Chapter Text
Brine clings to your calves as you stand with cold seawater lapping at your ankles. It saturates the air, filling your lungs with its scent and your mouth with its taste. It coats your cheeks and your hair, and even your eyelashes feel weighed down by it. Soft tan sand shifts underfoot, unsteady and malleable here at the tide line unlike further up the beach where it sits unyielding and hard-packed underfoot. Bits of shell make walking barefoot too precarious an endeavor, so your sandals sink heavily into the grainy mush below. Gazing upon the foam-topped aquamarine expanse—a sight you’ve never imagined you could see with your own eyes—fills you with awe and joy. Your voice emerges as a reverent breathy exhale.
“So this is the sea?”
You sense someone coming to stand next to you in the water, but don’t turn. You know without looking who will occupy that space. Her indigo and pink hair has started to grow out again over the last six months since she gained her freedom, from just past her ears to brushing her shoulder-blades. It tickles your neck when Kaina lays her head on your shoulder while smelling faintly of herbs, tea, and fresh linen. She sounds amused when she speaks.
“You realize it won’t move if you stop staring at it, right?”
You huff, turning to her with a pout. The former Pro Hero steps back with her hands raised in surrender, lips curved into a mischievous shape. Something bittersweet twists in your gut at seeing it. It still feels strange to see Kaina show any hint of happiness, especially after all she’s endured. She’s made so much progress since you helped her escape Tartarus, yet the reminder of her wounds still stings you. You still wish you could have saved her sooner, but by the time you infiltrated the prison with help from your Quirk and inventions, they had already branded her and cut her hair. It amazes you that she can laugh or smile at all, let alone find it in herself to tease you over your reaction.
“I’ve never really been to the beach at all,” you explain, turning back to stare at where the horizon kissed the rippling mirror of the water’s surface. “The brief glimpse I got during your escape doesn’t count.”
Something in Kaina dims when you mention her rescue, and it makes you hate yourself for bringing it up in casual conversation. You can’t find it in yourself to lie to her, though, so you don’t regret it. She deserves honesty after all the lies, pretenses, cover-ups and facades she experienced during her tenure as an agent of the HPSC. Truth comes with freedom after all. How could you possibly hold anything back since lies and deception shackled her for so long?
“You risked so much just to free me,” she murmurs, catching your hand and twining your fingers together. “I still don’t understand why.”
You close the distance and wrap your arms around her, burying your face in the bodice of her lilac sundress. Tiny white and yellow flowers decorate the smooth fabric. Subtle hints of lavender reach your nose, offering a soothing effect. Her lower sleeves reach her wrists, though the upper sleeves stop just before her bicep in an off-shoulder cut that exposes her collarbones. She wears her hair half-up half-down in a pretty seashell clip you bought her on impulse when you two had first arrived. You continue making a decent amount selling Support Items under three separate pseudonyms, so you often find yourself buying her small gifts—usually jewelry, hair accessories or products, or as of late, stupidly indulgent colorful chiffon floral dresses she never got to wear as Lady Nagant.
“Because you deserved better than a cage, so I gave it to you.”
The commission wanted an assassin—a sniper , someone who remains unseen, who doesn’t draw too much attention to herself—after all, a trained attack dog who didn’t ask questions, so Kaina never had much time for something as delicate yet loud as flowers or chiffon or a color of purple lighter than her own hair.
Donning any outfit that serves more than a purely functional purpose sings of defiance. Each time she puts on one of her new dresses, she rebels all over again. She refuses the roles of dutiful soldier, mindless weapon, or soulless executioner, refuses to pretend at being unfeeling or without personality or individuality outside of her HPSC approved persona. You glory in every little way she fights back against their narrative. She is fierce, your love, and now, amidst the early dawn light, briney sea breeze and lapping tide, she is free.
Tears drip onto your head, but you say nothing because she deserves this freedom—this relief, this release, this relinquishing of old poisons residing in her heart—too.