Work Text:
Often, Falin finds herself staring, for one reason or another.
Today, it’s her hands.
Her fingers long and slender, laid between the pages of the book on her lap. Tall palms, soft knuckles. Delicate, like the china their mother had always kept in the top shelf on the cabinet and only took out for the most important guests. Porcelain fragile, and petal smooth.
Such a contrast to Falin’s own; weathered from years of wandering and climbing and playing and doing whatever else young children with a backyard as wide as the world were wont to do.The white scars grazing the inside of her left thumb, where she’d slipped out of a tree and snagged a branch on her way down. The mark on the second knuckle of her right hand, incurred from an overeager pup who missed the toy she’d offered. Thick, calloused fingers and square palms. She’d never been known to spend much time on them, aside from soothing them with lotion when they’d crack in the dry winters of her hometown.
She wonders how soft they’d be - Marcille’s - if she could hold them.
Well, really Falin already knows. She’s touched her hands before. Of course she has. Neither of them were particularly shy about that. Often when they did spellwork, their fingers would brush as they excitedly pointed over each other in a textbook, or guided the other’s movements to help her master the form of it.
But she wants more than those tiny, thoughtless touches.
She wants meaning, and intent.
She wants to hold them; for warmth, for support, for comfort, for strength.
She wants to be able to take them in hers without a thought, to twine their fingers together and pull her along on whatever path they’d find themselves on.
She wants time.
A single twinge plucks at her chest, a chord struck through silence. She’s not quite sure what it is. It dissipates as quickly as it comes.
What Falin does know, is that every day she’s with Marcille, she wants her at her side more and more. And she hopes that their paths will find them intertwined for a long time.