A Note For Petals

"Well Skara, congratulations. You've outdone yourself this time... You idiot."

Looking down at the piece of paper in her hand, at the words, and the small drawing that she had done on it, Skara felt her ear's twitch, her heart flutter, and her face burn.

Whenever a Witches ear twitched, it could be for any number of reasons. Joy, excitement, embarrassment, nervousness, anxiety, or just plain old fashioned outright primal terror.

Skara, well-adjusted and emotionally mature as she was - Was all of them. At once. At the absolute maximum capacity she could feel for each individual feeling. Again, all at the same time.

Her hands clutched at her face, and then her head fell against the counter. The words and drawings all felt so... Skara didn't know. She would have said childish, but somehow she had no doubt in her mind a Witchlings drawing would have been less, well, childish, somehow. She hadn't even meant to draw anything. It just sort of... happened, absently, until Skara stopped at the verge of completion and realised exactly what she had done. And that made it all the more embarrassing in and of itself.

At least if a Witchling had drawn it, there would be an excuse for how, well... childish it really was.

That, and Willow wouldn't know it had been Skara who had drawn it.

Peeking her eyes over her hands, Skara took a deep breath, and looked around the room that she and her girlfriend had lived in for close to five years now. There were a thousand tiny charms to it that anyone other than Skara wouldn't notice, because she had been there for every single one of them.

Plant pots on the balcony that Willow looked after, and a gash in the wall that tore off a small amount of paint when one of the plants - Bitey - got upset when Skara had tried to feed it and not Willow. A pile of letters that they didn't have room for anywhere else just pushed into the corner of the counter and against the wall. A corkboard with a dozen photos of them and all their friends added to over the years. Skara's shelf on their bookcase that was full of albums and old fantasy books, Willow's filled with information on plant maintenance, Flyer Derby memorabilia, and coursework books, and another shelf where all their things were a jumbled mess. Some Bard instruments hung on the wall, like the tuba Skara had used to serenade Willow on their first date, or the guitar she used when she realised a tuba was a very bad instrument to serenade someone with. Papers of her ballads, songs and plays she had written and gotten Willow to look over were scattered everywhere, some unfinished, some abandoned, some that only needed her to put them together formally, some she already had, and some that were being performed by Bards across the Isles already. A blanket on their sofa, with one corner slightly burned due to the incident that they agreed to never speak of or acknowledge again. All of it was theirs.

And Skara owed all of that to Willow.

Looking around the room and remembering that helped calm her down, at least a little. They weren't in Hexside anymore. They were in their twenties. They weren't children anymore. Skara's feelings for Willow hadn't dulled or faded at all since then though. If anything, they had just grown deeper.

But sometimes, that made her feel like she was still back in school and dealing with all of this for the first time.

Skara shook her head, sighing. Standing up, paper in hand, she walked onto the balcony. A few of the plants there tilted to look at her, and one of them - Venomy (Willow was terrible, if descriptive, at naming things) grinned at her expectedly. Skara knelt down, and grabbed one of the many bags of plant food that they had for all the diverse flora, and found the one with food that looked uncomfortably close to Witch meat, and fed the hungry plant creature... thing.

"There y'go, buddy." Skara muttered absently as she fed it. "Sorry it's late. I've been... busy. Yeah, let's go with that. Busy."

As the sin against the Titan chewed, Skara glanced at the street their home was located on. She loved the view. It wasn't a busy street, but it wasn't exactly a quiet one either. People went about doing all manner of things at all points in the day, from chatting with friends on the sidewalk to getting thrown out of Grimgrubs Pub across the street. Sometimes, she would just people-watch from here. Seeing all the little stories playing out from outside her own home helped when she was trying to write her songs or plays. And sometimes, she could see her Petals flying or walking down the street when she was on her way home.