She is struck by how different it feels to hold him now, to be held by flesh and blood and the warmth of a body when she is something else entirely. It feels similar to how she remembers the sun warming her skin, similar to that kiss of sunshine on lazy days lounging in meadows. She misses that warmth, she realizes, just as she realizes she is no longer warm like that. Like him. Must it be so strange for him to hold her and feel not soft fur but instead the bite of bark on body that had always warmed him. She would blush if she could, soft shame the color of pale flower petals. But there is no blood in her to rise to those delicate cheeks, so she merely blinks and looks past him to the trees at the edge of the garden.
It is moms voice that recaptures her attention, draws her back safely from the edge of quiet terror she peers over so uncertainly. She is quiet as she watches, though there is a part of her mind busy wondering at why Nikolaus pulled away, wondering how long it would take for him to decide she was too strange now. Maybe he already had, maybe holding her had been too much. “Of the earth.” She repeats slowly, blinking crystalline eyes in and out of existence.
Leliana makes it sound like something lovely, like it does not make her too different to love. But Linnea doesn’t want to be different. It makes gentle panic rise in her belly and the only thing that keeps it at bay is when Nikolaus promises she is not wrong, like he can hear the worry swirling to life in her thoughts.
His words make her heart break.
She is so ready to unravel, so ready to fall apart that she is startled when the conversation veers back to Nikolaus. ‘Linnea, try to distract him—if you can.’ She looks from the solemn face of her mother to a boy made man by a war not meant for either of them. She can see his expression change as he braces for pain, for the unknown, and something in it wakes the gentleness in her again. With a nod she reaches for him, and when he is not close enough to draw closer, she wrestles her foreign body until three unsteady steps carry her back into the crook of his shoulder.
She feels like a child again, shy and unsteady, not completely in control as she tries not to lean into him too hard lest he be knocked off balance. They are close enough now that she can whisper, leave words in shy kisses over his smooth, dark skin. “Hi,” she says, and she feels like that girl again, feels a smile slung crooked across her mouth as she relaxes beside him, “it’s probably a really good thing you don’t have any pollen allergies.” That smile deepens, touches her eyes as she touches her mouth to his shoulder, to the warmth of his skin.
She feels shy to love him like this in front of her mother, but it the best way she knows how to keep his focus on something besides the way Leliana will have to unmake his brokenness to heal it right again. Her mouth moves across his shoulder, following ridges of bone and lean muscle that she does not remember being so prominent before. “Nikolaus?” She asks, and her voice is a whisper she buries against him. “I need to know,” a weighted pause as she drops her mouth to his elbow to grasp soft skin between impossibly gentle wooden teeth, “is my bark worse than my bite?”
A smile, a light in her chest that she can only find in his company.
Maybe this will be okay.
linnea
these wildfires grow and grow until a brand new world takes shape
