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glassrowboat · 2 months ago

Text

All The Parts Of You.

Mydei x Risse

I ended up writing that thing that's fully for me, but I'm sick and deserve this <3 Pure fluff and some funky facts about Risse in this one.

Cheerisse wasn't the type of person to hold themselves with grace.

It is an ironic fact considering the name meant exactly that, along with the monikers of 'dearly held' and 'kindness'. But if you asked anyone who knew Risse to describe them, none of those three words would be the first to leave their lips. Some would choose a hazard to your braincells (mainly the man she referred to as Axolotl), melodramatic, or wildly stubborn - not even Mydei would pick these three adjectives to describe his own partner at first.

Creative? Without a doubt. Witty, self-reliant, warm, safe.

And yet when he stared at Risse now, the thought struck him.

They were bent over a stack of papers with one hand moving nonstop as the other traced along the bold letters of a dictionary to double check each word they wrote down was spelled correctly. Rays of sunshine were streaming through the open curtains, bringing light to each description and her skin, seemingly making it glow with the dew clinging to her.

She was still wet from their visit to the baths, allowing a stray drop of water from their hair to fall onto the stack she was shuffling through. It smudged the ink, but it did nothing to deter the sprawling swirls of messy lettering to continue.

It was almost like Risse was completely lost in their own little world.

This had been explained to him before, the need to write something down before it escaped the mind entirely, but it still caught his eye every time it happened. They always looked different when they were concentrated, the playful air he had come to expect from her all but lost for the sake of her concentration.

Cheerisse had been like this since the moment she had tucked one of the flowers that drifted along the golden water in the baths behind his ear. She had cupped it in her hands when it had first drifted past, letting the lotus capture her attention as she buried her nose against its receptacle. More had soon pooled around both their waists, leaving stray petals tickling Mydei's skin to the point he had pushed them along with a wave of his hand to continue their journey through the bathhouse.

"Is it a holiday of something of the sort I forgot about?" Risse asked.

Mydei responded with a no as he watched them dance along the surface, twirling with every ripple they floated over until they stopped at the edge of the tub left with nonwhere to go. The soft pink clashed against the blue tiles, just like the three red hedges in the midst of purple flowers with the miraculous ability to giggle or the figure far beyond the priests of Janus wearing a knowing smile.

It had clearly been a mistake to ask if Risse was allowed to use the Hero's Bath with him.

At the time, Mydei had turned back to Risse, waded through the sheen of gold to stand behind them, and settled his arms around Risse's midsection to pull her close.

It had been an unconscious action to shield her from the others' view, but burying his face in her neck to assure himself he couldn't accidentally meet anyone eye to eye hadn't been - The fact it hid the abashed look on his face had nothing to do with his actions - and neither was the kiss pressed to her skin, silently asking if they could both leave already.

He had expected her to readily agree, given the fact her fingers were already reminiscent of the prunes he would occasionally pick up when buying pomegranates at the Fruit and Veg Store, but Risse had stalled. Just as another wave of giggles hit his ears, too.

Mydei's assumption their hesitation was born from the chance opportunity to peek out from behind his shoulder to catch a glimpse of the three trouble makers faded when he felt a stem brushing his hair out of the way as she settled the lotus Risse had been cradling so tenderly behind his ear. Her fingers danced along the cartilage to give it a light playful tug.

"There we are, pretty as can be."

A soft grunt fell from him, shoulders relaxing, but his grip on them still held firm when he had voiced his question on if she was ready to go.

"Alright, I got the message the first time. There's no need to rush a lady," she teased.

"You're only a lady when it's convenient for you."

"Maybe."

With a click of his tongue, Mydei urged them both out of the tub. Along the way, he had stopped and gathered his towels.

It was when the rough fabric graced his hand that Mydei detected the faint traces of divinity hovering in the air right above the tub he had been occupying. A passage of Janus had been used, of course. What else did he expect?

He gave the three girls a smile as they peeked their heads out above the planter they had been hiding behind and left to catch up with the source of the wet foot prints on the ground - nodding respectfully towards Aglaea on his way out.

From there, they had both gone to the dressing rooms to change back into their everyday clothes (despite Risse's comment that there was no point for him to even bother before pushing past the door) and left to head back to her apartment.

Cheeky. She's that, too.

The entire walk Risse had been mumbling to themselves, seemingly lost in thought as she broke the quiet air between them. He caught the occasional snippet, something about withering flowers, a witty one-liner he had no context for, and a comment about how they would even make this all work at the theater. When they had finally breached the doorway, she was gone, shuffling off to leave Mydei to find her in the bedroom.

Bringing them to now, with Mydei leaned against a wall and taking her in.

"You'll get sick if you don't dry your hair." He finally said.

Risse stopped a moment, brow raised as they looked at him, only to come face to face with a towel he was holding out.

"Yes, your highness. Whatever you say, your highness." Risse said as she took it from him and began drying off her halr.

The towel was still hanging off their head when she returned to her work, letting it hang there until Mydei pulled it off. He tossed it into an overfilling hamper before sitting behind her, watching a story slowly come to life before his eyes. He works have asked what it was about if Mydei didn't already know she would tell him in her own time. She was often struck with the need to bounce ideas off of someone, even if it was just for the sake of voicing every thought, and he was more often than not her chosen candidate. And if not, well, Risse had a habit of leaving unfinished scripts lying around.

She wrote a sentence down, scratched it out, added something new in its place, cursed when the quill when it ran out of ink, and dipped it back in the pot - and she would be like this for a while.

Quietly he gathered up her hair, pulling the strands from where they stuck to her forehead and began separating it off into segments just like he had done a dozen times over since their habit of doing each other's hair after the baths truly ingrained itself in his mannerisms. With only the sounds of a pen scratching and their breathing, Mydei braided one side of Risse's hair and then the other. Each twintail was tied off with a cuff, one made of gold with a green gem hanging off of it, and the other was his - the bronze shining in the beams of sunlight.

He let the braid drop back down to rest on her shoulder, only for it to slide down and fall to hang by her face.

Mydei reached over to fix it, knowing how hard it could be to write something down when your hair was in the way only to stop when he noticed the faintest scar on her back. It was old. He knew that just looking at it, and yet he had never noticed it until a single droplet caught on the divet before continuing to trail downwards.

He traced the jagged shape, following it even past the marks stopping point down to her scapular spine - and back up again.

"This scar, where did it come from?"

Risse took a moment to answer, her head tilting as she tried to figure out what he was asking about before it finally clicked. "Oh. Tis but a flesh wound."

"Cheerisse, I'm serious here. I want to know."

"My aunt tried to kill me."

A pause. "What?"

"Okay, now that I think about it, you are the worst recipient for that joke. My apologies. But you actually want the story, ya?"

With a sigh, Mydei nodded. When he did, Risse set their quill down and turned around to face him.

"Alright. I was two at the time, so I'm telling someone else's version here, but...At the time my older sisters had this bunk bed, and my aunt thought it would be a great idea to take the ladder to the second bunk to see if she could use it like a pair of stilts. Great idea, right?" Risse asked. "No."

A snort let him at her sudden deadpan.

"Well, of course, my aunt eventually fell. But here's the kicker: poor little two year old Risse was sitting on the floor in the same room playing with her dolls when this all went down. I got a ladder hook to my back. Though, when my mom tells this story, she always likes to start it by saying that when she was woken up, her exact words were 'someone better be bleeding.'"

"That sounds like both your aunt and mother were extremely irresponsible."

Risse shrugged. "Eh, my aunt was like ten, so I cut her some slack."

Mydei reached around her, fingers finding that scar again to trace over it with a new reverence. She shifted in his hold, accommodating to how he was pulling her closer to wrap her arms around Mydei's neck. They stayed like that until the ink on her scripts were as dry as bone before he could bring himself to ask if there was another story she had behind a scar.

"You seem to care a lot about this, huh, kitty?"

"Scars can be fascinating to someone who's never had the ability to bear one." He tried to justify, but the words felt wrong on his tongue. Risse bore the mark of the wounds she received in the past and wore them with pride, the way way the soldiers of Kremnos do when they come home from a journey after a long time away.

There's another trait he would attribute to Risse: strength.

He took her chin in hand, allowing himself to caress the line of Risse's jaw to the birthmark under her chin; a shape Mydei has long since memorized with both his fingers and tongue. "I want to hear it all if you are willing to share."

"You do realize you're distracting me, right? I was working on something."

"I-"

"But alright, if you insist."

For the next half hour, they sat together curled up in bed as Risse told him about each of her "battle wounds" while she braided and unbraided his hair (doing her best to avoid the lotus he stubbornly refused to lose) before doing it up again. There's one from when she got stitches on her head, one from loving on a stray cat too much, someone breaking a vase. There was so much to Risse that he still hadn't learned, and here they were sharing everything so openly because he asked.

She is enthralling in a way he's never known anyone else to be, for he could read a book full of the most wonderful sonnets and still have no way to describe Risse in their entirety, scars and all.

#mysse #crystalink #for those wondering about the idea i had #it was inspired by the lotus #and how a nymph who took the form of a flower was one day plucked by a young man #she fell in love with him instantly #the fact she was picked out of all the beautiful flowers making her feel loved in turn #but when they had returned to his home #the man didnt put her on display in his best vase #but instead gave her to another woman - his hearts conquest #in her grief the nymph killed herself and was left as nothing more than a withering lotus in the hands of her lovers true chosen one

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