His playful smile has her gritting her teeth; the flippancy in his gaze as he regards her captivity elicits a dark scowl.
Dry, sand is everywhere and nowhere all at once. Hard to hold and often impossible to see, everything changes when water is added. That is why the djinn had chosen the desert, and why the grullo mare is so uncertain about the sea. She had left Nerine, both to keep her word and to keep away from the water, and yet here she is, trapped while stone-dry. She’s utterly still and all but snarling as he tells her that he is capturing sand.
Djinni has always been fine with contact on her own terms. She is openly affectionate, perhaps even overly so. Raised in a family that touched as often as they spoke, Djinni often comes off as exceedingly friendly. That has never been the case with Stillwater. Their first meeting had not ended well and has colored the entirety of their interactions since, even if the dislike she had intitally felt has changed to something far less negative.
She had thought that perhaps they could be friends now that he had his cave, that he could do whatever he wanted underground (as long as he kept Sylva safe) while Djinni did…whatever Djinni wanted. She’d thought things might be normal: or at least as normal as they could be while she kept him magically bound to a physical location.
But friends do not do what Stillwater is doing to Djinni. Friends do not drag molten fire up each other’s necks, do not send waves of volcanic heat roiling through each other that keep her pressed beside him (make her press more of herself to him, even, desperate to stay warm).
She is reaching out for something -
And then he disorients her again, leaving her head spinning as he talks of Ischia as if the little island is something important. She dangles, uncertain and very cold, and tells him that “No one needs an island. Don’t be…stupid,” while still catching her breath and struggling to regain her composure. This is even worse than the scorn; at least that she had dealt with before. This is new.
She doesn’t like it.
natural build - slim
smoky grullo tobiano
brown eyes