[AW] in the back of my mind

[Marisol]

i wish i could say everything i've done and still be loved.

If Marisol is intimidated by the bristly rise of the girl’s spines, she doesn’t show it—instead an intrigued kind of surprise pushes up her dark brows, and she regards the stranger with a new interest, perhaps more watchful than she was a moment ago. Still her eyes are cool and her stance is soft. No reason to start trouble yet, not without proof there’s some coming.

Instead she keeps her eyes turned to the horizon. Often Marisol has wished for more moments like these, in sweet silence and the pleasure of a pretty sunset. Calmer than the rest of her life by a significant measure. She inhales—a deep breath that smells like salt and white foam—and exhales, a burning kind of warmth that winds through all her muscles, pleasant as soreness. Birds click and wheel through the cloudy sky, and Mari watches with envy. And again, unbidden, she thinks of Cirrus.

What happened to her? She must have gone with Asterion, wherever he’d fled, or the inverse was too sick to think of. Or, or—if they were lucky, if Mari deserved it—there was a chance, was there not, that she was still here, fit to one of those birds in their flocks, her worries and responsibilities totally forgotten?

If they were lucky. Mari squints at the fluttering wings in the distance, but they’re too far away and packed too close together to make out anything useful.

At last she turns her gaze to meet Kalae’s, and lets the stoniness in her face fall away to be replaced by a faint, warm smile: she’s careful not to let her eyes rest too long on the wildness of the stranger’s hair or the salt-cured colors of her skin shifting to match the brightness of the horizon. 

“Marisol,” she offers, and tries to keep the tightness of ritual from entering her voice. “Pleased to meet you. If I can ask—what brought you here, Kalae?’

She tries not to think too hard of Ard and Erd and the last time they opened their arms to a stranger; she tries not to think of Lysander and Reichenbach, and how many bones might’ve been broken on the night that a shadow became a man.

Tries not to.

@kalae  <3

"Speaking."

queen marisol

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