It's easy to forget, I think, how meaningful touch can be. It doesn't have to be the heavy gestures, the full embraces.
It can be the light skating of ones fingers across the shoulders. The simple but powerful weight of resting your hand stop someone else's, or someone else doing the same for you. The brush of your knees and thighs when you're sitting close together, that sudden and intimate awareness of their body through that minute contact. The amused poke into someone's puffed cheeks, causing them to make a funny noise as they exhale. Even just bumping shoulders or hips as you move about the same dresser, the same bed, the same table or chair.
And yes, there are more involved things. Full body hugs, feeling arms embrace you and hold you, sometimes even helping you remain upright when you are just so tired, or sick, or sad, and the world seems to be crushing you down. The stark sensation of someone cupping the side of your face, holding you there, all so that you can look into their eyes, and them into yours. Simple, kind, human contact.
It doesn't have to be sexual, or even necessarily sensuous. Just...genuine intimacy in it's many forms, things where the slightest touch of fingertips can bring about what feels like a miniature lightning storm between you.
And yet, when Natasha does this, she has to watch every time as she leeches the heat, the life perhaps even, from them. It's not just leaving Frederick's lips chapped, or her hand leaving his cheek reddening not from a flush of blood but rather from sheer cold.
Because of her altered eye, she has heat vision, essentially. Meaning that when I said she watched herself leech the heat away, I meant it literally. I, personally, would find that utterly horrifying, if every tactile gesture towards friends and family, let alone lovers, required me watching as the heat left them with one eye and their skin redden, peel, and eventually potentially go blue and black with the other.
And despite that, Frederick continues on loving her. And she him.
Sorry if it's a bit maudlin to think about, I was just reflecting on the consequences/dangers of magic and such topic. I mean. Yes, she didn't become a Chaos Spawn, but I definitely wouldn't say that her quality of life hasn't drastically changed negatively in several facets. Or at least just the one big one.
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