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Both ears flick up to attention at the sudden thump, a jump that makes Aaravi instinctively coil over herself, back bending forward and shoulders pulling down around her chest. It’s not the most dignified reaction, especially since her hair’s puffed out like the quills of a manticore’s mane, but she is alone. Reactions like this are fine when she’s alone, but she’s gotta stop doing that, really, before she starts doing it where actual people might see.
The startle, brief as it is, must be smoothed over quickly all the same, because the harsh and steady thumping is repeating. Why is it repeating? Moreover, it’s repeating next door, which is just close enough to get her mind spinning in all sorts of directions, ranging from something about the wall about to burst down due to a rampaging monster to something about the wall about to burst down due to a broken gas line. Neither happens, but too much nothing is happening so slowly that Aaravi’s already on her feet and rocking on her heels, hand slowly reaching for the handle of her blade.
She can’t just leave it to be. The noise is still banging away on the other side of the wall, and it just hasn’t stopped, and it’s irritating enough that she needs to go see what it is right now or else she’s going to lose her mind. Which is fine, though, because she was already getting bored of sitting around for too long. She needs to be ready at a pin drop after all. Getting too comfortable was how you got taken by surprise, and Aaravi Mishra the Monster Slayer was far too proud to ever admit that she had ever, ever been taken by surprise.
The hallway is clear, that’s good. The door doesn’t squeak as she steps out either, which is also good. The castle is always good about that. It’s so good about that, in fact, that it kind of freaks Aaravi out. The silence is too long and too eternal and she can’t hear when something is about to happen, when other people are moving around, when something might be sneaking up on her.
The next room over is Miranda’s office, an afterthought which occurs so late that she screws her face up again for missing it the first time. For royal stuff, of course, because that was what Miranda did and what she always talked about, and if a noise was coming from in there…
Should she open it? What if Miranda was, like, in the middle of something? And by something, it was like… Torturing someone and potentially having them executed in the slowest and most agonizing method she could devise, because Miranda also did that, and also talked about that. But then… If it was that, then…
Well, what if it wasn’t, though, actually, and it was Aaravi who was going to be the big fool for not coming in and saving her wife and ul’kiha when some assassin had burst in through the window and was like, doing SOMETHING that was making that noise, and who still hadn’t stopped. Or what if it really HAD been the pipes all along and Aaravi needed to go in right now to save Miranda from a gas explosion? Gas explosions happened. These were perfectly reasonable things to be worried about, and to be worried about happening right now.
She toed the door open, nice and slow, just in case. There was no shotgun blast behind the door, no elaborate pulley system setting off a trap, just the same squeak-less easy opening as ever. With nothing else impeding her way, Aaravi stepped in, calling a soft, “Miri?”
Eyes lifted, ears perked, scanning the room and— oh.
Oh.
There was Miranda, sitting at her desk as ever, crown left beside her in a hunk of gold and fear-inducing pearls — a bad omen, Ravi didn’t like that, not one bit — and she was hitting her head against her desk, smacking heavy bone and muscle down against wood that looked like it had been losing the fight from the first hit.
“Hey- hey, hey, hey,” already the words were tumbling out, mouth running faster than Ravi’s thoughts, all of which were slower than her feet, because she was already by Miranda’s side. Her hands touched Miranda’s sloping shoulders, sitting parallel on either side of her spine swathed in soft, rich fabric of an unknown make. That calmed Miranda, maybe, because she just lay there on the desk, not lifting her head up again. Aaravi gently shook her, trying to rouse her back to… Well, back to some state to start talking to her, really, because Aaravi wasn’t a specific type of person. Anything was better than hitting her head against the furniture. “Hey, Miranda, hey, what’s wrong?”
That drew a long, miserable warble out of her, which was progress. If Miranda was warbling, then she wasn’t dead, and probably didn’t have some type of brain damage or another. Aaravi saw Miranda’s own hand lift, snaking up and along the long length of her neck, but didn’t knock Aaravi’s grip loose. Miranda just cupped her paw-hand-paw over her eyes, trying to hide herself away.
She answered with another sad whine, a real kicked-dog type of sound, which wasn’t an answer, even if it was a relief that she was listening to Aaravi.
“Hey, you can tell me, come on Miri, you know you can tell me anything.” Then, like afterthought, she added, “Or, you know, I can sit here with you. I’m not gonna let you just smack your head against the desk, not all by yourself.”
Miranda whined again, and it was at this moment that Aaravi noticed that she was shaking a little under her touch. A tremble so faint and so easy that she had forgotten it in her excitement — stupid of her, stupid of Aaravi, she should have been looking out for something like that, should have been paying attention! — but was centered up over Miranda’s shoulders as she tried to shove herself down into the splintered wood of the table. Like she was trying to submerge beneath the wood grain to hide.
“I do not… I do not want to. I do not want to.”
Her voice was soft, tender at the edges, trembling too where tears were about to fall but couldn’t, not yet. Tears and hurt and pain, stretched thin around the words which didn’t want to come, words that were so slow and tiny. Miranda was never tiny. Or, she was, but she was small in the type of way that you forgot, because she took up so much space, caught everyone’s attention so effortlessly that the sun paled in comparison to the gleam of her smile, and she could talk the stars out of the sky. She was brassy and she was loud, and she was a horrible bossy brat, but she was never someone you could look away from. Never someone that anyone realized was as small as she was.
“I- Miri, you don’t have to talk if you don’t want to.”
“No, no,” Miri’s face scrunched up harder, shoved herself down and into her own palms and curling claws all the harder. “No, I do not… I do not want to look at them, I do not want to be here, I do not want to do this, I do not want to do this, no, no, no—”
Aaravi knew her wife. She knew what these moods looked like and what dark clouds they drew over Miri, and this could only mean one thing. She lifted her hands from Miranda’s shoulders for a moment, trusting that Miranda wouldn’t go far. She had to look around for a moment, but she knew there would be a chair in here that she could sit in and wasn’t just made for merfolk like everything else, so she pulled it over to take a seat next to Miranda.
This was, maybe, a more dramatic affair than what she might have liked, realizing too late that the chair was a little heavier than expected and having to huff and puff as she more dragged than lifted it, but the chair was soon over next to Miranda’s desk and that was what mattered. Also, maybe, she had to take a breather as she sat back down and into it again, but like, it totally wasn’t very long, and she had already leaned forward to drape her arm over Miranda’s back again to pull her into a loose sort of half-hug.
“Miranda, hey, just… Just talk to me. What’re they making you do? What are you talking about?”
Miranda, by then, had pulled one finger away from the other to peek at Aaravi from her vantage point of the desk, blue eyes stark against the pink shadows of her scales and hands. Ordinarily, her pupils were slit, like Aaravi’s own; something that she still didn’t want to admit that she found comforting. But now they had rounded out, more into a tender almond silhouette.
She didn’t look to be in good shape. It reminded Aaravi like when a nail got ripped off, or a scale, and all that was left in the shape of something hardened and sharp was skin that was so soft and supple that a single brush against it hurt and ached. Angry red lines outlined angry flushed flesh, haunting beads of red pilling up and haloing the absence of a form. Like when Miranda couldn’t pretend, or the mask slipped, because she always looked so confused and bewildered and just…
Now Aaravi wasn’t stupid, she wasn’t going to tell Miranda that, but she always just looked so lost when she got like this. A type of lost that tugged at the heartstrings more than any sad expression she gave to try and get her way when someone didn’t immediately agree with her. Just the pure, undistilled expression of someone sincerely too innocent to understand anything at all about what had happened to her or what was going on or why she was hurting — a total lack of knowledge that made the pain echo deeper and greater with no recourse. It always made Aaravi feel like she was having to pick up after someone else told Miranda that her dog had died.
“I… The presents, I am supposed to open them, but I do not want to, and I do not want to look at them and I want them to go away and I hate them and I hate being here and—” She paused, taking a gasping breath, trying to speak too much at once and failing at doing so. “And I hate that people kept sending them here for me because I do not want them, and I do not know why they keep sending them or who they are even trying to send them to.”
Aaravi pricked one ear up then, more out of confusion than interest. Presents. Miranda was upset over presents?
In her great and eternal wisdom, she immediately asked, “What presents?”
No response came. Instead, Miri lifted her other hand, and pointed to the other side of the room.
Sure enough, there were presents there. A modest pile, arranged up with the largest and heaviest at the bottom and the finer and more delicate ones at the top, all decorated independently with different paper and different ribbons and different amounts of effort. They had been left on another table to the desk Miranda was at, one tucked against the wall so that the pile could lean against it. However, some presents had spilled over, or were simply too large, and had instead been left on the floor.
Never in Aaravi’s life had she seen Miranda celebrate Christmas on her own, without outside prompting, though she had only known Miranda a few years. Most of those years she hadn’t even spoken to her either, just kind of being vaguely aware she existed while Aaravi focused on other things. Like trying, and failing, to kill two of her friends, who Aaravi barely even wanted dead anymore, honestly. Even though she kept trying to convince herself otherwise and was having worse and worse returns for all the effort.
That was… Huh. Christmas had been a few days ago, but it looked like none of the presents were even touched. Which… Okay, yeah, she couldn’t relate to that in the slightest. Sure, Christmas wasn’t much of a habit for her either, more of a sort of unintentional reminder that kept occurring annually and Aaravi kept getting swept up into. But if someone handed her a present she, might be, unable to resist tearing into it for very long. Hell, she couldn’t even resist wrecking the paper, which really was the only objectively correct way to rip into a wrapped present, but apparently other people had other ideas. It was a begrudging fact that Aaravi liked stuff, and it was an embarrassment so bad that she absolutely had to defend her decision as a strategic one, to anyone who pointed out that she might have ever once enjoyed receiving gifts in the slightest.
But no. Other than the wrapping job on some of those presents — which, who does that, just gives the shittiest wrapping jobs on the planet to a fucking princess? — not a single ribbon was loosened nor was a strip of tape out of place. Gift bags had been placed there and never touched again. Of all the boxes there, it looked like the only person to have touched them was Miranda’s serfs, and not since had Miranda herself paid them any mind.
“Oh. Huh,” Aaravi said, intelligently. It took her aback for a moment, really. A tree still being up was one thing, decorations were another, but unopened presents were just… Odd. “Who are they from?”
That drew a horrible, mangled noise out of Miranda. A sort of sob mixed with a choke mixed with a short grunt, or maybe a snorting laugh, something mean and bitterly amused. She lifted her head up, finally looking at Aaravi properly for the first time, and kept waving her hand in the direction of the presents. Tears were already starting to leak from her salt organs, and her voice was hoarse, pain seeping in the more she rambled.
“From the others! From, from, I do not know, they just, they act as though we are close and as though I know them, and I think they are fine, and they get very close about it and… And I do not want them. I do not want this, I do not want them to send these things to me, but they keep doing it. And, yes, they are nice, and they are nice enough that I am not supposed to tell them no and to stop and that we are not close, but… But then I just hate them for it. I hate that they send the gifts and I hate that they pointedly want me to open them, and they want this to be a gesture of closeness, but I do not want to know them like that, and they do not know me like that! So, I hate them, and I hate their presents and I want to wreck them and ruin them and ruin this room, but it does not matter because it does not stick! But then I get punished anyhow for it!”
Aaravi blinked. A little stupidly, maybe, but it was a lot. “Oh,” she said, and then, “Oh, Miranda.”
Her arm slid up Miranda’s back, up over her shoulders and up over her strangely knobby spine, over the hem of her clothes and the priceless clasps of her necklaces, and Aaravi’s fingertips touched behind Miranda’s fin. Slowly, she started to scratch and to rub, just in the way that she knew Miranda liked. Slow, patient circles with the tip of her fingers, pushing down with a soft pressure, gently scratching with her claws at the fine scales just behind Miranda’s jaw and before her gills. “Who sent these? I’m not gonna tell anyone.”
The tears were starting to flow. Miranda was making little hiccupping chirrups, noises that sent arrows straight through Aaravi’s heart. Saltwater beaded at the ends of her salt organs, starting to trail down and over her face, running under her eyes. Her jaws opened, showing teeth, but they were shaking, staying open as Miranda gasped softly. Aaravi could feel the flex of Miranda’s gills under her hand, feel them trying to open to help her breathe. Miri’s hands lifted, and those giant bear claws of hers curled helplessly into loose fists, trying to wipe away the budding tears.
“One of them is- He is supposed to attend a chemistry class, and to sit next to me? And he talks to me all of the time and we are often assigned upon papers together, but he thinks this means I must be close to him, and… And another is someone who I keep running into, and who thinks I do it on purpose, and that I am nice on purpose, but I am just… I am just being me? But they do not see it that way. They see it like there is someone else there, someone who is not me, but… But I do not know this person, and I do not know what they are talking about, but people tend to get upset when I properly set to punishing them for this and they always say that I am being overreactive, so I try not to do it anymore. But it keeps happening and… And I do not even know who they are sending them to. They keep coming for me, but they are not for me! They are for someone else! Someone who they tell themselves is me but who is not, and I cannot make them believe that it is not me!”
Aaravi let Miranda talk as she pulled her deeper into her arms. Miranda was in one of those weird chairs made for merfolk, so it was a little awkward, but it was easy enough to pull her head close to Aaravi’s chest. Miranda’s head was solid, huge, a hunk of bone and muscle and scale that looked and weighed about as much as a cinder block. As Aaravi tucked Miri’s brow underneath her chin, she could feel that weight on her chest, forcing her breath to slow and even with the pressure. Miranda’s fins stuck out to either side, soft and ticklish, drooping back against her neck and brushing up against Aaravi’s jaw.
She could feel the wetness of Miranda’s tears leave little tracks against her shirt and neck, feel the little shivers of Miranda’s sobbing. Her breath was warm and puffed against Aaravi’s chest. She felt Miranda’s eyes close. Her nose began to leak, collecting stickily on the fabric. Aaravi, like the good ul’kiha that she was, brushed her hand over the back of Miranda’s head and smoothed down the back of her neck.
“Come on, come on,” Aaravi found herself repeating. The words were stupid, nonsensical, but comforting. Nonsensical was often comforting, and it calmed Miranda down. Ravi tilted her head down, brushed her lips against the smooth, pebbly scales on top of Miranda’s head. Miranda was so cold compared to Aaravi, and she always smelled like saltwater. “Yeah, I know. I know what it feels like. I know, Miri.”
Miranda made a harder, longer wail, gasping and clutching against Aaravi’s middle, pushing her head deeper. More tears stained Aaravi’s shirt. More shaking rattled against her chest.
“It’s not— it is not fair,” Miranda was properly crying now, and it stung in Aaravi’s chest. Aaravi hadn’t wanted to admit to herself how horrible it felt to hear Miranda cry for so long, but she couldn’t trick herself anymore. She hadn’t been able to in a long while. “I do not want them and why should I have to have them? Why do they keep sending them? I hate them, I hate that they keep sending more, I hate their awful, terrible, stupid presents and I hate that they want me to tell them how nice that it was and be grateful to them, but, but…”
More words were tumbling out, but they were less intelligible. Mumbling that dissolved back into just noises, sounds without meaning, choking in patterns that could have, at some time, have been mistaken for the words they kept trying to be.
Aaravi got it. She was pretty sure she got it. Not like it was the most alien concept in the world, after all, people loving someone for something they weren’t. How they came up with their own ideas, their own wants and desires and did not listen to what the other person said. How they were not paying attention when the terms were set. They took what was offered and that was it, an offering, an appeasement. There was something else in their eyes, something else that they wanted to shape a living being into, and if they could not do so then they would wreck the house and everyone inside and leave only crying children and broken cribs. A hurricane of projection, of source less blame, of a dream that was never going to happen.
Everyone always wanted something other than the angry slayer. They always wanted something other than the jump, than the bared teeth, the grasp for her crossbow. They wanted something cute, something waning, something that would flush hot under their touch so that they could congratulate themselves on something they hadn’t even done. They wanted to feel good, wanted to feel like a real Casanova, someone who could make Aaravi blush and stumble over herself and warm up the monster hunter’s cold heart.
What they never realized was that her heart didn’t need warming. They didn’t realize that her being angry, that her being frustrated, wasn’t just something she did as a stupid joke, something that they could laugh at and act like she was just harmless. Her anger wasn’t real to them because she wasn’t real to them. They wanted something they could play with, something that they’d plop down their flag on and name theirs and put her in a muzzle so that they could forget she might bite them.
They wanted a reaction. Aaravi gave them a reaction, because her stupid body was all naked and bared skin, because she felt everything she had ever experienced as though it was the end of the world. She couldn’t help herself, her blood running hot and fierce, couldn’t help wearing her heart on her sleeve. Aaravi was nothing but reaction, and it attracted them in droves.
It never occurred to them that Aaravi’s anger might just be that. That she might be having some kind of real emotion — shocker! — and one that made her hate them, hate their stupid nonreactions, hate their lack of fear, hate the way they handled her like a toddler with a gun, sticking their fingers in the family dog’s mouth just to laugh when she didn’t bite. That she might hate them in the kind of way that made her want to hurt them. It would be easy, would make it all stop in a heartbeat, blissful and simple. Maybe if they hurt bad enough, maybe if she pinned them down and cut a long slit in their belly to pull them open and gut them and skin them alive like a caught rabbit then they’d stop laughing, stop treating her as a joke.
But personhood was never earned with such people. Even further reactions, even those of genuine hatred and malice, only made it worse. Which made the anger worse, made her want to try all the harder to buck them from her back. Try to make them stop thinking of her as a dirty mag they could pull out and play with whenever they wanted, force them to see her as something worth reckoning with, worth a reconsideration.
Violence never solved it. It made it feel better for a little bit, but then they’d punish worse, and the violent need would get worse to compensate, and around and around they would go. Never ending. Never stopping.
It occurred to her then that Miranda, too, had started out poking and prodding at her to try and get a reaction. And, yeah, Aaravi really hated it when it happened, hated the prying words and the incendiary remarks. But with Miranda, it had worked. Why had it worked? What had made Miranda different, when everyone else was all the same, when everything was supposed to go the same way it always had?
Well, maybe it was the fact that Miranda never pressed that far. Or maybe, although she saw Aaravi as someone to play and toy with, she was still seeing her as someone. Maybe it was the fact that Miranda just did this, not just to Aaravi but to nearly everyone else she knew, that she did it to her friends because this was just some fucked up bonding ritual that was natural to Miranda. She saw her friends as people still. She could still be called off if she pressed too far.
Aaravi’s thoughts were wandering. She couldn’t let herself get distracted, not like this, not like now. Introspection was going to be her death, going to ruin her, and Miranda was still crying, making soft whimpers against Aaravi’s breastbone, hands balling the fabric of Aaravi’s shirt into fists.
Still the presents were sitting in the corner, unopened and playing voyeur.
“Miri, Miri, hey, I thought you liked using these saps for things,” Aaravi tried to comfort, speaking softly, trying to turn Miranda’s thoughts into something a little more optimistic. It wouldn’t do any good for Miranda if she just cried her eyes out and Aaravi listened to it all, even if Aaravi didn’t really have any clue on what to say to make it better. She wasn’t good at the words stuff. That was all Miri’s purview. “Maybe you can still keep whatever they sent for their stupid gifts? Thought you liked stuff.”
A scandalous amount of bare chest showed as Miranda swept her head from one side to the other, dragging Aaravi’s shirt with the motion as she shook her head. Miranda wasn’t looking, for sure, but it made Aaravi’s cheeks ruddy up a little, her hair to stand up a little further out from her head. Not quite at full fluff, but still. She couldn’t help it, having to glance away to not just stare at Miranda’s face next to an attempted boob window.
“Nooooo—” Miri warbled, dragging the sound out and against the coals, making the singular vowel crest up into peaks and bow down into dips. Every now and then it was interrupted by a hiccup. “I don’t, I don’t want… I do not want whatever they offer. It’s all… It is all bad. Bad, bad, bad. It is not unique, or good, or anything I like, and I do not want to look at it, I do not want to touch it, I do not want to be reminded of it, I hate it, I want it all to break and go away forever. None of it means anything and none of it is worth anything and I do not even know why they think I want it.”
“It’s okay, that’s okay then.” The words felt useless. Aaravi didn’t know what else to say, how to make her words mean anything. Her hand was patting over the back of Miranda’s head, cupping up and over the curve of her skull to touch the large, squishy masses that were her jaw muscles, and, lacking much else to do, Aaravi pressed down against them. It wasn’t so bad. Miranda seemed to like it, before now and during, because she turned her head to rest her cheek against Aaravi’s chest. She knew she was listening to Aaravi’s heart. Miranda liked to do that, although Aaravi didn’t fully understand why. Miranda’s pulse was so much slower than Aaravi’s, more calming.
She stretched her thoughts to the breaking point, fumbled around in her own brain for any ideas, anything to offer, something she could do. “Maybe I could get rid of them for you, then? The presents, that is. If it’s too much for you to handle, then I can do it, and it won’t be as bad, and it’ll feel a lot better if you take it all out on them. And if any of those people have any problems, then they can come talk to me about it.”
That was a lot of talk for Aaravi to then immediately realize she didn’t even know who the hell it was that kept doing this to Miranda. How tough could they really be, after all? Aaravi could take them. C’mon, she could absolutely take them. She was the one who had earned Miranda’s heart and had married her and that was for a reason, and no schmuck who wouldn’t take no for an answer could compare to that.
Just, maybe she should also stock up on crossbow bolts before then. And do it at a safe distance. That felt like a plan, yeah.
The response to this idea was a soft chirrup rolling up from somewhere beneath Aaravi’s chin. Miranda was still clinging to her like she was trying to climb in through her skin, but there wasn’t any more wetness spreading over Aaravi’s shirt. Snot was still leaking out of Miranda’s nose crest, and Aaravi would have to clean up afterwards, but it was a little hard to be mad at Miranda. Especially because she was still faintly shaking, and Aaravi didn’t want her to start whimpering again. Progress had been made.
She felt the top of Miranda’s snout press up against her neck, against the soft skin. Once, the action would have made Aaravi freeze up. Now, she willingly let Miranda touch her killer jaws to Aaravi’s neck, relaxing down into the motion for what it meant. Miri’s voice was tender, so quiet still. “… Maybe.”
“It’ll help you feel better! I promise, slayer’s word. I wouldn’t break a promise to you, you know that.”
Miri shifted a little, trying to curl even deeper against Aaravi’s front. “… You promised the other day that you would go to bed upon the decided time, but you stayed up later than that. And I had to fetch you and pull you in.”
Aaravi pressed her lips to the top of Miranda’s head, delivering little kisses in the absence of Miranda’s crown. “Nope, that wasn’t a promise. I totally didn’t say it was a promise. You can repeat back my exact fucking words to me, and I didn’t say I promised then.”
Another little kiss, more reassurance. Something more to crown her with, better than gold and nightmare-inducing pearls.
“But I promise. I promise I won’t let them hurt you.”
Sharp points of teeth grazed against Aaravi’s collarbone, and she abruptly ate her words with a soft gasp and a way-too-dramatic fluff of her hair, the entire length of her ears darkening.
“You suck at making spoken deals, vlt-r'iiw. I need to teach you one day or another.”
“Oh good, I know that’ll cheer you up for sure, you always love getting an excuse to bitch at me,” Aaravi snorted, being so distracted that she wholly forgot to cringe at herself, and returned Miranda’s teeth with her own, grazing sharp canines over the top of Miranda’s head.
Miri squeaked, a far more pleasant sound to Aaravi’s ears than all her soft whimpers and the bruises they left on her heart. Aaravi could feel her wiggling against her arms, to which she squeezed tighter, bringing more delighted squeaks and chirps. Funny how Miranda always sounded so birdlike. Funny too, just how pretty she made the sounds, like it was her sole duty in life to play songbird. “Hey!!!! But you like it!”
Aaravi nipped at Miranda’s scales again, for good measure. Out of all her deviances, she had to thank her sharp teeth for this one. All those sharp, pinching points, and all the better of a time she had making her wife squirm in her lap. “You like it too!!! I know you’re smiling down there! That’s why you keep doing it!!”
Miranda thumped her palms against Aaravi’s rumpled shirt, unmistakable giggling drifting up from under Aaravi’s jawbone. “Mean, mean, mean!!! Mean to me!! I cannot endure such cruelty, oh, and from my beloved wife of all!!”
“Mmhm, and you’re going to have to deal with it, princess, because there’s no way you can escape me now!”
Aaravi reached both of her arms down, scooping Miranda up and around the middle to pull her fully into Ravi’s lap, while Miranda shrieked and giggled and kept swishing her tail back and forth, thumping against the wooden frame of her big fancy mermaid-princess-office-chair.
This wasn’t an easy task, being that Aaravi had to lug over way too many pounds of marine predator, but it was a happy task. A task made all the easier by pride. And very much by the fact that there was no way in hell that Aaravi wasn’t going to pick up her lovely wife, like she was just some kind of loser who didn’t even lift. A loser, who would have found all the wiggling to be an added problem, for the difference in furniture and the gap between them to be difficult to cross, and a loser who was NOT Aaravi, who did all of those things and didn’t even complain when her muscles felt a little sore afterwards.
“Nooo, nooo!!! Cruelty, wickedness, evil!!! Oh, however could you do such a thing??” That was absolutely a smile on Miranda’s face as Aaravi bent down, biting and nibbling at her fins, tensing all of her muscles in her arms just to keep Miranda tucked up against her. The thin skin of her fins burned hot, flushed with blood, beneath the briefest flickers of Aaravi’s tongue, the subtle graze of her mandibles, and Aaravi felt fairly confident that Miranda was feeling better.
“Come on,” Aaravi said, immediately doing the Aaravi thing of risking all her good luck that she had fought so hard to get, “I bet you would feel way better about getting rid of all their stupid presents now! We could smash their stupid present faces in, and you never have to look at them in here ever again.”
Miranda’s smile dimmed. Not fell, not really, but she stopped wiggling and writhing so much, and her eyes focused up on Aaravi with more intent. Her slit pupils were thin, veined through with undercurrents of hesitation, of brief fear. Because, yeah, Miranda never did want to openly volunteer to be the first one to do something wrong, especially when she felt obligated to do otherwise. Especially when someone else might tell her off for it, or when it might make her look bad in their eyes.
Maybe that said something about Aaravi too, that she felt a brief flare of anger again at that, anger for Miranda’s sake.
“No, no, come on, I’ll show you,” she tried to correct course. Being Aaravi, this meant she doubled down harder, her heartbeat quickening in her chest. Someone else would have noticed that it was doing so out of fear, but Aaravi wasn’t someone else, and she was already trying to now shimmy out of her seat, as though she hadn’t just pinned herself down with her giant mermaid wife.
Yeah, yeah laugh it up, came the snide thoughts, speaking to no one other than Aaravi’s own mind, chasing herself around in circles. But she knows what she’s doing, she just needs a little push to help Miranda solve this problem for good, so HAH, sucks to be you, other half of Aaravi’s own damn brain.
Miranda, to her credit, realized what was happening and tried to help. Having most of her body weight on the other end of her torso assisted with that, probably. She bent back, putting her hands on the armrest and semi-standing up where she was, giving Aaravi some space.
When she fully stumbled to her feet, Aaravi was a mess. She hadn’t realized exactly how much Miranda had been crying, because the soft pine green of her shirt now had big dark puddles and streaks that stuck back and against her skin, sticky spots that told her that she was going to have to take it off and wash it afterwards. Yeah, Miranda would like that too. Another thing for her to get her spirits up, ogling Aaravi’s chest. It was already partially pulled off to one side, and she was certain one of the buttons had slipped free, which was fine since it matched how rumpled her pants were now.
At least this meant she was a bit of a sight when she walked on over to the wall, sunlight spilling in from an adjacent window, and looked over the mound of presents there. Yeah, that sure was quite a few. She could read the names on them from up here. No one that she knew, she was pretty sure, because the only names she recognized was the one written beneath them, a countless barrage of Miranda’s and nothing else. Over and over, all addressed to her wife, to the princess who was sitting very quietly behind Aaravi and watching her with bated breath. Tucked under ribbons and on the tags on bags, written on the present itself or not even written at all. Some had little drawings next to them, fish or bubbles or crowns or hearts.
A phantom pain started up in Aaravi’s back the more she looked at them, a grey matter ghost of a limb she used to have flicking angrily behind her, something that would have been sweeping over the ground to its own rhythm.
All this shit. Jesus fucking christ, just, all of this. Who the hell did these people think they were? How much had they spent, barking up a tree that didn’t even want them to stand beneath it in the first place? All of this couldn’t have been cheap. Maybe it depended on what was inside them, but, like, Miranda was a princess. Most people felt the impulse to get her expensive things. Aaravi certainly felt that impulse herself early on, and she still hadn’t fully been broken of it.
All this cost. All this time. Time spent wrapping and preparing, time spent thinking about this, time spent making gifts. You’d think with how much had been sunk into this they might have asked the question to themselves of, if Miranda wanted any of this, but apparently not. Apparently, whatever they had been thinking had led them here, led them to Christmas gifts left unopened and avoided long after Christmas, led to Miranda crying and crying and smacking her head down into her desk. Led to Aaravi having to pick up the pieces, enforcing limits that they hadn’t even considered Miranda as capable of having.
Aaravi knew how Miranda was. She knew how she acted, how she talked. She knew how much she wanted to be loved, how much she ached for love, how much she just wanted people to like her and to want her and to be good for them. Hell, she had only a begrudging respect for Liam, but she knew how much Miranda worried over him for something as small as him not being very well-liked, even if he preferred it that way.
How had it gone down? Maybe Miranda just was the way that she always was. Maybe she wanted to be good and to be loved and couldn’t tell them no or didn’t even realize that she felt uncomfortable. Maybe she didn’t understand at the time what was happening in the other person’s mind, didn’t realize that they thought they were being given something that Miranda never would have offered to them to begin with.
Or maybe she hadn’t. Everyone knew Miranda could be cruel too. She could punish on the turn of a dime, turn cruel and furious to anyone who displeased her, who crossed that eternal line between what Miranda thought was acceptable and what wasn’t. Everyone knew the horrible verbal lashings she delivered for rejections; knew how she zeroed in on every little insecurity to pick into an open wound.
Maybe she had told them off, had made a show of it, had given them every reason they were an eternal failure to her, and maybe they still didn’t catch on. Maybe they had come right back, ignored the clear line in the sand that had been drawn, tried their luck a second time as though they could wear Miranda down with enough attempts, enough want, force her to finally give up and give in.
Aaravi wheeled her leg back and sent it through one of the big presents on the floor, denting and crumpling over itself as paper ripped around her shoe.
She kicked it again, crashed it back into the wall. Lifted her foot up and smashed it down on top, on top of the stupid stick-on ribbon, felt something shatter inside of it. Behind her, Miranda made a soft gasp, and Aaravi turned around to gauge Miranda’s reaction.
Her eyes were huge. Her fins were fanned out well over twice the size of Miranda’s own face, and she was staring directly at Aaravi with a slightly ajar mouth. Her slit pupils were thin, chicken-scratches, and then slowly they broadened, dilated outwards into circles of awe.
“See?” Aaravi said, trying to sound cooler than she felt, shaking the broken present off her shoe. “It’s easy, I even got it started for you.”
She chased the thought away by spinning her shoulder around and punching one of the topmost presents from the table, feeling a lot better with her fist hitting something more than her foot. Something cracked, crumpled inside, hitting the floor heavily while the ribbon fell across the hardwood with such a dramatic sigh that Aaravi wondered if it had been practiced. She tried not to focus on that. She put her other fist through a different present and felt the soft give of whatever was inside, knocking it off onto the floor to stomp it down for good measure. For each one she heard Miranda’s soft gasps, her tiny little noises of surprise, and she knew she was still watching.
“Hey, princess, catch!” Aaravi threw another present into the air so that she could kick it across the room in Miranda’s direction. Miranda clearly must not have gotten the memo, because she ducked down instead of catching, her hands reaching up to shield her still-crownless head.
“You are making a mess!!!” Miri complained, but Aaravi saw that smile start to slowly come back, collecting around the very ends of her mouth. She turned away, removing her hands to look back at wherever the present had landed, which gave Aaravi a good excuse to throw one of the lighter presents directly at the merprincess. It hit her square on the chest and fell down, hitting the ground in front of her.
She gasped, mock-offended, and Aaravi saw those jaws open wide to make such a sound, saw all the gleaming of her serrated teeth. When Miranda surged forward, pounced on the present with her giant, curved claws and crushed it down beneath their wicked edges, Aaravi was there to offer a whoop of encouragement.
“Oh, now you are asking for it!”
Miranda was giggling again. Aaravi felt very confident in calling that a victory, especially as Miranda finally got up to stalk forward and join her. Miranda’s smile was as beautiful and terrible as ever, glinting with that unbridled mischief that made her fun in all the secret ways Aaravi loved discovering about her, a shared conspiratorial nature that brought so many plans to fuck over so many other people with Aaravi to life. Nothing else compared, and nothing else would ever compare to the feeling of having Miranda sidle up next to Aaravi, brushing her side against Aaravi’s hip.
“Come on, you are not even doing it right! What you have to do is that you must rip into them,” Miri’s tone lilted towards the bright and regal, especially as she lifted up a flat present so delicately between her hands, just to suddenly slice her claws down into it, spilling torn threads.
“Yeah, sure, I’ll keep that in mind next time, that I should have just been born with claws like you.” Aaravi, feeling sly, added percussion by simply knocking another gift off the table, letting it smash into the floor and hearing it shatter.
“No, no, I know you have knives!! Do not tell me that you cannot do so because you do not have claws, when I know you are perfectly acquainted with sharp weaponry!”
“Wow, don’t you know better than to ask a slayer about what weapons she has stored away on a hunt? I though you of all people wouldn’t underestimate the element of surprise.”
In return, Miranda was the one who threw the next present at Aaravi, drawing up her shoulder quick enough to stop it from hitting her head. Not that it mattered, since only the edge kind of hurt when it hit her, and she was laughing too much to give a shit about that anyways. “Think about it!! Are you so sure I’m packing knives today? Maybe you should think twice before you bet on it, princess!”
“Ravi!!! You always have knives on you!”
This time when Miri went to playfully thump her hands against Aaravi’s chest, Aaravi thought fast, and swept Miranda into a kiss before she could even get started. One of the giggly, good kinds of kisses, where they had to keep diving in again between all the laughter just to make sure their lips remained together.
Yeah, yeah Aaravi did good. She had done a good job.