gutsymmetry:
@fuckingstripe
Kate’s tried, but there’s no budging Molly: she’ll come out of her room when she’s good and ready. It used to be that Zephyr’s visits brought her bounding out, all smiles, looking for a present, a laugh, a rumbling, “Hey, kid,” from the closest thing she’s ever had to a second mum–or a da, Kate supposes–but sixteen is a hard age. Not so easy to put off a sixteen-year-old with white lies and generalities about where Zephyr goes and what she does, about what she means to Kate, who she is to their little family of two. Not easy to explain why sometimes they’re three–wonderfully, happily three–but just as often, not.
Just the two of them on the sofa. Kate brings their cups of tea round. Sitting with her, she looks again–can’t help but look–at the fresh scar, a confronting pink, crossing almost the whole of Zephyr’s face in a slash across her aquiline nose. She makes a little sound of sympathetic pain, of frustration and tenderness, their mugs clinking onto coasters on the low table before she can scoot forward on the cushions and reach for her, taking her chin.
“Shouldnae ask where you got it, then,” she says. “No, I don’t want to know. C’mere.” She cups her face in both hands, looking deeply at her. Still Zephyr, fitting just right between her palms. Still all the usual questions–where have you been, what have you done, who were you with? Did you see someone else, touch someone else, while you were out there? Did someone else make you smile like me, and laugh? Did you miss me at all? And all the answers she’s afraid of, too. No, I don’t want to know. You could fill an ocean with the murk of all the things that go unsaid between them two.
She leans in and puts a kiss on the scar, right where it makes a jagged path over the bridge of Zephyr’s nose. “Poor lamb,” she says softly. She kisses her brow. “I’ve missed you. You don’t have any more, do you? That I can’t see?” It makes her gut clench to think of it. She needs to take inventory of these wounds, start pouring tenderness on them now.
Kate fusses. To anyone else, to a random observer, she wouldn't appear to be but she is. In her own obstinate way. Kate fusses. With tea, with concerned looks and tender touches, with what she keeps behind the blue of her eyes. "That's asking," Zephyr points out, the corner of her mouth denting a wry smile in her right cheek. Indirectly. Hopefully. A quiet entreaty teeming with the tenuous hope that a story will be told - as if knowing what happened to mar her face like that will help tend to it or understand or even just help with whatever it is brooding inside Kate. It won't. It never does.
The fussing simultaneously intensifies and mollifies. Warm lips find the wound still in the fresh, pink stage of its healing process, move upward. "If I said no you'd still take an inventory." The truth is that Zephyr doesn't know because she doesn't remember. Kate will. She's good like that. Stores so much in that stubborn head of hers. So much that needn't be stored. Chin jutting out, Zephyr peers down at her and her smile softens, her brows relax, her body sinks a little into the inviting softness of the cushion - of Kate's body. "You thought about me?" A tease. Some cheap, transparent ploy designed to goad her into talking. Zephyr missed listening to her, to the inflection in her voice. Missed watching her, too. So now, she is. Watching her. Gazing into her eyes.
The blue of the sky or that of the sea have never come close to that unique shade in her irises. Zephyr knows. She's looked for it. At dawn, midday, dusk. Between clouds. By the shore right before the waves break and crash. Even in flower petals or blossoms. It doesn't exist anywhere. Only here. In those eyes. She'd tell her if she could but Zephyr doesn't know how. She's a soldier, not a fucking poet.
"I'm here." One arm ropes about her waist to bring her closer. "Quit worrying." With a small tilt of her head, she arches her brows and sounds a hmm. Stubborn lass won't rest until she's made sure everything is intact, that she's fed and cleaned, her fatigues scrubbed, her hair untangled. "Where's the kid?" There's a glance towards Molly's bedroom door. "You two fighting?" When her eyes return to Kate, it hits her. Zephyr scoffs as she leans forward to pick up her mug. "She's pissed off, isn't she? What did she expect? A bloody postcard?"
