Author Topic: Bad Kelsey: The End of jcompton  (Read 5452 times)

Offline jcompton

  • Niche Exploiter
  • Administrator
  • Planewalker
  • *****
  • Posts: 7246
Bad Kelsey: The End of jcompton
« on: June 13, 2005, 11:14:47 PM »
"Oh, Kelsey." Merena shook her head and unsheathed her hunting knife. "You’re forgetting the rules."

Kelsey swallowed and tried very hard not to sound facetious. His attempt at projecting calm--propping one hand on his hip--resulted in a far from regal foldover in his rumpled robe. "Which rule is that?"

Merena gestured idly with the knife. "The rule we had about hurting one another! That we would sooner... sooner walk into a doorframe, or fall on a knife"--once she realized what she was doing, she quickly tucked the blade away--"than cause each other this kind of..."

Kelsey weakly offered, "Pain?"

"Try anguish. Despair. Worthlessness." Kelsey nipped the tip of his tongue by way of apology, one of those little acts of sacrifice nobody else knows or cares about.

Merena sat down heavily on the bed near him. The satisfying thwump of the mattress did little to ease her frustration. "Do you remember when I told you I thought Anomen was propositioning me, Kelsey?"

Kelsey's features went slack for a moment as he calculated the implications of the question and sagged to the bed beside Merena. He thought he had heard voices downstairs, but they were female voices. Could Delryn be downstairs? Was he already Kylia's surrogate father? Was he--"Of course I remember. He denied it, of course, when I asked him."

Quite despite herself, Merena whacked Kelsey in the shoulder. "When you asked him. Four days later, Kelsey. For the first three, you sulked so heavily I thought a bag of lead shot had been tied to your boots. You mumbled, you muttered, you moped, you barely spoke to me... all over something I didn't do that wasn't my idea in the first place!"

"I... I remember." Kelsey didn't need to be reminded of what was going to come next. Technically, he hadn't asked her for the pledge, but he knew in his heart she was right--he had damn well nudged and needled her for it.

"That's when we promised to be true to one another. To steer clear of that temptation, to make sure all the Anomens of the world knew that we were lovers, and in love, and together and inseparable and all those things we were supposed to be to one another. I promised. You promised. And I didn't change, Kelsey. You did."

There was a long, long pause, and Merena took the opportunity to scan the room. Kelsey hadn't been here long, but he didn't show any signs of leaving yet, either. She could tell a stunted wardrobe had been set aside for him by the cluster of headache powder parchments lining its top. He'd been getting them more often since Kylia's birth.

She had seen enough. "I'm waiting, Kelsey."

"Waiting for what?" Kelsey played the mule. He saw little else to do.

"Waiting for you to tell me what changed."

Kelsey slowly rose to his feet and shuffled uneasily to his wardrobe, his still-disheveled robe impeding his progress. He reasoned that stopping to fix it would be an insult at this point. After a few long, deep breaths, he tried to answer her.

At first, this was a spectacular failure, a stream of one-word sentences like "I..." and "But..." and "It..."

Finally, it poured forth, his voice becoming a frantic bark by the end. "They wanted me! They wanted me, and I had never been wanted that way before and I... just... couldn't... say... NO!"

Surely, the whole house had heard. Neither cared.

Merena flushed hot and angry, her knife-hand twitching reflexively. "Oh, PLEASE!" She realized she was only getting louder, and at some point, Kylia would manage to induce at least one of her companions to open the door. She didn't want any interruptions, not even from their daughter. So she measured her tone, low and threatening and vengeful. "Kelsey, the things I have done for you, the ways I have welcomed you into my arms and into my bed--"

Kelsey waved his hands, managed to regain his composure as he interrupted. "No. No. I know that. And you're right, you do, and you have... gods know you have. But no, Merena. They wanted me first. Would you have found me, loved me, if I hadn't rushed up to you, told you how you had awed me, told you how you continued to impress me? If I had refused to go away?"

Merena's eyes betrayed no understanding of his position. "I still don't see what that has to do with anything. You've caught the eye of plenty of other women. I've seen it myself. What about that barmaid who kept asking you for a massage? I didn't see you leap into her bed!"

A wave of nausea rolled into Kelsey like a runaway log, because he knew what he had to tell her. He hadn't reasoned it out until he had left Talice's party long behind. Gods knew he had searched for the answer morning after morning as he pondered the terrible, awful, exciting pleasures of what he had done. But valuable insights come slowly.

"It... it's just..." Kelsey took a deep breath and held it, desperately trying to prevent another embarrassing explosive rant. "It's just that forever is a very long time. And I didn't realize that until... until very recently."

Merena stood to face him nose to nose, her eyes icy.

"What?" It was a single syllable that hung in the air for a very, very long time. Kelsey was reluctant to intrude on it, reluctant to be sliced to bits by its razor-sharp edges.

He steeled himself. "Forever. It's a long time. I never really appreciated that before. And I'm sorry. I'm so, so sorry that I lost my resolve... that I gave in. But it was one thing to say that I could be true to you forever and another to... to actually do it."

"Obviously."

In a flash, Merena saw two paths before her. One involved a great deal of cursing and heavy objects. He was telling her the truth--he would take any punishment she could think to dish out at him. But that would break the promise she had made, and despite it all, she was simply not prepared to do that. The other path would be harder on all of them, but it had the ray of hope she was looking for.

She chose. "Go. Go to Kylia, and spend the day with her. Ask her about all the things she's wanted to tell you over the past seven months--and believe me, she remembers. Ask her about her counting numbers--you'll like that, there's really no doubt that she's your daughter."

"Of course. Of course. I wanted to hear it all the minute she came in, but..." Kelsey, finally, felt he had leave to properly adjust his clothing.

"But you'd been talking to the dryads, and on this little quest of ours, Kylia's come to understand why that's not always a good thing." Kelsey nodded slowly, blankly... far past the point of trying to display any extra nuance of understanding or repentance.

Merena was equally at the end of her emotional reserves. The preliminaries were over, and it was time for the remedy. Bitter medicine though it was.

"At dawn, we are going to go home." She didn't mean to pause for breath, but it took a lot of resolve just to get started. As she feared, Kelsey's eyes brightened with hope at the word "we."

"You can stay here"--at which point the brightness in his eyes dimmed--"although I very much doubt Skie will be very enchanted by you now that she knows the kind of company you should be keeping. So, go fight your Talassans and pacify the pirates and squash the leeches and take your sole payment after nightfall. We both know you don't need the money."

"Unless we both decide you have really had enough of this life you've chosen over your home, you can't come home." Tears and a quaver bit into the end of her sentence, but she held her ground.

Kelsey reeled, bashed between the eyes by a second attack on his equilibrium. If he were on a ship, she would be taking on water. "How... how long?" The question sounded more pitiful than he had intended, but his guard was obliterated.

"I don't know yet." Merena sighed and paced slowly toward the door. She was fairly certain she heard Imoen spin on her heel and pad down the hallway to avoid detection. No matter.

She did not--could not--turn to face him. "Probably not forever. Because you were right about one thing, Kelsey. 'Forever' is a very long time."
Cespenar says, "Kelsey and friends be at the Pocket Plane? Ohhh yesssss!" http://www.pocketplane.net

 

With Quick-Reply you can write a post when viewing a topic without loading a new page. You can still use bulletin board code and smileys as you would in a normal post.

Warning: this topic has not been posted in for at least 120 days.
Unless you're sure you want to reply, please consider starting a new topic.

Name: Email:
Verification:
Type the letters shown in the picture
Listen to the letters / Request another image
Type the letters shown in the picture:
What color is grass?:
What is the seventh word in this sentence?:
What is five minus two (use the full word)?: