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synchronmurmurs · 3 years

Text

Apricity

(noun) ; the warmth of the sun in winter

Evette x Credo

So a while back, I slapped some tags onto this post, and I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it ever since, so here I am with another short ficlet to get it out of my system, so I can concentrate on more important things. 🤣 Not posting it to AO3 just yet, just in case I want to refine it a little. 🤔

Photo by Eduard Gordeev

Unsurprisingly, the cold had snuck up on them.

Well, perhaps only for one of them.

For those unfamiliar with Fortuna's climate (in plainer words, people like Evette) they would be forgiven for thinking the island is of mild temperate all year round. The port city reaps all the benefits of the ocean breeze, but the further from the city one moves, the more erratic its weather; all side effects of the dormant hellgate beneath the city. The perpetual snowfall upon Lamina Peak is one such miracle.

But Credo had known that once the sun dipped below the horizon, soft and slow, as intimate as the tide, temperatures would drop within the hour. He'd known Evette, dressed as she was, was ill-equipped to deal with freezing temperatures. He knew - all of this - and yet he still made no indication of such. Did not hurry her home, even as the sky darkened and her breath began to fog. As the stars began to light up the sky; as a gentle snowfall began to settle, a sprinkle of stardust in her hair at first, and then in thick sheets over the ground and canopy of trees; as the moon rose, and her gaze lifted skyward in awe, it had slipped his mind completely.

Is it selfish of him? That he clings more and more to these moments with her? As a human, as

Credo

, he only knows her as loud. Boisterous. Childish, untamed and wild. But as he is now, an Angelo, the very last in a long and tragic line, he sees her in her silences, more telling than the stream of unconscious thought that she deals in. The way light reflects in her eyes. The respect she has for the uncontrolled, and the uncontrollable.

He sees her.

And he would give, more and more and ever more, to be with these parts of her that only ever bubble to the surface through the lens of her camera.

So he does nothing, merely letting the snow fall in silence. It is a blanket. A buffer, a shroud that will hide them from the rest of the world, isolate them from their normal routine. Whatever this is, whatever is budding in this cold winter, he wants it to flourish.

And he thinks, he hopes, that in her silences, the way she takes his outstretched hand, and lets him lead her into the hollow of a once great tree, that she's putting her hopes into this bloom too. The chill is unforgiving, and the night has only just begun, but tucked away in secrecy under silver moonlight, by the flickering glow of a campfire, they sit and watch the snowfall together. He knows this moment is fleeting, a temporary pocket of time that will disappear with dawn, but that's a problem to face several hours from now. For the moment, Credo is happy to sit and watch her lift her camera to her face, clicking intermittently between careful shuffles across the floor. He loves the sound of that shutter now; it tells him that she's losing herself to her surroundings, capturing on film to keep forever, that special way she views the world.

There is much that Evette is; slippery as an eel; immature; silver-tongued, always outlandish, fabricating excuse after excuse as to why she hasn't eaten, or why she hasn't bathed in days, or why she doesn't do any of the things any upstanding person would. But she is never more honest than when that shutter blinks.

She will never again be more mild than when she takes his hand again and climbs into his lap. Curls right up against his chest, warmed by flame and by feather, and sleeps.

When the morning comes, Credo's lap is empty.

Evette is gone.

He's briefly alarmed; it speaks to just how lax he grew that somebody shifting, moving, leaving, in such close proximity would go unnoticed. His eyes travel to the charred remains of the fire, nothing but a smoking pile of cinders, then to the entrance of the hollowed tree, where the freshly fallen snow lays puffy and thick.

Where a set of boots have left deep depressions.

He feels himself relax, eyes sliding closed momentarily as he breathes a silent sigh. Then he rises to his feet to follow the trail she'd left behind, ducking through the opening in the tree. He's greeted with an instant chill that ruffles his feathers, the residual warmth of their little refuge chased away by a crisp brisk, just as the night is driven away by the beginnings of the sun peeking over the horizon.

Her tracks are erratic, sometimes looping around, sometimes swerving madly, but her intent is not to mislead; Evette follows the lens of her camera first and foremost. And on this still morning, where frost still clings to the trees, it leads her to the swell of a brook where she sits crouched by the edge. Her camera hangs around her neck, and though there's no chance that she didn't hear his arrival - he is, after all, double her size - she makes no acknowledgement of his presence. Her element is her own, and that too, Credo finds he respects.

She dips the very tip of her finger into the running water, flinching back immediately perhaps in surprise at how brisk the water is, laughs to herself... and then does it again. She only looks toward him when he lowers down onto one knee behind her, smiles in a way that she only ever shows to Credo Angelo, warmer than the glow of the sun, and then flicks some of that water into his face.

Even her laughter is different here. A little more subdued, but no less sincere, and against the backdrop of sunlight on fresh snow, he thinks for the first, but not the last time, that there is beauty not only in how she sees the world, but in her too.

Fortuna's winters no longer seem so harsh.

#credo thirst #credo x oc #Evette/Credo #dmc #credo #evette #would love to use this photographer's work as base inspo for Evette's photography but that makes me feel bad for some reason?#like I'm stealing somebody's work somehow 😶💦#his shots are absolutely stunning though #please give his gallery a browse 🙏

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