Chapter Text
Dressing herself is an ornate and complex ritual. It has been for a long time--since she tugged on those fishnets and stepped into those studded combat boots. She still remembers the first time she had done it. It was, perhaps, the first time she had felt comfortable in her skin when she was still growing to fit her own body. When she was still awkward and lanky. It was the first time she felt right, felt powerful and intimidating. Like she could step over and on anyone instead of the reverse.
And in the style she feels a comfort, a confidence that she hadn’t felt before.
One that isn’t so surface level. She feels it within and it comes to the surface when she styles her hair and straps a spiked choker on.
And with the right makeup brushes and brands she can do wonders. She can contour her face to her satisfaction. Can make soft features look wicked. Imposing. Sinister.
With the right tools she becomes someone worth being.
Dress and demeanor have long since become a lifestyle, and in time they have shifted from a sense of security to a sense of confidence.
And from a sense of style it became a lifestyle, a way of doing things that ran significantly deeper than just putting on some leather and winging her eyeliner with dramatics.
Goth, in its most traditional form, is her saving grace. A small community on the very fringes of society. The outcasts and the pessimists. The rebels and the darkly optimistic folks who can see something alluring and lovely in that which is wicked and forlorn.
They are few in her realm.
Her planet, a place that is so dead and unforgiving. A place with plenty of gloom and grey to fill in the places untouched by the white. A place where trees branches rise like the hands of skeletons desperate to shake the dirt off of their bones. A place where nights cling to the sky and the sun is dim when it does crack through.
There is a very special kind of melancholy in the winter. A special kind of lonely quietness. And for this, she thinks that autumn has stolen the reputation that winter should don. Sure, autumn has a crispness it has a creeping death, an air about it that thrills the witches, the goths, and the odd folk. But it is winter that has the desolation, winter when death is in full bloom. Winter that more closely embodies the bleak silence, the beautiful glittering sorrow, and stately curiosity of the gothic soul.
So where then, are the others--the witches and goths? She sees mostly faeries. Faeries who see the snow as fluffy and light-hearted. For them it is different; for them the world of winter is enchanting, magical, wondrous, and carefree.
They don’t see the brutality of a Solarian getting lost in the tundra. They don’t see the truth of the season. They don’t accept their planet the way she does. They don’t love it the way she does.
They don’t dress the way she does.
Icy supposes that she is fine with that. There is poetry in isolation and something special in embracing it to the fullest. Something that makes her feel profoundly connected to the frigid world she treks. It is deeply quiet out here where the
She thinks that she can hear the moon. Such is the depth of the quietness that she thinks she can hear the whisper and hiss of the lights above as they fold and unfold in curtains of teal and purple. They speak to her in delicate voices and in languages and tones like death rattles trapped in a crypt.
Sometimes she thinks the lights, in spite of their vivid colors, were the original goths. That winter as a whole was the original goth. Post punk and autumn be damned! It is here in the unforgiving snow that her platform boots and fishnet tights fit the most comfortably.
Here in her world of winter.