For the intimacy prompts: slow dancing, dealer's choice?
Thank you for sending in this prompt! Writing dancing is always an ordeal for me, so let's give it a whirl with some angsty Nocturne/Shadowheart💜
Send me a ship and a number from this list
They dance under the shadow’s comfort, in what time they can steal away from the Mother Superior. Sometimes, a moonbeam spills through a gap in rotted wood through to a natural cavern, sequestered from all eyes and ears but theirs. Nocturne swears she can still feel the stones under her bare feet as they tap, tapped out a rhythm so sloppy that even the clumsiest bard would laugh at them.
But did it matter then, in those years? Nocturne explains it to Shadowheart as training in subterfuge.
“I believe you,” Shadowheart says, but her brow quirks up in that way it always does before she remarks in that half-scathing, half-joking way. Her act is almost believable, a kind of deceit of its own.
Years pass, they dance. It’s strange, she says one night with Shadowheart, that they’ve spent all this time in their private training. So long, she thinks, with hands on hips and voices quiet enough that only that slice of a moonbeam might hear them, and they’re as awkward as ever; they're as sloppy on their feet, in their hands, as a novice on her first day with the interrogator’s tools.
The light disappears when someone repairs the wall of the House of Grief that had let in moonlight before. It happens the night before Shadowheart’s next appointment with that damned mirror.
How many times, she asks Shadowheart, will the Mother Superior make you do it…?
Resolute, Shadowheart grits her teeth and says nothing in response. She takes Nocturne’s hand in hers, grips her hip, and guides them into the first form of the dance until they twirl, twirling into the crescent patterns that give way to the languid second form.
That’s her answer, wordless and with her chest lifting and falling faster. It’s an unusual sight; Shadowheart has always done well enough at the physical tests. But her breathing accelerates visibly, becomes erratic, in the way the black-and-violet tunic she’s wearing hugs her chest. She blinks faster and faster, finding the third form of the dance, messy and unbridled.
“I can’t do it. I can’t go before the mirror again, Nocturne,” Shadowheart mutters, clutching her mouth with her hand as if she’s spewed blasphemies.
Nocturne touches the back of her hand, draws her closer to a near-embrace that never closes the impossible distance. If you want, we might run, she promises. Promises as she’s done so many times before. Just say the word.
It is all Nocturne wants to hear, but she knows better. She knows she could’ve taken the initiative, moved of her own and taken Shadowheart regardless. Taken her and cursed their souls to the Lady’s eternal hate for abandoning Her.
Even the simplest calculations in Nocturne’s training are more difficult than walking away, away to somewhere without any mirrors to watch either of them. So easy. It is all so very easy, she tells herself without voicing it.
The girls spin again into the first form of their private dance.
