Work Text:
a brief study of lián and farrukh / or love is stored in orange.
Daytime beams spattered on the ground and Lián must admit to herself that she was not really used to the summer season that was encroaching. The sultry air was inflating her lungs and then again, there were lots of things that she was not used to. Things which had been foreign and distant after years were spent in the care of the Doctor, palmful of distorted anamnesis and windswept unclarity of scabbed recollections.
The animated boisterousness that the street offered was once thumping relentlessly in her head when she first set her foot in the city, a madness steeped in paramount intensity that was overwhelming compared to the alabaster walls which had confined her. How in the first week before her admittance to the infantry training she had to remind herself that every soldier there were tangible people, that they were not revenants of dead bodies that loomed in her old room; reiterations that she kept on chanting like it was a Buddhist mantra; that this was not a pyrrhic survival. There was so much to be relearnt and to be unlearnt that she was no better than a jejune faun staggering to walk, flittering due to continual unsteadiness. Your life is now yours. You fight with a cause.
“Didn’t really expect to find you to settle here during break.”
“That’s none of your business.” She said, not bothering to look up to him. Farrukh simply grinned and sat beside her. Lián did not mean the harshness of her blunt rebuttal. Rarely was she coarse with her speech, though it seemed hard to disentangle herself from his presence and persistent might appear to be his strong suit.
But she did not despise him. Everything had been unbearably inundating and Farrukh, from the very beginning, was an all-consuming force that she could not fathom. Blithely brash, treacherous, unbound like forest fire. She was wary of him, of what he could do, of the underlying aspiration that impelled him to fetter himself to her like this.
“I was looking for you, dorogaya. Here,” He handed her two tangerine oranges before Lián managed to utter anything. “I get it for you.”
The fruits were a handful in the cradle of her palm. She always liked how orange tasted: sour citrus and sweet-tart on tongue. When her fingers scraped the rind off, it was the peeling of sun, marmalade balmy. Lián gazed at Farrukh. His eyes blue on a hazy afternoon, far more tender than a temperate summer’s day; rosy-cheeked and gilded rays cascaded down the slope of his shoulders. She never despised him. Because how could she? When he grasped for her, her cities of haunting; and sought to save her from loneliness? Despite he might make her nurse a knife in her ribcage, despite he might drive the blade to sink in the frailty of her spine; despite despite despite. Lián knew she would forgive him if he was to ruin her.
There was no vocal rejoinder she made and Lián separated an orange in half instead, juice staining her hand like the spilling of sunlight. She passed him the bigger half and Farrukh's soft chuckle ripened as it fell from his mouth and it was warm.