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[nightsung]

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[nightsung]

[ Shadowheart plucks a raspberry before taking the plate properly, hums in thought as she presses it to her lips. ]

I'm sure you're right. [ Though there's a small knot in her brow that suggests otherwise, her gaze drifting somewhere past the fluttering curtain. Half of oneself. For a moment, she knows with utter clarity that she's had access to so much less: closer to a blank slate, all her years on this earth wiped clean.

The feeling passes, but it leaves her cold. Shadowheart sets the desserts down on their small breakfast table, hardly touched, and gets to her feet, her hands sweeping up Emmrich's chest to cup his jaw. ]

Should we see about that bath? [ Without her heels, she nearly has to rise on tiptoe to reach him. Shadowheart grasps at a memory, as her thumb gentles in the hollow of his cheek: how she used to ride on Emmrich's shoulders, when he was a teenager and she was still small. There was a trellis with night-blooming datura in their family's garden, and he'd steady her so she could reach the tallest one. Shadowheart can still conjure the scent of them, real as anything--not a blank slate, not a lost year. ]

[volkarin]

[ (In this moment, he thinks: she's always been this small, to him. Easy to take and carry in his arms, to hold — easy, because such closeness is meant to be. Loss had touched them early — which feels right, feels true — but they'd had each other. He'd known, then, what to do. That it was up to them to fill up the emptiness their parents had left behind.)

And in this moment, he smiles, leaning into the hollow of her palm. ]

Quite right, [ he says, gently squeezing their joined hands, ] I did promise, after all.

[ A promise sealed, now, with a kiss, stealing the faint taste of raspberry from her lips, though he's always known her to be sweet.

Into the sliver of space between them: ] Now, I believe you ought to be wearing much, much less.

[nightsung]

[ She's much warmer with him here; the world is much warmer with him in it. Whatever unease she'd felt on their arrival melts into the kiss, and Shadowheart follows Emmrich's mouth for one more, soft and languid. ]

Is that so? [ With a coy tilt of her head as they part, and Shadowheart guides his hand to the row of buttons between her shoulder blades. She needed Emmrich's help getting this dress on, a sleek satin thing, and will need his help again to get it off.

Winding her arms around Emmrich's neck, she arches her back so her chest is flush with his sternum. Teasing, ]

Here I thought I'd get this all wet, so it clings to my skin.