To reach her
Fandom: Ciconia: When They Cry
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationship: Valentina/Maricarmen
Summary: Sometimes, Maricarmen really couldn’t stand Valentina’s haughty blue eyes and contemptuous secrets. But that didn’t mean she couldn’t try to understand her. [Femslash February 2021 Day 9: Shame]
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Link on Archive of Our Own
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Notes: Written for Femslash February 2021 Day 5: Orange, from those prompts.
Bleh, this one was hard to write cause in Phase 1 we really only have a few glimpses of these two’s relationship, so I extrapolated a bit and it’s possible their feelings about each others are nothing like that at all lol. It doesn’t even fit the prompt that well. But well, I still wanted to write about them here haha.
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“God, that’s why I hate these old men.”
Valentina let herself fall on the chair with a sigh, crossing her legs and taking the glass of water on the table. She finished the cup in one shot, then ran her hand in her long, wavy blonde hair — in a way that was much too elegant for such a casual gesture. Maricarmen stared at her without a sound for a while, eyes narrowed, before finally opening her mouth:
“Well, that was unusual.”
Her teammate turned her gaze towards her and arched an eyebrow. “How come?”
“Seeing you lose your cool like that. Over something silly, too. I mean, you don’t see that everyday.”
Tina had just been arguing with a superior officer about something trivial like a bad training schedule, which for some reason had triggered and unleashed her full anger on the man. Maricarmen had been unable but to just stare at the other girl with wide eyes as the spectacle unfolded, as if she was watching some of those bad soap operas on TV.
Valentina wasn’t the type to let herself be overcome by her emotions, even less so in front of her superiors.
She was the kind of girl who knew how to be in perfect control of herself, and she would never get annoyed or disturbed or saddened openly — that was the very first thing Maricarmen had learned about her. In fact, it might actually be the first time she’d ever seen her getting angry like that, so ‘unusual’ was actually a rather tame word to describe this.
Being this rational and composed was probably a good thing to have for a soldier, but on a personal level Maricarmen couldn’t help but feel frustrated at this.
It was an attitude that sometimes made her unable to stand her.
It just irked her that Tina was so much better than her at keeping her head and thoughts straight while Maricarmen was so easy to get flustered and struggled to maintain her cool. One could say that was why they formed such a great team, but most of the time it only managed to makes Maricarmen feels inferior.
Tina only shrugged. “Well, I’m not a robot. It’s just a bad day for me, that’s all.”
“Hmm, bad day how? What happened?”
“Is that any of your business?”
“C-C’mon, Tina! You’re my partner, right? You can tell me anything!”
Maricarmen first thought she would get sharply shut down, as it was usually what happened whenever she tried to pry a little too much into her teammate’s problems, but strangely enough, Tina only stared at her with an unreadable face for some time, before a strange smile spread on her lips.
“Why would you care so much about what put me in a bad mood?”
Okay. That was new.
“I-I don’t! I’m just curious,” Maricarmen stuttered, trying to deflect, but somehow Tina’s smile only grew wider. Suggestively, almost.
She leaned on the table and put her chin on her hands, blue eyes shining maliciously.
“Careful, Mari. If you want an advice, it’s a bad idea to pry too much into other people’s problems.”
There was what sounded like a warning in her voice.
‘Don’t get too close, or you’ll get bite off.’
Maricarmen hated when Tina was doing this with her. She always tended to have that habit of looking down on her, as if she was some naive child who didn’t know the hard truth of the world. She looked down on others pretty often too, in fact, but because of how good she was at camouflaging her true feelings, people who didn’t know her well wouldn’t be able to tell.
Maricarmen could tell, though. People tended to take her for a silly, funny girl, which was partly intended on her part, but she was much more perspective and clever than she let on. She wasn’t as skilled as Tina to control her emotions, but this she could do almost like a second nature.
She wondered sometimes if Tina was able to tell, or if she was too busy with her little secrets and looking down on others to notice.
“I can deal with the consequences of my actions when it happens,” she replied, almost provocatively.
And, for a brief second, something happened. A faint glow shimmered in Tina’s eyes — a glow that Maricarmen couldn’t identify. Something akin to surprise, maybe? But before she was able to tell, it disappeared, and her teammate’s face was back to being indecipherable again.
“I wonder about that,” the Brazilian murmured.
But before she could even ask what she meant by that, the other girl rose from her seat and leaned towards her in a quick movement. Blond curls fell in front of Maricarmen’s sight, and a blue as clear as the sky eat away her vision while a warm breath brushed her lips. Tina was suddenly so close to her she could almost kiss her if she wanted to — and for a moment, Maricarmen almost thought she would.
“In that case, I’ll be clearer,” Tina repeated, her voice lower.
Slender fingers grabbed Maricarmen’s light purple hair and started playing with it, and suddenly all of her breath got knocked out of her lungs. LATO might have the reputation of having the purest air on the planet, but right now it felt really hard to just inhale.
“Don’t try to pry into my problems, or you’ll get into trouble.”
Maricarmen was frozen in place, petrified by Tina’s intense blue eyes piercing her own gray ones, until she pulled her face away from hers and smiled again.
“Well, it has been a hot day, so I’m going to take a shower now,” she said spontaneously while standing up. “I’ll see you later for dinner, right?”
She didn’t answer, but it seemed Tina didn’t expect any as she just walked past her without adding anything. Only when the sound of her footsteps vanished that she found herself breathing again, and she slowly brought her hands to her face, her cheeks feeling way too hot even with São Paulo’s ambient heat.
Sometimes, Maricarmen couldn’t stand Valentina.
She disliked her level-headed approach to everything, her ability to have complete control over her emotions and body, her haughty behavior and the way she looked at her as if she was so much more intelligent and gifted than her.
It made her feel like an ashamed child who tried to desperately follow and cling to their much talented and superior sibling — which was silly when she knew that as a Gauntlet Knight she was already one of the most talented children in South America, and even in the whole world.
But that didn’t matter if she could beat every single Latino kid at every single subject if she couldn’t even reach her own teammate’s ankle.
She disliked Valentina for not letting her reach her, but she still refused to abandon trying, because regardless she was still her only and unique partner and she would keep on standing by her side and sustain her arrogant gaze and try to piece together every single one of her secrets.
Even if that means she’d get burnt by doing so.
