Post by wordy on Dec 1, 2021 18:53:51 GMT 10
Title: Sown deep
Rating: PG
For: Tamari
Prompt: 1. Briar in love.
Summary: Coming home.
Notes and Warnings: Set after...everything, basically. I’d never given this pairing much thought before, but as I was writing I was like damn, I can see it. Happy holidays!
After years abroad, the walls of Winding Circle and their concealed magical protections had felt more stifling than comforting, but now, as Briar walks the gravel path that leads to Discipline Cottage, the tension in his shoulders begins to ease. This is not his first visit since arriving back in Summersea, nor his second, and certainly not his last. It had been simpler to credit his feelings to childhood nostalgia or some dormant genius loci specific to Discipline itself—but the reason he finds himself returning is not a place, or the memory of a place.
The reason is a person.
The cats make themselves known before he even reaches the gate, their bodies fluid and carelessly graceful as they walk the fence posts and spring onto the windowsills. There are more cats than his eyes can count: black, grey, striped, and ginger. They roll in the shade of the cottage like furred grubs, twitching this way and that. Through one of the propped-open attic windows, he spies a pair of pointed ears, their owner basking in the sun.
“Be gentle with me,” he murmurs, leaning down to stroke a black and brown tabby once he’s made it through the gate. The cat arches its back to fit his palm, and the thing feels like all bones beneath his stroking fingers. He hasn’t yet learned which of the cats are more docile and which more likely to claw and pounce and bite. Not that it really matters if he gets a few more scars: his hands and forearms are already decorated with old briar scars, among others, and the living ink tattoos that shift beneath his skin still earn him plenty of stares.
It would not be accurate to say that Rosethorn's garden (Green Man ruin him, he still can’t think of it as anyone’s but hers) has been diminished under its new steward, but it’s certainly changed. There are still tomatoes and beans, and roses raising their heavy heads upon prickly stems, but there are also a great many wildflowers that have overflowed their garden beds and ventured onto the grass. Purples and yellows and reds and oranges: they scatter in chaos, calling the occasional honeybee to dip towards their wind-ruffled petals.
And more than the vegetables, and the flowers—and even the cats—are the stones.
Placed with deliberation and care among the gardens, glimmering in the shallow pool of water in the bird feeder—also shaped from stone—and resting on the stool by the front door where countless children have sat to remove their muddy shoes. The power of these stones, and the many more inside the cottage, shimmer on the edge of his power like the raised veins on a leaf. Their magic is immeasurable, and not simply because of the potential that vibrates within every chunk of jade or agate or brilliant blue tanzanite, but because they once felt the kinship in a skinny slave girl when her own kind had turned their backs on her.
When he opens the front door, the interior of the cottage is like the outside writ cosier, the essence of all Briar knows and loves distilled into this familiar place. Across the room, beyond the soft mreowt sounds of more cats and the rough-hewn kitchen table that has seen more knife blades and stained tea rings than can be equated to a single childhood, he glimpses Evvy through the workroom doorway. Her back is to him, her black hair long and straight against the shoulders of her green Dedicate’s robe; there is a hidden tension within her wiry form, the deep-running vein of war and death and too many traumas for one so young; but she is older now—they both are—and if the years have gifted them any wisdom it’s that there is more that can be shared between two people than the terrors that tried to shape their lives.
“You’re late, plant-boy,” she says without turning. There’s a smile in her voice.
In all his travels, he’s been trying to put distance between himself and his past, mistakenly thinking he needed to send his roots further to grow; here, now, as he closes the distance between him and Evvy, threads his arms around her robed waist as she turns her mouth up for his kiss, he knows how little it matters which direction he takes as long as they travel that road together.
Rating: PG
For: Tamari
Prompt: 1. Briar in love.
Summary: Coming home.
Notes and Warnings: Set after...everything, basically. I’d never given this pairing much thought before, but as I was writing I was like damn, I can see it. Happy holidays!
The reason is a person.
The cats make themselves known before he even reaches the gate, their bodies fluid and carelessly graceful as they walk the fence posts and spring onto the windowsills. There are more cats than his eyes can count: black, grey, striped, and ginger. They roll in the shade of the cottage like furred grubs, twitching this way and that. Through one of the propped-open attic windows, he spies a pair of pointed ears, their owner basking in the sun.
“Be gentle with me,” he murmurs, leaning down to stroke a black and brown tabby once he’s made it through the gate. The cat arches its back to fit his palm, and the thing feels like all bones beneath his stroking fingers. He hasn’t yet learned which of the cats are more docile and which more likely to claw and pounce and bite. Not that it really matters if he gets a few more scars: his hands and forearms are already decorated with old briar scars, among others, and the living ink tattoos that shift beneath his skin still earn him plenty of stares.
It would not be accurate to say that Rosethorn's garden (Green Man ruin him, he still can’t think of it as anyone’s but hers) has been diminished under its new steward, but it’s certainly changed. There are still tomatoes and beans, and roses raising their heavy heads upon prickly stems, but there are also a great many wildflowers that have overflowed their garden beds and ventured onto the grass. Purples and yellows and reds and oranges: they scatter in chaos, calling the occasional honeybee to dip towards their wind-ruffled petals.
And more than the vegetables, and the flowers—and even the cats—are the stones.
Placed with deliberation and care among the gardens, glimmering in the shallow pool of water in the bird feeder—also shaped from stone—and resting on the stool by the front door where countless children have sat to remove their muddy shoes. The power of these stones, and the many more inside the cottage, shimmer on the edge of his power like the raised veins on a leaf. Their magic is immeasurable, and not simply because of the potential that vibrates within every chunk of jade or agate or brilliant blue tanzanite, but because they once felt the kinship in a skinny slave girl when her own kind had turned their backs on her.
When he opens the front door, the interior of the cottage is like the outside writ cosier, the essence of all Briar knows and loves distilled into this familiar place. Across the room, beyond the soft mreowt sounds of more cats and the rough-hewn kitchen table that has seen more knife blades and stained tea rings than can be equated to a single childhood, he glimpses Evvy through the workroom doorway. Her back is to him, her black hair long and straight against the shoulders of her green Dedicate’s robe; there is a hidden tension within her wiry form, the deep-running vein of war and death and too many traumas for one so young; but she is older now—they both are—and if the years have gifted them any wisdom it’s that there is more that can be shared between two people than the terrors that tried to shape their lives.
“You’re late, plant-boy,” she says without turning. There’s a smile in her voice.
In all his travels, he’s been trying to put distance between himself and his past, mistakenly thinking he needed to send his roots further to grow; here, now, as he closes the distance between him and Evvy, threads his arms around her robed waist as she turns her mouth up for his kiss, he knows how little it matters which direction he takes as long as they travel that road together.