[P] the dark won't hide you [winter festival]

[Marisol]

but when the night has left us
will the spell remain?

She is surprised to see him. Happily so, but still surprised.

And for a moment she thinks she is dreaming, because he looks like a dream. Orestes is too beautiful to really belong. In the strange purples and silvers of Terrastella’s night, he burns a bright gold completely foreign to this place. He would stand out even if the sun were out and the windows unshuttered, even if the lanterns had remained lit; in this kind of gloaming, though it should be impossible, he still manages to glitter in a bold mirage, his edges gilded, his hair wild, pretty in a way that does not shy away from being close to feral.

Behind him the dancers are still laughing and howling and spinning. The crowd around them watches for just a second before turning away, not quite as bold as they’d like to think they are. 

Marisol heaves in a slow breath. The scent of him hits her like a wave—sun-baked sand, and salt, and something better than perfume. The warmth of pleasure in her chest grows stronger as she sees that around his neck, lovelier than any jewelry, is a tightly braided wreath of pine branches spotted with red. Poinsettias, maybe. “You look nice,” she says. It is strange to say and stranger to hear; she says it without her usual scientific measurements, without weights, and the timber of her voice is newly dark, unusually casual.

But he does. There’s no denying it. Mari is not a liar; that has never been one of her many faults.

Wind blows cold through the battlements and lets a low moan into the courtyard. It rattles the flags and the darkened lanterns; it spins the baubles on the conifer. They are beautiful, he says, and she wants to tell him, you are too.

But she does not. Instead she blinks, slow and calm. Lets her smile deepen into a kind of half-moon which flashes too bright against the darkness of her skin. It fades a little when she hears his warning—your court has sabotaged you—because, for a moment, she takes him seriously.

Too seriously. Her heart picks up speed, a frantic protest in the throat; her skin runs a little too hot for comfort; then he finishes his sentence, and Marisol feels a cyclone of embarrassment form in her chest when she looks up and sees that there is, indeed, a bough of mistletoe above her head. A whoosh of flustered breath escapes without warning.

Heat crawls down her cheeks, shoulders, neck. It feels almost like electricity. Her pulse is still beating fast, but now—the fault of something else. 

Mari flashes a meek smile. She says, half-laughing: “I suppose they think they’re looking out for me. Maybe they would feel better if they had a king, too.”

Oh, you foolish girl—how could she say that? it is not the kind of thing she would say, not at all, and yet she has said it, in a voice so soft and so earnest it does not even sound like her own—she sounds like a girl, like someone who is not, for once, hiding her wants. It is shame, then, that burns in her chest. It is shyness that twists up her tongue.

But tonight, of all nights, no one will notice. They are all too busy with their own lovers and villains and dance partners. They are too entranced with the sparkling lights, the crimson ribbons, the smell of spice and alcohol thick in the warm air. Tonight—well.

They have already been swept up into Terrastella’s rowdiest celebration. What rule is left to break?

Marisol gently shakes Anselm’s head from its resting spot on her spine and climbs, almost gracefully, to her feet. She swishes her tail absentmindedly behind her; strangely frivolous for a decorated warrior, it becomes a rolling wave of slick black hair slashed with red, green, glitter, gold. All at once the cider seems to rush into her head.

The Commander’s gaze meets the king’s, and it is dark, dark, darker than it should be even in this lack-of-light. Mari measures an inhale. Then an exhale. 

“Come.” 

In a gesture more unrestrained than the world has seen from her in years, she tugs gently at the leaves of Orestes’ wreath and draws him closer, closer, closer.

“Speaking.”

credits