(no subject)

[originallutece]

is that a motherfucking homestuck reference in the year of our lord 2018

anyway you know the drill voice | video | text | action

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misfire.

[sorserer]

[ stephen is responsive to texts, but doesn't usually text first unless he has a problem, question, idea. he's never been the type to check in either, neither hawkish nor paternal, so it's good that rosalind isn't usually the type who needs it.

but suddenly, a text that's just an attachment.

it's not the best photo, a little blurred. (shaky hands.) probably stephen was in the middle of a message, or checking something, had maybe simultaneously hit that rare sweet spot where his dry humor doesn't inspire an equally dry response: it's just rosalind mid-laugh in her own flat, one of those wide open laughs that seems mostly the province of the youthful and giddy, her eyelashes against the curve of her cheek, her head near-slumped in her arms so she can crack up safely into them, hair loose and soft enough to touch.

not drunk, probably. (not anymore?) there's sunlight in the background. (he'd stayed for breakfast, he's done it before; not so unusual, stephen doing some disney shit in the kitchen because he doesn't hold pans.) it looks like her laughter is the loudest thing in the room, everything else sedate, soft, comfortable.

(stephen had probably been smiling back: the last of his reflexes to be refined.)

the picture can't be that old. two months, at a maximum. but it's not recent, either. stephen has only visited sparingly since that dinner. they're both busy people. ]

[originallutece]

[It's a photograph of herself unlike any she's ever once seen before. Of course it is. Her family had a portrait done once, and of course, Comstock had wanted to publicize her, but those were different. Formal, composed. Every factor in those photos had been meticulously chosen and arranged-- especially when it came to her later ones. The little lady who made Columbia fly, they'd called her, and she'd glared down into the camera, cold as ice and hard as diamonds, daring them all to try and call her that to her face. Those photographs and videos were as much a challenge as anything, another obstacle to fret over and overcome.

This isn't that.

This is candid, for starters, which is something she'd never normally allow. She's smiling, her hair is down, and oh, she looks so terribly soft, soft and weak and vulnerable. Not the icy figure she wants to cut, so terribly inhuman and distant, but rather a person, who laughs at startling remarks and has to hide her face to salvage it.

She remembers that moment. She can't recall the joke; she just remembers the shock of the unexpected, dry humor elevated and twisted into something that she couldn't help but laugh at. Not drunk, no-- but maybe a little intoxicated on who was with her. Delighting in something even faux-intimate, after being starved of her Robert for so long.

Why had he taken a photo like that?

She stares at it for a long while, and then, carefully, saves it to her own phone.]

How many other candids do you have of me?