Work Text:
Tileke assessed her almost finished embroidery. Couching for the hawk’s body, laid horizontally and attached with little dapples of darker thread. Hawks aren’t even in colour, she thought, they look dappled with many shades. Feather stitches in the wings. Wings have feathers, don’t they?
”Let me see it again,” she said, and Amira looked up from her own work.
“Here.” She held the feather so Tileke could see: dark at the tip, white at the bottom, spotted inbetween. Tileke chewed her lip. Should she make the next one with even more dapples?
”I think it looks lovely,” Amira said sweetly, leaning closer to look over Tileke’s shoulder. But that was no help. It wasn’t that Tileke just needed Amira to like it! She needed it to look like the memories of birds she could see behind her closed eyes.
She pulled out her favourite one of the pillowcases she’d made earlier. It’d been almost an accident how she’d laid the arch of the upper edge of the spread wings, but it looked just right. Maybe if she tried to draw a line like that in chain stitches?
Oh, if only she had a hawk of her own to look at…