shelter.

"everyone else is more important than me."

you're deathly afraid of being selfish. you're also deathly afraid of being forgotten. all you want is to be somebody's favorite person, but that feels like a far off dream. you try and make yourself interesting so that people stick around you. it doesn't feel like that's working. you want to hang out more with your friends, but it seems like they're always busy or that they have better friends than you.

endvres said: trace "reverse"

dina is gentle, always gentle. a cautious hand on ellie’s waist, careful fingers through her now shorter hair. there may have been a time, before, when taunting remarks would be met with rough hands and playful shoves. the sort of adolescent poking and prodding to get a rise out of one another.

but they don’t feel much like teenagers anymore. now, in the aftermath, with seattle’s shadow still looming overhead, they provide each other small kindnesses. comforts they can find only in each other and in the distanced life they’ve made on the farm. far enough from the people who don’t, won’t understand. it’s a shelter they’ve made from the world.

scars still mar their skin, memories that no amount of time can erase. dina cannot wash them away, though she wishes she could. but she can press kisses to them, as she does now to the callus on ellie’s back, and try to convince her— we will be okay, we will be okay.

lethalwlf said: trace

the slow draw of fingers along dina’s shoulder wakes her. it’s been months since seattle, but the wound is still sore; tissue so fibrous and hardened that she often has to take breaks from gardening, sometimes winces when she goes to pick jj up from his nap.

late summer, the harvest season, means days on the farm are long and hot. but it also means jj is tired early on, leaving dina and ellie to put him down and finally have some time for themselves. it’s mostly gentle touches, basking in the soft afterglow of an evening together, not even bothering to rinse off after. it feels good. it feels almost normal, like they’re finally getting past those ghosts that have followed them from jackson, from seattle. until they lay themselves bare to each other and find the reminders on their skin.

dina doesn’t say anything; just looks at ellie with doe-eyes and presses herself deeper into ellie’s embrace.