#◈ › bonds — ❛ there is always something left to love ❜ — odessa × lena — chronal anomaly

[decidentia]

ODESSA and LENA. ( @chronal-anomaly liked to get a web weaving )

?  /  to live in the body of a survivor, blythe baird  /  ?  /  promises of gold, josé olivarez  /  love poem to a butch woman, deborah a. miranda  /  ?  /  ?

[austerulous]

◈   @chronal-anomaly said:  ❛ 🕰️ an early morning text!! ❜  //  texting starters.

— 🕰️ AN EARLY MORNING TEXT.

[ text : LITTLE BIRD ]   IF I WORKED IT OUT RIGHT YA SHOULD BE WAKING UP SOON. I DON'T REALLY KNOW WHAT TO SAY EXCEPT IT AIN'T THE SAME WITHOUT YA HERE. MAYBE SOMEDAY I'LL MAKE IT TO WHERE YA ARE. BET THE VIEW IS LOOKIN REAL SWEET RIGHT NOW. I'LL BE THINKIN OF YA.

[austerulous]

◈  @chronal-anomaly clicked the ♡ to get a web weaving

1. Crush, Richard Siken. 2. NOT YOUR GIRLS, Alexan Sarikamichian. 3. The Way You Take Time, Joe Buck. 4. Anxious People, Fredrik Backman. 5. Sue Zhao. 6. Free, Florence + the Machine. 7. Transgender Heroic: All This Ridiculous Flesh, Kayleb Rae Candrilli.

[decidentia]

◈   @chronal-anomaly said: ❛ "Sorry, didn't mean to wake you." Bathed in the glow of the fiery rising sun, Odessa's face softened. Stress lines relaxed, the growl of nightmares long faded by the morning hour and years of hardened labor and stress disappeared. Odessa seemed to be a totally different person in the dawn. Lena wasn't entirely sure when the sketchbook appeared in her hands, when she began highlighting the curve of the woman's lips, the flop of a loose mohawk over her eyes. Something felt vibrant, if temporary, and Lena wanted to capture it for as long as possible. Lena bent over the woman, gazing through her eyelashes at the sleepy but adoring look on the junker. Her face split into a grin as Lena captured Odessa's lips with her own. The sketchbook sat abandoned on the bed beside the former pilot. "Good morning, m'queen." ❜

In that timeless space between sleep and waking, Odessa remembered Lena’s face.  Eternally youthful and pinched with concern, framed by an empty sky of brilliant, blinding blue.  Knurled metal vibrated at her back, while tentative fingers sought her wounds, plugging them.  Still the blood leaked out of her, dripping through corroded holes in the truck bed, making sand curl and bead in a sparse, speckled trail that blazed back to Junkertown.  Odessa wondered, vaguely, if her blood remained deep in the beds of Lena’s nails even now.

No, surely not.  That misadventure had played out days ago, and in the wake of wounds the queen’s life was made to move at a slower pace.  As dawn crept over the horizon, in irradiated shades of carmine and coral, there was nowhere else she needed to be, no business that pressed.  Instead, her sleepy attention was given to her bright-eyed bedfellow.

There was no better awakening, no manner more soothing after a slumber punctuated by nightmares.  Trauma had a way of burrowing into the mind, and in the dark horror seeped from those holes like an infection.  A different kind of bleeding, wounds that could not be sutured and would never entirely heal.  Odessa knew her beloved little bird carried similar scars, that she understood what it meant to live, to lug grief with her.

“G’mornin’ yerself…”

A hazy smirk tugged at the queen’s mouth, scarred lips lifting even as they pursed.  From amidst the body-warm sheets a tanned hand emerged, coming to rest at the nape of Lena’s neck.  Better to have the former pilot come to her, and to hold her there, than to disturb the shrapnel sites.  Linen bindings wound around Odessa’s abdomen, beneath which days-old lacerations were beginning to knit and itch. 

Only once she had her fill of Lena’s lips – kissing her sleepily, adoringly – did her crimson gaze skirt towards what passed for a nightstand.  A grill-faced locker, dented and lustreless, upon which was perched a book.  That was something new.

“Wouldja look at that…” Dez murmured, raising an arm to make room for Lena by her side, should she choose to settle there.  “Didn’t know you kept a diary.”