[P] DEEP CALLETH UNTO DEEP -

[Marisol]

your oldest fears 
are the worst ones

Don’t slip. She won’t. The suggestion of it makes her teeth itch. She stamps a hoof into the edge of the rock, as if to test the bearing of her strength, and though it does not even tremble, she scrapes her weight back an inch and shifts away from the margin of the ledge. White foam spits freckles onto the sly dark slope of her narrow shoulder, and she brushes it off with a pale wingtip as easy as breathing.

His teeth make a moon against the dark grey of his jaw, the black of the wet rock behind him, and Mari’s pulse catches for a millisecond as she looks at them: sly and sharp and too-too white, like a bone that knows, intimately, the sun. Blood still taints the water sloughing off his dark legs. And for all her pale fear the warrior in Marisol still respects him, more, even, than she might have without, for the acute edges of his shark’s smile.

She watches the serpentine slash of his tail move through the air with a white-hot concentration. Wind swirls its fingers through the short, dark swaths of Mari’s cut hair and turns it into a wash of faint curls, cemented by salt. 

Well, she says, unsure of what else they could possibly talk about. That’s strange. I’ll leave you to it. But she does not walk away. She does not even move, not really, except for an infinitesimal lean backward, muscles working under her skin to freeze in place. For all her fear - not as intense as it should be, really - she is not quite afraid enough to leave, not when fear is the only thing that has ever kept her going.

@amaroq

credits