#mantcdea

@mantcdea sent: ❛ i always feel better when you're with me. ❜ (For Jeff)

↠ 𝐑𝐈𝐃𝐄 𝐎𝐑 𝐃𝐈𝐄 .| Accepting

It's an effort to keep her breathing even, to keep the grief she feels in her chest from ripping outwards. From destroying everything. Her teeth grit and she forces breath, nostrils flaring.

" You don't have a clue what you're talking about. " She bites out, voice remarkably calmer than she feels. " You don't— " she sucks in another breath. " I could have stopped it. I could have— " she trails off.

With her is an aged dog, old and grey but still with plenty of light in his eyes, a corgi from when corgis were cool. He'd been a gift from her parents, a friend for their daughter who needed one. And he has been. He's been her best friend, and she doesn't plan on letting him stop any time soon. So she keeps him healthy, brings him out to make friends. And he does seem to have made a a friend, his backside wiggling in pleasure at the attention.

The crush of ice cubes pays heed to the pounding beat against his temple, their coldness unconsumed in their entirety. The cubes shift in her hand, cracking faintly beneath the fire tips of her fingers. Mantis’s touch is soft, gentle and careful as though she feared he might break under it. But it’ll take much more to injure a Xandarian, and a random one out of the numerous whose life had fizzled down journeys from the place he’d come from to the tempest of space. The only cold he finds filters from it. The rest feels like a tumble beneath the desert sun, or the lakesides of his old planet with its lambent lacelike leaves towering in the sky.

Still, the care renders him silent, sitting with the nonchalance that fits the cradle of his back. Kraglin words spill from him, goddamn-noise-sometimes Yondu gnaws the jaws to the back of his eyeballs with, and if he were around, he wouldn’t have let the scene unfurl till a part of the ship cut its flat bottom into the stubborn earth of a planet kicked up like a bowl of dust.     

‘   I’m okay… I’m not okay, I’m going to get married before I reach the end of my prime and the least I could do is think about it before doin' it.   ‘

His hand raises. Fingers close around the pack and he peels away the cubes. Kraglin’s head tips back, turning his eyes up to her, a colour common and never thought of.

Nova sat on the ground, the sun finally shining even if the air itself is cold. Gazing down at a butterfly by some flowers, the creature's wing fluttering slowing with each blink of her eyes. Brows furrow ever so slightly as she watches it, registering Mantis coming up beside her.

"Is it sick?" She whispers, eyes not looking away from it. She doesn't want to, even so much as reaching out her hand as if to touch the butterfly, the wish to hold it rather strong. But she doesn't want to risk hurting it more.

ㅤㅤ❝𝓘 thought I was the only one of my kind for so long...❞ Mantis said, big eyes focused on the woman before her. She had similar features to her own. Almost a mirror image. Regardless of who she was, she could ask questions and find out more about who she was. Perhaps there was more to it than what she had originally discovered about herself. ❝Do you mind if I ask questions? I have many.❞ She clasped her hands together in front of herself. Eager to hear what the other woman had to say in return.

@mantcdea

The visitors to the Avengers compound had Mithran doing doubletakes and feeling a fair amount of déjà vu. Did he know these people? It felt as though he did, and yet something was obscuring his memory. Though he carried with him much of the knowledge that Munoh once possessed, his memories as Caelen sometimes suffered after his transformation.