ironchosen:
you let her keep touching you because god, jesus, fuck, christ, has anything felt this good in so long? it hasn’t. you’re basically in the thick of fucking dying but look at this. look at this right here. look at this life you’re sort of living, even if you’re a little bit fucked up on painkillers (for medical reasons, right now) and your chest feels like it’s being sewn shut and ripped open. breaths are hard, but you don’t care. you’d rather be awake.
against feathers yet still, gentle and so very tender, all fingertips, all fingertips. those light touches, those little things. you get to do this, too, and you love that most of all. (you’d never so liberally thought the word ‘love’ before but here you are, sort of saying it anyway).
“most people don’t realize how completely beautiful snow is. whenever it snows it gets really quiet because snow actually absorbs sound around it, so a snowstorm is sort of like shutting everything up into safe, muffled silence. i always liked snow so much,” fingertips still over feathers. you feel them react, so you keep the pattern safe. “i just think of you in terms of things that make me feel safe.” it seems very basic to you. of course that is how you feel. “—the good doctor’s a bleeding heart. people drop at her feet like dominos thoroughly affects by the weight of gravity. it’s mesmerizing.”
you inch closer and closer and closer until you’re comfortably nestled beneath the warmth of a wing and against her. you’re safe, there, after all. as safe as you can be. “thanks. it’s cold.”
she lets alana touch. lets those fingers run over her feathers; the dark bars and stripes patterned against cream and what would be russet in a normal light. there’s a soft noise in her throat. a birdlike noise of contentment. her wing twitches in the way that muscle and skin react to touch and in some ways it’s a foreign sensation. that light touch. that softness.
alana has her curious now, and she cocks her head ever so slightly to convey that. “do i make you feel safe?” it’s a genuine question. there’s something quietly earnest in the way that she asks it. a subtle desperation. she tucks those loose strands of hair back behind alana’s ear and briefly lets her fingertips wander to the curve of her jaw, then shifts when alana scoots closer. shayera snares her arm around a thin waist and wraps her wing a little tighter around them both.
safety. that’s not a term she’s ever used to define herself. not one that has ever seemed to suit her. but she’s never likened herself to snow before either. the first time she’s been called winter. the first time she’s been called safe. it’s funny, when she thinks about it, that she had to travel lightyears to hear these words for the first time. that she’d ever have found herself here, in this room, in this bed, with this human who is so much more to her than just that word.
“you make me feel less…less…” shayera struggles for a moment, forehead puckering while she searches for the word she wants to use. “less isolated.” her fingertips begin tracing shapes against alana’s spine—nonsensical patterns mostly. the familiar movements of her own native language, spelled out against a body. words that have no human equivalent.
“i feel like i belong here when i’m with you.”
“we’re strangers in a strange land,” your eyebrows raise and your grin slips across your mouth. it stays there and you’re glad of it. you’re glad you can be that freely expressive, at least for her. at least for her, “right? i— don’t belong here, either. but i belong with you— i feel like i belong in your company.” you’re trying to be more straightforward, more honest. you’re trying to speak your mind. you almost remember to.
“yes. you make me feel safe. you— have my back,” her fingers brush up and down your spine, up and down. over the rough, jagged, gummy scar tissue where you almost severed your whole fucking spinal column and your brain stem. your back is a mottled wreckage of scars— your whole entire body is. every goddamn inch of it. all of it is more than you can deal with, but she keeps touching you. she keeps touching you and you shrink a little further in, against.
safe. she makes you so safe. (you feel her alphabet against your flesh and it warms you.)
“you make me feel like i don’t have to be as afraid. or uncomfortable. maybe frightened. it’s comforting. it’s— good. good. it feels like i can maybe finally go a whole night in a bed again and not wake up dizzy from hyperventilating in my sleep.” it’s honest. (in the dark, that touch of silver, of metal melted into your jaw, your cheek where her fingers touch, it’s moonlit.)
you keep touching feathers. so soft. you touch and you touch.
in fact, you mimic her sound gently, the content avian coo out of your mouth. a purposeful point made that you’re safe, you’re so safe.
