[P] what i know about forests is they always grow back

[Marisol]

WITH SWORD AND SALT -

I would never let anything happen to you.

The Commander’s gut reaction is a sad, horrible smile, a facsimile of the real thing steeped in sadness - a parting of the lips to say It’s not that simple - 

But, well. Maybe it is.

Maybe it is simple after all, and the simplest explanation is not that she does not deserve protection but that no one has ever offered it to her. All this time she had thought she was the top of the food chain - something to fight, not be defended - and yet the truth of the matter, she realizes, staring into Isra’s blue eyes, is that she is still nothing more than a girl. Young. Lovely. Bruised. In need of a kiss between the eyes, bullet or lips. The simplest explanation is that Marisol is not human enough to ask, but that, too, is a lie. She asks all the time. Come deliver message with me. Hand me the spear. Give me a fight. And no one except Isra has ever caught onto it, or given it a name. Even Marisol has kept the awful, stupid desire under wraps since the first night she slept in the barracks and cried herself into silence.

Dark, dark sleep, and silence, and only the protection of a hard heart.

She blinks mutely. Something prickles over her neck, and finally she is startled from her reverie by a pleasant jolt of pain as Isra’s teeth grasp at her hair. (A little thrill of electricity goes rushing down Marisol’s spine and pools in the pit of her stomach -) The tree corrupt and so the fruit, she says dazedly, so prune the tree, and finally the glazed look in her eyes rushes away, replaced with a sharp, deadly darkness. A kind of love. An unholy desire.

Oh, Solterra is nothing now. Just dead sand and a battlefield waiting to be bloody. Against the sandstone they are two lithe shadows, and though they do not escape the glare of every guard, neither are they sniped at or battered. Marisol feels her muscles coil like a leopard waiting to pounce. Her chest constricts, and her lungs inside it; what feeling overcomes her is a cousin of passion, perhaps less moral, but just as useful.

Show me, she says, and suddenly her voice is a fierce thing, vibrating with all the force of waves crashing on rocks - salt tears into her mouth - her jaw sets and her head lowers, and she is comforted by the promise of violence in Isra’s eyes and how it matches the anger in hers. The two of them sparkle and roar. 

The sun still glares from overhead, but it is nothing compared to their perfect darkness.

---

@isra <3

aimless | kokovi