saintly virtue (yuri)

here's the fun trivia: while rekitting my chaptered fics i found a "commented-out" section from Ten Minutes To Go. now, a fair number of my works had extra bits and bobs floating around at the beginning or the end, notes of all kinds, that i've had to variously corral since converting to reader-facing batch-processed text files (they were always text files, you just never saw them before). but i don't do commenting out. thank god. i try to throw right out when i can. however this bit was good

"My lady! I can't find my wedding ring!"

Lora has to blush - and she'd gush too, if there were anyone else around to listen - at Haze's frenzied cry during which she not only reached for a pet name, but also extended herself to their most unorthodox, though not at all private, epithet.

What a humbling display of respect. What a beautiful reclamation of what you're "allowed" to call someone dear to you (that is to say, not just "dear" or "love" or "sweetheart" or "honey" but absolutely anything you would, could, should wish). What a lovely set of three syllables, one to two.

What a shockingly pure expression of undiluted, all-distilled love between girls. Well, women, they were - they are! - , but as the saying goes, girls and women are, have, perform different genders, and Haze's is girl, if not lady, more than it is woman. Lora's too, with a little bit of boy thrown in for fun, sometimes. Haze doesn't mind, so long as she knows she's saying the right thing.

And by the Architect, indeed, she has.

"Keep that up, Haze," Lora finally calls back, "and I'll buy you a new one!"

"Lora!" Wife appears: "I'm not a gold-digger!"