outfields | open post : picture prompt

For all that she claims to be anything but a perfect model, he's never had anyone under his fingertips capable of her stillness. (Except, perhaps, Sanageyama, but he always ruined it by talking.) Even when he works with professionals - and there are a number of those, these days - they don't manage to have her brightness even with a dress half-constructed around her. "You're never a hindrance," he says, without looking up. Hand-beading this dress has been weeks in the making; he's done as much of it as he could with an actual mannequin, the memory of the curve of her hip enough as he drew curves in glimmering, glittering glass and thread. The final adjustments he can only make when he's sure of how the beads and the fabric will lay against her are those he's doing now, long practiced pulls of the needle leaving seafoam clouded glass and peach-pink pearls in their wake.

He looks up when she asks about turning. He's been sewing her into things long enough by now that she always seems to know. He still isn't sure what his tell is. "Yes, please. Carefully, this knot isn't tied off yet." His free hand rests heavy against the back of her thigh to guide her to the right angle under the lamps.

"Is that so? I'll take your word for it, then."

She breathes out heavily once - her own tell - in response to his hand on her thigh. She is unfailingly patient, most of the time, about most things, so she waits for him to guide her into place, fabric barely rustling as she slowly turns.

Satsuki turns the bracelet on her wrist again, breathing normally. She's never anything but careful - about things like this, anyway. Each movement is carefully considered, her posture practiced. She's been his model often enough. His cautioning would be an insult coming from anyone else.

Isn't it strange that they spend their (more infrequent, now) time together in rented spaces, spent stitching the finishing touches onto projects? She's been asked before, and it would be strange, if anyone expected normalcy from them. Satsuki puts too much effort into protecting strange and abnormal humanity for it to be anything other than fitting. Satsuki's content in his hardworking silence, and they both need to keep their hands busy.

"They'll be mass producing these next summer." Satsuki turns her bracelet.

"What an honor," he says, lightly teasing as much as it is sincere, and his fingers linger three beats too long after he's satisfied with her new angle. He shuffles his weight from one knee to the other as he leans close to correct the lay of the last line of beads.

Sewing clothes with the disconcerting buzz of life under his fingers for the first five years of his career has made sewing clothes without them an adventure in finding that life somewhere else. The buzz of life under his fingers now is Satsuki, the thrum of her patient breath and her bracelet twisting slowly around the delicate, too-strong line of her wrist. Familiar and sweet, not ill-fitting and wrong.

"If history repeats itself, the prototype will be the finest one of all. No doubt because of who wore it," he says, looking up at her. He shifts to peel a pin from the cushion on the table, putting the end of his needle between curved-in lips.

"Flattery's to be my remuneration, then? It's theft you're getting away with tonight. Iori." Satsuki can tease back. It's missing all the barbs their friends use in their banter. In private, her edges have always buffed down quieter around Shiro. She can't even make small talk around him, because none of their conversations have ever seemed small.

A tailor's hands are never empty - and then some. Thread, needle, pins, pegs, binding, beading, boning, mesh...lace. Skin. It's no wonder that given the chance, he built himself four more arms.

And here she stands, fooling with her baubles like a heartsick teenager.

"Do you need me?" she asks, an offer of her idle, anxious hands and nothing more. Satsuki releases the metal she's pinched between her fingers, dropping one cupped palm in offer. Her affections aren't fickle, but it's hard to tell where you stand, sometimes, having lived so long on a precipice.

His eyebrows rise. Of course she takes her moment when he's got metal in his mouth. She's never been the type to let weakness go unchallenged, instinct coiling in her limbs. He works quickly with the pin in his hand, gathering cloth flush against cloth and sliding the pin through with a push. When it lays as he'd wanted it to, he peels the needle out of his mouth, point held out between his fingers.

"I suppose I must pull together some kind of bonus to offset your disappointment, then, Lady Satsuki," he answers. "Robbing a model her due is in bad taste." What kind of bonus, well. That's up to her.

He reaches out again for the pincushion. Usually he has an assistant, people who do the simple pinning and hemming work for him. Not for Satsuki. This work is his work, for better or worse. Do you need me, she asks, as if he hasn't spent the last decade wanting to be what she needed. "If you could hold this and pass pins as I need them, that would make this process faster," he admits, holds it gently in the space above his head.

"I'll do it. You've been hard at work on your knees long enough today."

Anything to alleviate the stress she's placed on him. Satsuki's spent years making Shiro's life difficult, asking him to do things more dangerous and demanding than kneeling. She takes the pincushion on offer. It has the trajectory and presence of some sort of idol, offered up from ground to pedestal. Clothing will always have some ugly aspect of the religious to her, even with the Life Fibers gone.

Her time wearing Junketsu chooses this moment to make its timely reminder: an old ache that pulls and pries at her hips and thighs. Satsuki waits until the pincushion is in her hands, so she can shift her weight under the pretense of bringing the pins around in front of her. She'll sleep on her back, she decides, hours before she'll even end up in bed.

"Allow me to wear this to the next benefit I attend and we'll call the bonus awarded," Satsuki says, counting our three pins into the palm of her hand and holding them at the ready. Let him be the expert.

His eyes turn up toward her once more, mouth barely parted, but of course she doesn't seem to have noticed the terrible innuendo. (One of her more charming traits, though she never accepts being called 'cute' gracefully - a compliment that lays ill-formed on her, unlike every piece of clothing she's ever worn.)

Were she Nonon, it would have been on purpose, a trap laid to be fired back, but instead he turns back down, swallowing laughter. "I would hardly call that a bonus," he says, knowing who he'd created it for. "I'm sure I can find something else," he continues, more quietly, "perhaps a different kind of work." On his knees or not. The shift of her hips is old and familiar, the scars of youth harsh on her skin, but he allows her that dignity without a word.

"A pin, if you please, Satsuki," he says, dropping the false distance of formality, looping fabric together. He's nearly done, the last of this dress can be sealed shut around the shell of the glittering embroidery - but the girl he can barely see in the mirror out of the corner of his eye is a girl he likes to think is his, just a little, for these hours.

"A proposition? I see." She knows better than to think he means something so sundry as paperwork. For someone who just genuinely overlooked her own innuendo, she's more eager to tease out the meaning in his words.

She flirts quietly with small movements of her body. It's the way she turns her wrist, the way she adjusts her display, the way she stands. It's short work he's doing, but prolonged, and she knows better than anyone how to endure a long wait.

Satsuki offers him the pin reminiscent of the way she'd offer a blade, the sharp end safe between her thumb and forefinger.

"Make sure not to poke me with that thing." She might be aware of that one, but Satsuki's already turned her head back in the other direction, the back of her neck exposed and red where her hairline ends now.

He laughs without sound at the question, attention lasering in on finding a better handhold so he can - reach up and take the pin, gently, his fingertips brushing hers. Even that small touch seems hot as coals, now.

He slides the pin into place before what she'd said actually registers, and then he does laugh, looking up. The flush to her neck is barely visible from here, but she's understated in the strangest places.

"I will endeavor not to poke you with any needles, Satsuki," he says, and draws out three or four seconds of pause. "I make no such promises about other ventures in poking you with something." It's crass, but she's not a flower that will wilt at the first sign of shade.

Satsuki lifts her elbow to look back at him through judging eyebrows, though it lacks the death threat it could have. It's more game than disgust. All too often, it's a game: Who will lean in, who will touch, who will resist. As much push as it is pull. Being alone with Shiro always feels intimate, but sometimes it lights this energy in her, hot and unanticipated. It makes her glad to be alive.

Still, it's difficult to twist far enough to show her stern disapproval while also not disrupting his hands.

"I should limit your time spent with Sanageyama." Satsuki means it very little. They both know, besides, that Uzu's stomach would shrivel up into his chest if he tried saying something like that to her. "Or your tongue will get you in as much trouble as his does."

She preempts the need for another pin, passing it back beneath her lifted elbow. Satsuki's invested in helping him with his work, but this time, maybe, she makes him reach a little.

"Are you interested? Don't get too distracted." Said like someone who plans on being a very big distraction soon.

He glances up and meets her gaze, a bold arch to his own eyebrows (thin though they are in the face of Satsuki's truly mighty weapons). Their usual dance over the hot coals that is the space between them is its own reward, the flashes of meaning and hum of closeness their own boon, but sometimes - sometimes he grows a little impatient.

He snorts, at what they both know is a joke. "I'll keep your warning in mind, though I have confidence in my skill to get back out of trouble the same way," he says, and scowls as he has to straight his back and snatch the pin from her, swift so she can't pull her hand away, so that he won't accidentally stab her retrieving it.

"I'm not sure if you're insulting me or yourself by suggesting I could be anything but interested," he says, twisting material and running the pin in. "But you should know better than anyone that distraction won't be a problem." At the cliff of the end of the world, he'd woven clothes then times as difficult as this.

It's a bad time to second guess their arrangement, now that he's buttoned her into a dress that fits like another skin. His hand slipped beneath it would feel fumbling, unprofessional. As if they aren't childish together already.

"I have the utmost confidence in you, as always...but I hope you won't lose interest by the time you've finished."

Satsuki falls silent. The emptiness where the banter had been is palpable. She runs her tongue between her teeth once, nervously, walking that fine line between safety and danger. For a time, there's nothing but the soft, buzzing sounds of the room alive around them.

"Do you remember the last time we were in a place such as this one?"

There's much more she could say, more that could prolong their torment. Has she made him suffer enough? Satsuki is a master of speeches, but there's likely not much she could say that would burn him down faster than whatever his imagination can conjure. Satsuki hums low in her throat, ghosts her fingers against the back of his head (only when she's certain the pin has pierced fabric). Then she resumes her bombproof stillness.

He lets the silence ring. As if he would - or could - lose interest in her, after all this time. His work distracts him, draws him into a courtship nearly as long as the one he's involved in with the woman inside the dress, until she breaks the silence, and with it, his concentration.

He certainly remembers. He squeezes his eyes shut, lips pressed together, and follows the feather-light touch of her fingers to turn his face toward her. "How could I not," he asks, and he lets the fabric in his fingers slip free, traces a line down her thigh with his knuckles instead. "You are a very difficult person to forget."

"So that's what you remember," she teases, as if it isn't the point of the memory. They'd spent so much of that time wrapped around each other - what else was there to pay attention to? Even for Satsuki, whose mind is prone to never softening, it's almost all she can recall. Her hand follows his, almost startled, the reflex sharp - but she stops before she can touch him through the fabric. "Even memories have to be earned."

The touch is too deliberate; whatever work he's needed to complete, he's as near to done with it as he'll ever be. Satsuki's stoic in the face of so many challenges; it can only be on purpose that she drops her eyes down towards where she knows his hand rests, daring him to do something with it. She knows him too well, knows his movements. There are some things that are just predictable, even for their nonsense species. Satsuki knows he has his ways of responding to challenges. As soon as he rises, there's unlikely to be any more playing.

Her footfall is muffled on the floor beneath her. "Put away your needle and thread." It's no order when he's already finished sewing, just the feeling of their old, familiar paths. She brings a hand around to begin unfastening the top clasp sealing her into his latest project, pausing only to see if he needs to take final measurements.

She made that trip remarkable. His record-keeping takes care of the facts of those days, but his memory had filed all of that away as unimportant, keeping instead the way her hair fell around her shoulders and the curve of her mouth against his.

His expression, still but warm, doesn't change as his fingers uncurl, or even as he draws back entirely to gather the loose end of the thread and tie it off. He'll complete it later - when he isn't looking for something more satisfying than beadwork. He ties the knot off and offers his palm for the pincushion.

"As you wish, Lady Satsuki," he answers, light with teasing.

When she hears - or feels - the thread sever, Satsuki slips the hook from the eye, letting the dress start to fall open. Undressing has a different meaning for them, but she won't deprive him of having his hand in it if he wants to help.

Satsuki turns and drops the pincushion into his waiting hand, pushing his fingers closed around it. The dress, half-unfastened, drops loosely around her shoulders, exposing her collar bones, the old scars.

"It looks nice." Leave it to her to measure the success of his fashion. A triumph, even by your hands."

She's careful not to disrupt his handiwork, even as she stands astride him, one foot on either side of his knee. She's close enough to bring his face against her stomach if she pulled him there. Instead, she drops her hand to his elbow, bracing him so he can pull himself to his feet - and just maybe into her mouth.

She's always one step ahead of him, and especially so when it comes to something he stitched her into, translating the movements of his fingers into sentiments. He squeezes the pinchushion, once, and transfers it from one palm to the other to set it aside, looking up at her all the while.

The movements are rote and familiar, but looking at her is always finding something new, past the scars of childhood stripped too young. "If you like it, then my work here is done," he says, because he wouldn't put a dress he's unsatisfied with on Satsuki's skin. Nothing but the best of his best for the lady of the manor.

The heat of her is distracting, over him as it is, but he sets his hand to her arm and rises, to his feet, to her embrace. His hand curves at her cheek, and he kisses her with the satisfaction of a man impatient.

Satsuki's always shy when they kiss like this, a completely different side of herself from what others see - what she lets them see. It's in the subtle way she tucks her head, the way her hand hesitates on the way up to cover his. She's not a timid or submissive person, but the intimacy disarms her and leaves her soft.

She leans her head to the side, the right side of her neck straightening into a tight, sloping line. As the kiss breaks, she touches her cheekbone to his.

"How could I not?" Satsuki has her high standards. Her expectations have always been cloud-buried, insurmountable to all but a select few. Putting down her false life that came with her dictatorial mantle hasn't changed that. Anything Iori makes, he makes with skill and care. She doesn't have to weigh its value: She'd love anything. As if in confirmation, she drops her free hand low on his back to pull him flush against her.

Satsuki, as Shiro knows her, is a sharp blade and surprisingly soft eyes, beautiful and radiant. In the moments between the quieter warfare that is business and the noisy warmth that is her - their - family, the moments they have for themselves, she's... cute, in her way. His fingers flutter under hers when she touches him, and when they break he sighs breath out.

He leans into her without protest or second-guessing, familiar as stitching a seam, pleasant as a freshly-pressed coat. "Your confidence makes it impossible to rest on my laurels, you know," he says, gently pleasant, and skims his fingers down her arm. "We should hang this up," he says, and it's not just because he doesn't want it to wrinkle.

Satsuki's acquiescence is in a soft mm, punctuated by a squeeze of her hand low on his back. It would be cheeky coming from anyone else; from her, it's...cheeky. "As you say." She turns her head once more, to get one final, full look at the dress in the mirror. Her blind eye to any shortcomings in his handiwork aside, it really is beautiful.

Deftly, but handling the dress as though it's the powdery membrane of a moth's wings, she reaches behind her to continue working open the closure, needling at his impatience with her steady, unhurried hand, and knowing he has two of his own, if he has such a problem with it. And, in truth, the process doesn't need her leading to make it any more arduous. Hung and bagged, the bag looped, the bag tied, his kit pushed safely back beneath the work desk they've been using half as studio, half as office. She stops moving so slowly, then.

Less a testament to her capacity for multitasking and more a testament to her capacity for eyefucking, Satsuki holds his gaze while her fingers work, forfeiting another kiss for this.

The woman who was content to tease him through chiffon moments ago has been left behind with such swiftness he's very nearly surprised. Very nearly isn't certainty, though, and his hands duck around her to start from the bottom of the row of closures. Satsuki is the master of eyefucking in this relationship, her intensity narrowed down to live hot under his skin, but Shiro has been making board meetings more exciting with his fingers on a pen and half-lidded eyes for years. This dress, born of his hands, is a child's six-piece puzzle, solved with ease, and when it lays open he finds her skin.

He brushes the pads of his fingers in a loose arc across her back just before he curls his grip closed, and he gently begins to draw the fabric forward, drawing his lower lip between his teeth and barely catching more skin revealing itself in the corner of his eyes.

She can't stand when he bites his lip like that. It's enough motivation to draw her into retaliating; Satsuki ducks her head, not all shyness this time, but vigor. Her nose just touches his; their mouths and the rest of them, she keeps separate.

"Frightened?" she asks, even the word a challenge, as if she might bait him him into slipping from the game. (And why not? Why play when they're this close together?)

One of Satsuki's arms slopes across her ribs, collecting the dress before it can fall too far from her body or hit the floor...but it's low enough. Satsuki handles this disrobing with a care she rarely shows for clothing. She's nearly tender with the way she helps it fall. She touches the back of his neck, then his chest, then her own waist. For a moment, it seems she might let their mouths touch again, but it's a ruse - a trick to rouse his teeth from his bitten lip in pursuit og her.

He knows the shape of her reaction the moment his lip moves. She's not predictable, but she is fond of a challenge, and he won't give her the empty satisfaction of a victory barely won. His eyebrows rise, and he blinks, long. This quickening is anything but fear.

His fingers draw free of fabric, finding the dip of her spine, and he lays his palm there with enough pressure it can't be immediately dismissed. He draws in a breath, eyes flicking toward her mouth - and he knows she won't miss it, because when has she ever? Her trap is confident, and there's a thought of resisting for a moment longer, but hasn't he waited enough? He leans up to close the space between them. If she doesn't like his lip between his teeth, perhaps she'll like hers there better.

The moan that leaves her mouth is earnest, her lips parting as soon as they brush back against Iori's. She lets him draw her into his mouth without resistance. It's what she wanted, the unbridled crush of his body against hers. The slight pain from his teeth in her lip is a thrill, and she finds herself pulling back just enough to make it sting her. She won't forget it soon; he'll be bitten back soon enough, not retaliation but escalation.

She's been holding up the dress so diligently that it's almost compromised the minute she pushes back into his kiss. Satsuki is a woman of resolve and will, and it's will and resolve that keeps her from trashing his handiwork. His firm hand on her back keeps her still, and it's in this stillness that her stomach shivers, twitches against his, an alien, but too familiar fire lighting in it. She's short-sighted with the heat of want, and she fidgets her hands and body anxiously, the way only she can.

Now her hands won't stay away from him. They travel back up his chest and into his hair and stay there this time, thumb tickling the back of his ear. But, oh, the dress - and, her tongue touching his upper lip, Satsuki grunts again, impatiently. She lets it drop, purposefully, neatly, letting it piled soft on the floor. They'll kiss without end if left to it; she's happy to move the action to a more comfortable place.

open post : picture prompt

i'm oasis and here's wonderwall

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i'm mad at you for ignoring my hilarious wonderwall joke

what wonderwall joke :)

rude???

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she's not cute...she's manly as hell.

she's both.

a woman of many trades

and master of all of them

brows emote