Post by max on Jun 1, 2013 7:22:03 GMT 10
Title: Westbound
Rating: PG
Word Count: 635
Pairing: Alanna/Jonathan
Round/Fight: 3/a
Summary: Shelter from the storm, or something. Set in 462 HE.
Notes: The title is from a Lana del Rey song. There's also a Jeff Buckley reference (from Jewel Box, if you're that interested).
She comes in with the scent of the night on her clothes and netted through the cottony strands of her pale, shining hair. To his very room, although she hasn’t done so in over twenty years, it is the middle of the night, and, if he recalls correctly, she was to have gone to Giantkiller upon her return to the front, hundreds of miles east of here.
It is her eyes he sees first, though – alight with exhaustion, amethysts set in blue-grey hollows, filled with something he cannot place except that it chills him – so he only lights the grate with his gift and pulls a cloak on over his nightshirt as she closes the door behind her.
‘You must be freezing,’ he says, and pours them each a glass of port rather than offering to take the cloak she does not remove – it is spring, by the calendar, but all Aprils are bitter in the north.
She accepts the alcohol and shrugs off the hand he touches to her back to guide her over to the fireplace. The movement is as reflexive now as it would once have been unthinkable. He rolls the strangeness of it over his tongue, tasting bitterness even through the sweetly fortified wine, and watches as she sips. Almost still, which is as close as she ever comes to motionlessness. So very small when she isn’t surging and burning; delicate now as she had been the first night he ever held her – except. There is a wary, animal nervousness in the way she swallows minute mouthfuls of alcohol, and there is something terribly wrong.
Anxiety rolls through him like a wave. She is Bazhir and she is his first love and he has carried what she feels like a star in his belly for most of his life, now. Before he can control it he finds his mouth saying, ‘If you want, I can –’
And her eyes flutter open.
‘I didn’t come here to cry on your shoulder.’
She says it flatly, firm as the glass in her hands is not. Fingers trembling with the exhaustion of riding here and then being expected to sip Marenite wine. Eyes flashing an old resentment – she attributes it to him – of course she does – all mixed up in the thing he cannot name.
‘I’m old enough and ugly enough to handle my own problems, so don’t presume I –’
He cannot hold her because he hasn’t kissed her in ten years, and she hasn’t belonged to him in twenty. He takes the glass from her hands before it slips from them and smashes against the floor.
Stills the trembling of her fingers by holding them between his own, a touch of his gift casting a beautiful blue gleam over her pale, faintly freckled skin.
When he next speaks to her, he uses the language of the past – knowing she will accept the words of a long ago desert (choked and broken terms of endearment in a world made austere by the shadows of dunes and the cold court of the stars. Coolly golden sand falling from the folds of her burnoose in a million glittering promises) as she will not Common.
‘There’s a difference between asking for help and receiving support, Lioness.’ Her fingers twitch between his own, then relax. Her luminous eyes close.
‘I know’, she tells him, and leans her brow against his own.
Skin cool with the night’s cold still dancing over her.
‘I do. It’s just...’ she sighs. ‘Probably just me overreacting. It might be nothing, and I certainly can’t come running to you whenever Geor – I can’t solve my own problems...’
Says, ‘But I needed –’
And what she needs remains unclear but she does: and for now he doesn’t need to know any more than this.
Rating: PG
Word Count: 635
Pairing: Alanna/Jonathan
Round/Fight: 3/a
Summary: Shelter from the storm, or something. Set in 462 HE.
Notes: The title is from a Lana del Rey song. There's also a Jeff Buckley reference (from Jewel Box, if you're that interested).
She comes in with the scent of the night on her clothes and netted through the cottony strands of her pale, shining hair. To his very room, although she hasn’t done so in over twenty years, it is the middle of the night, and, if he recalls correctly, she was to have gone to Giantkiller upon her return to the front, hundreds of miles east of here.
It is her eyes he sees first, though – alight with exhaustion, amethysts set in blue-grey hollows, filled with something he cannot place except that it chills him – so he only lights the grate with his gift and pulls a cloak on over his nightshirt as she closes the door behind her.
‘You must be freezing,’ he says, and pours them each a glass of port rather than offering to take the cloak she does not remove – it is spring, by the calendar, but all Aprils are bitter in the north.
She accepts the alcohol and shrugs off the hand he touches to her back to guide her over to the fireplace. The movement is as reflexive now as it would once have been unthinkable. He rolls the strangeness of it over his tongue, tasting bitterness even through the sweetly fortified wine, and watches as she sips. Almost still, which is as close as she ever comes to motionlessness. So very small when she isn’t surging and burning; delicate now as she had been the first night he ever held her – except. There is a wary, animal nervousness in the way she swallows minute mouthfuls of alcohol, and there is something terribly wrong.
Anxiety rolls through him like a wave. She is Bazhir and she is his first love and he has carried what she feels like a star in his belly for most of his life, now. Before he can control it he finds his mouth saying, ‘If you want, I can –’
And her eyes flutter open.
‘I didn’t come here to cry on your shoulder.’
She says it flatly, firm as the glass in her hands is not. Fingers trembling with the exhaustion of riding here and then being expected to sip Marenite wine. Eyes flashing an old resentment – she attributes it to him – of course she does – all mixed up in the thing he cannot name.
‘I’m old enough and ugly enough to handle my own problems, so don’t presume I –’
He cannot hold her because he hasn’t kissed her in ten years, and she hasn’t belonged to him in twenty. He takes the glass from her hands before it slips from them and smashes against the floor.
Stills the trembling of her fingers by holding them between his own, a touch of his gift casting a beautiful blue gleam over her pale, faintly freckled skin.
When he next speaks to her, he uses the language of the past – knowing she will accept the words of a long ago desert (choked and broken terms of endearment in a world made austere by the shadows of dunes and the cold court of the stars. Coolly golden sand falling from the folds of her burnoose in a million glittering promises) as she will not Common.
‘There’s a difference between asking for help and receiving support, Lioness.’ Her fingers twitch between his own, then relax. Her luminous eyes close.
‘I know’, she tells him, and leans her brow against his own.
Skin cool with the night’s cold still dancing over her.
‘I do. It’s just...’ she sighs. ‘Probably just me overreacting. It might be nothing, and I certainly can’t come running to you whenever Geor – I can’t solve my own problems...’
Says, ‘But I needed –’
And what she needs remains unclear but she does: and for now he doesn’t need to know any more than this.