Fiction: Denial – Kara and Etta

Written for the Lost & Found: Valentine’s Edition blog hop.

Kara doesn’t think it’s love.

Not at first, not for a long time. She knows love. Knows how it feels – she’s sure of it. This doesn’t feel like that. She loves Etta, her parents, her brother Lewis but this doesn’t feel anywhere close to the same. This is all fear and anxiety and blushing whenever Rochelle looks her way.

Kara isn’t magic. She works in an office. She reads history books and does boring admin work. She’s never been the interesting one, ever, but the way Rochelle looks at her is interesting. Curious. Analysing. The way she moves around the apartment Kara shares with Etta, always in Kara’s periphery, always careful not to disturb her too much but always catching her attention.

It takes her breath away. That awareness.

Rochelle is magic like Etta, but nothing like the other woman who Kara has known all her life. She hardly knows Rochelle at all, she sees her once a week, has known her a few months. But this feeling, it burns sometimes, and she’s never felt anything like it, anything so intense. Rochelle is quiet, even when she and Etta are practising spells in the living room, even when she’s laughing at Etta turning her hair green by mistake or giving herself a moustache. She’s quiet, contemplative and Kara finds that more attractive than any of the young woman’s curves.

When the other mage talks to her, she can’t help but smile, a warmth that spreads through her and settles in for the rest of the week, fading slowly until she sees her again and it starts all over again.

Rochelle never indicates anything more beyond curiosity.

Kara doesn’t know what to do. This feeling, burning bright behind her eyes, and in her chest has her reeling sometimes. She feels dizzy and thinks she might fall over and she’s annoyed more than anything that this woman has such a strong effect on her. That she suddenly becomes to weak.

When Rochelle kisses her one day and she wants to be weak suddenly. Weak against Rochelle, weak with her, for her. She feels alive for the first time. Every nerve is aware of something intangible and she wonders if it’s a spell, something the other woman is doing other than kissing.

Except Rochelle blushes just as hers as Kara feels she is and stutters when she speaks, when she apologises. Apologises for kissing her and Kara doesn’t reply, can’t reply, just kisses her back because she wants to. It’s been too long since she’d kissed anyone too long since she wanted to kiss anyone. She didn’t even know she wanted to kiss Rochelle until those dark soft lips were moving against her own rough pink ones and her arms are around the mage’s waist.

There’s a buzz then, a little ripples of electricity over her lips and when she pulls away Rochelle is giggling. Giggling ans the sound causes the same sensation as the spell and even then Kara doesn’t think it’s love – maybe something like it, something close but not love.

Then Rochelle and Etta go missing.

Kara’s pretty sure she’s dying at first.

Her skin feels taut, she feels like she’s being pulled apart, her heart is beating but it feels off-centre, off-rhythm.

Nothing is quite right.

Etta is her best friend. She understands that pain, it’s akin to when her brother almost died. She understands the worry, the possible loss, the dull way in which the world ticks by.

She doesn’t understand why Rochelle being missing magnifies it, means that while her heart isn’t beating right sometimes she can’t breathe at all Rochelle is gone too – Rochelle. Is. Gone.

She’s pretty sure she’s fainted once or twice but it’s hard to differentiate between that and passing out from exhaustion whenever she sits and on occasion stands.

It all comes together when she and Micah find both mages.

She’s alive again, Rochelle is alive and so is Kara.

She kisses Rochelle, hands on her cheeks, dark skin a little pale from their time in captivity and she’s never looked so beautiful and the way she feels about having this woman back is the same for Etta. And heavens it’s so perfect, to have them both within reach again, wrapping both an arm around each woman, even as Micah holds tightly onto Etta’s hand and tries to pull her into an embrace of his own.

This is perfect, this love, and she dots kisses over Rochelle’s face, even as she sways from her own exhausted and giggles at the way Kara treats her.

She doesn’t tell her. Doesn’t tell her she loves because she can’t, can’t trust her voice. She can already feel a few tears falling.

“I missed you,” Rochelle says.

“Yes,” Kara mutters, hugging the mage close to her, face against her neck and kissing her again, mumbling the word over again.

“It’s okay my love,” Rochelle says, pulling back so they can look at each other. “It’s okay, I know.”

Kara isn’t sure what she knows, never really is but it doesn’t matter. She will know, eventually, Kara will tell her. Just not today, not now, in this cave in the middle of a broken down factory far from anywhere.

Perhaps when they’re home again.

Safe and sound and in love.

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