Work Text:
It’s cold. Almost dizzying, an ache spreading through the chilled wind, slowing muscles and grinding bones to a halt in its dull embrace. A fresh type of cold though; the sky clear, the atmosphere exposed to the cloudless night. You could almost forgive the chill gnawing at your skin.
Salem is not a stranger to the cold. The night is the one time she can let herself be free, unrestricted- a few nerve endings sacrificed and numbed to the chill are surely worth it. To her, the night is freedom, free from commitment and responsibility and things needed to be done, a brief respite from the day’s work. The cold against her is comforting, even as the hairs on her skin stand on end and her shivers betray the chill in her muscles. It makes a change from the day’s damp heat; that’s certain.
Do the stars blink above her? Do they shoot across the void of night, hazy voyagers on their path meandering above the thermosphere? Of course not- nothing moves here. When was the last time Salem saw a plane flying overhead? When did she last see a pack of migratory geese, headed to safer lands and easier prey?
There’s no light pollution. Only the stars, the constellations that shift shape in her eyes as they unblinkingly stare down at her. Like sentinels of the camp and the woods that imprison it, the sky twists on its vortex as the stars watch, over and over, and ground her. Tethering Salem to the calm and solace that she can only in this darkness and cold reach, only out here, alone and free and untethered beneath the stars.
Ah, no- that’s a lie. Because Marisol can also bring that peace, that balance in the hecticity of Salem’s life (that she so often craves). Because god , the world stops when Marisol’s fingers thread through her hair and she melts like chocolate left on the dashboard of a hot car and that’s peace, that’s solace and calm and security. Marisol, the night sky, and the stars turning their hyperborean gaze on this woman, solitary and burning with love at the centre of a desolate campsite.