#carminecrossroads

💙 Finding the silhouette of her dear friend perched outside in the chilly night air as she opened the door leading out, Madilin’s long legs instantly carried her over to Cerise to join her on the table. Her slender hips sliding onto the old wooden surface with a tuck of her long ebony fur coat underneath her, before coming to rest her head against the blondes shoulder with a softly content tired sigh. “Do jou want to share a cigarette wiz me?” She offered softly after a moment of just settling into the warm of her jacket next to the red spy, with a slip of her hand into it’s silk lined depths for her diamond and sapphire encrusted cigarette case. Pulling an extra one out with a small offer to Cerise after she had slipped her own between her full, and surprisingly unpainted, soft lips; having not bothered to paint up her face when she assumed that no one else would be out this late, with the exception of perhaps Charles. 

The soft whisper of his pencil gliding across the textured plain of his sketch book page eventually paused in it’s path as the man’s crisp silver blue pools glanced up and over to the woman laid out next to him; the faint rise to the arch of his brow allowed to her to better see the amused emotions he felt sliding subtly across his face where they came to rest more obviously in his eyes. The black puddle of pup draped on her back across Cerise’s lap with the pink of her belly fully on display, not at all sharing in her fathers inability to show enthusiastically what she was feeling or thinking while she basked in the attention she received from both of them. There was a brief chill of stillness that penetrated the air around the engineer as he silently contemplated what it would take for him to be surprised or for anything to even get under his skin, making it almost palpable to feel his internal cogs working as his eyes again returned to the page he had been sketching on for a moment to thoughtfully trace the outline with his gaze for any imperfections. “Yeah.” His voice rippling with the low distant thunder that was tinted in amusement from the storm in his chest she was beginning to become familiar with every time he spoke, as he knew that one worded answer wasn’t going to be enough to satisfy even if he himself was having trouble coming with an example of a way she could honestly rile him up. “I get surprised an’ thin’s get unda my skin a lot more than ya realize. It just doesn’t show tha same way it does with most people.” 

With the warmth of summer slowly starting to ease in with a taste of spring pushing back the cold winter the sniper hated, Knowlen had begun to take his activities back outside again like a lizard looking to soak up all the sun he could take. His tanned broad bare back turned into the light shinning from the seamless sky above while his hat shaded his eyes while he worked, making it easier for him to focus on small parts of his rifle that he cleaned out piece by piece. Every time his arms would shift to look over what he was doing or use a brush to polish the insides, the muscles across his back would shift and twitch all around the dark ink of the tattoo centered at his spine. It was Ariel’s voice that he heard first before the image of her figure slipped into view as she joined him at the picnic table he sat at, getting a slightly curious glance out of the corner of his golden eyes; not knowing if he should answer yes or no right away, even though the large tribal B at the center of his back most likely could answer that for her. It was the question though about his cousin that really grabbed his attention as he lowered the barrel down really turn his gaze on her, doing his best to assess whether or not he was about to be told something bad or good. “...Yeah. Why? What did he do?”

“One foot in front of ze ozer?” Madilin answered with a teasing smile. “‘Ave jou never seen what I work out in?”

“Yer not a callous hag.” He murmured in a low graveled voice that was heavy like the chilly night air as it billowed out from him in a cloud of steam, keeping his eyes on the fire for now because he couldn’t bring himself to look at her just yet. This was his fault. He had been told before how his fathers views bred into him were wrong and that he was too busy being blind in that faith to listen to anything else, causing a rift to form between himself, Dianna and Sam that he was afraid of getting so large he couldn’t fix. Now there was one between him and Cerise, and it was with his heart in his hands he was realizing that something had to change. “….yer right…..” He said softly as he rolled the bottle of beer idly between his hands as his gaze fell to that, feeling himself fumbling for words as he tried to take a step in what could be the right direction with the hopes to mend what he had broken. He didn’t want to lose her. Fuck, he would love it if he could find a way to have her see him the way he saw her, but right now he would start with just trying to get her to see him in any good way at all. “…I’m sorry….I’m tha dick, not ya.” 

Val settled into her desk before picking up the letter, thankful that she no longer had any more plans for a little while. She couldn’t help but snicker and shake her head at the composition. It wasn’t the best, but at least she could read it, which was more than most of the stuff she gets. “Well, if you’re going to be back here, I should be prepared.” she mumbled to herself as she meandered over to one of her cabinets and retrieved a few bottles of schnapps, each a different flavor. She set them on her desk and shed her coat and undid her tie.

“That’s a tough one... But I’m partial to holding onto pictures. They’re fun to look at.”

 “When I was in highschool.” He answered in that familiar ripple of thunder that reached out to her like it was his hand coming to caress over her in an electric filled touch while he as otherwise occupied, taking his time to kick off his dust heavy work boots while Gizmo grunted at him for his attention. Levi had originally started his sketching with the ideas of new devices to make and as a way to pull apart electronics without actually needing to while he was in class, though his artistic passion slowly began to slip in face of the girl he had longed for in school when he was unable to be with her; her attention and affections belonging to the monster of a sniper that lived outside.  He had no doubt that she would have seen how his work had shifted from parts and ideas to one woman’s face and portrait as the pages went on, though as time passed his focus drifted away from her and filled his art with those in his family instead, no matter how she still managed to creep in every so often. However as the years had passed and his heart could no longer stand to cling to a hope that was no longer possible, Levi’s muse changed as well from the caramel dipped ringlet ghost of his passed to the golden sheet wrapped goddess of his present.