#cigydd

It starts, as it often does, with death.

The death of monsters, to be precise, though the truth of it all is that MONSTER is far more subjective than some may wish to believe and while the enemy has a human face and human hearts there is something doubtlessly monstrous about them, nonetheless. Dorian has killed far more than most would bother to believe, so coddled and spoilt he was ——— his life will be book ended by death, its beginning and end in Death’s arms. He wonders, in the abstract sense of wondering, if Geralt is the same on some level / in some way.

It starts with death and a corridor and blood seeping through the cracks and the crevices and him : examining the bodies / feeling the souls depart / hearing the spirits scream. A standard scene, a usual scene, and within one breath and the next he finds his attention enraptured with a DYING MAN and then, suddenly, THE LIVING MAN CHASING DEATH.

Himself? Geralt? Who knows, truly.

It starts with death and a corridor and blood and a mirror, in the metaphorical sense. And the literal sense, as there is one hanging on the wall that he views the Witcher through for a beat of his heart and the another and his mouth parts and / it starts with death and / a sardonic smile and / a smear of red on his cheek as he approaches the fearsome Witcher and there are monsters and there are them.

( there’s something in his eyes, the set of his mouth, the paradoxical way in which he holds himself that’s eye catching / that has caught his attention time and time again and the dead can wait, can’t they? )

And, with his hand splayed innocuously ( ironic, he thinks, and so very false too ) across Geralt’s chest and a wall to his back and a distance between their bodies that lingers along the precipice of indecent, their mouths meet. Close-mouthed and lingering in the abyss that lies between severity and something like endearment and gentled by the tilt of his head and the slow and measured exhalation that he gives. There are monsters and there is ——— him. And a pulse / and a thud / and there is the space between them as he pulls away.

❝ Your pendant senses magick, ❞ a dry observation if nothing else, one made out of the desire to SPEAK and therefore he does, words bidden and unbidden in the gravity that forms between them. Talking : about this and that and the other and drawing nearer to each other / lest it’s simply the necromancer growing closer to the Witcher / or the other way around ——— all equally plausible and absurd in turns. Oh, the absurdity of it all !!

It’s a delicate dance, always, one that he knows well and falls into with ease and he looks up at the man, their difference exacerbated by their nearness and, truly : the absurdity of it all. So much so that he reaches out and touches the pendant, this pulsing thing, an electric point of contact with no beginning nor end and fleeting in its nature. ❝ Or is it danger? One in the same, perhaps? It doesn’t much like me, either way, ❞ the gall of him !! Yet magick thrums beneath the surface of his skin and radiates from him and he makes no effort to stifle nor lessen it. Such an act would be heresy, insofar as he’s concerned.

And he remains close, in spite of his observation. After all, he poses no true threat to the Witcher in the here and now. A fact they both know, and one he doesn’t begrudge him.

It starts with Death / and he can feel Its lingering as his magick sparks, and there is yet things to do. ❝ Shall we continue? ❞ A raised brow and a double entendre and a richness to his tone and he can sense them, just beyond the precipice, walking into the arms of DEATH.

He remains close / and he doesn’t / the egocentric inconsistency of man.

   OFT IN THE GLOAMING HANDS OF LATE SPRING SHE THINKS OF HIM.   it is cruel, perhaps, how she lets the seep of want come in through the shallow of her chest, unnaturally still in the twilight.  cruel to myself.  cruel still to this farmboy and his earnest laughter, soft blue eyes that had followed her through the day and the merriment of early spring festivities;  he has guessed her to be nothing more than a traveller, a runaway bride he teased, something of a story to tell someone else one day;  how they sat just now across the small table in the market space, his heart  ( no, not his )  stuttering a bright rhythm as he thinks of touching her hand,  not yet, wanting only the short delight of holding such unrealness closer ——

    that isn’t a dream that may last;  she is only present as a myth, fading impossibly into the late evening;  there are no hands intertwined in her own, nothing warm as a body once the slip of shadow she calls herself is again on the moors of empty roads, weaving through the woods;  this is more a home than someone else’s bed.  because truthfully, in the ugly and most real truth of it, the animal of her wants a name yet unsaid.  sometimes the craving of it rings like a bell, unkind and brass and repeating, how she wants.  solace comes uneven in the tangle of thoughts as the girl walks, leather boots soundless on the perfuming loam, always reminded that they would find her out.  a man’s fear is cannier than bloodhounds, more terrible and searching than any monstrous thing in the night.  how many blades had she seen levelled against her, pulled sudden to life, like the tides of intention?  how man men had turned sloppy pleasantries into foul and cutting things once they saw her just so?  in all the stories, the monster dies badly.

     but the night is cool and long and she has miles yet to trace aching through wandering feet.  it is good, this humanity.  good to walk upright and calm, the half-chill of spring air pulling through bare fingers, clawed and inhuman.  is this practice or vague pretending, this scarp of being?  if she believes it long enough, will it be real?  without thought the girl idles off the tracks, thinking past herself, remembering.  birch and fine white oak whisper older promises than her, nothing soothing but soothing none the less.  

     (  very soon she will have to kiss him;  very soon she will have to take calloused hands in her own and press wordless longing in his palm, cruel mouth gone soft where he cannot see  ——  it is an awful thing to know.  )

     how long did she walk?  here is a dreary town with no name worth knowing.  buildings clustered around a small well, the ramshackle inn barely more than an attic housing but one customer.  she traces the sent of him before seeing anything, the bright clean of soap and yesterday’s gentle rain, ash and something tangy and herbal, the smell of blood.  for her, he has never been so difficult a ghost to find.  it is a simple thing to vault the short fence, boot to the wall as momentum springs upwards.  the window is open and with bird-like lightness suddenly it is full, her splashing silhouette drinking light from the room.  wild, blue-eyed, haunting and hungry.

     she knows that she has missed him;  her body would call it the same as grief.  like a fist in the empty space of her chest, it opens suddenly, that grief.  for the first time in weeks something circadian thumps, once, twice, again and again.  it hurts  ——  like the unpleasantness of a strained muscle it hurts, tightens air out of her lungs, beats on.  what a terrible thing, to be so human.  but it is a small death to live through in the sudden warmth of him.  even across the room it as if she can feel already the assurance of his hands, the solid nature of him, how real it becomes in the scatter of a heartbeat.  the room is too small and in only a stride she finds his arms, his gaze, honey-dark and flashing.  

   the room is too small;  it is overwhelming all at once, the smells of him, the unhesitant grip placed along her back, the welcoming curve of her spine, how they kiss as if it were the first time.  as if she does not know how, it is the girl who pulls back first, gasping air she could not manage  ——  in the dark her eyes are black now, velvet and bottomless, watching.  slim arms have found his shoulders, pulled up and in so that the difference between them is only a slight thing, muddied boots barely touching the floor.  she is meant to be here, just here, feeling a heartbeat against her own.  that, too, is a terrible thing to know.  

nonverbal starters || @cigydd  (Touch my muse’s shoulder while they are crying in secret)

She had been sitting there long enough that her hair had begun to dry in great lank tangles, unbrushed but at least clean. Her clothing, all of it but a thin shirt long enough to cover her to mid-thigh, lay folded on a rock nearby.

Renfri had counted on the stream rushing by, chuckling noisily to itself, to cover any sounds she might have made. She had bathed numbly in the cold water – so cold, pouring directly down out of the mountains, that it had hurt her skin, reddened it like a burn. She had gasped, wading into it, when it touched the still-healing wound on her thigh. But the pain had felt good. It had shocked something into hot life inside her, even as the cold of the water had made her flesh feel wooden and strange.

One of the first things she’d learned was how to cry in silence. How to choke the sobs back until they wrenched painfully at her throat and chest but made no sound, however they shook her. She’d thought, as she sat there on the bank with only a thin shirt to cover her shaking, frozen nakedness, that it would be enough. She could hug her knees to her chest like she remembered doing as a little girl when she’d learned her mother was dead, and she could cry, silently. The water would carry any stray sounds away. The water would carry it all away.

She hadn’t counted on witcher senses. She hadn’t counted on the fact that Geralt still didn’t trust her not to come up behind him and slit his throat. He’d given her back her knife. She could have done it. She sometimes wondered why she didn’t try. But he had stayed close, maybe. He had listened for her. He had watched for her. And he had heard.

And she, lost in the private misery of a lifetime of grief repressed just like this… taken and crushed back, turned into a tightly tumbling ball of knives which tore at her chest on the inside, on the inside where the bleeding didn’t show, turned into silence and shaking shoulders and something hidden because it was shameful (if she had been stronger, it wouldn’t have happened to her; if she had been better, it wouldn’t have been done to her) and because it was weakness… she, lost in all of that, had not heard his step on the path behind her.

She went tense, lifted her shoulders; she waited, unconsciously, for a blow. She was numb with cold. Maybe it wouldn’t even hurt.

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