[AW] take an angel by the wings

[Marisol]

heaven talks
but not to me

You… you fly?

Mari blinks in surprise. Her feathers twitch a little in stupid surprise. You fly? Yes, she wants to say, and with some measure of derision - did the girl not just see her come crashing through the forest soaring on the same wings she holds out at her sides now? - but she bites her tongue and frowns, only. The gray of her eyes shimmers with doubt. Suspicion rides a tidal wave in her chest, but she feels the wet of red-and-white paint on her cheeks and thinks it is her duty into listen, and her world is duty unto death.

A prisoner? Mari’s frown sinks deeper. The spear strapped to her leg beats like it has its own pulse, and the urge to grab for it is so compulsive she almost thinks of it as an itch.

Is that a threat?

Just like that, the commander falls into calculation. Every variable is counted. The absence of a weapon at the girl’s side. The measurement of strides between them. (She feels the ground underneath her feet and thinks hard about how much it would slip if she had to spring forward.) How much the broken wing might hinder the stranger, considering she evidently does not even know how to use the healthy one. If it came down to it, Mari says to herself, she could win in a matter of seconds, and that is the only thing that keeps a full-blown snarl from blossoming on her dark face.

She does not miss the way the girl leans on the tree next to her, how she has to keep the broken wing half-cocked like a flightless bird. And despite it all - the darkness between them and the dim light filtering through the trees and the bullet-bright song of her heartbeat, and, most of all, the iron scent of blood on the air - Marisol has to grin at the notion that her life is something to be spared.If I relied on others to spare my life I would have been dead years ago, she answers, and shifts the head of her spear against her leg.

The questions have come at her so fast she’s not even sure how to answer them. Instead of answering one at a time, Mari says the only thing that she thinks will touch on all of it - flight is not a crime, girl - and furrows her brows.

credits