Tree climbing

Lantadyme at tumblr for fic illustration meme:

Aradia steps out onto the long limb of the tree, her bare feet careful on the bark and the noose in one hand. She’s smiling and beautiful in the moonlight, giggling under her breath as she scrambles higher. She moves fast and overzealous, the movements of a girl who knows she could plummet from this tree at any moment but who also knows she could catch herself an instant afterward. Terezi steps out behind her, the scalemate clutched in one hand. She doesn’t have the same luxury as fancy psychic powers. She moves like a cat, like a gecko, feet placed precisely like she’s scaled this limb a thousand times before (because she has). She slips the yellow peaks of Secretary Cornsyrup’s ears between her teeth and clambers with all four limbs up through the little handholds and footholds that aren’t obvious to the untrained eye. She knows her tree inside and out. She could climb to the canopy blind and she would gamble her life on that.

She disappears into the pink jungle of leaves, the branches shivering with weight of two troll girls in two different places, and Terezi grins around her mouthful of scalemate because she’s beaten Aradia to the execution site, but still the other girl hasn’t cheated and simply flown here. Aradia plays by the rules every time, and she loves that through and through.