queen, and Mara shudders by proxy as young Petra’s realisation of that fact utterly destroys her.
“I did make a choice, in that moment.” The world of the physical has reasserted itself, Mara is no longer primarily exposed to Petra’s mind’s eye of events centuries past, but they still communicate inside their link. Petra feels too exposed to do otherwise, and Mara with her.
”What choice?” Mara asks inside their link, their skin-to skin contact in the real world is warm and comforting.
”To serve in spite of my feelings.” Petra repeats the Corsair’s oath. My loyalty and life for the Queen and her holdings.”.
For the first time in a good few hundred years, Mara’s breath in the physical world actually hitches.
“Again. I wonder why I am worthy of your love.”
Petra’s reply is simple
“Because you are Mara.” She plants a kiss on Mara’s nose, a gesture so sappy that were it done in public Mara would probably have her skinned alive. “You are my Queen, my Goddess, my Mistress, my Ruler.” For each title, a kiss, painted along Mara’s jaw with light lips. “But above all, you are simply Mara. I knew your heart when I met your gaze, and every time I have spoken to you since; I knew more and more that I loved you, so truly that I would devote my life even beneath your notice-” Petra stops as a finger is pressed to her lips.
“You are too noble, my Wrath.” Mara hooks her leg over Petra’s hip under the blankets. “Too noble for one such as I.” She kisses Petra’s cheek. “I do enjoy hearing you wax poetic though, you have a wonderful voice.”
“Your Grace is charming.” Petra bows her head, ducking out of Mara’s eyeline.
Mara kisses her, soft and sweet.
“I’m afraid I cannot return the favour.”
“Mmm?” Petra hums, softly.
“There was no shocking realisation.” Mara whispers, refraining from retreating to their mental link to say the words. It feels more personal to say them aloud. To show Petra just how much she trusts her. Then she catches herself thinking about Petra like she does everyone else, carefully choosing her words for maximum impact, and she swallows the guilt like acid-bile. “You are more than Wrath or lover.”
“I love you.” Petra mumbles, voice delicate. Mara smiles at her.
“Somehow, that makes it all feel better.”
Petra’s arm under their thick blankets tightens gently on Mara’s waist.
“It’s still surreal to me that you love me.” She says. “It makes me feel grateful every time you say it, when I remember our wedding ceremony.”
“Should I feel guilty that I do not have quite the same level of awe?” Mara asks. It’s couched in a sardonic, languid delivery; but Petra assumes the question is genuine, and she answers it as such.
“Guilt?” Petra muffles gentle laughter into her wife’s shoulder. “My Queen, you have nothing in your life to feel guilty for.” A kiss, pressed to Mara’s lips as they open for a quick-witted rebuttal. “Especially not me.”
Mara hums with uncertainty.
“Shall I confess one of my most deeply held secrets to you, my Wrath-” she takes a breath, relaxes. “My Petra?” Deliberate fingers trail up Petra’s spine and Mara whispers a litany of epithets under her breath and in their shared mind. Each of them asking the question.
”My love? My consort? My wife, Princess of my Dreams?”
“If that is what you want to do.” Petra half shrugs. “You needn’t feel any pressure just because of the topic at hand..” She kisses Mara softly as she can. “You could tell me you’re the Darkness itself and I’d still love you until the stars have grown cold.”
“The Witness I am not.” Mara huffs a small laugh at the thought, and Petra smiles at the minor victory. “But I am scared, Petra. Of the things I would do for you.” The confession traps at Mara’s lips like barbed wire, openness still unfamiliar to her despite their years together, but Petra simply holds her close and smiles.
A delicate finger touches Petra’s implant, and when Mara requests a connection, her Wrath instinctively falls into their shared headspace. But when she does, her heart stutters in her chest, and she feels the true, dreadful magnitude of Mara’s power over reality by sheer force of will.
“I would tear it all down to get you back.” Mara’s voice whispers to her over the tumultuous hurricane of sensations and Petra clings to her presence. “How very far I would go, Petra, for fear of losing you.”
Petra takes a deep, shuddering breath and Mara whispers apologies into the air between their lips.
“Well I had better be careful.” Her soldier whispers. Mara smiles against her soft lips as they move together.
You had better.