Post by max on Jun 9, 2014 21:39:16 GMT 10
Title: Desiderata
Rating: G
Word Count: 739
Bingo:Warmth Dancing Charm Joy Golden
Summary (and any Warnings): The restorative power of the weather. Post-BM, vaguely Briar/Evvy.
Notes: Don’t expect too much.
Once she’s been there long enough to have an opinion on its seasons, Evvy decides she likes Emelan in Rose Moon best. The way the warm air of the coast mingles with the clouds buffeted down from the mountains, still overflowing with the vestiges of the spring to form the strange, halfway days unlike anything she’s experienced anywhere else, all warm like the summer but pouring with rain.
There had never been weather like this in Chammur, nor in Gyonxe (nor, from what she remembers of it, in Zhanzhou – but Zhanzhou is a place that doesn’t bear revisiting anyway, so she doesn’t often); it’s weather she feels to be the most Emelanese – and when she skives off her duties and opens herself up to the sky, it feels like a kind of benediction.
Which is strange, considering it isn’t at all a part of her magic, but she guesses that it’s probably the same way that very old stones have told her how much they like how smooth and fine they’ve become with the passage of water and time: the Rose Moon rain makes her smoother too.
As a kid she’d thought anything that took away from stone was terrible, but that was before Luvo and Briar and having consistent meals had taught her how change could be a good thing – how change could be growth, instead of just destruction. Change had meant growth for her, at least after Starns.
At sixteen years old, she is stronger and healthier and luckier than she could ever have envisaged being, for all that sometimes Briar fills up with guilt at all the things that happened to her he blames himself for. Sometimes he tries to talk to her about it but that just brings it back to both of them, the war and everything, so she’s learnt to recognise the faraway look he sometimes gets in his eyes, and in Rose Moon she’s even gentle about the way she snaps him out of it.
It’s easier to be gentle when the sun glazes over to become nothing more than a suggestion of butter-coloured radiance filtered through hazy layers of rain and cloud, and the air grows warm and wet like the breath of a secret god against her throat. When the clouds finally break and divulge their mellow secrets they wash away the other darker, tangled things and even the perfume of the sea on the breeze can’t bring her down. And even though Briar doesn’t really understand it, eventually he’ll smile, or laugh too, and she knows she’s drawn him back to her, like calling light into a crystal and banishing every shadow.
Gyonxe feels very far away in the sun and rain, and sometimes she falls asleep under the verandah at Cheeseman Street, dry enough beneath the living awning of the clematis, soothed by the sweet fragrance of Briar’s garden and the sound the water makes when it hits the stone flags, waking only in the fine lemon-clarity and sudden silence that means the rain has ended.
Briar knows better than to touch her when she sleeps, but when she rises he is always nearby, quietly transplanting seedlings or blending a new tea and it makes her feel like all that’s happened to them is worth nothing against the brilliance of what is to come.
And that they are still very, very young.
‘You didn’t wear one of Sandry’s today, did you?’ he remarks without looking up from his worktable and whatever herbal concoction he is mixing there.
‘Your sister’s the weather mage, not mine,’ Evvy responds, but the dampness of her habit has indeed highlighted the fact that clothing made by people who aren’t Sandry or Lark doesn’t really stand up to much in sun showers, and maybe she should have known better than to wear anything else, given the season.
‘You can borrow one of my tunics while that dries then,’ he replies, and when she hugs him around the shoulders, the wet linen chafes against her arms, coarse enough to make her rain-cooled skin smart while he half-heartedly complains about how she’s getting him all wet.
These are the moments she stores in her heart, because the sting dancing across her skin reminds her that it is all real: the rain and the sun and the only person who has ever belonged to her.
And how she is glad to be young, and damp, and alive.
Rating: G
Word Count: 739
Bingo:
Summary (and any Warnings): The restorative power of the weather. Post-BM, vaguely Briar/Evvy.
Notes: Don’t expect too much.
Once she’s been there long enough to have an opinion on its seasons, Evvy decides she likes Emelan in Rose Moon best. The way the warm air of the coast mingles with the clouds buffeted down from the mountains, still overflowing with the vestiges of the spring to form the strange, halfway days unlike anything she’s experienced anywhere else, all warm like the summer but pouring with rain.
There had never been weather like this in Chammur, nor in Gyonxe (nor, from what she remembers of it, in Zhanzhou – but Zhanzhou is a place that doesn’t bear revisiting anyway, so she doesn’t often); it’s weather she feels to be the most Emelanese – and when she skives off her duties and opens herself up to the sky, it feels like a kind of benediction.
Which is strange, considering it isn’t at all a part of her magic, but she guesses that it’s probably the same way that very old stones have told her how much they like how smooth and fine they’ve become with the passage of water and time: the Rose Moon rain makes her smoother too.
As a kid she’d thought anything that took away from stone was terrible, but that was before Luvo and Briar and having consistent meals had taught her how change could be a good thing – how change could be growth, instead of just destruction. Change had meant growth for her, at least after Starns.
At sixteen years old, she is stronger and healthier and luckier than she could ever have envisaged being, for all that sometimes Briar fills up with guilt at all the things that happened to her he blames himself for. Sometimes he tries to talk to her about it but that just brings it back to both of them, the war and everything, so she’s learnt to recognise the faraway look he sometimes gets in his eyes, and in Rose Moon she’s even gentle about the way she snaps him out of it.
It’s easier to be gentle when the sun glazes over to become nothing more than a suggestion of butter-coloured radiance filtered through hazy layers of rain and cloud, and the air grows warm and wet like the breath of a secret god against her throat. When the clouds finally break and divulge their mellow secrets they wash away the other darker, tangled things and even the perfume of the sea on the breeze can’t bring her down. And even though Briar doesn’t really understand it, eventually he’ll smile, or laugh too, and she knows she’s drawn him back to her, like calling light into a crystal and banishing every shadow.
Gyonxe feels very far away in the sun and rain, and sometimes she falls asleep under the verandah at Cheeseman Street, dry enough beneath the living awning of the clematis, soothed by the sweet fragrance of Briar’s garden and the sound the water makes when it hits the stone flags, waking only in the fine lemon-clarity and sudden silence that means the rain has ended.
Briar knows better than to touch her when she sleeps, but when she rises he is always nearby, quietly transplanting seedlings or blending a new tea and it makes her feel like all that’s happened to them is worth nothing against the brilliance of what is to come.
And that they are still very, very young.
‘You didn’t wear one of Sandry’s today, did you?’ he remarks without looking up from his worktable and whatever herbal concoction he is mixing there.
‘Your sister’s the weather mage, not mine,’ Evvy responds, but the dampness of her habit has indeed highlighted the fact that clothing made by people who aren’t Sandry or Lark doesn’t really stand up to much in sun showers, and maybe she should have known better than to wear anything else, given the season.
‘You can borrow one of my tunics while that dries then,’ he replies, and when she hugs him around the shoulders, the wet linen chafes against her arms, coarse enough to make her rain-cooled skin smart while he half-heartedly complains about how she’s getting him all wet.
These are the moments she stores in her heart, because the sting dancing across her skin reminds her that it is all real: the rain and the sun and the only person who has ever belonged to her.
And how she is glad to be young, and damp, and alive.