Wanderlust (Olkhon Island | Baikal Lake, Siberia)

[Thalia]

Unprepared for the reaction, she nearly walked into him. The ferocity of it took her back for a second, probably because he’d seemed so mournfully lost inside the cabin. Foolish, really, since she’d only been contemplating the broken door moment’s before. His yellow eyes flashed, and she suddenly remembered the drawing of him with teeth like boar’s tusks. “Let me?” she repeated, blinking, like the concept was a foreign object. The rest filtered in somewhere, but felt an awful lot like the bars of a cage. She didn’t argue his exterptise, and it was even sensible, but the snap of his voice made her bristle.

She waited it out. Refusing to step back, despite that he stood so damn close she had a long way to look up to meet his eye.

“What makes you think this is a decision you get to make? I don’t need protecting, Tristan. I know what it looks like. I know what I look like, but I don’t need that.” Her temper flared in turn, but mostly it was pure stubborn fire: the sort of reaction of someone who’d lived a long time by their own rules. The sudden tempestuousness hovered light at her senses, though she tried desperately not to let it close. “My swimming’s fine. I nearly died because–” But he wasn’t even listening. It hadn’t been the water. The fuzzy edges of her memory recoiled, but her eyes widened, the epiphany dropped almost as soon as rose because he was yanking the shirt over his head like after that entire tirade about safety he intended to dive in his own skin.

She pressed a finger to his chest, right at the heart of the dream-marks, and it certainly did not feel like he had a wetsuit either. “I won’t be left behind. And you will not tie me to a tree.”