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[indent][indent][indent][color=#808080]The plastic bag rustled softly against her sweater, a small, persistent sound keeping time with her steps as Anissa wound her way back toward the arena. Two plastic bottles were nested inside the bag, insulated by layers of plastic, while a third—the one meant for her—she held separately, the straw already settled between her lips. She sipped absently, the fruity liquid cold enough to leave a faint sting on her tongue. It was, she knew, the sort of thing that would have horrified anyone with a working sense of self-preservation, given the winter air biting at every inch of exposed skin. But she had grown up in a country where iced drinks in subzero temperatures were simply not questioned, and some instincts, it seemed, survived distance. 

The arena emerged slowly as she approached, first as a skeletal outline against the grey-white sky, then gradually resolving into something more substantial. Inside, the earlier frenzy of training had softened into something quieter, the sharp edges worn down into pockets of lingering activity. Figures clustered in loose groups near the exits, some preparing to leave, others orbiting those who hadn't yet escaped the course's indifferent demands. She must have looked strange to them, she thought, actually returning to this place of torment, bottle in hand, as though she expected anyone left to join her for some kind of weird picnic. But whatever. It wasn’t like she was here for any of them, unless they were a pissed-off girl in a purple outfit named Blair. 

Her gaze found said girl before she meant it to, and Anissa’s pace slowed without conscious decision, the straw falling idle between her lips. A boy stood beside her friend—someone Anissa didn't recognize—close enough to offer assistance without quite presuming to touch. He held himself with careful attention, focused on Blair in a way that wasn't possessive but present, like he understood that proximity alone could feel like overstepping. She couldn't hear what they were saying from this distance, but she could tell enough from Blair's posture that whatever it was, it had improved her mood considerably. Thank goodness for that. Anissa hadn't realized how worried she'd actually been until this exact moment, watching her friend exist in someone's company without the weight of everything else pressing down. If Blair could find some small pocket of happiness in all this, maybe it meant Anissa wouldn't have to mediate some disaster later between her and River.

Her attention drifted then, almost involuntarily, scanning the arena with quiet intent. Searching for a single, specific absence she had already begun to feel before she'd even registered its presence.

The space where River had stood—where he had been a fixed point since the results were announced—was still occupied. But this time, instead of possibly meeting the cold demeanour of his half-sister, his company was someone else entirely. A girl Anissa didn't recognize. One who was, without her really trying to notice it, extraordinarily beautiful, and not in the familiar taxonomy of symmetry and proportion that Anissa had been trained since childhood to catalogue and replicate either. This was something else. Something that resisted clean classification, that defied the neat categories she'd learned to sort people into before she was old enough to understand why anyone would bother. The girl's skin glistened faintly with sweat beneath the winter light, her hair imperfect in a way that only amplified her appeal, lending her an immediacy that was almost aggressive in its vitality. She existed in the space between categories, between definitions, and the effect was disorienting in a way Anissa couldn't quite parse.

She realized she was staring. The plastic bag swayed once in her grip, then settled, forgotten. Even the cold that had been gnawing at her cheeks moments ago receded into irrelevance, replaced by a strange and pervasive warmth that had nothing to do with the season and everything to do with the inexplicable pull of watching someone exist so fully, so [i]viscerally[/i], without any apparent awareness of the effect they were having.

The sound inside the arena seemed to dull, the movement of others slowing to something distant and unimportant.

There was only her.

And the girl.

It was difficult to pinpoint exactly when observation had become fixation. The girl wasn't wearing anything particularly eye-catching (nothing like Blair's party outfit from the night before). Still, the transition was seamless, unmarked by any clean boundary Anissa could identify. One moment, she had been looking, and the next, she was no longer certain she had the authority to stop. And if she was being honest with herself, a rare and uncomfortable thing, she found she didn't really want to.

She had always liked beautiful things. 

Not in the shallow, acquisitive way people so often assumed of her. Her admiration was more...reverent, in a sense. Beauty had been one of the few constants in her life, something observable and predictable, governed by rules she could learn, replicate, and on her best and worst days, embody. She knew symmetry. Understood proportion. Knew how light favoured certain angles and forgave others. She had spent years studying those principles with the diligence of a disciple, memorizing the architecture of a perfectly composed face the way others memorized poetry. But most importantly, she knew exactly where she stood within that hierarchy. At least, she had always believed she did.

But this?

This was something else entirely.

The girl's beauty did not feel constructed. It did not announce the effort behind it, did not bear the telltale traces of curation that Anissa had been trained to detect. It did not invite analysis or comparison, because it existed outside the framework that made comparison possible. It was not a matter of increment—not better skin, or softer hair, or more harmonious features. Overall, it was not prettier in the way Anissa was accustomed to measuring. It was something more ineffable, something that resisted the taxonomy she had spent her life perfecting.

Frankly, if she had to put a word to it, it was [i]presence[/i].

It was the unbearable certainty of someone who did not need to wonder how they were being perceived because perception itself bent willingly toward them. Anissa felt the recognition of it like a physical sensation, and a small part of her understood, instantly and without protest, that this was something she could never replicate. No amount of discipline or refinement could manufacture whatever invisible gravity the girl possessed so effortlessly.

And strangely, that realization did not offend her. It humbled her.

Anissa resumed sipping her drink, the straw finding its way back between lips that had gone slightly numb from cold, and wondered, distantly, what it must be like to move through the world with that kind of unchallenged authority over attention. To be looked at without needing to earn it. To simply [i]be[/i]. She found herself wanting to remain exactly where she was, suspended in that observation, as though proximity alone might allow her to understand it. Or perhaps, selfishly, to borrow some infinitesimal fraction of it for herself. 

The girl leaned forward then, closing the distance between herself and River with an ease that made the movement feel inevitable rather than chosen. Her hand rose, graceful, and—

—touched him.

A soft, almost playful tap to the center of his nose.

Anissa turned away before she could understand why her chest suddenly felt too small to contain her lungs.

The motion was so abrupt, so instinctive, that she choked on her drink, an involuntary sputter that sent cold liquid burning down the wrong pipe. Her hand flew to her mouth, eyes watering as she coughed. She swallowed hard, forcing her throat to cooperate, and it was only then—mid-recovery, mid-wheeze—that she noticed something important.

Her hands were completely bare.

She stared at them.

For a moment, the sight registered as nothing more than absence. Pale fingers, mottled faintly from exposure to the cold. Nail beds still carrying traces of dirt from her obstacle course run. Damp at the knuckles where condensation from the bottle had gathered. Ordinary. Unremarkable. The same hands she'd had her entire life.

Too ordinary. 

Memory returned in fragments. The empty hall. The quiet. The borrowed illusion of safety that had convinced her, briefly, that she did not need the barrier she so carefully maintained everywhere else. She had left them behind. Not physically, she realized after a second's panic. They were still in her pocket, a soft woollen weight against her hip. But she had walked back like this. Exposed. Unshielded. Forgetting.

The realization did not frighten her. It shamed her. 

She hadn’t endangered anyone. There was no one close enough for accidental contact. No brush of skin against unwitting skin. So, no harm done, not really. But still she understood, with humiliating clarity, why the absence of the gloves suddenly mattered now when it had not mattered five minutes ago.
 

[right][color=#5a3e85][i]I can’t do that.[/i][/color][/right]

Her fingers curled slowly, as if she could will the wool back into existence through muscle memory alone. But that, like the other girl's natural, mesmerizing beauty, was not something Anissa could manifest through wanting. Not without becoming the one thing that ruined the beautiful things she liked simply by reaching for them. Not without leaving marks where she only meant to leave admiration.

She walked to a nearby bench and set her almost empty bottle into the plastic bag after placing it down with exaggerated care, the crinkle of it obscenely loud in the hollow space inside her chest. Her free hand slipped into her pocket, retrieving the gloves she had so thoughtlessly abandoned earlier. For a moment, she simply held them, the weight of them suddenly heavier than it should have been. Heavier than wool had any right to be.

They were ordinary gloves. Unremarkable. The kind anyone might wear against winter cold.

Anyone who didn't know what skin could do when it forgot itself.

She pulled them on slowly, watching the last visible trace of herself disappear beneath the barrier she had trusted for years. The wool settled against her palms, and something in her chest eased slightly even as something else squeezed.

Only then did she allow herself to look back.

The girl was gone, but River remained exactly where she had last seen him. Exactly as expected, and yet not. Something about him had shifted in her brief moment of retreat, some quality of bearing or expression that she couldn't immediately name. His mouth hung slightly open, brows drawn together in open bewilderment, and his hands had come to rest behind his neck, rubbing at unseen tension there. Whatever had transpired between the two of them, whatever exchange of words had rearranged the air around him, Anissa had, fortunately or unfortunately, missed entirely.

Who was to say which it was? Fortune or its opposite?

She didn't know. Couldn't decide. Could only stand where she was, watching someone she thought she understood become suddenly a little illegible. But only for a moment. Only long enough to confirm he was still someone she could approach without crossing the invisible boundary she had only just finished reassembling around herself. Long enough to verify that the ground between them remained safe, remained ordinary. 

Anissa exhaled softly, the plastic bag rustling as she bent to retrieve it from the bench, her fingers curling around the handles after a brief adjustment of her grip. She straightened, rolled her shoulders once, and began to walk toward him. And by the time she reached him, she had managed the faintest trace of a smile. Not her best work, but serviceable.

[color=#5a3e85]“Hungry?”[/color] she asked, lifting the bag slightly in demonstration.

Up close, River still looked unsettled. Confused in a way that did not suit him, that sat awkwardly on features more accustomed to composure. It made him seem younger somehow. Less like the immovable force he had been at the center of the arena despite whatever nerves she knew he must have carried, and more like someone still learning where exactly he was allowed to stand. Still learning that the ground beneath him would hold.

Anissa did not comment on any of it. She simply reached into the bag and withdrew the container meant for him, holding it out like an offering.

[color=#5a3e85]“I wasn’t sure what you liked,”[/color] she added, her voice carefully neutral, [color=#5a3e85]“So I chose something that seemed… okay. It’s lamb. But if you’d rather the chicken, that’s in the other one.”[/color]

A small pause. Then, softer, almost as an afterthought:

[color=#5a3e85]“Or, you know, you can mix it up, have a bit of both? I just figured…”[/color] She hesitated, the words tangling slightly before she forced them out. [color=#5a3e85]“You might not have had anything this morning.”[/color][/color][/indent][/indent][/indent]
[hr][sub][color=9b9b9b][b][i]Location: Arena  
Interactions: River [@Mjolnir]
Mentions: Blair, Colton, Maylisse, Veronica [/i][/b][/color][/sub]

[right][sup][color=#5a3e85][b]#5a3e85[/b][/color][color=2e2c2c]...[/color]|[color=2e2c2c]...[/color][url=https://i.postimg.cc/7P1f3XK9/image.jpg][color=9b9b9b][b]outfit[/b][/color][/url][/sup][/right]