[P] if you don't believe, you better get superstitious -

[Marisol]

WITH SWORD AND SALT -

She laments the obviousness of her debility. For the most part,Mari is robotically adept at covering her weaknesses: she has learned from experience how to put weight on a bruised leg to cover a limp, more than once both begun and finished crying in the space of a moment, covered her sprained joints with nothing more than the a grinding of her jaw, but today her is exhaustion is so deep it cannot be covered and she feels that visibility as openly as a fresh wound.

It is a hateful thing, to be so exposed.

And it almost makes her bristle as she stands there, with all the defensiveness of a predator trapped, for what kind of Commander is she if she cannot even control herself? The muscles that line her shoulders are wound into tight knots, her gray eyes glower chilly and uncouth. Inside her chest war sympathy and disgust, rage and sorrow, wanting and a childhood of unrelenting discipline, and all the while she stands as still as a victim of Medusa underneath the rain and sleet.

Marisol is quiet as Ard speaks, though pleasantly surprised enough to blink involuntarily. The rasp of his voice convinces her that he has not become any more talkative since the day she picked the twins up from the fields. Ard, she responds simply. Her tone is no colder than it has been - perhaps only more vacant, the intensity leached from it by days of rain and darkness and the overwhelming fear that doom is upon them at long last. And when Erd continues she can do nothing but look at him drearily, for a long moment, until the caustic response spills from her mouth unbidden: Good luck finding anywhere, the end of the remark snapped off as violently as a tree branch by a tsunami.

It is not mean as much as it is war-weary. Marisol can only hope they understand that - that they have the sense (and the experience) to understand the bitterness in her silver voice is not aimed at them.

Are you two safe, at least?

---

<3

aimless | kokovi