Strands

Strands

Augusnippets Day 2: platonic bathing | hair care | makeup

Word count: 500

Trigger warnings: none

——————(0)——————

"Are you done yet?"

A nearly-inaudible, long sigh came from behind Brier, before Karmic said, “Say that again, and I’ll cut your throat instead of cutting your hair.”

“Young lady, do not make me turn this car around!” Brier said, dropping her voice low, then giggled. “That’s what you sound like right now.”

“Young lady, do not make me stab your carotid with these scissors,” Karmic immediately deadpanned back. Said scissors made a snick-snick noise, slicing through more of Brier’s hair.

“Ha, see—? Oh no, shh, shh, I’m sorry, Sor, sorry, sorry, rest your tired eyes,” Brier sang, fingers running over Sor’s fur. The touch of magic in her words made the cat settle down again, his eyes sliding closed. Brier hummed a few aimless notes, slowly stroking down the length of Sor’s spine, before she reached out from under her protective cape for the half-made straw sandal she’d abandoned to placate Sor.

“You—” A yawn interrupted Karmic’s sentence—it was silent, but Brier could hear his jaw creak, could picture the one eye Karmic always kept open when he yawned. “You’ve done that … three times now? You’re putting me to sleep, dirthead. You’ll end up lopsided and laughed at because you enforced naptime on your hairstylist.”

“I can’t help it!” Brier whispered, starting to weave a careful distance from where Sor was dozing across her lap. “Don’t move while a cat is on your lap or you’re the worst human in the world, that’s the rule. You know that, that’s why you put him there to begin with.”

“It’s for your own good,” Karmic said, unrepentant. “Every time I thought about your sheer amount of split ends, I fantasized about freezing you into a giant block of ice except for your head and giving you a haircut. You got off easy.”

“I guess I did,” Brier sighed. “Honestly, who can blame me? He’s trapped me, but he’s the cutest trap in the world.”

“Correct answer.” The tug of the clips in her hair released, and a comb glided over her scalp without meeting any resistance. “Okay, now I’m done.”

“Yaaay!” Brier quietly cheered, now having the freedom to turn her head. Karmic was leaning back a little to inspect his work—his face was as severe as ever, but there was a softness to the corners of his eyes, and a jaunty, almost triumphant trill had risen out of the quiet, mellow tune his emotions had become.

“Thank you!” she continued. She tilted her head, and said, “Is there something you want help with for your hair?”

A beat, as Karmic went still, both in body and emotions. Then he huffed, the meditative tune coming back, and as he turned in the direction of their broom closet, he said, “I think Sor’s got you occupied at the moment.”

As he walked away, Brier smiled, eyes catching on the tufts of hair on the floor. After all, she’d learned how to listen for the ‘later’ implied, how he’d never said no.

Philosophical Incident

Augusnippets day 6: car accident | plane crash | shipwreck

Word count: 500

Trigger warnings: minor injury, minor blood

——————(0)——————

“Cass. Cass! Cassie!”

Cassander let his head loll to the side. “What,” he deigned to answer.

“Don’t ‘what’ me, ya goth fuck!” Mag snapped. “Stop contemplating the secrets of the universe and tell me if it’s because yer being you or because yer head got fucking cracked open!”

Ugh, he was so loud. “If now isn’t the time for philosophy,” Cassander posited, “when is?” The road was nice and level, warm from the sun. It was a good day for cloud-watching. In all honesty, laying here and staring up at the blue sounded like a much better deal than having to sit up and contend with any injuries he definitely had.

“When yer magic-forsaken road rash hasn’t maybe sheared off important bits of your fucking circle tattoos! Have I mentioned lately that those’re fucking suicidal? Have I mentioned that I don’t like being, oh, I dunno, stabbed or burned or exploded?”

“If my spell circles were going to explode,” Cassander said, “they would’ve done it already.” They did have a point, though. Hells. If any of his circles were affected, if his clothes hadn’t protected his skin enough … he was going to have to do so many touch-ups, he just knew it.

Alright. Time to get up, aaand there was the pain. Mostly duller pain, though—he was going to have a helluva set of bruises later.

“Any goose egg-type feelings?” Mag asked, squinting at him. “Can’t check your pupils—dizziness, amnesia, anything?”

“Oh, I hate having to reimburse people,” Cassander muttered, eyeing what had once been their car. Well, it was still recognizably a car, if you liked your cars crumpled like an accordion. At least the top was open, and they both knew how to fall when they got thrown forward and out.

“Cassander!”

“No concussion symptoms, just bruises and minor cuts.” What had made it through his clothing hadn’t seemed to touch his tattoos yet, thankfully. “You’re going to be the one paying back the rental. This is on you and your horrific driving. I didn’t think it was possible to hate cars even more than I did before.”

Mag sputtered, before leveling an accusing finger at him. “Take the wheel, then, if ya hate my driving so much!” he said.

“No,” Cassander said, flat and immediate. “I would rather die. I almost did die, actually.” It was either endure Mag’s idea of road safety, or willingly put on a siphoning cuff to provide magic for the engine. He’d like to sleep at night, thanks, instead of scrubbing his wrists raw from the nightmares.

All of Mag’s fight left him, his shoulders sagging. “Right,” they muttered, looking at a vaguely bloody rip in Cassander’s pants.

Cassander instantly made an affronted sound. “Stop looking like a kicked puppy; I know what I signed up for, or else I wouldn’t have gotten in a car with you again.”

“Right,” Mag said again, lips quirking a little; he held out a hand. “Well, let’s figure out how’ta get outta this mess.”

hey

hey friend

dont kill yourself tonight ok

you have a really pretty smile and i know its not always easy to manage one but itd be a bummer if we never had the chance to see it ever again

youre really important and you matter a lot so stay safe and try and have a nice sleep

Voltaic Refeeding

Augusnippets day 3: thunderstorm | blizzard | heat wave

Word count: 499

Trigger warnings: mentions of eating, electric shock, burns, blood, fear of death

——————(0)——————

Camlanns were born attuned to the elements. Magic wove them into being just as much as DNA, and they needed magic just as much as they needed food or air. This was easy, for some—if you were attuned to earth, wind, plants, water, physics, all you needed was to touch it to feed on the ambient magic, and you were set.

For Ruika, attuned to electricity, that was harder. Tal had told him that there were people thinking about using electricity to power lights and heat in a house, but for now, fire magic was used to bring fire, light magic to produce light. Outside of combat and nastier warding styles, no one had really incorporated electricity into their life, and Ruika did not want to get in the practice of getting beaten up by wards or people just to try and keep himself healthy.

So, when summer rolled around, the air turning souplike and clouds becoming dark with the promise of rain, Tal whipped out all his governmental real-time storm maps, Piri rented a mobile, and the three of them went storm-chasing.

Lightning was an excellent source of electricity for Ruika. Electricity naturally bent towards him, knowing he was a home for it, which was great when he was fighting lightning mages and even better when he wanted to get struck multiple times in one storm. The rest of the time, Piri and Tal set up warded spheres to catch lightning, to feed him for the rest of the year when storms were rarer. It really was the best way to keep his magic stores from withering and him dying of starvation!

It also, Ruika reflected, hand raised to the roiling sky and shaking, just could be really very dangerous.

His ears had ceased to hear anything but a high-pitched, screaming whine. He was somewhere between feeling nothing but tingling numbness and like he was about to explode, the telltale sign that he’d eaten a little too well, and like a starving person gorging themself, that was going to have some immediate, horrible consequences. Distantly, he knew he was burned all over to the point of burst, bleeding blisters, even if he couldn’t feel the blood trickling over his skin.

Somehow his arrhythmic, rabbit-quick heart found it in itself to leap in fear when his smearing vision managed to catch a flicker of light in the billowing darkness above. The three strikes in quick succession before had destroyed his ability to withstand any more voltage. If he got struck again—

The world went white.

He registered his vision jarring—had his knees given out? He couldn’t care, around the agonizing numbness, around the sight of a copper, spiky rod above him, now sizzling with the heat of catching lightning before he could. He saw a blur of red—candy-red, Piri-red. Oh, she’d put the lightning rod there.

And then any coherent thought was lost to the blinding torture of a brick-red, Tal-red blur picking him up and sweeping him away.

Have your whumpee break down crying into whumpers shoulder. Let them fall apart against the only person who knows how much pain they’re in.

Break Rocks; Breaktime

Augusnippets day 5: drunk caretaking | concussed caretaking | feverish caretaking

Word count: 495

Trigger warnings: implied/referenced vomiting, injury, minor blood, implied/referenced slavery

——————(0)——————

“Wakey wakey, eggs ‘n bakey!” Brier chirped quietly.

With a jolt, Karmic finally came to, eyes snapping open wide and pupils … probably slitted to nothingness, since she couldn’t see them. His thin sleep cocoon raced away in a rush of frost, but his instinctive attack stopped, the consequences of how he’d twitched catching up. He didn’t do anything so loud as groan or curse, but his face said everything about how heavily he regretted waking up.

“Brier,” he said after a strained moment. He was starting to categorize all the bumps and scrapes he had—she saw his fingers flex subtly, then a cascade up his limbs as he made sure all his joints were in working order. She also saw when he got to his twisted ankle, judging from his obvious wince.

“Hi, Karmic!” Brier murmured. “Checked you for internal, spinal injuries, you’re good. No breaks in your ankle, just sprained. No lumps on your head. Your pupils are the same size, too! You’re not gonna vomit or kill the sun, right?”

“No,” Karmic said, rolling his shoulders, then stared sulkily at his turtleneck, which was slightly torn, spattered with blood, and covered in rock dust. His gaze flickered over to Brier for a split second. “Fun fact about your head, though.”

“I think I slammed head-first into the ground,” Brier admitted. Nothing else would make ol’ reliable earth damage her so much. The concussion would go away in two days, sure, but it was impressive that she was concussed at all. “We got off lucky.”

(A sprawled, unmoving form; blood seeping into the river. Yes, they’d been lucky.)

“I’ll say,” Karmic muttered, now staring up the slope they’d tumbled down. “How did we get down here? And how am I …?”

“… Um. The metal mage could conjure magic-canceling shackles,” Brier said. One of her hands curled into a fist. “Another slammed you with a sleep spell instantly after.”

“Fuck,” Karmic spat. His hand aborted a movement towards his deep, obvious eyebags.

“We’ll fix it,” Brier said. Hopefully they could. A weakness to sleep spells because of lack of sleep aside, those eyebags really weren’t healthy. “The teleporter tried grabbing you when you dropped. And I ….”

(A burn, starbursting and charred on the side of a pale neck. Nightmares, hostility; a newfound hatred for small, locked places.)

“That’s a telling skill range,” she said. “So I threw a boulder. And accidentally caused a little rockslide.”

“A little rockslide, she says,” Karmic mocked, fingers ghosting up to make sure the collar of his turtleneck was intact. “Those fucking slavers”—his lips peeled back to reveal fangs—“better be alive.”

“Waiting for the guard to pick’em up!” Brier confirmed, pointing at three lumps of rock, then turned her sway at the motion into a turn, presenting her back. “Up! I’ll be your legs, you’ll be my brain.”

There was a mutinous pause. Then arms circled her neck—she hefted him up, wavered, then started walking.