He bares Alex's suspicious scorn without a ripple, trying to keep his eyes only on her face to make the muscles between his shoulder blades breathe. Repeats words, like stone blocks, building another wall. One far more important than the bricks he could still feel in his hands if he closed his eyes too long.
Proper. Respectable. Friendly. (Safe.)
She'd always been made of glass shards, even before the whole glass cabinet was shattered on the ground around them. The better to protect herself, even when she couldn't defend herself at all. He couldn't entirely forgive himself still that he hadn't puzzled that out before she'd shoved it into his overly judgemental hands. This girl who came into hell and carried his soul, inside herself, out again. She's not mad at him. Nor wary of him. She wouldn't be this close if she were.
(It's a balm of desperate relief. It's concerningly wrong—now.
He wants to hold on to it too tight. In both ways.)
Proper. Respectable. Friendly. (Safe.)
Except then, of course, she does another of the million things he can't entirely predict from so obvious telegraphing he usually could tell from others so quickly and steals his glass. Her fingers brushed his with careless disregard (that lances through his skin) as she took it as though she could, as though he would have no complaint. How right she was, yet he still steepled an eyebrow as though calling her on a further trespass, somehow higher in the estimation of honor's insult than bodily accosting his side.
Her lips touched just where his lips had been, and he swallowed reflexively along with her. Throat dry, but the burn just as present.
Darlington made himself lean back on the couch, head cocked slightly but attentive as she pieced it together, and there was the dismissive, judgemental disregard he'd expected. But it's not as acrid as it used to be either, how it was at the beginning. Her point isn't the complaint about their trespass of her existence and time or the idiocy of their reasons, with which Lethe was not born to weigh, only guard: it was about herself, how it left her.
Rare, quiet confessions. Even in the tones of a beleaguered complaint, rounded first with cursing. It makes the rest almost worst. This was what she brought to him; this was how he betrayed that trust before it even came to words. But it's such a simple thing to answer, to offer repentance and recompense to.
"Here. Give me your hand." It was a careful nuance with which he reached for the one not currently still holding his glass.
Alex isn’t an easy person to love (not like Hellie had been, all light and warmth and unthinking affection). She doesn’t find it easy in herself to love others, either: she’s prickly sides and sharp edges you could cut yourself on, acerbic and defensive and quick to shove others away, but there’s something about Il Bastone which has been sanding down those edges.
It’s not Lethe itself — fuck Lethe, honestly — but there’s something here, in those buttery-yellow lamps, the stained-glass windows, the old floorboards worn soft from a couple centuries’ passage of feet, the sensation of the building alive around them and that it cared about them. Magic. Actual, real magic, and not the society kind that made her want to be sick.
(Enough to make you start to believe in what Darlington had loved about all this shit.)
So she shifts his glass into her other hand, and she reaches out. Her hands are freezing; her circulation was always terrible, her body starving-thin with so little padding on it, then drawn even tauter from the years she’d kept the hunger and the Grays at bay with drugs. But she reaches out, warily, and she takes his hand.
Darlington was patient with the wait for whether she'd acquiesce, a part of him too aware of that strange gapping readiness for that. Waiting. A second like the whisper of eternity. But she reaches out. Given her hand, it is impossible not to see their smallness from a girl who had never been more than that. Malnourished for too many years, undoubtedly both of food and by any number of her prior substances abuse.
Without even needing to tilt her hand, the bones are so apparent. In her fingers, the delicacy of her wrist. Even as he kept himself from stroking the pad of his thumb down the center of her palm at first touch, he waited for it. Not her, but the want. The ease, violence. The thought about how easy it would be to break these bird bones. But nothing comes. No flicker of longing licking at his seams. At least not of that kind.
I will worship you until the end of days, he'd said. An absolution refusing brook even with the predictable. It makes him want to lower himself to that held hand and brush his lips against her knuckles. Fingertips. So fragile, and yet so full of power, too. Promise or abasement? To her, or for himself? He can't tell. His book was set down, second hand joining the first, as he started slowly, gently to knead his thumbs against the thin muscle over the palm of her hand.
He could warm his hands, but it might send his claws into her, too, and the perversity of answering a wound left by the ghosts of frozen dark with another of demonic flame is not lost on him.
Oh, fuck him, of course he’d be good at hand massages too. Darlington’s good at everything he touches.
Even at a base level, even before that demonic fire took anchor, his body still ran hot. (She remembers that, from sharing a bed with him at Black Elm.) So his hands cup around hers and his palms warm her chapped, chilled skin and his thumbs dig into the sore muscles and she, involuntarily, makes a helpless little noise of pleasure.
Embarrassed by it, by how she can feel herself practically melting into Darlington’s hands, she finds herself saying something instead. Something to fill up that space between them; some reminder of her own pain to sting her into alertness, like picking at her old scabs.
“I could never afford to get a massage,” Alex confesses. “My mom was big on acupuncture, but I never got it — just sticking your whole body with needles, what the fuck — but I only got a massage the once. Hellie and I stole some of Len’s money and had a whole-body spa day. Like a treatyoself thing. It was great.”
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letheian) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
epistolaries2023-01-29 12:24 am
no subject
Proper. Respectable. Friendly. (Safe.)
She'd always been made of glass shards, even before the whole glass cabinet was shattered on the ground around them. The better to protect herself, even when she couldn't defend herself at all. He couldn't entirely forgive himself still that he hadn't puzzled that out before she'd shoved it into his overly judgemental hands. This girl who came into hell and carried his soul, inside herself, out again. She's not mad at him. Nor wary of him. She wouldn't be this close if she were.
(It's a balm of desperate relief.
It's concerningly wrong—now.
He wants to hold on to it too tight. In both ways.)
Proper. Respectable. Friendly. (Safe.)
Except then, of course, she does another of the million things he can't entirely predict from so obvious telegraphing he usually could tell from others so quickly and steals his glass. Her fingers brushed his with careless disregard (that lances through his skin) as she took it as though she could, as though he would have no complaint. How right she was, yet he still steepled an eyebrow as though calling her on a further trespass, somehow higher in the estimation of honor's insult than bodily accosting his side.
Her lips touched just where his lips had been,
and he swallowed reflexively along with her.
Throat dry, but the burn just as present.
Darlington made himself lean back on the couch, head cocked slightly but attentive as she pieced it together, and there was the dismissive, judgemental disregard he'd expected. But it's not as acrid as it used to be either, how it was at the beginning. Her point isn't the complaint about their trespass of her existence and time or the idiocy of their reasons, with which Lethe was not born to weigh, only guard: it was about herself, how it left her.
Rare, quiet confessions. Even in the tones of a beleaguered complaint, rounded first with cursing. It makes the rest almost worst. This was what she brought to him; this was how he betrayed that trust before it even came to words. But it's such a simple thing to answer, to offer repentance and recompense to.
"Here. Give me your hand." It was a careful nuance with which he reached for the one not currently still holding his glass.
no subject
It’s not Lethe itself — fuck Lethe, honestly — but there’s something here, in those buttery-yellow lamps, the stained-glass windows, the old floorboards worn soft from a couple centuries’ passage of feet, the sensation of the building alive around them and that it cared about them. Magic. Actual, real magic, and not the society kind that made her want to be sick.
(Enough to make you start to believe in what Darlington had loved about all this shit.)
So she shifts his glass into her other hand, and she reaches out. Her hands are freezing; her circulation was always terrible, her body starving-thin with so little padding on it, then drawn even tauter from the years she’d kept the hunger and the Grays at bay with drugs. But she reaches out, warily, and she takes his hand.
no subject
Without even needing to tilt her hand, the bones are so apparent. In her fingers, the delicacy of her wrist. Even as he kept himself from stroking the pad of his thumb down the center of her palm at first touch, he waited for it. Not her, but the want. The ease, violence. The thought about how easy it would be to break these bird bones. But nothing comes. No flicker of longing licking at his seams. At least not of that kind.
I will worship you until the end of days, he'd said. An absolution refusing brook even with the predictable. It makes him want to lower himself to that held hand and brush his lips against her knuckles. Fingertips. So fragile, and yet so full of power, too. Promise or abasement? To her, or for himself? He can't tell. His book was set down, second hand joining the first, as he started slowly, gently to knead his thumbs against the thin muscle over the palm of her hand.
He could warm his hands, but it might send his claws into her, too, and the perversity of answering a wound left by the ghosts of frozen dark with another of demonic flame is not lost on him.
no subject
Even at a base level, even before that demonic fire took anchor, his body still ran hot. (She remembers that, from sharing a bed with him at Black Elm.) So his hands cup around hers and his palms warm her chapped, chilled skin and his thumbs dig into the sore muscles and she, involuntarily, makes a helpless little noise of pleasure.
Embarrassed by it, by how she can feel herself practically melting into Darlington’s hands, she finds herself saying something instead. Something to fill up that space between them; some reminder of her own pain to sting her into alertness, like picking at her old scabs.
“I could never afford to get a massage,” Alex confesses. “My mom was big on acupuncture, but I never got it — just sticking your whole body with needles, what the fuck — but I only got a massage the once. Hellie and I stole some of Len’s money and had a whole-body spa day. Like a treatyoself thing. It was great.”