Something like fear

[Tahara]

Her hands are stuck.

Not true, she thinks, as she slowly wraps the bandages around his shoulder, trying not to hear his pulse and trying not to smell the soap he uses and definitely trying not to smell what’s underneath that. Her hands are close enough to his chest that his heartbeat plays at her fingertips.

She knows, in theory, what the colour of his skin means and represents, knows the word fel in her mind, but those are not the images coming to mind.

For someone with no love for the wilds he is the picture of primal. Her heart sees light and shadow flitting over dark green and thinks of Zuldazar and the lush jungles. Where a shoulder and an arm should be she sees leaves and vines, tangled and tempting and filled with life. In the dark of the tent his hair is the same colour as the bloody trails she follows at midnight. She swallows and thinks of hands around her throat and something like fear.

She adjusts the bandages a seventh time, as her eyes look but don’t see, as she thinks as hard as ever but her mind is still blank, somehow.

Green is her favourite colour, but that doesn’t matter.

Her stomach sinks, reminding her of something she knows, so deeply and instinctively as she knows few things in life.

She can’t want. Can’t want the thing that killed - destroyed Masha. She tries to hold on, to keep the memories separate and whole and not let one crush the other but before the heart under her fingers beats a second time the jungle is filled with screams, the blood no longer spilled in a hunt and the feeling in her chest quietly, slowly, steadily turns from something like to fear.

When the jar crashes to the floor she’s grateful, only needing to pick up the shattered pieces of the clay pot - not her own.