[private] she keeps me alive; Ciri

[Leokadia]

she got blood cold as ice
and a heart made of stone

Ciri protects her on that mad run across the isle and Leokadia is surprised. She runs harder because it confuses her, she has images in her mind of how one is meant to react when they are aided or rescued but she has never been the one receiving that aid.. No one has ever redirected her, or stood between her body and any danger at all. She has only ever been left to the wolves and has learned to get herself out of trouble or suffer through it. A pitched fall into a crevasse would not have been something to just “suffer through”. Pale eyes flick hard to Ciri when the mare sends her around the danger and Leokadia runs harder, her lungs burning against the cold.

Once they stop near the lake and she is uninhibited she is no longer thinking about what she’d felt as Ciri kept her safe on their run. She pulls in oxygen in deep gulps and heeds the impulse to be nearer the dark mare. While she gazes at the blue tree, Ciri drifts away and into the cold water. Leokadia does not follow, only moves nearer to the edge, breaking the lacework of ice near the bank to take a drink, pale eyes watching starlit wings stretch themselves. There is some of the Ciri who had first attracted--drawn--Leokadia there again, but the anger is there too. That anger is not something the little mare welcomes, but she will not say so nor explain why resolving instead to make room for it as she will not expect Ciri to leave it behind. Not after she comes ashore and tells more of the story.

“He killed you?” Whispers the little cremello, nausea and anger a confusing muddle in her tired frame.

Leokadia listens, once she almost says something else but stops, trying to fathom the power to bring someone back from death and what the motivation would be in this case. She is glad of it, glad Ciri lives, and still silent, Lo presses her forehead to the widest point on the scarred woman’s neck. She has killed before, driven to join in murder at the bidding of a dark god. Is it a similar madness that has taken this friend of Ciri’s? When she withdraws it is not far, her breath fogs in the space between them. “I have never thought there was anything else. Why did you think there would be?” She wonders what it must be like to hope for something beyond this, perhaps some kind of rewarded afterlife… but Leokadia has seen the way others live, and she does not think that anything that waits would be any different from what is here in this world.

They both shiver in the cold night, the darkness endless beyond the auroras that cast blue rivers across the surface of the star-strewn lake. This northern place is beautiful and savage, it is the first home she’s had, even if it’s only been home for an hour. “I can’t imagine how you are feeling… but I do not think you live for nothing.” Leokadia dips her muzzle to touch Ciri’s shoulder. She does not know how to do this, how to be a friend to anyone, how to navigate the feeling of wanting to be nearer still to Ciri. She does not know how to use words honestly, they feel wrong in her mouth, painful in her throat. It is easier to pretend and twist a story than to live as herself, out in the open. Yet Ciri waits in that world of discomfort and so she tries, struggling against a current that wants to send her safely back into her solitary life.

but she keeps me alive
she's the beast in my bones

Leokadia

@Ciri