Sochi;

[sochi]

Sochi

darling, you're wild-eyed, empty, and tongue-tied
maybe you need me or maybe you don't

Sochi had never imagined she could feel the things she does for him.

She had never thought, that day they stood across from one another sharing secrets, that one day he would be one of her greatest. But she doesn’t fight it—suppress the full extent of her feelings, perhaps, but not fight entirely. She just growls lightly in the back of her throat, feels the smoke of it rising there, and lets it simmer. She closes her silver eyes, tracing the masculine angles of him, the things she has studied for so long. She memorizes the gold band, the bronze of his mane, the boyish curl of his lip.

All of these things that make him who he is.

All of these things that make him hers.

The flame between them rises and falls, stirred into life by slow touches and proclamations and then softened into embers again. It is all edges and heat and kindness—and she cannot feels the pressure of it building in her chest, the knife of it cutting against her flesh. But the sound of his laugh, that mischievous chuckle that is so uniquely him, cuts through her. Could anyone enjoy life the way that Castile could?

“We’ll go back someday,” her smile is slow and lazy, her silver eyes finding the horizon before sweeping back to him. When he asks about her childhood, she frowns slightly, thrown off by the question. It’s been a long time since she’s thought about it. “I was born in Nerine during Hestia’s rule.” She rolls a shoulder, that frown creasing her brow. “My mother was kind but a worrier. She warned me often about the dangers of being in my tigress form. She wanted me to be careful; that others wouldn’t appreciate me like that.”

A child’s interpretation of a mother’s warning—a warning twisted into self-hatred.

Never Sloene’s intent, but the end result all the same.

But Sochi rolls it off. “I was part of a child exchange with Hyaline. I was young when I left for there.” In those ways, she had been perhaps a disappointment to kingdoms. As she had grown, shedding the more cheery demeanor of her youth, she had slipped into the background of the East and then left altogether. “What about you, Castile?” Her frown melts away into a smile, teasing a rare warmth into her features as she nips at the corner of his mouth. “I imagine your childhood was more than being traded like chattel.”

playing the slow rooms, howling at half moons
if you are a Queen then, honey, I am a wolf

@[Castile]