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“I wonder what it would feel like to be loved like that.”
Rufina’s voice was a soft murmur. Her words were caught by Ein as they spilled from her mouth like pearls from a string, the delicate baubles tumbling as the tether snapped and broke. She hadn’t been speaking to Ein. From the way her head was turned she’d been attempting to converse with the sky spread dark and velvety beyond the sanctuary of their airship’s cloaking, dotted by stars blinking too dim to see in this kind of night without straining one's eyes.
They were ageless – omnipresent, in their haughty perches on some faraway abode – and faded and flickered as though hunted.
Rufina’s hand had stilled, though Ein didn’t need to move closer to spot the line of tension in her wrist, angling the slope of her shoulders, spelling out interruption of a motion so rote and habitual. The break in familiarity resembled a cracked shell, or a split-open quartz. More than the impromptu remark, or her companion’s retreat into herself – in place of a hummed melody or babbling with open merriment – what brought Ein’s thoughts to a startle was the bowgun that lay on the table before her. The deadly guts sprang and splayed, spread open but still as a discarded memory. They made for a sour and perfect match with Rufina’s vacant hands and diverted gaze, all signs of having suspended what ought to be nothing less than a most welcome respite when the woman was concerned: the act and care of maintaining her armament, either to paper over nerves before a mission or to soothe them back down after one was over.
“I heard you,” said Ein, angling for brusque levity, and shrugged one shoulder as her hair tossed back, one step urging on the other into the steady gait of advance. Her fingertips ached for a cigarette – no surprise there – but it had to have been to prove some point that she laid her right palm atop Rufina’s, where the other woman had idled it on the tabletop, instead of reaching for the familiar rattle of singed metal and creased carton at her side. The Merkabah interior was cool. The metal table’s surface must be even colder. Ein clicked her tongue. “What’s brought that little remark on? Feeling melancholy? Lonely, perhaps?”
“Oh, not me!” Rufina challenged blithefully, “Of course not. Never, when you’re here.” She tipped her head up, so Ein could better see the glimmer deep in her eyes, the most miniscule of twists in her upturned mouth that on someone else’s face would've poisoned the grin into a grimace. Ein had thought that look had been a visual oxymoron, the first time she'd regarded the other woman face-to-face. The memory clung to her with stark persistence, even after time and familiarity had eroded the quality of her presence before Ein that might have disarmed a smaller person – or perhaps merely one lacking in her prodigal background. Rufina’s hand turned underneath Ein’s and squeezed. “I was referring to the Goddess.”
“So, entertaining thoughts of godhood, are you, Sister Argent? Hardly winning any bets for originality, as a quick perusal of our past targets proves, but hearing that from you is certainly… novel.”
“Hearing that from you greatly inspires me to repent and beg for absolution from such sacrilegious thoughts,” said Rufina brightly. Her gaze lingered in the space over Ein’s shoulder as the other woman took the chair across from her and sat. The bowgun lay mutely between them on the table. “How’s the status on the front deck?”
“They're fine." Ein waved her off. "Those sods I’m entrusting the controls to for the next leg tremble at the slightest cloud or turbulence, however, so don’t tell them what I said,” she added. “Regardless. There’s downtime for me that can use some spending. Tell me what’s eating you.”
“I’ve already told the long and short of it,” she said. “Just idle wondering. To be loved like the Goddess is loved… we’ve heard the worshippers’ perspective. Written guides on it – proper dictation on the proper way of devotion, nothing less.” Her expression shifted, a shadow of something nameless moving beneath her vivid irises. The smile had slanted, more a line than a curve. It looked to Ein like Rufina was weighing her next words, even as she had turned them over in her head time and again like an amulet or coin in the dark. Carnelia had possessed a glare that could pierce through any haze in its scarlet sorrow, but Rufina's ability to transform narrow spaces into caverns and garden paths into which she could retreat was no author's embellishment. “But what about the other side? To be loved, worshiped, knelt before–”
“Prostrated to,” Ein supplied helpfully.
“–and misunderstood,” finished Rufina, meeting her companion’s irreverent smirk with laughter, short and soft and altogether just as wry.
“I imagine it’s a petty concern for such a mighty, omnipotent being.”
“I imagine so,” Rufina conceded. Then, with a sparkle of inspiration in her voice, “Ah, maybe I’ve been sketching it from the wrong angle. Perhaps what concerns Her more is how to love like a deity.”
“And what would that look like, according to your limited, mortal, Goddess-given imagination?
“Coldly,” she said, with no hesitation at all. “Distantly.”
“Kindly?” Ein teased.
“Not kindly, no.” Rufina muffled a giggle behind her palm. “She prefers the impersonal approach…”
“What a coincidence! I was about to say I believe the same.”
“And yet faith in Her salvages lives and pulls them from the edge of an irrevocable brink,” Rufina went on. Ein’s gaze had only flickered for a moment but the other woman moved fast, turning in a cheeky flash of red to the window at her side again. Her breath, meted slowly, puffed out into thin condensation against the glass. Now the stars – inhumanely smoldering and bright somewhere too far for the eyes to capture their light – would appear as though truly devoured. Her voice sounded distant. “Faith is a savior. For some, it’s their only one. The scriptures would call that a virtue; a blessing guised in a dearth of alternatives.”
“That’s despair, if I’ve ever heard of it,” Ein said. I’d say we’ve heard more than most.
"Mm-hmm." Rufina, of course, saw the right of it. Her voice had settled back to its usual lilt. But the imagery was mismatched. Her eyes were closed and her hairline was pressed against the bulletproof glass. She remained a woman on a venture, inexorable in thoughts if not physical motion, and one whose pathways Ein was following. And the weapon still lay there, a respite she was denying herself for the circling length of this conversation. “Yes. For both the believer prostrated before the altar and the Goddess hung in idolatry above it, there is no other choice indeed. A religion cannot only be a deity. There must be a follower.”
“A faith with only one devotee!” Ein declared, the humor in her voice half a scoff. “Sounds like a hoot. Or a lunatic proselytizing to himself, rather. I’d like to give that a look-see – when I get bored out of my skull enough.”
“It may be closer than you think,” said Rufina, her captive hand easing away, opening her eyes with a sad little smile. She went back to cleaning her bowgun, before Ein could ask, and Ein ended up lighting herself that cigarette after all.
What was it she had wanted to talk to her knight about, before her casual words had thrown that into disarray? The desperate application letter that had found itself on the mahogany desk of her office that morning – if Rufina had maybe heard of the kid? But she gazed at Rufina sidelong from behind the curtain of dispersing smoke – translucent blur superimposed on opaque certainty, and both comfortingly so – and she took a long drag, pushing the thought for another time, and leaned back into this present, transient moment, of Rufina in an act she had seen before and would surely witness again a myriad times over.