leicesters: (153)
Claude von Riegan ([personal profile] leicesters) wrote2022-12-06 08:26 pm
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warmare: (気付く)

[personal profile] warmare 2023-07-03 01:59 pm (UTC)(link)
[He is right, in his estimation of how it might go if he were to say he was proud. Even to hear that he was happy... it is a fraught thing. Sometimes she can hear it. Other times... like now... she feels like she has already peeled back and explained so much already, left feeling tender and defensive in its wake. Even though she knows... it is necessary, that they must come to know each other in more than one way, that she must... speak. ... For this morning, it is enough.]

... Wide awake.

[Her remaining eye focuses on him. On the softness in his smile. ... She almost wishes she could give him something like that. It would reassure him, wouldn't it? It would make him feel... Fingers slide across the mattress, hesitating... and then moving to brush a wayward strand of hair off his forehead.]

... Have you read all the books in this room?

[She hadn't known he meditated every morning.]
warmare: (批判)

[personal profile] warmare 2023-07-03 07:39 pm (UTC)(link)
[Not all, he says, but “a lot” of the volumes she’d seen just in his living room still seemed like an overwhelming amount to a woman who had been raised in a world where paper was precious and only the nobility and the rich were educated. Hair “fixed” she withdraws her hand… but it hovers close on the mattress, still, like it was just ready for some other excuse.]

What good does it do to read about worlds you will never see… ?

[She only knew how to read her name and a few of the most basic words, which she recognized by the shape of the kanji character more than actual “reading”.]

Or is it… “for fun”?

[It made the concept of reading for pleasure a bit difficult to grasp for her. Liem read often from the holy book she’d returned to him, she knew, but that served a bit of a religious purpose, and Claude…. Was his curiosity simply endless?]
warmare: (一目)

[personal profile] warmare 2023-07-04 01:39 pm (UTC)(link)
[Hayame has been known to look dismissively on things that were done for fun. Because she had never had fun, she didn't... she didn't understand fun, not really. It had always been something she had been taught was a waste of time, just foolishness when there was training and duties to attend to... and though she tries to view it softer, because she knows... so well that other people could come from better worlds, better circumstances...

It is still made easier by the fact that he supplies the region of strategy and advantages. It's not something she doesn't understand, even if it was a method that had never been available to her. If he was reading books like that...

For his dream. (A foolish, surely unachievable dream of a place with no war, no discrimination...)]


... When did you learn to read?

[Her fingers slowly curl and uncurl in the sheets near his shoulder.]

When you were a baby... ?
warmare: (ふざけるな)

[personal profile] warmare 2023-07-04 02:08 pm (UTC)(link)
[He says it so casually that it makes her instinctively bristle to defend her ignorance, fingers curling back tight and lips pursing.]

I don't know what babies do.

[She'd... seen jinba foals before, from a distance, taken from Armless broodmares after being fed from them and handled by grooms but it's not like she'd ever interacted with one. And the frontier stables weren't any place humans brought human children... not that that would be helpful, either, seeing as the only literate ones there were the stable master and his secretaries. Her time as a prisoner had been the first time she'd interacted with children when she wasn't a child herself and they...

Her fingers curl tighter, her knuckles paling, struggling a moment to prevent herself from once again dragging their conversations down into the muck and the dark. She just has to say something different-]


I am trying to tell you I cannot do it.

[She hadn't admitted it before, not really. She'd asked him what he'd sent her, but she hadn't... said it.]
warmare: (pic#16524843)

[personal profile] warmare 2023-07-04 02:49 pm (UTC)(link)
Don't apologize.

[She knows he figured. But she had been cowardly not to admit it before and try to just dance around it. ... She'd been cowardly about a lot of things before, or she wouldn't have avoided him for weeks after their encounter beneath the tree. She was still being cowardly, hiding under his sheets in his bed on the floor of his home, feeling relieved that no one would see how her fist spasms under his hand before she unfurls her fingers again and slowly slides them between his.]

Jinba foals can do much more than human babies.

[That much she knew.

Before he had betrayed Meridian (her)... Liem had read to her from The Book of Numbers. She didn't even know if he really wanted to, or truly enjoyed it. She'd seized upon it after returning the book to him out of fear that if she didn't tether him to her with some kind of obligation that their bond would dissolve without debt to hold it together, but...]


... Is what you are reading now interesting?
warmare: (僻目)

[personal profile] warmare 2023-07-05 07:49 pm (UTC)(link)
[If she were being honest... Hayame was not that interested in flying machines. If jinba were meant to fly, she assumes they would have been born with wings. She does not like heights if she doesn't have solid ground beneath her hooves. ... But it's not really about whether she thinks the topic is interesting or not.

It's about... trying. She's trying. Trying to accept his affection. To trust. To be... something more than just a warrior.]


... The pictures would mean very little without you reading the words aloud along with them.
warmare: (ふざけるな)

[personal profile] warmare 2023-07-06 01:43 pm (UTC)(link)
[He wasn't supposed to volunteer to read something she was interested in. It was supposed to be... not an inconvenience to him, that was the whole point in having it be just the thing he was going to be reading already...]

I am not the scholar.

[So she tries to put the responsibility of the choice back on him, even though she... probably could come up with something. It wasn't like she was stupid, just... illiterate, and without ever having had the luxury of time to do things like learn beyond the scope of archery and hunt and servitude. She was surely interested in... She could surely think of...]

- And you will not be calling them "bedtime stories".

[For obvious "not a filly" reasons.]
Edited 2023-07-06 13:44 (UTC)
warmare: (恥ずかしい)

[personal profile] warmare 2023-07-07 12:59 am (UTC)(link)
[The moment his lips press to her forehead (what was- did he like her forehead in particular for some reason?) Hayame's cheeks grow ruddy, the corners of her lips twitching downward.]

That makes it sound like something lewd...

[She knows he's just joking, but she can't allow it to go without saying?!]
warmare: (Default)

[personal profile] warmare 2023-07-08 03:37 pm (UTC)(link)
[A her problem? A her problem? Knowing he's joking protects him from her ire the way another person would not receive grace, but her cheeks still grow red with the idea that she could be accused of having a lewd mind. After everything-

After... after what she'd done her last heat, struggling with how discord made her season so much worse... She'd almost reached out to him. She almost had. But he... he was a Stargazer. It would only have gotten worse. And instead...

She suddenly looks... something else, on top of embarrassed. Guilty? Sad? Something that makes her turn more into her (his) pillow, muttering,]


I am not that perverse.

[... Not now. But what is she going to do be in two weeks?]
warmare: (Default)

[personal profile] warmare 2023-07-08 04:59 pm (UTC)(link)
[... She definitely cannot tell him. Even if it occurred before she had agreed to attempt to accept his affections, before she had been forced to admit that, even if she did not know if her feelings matched his, there was something there she could not deny...

Men had their pride, did they not? And her own reputation...

Hayame struggles to answer him. Should she warn him now, that she will not be able to meet with him some times? Should she try to prevent him from teasing her about certain things? She does not know. What she does know... is she feels she has made so many errors since she arrived at his home last night. That despite her intent to be... normal, to be... amiable... that she has failed, and he has had to stop and comfort her, or find himself at the mercy of her ire...

Her fingers tighten on his where he had taken hers, before, and instead of providing words... she pulls his hand to her mouth and kisses his knuckles instead. Ring finger, middle, pointer... It buys her time until finally,]


It is nothing.
warmare: (Default)

[personal profile] warmare 2023-07-08 08:26 pm (UTC)(link)
[Perhaps it was cruel of her to do that... when she does it because she knows it will distract him. It distracts her, too. He has... good hands. Despite his status, they are an archer's hands, like hers. They are strong for a human. He smells good.

And to cover her lack of answer when he gently pushes for one... She goes back to it. She'd neglected his little finger, his thumb... and then she is just pressing his knuckles to her lips, silencing herself, her eye lidded and half-hidden by the dark hood of her lashes.

What can she give him, that is still true but is not... that? It takes her a while, but finally,]


... I have failed at several things I wished to do, coming here.

[Her words whisper warm breath and hints of her lips against his skin. Her cheeks are still ruddy. Her hair is still disheveled from sleep.

And the answer is still honest, even if it wasn't everything.]
warmare: (立ち聞き)

[personal profile] warmare 2023-07-09 01:28 am (UTC)(link)
[She does not really want to tell him, because failure is not something she has ever been conditioned to accept or view as anything but shameful, no matter how small or petty the failure. But his voice is soft, he entreats her for an answer…]

… I meant not to bring up anything we would fight about.

[The ambassadors movement, whether or not his intent to come to her world was believable to her…]

I did not mean to make you feel as if you needed comfort me.

[Her brother, Liem Talbott…]

I meant to…

[She bites her lip, and the pink color on her cheeks grows darker, her eye averting, her forelegs curling with a soft click of hoof on hoof. She’d thought… he deserved some sort of proof of her intent, perhaps a reward for… for dealing with her… something that would make up for the month she had left him waiting for word? (And maybe she had wanted to see for herself, if she-) She didn’t know-

And her eye shifts back to look at him, struggling to just say it-]


… Do more.

[Her lips press again to his knuckles, her gaze averting again.]

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[personal profile] warmare - 2023-07-09 17:54 (UTC) - Expand