✩ Grooming, brushing, or tending to their hair. -Also Soapie!
✩The winter sky was cold, clear blue, and the pale stone that Stormwind was built from glinted harshly in the morning light. Mahat shaded her eye, peering out over the city from her perch atop what she and her fellow miscreants had dubbed “the smoking tower.” It was an easy climb just across the square from headquarters, a perfect place to slip away from the haze and hustle of Old Town and get a moment of peace.
Sophie was there with her, both of them indulging in the tower’s namesake activity–’Hat with a musty tobacco cigarette, Sophie with her preferred sweet-scented silverleaf. The red-haired druid was kneeling beside her and excitedly extolling the virtues of her favorite dumpling-seller, and ‘Hat was nodding along, grinning, limbs folded loose and lazy. Her arm rested on the edge of the parapet, drifting her cigarette to her mouth and then back to the edge, to flick the ashes into space.
“Y’hair’s pretty, ‘Hattsey,” Sophie said, veering off-topic. “Kinda like silver–metal, yeah?”
Mahat chuckled, blowing out a puff of smoke. Conversations with Sophie were like that, sometimes, traveling a path that was perfectly sensible in the druid’s mind but would require anyone trying to follow to make some precarious leaps. ‘Hat enjoyed the adventure of it. “Thanks, Soap. Doesn’t do a damn thing f’me but tangle–an’ no’ even in th’ way yers does, where y’kin keep flowers an’ shite in it; they fall righ’ out. ‘S a lost cause.”
Sophie scooched closer to Mahat, her blue-green eyes bright with interest, twin spots of flushed pink appearing on her cheeks. “Kin, kin I try somethin’?”
‘Hat’s eyebrows raised, her curiosity piqued. “By all means, lass.”
“Y’hafta lie down,” Sophie said with great conviction, nodding with almost the entire upper half of her body. The pink flush was spreading but she seemed determined. She patted her thigh, and Mahat obligingly shifted to lay her head down on the indicated spot.
She wasn’t sure what she had been expecting, but the druid’s fingers running through her hair felt like a pleasant shock, like rolling in snow and then dunking yourself in a hot spring. Sophie coaxed and teased her way through the tangles, quiet now and intent on her mission. ‘Hat was quiet too, her eye falling shut. Sophie’s lap was a pleasantly squishy place to lay, and even with cold stone pressing against her back, ‘Hat felt more comfortable than she had… in a long while.
Sophie’s strong, clever fingers brushed gently along her scalp, parting strands of hair, bringing order to chaos, and Mahat looked up at the blue vault of the morning. Twin plumes of smoke from their respective vices spiraled skywards, side by side. A song drifted across her mind, for some reason–an old, old harvest song, so old she’d forgotten almost all the words. But the tune stayed with her, and she began to hum it, a soft smile tugging at her lips. They stayed like that for a long while, one stroking and one humming a warm, rolling melody, caught between dirt and sky in the sacred space of the smoking tower.
