][ 21 ((action)) [I or II] ]][[[ open
I.
At a far distance the light given off by a star in the snow is only so big as one might hope to thread through a needle's head, and up close it is hard to detect at all, almost invisible in fact as the glow connects itself with her happiness and 'happy' is simply not the state of most creatures wandering through a growing snowstorm. The forest seems to crowd around her neither as friends nor foes, just other beings swaying in between the wind and the snow and the late night hour, just managing as well as they can, and really that's the same as Yvaine does, or tries to do. She thinks Tristan would roll his eyes at her, the boy from Wall with a reassurance about all of their doings in connection to Victoria~, but then she shakes her head. No, that's not right. He had changed before he left, though she could not understand it, had no placing for it, no foothold. Almost, he seemed like he wanted to be kind, or more accurately was kind, but then she knew he had the potential. Even loathing could not veil perception entirely after so many centuries of living. She knew he had more heart than Victoria might allow for just as she knew he likely could not have stayed a shopboy even if he hadn't lost his job; it wasn't him. Whatever change had happened, seemed to be for the better for him. But what of her? Of his promise? Of even the fair Victoria?
Yvaine had never asked and he had never told her and it seems painfully shortsighted to have failed to question, though at the time she was still not very fond of him and even now cannot bring herself to be. Easier for mortals, maybe, she makes up such excuses but she knows they aren't true. There have been those she has appreciated here, if in brevity, if from her own distance. None of them are out here, of course; why would they be? Only a mad man would be out in this weather on purpose...or a star who cannot be bothered to walk faster though that might save her finding out if stars can fall ill--something perhaps best left undiscovered by all considering her disposition often enough when things are 'fine'.
Pale gold straightens and folds in the growing storm, tangling with the air more than itself, and she brushes it out of her face when need be, still walking. The woods seem particularly endless tonight but it can't be helped and she has nowhere to turn to other than the direction she has already chosen---toward Xanadu.
She seems to end up there quite a bit, lately.
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II.
This is no place for her, she knows--this City, this earth--and not for the first time, but she'll bide her days because she doesn't have much to go back to---just a catch in the dark that she might return home in that place, those heavens, but a weak stab at best. She doubts it even now, back against a particularly accommodating willow in the still summer green of the gardens. Not long ago she had come across a statue of someone who was not a friend and not an enemy...not to her. He isn't there anymore but she hasn't checked the Hall. It isn't lost on her that there is obtrusive irony in the fact that the only one she did check for was the one person she could not stand for so very long, and when she could, she couldn't understand him any better for it, which in the end leaves her in simplest terms: blank. Not angry. Not irritated. Not sad. Not relieved.
She doesn't know what to feel about it anymore, feels old without her sky, older now with the hazy memory of a mere hundred years of life and how everything shone because even the dark parts were things she could find a light in. What she is missing, she does not think about any more here than she did in Faerie. It defeats its own purpose in the basic matter of what she is, and at least above everything she had the automatic safety of distances and impossible things.
But the green in this particular pocket of Xanadu is young and it is kind to her, the whisper of a breeze threading through the willow leaves to her is the comfort that a holding hand might offer to a person. It is enough and lately that is all she asks.
[ooc; pick either I or II to reply to, short tags are fiiiiine and I actually have to be awake again to get ready for work in like 4 hours so there will be backdating/backtagging, etc...are notifs back yet? Sort of... ;; idk gaiz... ]