bottom line, we made it out the first time still in love and half alive
When The Ark presses his palm to her skin, she feels the heat inside her surge toward him, rising eagerly to meet the contact. So when he jerks his hand back with that sharp hiss, her first thought is that she’s burned him. Her gaze drops instinctively to his fingers, searching for some mark, some blister, some sign that the flame has leapt outward, only for him to insist again that it isn't fire.
Her eyes lift slowly to his face as he shoves his hands into his pockets, and something tightens behind her expression. Skepticism first, then something sharper as he says it’s an emotion. Says they’ll get her a book. Call her entitled, but there hasn’t been a single thing in her existence that she’s had to puzzle out alone. From the moment he dragged her out of wreckage, he has been there, teaching, shaping, guiding her through a world in the only language she understood. Rope and current and leverage and men. Every lesson came from him, until now, apparently.
Ironically perhaps, given that she knows him best in ways others don’t, that she can't see how he is the least equipped man in Caido to tutor someone through the architecture of feeling. She only sees that he is stepping back, hand off. "Fine," she snaps briskly, the word is clipped, not wounded but offended, and she lifts her chin as she turns away from him. The wind answers her mood almost immediately, a stiff gust rolling down the pier and rattling the thin walls of the stalls. Newspapers go skittering, astack of empty cups clatters and tumbles, the lemon rind rolls off the boards and into the water below.
She strides toward the harbour without waiting to see if he follows, shoulders tight, the new ring heavy and unfamiliar on her finger, the heat in her belly still burning, only now it feels unquenched, misunderstood, unsatisfied, and very much real.
Her eyes lift slowly to his face as he shoves his hands into his pockets, and something tightens behind her expression. Skepticism first, then something sharper as he says it’s an emotion. Says they’ll get her a book. Call her entitled, but there hasn’t been a single thing in her existence that she’s had to puzzle out alone. From the moment he dragged her out of wreckage, he has been there, teaching, shaping, guiding her through a world in the only language she understood. Rope and current and leverage and men. Every lesson came from him, until now, apparently.
Ironically perhaps, given that she knows him best in ways others don’t, that she can't see how he is the least equipped man in Caido to tutor someone through the architecture of feeling. She only sees that he is stepping back, hand off. "Fine," she snaps briskly, the word is clipped, not wounded but offended, and she lifts her chin as she turns away from him. The wind answers her mood almost immediately, a stiff gust rolling down the pier and rattling the thin walls of the stalls. Newspapers go skittering, astack of empty cups clatters and tumbles, the lemon rind rolls off the boards and into the water below.
She strides toward the harbour without waiting to see if he follows, shoulders tight, the new ring heavy and unfamiliar on her finger, the heat in her belly still burning, only now it feels unquenched, misunderstood, unsatisfied, and very much real.
we didn't die, but no guarantees this time, but fuck it lets do it again
Siren's Wake | After she leaves a space, traces of her presence linger briefly: a faint scent of salt, the sound of distant water, a restless feeling in the chest. People rarely notice it consciously.
