Restless
Imogen can't concentrate.
(standard procedure for up to a couple weeks ago, now it wears a different guise.)
She fidgets, sits with her legs crossed on her bedroll, backpack in her lap, removes, itemises, arranges its contents, huffs stray hairs out of her face, hands still twitchy, mind still scrambled, organises it all again. Repeats.
It's early, the fact given away by the low-lying sun and crisp smell on the air that has not yet been burned away by its sustained and blistering presence.
The blisters on her ankles, the friction of leather that is still not fully broken in. Imogen delays in pulling on and lacing up her boots, calves restless but exhausted, thrumming if they remain still too long (too long being only a moment).
She falls back heavily onto the bedroll.
Overhead, in the weave of vines and branches, birds sing. They're mocking her, surely, the awkward and bound to the ground sack of flesh and fat and bones that she is, hair frizzed and sticky from the humidity, her inner thigh chaffed and perspiring where the contact of her dagger's harness coils around it like a constricting snake.
She loosens it a few notches
The pathetic and inconsistent touch of it frustrates her more, so she buckles it tight like a tourniquet.
She exhales, deflates, heavy as she is, runs the back of her forearm over her brow, spreading the salt and sweat, breathes in, feels the connective tissue holding together all of her joints, exhales, arm to ground, along with every other limb, the back of her knees, her spine, her shoulders (there's a rock digging into one through the mat, did she sleep on that last night?), her neck, her ass, wishes they were all gelatin, that she could become one with the floor and not collide with every edge and corner and texture of it, stop being so reactive.
She inhales, skin pulling away, wishing it would continue, peel, lift, blanket, canopy (closer than the trees), shade, but it would drip with blood, hot and sizzling as it rained back onto her exposed bones.
Shadow, the dark tatters, the veil. Molasses of ichor. Dull, hazy, sharp, thorns. Don't touch, don't approach. Space. Wail, scream, chorus, silence. That would chase the birds away, feathers dislodged from sudden movement re-lodged into black tar, carried off, away, down sluggish stream, no contact. Barbed like a briar.
The thread of the bed roll is itchy, the weave of it too thick and open, rough spun from fibrous burlap, it splinters bare skin where it makes contact, nape of her neck, backs of her forearms, thighs, knees, and calves.
Delicate, cool, billowing lace that accommodated to the pads of Imogen's fingers, to her palm, fractured by magic, calloused and freshly wounded, it dulled even the rows of needle teeth beneath. Imogen imagines it her bedsheets, the ground would not matter - could be rivers of lava jutted by shattered glass, it would not matter, sure, cool billowing lace, Imogen would sleep well.
Easier to tell now, how restless her hands are. They pluck at the gauzy linen that makes her dress, the more rigid weave of her waistcoat, following stitching as if it were pathways, movement, roads to get her somewhere, them, skin to skin contact barriered like the rock digging into her shoulder. Her touch meanders to her chest, unintentional, she swears, in promise and obscenity, a winding path with sides towered by hedges and trees that block the horizon, a shock carried from the point of touch to manifest as an ache between her legs and a weightless haze in her head, body rolling, shoulders leaving the mat, leaving the rock that digs, a breath to a sigh to a gravelly moan, sends a bird or two scattering away, a leaf or two falling behind them.
Fuckin' birds. Relax. More touch. Touch is good? Barbed. Thorns. Restraint. Maybe she should grow her nails, maybe then the touch won't feel her own. Laudna - fuck, the name gets a reaction from her again, the jolt in her core as she feels the heat pool at the surface of her face, her neck, her chest, crimson damming, damning, acid rising to her throat carried by the guilt of it.
She kicks and squirms, side of a fist like hammer to nail on the bedroll beside her, other covering her face from the shame of it, it being the burn, the rolling simmer, the violent boil of want and guilt and acid and sting and she is so restless, boiling over, she can't concentrate, the contact of the ground and the fabrics and the atmosphere all feels wrong, scalding, now she knows what to compare it to, how it could feel, what she could be touching.
Could be death calling, alluring, maybe, how long she flirted with it. Cold with head empty, sounded nice, still does, though the delivery and means maybe different now. A face to an end, ends her, finishes, acid in her throat again, hand bunching the rough fabric under her hips.
It moves of its own accord to her thigh, takes a fistful of cuff and flesh and she sobs, eyes scrunching shut so tightly that she starts to see colours in the dark, blotches of crimson in a grey dream, her body in the butcher's cart.
Dreamlike, hazy, drunk (this must be how it feels), she moves without thought, groping herself through the crotch of her shorts, writhing, the floor is too hot against her back, sweat gathering at her hairline and salt beading down into her eyes, again, breath short, short, when did it get so shallow, dizzy. How long could she hold it (hold herself), heat, radiating into the cup of her hand, squirming, a worm under boot, squashed before it gets to dine on the corpse. She pushes firmer against herself, shudders, the feel of the floor leaving, rolls her hips onto the press of her fingers, barriered, dulled, not enough, as they fumble, clutch at the shorts and wrangle the inseam of them in frantic pulls against uncomfortably undulating heat, heat, damp forced through from the close contact onto the pads of her fingers and Gods she's gonna have to prestidigitate that, what the hells is she doing, Laudna could return from her morning forage or whatever it is any moment and
fuck the thought doesn't quell the need at all, her hips spasming and knees shaking as she holds them suspended and trembling, working herself up, frantic, frantic and desperate. How did she get here? she followed the woman at the market, the woman followed the yellow bird, the birdsong silenced for pathetic needy moans, her hips raised so high her shoulders are pushed further into the cut of the offensive rock, princesses and mattresses and beans or whatever that fairytale was Laudna had mentioned about ladies and their proper behaviour.
Proper, right, she should stop, get it over with, fumbles with the fastening of her shorts, hand making its way beneath fabric before it's fully undone, now registering coarse curls, then slicked, heat, heat, heat, hot, wet, eager, soaked, soft, the glide of her intensity, betrayal, soaking. fuck. Touch is not enough, hers, fuck. Not right, the feel of callouses and scars and heat and a barely registrable thrum shit what happens if she gets away from herself, gets too excited. magic fried uncontrollable she is out of control fuck the heat of the bedroll on her back and the push of the rock imbedding imbedded scars wrapping tangled suffocating sinew silvered skin nightmares burden and guilt guilt guilt storming-
Imogen rolls over onto her front, the rock through the bedroll pushing into her chest, against her sternum, aiding to evacuate the bile that has been suspended in her oesophagus but the guilt won't leave her thighs slicked and hot and tacky and uncomfortable and the chaffe of the itchy fabric of the mat burning them, restless, as she removes her fingers from between her legs, wipes the evidence of a pathetic and failed and just and just wrong attempt onto her shorts, prestidigitates it all clean as if she can wash herself of her impurities and intentions, dares to think of the occasions the purple glow has evaporated the rain from Laudna's clothes and skin, now a selfish act, was then too, maybe, always selfish.
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