ofgoldenfruitborn:
Something wry pulls at his own mouth as well. “Sometimes,” he agrees. And somehow it feels like the correct acknowledgement to give.
(That he’s difficult, maybe, with a spirit full of hungry teeth. That he’d be too much for quite nearly anybody else who wasn’t, in that way, very much like him.)
Still, Tora isn’t altogether prepared for Moira to turn in her seat to face him when she does, and so he only lasts for a few strange, arrested moments of quiet, studying her right back, before he shies from the look and instead coaxes her up to her feet and into his space, fingertips fanning upon the shelf of her jaw. “Come here,” he mutters as she rises, more faintly than he would have liked, and, “Kiss me,” fainter still; but then her face, odd-eyed and knowing, is filling his field of vision, and he is kissing her, holding her to him with a gentle insistence he hadn’t expected of himself. When at length he turns his face, only slightly, he lingers there with her, cheek to cheek, words he isn’t quite ready to say growing heavy on his tongue again.
Breath on each other’s necks.
Pulses warming the air immediately above their skins.
He swallows.
“–I don’t need you any more than you need me, you know.”
Halting, muted intensity. Groping his way through a language he only half-knows and finding himself dissatisfied by his own limitations.
“If you wanted to leave – start again somewhere else, by yourself – I’d let you. I don’t need you here, but I–.” (Breath hisses through his teeth.) “–I like you here. And. I want you here. With me. If that’s how you’d choose to have it.”
At last he leans back and chances to look her in the face, brows drawn low and eyes guarded, mouth set in a hard line like he doesn’t know what expression to make. Lamplight halos in Moira’s hair. His jaw tics.
“Understand?”
[ @talonedbanshee ]
Moira isn’t sure what she expects to see when at last she settles her gaze on the Kai rather than his reflection. Maybe the cool look he often assumes before muttering some quick, dismissive answer (something sharp and witty, yet brittle in a way). Instead, Tora almost...shrinks, in a way she’s never quite observed before. There isn’t much time to assess it, however, before she’s beckoned to her feet and then to his lips. Moira has no qualms about obliging that simple request, one that is instead initiated by Tora himself. It’s soft, the way he presses to her, the way his hands hold her. Not with the barely-restrained heat of lust, but simply the want he speaks of.
Their lips part, and her eyes flick open to take in the face before her. Even that sight is fleeting, as Tora’s movement puts them cheek to cheek. Her hands rest lightly over the fabric of his tunic, and she swears she can feel his muscles taut and tense just beneath it. What he says isn’t necessarily surprising, but neither could she say that she expected it. They live in two vastly different realities, and while Moira is more than accustomed to remaking her life in faraway lands amid entirely different cultures, different species is admittedly a new leap even for her. It has never really bothered the curious woman, whose thirst for knowledge was bound to stretch far beyond the reaches of one planet. Yet she had perhaps figured that in Tora’s eyes, she was just as much a curiosity. A short, fleeting, and very small speck in the scope of his universe. Or perhaps she had been applying her own cold logic to a being not as unlike mortals as he might want to believe.
“I do.” She says, when finally she’s granted view of his face once more. She isn’t imagining the stiffness he holds himself with, it’s so present in his face even now. There’s no amused smile playing at her lips, though. She appears thoughtful, still and calm like the unbroken surface of a lake. “It seems that we want the same thing, then.” Her mismatched eyes weigh him, before finally an aloof front cracks into a familiar slyness. “Most people would find that cause to be happy, so do try to look less like I’ve asked you to join me on Earth to run a farm.” Her long fingers release their hold on his bicep, rising to grip the back of Tora’s neck. An insistent tug closes any distance left between them as she takes a kiss of her own from the somber Kai. When their lips part, she regards him calmly once more. “Now, was that so hard, you insufferable eejit?”
[ @ofgoldenfruitborn ]











