now kiss

"Nia."

Not a question, not an address, not a command, not even a statement. More of a hypothesis. A tentative description of the woman standing before her. And has the idea of Nia always and only been such a concept as that?

Melia lays hand over hand, fingers loosely curled as if they should hold a staff (maybe even as if they are simultaneously disgusted and enamored with such an idea, that the violence and the order both had once been hers to hand in their entirety, or at least in some part measurably real and un-cast-off).

"Melia," Nia answers curtly, sounding much more sure of herself by comparison (perhaps only by comparison). They're both still wearing the masks, and I needn't go into the intricate redundancies of those iconographic vestments as specifically do mirror inner attitudes. Not too much, anyway.

Were they to be the perfectly predictable pictures of wry, matured (like wine, except slightly soured) women who tolerate no insolence nor any petty displays of frailty from any suitors of their time and impression, one of them would vipe an accusation directly at the other's throat: "Well? Is there something you've got to tell me that you couldn't have said in the audience chambers?"

Would they be entertained by the thought? Frightened? Merely inconvenienced?

But Melia can't ask that, because she's the entrant, and Nia can't ask that either, because she's just foregone her ordered piece.

"I was curious," the Keves queen says instead. It's so simple, she could quite justifiably have sprung for the audible air of an ellipsis to pad out her presence. But she didn't. She doesn't. In her own suddenly-meek way, she has driven directly to the point. I needn't even have called her by her epithet just now.

And, indeed, that sentiment couldn't have been said in the audience chambers. She hadn't been curious, then - not any more so than usual. She'd only been calculating, and compromising, and ever so faintly bemused. But after seeing Nia turn away, expressing a strange and newfound aura of disappointment...now, there is a point to be pounced after.

Nia gulps, but makes it sound like a sigh. She has already detected the distinct tenor of her slip. "I can't blame you." And I won't, either, even though I've just admitted to eschewing my fairest fair's fair idea of "could".

The answer, then, is a curious mixture of all three. Novelty is something that comes upon us regardless of desire, and curiosity is a desire but it is not...desire. Both and all carry tempestuousness into the unknowable eye of the storm.

Surely there are other ways to balance international scales of difference that leave aside the desire of one woman to understand and to make more than peace with the other. But if that were indeed the only way, would you yet complain?

The eyes of the masks are shut. Not tightly, mind you, only enigmatically, only giving the illusion of complete and utter relaxation and unbotheredness. But they are shut nonetheless - well, simultaneously shut and squinted, as is characteristic of the cat-eye shape.

But Melia's eyes are not shut. Neither are Nia's. What is blue and gold on top is blue and gold underneath as well. A well can be eternally deep, so long as its depths are clear. So...so much for secrets. The truth will out, and it shows itself in traces of nervous sheen on ruby and violet lips.

More masks. More lies. That's not how anatomy, whether that of Homs or human or Flesh Eater or Blade, works. (Well, maybe you can find me a Blade with bright electric blue lips and a magnetic quirk in their pupil, but I'm not quite in the market right about now.) That's a special and especially deadly on commentary on femininity, how the lipstick of an assassin is her most cruelly indelible mark.

How old are they? Then again, how perpetually young? Melia's hand hovers; she is not promiscuous, is not brusque, is not in any way intending to take self-righteously of what Nia has to offer, of her own self and not of the lives of child soldiers and religious subjects and whatever else have you, as was cultivated to be their structures in that past world.

"Strange, that I should feel this way."

"What way?" Nia feels herself venture out uncomfortably sharp, and the sound of her own voice whipping out of her mouth screeches likes nails and death. It should be a quiet question. They meet in an offbeat manner of momentary peace, after all.

"That I should feel charitable towards you. Kinship, one might even call it."

Is it even possible not to feel some measure of kindred spirit with someone standing so near to you, their breaths rising and falling against your own and your breast without conscious hope of independent rhythm? It would take a harder woman, a more personal war, for that to be so.

Tilting her mask toward the ceiling, Nia dips her chin closer to her collarbone, her Core. "It's selfish, isn't it? That we don't even know what we want, and we're still ordering everyone all this way."

She thinks back to Jin, and Torna; of course she does, because that had been the boldest starkness of her youth standing in cold relief, raised from Echell and bowing before Elysium. At least he'd never turned tail. Maybe he'd found it too great a task, but his army had marched only five or six troops wide with only two for depth, if those. He'd had only their minds to change, if necessary.

(Melia had had those of the Companions, and that had been no great moral struggle on her part - for and to her, more natural than anything had been the idea that all should come together in sight and in want of homeland, of safety and of belonging. Of warmth in novelty. Of will to survive. Of freedom to change.)

As Nia has only Melia's, at the heart of it. And snogging her in a hidden enclave of the Agnus headquarters (she doesn't even think of them as her own, sometimes)? Well. It's not a strategy she'd ever envisioned using, in truth. So much for foresight and prescience.

"Nia..."

The word escapes again, ever more throatily carved into an ephemeral shadow of the truth. No one knows Nia, really. The mask is far from the only thing that does that, even as it has just so majestically covered the wound-laden battleground of their kiss. But though Melia's execution of the word is just as unsure as it had been a mere handful of minutes, moments, ago, the echo of its model in her mind is astonishingly loud.

What she is and who she is are concepts just as plain divested as the ideas of what she wants and who she wants, with both of those statutes upon identity nestled firmly in place.

Melia, queen of Keves, is a girl who lost her family twice over, once to tragedy and once to diversely stratified age. Nia, queen of Agnus, is...just the same. Just the same.

The only question is whether or not when they leave this room those precious, precocious inner souls will remain to be returned to.