[P] to hear you call me companion

[Marisol]

live by the sword
die by the sword

The girl on the cliff is something strange and terrifying that Marisol recognizes intimately — the personification of the rage that builds in her like bloodlust. For a brief moment, she is totally caught off-guard. The scream still rings in her ears. The wind howls past them, cold and brusque, and the combination of the fear and the breeze nearly knocks her off her feet. But she is nothing if not stubborn, and so instead of turning away, Mari raises her head against the chill and watches the stranger with cool, dark eyes, both careful and curious to a fault.

They are… opposites, almost. Where the Commander is nothing more than dark and plain, this stranger is burnished in deep red and perfect white; two long, thin horns spiral from her forehead, and her tail is that of a unicorn’s; she is made for attack and Marisol is made for strategy, the wings on her back a genetic neon warning for I could run. The stranger is pretty in the way of all feral things, her beauty innately tied to the bright burning in her eyes that calls for blood. Respectable. More than that, understandable. In a perfect mirror Marisol might look almost the same. 

She doesn’t miss the way that Boudika’s face twitches in aggravation (though from here it is only a millisecond of movement). But what is there to apologize for? How could Marisol have known that this particularly barren plot of land would be hosting the human embodiment of rage? (Is that how her cadets feel about her?) The Commander pulls her shoulders back, a little defensive. She blows a plume of warm white air from her nostrils, more a huff than an exhale, and tries to reel in the desperate desire to ask the first question.

Far behind them, the ocean roils in a gauzy curtain of deep and smoky blue. Marisol misses it like she misses her old name, like she misses the old taste of blood, the watchdog inside of her that snarls and tears at her heart. It’s been a long time — far too long, eons too long — since Marisol has gotten into a proper fight. The desire gnaws at her with dull, insistent teeth from a place deep under her skin. Like a bug simply hellbent on itching her to madness. If you’d like to  give it a try, the stranger says, and Marisol almost, almost smiles.

Oh, if only she knew. 

She fishes briefly for an answer. Trust me, comes the begrudging response, I know. She blinks serenely. There is a momentary flicker of humor in the Commander’s tone and the sharp lines of her face. And it’s not. I don’t come here often. It seems like you do?

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