Hushed Willows [m] Blood on your knees, outside in the cold

Mature Content Warning

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The participants have indicated the following reason(s) for this warning: Self-harm, references to past abuse, some internalized grossness

Maaaybe @Boone? Just one joiner, please! Will set this to read only in about a week if no one joins <3

She woke with the sun, as she often did. Dawn had brought with it an icy downpour, and a morning like this should have seen her tucking herself closer to her husband to hide from the chill. But Reverie felt less and less deserving of Boone's love lately. So she slipped from their den in silence, and headed for the lake she spent so much of her free time by.

It was late summer when she'd fled The Gilded Sea; still a gangly adolescent just shy of her first year, her steps haunted by what had surely been one of the last fires of the season. Reverie had known nothing of the world then. She'd turned her paws east and ran for miles, rarely ever stopping to rest or to drink. By the time Riordan found her she'd been a ragged thing, half-feral with fear and hunger. But he'd been kind to her.

It'd scared her at first, the attentions of an older man. Riordan had always called her mature beyond her age, but for all that Reverie had still felt like a child. She certainly hadn't been a woman then. But he hadn't quite treated her as such, either. Most of all Riordan had treated her like a possession. And she — she'd felt that she understood it.

That need for absolute control, the white-knuckled grip on the notion that something could be yours, only yours, forever. He'd hurt her. But maybe that was what she deserved, because some part of her wanted that possession; to be gripped so tightly she could scarcely breathe. Boone was far too good for her.

Reverie turned a rock over with her paws idly, shivering under the cold rain. She ran her pads over the jagged edges of it and wondered if what she really wanted was to hurt. A surge of wild energy shot through her then; she pressed her foreleg against the sharp edges of the rock until it bit into her skin, and gasped softly, and immediately regretted it. She kicked the rock away from her, into the lake, and tucked her bleeding leg against her chest. Maybe it could have been a metaphor or something, but Reverie was too miserable to think about it just then. She cried instead.