* — 𝐡𝐢𝐭 ‘𝐞𝐦 𝐰𝐡𝐞𝐫𝐞 𝐢𝐭 𝐡𝐮𝐫𝐭𝐬 𝐬𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐞𝐧𝐜𝐞 𝐬𝐭𝐚𝐫𝐭𝐞𝐫𝐬.
THERE’S SOMETHING ABOUT SUMMER that makes her feel incorporeal. funny, with how winter is numbness, but she’d grown up by the ocean, and snow is a precious thing she’s only ever seen a handful of times. snow angels, snowmen, the way blood looks against the white, carmine and crisp and sharp. the height of summer, in contrast, is too much and not enough rolled up in one ; helenah from the kitchen used to sneak her frozen oranges if she was good, or slices of watermelon so ripe and sweet it felt like eating sugar, and she’d tie up the long skirts of her dress above her scrapped little girl knees, and open the windows wide to watch the ships sail by.
jester can cut her own melon now, but somehow it’s not the same. even in the shade of the little cabin on the cliffside, kios burns just like the sun, like all the things mortal hands are not supposed to hold. all the things she’s ignored, of course, raised as she was amidst the jungle of imagination with her god, the archfey, her only companion. thumbnail pierces through the skin of an orange, sticky juice running down the side of her palm to pool at her wrist. brings it up to her mouth to lick it away, absentminded, then goes back to peeling.
in the buzzing silence, @saintsdeath says ❝ you already know how this will end, ❞ and she can hear something like the rumble of thunder in the echo of his voice. over the years, she’s invited all kinds of spectres into her home-heart, but no one quite like him. hums low to show she’s heard him, them pushes her thumb in the centre of the fruit, splitting it down the middle.
❝ maybe. ❞ her books are always simple : and they lived happily ever after to tie everything into a neat little bow. they never speak of what comes after, when friends part, when relationships falter, when everyone settles in lives of their own and she remains, untethered, unbound, the eye of the storm. divides the orange into quarters, then separates each slice to plate for him, arranged in the shape of a flower. heartbreak isn’t new ; she won’t shy from it anymore. ❝ but i think not doing something because it might end a certain way is kinda dumb. don’t you ?? ❞
