i guess time is my enemy

SUNJATA

the flood

i'm nothing more than a page unwritten
on the pavement, blowing in the wind

“Too bad. I am now.” Sunjata quips back, an easy rogue smirk crossing his face as he focuses on Weaver’s own chuckle, his drunken mind flitting to other scenarios where he might be able to pull that sort of joke out into the open – a reflection back. Provided he remembers it in the morning. But instead, he focuses on what she has to say about the tattoo artist, giving her all the attention he can when it comes to it. “Ah, that’s fair.” An easy reply, because Sunjata had been there too before. Back in Korofi.

When he’d had the compasses added to his neck, to give that extra bit of a reminder of who Lusea was, which sort of memory she held to him. The star, the northern point.

The comment of rooms, however, has him dragging a longer inhale off of the cigarette before putting it out – keeping it in for a brief moment before a heavy exhale of a sigh slips from his nose, the smoke curling about it as his steel (and somewhat glazed) eyes lift to meet hers again. “I even know how to get in them.” He teases her back lightly, a slight tilt of his head as he considers it, a snort leaving his nose. “Might need some help tonight though.” At least with the door that Weaver had made up quite well – the key that he still held within a pocket of his pants.

So instead, he goes to move a bit while he explains, pushing away from the table as he focuses on the way that Wessex was involved. “Mm, well, to me Torchline is a surefire step up from the Grounds.” He rumbles with a grin shot back Weaver’s way, hand lingering on the bar top before a nod is given toward her at the comment of Wessex, leaving it as it was. “Alright, lets see about this room, huh?” He pushes off the bar top then, head spinning a small amount and gut incredibly warm with the alcohol that swims within it, making his way past the bar toward the entrance to the guild section.

you win a lot, and you lose
just a little bit more than you gained in the end

The problem with the world is that everyone is a few drinks behind

”Weird,” she says, with a distasteful look on her face, though she’s clearly playing. Honestly, perhaps it’s not all that weird. Perhaps she is more motherly, in some ways, than she gives herself credit for. She just always feels too young, too unprepared, for the possibility of children. Yet...would she have them? Maybe. It had always been a possibility to her. An unlikely one, but still...maybe.

The topic drifts on though, and it’s not as if she’d voice those thoughts. Right now, Weaver wants nothing more than to be young and wild and free. To pretend like her life wasn’t a laundry list of responsibilities, even if it was. Still, when your job is to get people drunk and drink with them, it is a rather fun laundry list of responsibilities. Weaver doesn’t even mind cleaning the glasses, or putting them back on the shelf.

Weaver collects their empty glasses, placing them in the sink to be cleaned in the morning. Mornings were for cleaning though, not drunken nights. She puts the bottle of vodka back on the shelf where it belongs, and dumps their cigarette ashes into the trash. Though the world is slightly sideways, she’s generally feeling pretty good. ”Do you want a proper room with a proper bed, or do you just want to crash in the guild room?” she asks, not particularly concerned one way or another. They had empty bedrooms, though that would require climbing the stairs. Or she could, most likely, manage to get the door to the backroom open. There was a nice couch in there and some decent furs, a small hearth to keep him warm.

She comes round to him, lacing an arm through his, figuring that they could stay steady together better than apart. Hold each other up and all that. ”The Grounds do kind of suck, and that coming from a girl that lives in Halo.” Not that she’d ever lived there, but she couldn’t see the appeal in staying. Not as better choices opened up. She follows him as he makes his way toward the room, fishing in her pockets for keys to whatever he chooses.

Weaver

SUNJATA

the flood

i'm nothing more than a page unwritten
on the pavement, blowing in the wind

She begins to clean up the bar, and his gaze flickers along her before moving back toward where that hidden entrance is. “Guild room.” He replies easily, because a part of him doesn’t particularly want to stay in a cold bed all by himself, not when he’s this drunk, this nostalgic, despite trying to push back all of those thoughts. A couch is easier in that regard, able to sleep as a panther if need be and the couch isn’t long enough for the length of his legs.

He’ll make it work.

She’s there, however, lacing her arm into his as they both seem a bit too drunk, making their way over toward the door and fumbling with keys to get it open. He leans on her as much as she leans on him, a give and take of not losing the other as he fishes for his own key and manages to find it after a few moments of pulling out the lighter from before. “It’s so depressing.” He offers with a small shrug, trying to open the door with one hand while keeping Weaver on his other arm.

It takes a few tries, but there’s a click and the door opens, and he flashes her a smug smirk. “Got it.” He chimes as if it were a mission in itself to get the door open. But of course, he aims to tug her along with him to enter it, pushing back against the door to close it after belatedly wondering if it was still able to be opened from the inside without someone else out there — not recalling how it had worked when he’d set it up.

you win a lot, and you lose
just a little bit more than you gained in the end

The problem with the world is that everyone is a few drinks behind

The both stumble to the guild room. She doesn’t question his choice, not all that surprised by it really. There was something rather comfortable about their little hideaway, and though she is rarely in that room, there are times when no one is around that she’ll slip into it. It is her little slice of quiet, a place that not even Korbin knows about. Some part of her feels bad, like maybe she ought to tell the bugger, but she doesn’t trust him with this secret. How strange. There has never been anything she does not trust him with, but this? All she can imagine is the screaming match she’d get for joining something so illicit without consulting him, because apparently she cannot live her life without his damn permission.

Sunjata is successful in opening the door, and she gives him a grin. As it closes behind them, she turns around, tapping a small hole on the inside. ”You get out the same way you got in, though I’ll come make sure you aren’t stuck in here in the morning,” she says with a chuckle. She intended to stumble home, knowing full well if she didn’t, Korbin would get pissed off or worried or both. Besides, she only lives a few doors down.

For the moment though, she busies herself grabbing a few furs and gesturing to the couch. The fire lights in the hearth with a thought, wood already waiting and more beside it should the fire grow low and the room cold during the night. ”Maybe mother suits me,” she says with a chuckle. ”I’ll even tuck you in,” she teases. And she will, too, furs still in her arms, waiting for him.

Weaver

SUNJATA

the flood

i'm nothing more than a page unwritten
on the pavement, blowing in the wind

Her grin at the success of him opening the door is reflected with a fanged one of his own, turning with her as she goes to gesture where he might be able to find a way out of here now that he’s snicked the door shut. And with that in mind — for now — he turns back to the rest of the guild sector, spying the couch he’d helped bring, how comfortable it had seemed. “Do you think you could make it back on your own?” He asks with a snort, slinking toward the couch and taking a seat — warm already by the myriad of furs around his neck.

He watches her gather the furs momentarily, before he’s shrugging out of the furs and shirt he wears — already too much of a furnace let alone being drunk on top of it, that if she insists the furs he’d likely sweat to death wearing them. And he discards it beside the couch, pulling up a pillow to rest his head. His other hand rests along his stomach, where a variety of shark bite scars linger along his abs and his side, the tattoos that linger along his chest and arms and shoulders, up to his neck.

He squints at her as she comes over with the furs, a rogue smirk crossing his face. “Tuck me in, huh?” He repeats with a hum of a laugh, before the words are slipping from his lips in his drunkenness. “Not even my own mother did that.” She wasn’t allowed, had held a very hands off approach to raising him until he’d won his trial. Easier to not get attached to your child in case they died. But it had been hard, in the grand scheme of it all.

you win a lot, and you lose
just a little bit more than you gained in the end

The problem with the world is that everyone is a few drinks behind

”I think I picked a location very close to my house for a reason,” she says, furs in hand, coming to settle before him. It’d hardly be the first time she stumbled home drunk, after all. But inside the Citadel was a safe enough place, and though there were always dangers, Weaver had enough of a reputation and enough knives around her waist that no one really bothered her and many would make sure she was alright, whether she needed it or not. ”Besides, I do not think there is enough room on the couch for us both,” she says with a teasing grin.

Unlike any decent Halovian though, he’s shrugging out of his furs and his shirt. She chuckles, placing the furs down beside the couch, knowing how cold it could get in here. The guild room holds heat, but still, nothing is truly warm in Halo. At his words though, she finds herself sitting down on the ground in front of the couch, fingers reaching out to trace the scars along his abdomen. There’s nothing particularly suggestive about the gesture, not between them, despite all the flirting that came too easily to them both. No, it is a curious touch, a question in it, though she does not ask.

”Even my mother tucked us in,” she says. Straia may have been unusual in her methods, but she had loved them so much. She’d tell them stories at night and tuck them in, kissing each of them on the forehead before leaving them to sleep. When they were afraid, she’d comfort them, but always make them go back to their own rooms. They’d grown stronger beneath her loving but firm touch. They’d learned not to be unafraid, but how to live with the fear. They’d learned how to love too. ”Though it seems to me you would prefer I find you frozen tomorrow morning,” she says, not insisting on the blankets.

Weaver

SUNJATA

the flood

i'm nothing more than a page unwritten
on the pavement, blowing in the wind

“That’s still not an answer.” He replies back to her with a huff of a laugh as he settles on the couch. She arrives soon enough with the furs in hand, and the comment that leaves her with the teasing grin has him rolling his eyes, though the amused smile remains. “Ah, that’s where we make room.” He teases back with another half smirk before a chuckle leaves him and he’s settling, shirt off, laying back in the comfort of the couch – wouldn’t be the first time he’d slept on a guild couch, after all. And when she goes to set the furs down, sitting in front of the couch beside him, his gaze finds her.

Mostly it finds the hand that she places along his torso, tracing along those crescent shaped scars, a silent question in the ghost-like touch of them. He takes a deep inhale of breath, tilting his head back against the pillow a brief amount. “Maea and I were attacked by sharks a month or so ago.” He explains, the reason why the shark bites might seem a bit more pink in areas it had taken longer to heal. But Loren had healed him relatively fully, relatively recently, and so there weren’t any wounds to his body. Just the shark bite scars on his abdomen, until he rolls slightly to show her his side. He has mirrored scars along his sides, one not nearly as long, the other jagged and 3 long swipes. “This one is from a dragon Loren summoned.” He explains, pointing to that one. “And this one is from Deimos.” A quiet huff of amusement leaves him, at how much he’d simply gotten fucked up in so many ways.

“The scar above my hip is where Lusea stitched me up the first time.” He offers, reaching for her hand to pull it over to the stab wound scar, before lifting it to the tattoos on his neck, the compasses that didn’t point north, but pointed to whatever stood in front of him, but it stops at the scar that trails from behind his ear to the top of his chest. “And this is where I almost died when I pushed back against the guards when my father killed her.” And gods, how he had wanted to, but they’d revived him somehow, through all the blood loss and the stitches, leaving him dazed and confused.

But he keeps his hand by hers, gaze sliding over to scan her face and see how she takes it, before he’s listening to her mention her mother tucking them in, a small half smile crossing his face. “She didn’t want to get attached.” He explains, as if it made it better. It didn’t, but it was worth a shot. So instead, his smirk grows somewhat feline when she comments that she’d find him frozen in the morning. “Do you feel how warm I am right now? Trust me, I’ll be fine.” A raise of his brow to that – of the myriad of shifts beneath his skin that would keep him warm with or without the furs.

you win a lot, and you lose
just a little bit more than you gained in the end

The problem with the world is that everyone is a few drinks behind

”Seems like an answer to me,” she quips back, easily enough though she’s clearly beginning to settle in and in no rush to leave. Even if she should. Gods, she is tired of that word, tired of doing the things she should. Tired too of tiptoeing around her brother lately as if anything she does wrong might break their relationship. When did it become such a fragile thing? ”That couch is barely big enough for you. I could sleep in a nest of all these furs that you don’t want though, if it makes you feel better.” She pulls the furs around her criss-crossed legs, looking very much like a human bird who has probably slept on the floor in a pile of furs many times in her life.

He answers the question in her touch though, speaking again of Maea, telling him about how they were attacked by sharks. He rolls, showing her more scars and explaining them. Though she has many scars of her own, the only interesting one was from the ursur. The rest were just from living life as a hunter in Halo, and fighting with her brothers on the regular. They were good scars, generally. ”I think you need to explain the Loren and Deimos ones a bit better than that,” she says, gaze lingering on the marks for a moment, curious how those had happened.

Then he shows her the scar from where Lusea had patched him, and she can see how his life is ripped pr painted into his flesh. How he bears the marks of them all, formed in scars and tattoos. He takes her hand, moving it to the scar on his hip. Her fingers are light, gently tracing the pattern of it. Of him. She cannot really help it, for they are one in the same, and damn if he isn’t an attractive man. She doesn’t have to want to date the boy to see that. Then he lifts her hand to the tattoos on his neck, to a scar beneath his ear she’d never noticed before. The sort of scar she is familiar with, the sort that should have killed you. ”And what of the tattoos?” she asks, fingers still light on his skin, tracing down the scar.

She chuckles at that. ”For someone who hates the cold, you are well equipped for it.” His skin is warm, far warmer than she would have expected. ”Is that in part thanks to your shifts, or should I be concerned you have a fever?” she asks. She may not feel the cold anymore, but she knows her own skin is certainly not so warm. Her fingers are always slightly icy, her toes too, though her face is certainly flushed and warm from the booze and the fire, the only light currently in the otherwise dark room.

Weaver

SUNJATA

the flood

i'm nothing more than a page unwritten
on the pavement, blowing in the wind

He peers back at her through half lidded steel, watching the makeshift nest she makes and snorts at it. “It would.” He agrees, flashing a grin her way before he settles in a bit, to explain the scars and drag her hand along his skin to feel the rise and fall of them, the dips in his skin of stories to tell. And after her question is aired about Loren and Deimos, it’s half amusing half not.

“Well. Loren was drunk and looking for a fight so I tried to get him into a fist fight.” He’d offered to spar it out many a time with the summoner, but this had been the time it was taken up. “He used magic and I used my shifts at the end of it. A sloppy fight, really. But the dragon was… Not a good choice after what I did here in Halo.” He trails off, free hand raising to run through the dark waves of his hair. “As for Deimos? The same. I led the party that got Peter and Adam killed, fucked up a relationship with someone quite close to Deimos when I got married.” The tone of his voice is clear in the sense that he believes he deserved what he got from the Sword.

But then he tilts his head down toward her again at the mention of the tattoos, releasing her hand as her fingertips trail the expanse along the column of his neck, a light hum leaving him with the feeling. “The wings were my first tattoo. A fuck you to my father. The compasses I had added after Lusea died, pointed the northern point in front of me because she was my guide.” He snorts at the poetics of it before shaking his head. “When she came to the grounds I got the flaming arrow, and she got a wave.” The fire and the Flood. The Vlam Vloed. “And the arms for Safrin.” Well, the arm currently. But the idea was the same.

“And just because I’m equipped doesn’t mean I have to like it.” He flashes a smirk toward her before he’s shifting onto his side, arms reaching out to tug her onto the couch with him. “No fever. Quite a bit drunk, though. Probably something to do with my shifts.”

you win a lot, and you lose
just a little bit more than you gained in the end

The problem with the world is that everyone is a few drinks behind

”Fine, she huffs, though she doesn’t actually mind. It doesn’t particularly matter to her where she sleeps, and she’s just as content here, in a nest of furs on the floor, as she is at home. Korbin flits into her mind again, though her sense of duty to him has been waning with his ever increasing misery, and she decides she just doesn’t care. It's hardly the first time she hasn’t stumbled home until morning. She starts removing her own layers, leaving her undershirt and her pants in place and tossing the rest of the clothes into a pile nearby. She snags a pillow from the couch. ”You have to at least share a pillow,” she says, plopping it into her lap for now.

She listens as he explains both Loren and Deimos, giving little more than a nod, her fingers lingering on the scars as he talks. She could tell him fighting while drunk is stupid, but then again, it sounds like something she’d be happy to do. She could tell him he didn’t deserve the scar from Deimos, but maybe he did. Sometimes the physical pain helped, and whether they deserved it or not was irrelevant.

She nods at the wings, remembering that bit from his earlier story. Then she listens to the rest, the one that will forever point forward for his twice dead guide. There would be another life for them, in Mort’s realm, perhaps. The flaming arrow too for Lusea, and finally one half of the whole for Safrin. She’d never know what god he prefered, though now she does. It makes sense, given what he is. Safrin seems like a goddess Weaver is unlikely to meet though, given what she is.

Weaver shifts, turning around in her nest of furs and pulls the undershirt up, revealing all three birds amid various scars and muscles. They are each about the size of two hands, starting from her mid-back, the third nearly flying off her shoulder. ”Father, mother, brother,” she says. He’s seen pieces of the one on her shoulder, which she’d added after Erebor’s death, but she’s never actually shown him the whole thing. It is not the most easy thing to put on full display, but of course, they were never meant for anyone else but her really. She lets her shirt fall back into place after he’s had the chance to look, spinning back around to face him. Less on her skin, but still, she carried her own story.

He reaches out to tug her onto the way too small couch with him, but she finds herself obliging. Certainly the booze has something to do with it, though it’s easy too, like it’s right in the sort of way that comes without any expectations or strings or feelings past being friends. Drunk friends, yes, but friends all the same. ”You get used to it, eventually,” she says of the cold, wiggling into what free space there is, her body pressed against his. There’s no other option, though she doesn’t mind. He radiates warmth, and they don’t actually need the fire save that she likes it. ”What shifts do you have? I’ve only seen the horned thing and your feathery arms.”

Weaver

SUNJATA

the flood

i'm nothing more than a page unwritten
on the pavement, blowing in the wind

She stays, and that’s enough for him. At least until she steals a pillow and there’s a hint of a whine that slips from his throat as he watches her hoard it away in her lap like some sort of nesting dragon. “Fine.” He repeats, accented voice lilting slightly to mimic her ‘fine’ from earlier, before he goes on to explain the scars and tattoos. Her hand traces a line against them all, and he doesn’t mind it in the slightest.

She doesn’t comment on them either, and that makes it easier for him in the long run. He chooses to focus on her next as she turns and reveals her back, littered with scars and those raven tattoos. He fights himself from reaching out to trace them like she had his scars, and luckily for him her shirt is placed back down and she spins to him. “They’re done well.” He comments, offering a light smile, a hidden message that he’s sure they appreciate them from Mort’s realm or wherever they went.

But he’s reaching for her, now, pulling her up onto the couch with him, scooting back as far as he can to give her room. And she comes with him, settling and wriggling her way into his warmth, an arm slipping around her middle to her back and flattening along the small of it. “That‘s what everyone says.” He accuses her, flashing a wink before settling into the pillow that remains, scanning the lines of her face as the question leaves her lips.

And he chuckles lightly with it. “The horned thing, is a Nyala. It’s like a deer.” Only it wasn’t at all like a deer, he doesn’t know if she knows what gazelles are, but it’s easier to explain this way. “Here, I’ll show you.” He offers, tilting back a small amount and resting his hand at her hip if she lets him, focusing on her. The feathers appear, vibrant navy blue that almost look black in this light. “Macaw.”

Then the feathers disappear to make room for a thick coat of black spotted fur, claws at Weaver’s hip that are sharp and pointed that don’t dig in. “Panther.” All the fur disappears until his lower half becomes that of the whale shift, the fin sticking out over the edge of the arm rest. “Killer whale.” Which she may have seen before, in the sea of glass if they ventured into the colder waters to get seals and the like.

The half merman shift disappears to make room for the horns that sprout from his head, a rogue smirk crossing his face as he regards her. “The Nyala.” The horns stay, curled about the pillow, tipped in gold. “A cobra shift.” He pokes his tongue out at her, not surprised as he does so and the tongue itself is forked. And lastly, the skin of his arm and the space between where his hand rests at her hip and where his torso meet, is suddenly filled with a wing attached, a dark velvet membrane. “And a bat.”

you win a lot, and you lose
just a little bit more than you gained in the end

The problem with the world is that everyone is a few drinks behind

To be fair, she is absolutely a nesting dragon. A bird, a dragon, both are accurate. She is the type of girl to fly away or come back as she pleases. She is the type of girl to breath fire and burn the world down to the ground around her. She is the type of girl to sit in a nest of her own making and wait. For what? She never knows.

She nods at the compliment to her tattoos. ”There’s a reason you wanted his name,” she points out, though still, she is pleased at the compliment. He is an excellent artist, and her family deserved nothing less than the best.

She finds herself a little too content with his arm draped around her, resting on the small of her back. A little too content at the warmth of him, and she should definitely blame the booze but she does not. In truth, she just finds him easy to be around, maybe because they are not all that different. They are far from good and though they care about others, they still live for themselves, driven by passion and foolish decisions. She reaches one arm down, pulling up the pillow she’d stolen before and sticks it under her own head, perhaps willing to share whatever she doesn’t need.

”It looks more like a reindeer than a deer,” she says, though in truth it doesn’t entirely look like either. Still, she would not consider his horned thing form a deer. Horned thing. Nyala. Whatever. (She liked horned thing). His hand slips to her hip at that, and she lets him, not minding his fingers on her. The familiar feathers appear on his arm and he names the bird. She itches to reach out and pluck one, but she stops herself, deciding to be well behaved for the moment. ”Has Korbin warned you I collect feathers?” A few of those really would look lovely in a cloak, the dark blue glinting among the black (gods, Korbin would throw a damn fit). Then the black fur of a panther, gone before she can reach out to stroke it. The tail of a whale and she laughs, clearly pleased. ”That is why you are a mermaid pirate!” Her delight and amusement is a palpable thing, and her smile is Cheshire.

The horns, the tongue, and the wing of a bat. She reaches out to touch the tip of the horns, the soft membrane of the wing that now curls on her hip. Always a creature of touch, Weaver, like a child who learns the world by feeling it. She’d poke the tongue too, but it’s too quick to catch, and maybe that’s a step too far. ”Rather the impressive array. Two bars and a boxing ring. What, six different shifts? What other surprises are you hiding?”

Weaver

SUNJATA

the flood

i'm nothing more than a page unwritten
on the pavement, blowing in the wind

A hum leaves him in agreement to the fact that he had asked for the artists name upon seeing just the wing of one of her ravens. But that’s besides the point, and he concedes it to her as she joins him on the couch, carefully maneuvering enough to keep her within his arms. He can tell the reason why she might need the furs, the way her body remains warm but not the furnace that he was, and with it he tangled himself up with her a bit more — offering more of the heat he has in excess at this point.

But then he’s showing off, explaining the fact that the Nyala isn’t just a horned thing, but a beast in itself. “It’s a gazelle, more accurately.” He tells her with a knowing look, a quirk of his lips when the feathers appear and she informs him of collecting feathers. A rogue smirk crosses his face as he watches her. “He may have mentioned it.” He offers with a hum of a laugh. He recalled the raven mentioning she’d pluck them from him if she found out. Too late, now.

But her surprise and accompanying comment of a mermaid pirate has him rolling his eyes, leaning back a bit as an exasperated groan leaves him. “You met Seren didn’t you?” He accuses, a rumble of a chuckle leaving him. It fades a small amount as he leans back over toward her, the steel to his gaze scanning over her face as she reaches out to touch the horns, the surface marred a bit, scratched, but still vibrant all things considered. And when she goes to touch the membrane of his wing, that’s when his gaze narrows slightly and he can’t suppress the light shudder that travels down his spine with it. The bat wing shifts back to skin before feathers once more, longer now like a blanket over her as he tries to keep those thoughts from invading his mind.

“That’s pretty much all of them. And you got the bonus of hearing about my shitty upbringing.” He manages to say instead, his voice a bit deeper, a bit huskier with it as he moves his hand up slowly to pull it back and offer a few feathers for her should she want them. “And just for that, here’s your prize. Try not to take a blood feather, though.” He flashes her a smirk. “Unless you’re into that sort of thing.”

you win a lot, and you lose
just a little bit more than you gained in the end

The problem with the world is that everyone is a few drinks behind

He shifts slightly closer to her, warming her cool skin. It’s a curse of being female, she’s pretty sure, that her skin is never truly warm. She can’t feel it, of course, but she can feel his warmth. It radiates like the fire behind her, and she finds herself rather toasty between them (just in case her cheeks weren’t flushed before). Still, she has never minded being warm when her life has always been full of freezing temperatures.

Weaver only shrugs at the gazelle. If Caido has them, she’s never one seen one because they certainly do not live in Halo. Though she has heard of many things, thanks to books and stories, gazelle's were apparently not in the stories she knows. The topic shifts to feathers and her brother, and she grins. ”In my defense, many of them he’d just lost. Also, you’ve met him. He deserves to have a few feathers plucked.” Though he hadn’t been so miserable then. She’d apparently caused quite a lot of that misery.

He leans back at the mention of Seren, and she props herself up on one elbow with glee in her eyes. ”You are her best friend, you know?” Weaver really just can’t help herself. Honestly, it’s really just cute. There’s a soft spot in Weaver’s heart for children, even if she’s too chicken to have her own. Seren is a sweet thing with a child’s innocence, but maybe not a terrible taste in friends. Or actually, maybe a terrible taste in friends, because many of them were Weaver’s friends as well. Saiden, Sunjata...good men, bad influences. Not that she was judging, that’s why they were her friends.

He shudders slightly as her fingers graze the membrane of the bat wing, and she pulls her fingers back, the gesture casual enough though she is aware of his response. Exactly why though, she is less sure. After all, she does not have wings and has no idea what it’s like to have its membrane touched. Maybe it just feels weird, though some part of her sort of doubts that’s the reason. Feathers reappear on his arm, draped over her like a blanket, and she settles her head back down on the pillow, her arms tucked between their chests.

His voice is a little deeper, a little huskier, betraying something maybe, though she can’t decide what. Tiredness? The slow seep of the alcohol through their veins? The sorrow? Their closeness? All of it? But he offers her a prize, and she grins. ”No, I am not so mean as that.” A soft breeze blows over his arm, ruffling the feathers slightly, and she plucks a few that move as if they are older and likely to molt, should he decide to stick around in that form long enough. Should be relatively painless, and she tucks them into the pocket of her pants for safe keeping. ”Since we have talked of shitty things all night, tell me something good,” she says, a slight purr in her voice, her head on the pillow and her eyes half closed, lulled by his warmth, by the feel of his feathers and skin. Honestly, it’s just nice not to care, for a minute. It’s just nice to feel safe, for a minute.

Weaver