scribbled this one on a very quick very unpolished whim. @notadrde, you asked for this one as well!
❤️ first kiss / realization
“Oh,” Talanah breathes when they finally break apart.
Is that a good thing, or a bad thing? Aloy can’t tell. Talanah’s eyes are wide and her pupils are glinted by the sunlight and her lips—her lips are still parted. That’s all her mind can fathom.
“Ah—yeah.” That’s one way to put it. The space between them resounds, echoing the sudden newness of mouth on mouth. Aloy cringes. Glances away. Her hands tremble against Talanah’s waist but don’t withdraw. There must be something else she can say—something that expresses how her heart is knocking hard in her chest, something for her cheeks set aflame—but all she can manage is: “Yeah.”
Somehow the lack of eloquence doesn’t send Talanah on the hunt for an escape. Quite the contrary, she frames Aloy’s face with her hands, urging eye contact. Her gaze is shimmering, high noon cast over rippling water.
Her smile is—a little bit sad.
She says, “I’m so sorry.”
Aloy’s throat goes weak and sour. Regret. Optimistic assumptions and impulse proven foolish. There it is: the dread, the falling ax, the pale-shadowed urge to tear back and flee.
And she would, if it wasn’t for Talanah’s thumbs sweeping along her cheekbones, her soft but desperate voice.
“Wait. No.” She reads the silent hurt in Aloy’s eyes and corrects herself, more flustered than Aloy’s ever known her to be. “Please. I meant…I’m sorry I never knew.”
Sunflares dazzle. Time lost. All the ways this could have gone, if. Regret, set in a different framing.
Aloy gets a breath. Feels herself turning towards one of Talanah’s hands. Mouth-corner nudges against the base of her palm as she admits, with the new benefit of self-aware truth, “I wasn’t very good at showing it.”
“Neither was I,” Talanah replies.
Then she laughs, quietly. Aloy leans in without thinking. It’s the first motion of a bow, a grovel, a nod of long-coming recognition.
One tiny motion and there’s almost no space between them for daylight.
Talanah’s hands slip slow and smooth to the crook of Aloy’s jaw, letting her fingers find her nape.
“I’d like to make up for it,” Talanah murmurs, backbone-throbbing, “if you’ll let me.”
Aloy answers without words, without any need for them.
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