Brinly
She chooses the forest because it is one of the few places she can still be invisible. The crisp, sea-salt breeze that whipped through Nerine was a refreshing change to the incredibly still air of the forest, and she found that she actually liked the roar of the waves as they rose to crash against the rocky coast, but it still didn’t feel like home. Nowhere did, because she thinks she’s one of those lost souls who is not meant to have a home. And, it was harder to hide in Nerine – too many wide open spaces, and even though it wasn’t an overly crowded kingdom, it was still too many eyes on her at any given moment.
The shadows of the forest offered a familiar security, and while some might find the closeness of the trees and the heaviness of the darkness to be nearly suffocating, to her it was a breath of relief.
Here, she was safe from their critical stares (because her insecurity likes to tell her that they can see her invisible defect, that they all know she is damaged and a waste of time), and relieved of the loudness of civilization. The tension she carried in her muscles seemed to dissolve the further she disappeared into the depths of it, and she had almost let her guard entirely down when she heard footsteps.
Her steps slow, incredibly mindful of every footfall – her breathing stills, and she suddenly wishes she could truly become invisible. She has been doing far more socializing than she ever cared to do as of late, and she can feel her heart warring against her ribs at the thought of going through this again. With a downcast gaze she does not even glance in the direction that he walks, thinking that they might slip past each other.
But then his voice calls out to her, and a nervous chill chases across her skin.
She stops, and she turns towards him. He is young, and handsome – which makes it all the worse. Her jaw is already clenching with the effort it takes to bite back the poison that lays waiting on her tongue, her dark brown eyes narrowing as she manages to repeat tautly, “A girl like me?” Her mind can fill in the blanks of what that could possibly mean; a girl like her – a girl with fire under her skin, a girl too bitter to ever be anything likable, a girl that should be trapped even further than the stomach of this forest can allow. “What does that even mean?” Her words singe with heat in response to what she has chosen to perceive as an insult, and even her eyes seem to smolder as they glower at him from behind a veil of tangled black forelock.
— burn until our lives become the embers —
@[kildare]
she's still pretty bad at making friends, I'm sorry lmao