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Prompt: Uprooted, Agnieszka, she didn’t mean to drop it; it just jumped out of her hands
“It wasn’t on purpose,” I say, and even though it’s the entire truth, the phrase sounds trite and insincere even to my ears; I can only guess at what it sounds like to Sarkan’s, though the twitching of his eye (not to mention the puddle of soup in his lap) leaves little doubt.
“I see,” he says, icicles nearly forming on the end of my nose from the frost of his tone as his cleaning spell straightens him out (though it misses a single carrot chunk, stuck to his boot and winking up at me) before he turns back to me, continuing his typical berating with, “Am I to understand you wish me to believe that when you dumped my dinner into my lap not half an hour after I suggested your spellwork was as sad and raggedy as your attempts at mending, it was pure coincidence, and not a satisfactory bit of revenge on your part?”
Stiffening my spine, I toss my braid behind my shoulder and hold up one hand, ticking off points as I go: “First, I did not dump your dinner in your lap, it leapt there quite on its own, suggesting my cooking cares for you and your attitude as little as I do; second, my spellwork and my sewing are both functional if not pretty, which is all they need be, and third, an event can be both coincidental and highly satisfactory, all at once.”
Prompt: Uprooted, Agnieszka/Sarkan, mussed hair and rumpled clothes
It becomes my favorite thing - the gift I give myself every day - to disarrange some tiny piece of him as I pass, to give my seeking fingers free reign and let them do as comes natural, now that I know he’ll suffer my touch happily enough, no matter how he pretends otherwise, his thinned lips and heaved sighs all for show.
A silver button flicked open here to reveal a sliver of bare throat; a lock of hair brushed out of place there, falling over his forehead, dark against his pale skin, and slowly, he metamorphosizes; wizard to man, magic to human, Dragon to Sarkan.
“You have rumpled my clothing to an unsalvageable state,” he complains, long after night has fallen, pushing his hair back to no avail; “Perhaps you should give up and remove it,” I suggest, innocent as I know how to be, though my dress has already slipped from one shoulder as I leave the room, my hair falling loose down my back, the sound of his footsteps following like a spell to my ears.
Prompt: Uprooted, Agnieszka/Sarkan, pet names
He blinks as though offended, and it’s a struggle to hold back my laughter as he says, “I do not use pet names,” in much the same tones as he might use to say I do not bathe in ditchwater or maybe I do not dine from the compost heap.
“What would I even call you,” he asks, with a shudder that seems affected, even for him, “Aggie?”
“Never,” I say, and laugh, and kiss him right where I can feel the corner of his mouth quirk up against his will; that night, tangled deep in my bed, he calls me the only other name he has ever had for me, again and again without pretense, without shame, without thought:
Love.