◈   @dreystch​​​ said:   ❛ [ shower ] ❜  //  nsfw muse reaction prompts

Stitched at her centre, a cold like rough-cut ice.  Four years of frost had scraped its teeth against her bones, leaving furrowed marks.  There was nothing of her father in her face, in her flesh.  They did not share blood.  He was in the weight of her eyes and the hurt that lay behind them, in the bruises that fell from his fists, miserable parting gifts to be lugged across the sea.  Deep purple faded to yellow, a mottling seen in the corpses that bloated and baked.  Too many to bury.  Too many to mourn.

Hitch knew ugliness and stink.  Every mess Annie had made, she had cleaned.  Biscuit crumbs and flakes of pie crust.  Grains of sugar that sparkled like glass shards, sweet and crystalline.  Paper wrappers that rustled and crackled.  Heaps of abandoned laundry.  Lines and lines and lines of bodies, of men and women and children.  Pulled from the rubble, pieces gathered, families reunited in pyres that filled the skies with acrid smoke, the townships reeking of burning flesh, of the bones that splintered in the embers.

Bare feet came to a halt in the doorless frame of the cubicle.  Body-shy, Annie stiffened instinctively, spine curling, her shoulder blades straining through skin, like fins, like malformed wings.  Even wetted, she smelt of the dead and the dying, of old blood.  She could not be thawed by a shower alone, by those sheets that ran over her like heated silk – a luxury now unheard of in the wastelands across the sea.  Water-dark hair, rinsed of the stench of diesel and salt, clung to her neck, was plastered to her shoulders.  Worn loose, it softened the hard angles of her face, her expression gentled by old fondness, by memory.

A lifetime ago, when they roomed together as freshly fledged privates, Hitch had sparkled with catty chic.  Now, she had settled into womanhood, into adult features that were grimmer, less girlish.  Still groomed and glittering.  Still willow limbed and unapologetically beautiful.  Still all mouth.  That mouth.  Hitch took a step forward, and Annie moved back.  Not in avoidance, but to open up space beneath the shower head.  They found each other in the torrent of water, folding into one another, knitting together like a wound.