hawksblooded

[hawksblooded]

God bless Kathleen Turner

[hawksblooded]

more uwu w/ rare liz smile under the cut

sorry not sorry just more mhwilds liz screenshots... my girl...

[hawksblooded]

sorry not sorry just more mhwilds liz screenshots... my girl...

[hawksblooded]

[hawksblooded]

Rare for them to find moments like this, when their violent and relentless world slows to a stop even if for only the evening. Aye, the grog's still too much water and too little liquor, but the tavern is warm against the chill of the winter-bitten night and the gathered crowd's merriment seems infectious in an all too welcome way. Their off-key singing and laughter carries up from beneath the floorboards of their half-decent room, and Sam hums one of the tunes even as he presses his thin lips against Liz's own, stained hands cupping her strong jaw and long fingers leaving streaks into her darker skin. There's a few candles scattered about, a lantern haphazardly hung over the desk they'd shoved into the corner of the room to illuminate any late night tinkering, and the light is plenty enough to see the usual hard set of those grey eyes melt into something far warmer, far softer for being here with her like this. "Heldin," he murmurs inbetween soft kisses, the tenderness here stark compared to the violent shape their shared affections usually take. What with how gently he holds her face and traces her scars with those keen fingers down to her neck, one might've thought he was holding something fragile or delicate rather than the hardened warrior he beholds every morning and every evening. Such is love, perhaps, fool creature he may be for it.

THERE'S SOMETHING SHE REMEMBERS Stenvarr saying, one morning as he took their travels to a sudden standstill. Surrounded by chill mountain air, he had stopped in his tracks, the little girl she once was very near crashing into his wide frame. Her impatient voice, still pitched high by youth, had asked, why stop? He hadn’t turned to her, his eyes filled with dawn’s roseate light fixed on the peak-ridden horizon. “Look,” he said, and the girl squinted where his thick finger pointed. “There’s nothing,” she’d remarked. “There’s beauty,” came her guardian’s answer. Shivering, eager for the warmth and shelter of the next hamlet their pilgrim-path promised, she had patted his side as one would a horse, as if to spur him from his reverie. “It’s useless,” Alizebeth had said. “Maybe. But you have to spend what little time you have with it. Ours is a hard world. Beauty rarely comes to us. Welcome it, when it does.” She understands what he meant, now. Stenvarr is gone, but the words remain. She’s older, worn by the life that she has chosen for herself, that lonely path she chose to walk. In her relentless world of bloodshed, of white-knuckled survival, her great and cruel wilderness, she could have been made to grow cold and cruel also. Still her mentor had made it clear that despite everything, one must find beauty in it. One must hold on to that beauty with that same iron grip one has on their life. Because beautiful things are fragile.

Ah, but the world, the path, it isn’t so lonely anymore.

Her face is ever impassive as a scarred hand runs up the length of Samuel’s back. He knows it well, now, that there is a feeling her expression can never betray, something buried deep in her broad chest under the thick earth of fear, burrowed. Not a sleeping thing, but alive, beating, such that it may well be aflame. Something she cannot speak of in words that slip from her grasp, riverlike, and that instead he must piece together. It isn’t hard to puzzle out her fondness for him, not anymore. It’s true, she hasn’t spoken it, the words so far from who she is - from what she’s been made into. Instead she’s opened herself up for him, slit down the middle like skinned game, bared and red and raw. There are no questions in it. He knows exactly where her heart lies.

Lips meet, and Alizebeth’s hand at the nape of his neck is a gentle guide. His fingers leave blackpowder streaks at the edge of the crescent scar on her cheek like warpaint. War; that is the shape their entanglement took, in the first months. Not against each other, but against the world, a violent reminder that they were alive, a rebellion against their lonely fates. Two people who had seen the edge of humanity, and sometimes breached it -  who had looked death in the eye and said no, not us, not today. Animals surviving, teeth at each other’s throats, clawing at skin and dirt.

It isn’t so anymore, in the candlelit tavern room, the pair still dizzy from the revelries below. There’s nothing animal or warlike to his crawling into her lap, cradling her face. He whispers that sweet name to her, traces her scars. Samuel holds her so gently, as though she is made of silver and not steel. His fingers come to rest just above her heart, in the dip of her marred chest. His mouth brushes against hers as grey eyes peer, not sharp but tender, at her impenetrable features. It had confused her, this tenderness. She had blamed the now-countless drinks, watered-down as they’d been. Had, because she doesn’t want to think about it anymore. Her fingers comb through his hair as she kisses him again, her other hand at his thin waist. It doesn’t matter if the shape has changed. Her heart may not race, her veins not burn with adrenaline, her body not dully pounding with pain, but this, too, is being alive. It may even be love. She doesn’t want to think about that, either. Only the shadow of a man who has grown so dear to her, the softness of his lips, the strange and new lightness of his deft touch. She sees it now; more than anyone else, he understands. He holds on to this near-silent moment, to its precious warmth. She will, too. Beautiful things are fragile.

[hawksblooded]

Mary Oliver, from a poem titled "West Wind," featured in Devotions: Selected Poems

[hawksblooded]

finally got the layered witcher swords and took a bunch of screenshots of liz

[hawksblooded]

MOVE SLOWLY, SHE THINKS. Move deliberately. The flame welling in his palm shines bright in Alizebeth’s eyes, gilded with it’s hungry light. Damn those city guards. A runaway in cleric’s robes, they’d said. No name, no portrait past the secondhand accounts of drunks. They didn’t tell her he was a fucking pyromancer. They didn’t tell her shit.

She’s upright now at least, standing a good head taller than he is, backing away in precarious steps. It takes everything not to flick her gaze aside, find her crossbow. She feels naked without it. She may as well be. Her steel plate is no savior here - he knows his axe can’t breach it. He’ll go for flame if he can. And he can. It dances in his palm, reflected in the amber of her irises. Don’t look away. Do not look away. Don’t let him think for one second that you might kill him.

“You’re right.”

She holds up her hands, the left still wet where she struck his cheek. Her fingers brush where the axe has cut into her flesh. Blood pools at the edge of the wound when she talks. The hunter doesn’t even wince. Oh, he’s right. There isn’t enough gold in this world or the next to let herself get cooked alive in her armor like a crab in a pot. She can feel it from here, the heat, the anger. No, not anger - this isn’t an angry man. He wants to live. Of course he does. Must be why he ran.

“I want to live. So do you. I get it. That's why you fled.”

Laurentius is a sturdy enough fellow, having grown up in a swamp where most anything bigger than you could tear you apart and anything smaller than you likely had new and exciting kinds of venom to experience. "Sturdy," however, does not mean anything when one is not a) prepared to be struck in the face and b) is struck in said face by a woman half a head taller whose primary hobby appears to be lugging around a gods-damned ballista. Thus rebuked, Laurentius stumbles backward, only barely managing to keep hold of his axe.

His cheekbone isn't broken, but the spikes on those gauntlets have carved out a fair gouge along their curve; he can taste blood curling down into his mouth and spits. Gods, that hurts - she rang him but good with that one, and now she's up and free again. She's bigger than him, stronger than him, and gods dammit he doesn't want to burn anyone else, but like hell he's crawled this far out of the swamp to get dragged back and hanged -

A brilliant flame bursts into livid life above his left palm, slicing shadows into the hollows of his face, deepening the baleful expression plastered across it. The light glints in his eyes, catches on the bloody snarl of his teeth.

"I didn't mean to," he breathes. "I didn't mean to hurt anyone. He was going to kill me, do you understand? And I -- look, I don't know what they're paying you, but it can't be worth how badly you're going to get burned trying to take me in or kill me, alright? You might get me - you look capable enough - but I will make you regret it the rest of your days."

[hawksblooded]

Send 🍸+ a question and my muse will answer while drunk.

[hawksblooded]

Marguerite Duras, from a diary entry featured in Douleur; Wartime Diaries of Marguerite Duras

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hey you kind of set off my prey drive. wanna get out of here ? you first

[hawksblooded]

"[...] but you can't go. No -- you have to stay. Always half-aware of yourself."

-- Disco Elysium

[hawksblooded]

what’s the point of having a boyfriend if he doesn’t moan like a girl

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Finn. Our Irish Wolfhound.

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“Like the wild beasts, she lives without a future. She inhabits only the present tense, a fugue of the continuous, a world of sensual immediacy as without hope as it is without despair.”

— Angela Carter, The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories, “Wolf-Alice”

[hawksblooded]

Wuthering Heights (2011), dir. Andrea Arnolds

[hawksblooded]

Richard Siken, "The Stag and the Quiver," War of the Foxes