Work Text:
Elain’s hands are soft as the petals of roses when Mor takes them in her own, her nails, claw-like, are the thorns that grace the petals with their sharpness. She runs her thumb over Elain’s palm, feeling the softness that comes from a life without any work or pain.
Not without pain, no, Mor stumbles to correct her thoughts. Elain’s pain lies beneath the smooth, silken surface of her hands, buried and lodged forever there, a stone that cannot be removed.
Mor wears her scars and pain and her bitter, sweaty work openly on her hands. Her fingers are marred by nicks and scrapes that run like rivers and streams across her skin, her palms full of wounds that have healed but have not disappeared from view. And she wears them like she might wear Amren’s finest gold jewellery, draped over her fingers and running over her hands.
“Your hands are warm,” Elain tells her, in the softly honest manner that Mor is ever so familiar with. “I feel so cold, but you make me better.”
Mor smiles at Elain and takes both of her soft, silken hands in her own. “I’m glad that I can help you. Is Velaris treating you well? How are you settling in?” Elain had moved out of the House of Wind several weeks ago for a quieter life on the outskirts of Velaris with a garden and fewer people around. Since then, Mor had scarcely seen her or had a chance to check up on her.
“The people I see are all very kind to me.” Elain answers, drifting away from Mor as if she is in a dreamland where Mor is an interloper. “And my flowers are all blooming wonderfully.” With a jolt, she seems to return to the world and looks Mor directly in the eyes, sudden clarity replacing the cloudiness of dreams.
“I want you to come live alongside me.” Elain’s gaze is so gentle that Mor half-believes she does not deserve it, guilt settling heavy on her shoulders. “Get out of that house, even if for a short while. We could plant flowers together.”
“That sounds wonderful,” Mor says without a drop of dishonesty.
“Good,” she hears Elain murmur, and then those soft lips are upon Mor’s cheek momentarily. Elain’s kiss is as light as rose petals floating on the wind, as light as the air of the night sky when Mor leans out of her window and lets the wind tangle fingers through her hair.
Mor blushes rose-pink when Elain’s lips move away. So short a moment, and yet she is already half-destroyed by the tender kiss Elain gave her.
“Do you wish for us to live and plant flowers together… as friends, or as something else?” Mor asks, taken aback and uncertain. She is not innocent and naive — she has loved women before, and received their love in twain — but Elain throws her off-balance, makes her question things that had previously been answered.
“We can be whatever you want us to be.” Elain’s hand slides into Mor’s palm, and her fingers are cold. When Mor looks downwards, she notices a layer of mud beneath Elain’s nails, the soil making a mark on her otherwise perfect hands.
Perhaps the dirt can make a similar mark on Mor’s hands. A mark made not by pain, but made by simple work, done with love and care.
“I’d like us to be something else,” Mor answers, and Elain smiles like the sun itself has come to grace her lips.
In Elain’s presence, Mor feels blessed.