#riverwater

[premetheus]

Taken Tuesday November 29th 2022 at 11:59 AM. #River #RiverWater #MovingWater #Tree #Trees #Branch #Branches #Water #TreeBranch #TreeBranches #Rocks #Stones #Leaf #Leaves #Fall #Autumn #PureMichigan #MichiganAwesome #Michigan https://www.instagram.com/p/CljdO0FOTxD/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

[fatbikeamerica]

Believe it or not, but this is probably one of the best photos I have EVER taken! This was back in Utah, I had enough of the heat and saw my first chance to cool off in some crystal clear water! I stripped down to bare bones and took my soap with me and had a nice little bath all to myself. #fatbikeamerica #riverbath #bathing #utahheat #weather #swim #river #riverwater #tanned #tannedskin #brown #stream #bath #refresh #photooftheday #photography #photoshoot #photogram #splishsplash #bathtime (at Utah) https://www.instagram.com/p/Cla6InMu0r8/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

[swan2swan]

Absolutely exquisite that Chaos Theory ended with Brooklynn being forced to choose between her five smelly friends who had to bum a ride halfway to the airport and wanted her to take care of a baby, or a wealthy woman with a private jet and a job offer.

[bonefall]

OHHH OK now im curious. bc of this ask: https://www.tumblr.com/bonefall/729548700508160000/could-be-like-my-cousin-shes-100-percent-deaf-in?source=share about dovewing being deaf. do cats in the BB AU have a signed form of clanmew? or is it basic gestures/just the written form of clanmew for deaf/HOH cats?

signed,

someone who really loves languages (hoping to god i spelled everything right/actually used the right words. ive been rewatching 3 hour psych lectures sine 6am...)

They have a rudimentary writing system! Clan glyphs be upon ye

It's not phonetic Clanmew, it's glyphs. Snowkit, before his tragic death saving Tawnykit, was actually OBSESSED with these. If he'd survived, he would have built these out into something he could use to communicate with. He was actually a really interesting kid.

But, unfortunately... that passion went with him. Whitewing is the next cat born with a hearing problem, and she's really uninterested in them. She isn't the same creative person that he was, and struggled with the fact that her family seemed to imply she had to "live the life he couldn't."

(note: in BB, dovewing is lionblaze's adopted daughter and bio-niece.)

I think there's going to be a big of a tragedy at play, here. Whitewing has figured out her own methods of communication. It's not a full language, but she's able to communicate basic intent with "rudimentary signs" she's created on her own.

She was only ONE degree of separation away from Dovewing (as Birchfall's, Dove's mentor, mate), but...everyone was forcing Dovewing into what THEY felt she needed. More hunting practice, more glyph practice, more lip-reading. Dovewing wasn't allowed to set her own pace or learn in her own way.

And her response was to bolt, taking all the possibility with her.

IT was the right choice for Dovewing, I think. She thinks that too. But, it wasn't the ONLY choice, you know? There's always things left unsaid and things you'll never be able to try when you make such a big decision. Who knows what could have been?

Maybe Dove and White would have ended up creating the start of a brand new dialect of Clanmew Sign Language, or changed the glyph system in a way that fit them better. Maybe that's not what matters; maybe they would have just been able to make each other feel less alone.

But as it is...

Every deaf, HOH, and mute cat in BB is currently disconnected from each other. They can't pool their skills except at Gatherings.

So Fallowfern, Dovewing, Whitewing, and Stoneclaw all have their own unique way of communicating.

There are tail signs which are used for battle, and glyphs which are used for writing.

Info: Those who go deaf later in life are still usually able to speak. Those who were born deaf often have a harder time. (Clarifying because this is apparently not common knowledge?)

OH! Bonus! Here's how each of those four tend to communicate!

Dovewing

She's REALLY frustrated by everyone forcing solutions on her. I think part of her actually really likes that she can say whatever and then not hear the response. It's like, "Deal with it. Show me you care with your actions if it's so important."

ZERO patience for people who just try to talk over her. She will immediately respect you if you listen to her carefully; only then will she give you the time of day to try and talk back. She kinda treats it like a privilege to talk to her, and she WILL revoke it without remorse.

People who have earned this privilege;

Heartstar. Naturally. And all of their children.

All of the Guardian cats, especially Antfur who is her best friend.

Violetshine, weirdly enough. She visits ShadowClan now and then and Dovewing is very fond of her and her wife and husband.

Strikestone and her new family

Squirrelflight

Briarlight

Alderheart and Sparkpelt

Twigbranch

Fernsong (BUT HE IS ON THIN. ICE. As Ivypool's husband.)

Her preferred method of being talked to is glyph writing. Heartstar is really creative with them, and it's super endearing. She improvises signs a lot and draws full pictures, making whole "doodle pages", even writing little "love letters" in the dirt before Dove wakes up. Literally peak romance, Dovewing loves her wife so muchhh

Whitewing

Also has low patience, but in a more "quick" way. She doesn't like people who take a lot of her time trying to phrase something simple and act awkwardly around her. Time is prey to Whitewing-- cut to the chase and communicate what you need her to do.

Interestingly, this leads to her really disliking Bramblestar as a leader. He's very inattentive to her needs when he organizes patrols on his own. She has very strong opinions and bad synergy with some of her Clanmates, and if she's forced on a patrol with them it ruins her day.

(She's really relieved when Squilf is reinstated post-BOTTE, Squilf knows about this quirk and accounts for it.)

Her love with Birchfall was actually a long time in the making. He really sees her, and something about the way they communicate just clicks. It's easy. They were friends, then partners, and then eventually mates and have been close their whole lives. Their body language just makes sense to each other.

She's been deaf her whole life and only knows a few very important words, but won't "speak" words if she doesn't have to. She does have a habit of making noises when she's happy though, beeping, meowing, and meeping when she's surprised and "not in work mode."

Whitewing is the kind of deaf cat in those videos who sees their human is home and goes "MEEEEEEEEEA." She would walk into a bathroom and wail so she could feel the vibrations on her paws. Vocalizing feels good. She is NOT a quiet person unless she's hunting.

Her preferred method of communication is mostly modified tail signs, but ThunderClan broadly uses glyphs, but she doesn't want to correct them on it. She feels bad telling them it's frustrating that they take so long to draw.

Stoneclaw

She has selective mutism. Her vigil was the night of the WindClan Massacre, and while sitting outside the camp with her temporary silence, ShadowClan attacked and killed her sister Thrushwing in front of her.

At first, WindClan thought it was nobility, that she'd "carried out her vigil to the bitter end." But it never healed. It's not a choice, it's trauma. She can speak when she's extremely relaxed but it's a really rare circumstance.

But, the legacy is to her benefit. She's the granddaughter of Tallstar (through Flylight, his adopted son), has an honorable story, and is a strong and confident warrior... in the daytime. She never hunts at night, when the sun sets, so does she.

(Clan cats are crepuscular, working in the morning and in the evening, but Stoneclaw only takes daylight shifts.)

Glyphs serve her fine, but she really dislikes using tail signs to communicate... brings up really bad memories.

She would REALLY benefit from someone making an effort to "legitimize" some sort of CSL, it would be like a support club to her. SO if it ever happened, Stoneclaw would jump at the chance to join. She's probably friends with Fallowfern though, once SkyClan arrives. Stoneclaw lives to become a very old girl.

Fallowfern

Mom of the Road Safety Man, guy who knows a million words for vehicles, Rabbitleap, and best friend and co-parent with Hawkwing, Plumwillow, Fallowfern is an old cat who ends up losing her hearing later in life like Dovewing!

I'm actually not entirely decided on her personality, but I'm feeling that she'd make a really good "glue" to hold everyone together. Like some kind of organizer-type person, someone who's very good at networking. She's really upset to be losing her hearing, it signifies a lot of really negative things to her.

She suddenly can't talk with a lot of people... even the ones who are reaching out to her are doing exactly that. Reaching out to her.

She likes being the reacher-outerer. It feels like being old and washed up.

SkyClan is a very good, connected Clan, with bonds notoriously VERY strong in comparison to the other Forest Four because of shared persecution... but

She's got this awful feeling that everyone's just coddling her, being nice to her, sending her to the elder's den like a trinket on a shelf.

"Does this mean... does this mean I'm going to lose music? Will anyone dance with me ever again? Do my babies want me to join them, or... or are they just tolerating stinky old mama <:( ?"

They're NOT, btw. Of course not. She's Fallowfern and she means a lot to them.

So I think at the VERY least, she finds a fondness for Stoneclaw at Gatherings. Elder friends, girlies who bond over making little grandma bracelets, but I'm not sure if it's HIT them yet that they can do something very cool together.

In fact it would be kind of funny if they weren't even aware of each other's disabilities at first, like they just started hanging out quietly. Fallowfern assumed that Stoneclaw just doesn't have anything to say and Stoneclaw figured Fallowfern was respecting her silence.

Like something just gravitated them to each other in the most natural, orbital way.

And then Snapstorm, Stoneclaw's wife, bumbles up like "Hey babe who's your friend :) ?" And Stoneclaw smiles, nods at Fallowfern to introduce herself, and then Fallow's like... "Oh I can't hear you, honey."

Stone: !!! (Taps self and makes a crossing motion over her throat)

Fallow: O_O "Ohhhh"

BUT, anyway,

Her preferred form of communication is unequivocally glyphs. I imagine SkyClan might have more written characters than other Clans, simply because they used them a LOT during their time apart under Spiderstar's Plan. Plus, they used to see a lot of road signs which they may have just adopted as glyphs.

Hmm... yeah, seems very cute that The Road Family's traffic theme continues, lmao

[afieldinengland]

charlie cooper’s myth country 1x01: black shuck

i think nick being a proper countryman gives his story a lot more credibility, because he’s wise. you know? he’s an old soul. this is not his first time on the planet. no way.

[upmala]

time to take a nap in the lake. drown the ticks, feed the leeches

[the-gayest-sky-kid]

like fucking that weird man is inherently comedic to me. that guy??? that guy....??????

[tenpintsof-sundrop]

Omg I’m so excited someone is taking Harry Potter requests in 2023!! Definitely gonna be obsessing about your blog for the next few days❤️ if you would like, could I please request a Fred Weasley x fem gryffindor reader where the 2 of them sneak out at night to go to a bar in hogsmeade and Fred defends her from some shady men? Would love some fun tipsy shenanigans as well🩷 either way I’m so excited to see what you end up writing!!!

The fic is now posted!!!

I really love this idea omg <3

Also I am so happy to be accepting requests for Harry Potter and writing for HP again, because like I said - it was my first ever fandom back when I started writing fanfiction on Quizilla and I am so excited to get back into it again

I really love this idea and I am gonna have so much fun working on it

Harry Potter Requests - Open

[judassamara]

location: chri’s place with: @chris-elkar​

“Can you meet me? At my place? I gotta take a shower or something… Yeah, I’m- I’m physically ok. Some crazy elf just attacked me… No I didn’t do anything… Can we just talk in person?”

It wasn’t what he expected to hear when he picked up Chris’s call. He’d been attacked?! Judas was filled with a wave of fear, worry and anger. How did Chris manage to get himself into these problems? They didn’t waste any time, not even bothering to put on a clean shirt, the one he was wearing splattered with paint. It wasn’t long before he was pushing his way through the door, not bothering to wait for him to answer the door. 

“Chris?” they called into the apartment, looking around for him a little frantically.

[judgingbooksbycovers]

Nostalgia Doesn’t Flow Away Like Riverwater

By Irma Pineda.

[roughghosts]

Even the birds have gone away: Nostalgia Doesn’t Flow Away Like Riverwater by Irma Pineda

A drop of salt on paper is silence killing us Where have your footsteps taken you? In what corner of the world do they hear your laughter? What shard of earth drinks your tears? – from “A drop of salt on paper” **** I traveled the path from the south my feet blistered with memories so tired from dragging all my people’s dreams – from “I travelled the path from the south” The migration…

[comicaurora]

do you have any tips on writing soft magic systems? I only ever see them talked about when people are comparing it to hard magic systems or criticising it, which is a shame because I love systems where magic is just in the background being unimportant, with implied rules that will never be explained

god I wrote up like eight paragraphs of explanation and I was really working out some cool stuff there and then the app glitched and destroyed it all and I'm so upset

Unfortunately this reduces to a previous problem, which is "figure out how Tolkien did it and then do that."

Middle Earth is laden with magic. Hobbits being good at hiding is magic. There's a random throne in the ruins at the end of Fellowship that lets whoever sits in it see literally the entire world, and that's hella magic. Aragorn radiates One True King magic and occasionally heals people with a touch. Galadriel's mirror lets people see any point in time, past or future. Gandalf knows several spells, but most of the time he's doing less granular stuff by making lights or small fires or going all Servant Of The Secret Fire Wielder Of The Flame Of Anor etc etc. Elves are inherently so magical that the words of their language are never forgotten by anyone who hears them, the laws of physics don't apply to them, their havens are magically pleasant and beautiful, and the planet itself is magical for them - flat for the elves, round for everybody else.

The benefit of a soft magic system is that it produces a feeling in the characters and audience that the world is vast, wonderful and unknowable. It's at its best when it can answer why, but not how.

Why did the old empire of men have a throne that let you see the entire world? That makes sense! It's hugely tactically advantageous! HOW did they get the damn thing? No idea, doesn't matter, they clearly made it work somehow because the throne's right there. Why does Galadriel's mirror give you limited, randomized omniscience? Because while it's a useful tool if you can use it, seeing the future is a dicey and weird game, and the future can change if someone knows it's coming. HOW does riverwater in a birdbath do that? No idea.

Soft magic systems start running into difficulties when the writer needs to decide how it can or can't solve a given situation, which is a very common issue in storytelling, a format almost entirely centered on problems and solutions. For hard magic systems with clear parameters on what is and isn't possible, this is comparatively quite easy. The wizard can't magic this problem away because-

They're out of spell slots :(

They don't know a specific spell that can do that specific thing

There's another caster nearby stopping them

The object that lets them do magic isn't working

They need to speak words/do gestures/use materials to cast, and they can't for whatever reason

There's something "antimagic" around stopping them

Etc etc. The possibilities are easy to run through, because the "how" is clearly defined, and can be negated into a "how NOT." If magic uses spell slots, stop the characters using it by taking those slots away. If magic needs a material focus, break or destroy it. This prevents magic from feeling like an unsatisfying "a wizard did it" fix for all difficulties because the wizards can only do specific things under specific circumstances.

Soft magic systems can contrive answers to this too, but it can be a bit tricky to justify, and if it's Too Convenient it can feel like the magic system really just does what the writer needs it to do. When asked "why can't magic solve this problem?" soft magic systems can answer in several ways:

Too tired, sorry :( magic is Taxing and stuff so the caster can tip over whenever's convenient

They're in a Bad Vibes zone that's hindering their ability to cast because soft magic can be impeded by soft problems like "somebody was very mean here once"

That specific magic is tied to a specific location, like a magical elf forest, and doesn't work outside of it because it's intrinsic to the place and can't be replicated

There's another magical being around and their kung-fu is more powerful

These explanations work, but that's conditional on the story not making the audience think the magic SHOULD work in this situation, and this is entirely based on what's been established in the story thus far. If the wizard has been able to fly up until now, parking the gang at the bottom of the cliff and saying "sorry, fly machine broke" feels contrived. But if we've only ever seen other, intrinsically magical beings fly, the audience is unlikely to expect that the party's humble wizard will suddenly bust out a set of feathery wings as a gift from baby jesus himself. On the writing side, it's really a matter of feeling it out and making sure nothing feels too jarring - if the character who's previously displayed a certain specific space of abilities suddenly does something completely unrelated (like going from clairvoyance to slinging fireballs, or from a healing touch to earthbending) that feels inconsistent AND it teaches the audience that this soft magic system is softer than they realized, and can then make it much harder for the writer to then convince them that this caster CAN'T spontaneously manifest a power or gimmick that'll save them. But if the magical characters or objects operate within a specific space - one character that specializes in fire, one object that specializes in remote viewing, one artifact that lets its holder control the winds - then the audience will expect and accept things that fit in those broad, soft categories without speculating too much on the underlying "how" of their mechanics.

But the temptation to explain "how" is very strong for writers, and soft magic systems especially have trouble with this, because soft magic systems start calcifying into fragmentary hard systems when they're forced to explain "how". It locks in a hard-defined axiom that can be logically extrapolated. Because a soft system is not DESIGNED for that kind of internal logic, doing that will usually cause axiomatic collisions as they contradict one another. If a hard system is a crisp, geometric crystalline structure where any tangent line drawn through it will intersect cleanly with other lines in very predictable ways, adding "how"s to a soft magic system is like drawing tangent lines through a bowl of pudding - you're gonna get a lot of intersections in awkward places.

To pull an example out of absolutely nowhere, if a soft system without clear rules establishes something like "this spell can be used to summon an object towards the caster, but it DOES NOT WORK on living things", there are a number of questions that can become relevant:

Who made that spell to have those limitations?

Why can't WE make spells that DON'T have that limitation?

How is the spell defining "living things"? Would it work on a plant or a skeleton or a piercing in someone's body?

Why did you let this character use it on a living thing anyway, joanne?

In a lot of soft systems that try to lock in hard spell parameters, "who made these spells" and "why can't WE make spells" become the first and most obvious axiomatic clash. If magic can be created to do what the caster wants, why and how does that work, and why can't WE do it? This forces the writer to come up with an explanation to solve the clash without letting the protagonists make up whatever spells they want, therefore solving all plot problems forever - sometimes something like "the inventors of spells were intrinsically magical beings, like elves or dragons or whatever, and thus we ordinary scrub mortals can't make new ones." That's a functional explanation, but it reduces to a previous problem again - that this hard-ish magic system was created by someone with access to an unstructured soft system.

In a soft magic system, the only answer to the question "how does this magical thing work" is "because magic." If any other explanation is needed, things rapidly collapse into hard lines and axioms and covering for edge cases. How can elves run on powder snow, shoot targets in the dark and see for hundreds of miles? They're magical. Does that mean they can fly like a balrog or sling fire like gandalf or control weather like saruman maybe can? No, of course not, that's not their kind of magic and we have no reason to expect it from them. They're just magic. Magic means a lot of different things, and in a soft system the audience has to operate based on vibes rather than rules.

This can be difficult to balance. For instance, Star Wars has a soft system in The Force, and if you squint, every single movie and show uses it differently. It's not super disruptive to the audience's immersion because it's never framed like a Hard System with Hard Rules and it almost never pulls something out of COMPLETELY nowhere, but if you look at what it does from movie to movie and then show to show, it expands from "influence the wills of the weak-minded", "seeing the future a little bit" and "force choking" to "general telekinesis" and "limited telepathy" to "FUCKING LIGHTNING FROM THE HANDS MAN" which is a hell of a twist the first time you see it, to some even more buckwild stuff in the two different animated Clone Wars (like Mace Windu fighting an entire droid army Samurai Jack style and using the force to pull every bolt out of one of them at once, or the planet with the living incarnations of the Light and Dark Side) and the explanation never goes further than "The Force is magic, it's in everything, people who are good at The Force can use it to do a buncha stuff." It's not consistent, it doesn't have rules, but the audience accepts that Force users can just kind of do stuff that fits the Vibes of the stuff it's already been shown it can do. And as SOON as they tried to say "The Force is strong in people who have LOTS OF MIDICHLORIANS" everybody hated it, because it gave us a "how" answer to a question nobody wanted to ask and it made this pervasive, wonderous, soft magic system that Surrounds And Binds Us Luminous Beings Are We into "we are space wizards because we contain an above-average number of bugs."

As a chronic worldbuilder myself, I absolutely understand the impulse to explain and overexplain and lock in the Hows and the Whys, but as far as I can figure it, soft magic systems live and die on the writer's ability to restrain themselves from saying "how." The answer is "magic." The rest is just writing the story in such a way that "magic" doesn't become plot-breaking.

[tonythepizzaguy]

sunlight and riverwater - a crooked touch

nsfw version in the server

happy valentine's day everyone!

[lullabyes22-blog]

Snippet - Locked Out - Forward but Never Forget/XOXO

Silco goes a step too far.

Forward but Never Forget/XOXO

Tip Jar

"Silco?"

"Hm?"

"Have you considered—" She stops, "—what Vi's death will do to Jinx?"

"I have."

"And? If you can't control her emotions, you won't be able to control the consequences."

"Jinx is resilient." Silco threads a cufflink through one sleeve, then the other. "She'll survive."

"And forgive you?"

"I'm all she has." 

Unspoken: All she'll ever have.

Sevika takes the glass of vodka, and slugs it back. Then she sets it down with a hard clink. Her expression flattens itself. He knows that look too. It's the look that says she's about to bare her throat to him, and she'll take his head off if he dares to go for it. He's struck by the threads of silver that've begun to glint in her pitch-black hair, and the crinkles at the corners of her eyes. Numberless days of combat, closeness, counsel, sewn together in a single thread: one that binds him to the past, and keeps the future in his crosshairs.

And yet she has not changed. Not at the core. Thirteen years of loyalty, heaps of bodies, and a steady acceptance of every fatality in between.

This time, he understands, the acceptance may not be as steadfast. 

"If Nandi showed up again," Sevika says. "Right now, right here, alive as the day she died, I'd have two reactions. One: I'd be so goddamn happy I'd break down crying. And two: I'd gut anyone who tried to put a hand on her again. I'd do it for her. I'd do it for me. Because it's taken me this long to get over it. It's taken me this long to even imagine a future without her in it."

Silco's scarred features are etched in the neon-striped gloom. The rest is shadow. Preternaturally still.

"I know you," Sevika goes on. "I know you'll never forget what Vander did to you. What it cost you. I know that, after all these years, you've built up a rage like nothing I've ever seen.  But what if he came back?  Would you still go through with it? Would you still want him dead?"

Silco says nothing.

He thinks of Vander as he'd seen him last: a hulk of spoiling meat. He thinks of Vander before the drowning: a blurred silhouette in red riverwater. He thinks of Vander on the Day of Ash: a behemoth in a backdrop of flames. He summons the memories up with tenderness and no hatred, even as he knows that if Vander were to resurrect now, try to threaten Jinx, he'd stab him ten times over. Wouldn't stop until the man was a corpse.

Again.

That's what the rage says. But the residue of man says: No, and no. It's a truth buried deep. Too deep to be excavated. So he leaves it alone, beneath the layers of sediment. Beneath the body of a dead man, and the promise of a better world

One Silco will carve out with his own bloodstained hands.

Crossing the room, Silco pauses at the door. The knob is bracingly cold against his palm. 

"Dead is dead," he states. "It's the living who incur the cost." 

And he'll make sure Vi pays hers.

Stock, lock, and barrel.

In the background, Sevika's stare burns into his skull. But her mouth stays shut. He leaves her like that: the woman who'd watched the dark swallow him whole, and chosen to stay beside him as the shadows lengthened. So long as it meant a city shining bright. So long as it meant home.

Now she's paying her own price: an empty flat, an empty bed, a dead man's silhouette. And a monster who'll never, ever fill any of them.

Huskily, she says. "Watch yourself."

"You know me," Silco answers.

"I do."

The words pass with a grim intensity, like a vow.

Or a renunciation.

Shutting the door behind him, Silco hears a moment's silence. Then hollow click of the deadbolt sliding home.

And he wonders, with a sudden twinge like a blade between the ribs, if Sevika has locked herself in.

Or locked him out for good.

[alphacrone]

what you say: i want to run away to the woods and live as a hermit and drink riverwater and eats berries under the full moon

what you mean: i want to be able to afford fruit at the grocery store and also a place to live where i can't hear everytime my neighbor blinks

[kiraman]

Her hands are rough. She always marvels a little over that, when they’re lying together amid the rich silks and linens of her bed. Her hands are rough—calloused where a sword would sit in her palm, scarred from old burns and older fights. She wears it around her eyes too, a short life lived hard, with all its ghosts and old blood. She looks older than she ought to, cut out of stone: cold; hard; stolid; like shards of glass—like a blade, sharpened, the last thing men see before darkness falls— but when she presses her mouth — slick and soft, sweet with lipstick— to her neck, Mizu warms under her touch, becomes liquid; she flows, grasps at her waist softly, delicately, as though afraid she'll somehow break her.

I am not made of glass, Mizu she says, a little abashed, the first time she kisses her, gathers her face into her hands and sinks her teeth into the curve of her lower lip, hungry, desperate for her mouth her hands her smell, her her her — god, she wants her — and Mizu gasps, a sharp, low sound torn from her throat, and draws back, touches her as though she's never touched something this fragile before; unmarred by death. Clean. Pure. Hers.

I shall not break.

She traces the cross mark, the little black dot inked into the inside of her arm,  feels the heat of her body seeping through the silks of her dress, her pulse throbbing beneath her skin.

She does not understand Mizu when she murmurs in that detached, cool voice, like riverwater, flowing darkly through her, I can't - I can't... when her hands rise to caress her neck anyway, despite her protestations, her thumb, rough, made hard from all the blood they've spilled, rubbing against her throat, with such gentleness, it makes her ache.

Hidden away, sheltered from a world brimming with death, Mizu does not crack for her - she cannot let the walls around her be torn down in the name of desire, lust, want want want - this is weakness; she tells herself, fighting against the fire that swells in her blood; this is wrong, but she does not pull away when she looks at her through the thicket of her lashes, long and dark as soot; does not shrug her off when she sits near her, presses her shoulder against hers, hungered for her attentions. She would give anything to be seen, to be known, as she is: violent; furious; hungered and empty and aching- to be wanted, in spite of it all... To be... To be. She is warm under her, around her, and that same humanity, that fragile, small thing that growls its agony inside of her, that thing that makes her, when the hour grows late and she too deep in the darkness, the softness that claws at her heart that she always taught herself to despise in her, is what draws her to this strange creature she does not deserve but has somehow made her way into her life.

She laughs; Mizu, too, does not understand her when she says Come here; let me look at you, when she laughs at her aloof detachment, her cool, stony face, how she looks away when she smirks, how her hand twitches at her side.

(Every time Mizu is gone longer than she said she would be, she panics—what if she does not come back? She is beautiful and strong, brown from the sun and scarred, flaming, why would she come back to her?)

Her hands are rough from touching a world she has never known, and she carries the smell of strange forests in her hair. She presses herself into the warmth of her body (scarred and lithe, slim yet hard with muscle) as they lay amidst the silks of her bed. You’re the only real thing I have, Mizu breathes.

She does not say anything; she does not understand her; only looks at her, as though afraid something will take her from her if she blinks. Her response is to kiss her, over-eager, warm and willing and imprecise, desiring, and, if only for tonight, that suits them both.