Krishnapriya Devashree

103. Decisions and resolves

He looked down at the drink again, then threw it aside.

"I would have taken a hundred more blows from her brother," he whispered," But not this. Anything but her tears."

 Krishna pressed the heels of his palms against his eyes until colors burst behind his lids. Mortals drank to forget, but gods had no such mercy. Every tear she had shed, every tremor in her voice, every broken sob...they were etched into him now, permanent as the scars on her feet from climbing that damned mountain for him.

He had broken her heart.

"Can you... please—just—leave?"

Not a command.
A plea.

And he had obeyed. Because even if it killed him, he would give her anything.

Everything. Anything but that. Because how do you leave when someone is your entire home?

"Please..." He couldn't do that. "Please...." He begged the moonless sky. A god begging to a void that would not answer.

He dragged his fingers down his face, the skin beneath his eyes raw. And then he looked up at the sky, starless and vast and merciless.

"She is my home," he whispered hoarsely. "My light. My breath. My Lakshmi."

If only he could offer her his pain .... let her carve her fury into his chest if it meant taking away the ache from hers.

But she hadn't even wanted that.

She hadn't wanted him at all.

Krishna closed his eyes again and leaned his head against the cold wall.

"Please..."
"Please forgive me."
"Please don't stop being mine."

He had to do something. He must, or he would lose everything. 

Like Ram had lost his Sita.

And wasn't that the cruelest irony of all? 

Ram had let her walk away. Had watched Sita disappear into the earth with nothing more than tears in his eyes and silence on his lips. Because for him, his rules, his principles, and his people had been everything. 

But he was no Ram. 

He would not stand by and watch his love walk away. He would not let duty or pride or even divinity steal her from him.

He was Krishna. 

The trickster. The lover. The god who refused to let dharma be a noose around the neck of those he loved. The one who danced through battlefields, who smiled charmingly even in the face of fate, and the one who bent the rules when they didn't serve justice, until they snapped and rewrote them.

She was his Lakshmi.
And he would find a way to deserve her again.

With that thought, Krishna pushed off the cold palace wall and stood. He took a step forward.

Then another.

The wind howled around him, as if the universe itself warned him to turn back.

He ignored it.

He looked up above towards her chamber. 

If he went inside the palace from the entrance, the guards would alarm her and then she would close herself again to him. He needed to be discreet. 

His gaze tracked the narrow ledge that ran beneath the arched windows of the palace. Her window was the one with the conch-shell engraving carved into the wood just below. The same one she had pointed out earlier through clenched teeth.