Re: The Cat: Rae and Kratos
The tattoos did not, Rae determined, add much to the aesthetic overall that the stone skin helpfully began. She observed the spread of them, the writhe past thick hair at his temple with the clear-eyed survey of entirely bold and entitled deliberation. Rae didn't feel as if she needed permission, nor as if it were permissive in itself as a gesture. She looked because he wore ink over his skin and he didn't do it to go unnoticed.
An entirely deliberate gesture once more and she laid her fingertips against his wrist, thumb against the delicate bridgework of bone over veins and flexed her own wrist to turn his to better see the constellation of red-work. She didn't need to, necessarily. Rae wouldn't divine their purpose, whatever their purpose was but it was a gesture and it was a power-play and she executed it neatly as she sipped red wine.
"They're not very pretty," she said finally, letting his wrist go.
She'd no need of Greek ordinarily. His was heavier, weighted with sand and it slid sideways into something older than true Greek now was. She'd the tracery of it on the flat of her tongue, borrowed language temporarily loaned from years and years gone by, and she watched the procedure with the weighted glass and the water with interest.
"You'll ruin it," she observed without heat but he drank it anyway. It had presence, that moment and she was temporarily amused by it: it showed in the curl of her mouth and the corners of her eyes. And then Rae laughed. It was a warm sound, private.
"No," she said now. She'd no sisters to tell truths to, but she knew exactly who she meant. "Nel has been telling tales." Rae didn't look like she cared at all if Nel had.