If the sky should fall

Hotaru

Zeus has crafted you from clay and gold

She doesn’t anticipate his glowing appreciation or approval, but something is clearly distracting him down a path she can’t follow, and Hotaru lightly bites her tongue where he can’t see to refrain from trying to pry. It is likely to be only sentiment in nature; Hotaru has always striven for further and further strength, but she’s aware the likelihood of her own death is unfortunately much higher. It causes her own chest to wither and close up, close him out, because she has too many complex feelings about it. After the loss of Enzo she had longed for it. Prayed. Now, she wants to focus on living; it’s unfair to her that now she has to remember her own mortality so unexpectedly.

As Sunjata returns to his cigarette, Ru quietly retrieves her hands and tilts her head in mild concession to the defense he gives. “Exactly why we should try to focus on the positives.” Not her territory by far, but her gratitude for his nearly ironclad safety is palpable so long as she doesn’t consider the topic too deeply. She summons a smile, pulls on threads of playfulness that she doesn’t really feel but maybe if she reaches for it it will come more naturally. “You couldn’t have picked a better region then; surrounded by more water than most. Though maybe you should put a giant bubble over one area and sink it under the ocean like the Mer,” she jests, envisioning some sort of Atlantean globe with more defenses than most of Caido.

Such a lovely, pretty hand to hold - if you had the time