[VIDEO | un: inkmetal]

[inkedspell]

[It's disgustingly hot and humid and even with most of her hair pulled up and twisted back away from her face, she's got curly tendrils hanging down and a light sheen on her forehead. Ugh. But at least she's back to finding things to keep herself busy.]

My chair is open at Ursula's again, if anyone is looking for regular tattoos or some runework. Want anything more intricate let's talk and we'll see what I need and what deal works for you.

[Best way to act like nothing is wrong is to go right back to what she was doing before, right? Right.]

Catching up on the insane shit y'all love to get up to, but what little changes, a lot stays the same, doesn't it? Like how I still don't know who most of you asses are. Keeping track of the coming and goings ain't easy. Anyone keeping a list?

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[faceblocks]

[she's not prepared for that. had she been prepared for any of this? not at all. it's like how she only half looks before she leaps because she knows the lay of the land - or expects she knows. she's rarely been tripped up in that respect, even here it's been the easiest learning curve of everything.

this is not that.

she's given a few surprise hugs in her time here so far. (okay one, to be exact soon to be two) and it's been her initiative - tight, spontaneous near-lifting off the ground kinds of hugs - but this is not the clap of hands on her back, the pat-pat-pat that sometimes accompanies. this is not---

(it had taken so much time and time was all she had, except for her thoughts, which were as dark and stark and interconnected as the lines she'd channeled them into - memory interlocking with memory - some gone up in puffs of smoke but never truly gone - some so tight, so focused they may as well have been graven there in bone instead of skin - the puffs like rising steam to keep it down, to keep it in, to push through it - and some a distant, impossible hope - a flare in the dark - a hiss of smoke that might never come no matter how many shitty nights she spent on that freezing floor wishing she'd done things differently.

she had still been a child, but she'd had vague ideas of what kind of tattoo she might get someday - people she'd seen come in and out of the last drop, some of them were marked in ways that made them look more dangerous - others were just dangerous looking in the first place - and the addendum to that: this kind of overkill.

it's the machine she's become, it's a testament to her own trials, to powder, too - because that's the memory that has pushed her through those nights, those days, those beatings - the constant replay of the same night over and over and trying - so often failing - to imagine a different ending - the burden and weight of it on her back both literally and metaphorically - this is the machine that powder built.)

---it's not unwelcome. but it's unexpected, and she's suddenly holding her breath again as a finger traces a line - and words follow suit. soft words to mirror a soft touch - and vi is used to neither.

a surprise exhale when saeri moves closer, and a small space of silence hangs before she speaks. it is soft, too.]

And when life tries to make us something else, something we don't want? When it tries to define us differently? We look it in the eyes and say hell no. It's like you said before. we defy its expectations. It says give up. I say 'make me'.

[she'll turn, it's not quick or practiced - it's also a surprise, her guard's dropped to a level she's also not prepared for, but she rolls with that, because (also surprisingly) this feels like a safe zone. for her, there have not been many of those.]

Yeah, I knew.

[and when she's fully turned, she leans as close as saeri might allow, and rests her forehead against the girl's chin - it would have been her forehead had vi been taller. the last little bit of air huffs out like a sputtering blue flare.]

[inkedspell]

[They are kind of awkward and stilted in this intimacy and yet somehow it's seamless, the way they pushed and teased and fell into this, like they walked off the edge of a cliff and kept walking not even knowing how fast they were falling. Because that's what this feels like. Falling through the sky in a way that she's never felt before. How had this happened? It's blown past the parts of her that normally turn everything into a game, a joke no one could take seriously so they never threaten anything more. So she never had to think about what more meant and the potential loss of it.

Something in her says to step back, to adjust herself, land on her feet and walk away.

But another part of her is a gaping, open wound of rotted emptiness that she never expected someone else to see right into like this. Because she's been like this all her life--the scar on her chest the cruelest and most amusing metaphor life could have gifted her with--and the only other person who ever did might be dead and gone and that's on her. At any moment of the day that knowledge hits her in the face like a physical blow and she's backing away and refusing to let it consume it like she deserves. It's all that she deserves.

And yet here's someone who sees it and gets it and Saeri has no fucking clue what she is doing except letting it happen. Because when Vi's forehead rests against her chin Saeri may as well have frozen for a moment, eyes wide and breath caught in her throat. It's like a computer needing a reboot, the way her mind just stalls. But her body seems to understand. There stuttered reaction gives way to hands running over those arms, one warm flesh and the other chilled steel, back up to those shoulders and those lines and they dig in where the puffs of smoke escape the machine.]

Never turn down the chance to tell life to fuck off and look badass at the same time, huh? Guess there's a lot of things we agree on.

[She tilts her head down more, bending over to take away the space that steams between them so she can press their foreheads together.]

I can't wait to put my ink all over you. To add onto the machine you've built.

[And maybe that shouldn't sound as suggestive as it does.]

[faceblocks]

[honestly, vi is used to awkward more than she would like to admit - it's become a sort of default normal-abnormal so that yeah, at least half the awkwardness is lost on her, and - oh, that metaphor. they both carry their inside scars and burdens on the outside, too. buried memories, dead and gone buried people, same and same.

yeah, it's like that now. a hug happens. again when did she become a hugger? now, she supposes. and she doesn't try and lift saeri off her feet, she just returns the gesture with unguarded sincerity.

she can't help hum a little laugh at that. at how it sounds - and if things had been less ...whatever this is, she might have let a half-joke slip, but she doesn't.]

I have a couple ideas. Well, really, it's just one idea. I'd have to describe it from memory, and then you could just put your own spin on it.

[she will break the embrace, but give her a moment. give her two moments.]

[inkedspell]

[Maybe the returned hug is what completely does her in. Her face heats, eyes squinting in a unfinished smile because she can't help it. It does help hide the burning in them--good thing she's never been much of a crier. She doesn't even know why she might but the weird potential is there.

Instead she gets to take in this embrace and hold onto it as long as Vi will let her before they pull apart and she reaches up to pull a pencil out of her hair--no she will not explain where it's been hiding.]

Good thing I'm great at drawing from descriptions. Comes with the territory.