#(( technically this is commentary but shhhhh dont worry about that

[royalreef]

"Oh, darling." Miranda exhales the word, pulling her lips around it so that it comes sweet and dripping. Saccharine as a plum, rolled in sugar, left in a summer heat, swarming with ants, bubbling with juice that pours out like pus from an infected wound, like festering. It's so easy for her. Too easy for her.

Too easy to put her hand down beside their body, shifting her weight forward, back towards her shoulder where it wants to stay despite all her efforts to evict it. She's not even really aiming for a pin; it's just the way her body works, just the way she fills the space, just the way her voice rolls outwards like waves on a shoreless sea, just the way her eyes focus down.

She likes it when they get scared. When they start to squirm, itching in their skin, when they realize something's moving too close to their feet in the reeds, something that isn't them, something that they had no power to stop even if they realized what was happening. They, the ones who are landfolk, in particular, like to claim that it's because she's a predator, because she likes the way the prey-fear runs through them, the way they curl up on themselves, the way they mewl. It's not. It might be easier if it was, really, if Miranda was less beholden to the way it makes her salivate, to the way she thinks of all the people she has pressed under her thumbs, people who love her, adore her, would kill for her, would die for her, the way she could keep them on a leash as her pretty little pets, watch that love die.

They're so tender. Untested, by all the strains of systems larger than themselves, the delicate pink muscle stuck between bones which is hardly used and gets soft and sweet for it, marbled with fat. Something that has to be ladled up into the mouth, because it would fall apart on a fork. It would be so easy. It would be so rewarding. Her body flushes hot just thinking about it, thinking about the simple temptation, thinking about what she was owed.

So easy. So, so dreadfully easy. Miranda wouldn't lie and say that this part of her doesn't scare her, that she doesn't lie awake at night thinking about it, caught between the lapses of dual causes of insomnia. The pleasure, the delight it brings her, is just too real. Too present. It would be so easy. She wouldn't even have to forgive herself.

She is the Crown Princess. She is the Heir Apparent. One day she will be crowned as Sovereign over all she knows, Queen to every piece of the known world and beyond. She is entitled to this. She deserves this. She is owed every single piece of delight and satisfaction she could squeeze out of them, could extract away from their marrow and bones and scrape their skin clean down to the very last scrap, and she could have it. No one would be able to stop her. No one could stop her.

She does not. She knows the sheer ease of the action, knows the effortless way she could demand everything she wanted, could force them down to beg for every last scale of her, and she cannot permit herself that.

Miranda satisfies instead with the low, honeyed words of her voice, with the easy flex of her tongue against the roof of her mouth, with the way she stares down into them, trapped all by Miranda's presence alone, peeled apart under her gaze. She speaks so tenderly in her low voice, her regal voice, the voice that would've come from the royalty of someone's dreams.

"Let me be clear. No one ever gets their first choice. Everyone. Just. Settles."