【战锤40k同人作品翻译】Ennui 第十️一章：赠予 Given
本章概述：
亚历桑德拉修女试图祈祷灵族离开。
In which Sister Alessandra tries to pray the Eldar away.
正文：
我笑了。
我肯定本不该这么做，但我没办法收起脸上的表情，而我也不完全确定自己想要这么做。出于我的誓言，这个想法对我的困扰并不及它本应该的那样。
她的嘴唇很温暖，软得像我们的修会的圣花的花瓣轻抚我的皮肤。
我不确定自己在水里坐了多久，在伊莎莱离开后漫不经心地擦洗，最后我站起身来拿起我的毛巾。时间长到我的皮肤已经开始起皱，在冷空气渗入皮肤时瑟瑟发抖。我擦着手臂和胸口，尽可能快地擦干自己，然后回到更衣壁龛。
在我伸手激活控制板的一瞬间我才意识到一个问题。
“我没有衣服可穿，”我喃喃道。
我茫然地盯着壁龛的门看了会儿。我本来可以轻松地将我的糊涂归结于灵族巫术，但通过与伊莎莱的持续接触，我逐渐开始相信：她自称没有此类力量时没有撒谎。事实上，如果她想让我头脑发热的话反而会更容易些，毕竟我已经蠢到能在没有一件未浸过兽人肚肠的衣服的情况下去沐浴。
“行吧，好像没有产生什么形式功能，”我用毛巾紧紧地包裹着自己，感激着它的长度，随后坚定地走出盥洗室，拿起第二张毛巾开始擦干头发。
毫无疑问，我带上登陆艇的个人物品所剩无几。我们本应该与一支小股部队交战并于一个卫军连队汇合，但我们却降落在充斥着从四面八方的建筑物里涌来的兽人小子的交战区。
一个陷阱，很好的陷阱。
至少，这个陷阱好到没有哪怕一个战斗群里的参谋预见了这一点。
有什么柔软的东西落在了我的肩膀上，我吓了一跳，转头越过肩膀，看到伊莎莱平静地为我披上一件柔软的浴袍。她令人警惕的静默的移动让我倍感紧张。一想到她能在我不注意时摸到我身后，马上就能把刀捅进我的肋间，我便深感不安。
但她不会这么做。
“其中一个房间里有些你或许能穿上的衣服，”伊莎莱以她语调温和的哥特语说。“目前这就够用了，对吗？”
“我…… 是的，”我拉紧浴袍，脱下并提起毛巾擦头发。“谢……谢谢你。”
伊莎莱扬起一边的眉毛，随后微笑着点头离开，以她进入盥洗室时所带的那种诡异的安静消失在了主屋内。
我系紧浴袍，叹了口气，试图从脑海中清除关于这个灵族女子的思绪。她是个外星人，我提醒自己这一点，外星人的心思显然无法也不该被理解。
抬手抚上额头，我感受到了内心的激荡。我不知道她对我有何图谋，也不知道她是否真的想死。
我只知道这是某种宏大的操纵。
“我是修女会的姐妹，”我告诫自己。随后我跪了下去，在腿上紧握双手。“无有恐惧，无有动摇，盖因责任与恐惧永远同行。吾须追随其一，戒除其二。”
“地球上的帝皇，以神圣之怒充实我心，”我吟诵着，在熟悉的祷文中求得安慰。“异端所至，吾携怒火，异族敢犯，吾为盾剑。”
我在地上跪了一个小时，尽我所能地多念诵祷言，脑中闪过每一个教理问答，然而……
那美丽的紫藤色双眼从我的心底回望过来。那让言语在我的舌上嗫嚅，令我难以自拔的非人的灵族眼眸。
印在我的额头上的温存一吻并没有改善这种情况。
“草，”我郁闷地站起身来，战栗着意识到这里已经冷到什么程度，便把浴袍在胸口周围系紧些。
穿上一身衣服在现在听起来十分正当。
我离开了寒冷的盥洗室进入主屋，没走几步就口干舌燥地停了下来。
伊莎莱紧闭双眼蜷缩在长沙发上，她的胸口在睡梦中缓缓地起伏。
当然，她依旧一丝不挂。
慢慢地，我闭上眼睛，深吸一口气，并不久违地又一次后悔于这次深呼吸，毕竟这房间闻起来就是她的气息。它闻起来是伊莎莱的味道，一种干净，烟熏火燎的气味，就像篝火的余烬，而几乎事与愿违地，我没有移动也没有离开，而是站稳身子再一次呼吸。
我吸进了那种冷烟的味道，随后睁开眼睛，一半是期盼她能向她一直以来的那样看着我。
但她依旧双目紧闭，她的胸口依旧起起伏伏，她的手臂依旧掖在装点沙发的其中一个枕头下。
有生以来第一次，我祈祷伊莎莱是对的，神皇的确，无论多么短暂地，在我的眼睛漫游于她美丽的身躯上时从这个世界上移开了他的目光。我的心在胸膛里跳得像锻锤一样，我的眼睛从她的肩膀修长柔和的曲线，沿着她的胸口意外谦逊的隆起，直到她舞者的优美的核心肌。我欣赏着她纤细的的腰身，沿着髋部柔和地升起，又向下弯折到臀部和优美的修长双腿。
伊莎莱是很多种事物：一个异形，一个灵族，一个人类之敌。
从某种意义上说，她也是完美的。
完美无瑕。
她日出般的长发像罩袍一样散落在她的身躯上，我发现自己正蹑手蹑脚地前进以免惊扰到她。
小雪，她如此称呼我。并非是侮辱，反而几乎算是情话。这稍稍令我想起阿尔伯雷亚修道院（the Convent Arborea）的年长修女们照看预备修女们的方式——称呼她们的小名，在施训时以与戒律同等的关爱对待她们。
我从未被她们中的一位像那般庇护过，但这并未妨碍我脱颖而出。某种程度上，我很庆幸自己在忠嗣学院和修道院的大多数时间都孤身一人……这意味着我无比确信把我带到普瑞莱克斯五号并置我于先头部队之中的是我的能力和才智，而非某个想跟她的“小姐妹”呆在一起的高阶修女。
所有的训练，所有的时光，而我却正在此带着……欲望，盯着一个灵族女巫。
这个词沉重地哽住了我的喉咙，我转过身去，揉着自己仍然几近麻痹的手臂走向一间偏室。我一共能看到四间，不包括盥洗室，我当下相当想要一些衣物挡在我和冷空气之间。
不出所料，这房间乱七八糟。它并不是间卧室，而是某种书房。我溜了出去，这次我特意避免看向仍安静地蜷缩着的伊莎莱，然后沿着走廊走向左边的第一扇门。
一间卧室，不过根据床的尺寸和玩具们，我怀疑它属于一个孩子。不管之前是谁他都是匆匆离开的……我觉得这个孩子一直在玩耍，如果散落在地板上的塑料卫军可以作为依据的话，而讽刺的是，与他的小玩具龙骑兵交战的敌人就是兽人。
“神皇啊，请庇佑这个灵魂，愿他们在今生或您的怀抱里寻得安宁与富足，”我低声念出这段简短的祷文，同时低下头去，随后后退一步关上门，前去调查下一间。
这个房间像是父母的，也是乱成一团，看上去他们在匆忙收拾行李的中途放弃了，拎着随便什么拿得动的东西便冲了出去。
一个明智的决定，如果他们能逃到避难所的话，那很可能就是因为这个。
远端的墙上有一个精美的五斗橱，离床半米，床很大，装饰十分华丽。它看起来肯定比我之前睡过的任何东西都要舒适。
我拉开前几个抽屉，翻找了几件衣服后拿起了一间束腰外衣，我很快就判定，如果可以根据腰围判断的话，这是个远比我宽大的多的男人穿的。
相反地，当我终于找到不得不假定是她的妻子的衣服时，我只能推测她相当瘦弱。我并不是很高，伊莎莱当然要高一些，我或许能穿上它，但不会很舒服。
“不行，不行，不行，”我换了几件衬衫，如果我试图穿上去的话，它们的背部或肩膀很可能撕裂开来。不管这个女人是谁，她身上显然没有哪怕一盎司的肌肉或脂肪。“去它的，我该怎么才能……”
我停在了拿起倒数第三件时，皱起了眉头。
我盯着它看了好久。穿上它的念头令我反胃，被十足的羞耻感推回了喉咙后边，光是想到它我就能感到脸颊烧了起来。另一方面，这是为数不多的我确实可能穿上的东西，而现在看来，我的可选项相当匮乏。
“因帝皇有求必应，”我咬着牙背诵道，“吾曹盖因傲睨方弃天资而求所不应得于邪行。”
我想要衣服，而神皇赐予了我。我不该抱怨自己不喜欢它们。
谨慎地盯着房门，我蹑手蹑脚地走过去轻轻关上它，然后脱下浴袍，小心翼翼的把我发现的东西举过头顶放下来，直到它以某种优雅落在我的身上，随后我转身在衣柜边的等身长镜里端详自己。
“假如我的高阶修女——神皇护佑她——没有死，那看见我穿着这一身肯定就会了，”我嘟哝道。
我叹了口气，突然感到无比疲惫。
卡利昂高阶修女和我从未真的怎么相处过，我知道即便以我的姐妹情谊的标准来看我也被认为是过度沉默和不合群。倒不是因为我不在乎这些……只是因为我不知道怎么与人交往，怎么像她们一样建立纽带。就像我与其他人类间存在着微妙的隔阂，自我能记事起就一直是这样。
无论我怎么与她们接洽，我的姐妹和队友，这些本应该对我如家人般的人总是似乎和我保持着一臂的距离。
就好像我携带着某种沉默的传染病，在全世界人都知晓的同时只有我察觉不到自己的瘟疫而蒙头活着。
总是如此，可……我想念她们。
我后退几步一屁股坐到床上，环抱着自己，发出一声微弱的抽泣。
“地上的神皇，祂的恩典无疑地永恒、慈悲，”我轻声开始，“让我的姐妹们紧靠着您，带她们远离阴影，进到您光明的臂弯，并知晓她们的名字：Tress Kalion, Andra Lillimara, Yu Wenlei, Attica Tenzen…”
原文：
I smiled.
I certainly shouldn’t have but I couldn’t keep the expression off of my face, and I wasn’t entirely sure I wanted to. The notion of that troubled me perhaps less than it ought to have given my oaths.
Her lips were warm, and they were soft as the petals of one of our Order’s sacred blooms brushing against my skin.
I’m not sure how long I sat in the water, mindlessly scrubbing after Isarae left the washroom, before I finally stood up and picked up my towel. It was long enough that my skin had begun to prune, and I shivered as the cool air sank into my skin. I rubbed at my arms and chest, drying myself off as quickly as possible before moving back to the changing alcove.
It was only as my hand was stretching out towards the activation panel that I came to a troubling realisation.
“I don’t have any clothes,” I mumbled quietly.
I stared at the doors to the alcove sightlessly for several moments. It would be easy to blame the addling of my wits on Eldar witchery, but I was coming to believe through prolonged contact with Isarae that she was not lying when she claimed to be unable to use any such powers. In fact, it would be easier if she were addling my wits because then I would not have to process the realisation that I was stupid enough to take a bath without having any clothes not soaked through with Ork guts.
“Well, it’s not as though there are formal functions coming up,” I wrapped the towel firmly around myself, grateful for its generous length, and determinedly walked out of the washroom, picking a second towel up to start drying my hair.
Doubtless, there was little left of my personal effects that had been brought on the landing craft. We had been supposed to engage with a small force then rendezvous with a guard company, but instead we’d landed in a hot zone teeming with Ork boys boiling out of the surrounding buildings.
A trap, and a good one.
Good enough, at least, that not one member of the battlegroup’s strategium saw it coming.
Something soft settled over my shoulders, and I started, turned, and stared over my shoulder at Isarae who was calmly placing a soft bathrobe on me. The sheer silence of her movement was alarming, and it set me on edge. The notion that she could get right behind me, close to slip a blade between my ribs, without my realising was a disturbing thought.
Not that she would.
“There are some clothes that may fit you well enough in one of the rooms,” Isarae said in her gently accented gothic. “This will do for now, yes?”
“I… yes,” I pulled the bathrobe closed and shucked off the towel, moving it up to start drying my hair. “Th… thank you.”
Isarae raised an eyebrow at me, then smiled, nodded, and stepped away, vanishing back into the main room with as much eerie silence as she had entered the washroom with.
I tied off the robe and sighed, trying to put the thought of the Eldar woman out of my mind. She was an alien, I reminded myself, and the alien mind by definition could not and should not be understood.
Raising my hand to my forehead, I felt a stirring in my heart. I could not know what she intended for me, or if her desire to die was true.
For all I knew this was all some vast manipulation.
“I am a sister of the Adeptus Sororitas,” I reminded myself. Then knelt and clasped my hands in my lap. “I will not fear, I will not falter, for duty and fear ever follow the same path. I shall pursue one as I conquer the other.”
“Emperor on Earth, fill my heart with holy rage,” I intoned, taking comfort in the familiar litanies. “Where there is heresy, I will carry the fires of your wrath, where the alien foe dares, I will be the bulwark and the blade.”
For an hour I rested on my knees, I spoke as many of the litanies as I could, every catechism that came to mind, and yet…
Beautiful wisteria eyes stared back at me from the depths of my own mind. Inhuman, Eldar eyes that made the words falter on my tongue, and stole my breath.
None of this was helped by the echo of a warm kiss on my forehead
“Frak it,” I stood sullenly and pulled the robe tighter around my chest, shivering as I realised just how chilly it had gotten.
Clothes sounded excellent right about now.
I moved out of the cold washroom and into the main room, and paused a few steps in as my mouth grew dry.
Isarae was curled up on the long couch with her eyes closed, and her chest rising and falling in a slow measure of sleep.
And of course, she was still naked.
Slowly, I closed my eyes, took a deep breath, and for the second time in a rather short span I found myself deeply regretting that deep breath because the room smelled of her. It smelled of Isarae, which was a kind of clean, smoky scent, like the ashes of a campfire that had just gone out, and almost against my will, rather than move or leave, I stood still and I breathed again.
I breathed in the cold-smoke scent, then opened my eyes, half-expecting her to be watching me like she always seemed to be.
But her eyes were still closed, her chest was still rising and falling, and her arm was tucked under one of the pillows that adorned the couch.
For the first time in my life, I prayed that Isarae was right and that the God-Emperor had, for however brief a time, turned his gaze away from this world as I let my eyes roam over her beautiful body. My heart beat like a forgehammer in my chest as my eyes roved the long, smooth curves of her shoulders, down along the swell of her surprisingly modest breasts, to the graceful, dancer’s muscle of her core. I admired her slender waist and the way it rose in a smooth arc along her hips, and then curved down to her buttocks and her long, lovely legs.
Isarae was many things; a xeno, an Eldar, a foe of mankind.
She was also, in a certain sense of the word, perfect.
Perfectly beautiful.
Her long, sunrise hair fell across her body like a shroud, and I found myself padding forward carefully so as not to disturb her.
Little Snow, she had called me. Not an insult, but almost a term of endearment. It reminded me a bit of how the older Sisters of the Convent Arborea would look after newer novitiates, calling them fond names, and treating them with care as much as with discipline during their training.
I’d never had one of them take me under their wing that way, but it had not stopped me from excelling. In a way, I was grateful to have mostly been alone during my time at the Schola and the Convent… it meant that I knew beyond a doubt that it was my skills and talents which had brought me to Praelex V and put me in the vanguard, and not a Sister Superior who wished to have her ‘little sister’ at her side.
All of my training, all of my time, and here I was staring at an Eldar witch with… desire.
The word put a dark blockage into my throat, and I rubbed at my still-most-numb arm as I turned my back on her and made for one of the side-rooms. There were four I could see, not counting the washroom, and I dearly wanted some clothes between me and the cold air at this point.
Expectedly, the room was a mess. It wasn’t a bedroom though, but rather some kind of study. I slipped back out, studiously avoiding looking at Isarae this time who was still peacefully curled up, and moved down the hallway to the first door on the left.
A bedroom, but I suspected it belonged to a child given the size of the bed and the toys. Whoever it was had left in a hurry… the child had been playing I think, if the plastic Guardsmen scattered on the floor were anything to go by, and ironically the foes his little toy Dragoon had been fighting had been Orks.
“God-Emperor, preserve this soul, may they find peace and plenty, in this life or in your arms,” I muttered the short prayer, bowing my head as I did so, then stepped back, closed the door, and went to investigate the next one.
This room was likely the parents’ room, also a mess, and it looked as though they had tried to pack in a hurry only to give up part way through and rush out with whatever they could carry.
A wise decision, and if they did escape to a shelter then it was likely due to that.
There was a fine chest of drawers set against the far wall, a half-meter from the bed, which was large and sumptuously dressed. It certainly looked far more comfortable than anything I’d ever slept.
I pulled the first few drawers open, shifted the clothing around before hefting up a tunic that I quickly decided was for a man with far larger proportions than I if the width of the waistline was anything to go by.
In opposite fashion, when I finally did find what I had to presume was his wife’s clothing, I could only conclude that she was positively waifish. I wasn’t terribly tall, certainly Isarae was taller, and I probably could fit into them, but it would not be a comfortable fit.
“No, no, no,” I shifted through the various blouses, all of which would probably be torn at the back or shoulders if I tried to put them on. Whoever this woman was, she clearly didn’t have an ounce of muscle or fat on her. “Warp it, what do I have to do to-”
I paused as I pulled out the third-to-last article, and grimaced.
For several long moments, I stared at it. The notion of putting it on made my gorge rise, pushed up to the back of my throat by sheer shame, and I could feel my cheeks blazing just thinking about it. On the other hand, it was one of the only things I had found that might actually fit me and, at this point, I was rather badly starved for choices.
“For the Emperor answers all needs,” I recited through gritted teeth, “and only in hubris do we turn from our gifts to seek in the darkness that which we do not deserve.”
I had wanted clothes and the God-Emperor had provided. It was not for me to complain that they were not to my liking.
Eyeing the door cautiously, I sidled over to it and nudged the door shut, then dropped the robe and carefully pulled my find out over my head, tugging it down until it settled across me with something like grace, and turned to regard myself in the body-length mirror set to the side of the drawers.
“If my Sister Superior, God-Emperor hold her, were not dead, then seeing me in this would surely manage it,” I grumbled.
I sighed, suddenly incredibly weary.
Sister Superior Kalion and I had never precisely gotten along, I know that even by the standards of my Sisterhood I was considered overly taciturn and stand-offish. It wasn’t that I didn’t care though… simply that I didn’t know how to connect, to bond in the same way they did. It was as though there were a subtle divide between the rest of humanity myself, and it has been that way for as long as I can recall.
No matter how I approached them, my Sisters or my squadmates, those who were supposed to be like a family to me always seemed to keep me at arm’s length.
It was as if I had some silent contagion that everyone else in the world were privy to while I blundered through life oblivious to my own plague.
All the same, though… I missed them.
I stepped back and dropped onto the bed, wrapped my arms around myself, and let out a small sob.
“God-Emperor on Earth whose grace is eternal and mercy unquestioned,” I began quietly, “keep my Sisters close to thee, bear them from shadow into thy bright embrace and know their names, Tress Kalion, Andra Lillimara, Yu Wenlei, Attica Tenzen…”
