Prodigal - Book III

// Firefly

"We can get to Lower Level through the sewers."

She knew in the shuttered candlelit meeting how tonight would conclude. She knew when she tucked the bloody, wrapped silver conduit deep into her bag, where it could sit, where it could slumber for a time, how this would end.

She's followed him into the washroom, and though she leans forward, as if she's only in here to wash her hands in the basin, she knows he's watching. He's studying the plunging line of her robe when she turns around and sits up on the counter.

Come at me, an old invitation with new meaning, and Lei understands because this is what they are now, unsaid and unknown to all beyond these closed walls. Her legs close around his hips, capturing him there, and he sets his mouth to her neck, hands moving in familiar ways underneath her robe.

She remembers the second time this happened, drawn out long after the first, when they circled each other for months, both uncertain, neither willing to step forward. It had happened when Thalassa first fell, when old worries, concerns of past lives that should have been shed amongst salt and weeds and water, bloomed up. For all those buffering years, Allayria knew people in this city.

I have family in this city, she had reminded herself then, pin-pricks of feeling pebbling along her arms and spine. Parents, though it had seemed strange to think she ever had any. Parents that could have still been alive, parents that could have been be dead, buried—

It wasn't surprising what had followed. Her pacing, him seeing, pushing, but when they had clashed, when she had pinned him down into the ground, she didn't spring back. He had surged up, off of his elbows, and instead of fighting back or easing off, her mouth had pressed against his, her hands holding his face captive, and around her his hands had gone to work, pulling her closer in all the ways he already knew how.

He had fumbled under the practice armor then, her unoccupied hand traveling down along the front of him too before slipping up beneath his shirt. Her fingers had turned the corner to his back when he had frozen, muscles locking up, his hand quickly grabbing hers and yanking it away.

Everything had stuttered, a jolt of awareness washing over her like cold water breaking a slow slumber. But then his mouth had pressed harder, his tongue sweeping through in long, suggestive strokes—an apology, a gauze for the errant moment—and she remembers placing her hand on the powerful cords of his neck, thumb pressing into the cut of his jaw.

The scars on his back, she had thought, and this had been the first time she marked this bruise for later avoidance, the same way he now avoids the marred skin on her sternum. We are learning.

It is the same way they fought: knowing, furious but never vindictive, the line. Knowing what can be given, and what stays withheld.

Tonight is another battle, this time waged inside Lei's head. This, the way their limbs tangle now, on top of cold marble, reflected in the ripple of the warped mirror, is just another spar amongst snow or dust, in lamplight or moonlight, and neither asks more because they understand how far this can go.

His breath is uneven, stuttering under the weight of things he cannot tell her, old memories she reads in the way his hands shake and flex against her hips. Her hold has bite to it because she can see the way goosebumps have already risen on his arms, the way he already can't stand how close they are. Still, he grips one of her hands tightly, fingers lacing with hers.

She's thought about pressing her fingers to his forehead, of dipping in and taking out all the broken things inside, but she's afraid of what parts of him might come out with all the damage. She's afraid to take away the last safe place left to him.

So they do this instead, and she sometimes wonders if the part that really fixes it isn't just the simple sound of them both breathing in the end, the way his hand stays still on her hip. It's the closest she can feel to someone else without her lungs constricting, the closest he can feel to someone without his hands twitching. His forehead is always pressed against her cheek or set in the crook of her neck so neither of them has to look at the other. Instead she stares down at the pink scars peeking out from beneath his collar.

She's never seen his back. It's just another bit of armor that has to stay on.

A/N: MY CHILDREN. They are so...... emotionally stunted.

Alright, poll time: if you could have a Skill, which one would it be and why? Yes, there are incorrect choices; choose wrong and you will be ejected from this story.