[P] When Tides are Low

[Marisol]

 who's the fool who wears the crown?

Down here, the air is thick and cold; it’s muggy with the smell of the incoming sea and the moss that grows in a thick carpet on the walls. The guards stand with their cold, sleepy eyes still trained on the rock at their feet. It all just feels... clinical. Sharp corners, dark and dank. 

Marisol shivers, and it’s less from the chill than it is from the movie that crosses her mind of Dalmatia’s life since getting locked up—all those years down here with nothing to stare at but the always-damp walls, a bit of sun bleeding in from the outside. She hasn’t had room to stretch her wings, Mari realizes, for years and years. Barely had room to walk.

(For a moment she woners what she could have done to mitigate it. But when Dalmatia was imprisoned Marisol had only just become Commander, and other people had been in charge, and—Gods, all the evidence had pointed to her anyway. It’s still not looking great for the ex-vicarius’ guilt. But this is an unusual situation. Mari’s decided she has no choice.)

She braces for impact. For the aggressive flash in Dalmatia’s sage-green eyes, the curl of her lip in an unimpressed sneer. Mari’s shoulders tense as she watches Dalmatia’s mouth open in a snarl, but when the remark lands, it’s strained not by anger but by a fierce and battle-roughened kind of pleasure: It’s about time you found your spine, girl. And Marisol’s own lips split open in a flash of bright-white relief. It is so like Dalmatia that despite the situation, despite the circumstances, something deep inside Mari’s chest—the part of her that is still a child aching for the love of her superiors—is settled for the first time in years.

She dares to smile. Her head ducks to her chest, and the gray eyes flash up to meet Dalmatia’s green ones. “Well then,” Mari says—“we better go find him.”

The guards split around them, and she leads them out into the cold, gray light.

"Speaking."

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