14. marmoreal

[exnihilo]

[Private to Iris and Simon, text]

thank you for trying


[Private to Mal, text]

What happened to you?

[After you saw me.]


[Private to Luna, voice]

Do you like pancakes?


[Spam for Mickey, Helena, Cassel, and Stephen]

[Sometime in the night, she breaks into their cabins, quietly. She just wants to watch for a while. Just wants to see that they're okay. If they wake, they might find her perched nearby, scribbling in a notebook. Or maybe just staring, small and still, chin on her knees.]

Comments

[exnihilo]

[But she says it for him, almost too stunned to be hopeful, all tremulous.]

Your - please?

[Coul I really stalling hard in her throat, trammeling it like an impatient horse pawing at the ground, but she keeps it yanked back in its crossties, because he didn't actually offer. But she wants it so badly, so deeply, has more depth now to want it with than she ever wanted anything with Darling, when all her wants were wild and consuming and shallow, like prairie fire; this is the ocean, just as wild but slow and inexorable with tides, frothed with turmoil on the surface, largely a terrifying and inscrutable mystery even to her.

She has wanted to be his family since their first conversation in the chapel, when the only way she knew how to want it was wishing she could be someone else, when she had even less idea than she does now what it could mean, when it was a transparent, wistful, windy thing, when he was an impish idea more than a boy, when she wanted to be anyone's family - and she has that, now, has a mother and a sister and maybe a distant cousin/packmate in Riddick. Now she wants his kinship for himself.]

Please, I. People say 'more than anything' but I - do.

[patheticvillain]

[Now he smiles at her, a sunny little-boy smile, the kind he didn't know how to make before he came here to the Barge and met the people on it and learned how to be a real boy, the kind of real boy who offers family to a woman like Mira Hidalgo. He doesn't regret it, not in the least. He'd thought maybe there'd be something - a sinking in his stomach, a twisting sour feeling of uncertainty - but no. This feels right.]

I get to choose my family, now. I choose you.

[exnihilo]

[Her face hurts, and she doesn't care, breath caught in her throat, beaming. It feels like she's trying to pour too much happiness through too small a face.]

Me too.

[Iris told her that, that she could do that, that it was real. She gets to choose, and she has.]

I - me too.

[patheticvillain]

[It should, he thinks, take more effort to reach out his hand to her, to lay it on her shoulder, to squeeze, to reassure. It should be harder to be good to her, because she look exactly the same as his mother, but she is so impossibly different that Cassel thinks he might die from it.]

[He loves her. She's family. She will leave soon, and he will love her all the same.]

[Sitting up, he leans against her shoulder and wraps his arm around her waist, a half-hug from equal to equal, cousin to cousin. Between family.]

[exnihilo]

You said I couldn't.

[A whisper, sort of shocked and confused, the confusion itself muddling through the elation, even as she leans into it, eager as a needy cat. Logically, it's been a year, a year and a million changes since that first talk in the chapel, but the rule had nestled in her and taken root, somehow, that she didn't get to touch him.]

[patheticvillain]

[A soft smile, hidden away as he ducks his head.]

You couldn't. Now you can.

[The rules change. People change. He didn't know before he got to the Barge, either. Now he can show other people, like Mira, what touch means, what it does for love.]

[exnihilo]

Oh.

Thank you?

[She's hugging him back already though, enthusiastic and tight, just like she's wanted to for a long time.]

[patheticvillain]

You're welcome.

[This he says into her shoulder, his face buried in the soft cloth of her shirt. She smells good - not like his mom at all. He hugs her tighter for it.]