Re: [Not-a-picnic: Nel, Lear, Daddy]
Cold. The fucking cold. Fuck the cold. Lear was coiled over seething red silk, buried under layers of fur, his head, a yellow and black triangle, tucked under Nel's collar and against her skin, close to her throat where he could hear the oceanic rush of her pulse. Her heartbeat was tectonic rend, rhythmic and mesmerizing. Occasionally, his tongue would pass in a feather over pallor, a flit, but he didn't unwind, not until he was warmed somewhat through, and even then, it was a languid shift of scale, settling himself in a more comfortable drape as Leslie's voice floated through the snap-and-rime air. If snakes could roll their eyes, Lear would've been rolling his, as black and beady and unblinking as they were. Instead, he bore down, breaking through the skim of fabric where it sat like silt on skin, and he threaded downward.
Eventually, the glint and glitter of serpent broke free of black, of the warmth of Nel's body, a sensual landscape for all its austerity, and Lear leaned against the insubstantial trunk of an apple tree not too far from Daddy's, yellow and black warning gone. Now only his gaze, the dip of his chin downward as his eyes held—only these things, along with that lurking slouch of his body, long and thin, against bark—cautioned against his danger. And there was Leslie. In fucking tweed. Like Nel's, Lear's eyes were a bonebreaking blue. And now, they rolled. He pulled a cigarette from the pocket of his coat, lit it, and let his blond head fall back against the tree as he took his first long drag. "He's always reading into things," he informed his sister, his own voice dry and slanted in an unmappable Scandinavian accent. His gaze ticked to Nel. His body was still warm from hers. "This is bullshit."