[Judged] I've got no more tears or explanations;

[Marisol]

hallelujah
i found
jesus when
i drowned;

He lands hard, hard as a ghost into a house it’s not meant to haunt. Marisol watches with cool-dark eyes, her wings settled against her spine. And though she watches intently, she does not say anything, except maybe a single word, as quiet as the tiny quirk of her lips. 

Finally.

His accent is funny. Cute, even. Marisol is so used to the thin, rhotic song of Terrastellan voices that Tucson’s drawl sounds… alien. Unnerving, even. Mari’s ear flicks back and forth as she listens, as if it’s marking all the ways they might be different. She stretches—wiggles her hips back and forth like a wildcat about to pounce, rolls the kinks out of her stiff shoulders, pushes the joints of her wings forward and back as if testing the strength of their connection to her body. The warmth and the friction of the moving muscles feels good. Like starting to wake up from a long, dark sleep. 

“Ha!” she calls across the steppe. With renewed playfulness, Mari lashes the long, black strands of her tail over her haunches, shifting in place as if preparing for a pirhouette. “‘Dance’ is far too nice a word.” That’s true enough. There is nothing particularly romantic about the thud of a breaking bone, or the copper-bright scent of blood on sweaty skin. Nothing romantic about realizing the horrible weakness inherent to a mortal form.  Nothing romantic about feeling your legs give out, like a child’s in the face of danger.

But it is not made to be beautiful, only real, and satisfying. And what more does she need than real and satisfying? 

The game begins. Mari’s dark ears pin back to the curve of her neck; her eyes narrow and her head snakes down to the level of her chest. Each beat of her heart strikes deeper than the last. Blood rises to fill her cheeks and pools into the corners of her head. The sun is still shining, shining, shining, an ever-watchful eye overhead, and as it bears down on her like so many lamp-lights Mari digs her heels into the dirt and takes off in a lunge. 

Quick and sudden as an arrow she’s bolting over the dirt, a blur against the clear blue sky, running as fast as her hooves will take her. Dirt rises behind her like so many phoenix’s worth of smoke. Her pulse is pounding in her ears now, louder than eve, and as the space between them closes she does not stop, does not even slow. Instead the Commander twists her head out of the path of impact and throws a shoulder forward, hoping that when they collide, the momentum of her sprint and coiled muscles will be enough to throw him off his feet.

“Speaking.”

credits