(100 ways to say i love you prompts: “Can I have this dance?”)
This world’s piece of creation had been cradled in the claws of something that resembled a dragon but for the fact that it was covered in iridescent green feathers. This feathery dragon had been terrorizing the local populace for generations, and with the crew’s defeat of it a great celebration was organized. IPRE were, of course, the guests of honor.
Parties were never Lucretia’s scene. She sits at a back table by a window as the little string quartet plays waltz after waltz, eating plums and sketching out their fallen foe. She had been here for the last two hours, and she is getting dreadfully bored, but the others are all having a wonderful time and, well, they deserve it. They deserve a happy ending for once.
Someone coughs at her elbow. Lucretia sighs, prepared to chase off her hopeful conversationalist with horrible small talk, and nearly snaps her pencil when it’s Lup instead.
Lup had decided to wear a shimmering gold gown, cinched once under the bust with an embroidered cord before the skirt fell gracefully to the floor. Her hair is gathered and held up with a net of beads. One of the dragon’s feathers is perched jauntily, outrageously in her hair.
Lucretia had of course seen her when they were all getting ready and when they entered the ballroom to great applause. She had nodded and agreed when Lup had asked her if she looked nice (carefully, so carefully, only as much as to be appropriate and normal for a platonic friend, appreciative but uninterested, giving nothing away but standard kindness, careful Lucretia, you know how that would go).
But the warm light of the candles and lanterns around the hall make Lup glow. Even more than usual, she looks like a star, like a vision, like the feeling of being out in the sun after a long time spent inside. Lucretia is suddenly gripped with a desperate need for a canvas and oil paints, because this is yet another moment of Lup that deserves to be preserved. So much of Lup is fit for art - how her hair falls, the line of her jaw, how her mouth curves when she laughs. Lucretia knows why she thinks that, and does not let herself stare, and restrains herself from drawing as much as she wishes. It’s not as if she could properly depict her, anyway.
Lup shifts from one foot to the other, and Lucretia realizes she’s staring. “Yes?” she asks, belatedly, and mentally kicks herself.
Lup’s hand drums on the table. “I was, um,” Lup says. Then she pauses, takes a deep breath, tilts her head back, and says, every word deliberate, “Can I have this dance?”
“GET THAT SHIT,” Taako hollers from across the ballroom.