Nagi sat by himself in one of the arm chairs intended for one person on the lap of another and no more. Savil had been glancing at him all evening since Bradley had departed, for indeed, Nagi's lap was quite silky and bare all at once! And very smooth, and comfy looking.
As she nibbled the rim of her nearly-drained coffee cup, a pair of hands darted over and snatched her away from such considerations, flicking toy boats bearing jealousy her way on the hazelnut breezes of their steaming cups.
Schuldich promptly plopped her on his lap.
"Watch it! You'll make me spill my coffee!" ::And shouldn't I be the one jealous of you? You ought to be ashamed! Doing such a thing to Nagi-chan! :PPPP::
"You haven't spilled a damn thing in years." ::And I shared, did I not? Tasty little boy! If he gets a bit taller, I'll try sitting on his lap too. It'd just look weird now. In the mean time, I don't care how graceful I've made you or how old you've turned out...::
"Would that the same could be said for you, dear brother." ::Hehe...::
"Cheez-its don't count." ::...::
"Forshame!" ::You sound like a mother now! Nyah nyah nyah!::
::You know what, you're mean.::
::This goes two ways, you know. If I'm mean...::
"Mean mean mean mean mean!" Saying so to the otherwise silence which had fallen, he stretched, hoisted the younger telepath up and placed her in the corner he had been slung in himself, moving one of her arms back behind her head and balancing her cup just so, until she looked like a tiny empress of fae things.
::Be as mushy as you like while I'm gone.::
"Where are you going?" ::For the benefit or our friend.::
"After my rabbit." He hitched his pants a little higher and retreated to the maid-infested bedroom a moment after his coat. Well, one of them. He found in the closet though one he could be sure he had not packed himself.
::Saf...::
::I knew you'd need it. And I'm not even precognitive.::
He blew her a real kiss on the way out, thusly neglecting to zip his black windbreaker up until he had closed the door behind him. Shoeless and with his hair still damp, rolling around his cheeks in long, unruly waves, he leaned against the wall and chanced a single sigh in the gloom. He only barely heard the clank of his sister's cup as she left it on the coffee table and helped herself to the same chair as the telekinetic.
But the darkness glowed in his mind, bubbled and roiled, sang and screamed. All with a thousand white spooks of fleeting flavor he could catch and hold or smash to vapor with his fists. The fragments of the dead in the underworld, seeking redemption or condemnation. The petals of knowing born of the grieving and the living and the truly dead still living unlife in corridors of their acquaintances, now most vivid first without their bodies in a long time.
And you who knows all this comes out here and walks among your fancies without me as if I had been pulled away... baka.
He found himself a place at the crest of the stairs and presided over them from there. The candle flames outdid the moon and not one of the dancing fancies cleaved to them. No, he could almost feel them fluttering around himself, dancing on his skin, seeking his lips -- the one's that Bradley kept perpetually bruised and the ones that only Saffie knew in truth.
But this was Terra, and people got time off since watching over the sparks of their pain came not as an occupation such as demons of true lore would have known, but as a reason to flee home and pray until the morning light split their reason away.
I wonder if you even know about me and funerals, Brad. That even if I'm a bastard this is better reason to call me demon.
So decided such things had not yet come to be, he descended into the bower of the two angels and through the doors of night. Beyond, the staff remained, too distraught to go home, littering the river of the sidewalk with coins thrown off in their weeping. The two moons had started to ride low -- Diana and Cynthia fought with each other and fell to the moonlit grass.
No fireflies abided on the hotel grounds, as if the place stood as too domesticated for them. The lamps here were also unlit. He had nothing to go by save someone else's remembrance he found and followed.
I can find you even with your shields up.
I've come back. Are you surprised? You shouldn't be...
Seen or not so far, he could just make out the single ruby gleam of a far off cigarette. Head bowed, he came to it, and the figure revealed there by proximity, who knowing him or now, started away.
He seated himself beneath a barren pomegranate tree. And said, "Crawford, wait up."
Schuldich wasn't readily visible when Crawford peered in the direction of arching, luminescence limned tree, but he knew he exactly where he was. He had known, in fact, that he would find himself in his lover's company long before he'd ever return to their shared rooms.
Still...That he was there at all surprised him.
He found him to be a pearlescent shadow, at once seductive and dangerous, like something wild. Crawford smiled at him faintly around the sweet-scented cigarette snuggled in one corner of his mouth. He came to a halt just short of the tree's skeletal silhouette, and studied its branches, now waving languidly in the sudden breeze; the resulting rattle and scrape made him think of ancient, dried bones being shaken together.
"Pity there isn't any fruit. We could have shared one." He blew a rippling ring and watched it swim toward the first born of the twin moons, caricaturing her perfectly round figure.
"Ah, well..."
He dropped the cigarette onto the ground, crushing it out with his foot as he resumed his journey out of the known and into uncertainty. Crawford came to rest just inches away from Schuldich's right hand, and gazed down at him as if he'd never seen him before; as if he were a stranger.
He realized then that Schuldich was just that.
Five years had given little to him in terms of knowledge, of understanding Schuldich. Oh, yes, there were the shared interests. There was the sex. He'd never encountered such a powerful telepath in his life; the redhead had spoiled him for other men. Not that the others he indulged himself with weren't worth the trouble...But none of them could compare.
Sometimes, he made himself so sick. He didn't understand why he'd let himself get so attached, become so weak as he had.
All he knew was...
Crawford took two steps away from him and settled himself down on the ground facing Schuldich, and stared intently into those all-knowing cat eyes of his.
"What I wouldn't give to know what you're thinking right about now...What you're REALLY thinking."
Schuldich fanned a ripple of smoke from the space between them into a vanishing insistence of silver buttons winking into glass as away. A handful of cream lassies, sensing the warmth, came and alighted on the branches above them, the feathers of their antenna wavering like threads of yellow-green hair snagged perhaps from an unwary climber of that tree
And there we have pomegranates for ghosts!
He settled back then, after a moment taken to pop the bones in his shoulders. The bruise on his chin he rubbed with his finger tips.
"I'll tell you Bradley, but will you believe me? You have no reason to, now do you? Because I could be considering another's consideration, and who knows what they know? It's all very fucked up really -- memories of memories, thoughts on thoughts that go nowhere except into the tower of vast nothing. Besides, what I'M thinking is alllllll subjective, because I'm thinking exactly what everyone I can taste is thinking. My own thoughts are in there! My thoughts on their thoughts."
A pause. Crawford's eyes seemed more grey than blue suddenly. Tense and unhappy like a bank of summer storms speared with rays of broken yellow light against their will. But he was silent, mind and body. Utterly rapt as if he had never heard such nonsense. Or at least, never expected it.
"I'm thinking your eyes have no color in the dark. And that's a shame, because I've always had a thing for blue eyes, but under the moons, everything is blue, so blue things turn to green or grey. Oh I see the moons and the moons see me... damnit, I used to know that whole poem."
But gone for another reference perhaps, he started to whistle Claire de la Lune with long silvery notes. His fingers came close, painfully close, to Bradley's brow, but side down a curve in space and starlight that mirrored that of his nose (was only his galsses), finally falling on the tip of his cigarette, from which he plucked the ash with barely a wince. This he held up to their winged guests in offering. Their feelers all stirred, but only one came down and sat upon his hand, dipping her feet into the singed clove as if trying to warm her toes.
(OOC: Cream Lassies are the pistachio ice cream moths, rather like luna moths, only with white star markings, often a-symmetrical, and which tend to go about in flocks like birds as they're huge. [So when Schu has one sitting on his hand, it's more dramatic than cute.] Window Panes are a kind of butterfly which will be appearing later. Terrans keep track of the passage of spring and summer using such creatures. Window Panes signify high summer, Cream Lassies early.)
You know that wasn't exactly what I meant...
I believe you are being purposely obtuse.
But all right, Aubrey, I can play too.
Crawford stretched out in the shade with a murmured groan. Above him, he spotted the shadow of an owl, large and sweeping across the twins' radiant faces. "So you have no opinion of your own on anyone or anything, because you can't tell where your thoughts begin and theirs end?"
The owl wheeled through the sky, and with a hushed, quickening flap of its wings, snapped up a moth. He saw the gleam of its golden eyes just before it soared away.
"I must say I'm impressed. Both with you and with the fact that grotesque moths are attracted to you." He waved off one such creature that dove at him, only to miss it entirely; the curse of the nearsighted. The insect landed on Schuldich's knee, and batted its milky-green wings at him, feelers twitching with seeming delight.
"And here I thought I was the only one who couldn't resist you."
In the distance, the full-throated notes of a nightingale's song poured forth, the sound underscored and marred by a keening cry. Crawford lit two more cigarettes and handed one to Schuldich, gesturing with his own towards the hotel.
"You can hear them wailing, as well as I. But what are those maids and pretty porters thinking of as they shed their tears for the poor departed Kira? Are they truly grieving? Or are just a few of them truly sorrowing and the rest merely caught up in the moment; putting on a show to impress the others?"
To this, Schuldich had no reply -- no audible one that is. It amused Crawford that his lover hadn't tapped at the door between them, seeking entrance. He decided to keep his shields raised for just a little longer; having a strictly verbal conversation with a telepath was a novelty indeed.
"Ghosts know all the secrets of our hearts. Do you think Kira is listening now to theirs?"
"If he's not, I am," Schuldich replied, offering a wave of his smoke to the moth still poking at the ash on his hand. It's wings shuddered with delight or disgust. For a time, he fell silent, watching his thing of the heavens roll in that which the earth had wasted away.
Suddenly, he chuckled, scaring off the visitor which had taken to his knee. Fresh ash he tapped onto the ground beside him and the host of the pomegranate tree dove after the miniscule coals.
"They're only attracted to aromatic heat. Saffie told me that. It's why they like smoking sage better than light bulbs. Cigarettes better than the flashlights those maids have. Me better than you since I have a cut on that knee and they can smell the blood. Even if they're vegetarians."
Another long puff towards his guests, who seemed certainly now to be temped to go rolling over in glee had their wings not gotten in the way. Odd to have found the problem with wings on such a night.
"I can still tell you apart, even if you're all happy." He told them. "Just like I can tell the staff apart from here. There's one who's only sad because she has to come to work with glum people tomorrow. It bothers her so much because she used to live on the streets of Amsterdam where she was always sad and she thought those days were behind her. Only one of the door boys feels anything, having inadvertently killed a murderer. It's the one who isn't crying. The other is trying to comfort a female admirer of Kira's, who can't seduce him any longer. The porters are so stoic because now they'll have a new boss. Will he be better or worse than that tyrant? They don't know, they are stoic with nervousness and shaking but they can't weep, most of them. They should be glad for themselves. Tears disgust me. Unless they're real."
"And real tears or rarer than real ghosts."
A faint crackles as he stretched once more.
"I think I'd rather have one of those than... well, I don't know. And it doesn't matter, since I'm going to seduce Aya and then I'll have all I want."
A wet sapphire smile playing on his features as they were blued out by the gaze of light he had to go on while manifesting here as a person, visual for once, rather than a tickle in someone's mind.
"Doesn't that at least sound like me?"
"It sounds exactly like you."
Crawford lifted his cigarette away from his lips and held it up, reducing it to a smoking silhouette against the backdrop of the blue-green aurora. Then, he licked the ends of forefinger and thumb and crushed the twinkling hot end of it out; tossed it away without another thought.
Then he rolled upright, and invaded Schuldich's space, scaring away the delicately exploring moth from the palm of his hand. One hand planted firmly on the hard little lump of earth and grass beside his lover's hip, Crawford had him more or less pinned to the tree's trunk; he smelled of water and cloves and chocolate. Crawford bared his teeth in a smile.
"When you get the incredibly juicy Fujimiya Aya-san spread eagled and naked, you will get your tears, Aubrey. Real ones, full of pain and despair and anger. You will be able to ride the tumultuous wave of his thoughts as you ravage him, and he'll have no way to stop you...Ah, how glorious that sounds to me."
He wet a fingertip with his tongue and slipped it along the curve of Schuldich's lower lip.
"I would weep for you, Schuldich. I would delve up the memories of the most disturbing events of my life if I thought I would shed tear after bitter, sticky tear."
"But I can't."
He leaned in and touched his mouth to Schuldich's, lowering his shields as slowly as a stripper would a veil.
"I can't cry."
"I know, Brad," The telepath replied with a dainty shrug, a surprisingly dainty shrug really. As if they talked of someone they had both known a long, long time before and suddenly realized they had not spoken of for ages. "I knew that the moment you threw me down and let me in you." His lover sank back far enough for their gazes to meet.
It's not like I mind.
No one knocked on anyone's shields. No one even knocked on the hotel doors in the distance or would perhaps, until the scandal had become it's public evening gossip, the Askevron Plaza a place of carnival abandon and notoriety.
"Besides, that's not all I'm interested in. It'd be like a wine taster only going for blush champagne."
Another soft quititude about them, one waiting for the other to make some move, some indication. He himself knew what was expected, what was wanted, what would be another little wonder of himself.
But he did nothing and could not choose between the three.
Why the fuck did I say blush champagne. That's weak, especially for me.
And you're not going to figure me out just looking, Brad.
If that's what you really want.
Brad verses his Id. LOL.
He poked his tongue through his lips then as a tacit request but instead found the smoky sweet fingers seeking the heat of his tongue as they slipped inside and tickled him there. Schuldich held still.
And if that alone was not the stuff of will-o'-the-wisp parties and showers of silver from the cloud kingdoms of Terra.
::I like it when you do that.::
And I like the way you feel.
Crawford petted the velvety carpet that was his tongue, stroked the slick curves of his teeth; occasionally drew his hand back just enough for Schuldich to suck his fingertips, before making another creeping forward advance.
Then he drew his fingers away altogether and replaced them with his tongue. Kissed his cheek when he'd taken his momentary fill of his mouth, then his ear. Snaked a hand around his waist and under his jacket, and laid it flat on the small of his back.
"Besides having my fingers in your mouth, besides having Abyssinian as your own personal sex toy, what do you want, Schuldich?"
Crawford pulled back to look at him, now fully bathed in diffuse light from the circling moons overhead. "What frightens you? What truly makes you happy?"
"What..."
He licked his lips.
"What do you think of me?"
The telepath bucked suddenly in the cage of his lover's arms, catching the hand which brushed his back and drawing it away. His eyes had gone dark, or perhaps it was only that the fluttering halo above had quieted. They seemed no longer jade, but rather deep slivers of dichronic glass only barely showing color, having been turned the wrong way.
They were still together though, free of each other and yet hovering still above the earth. Schuldich's hot, serious look rolled to the ground.
"That's a long story."
He finally said, and with his eyes closed now, he pulled Bradley's fingers back to his lips and set them there... "You don't like long stories." ...a shrug as he kissed the faded cologne upon his wrist.
Tasted smoke again, much more cautious, almost stalling.
::I still don't bite... most of the time. C'mon... just a little more.::
The smooth, tepid digits took him one more time, remaining, even as he slowly, ever so slowly, eased Crawford away from him.
"I wanted whoever you are the moment I felt you in Sweet Sorrow, in the worst way you wouldn't want to understand. You have no right to ask me those other things, what I want and don't want, you know. Because of what you were then, and later, and will be someday when we are like Kira -- nothing but memories. It's sick, really. It goes from there. In the mean time, I only want one thing."
He yawned.
"Carry me to bed. I'm tiiiiired."
Crawford calmly plucked Schuldich's wandering hands away from his neck, and stood up, giving his clothing a quick brush down with his hands. His expression was controlled to the point of being placid, but when he raised his eyes to Schuldich's again, there was no doubt how furious he was.
"Are you? Poor Schuldich. I suppose you won't be much of a fuck tonight, then."
And that's all you really want, isn't it? A steady fuck. A place to lay your head. Someone to take care of you.
He canted him a speculative look. "Or is that what you really want? Is that what you're afraid of? Being alone?"
That got him a scowl, to which Crawford gave him a nasty smirk. Inside, behind his shields, he was fuming, and frustrated over the fact that Schuldich saw fit to probe his deepest secrets, but wouldn't share any of his own.
He wondered, and not for the first time during the five years they'd been together, if the German really did love him at all.
But then, love doesn't exist, remember?
I am a damned fool...
But Schuldich is a bigger one for shunning me...
He took out a cigarette and lit it.
"You want to go to bed, Schuldich? Then go. I have better things to do with my time."
With that, Crawford spun on his heels and stalked off across the yard.
Nagi had been contemplating making a departure of his own when Schuldich took his leave of them; after all, it seemed his services weren't going to be needed by anyone around there that night. But, of course, before he could even get to his feet, he found himself trapped by the slight weight of one little herald. He couldn't help but wonder if she'd read his mind. The smile she gave him only confirmed his suspicions.
The maids took that opportunity to leave, bustling out in a wordless, silent line of somber, stiffly starched black. Savil took that opportunity to wrap her arms around his neck and hug him as if he were her new favorite stuffed toy; he himself felt like someone had plopped a doll on his lap and left her there.
Problem was, he had no idea what to do with a doll, real or otherwise. But he didn't push her away. He didn't care -- but was mildly curious all the same.
"You weren't the one I was intending to play with tonight, Savil-chan."
"Aren't I enough like my brother for you?" Saffie giggled as she pulled out a few of the wrinkles that had formed under her when she leaned down for her embrace. "He just held you, didn't he? Aren't I allowed to?"
With sweet insistence against moving, she hitched her legs up so they draped across the arm chair and left her toes hanging in midair. Nagi, of course, could have thrown her across the room and out a window. But he didn't.
He seldom did.
She knew why.
"I am not just being silly and I am NOT thinking such sukebe things! Naaaaaagi-chan! We are not all that disingenuous!"
::No, you didn't. You weren't there, what are you...::
::I had Farfie do it.::
::Liebechen... but I...::
::I know, I know everything you know, and you know everything I do so...::
Mine.
"You didn't get mad at me LAST night."
This said, she finished settling herself in and reached one hand up to smooth the back of Nagi's silky, damp hair.
The image of him lying in Schuldich's arms whilst the older man had his way with him popped into his head, and Nagi promptly banished it into the deepest, darkest reaches of his mind and locked it away with all the rest of his conquests and conquerings. Such things he did not want her to see.
Never mind that he knew in the deepest, darkest reaches of his heart that Schuldich had probably revealed the minute details of their most recent encounter -- while said encounter was going on, most likely.
The thought of it made his insides furiously twist into knots. He fought to hold his emotions back. Tossing the coffee table at the farthest wall wasn't an option when a child was present.
Except Savil wasn't a child, not really. Not quite.
"I go where I'm bid, Savil-chan, just like the good little toy that I am."
He reached out and rested his fingertips lightly on her springy curls, touching them as if they might wilt under greater pressure. "I know the score, little herald. I know how they see me, for all your brother's assurances to the contrary."
Nagi bit his tongue, instantly regretting his lapse in judgment. Such things he should have not said before her, and not because she might tell her brother. But because...He feared corrupting her; feared stealing away that precious innocence of hers.
He reckoned that if he could perceive auras, hers would be pure, brilliant light.
And his?
His was better left unmentioned and ignored.
Nagi withdrew his hand and laid it back on the arm of the chair where he'd had it before. "Is this how we're going to spend the evening? With you on my lap and petting my hair?"
"If you want. I'm quite enjoying myself, aren't you?"
It was nice to ask, so she did, just because. Maybe it made her feel better or got her a few sure little teases when her brother returned. But her brother wouldn't be about for a bit yet she supposed. Saffie more felt the slightest tilt of a nod under her frolicking fingers. Nagi's lips parted as if he honestly intended to say something.
It was all she could do NOT to kiss him.
But such were the Marlow children, eager, but smitten with the idea of waiting all for the flavor of ages regrets and certain sudden sugar that only comes after careful minding of the season in which it is pulled forth.
"Do you know everything, Nagi-chan? Ange moy? Or are you having a good time only pretending to be an angel?"
To which she laughed, insisting a jest.
"And even if you are nothing but a dolly, aren't you having a good time in your little dollhouse with your pretty china teacups and your candy-sized CDs? Well, outside of sitting here with me? I think you are, even if I am sorry I haven't got much to do with it. So what does it matter? Why should Aya and Ken be sad because they are assassins? Why should the door boys who accidentally did in Kira's murderer be ashamed? It's all relative, like a sight of the stars. But you knew that, I'm sure someone told you this before. And if you were wondering, my aura is very pale grey-blue like the sky on a rainy morning. I don't know why though, as it has nothing to do with who I am or what I've done."
(OOC: Ange moy, Russian "my angel". I think Russian nicknames are cute. That and no one in WK fandom knows them :P)
"But morning skies are pure, and new, rain or no. So I'm not surprised."
Her fingers trailed briefly along the curve of his ear, but he didn't flinch away -- not even when she dared to tickle him under the chin before resuming her combing of his hair.
"Am I having a good time? I don't know. Would I leave them?" Here he paused, and a faraway look lit up his eyes as he lost himself in a memory. "I thought I would once, but..." He shook his head, shifting his attention back to the present and her. "It has its good points and its bad, living here with Schwartz. My power is more destructive than theirs, but they aren't afraid of me, because they know..."
Nagi tore his eyes away from her clear, knowing ones. He self-consciously picked at the slender fillet of lace edging her sleeve.
They know I won't hurt them. They feed me, clothe me, house me, give me money to buy things I want. And I don't...
I don't have to...
...To be taken care of.
"It's my power they want more, not me."
And I know I'm not telling you anything you aren't aware of.
The boy raised his eyes to hers again, and he shrugged ever so slightly. "Everyone usually wants something from me."
"What do you want from your fallen angel, Savil?"
(ooc: Datenshi, if you will recall from your KP tape, supposedly means fallen angel. Or that's how the theme song is translated on my tapes. :P)
Savil said nothing, thought nothing towards Nagi. Her shields had fallen up for now. She didn't know why, it was just to see, if maybe, somehow he could be like her and know, and then, in the pastel drifting of time perhaps they would have their places on the shore switched and greet each other backwards.
It was worth a try. Everything seemed to have gone so very slow and sweet and dim. She wished she could will the torches down like he could. It just seemed more fitting, being as it was very late or very early -- time for all good children to go to bed, but since none were about, yes, the hour stayed between them flowing still and brilliant like day turned into night or backwards.
She had come so close to him she found without a tingle of her mental sense she could smell her brother on him... Nagi... even his quick rinse had not dispelled the that sense of more familiar skin.
Her eyes came open then as if awakened. She knew. She knew this did not bother her but that she liked it...?
Nagi reached up and patted her head. He must have thought he had startled her somehow.
"Gomen nasai... betsuni... watashi no datenshi. Nene... onegai..."
The door without any invitation, came open and the elder telepath shortly stalked into the room and up the stairs without so much as a spoken word or offer of a glance towards the two children. The dog whined and shortly came half-rolling down the staircase.
Saffie sat now steeped not only in Nagi's warmth but a tingle of mute impressions from her brother. Some she had taken herself, rather than been offered. Even if the lap she found herself in was so much kinder to her peace of mind.
But I don't really worry, do I? I've never had to. Never been afraid until the other day.
"I want to do this again sometime." This insisted after a long soliloquy of embers, and after it, she brushed her lashes to his brow before retreating into the gloom of the stairwell, which uttered, in her voice, "Oyasumi," Footsteps, nothing more for that.
Outside of the windows of her quarters stood a garden seeming made of dark ice wrought by vaporous things, cold and asleep like their masters now.
::Heh, that's one way I guess.:: From the silhouette that barely ticked with breath. ::You know what I asked for, but throw me out if you want.::
::I was gonna steal you anyway.::
::I AM tired. I really am. It sucks.::
::Well, don't' worry about it.::
Her shoes left by the door, she climbed up under the canopy of her bed, but he caught her by the back of the neck before she could lay a hand on him. Then he smiled, and having pressed her back against the pillows, threw off his jacket and curled up with his head against her pinafore.
::The lace is all tickly.::
::I'll try not to move too much.::
But he was already asleep.
By the time Crawford returned some hours later, the party had moved to the other side of the heavens, and so the light of the beauteous moons no longer silvered their windows and rooms. It was all subtle, glowing teal and mysterious shadows now; not even a trickle of candlelight with which to see by.
Nagi had since retired, the door to his room firmly shut and locked and barred. He wasn't having anything do with Crawford or Schuldich that evening, no; nor was he having anything to do with sleep. Crawford knew that the boy was lying on his back, eyes wide open in the still gloom -- no doubt about Savil and the way she'd acted towards him. One didn't need to be a mindreader to be able to guess at the way one would be thinking -- especially if one knew the subject rather well. Nagi wasn't as inscrutable as that.
Schuldich however...
I don't want to think about him. I don't want to talk to him.
If I had my way, I wouldn't see him in the morning.
And yet, Crawford went to the Marlows' bedroom anyway.
For a time, and Crawford didn't know if it was long or short of a while, he stood in the open doorway and watched the two of them. Noted how his lover was curled up around his sister like a heartbroken little boy would his mother.
It came to him then in an epiphanic burst: Schuldich did not need him, did not care. Everything was a lie.
Or maybe most of it was.
But where Savil was concerned, Crawford knew there the truth lay for Schuldich. She was the one who knew him the best, who always would. She was the one who held the redhead's affection.
And he was not.
With a resigned sigh, Crawford shut the door as quietly as he could. Then he retreated down the hallway to the room he called his own, and fell onto his bed fully dressed.
It was a long time before he fell asleep.
The sun rose, but no one in Valdemar with it, or at least, very few. Ken, home at last, made no exception of himself for some time.
He didn't dare use the elevator with his beloved still fast asleep in their bedroom. He had no idea if the thing squeaked or not and frankly, he didn't trust it with his weight just yet. Stairs were fine. He stood naked in the empty room beside the bathroom for awhile, skating his feet over the floor after signs there might have been a purpose to this empty space once, but nothing could he find but patches warmth from the spilled milk morning. He gave up, pulled on some jeans and silk V-neck tee. The shirt left him feeling pleasantly shower damp all day and the jeans needed broken in. He merely enjoyed not matching.
Not to mention the surprise which awaited him in the living room.
"Ohayo Yuriko-chan! Fiona-chan!"
Fiona glared at him from under her drooping kerchief, but nodded and went back to bustling about the amply furnished table.
"You make real good coffee," the footwoman insisted to her with a wink before flopping down on one of the mismatched chairs that had been fetched for her so Ran might have the one meant for him. "And Ohayo to you too, sleepy-head."
"Oh C'mon, it's not THAT late."
"Nah, not at all. Just kidding! It's your koi who's the sleepy one!"
Ken rolled his eyes and helped himself to a cruller from the rather oddly arranged tray. He could not help but wonder what odd sort of monument his servant girl had been attempting to replicate, but at any rate, she had made it rather impossible to extract a single pastry without upsetting another.
Small revenge. She thought to herself, seeing him fiddle helplessly with her creation.
As for the Hidaka-dono, he got away with a croissant and a cruller who had been locked together in a rather obscene fashion.
"Ah, my Ran's tired. He had a rotten day yesterday. Let him go."
Just then, the shower started to run above them and the pipes which fed it sang like a flock of unhappy ducks.
"Might want to have that looked at." Yuriko pulled it cinnamon stick from her cup and sucked on it loudly before gesturing to the guest chair across from her. "Go on! Siddown, kiddo! You ordered the pastries, you might as well eat them!"
Fiona rather grudgingly took up a seat. "You're too kind." Though, as if she had been expecting such a request, she dove to the bottom of the doughnut quarter of the tray and retrieved a pink frosted cream.
Ken smiled at her anyway and tried the coffee, which was doubtlessly strong enough to do in sleep in increments of weeks rather than hours if imbibed in quantities larger than a scant cup. "Thank you for fixing breakfast, Fiona-chan."
"Stop calling me that," muttered, but between what he said next unto his old friend.
"What are you doing over here so early? 'fraid I'll get into trouble already?" He asked, poking Yuriko's cheek.
"Well, aside from that, Carly wanted me to send you her regrets. She's busy today. The murder at the hotel and all."
"Yeah, one of the guests said something about that last night. Oh well. She never could resist a good wake, could she?"
All three of them giggled a bit.
"But, she also gave me this, if you want a look." Yuriko reached under the table, only to be bopped be one of her host's bare feet, to which rubbed a pretend bump as she handed him her papers. "Job listings, if your boyfriend's really interested. Not everyone who's hiring, just the ones who have signs in the windows."
He took a moment to flip through them, which turned into several as keeping them out of the icing on his plate proved more of a challenge than he had expected.
"Chez Blaise is looking for waiters partial to frilly aprons... I doubt he'll go for that... Askevron plaza needs a new porter... wait, that's the hotel that...! Haha, very funny. Claire's wants... HEY! Claire's still in business!"
"The old girl always said she'd be around even after the Villa closed or turned into a monastery."
"Well what do you know! I guess I made her happy. She's probably laughing her ass off right now and scaring the customers."
"Doubt that will keep them away from her double fudge malt ripple with almonds."
"Wouldn't surprise me." He folded up the papers though and laid them across his lover's vacant chair. "I don't want to suggest anything myself, I actually don't know what he usedta do before we met so..."
No one had anything they dared say to that.
"So, he's going job hunting... what about you?"
"Calling distributors I guess. We have to HAVE flowers before we sell them, and I don't think we can grow them ALL here, besides the fact they'd actually have to BLOOM before we sold them. We'd look pretty selling passing off bouquets of rose shoots. Or maybe... I should look up the names of those people I gave the IOUs too... I mean, we've still got the records for now and they're in... I think I know where they are but then again where are we going to put all this! Not just that we gotta move the furniture but... good GOD~! I need a secretary." His head almost made it to his hands and his giggles nearly felled the actual seriousness of the situation of his scatter brain, but just then, he caught the knowing smiles that had come to his two girls. "What have you two done?"
"We're prepared for this eventuality is all."
"Yeah, no way you and grumpy bear could take care of the whole damn villa," Fiona yawned before hastily getting up from her seat and dashing downstairs after something.
Ken pouted in her absence but fell back to a grin the moment he realized her returning footsteps were mingled with a second set.
The girl she shortly produced seemed to be about thirteen, albeit an phenomenally well developed thirteen. He bit his lip for thinking over such things at once, but considering the black and dusty rose dress she wore, it was hard to miss -- ruffles in all the right places after all. She looked like she had come from the wake or a ball or both. Her hair was short and silver or the very paleST platinum, depending on the way the light struck it, and her eyes dark but showing flecks of mica light. She bowed before him.
"Ohayo gozaimasu, Hidaka-dono." Her words had all the stumbles of one who had only learned Japanese for a special occasion, but despite her petite frame she had a most distinct and brassy voice with just a bare twang of an Eastern US accent. "Watashi no Onamae wa Blackworth Primera desu."
"Bur everyone calls you Prim!" Yuriko declared, propping her chin up on her hand and grinning, her own blue eyes taken soft focus and creamy with warm regard.
"Well... yes." Prim acknowledged before sliding over to the table. She moved so smoothly she did not seem to have any feet beneath her petticoat.
"Nice to mettcha, Prim!" Ken replied.
And shortly got to watch her and his old friend share a few quick kisses.
"YURIKO! What's this action! Blackmailing your girlfriend into coming here! I'm ashamed!" A teasing flick of his tongue shot her way.
"Blackmail? Her? No, if anyone, I'd go for you. The hotel room in..."
"Eeek! No! That's enough! OK! You win!"
Primera giggled. "And I came her because I wanted to. I know you can't pay me to start off, but I don't want paid at ALL! Mr. Hidaka! Please let me work here. I really need to."
"Well, I just gotta check with my..." his cheer evaporated once again, another mood swing. She knew what had stopped him suddenly the middle of his acceptance. "Wait... did you say your last name was Blackworth?"
A nod.
"So you must be Lady Jessica's younger daughter."
"Actually... I'm her older daughter. I'm twenty-five."
His jaw would have fallen perhaps at this, had it not been fixed together with his bite of cruller. Not that he had any intention of doing anything different about his decorum, but somehow he thought it better not to chastise himself until his mouth was no longer full, not that chewing with an embarrassed grimace was easy... "Oh I... ah... oh gosh what a jerk I am so I..."
"No problem. I know I'm short. Insanely short. There's no other way to put it!" And with a well-resigned and mordant little tilt of her lips, she swung away from the table. "I also know what a snob my mom is, and that she may not leave you alone if she finds out I've come here to get away from her. But I worked in her boarding house for years! I know how to manage things, at least a little. Getting away from her is enough, if you think I'm worth the trouble. You can pay me with that if you want to think of it that way. It's not a little to ask."
Ken snatched up an empty cup from the coffee tray and filled it up. "Well, the more the merrier. I say we still ask Ran. Provided you two don't kiss in the hallway too much."
Ran was not one to laze around the shower. With him, it was in and out in 10 minutes time; any longer, and he would relax too much. Would end up more in the mood to crawl into bed with his nightmares than he would be to do anything else.
Today, with the screaming, honking pipes, he made no exception to that rule. Even though he would have liked nothing more than to go back upstairs and sleep the rest of the day away. His night had been just as cruel and harsh as his day had been, for it had occurred to him that while things had changed between him and Ken, they somehow had not. He was no closer to him than he had been before, for all the occasional, mostly chaste kisses and the fact that they shared a bed. Ran had lain awake for the better part of the night, clutching at Ken's hand and mulling over their situation.
And now, at the heart of the day, he was still at a loss over what to do. Ran reckoned he was wasting his time, and that nothing would ever change.
And he wondered: Was he truly Ken's lover, or was he simply holding the nightmares at bay? The white knight of Aya's fantasies once more, and all for a young man whom he loved, but who was even more of an enigma than he had been before.
Ran, now dressed in a long-sleeve grey T-shirt and black jeans, hastily tamed his damp, rumpled mop into some semblance of order. Then he scattered it from its near-perfectly smooth shape with a few artful flicks of his fingers, eartails tucked behind his ears because they bugged him today. As he made his exit from the bathroom, he saw that the door to the spare room was open. Saw the bare, sunsplashed wooden floor and blank white walls beyond it. It was a canvas begging to be transformed, and he was the artist who would do it.
He could see it fully in his mind: a couple of mats; a burner and plum incense; the equipment needed for the tea ceremony and a chest to store it all in. All of those things and one other very important item. It was the acquisition of said item that would be easy -- getting permission to bring it to Terra was another story.
But as he'd learned, there were ways around every rule.
He closed the door, and padded off up the stairs, noting the murmur of many voices on the air outside the living room. Ken's he recognized, and Fiona's. Yuriko's after some probing of his memory, but that fourth one...
He opened the door and crossed the threshold in time to take in the strange young woman at Yuriko's side, and the pastry sculpture in the middle of the table, before he heard Ken's answer to the group.
Sliding a sullen roll of his eyes at Fiona, he walked over to the coffee tray and picked up an empty cup before Ken even noticed he was there. He nudged it towards Ken, nodding at the pot in his hands as a request that he pour for him.
"Provided who doesn't kiss too much?"
"Us!" Yuriko and Prim chorused before taking to a pair of giggle storms such as only lover most sickeningly smitten with one another engage in. Ken shook his head and mouthed a few teasing words of them to his boyfriend as he filled his cup. But he didn't pass it to him straight off. Instead, he scooted it away and offered his warm, fuzzy regard instead. "Ohayo, sweetheart." At little pause, where they fought to find each other's thoughts. A fight with pillows as far as Ken was concerned.
Saaaaaaaa my baby's in a bad mood as usual.
He threw him some sad eyes then.
You're mad because you have to watch the two of them be all over each other first thing in the morning and you can't.
Don't need to be a fuckin' telepath to find that out.
But I can fix it! Kinda.
He leaned over and kissed Ran's forehead through his bangs.
'cause you'll get embarrassed if I ask you how you are in front of all these people. I know you.
Only then did the coffee cup return to the redhead's possession. "Actually, I know this is kinda short notice, but Prim here would like to be our secretary."
"The catch is my mother might go after your throats for allowing me to associate with 'common people'."
This accented with a few gagging sounds that happened to be disturbingly indicative of common people.
"It's up to you," Ken insisted. "Since I know we've already had some... interesting incidences with the help."
Fiona growled behind her milk with traces of coffee in it.
"I wholeheartedly agree, Fiona-chan," Ran muttered darkly, casting a glower in her direction. She snarled, then pointedly shifted in her chair so that her back was to him. He then turned his appraising eyes upon Prim and Yuriko.
A pair of lovebirds. How wonderful. Just what I need.
But he sighed, and picked a croissant out of the heap, it being the least sugary confection he could find. Dipped one end of it in his coffee, and nibbled.
"All right, you can stay on as our secretary. I suppose we'll have a need for someone to keep up with our correspondence and accounts. And I could always use some help in keeping her in line." This said with a nod in Fiona's direction, for which she harrumphed and mumbled something no doubt vile under her breath.
A cheer broke out from the sweethearts' corner of the living room, hugs and kisses exchanged between each other before Yuriko grabbed Ken in a celebratory bear hug. Ran barely noticed, for his mind had shifted to matters of a more practical bent.
There's room for us to expand beyond only being a florist shop if we wanted...
Or rather, if Ken wants.
"Thank you, Ran!" Prim exclaimed as she made her way over to him. "You don't know it, but you've practically saved me."
He cocked a brow at the beaming young woman before him, but otherwise said nothing; how many times had he heard similar words from other damsels-in-distress? His reticence didn't faze her, however.
"Um...I wasn't exactly kidding about my mother. She can be quite formidable."
"So can I, Prim-san." He took another nibble of his coffee soaked pastry. "Besides, this business will be partly mine. I will hire whomever I want to help me run it."
And to hell with your mother. No one's going to dictate to me anymore.
"Okay, then." She gave him a brisk, friendly sort of nod, and, after taking up a cream cheese-and-cherry danish, made her way back to her Yuriko.
Ran turned his attention to his cup, taking a greedy gulp of the brew and subsequently regretting that he had. His lip curled at the bitter taste of it, hitherto disguised as it was by the flavor of the bread.
Is this coffee or tar?
I'm NOT taking another straight taste of this stuff again.
"I'm sure Ken told you I'm going out to look for work today. Anyone have some suggestions about where I might begin my search?"
"Well, what with this being the middle of Terran nowhere, the pickings aren't what you'd call great," Yuriko sighed only to have her girlfriend fwap her on the arm for being so discouraging. "Unless you like service jobs!" She corrected abruptly earning a second none to gentle tap and a glower from Fiona who had not seemed to be able to glower any more than she did already.
"Cut that out!" Ken requested all too placidly of the three of them while doing his best to surreptitiously nudge to cream in his boyfriend's direction. He knew a what-the-hell-did-you-do-to-this-coffee look when he saw one. So did Fiona who brushed the sugar in that direction, only to upset it onto the floor. "Well, they're right. Kinda. Carly had some of the openings written up for you. They were on..."
Their servant, who was on the floor after the lid to the sugar bowl, witnessed a very interesting spectacle just then. The Hidaka's-dnono's fingers, destined only to point at first, came and hung stupefied in the air beside the seat of his beloved's chair and the crumple of mint- green paper peering out from under his jeans. Said fingers drummed a second with naught beneath them, pure fidgeting.
"They're right here!"
And Ken didn't just pull the papers out from under Ran.
He patted his bottom when he was done. Just a tap, almost a reprimand for his being silly and sitting on notes.
Fiona snatched up the tiny porcelain lid along with a quarter cup of sugar, dumped it all on the table and skittered away, presumably after the dustpan and broom.
Ran had started when he felt Ken's hand on his rear, had been equally consternated when Fiona leapt up from her perch on the floor and darted away. What in the hell had gotten into the both of them? Especially Ken -- who hadn't dared to touch him at all like that before. It had always been him who had made the overtures, however clumsy and inappropriate, and always in vain.
But no more. He liked to kiss him, liked to hold him, but...Ken always went so cold if he did, always pulled away, and he always ended up...frustrated. He wanted to believe that it was all because of his earlier poor treatment at Kaze's hands, but now he wasn't so sure if that was the only reason. Not that it mattered, for it was too late to rethink things. He was there, and there he would probably always be -- in love with a boy who didn't quite love him and unable to do anything about it.
He idly wondered if bringing Aya there would be such a good thing after all.
Ran set the cup on the table and turned his full attention on the papers in his hand. "Actually, before...Everything...I worked as a waiter."
In two different restaurants...
He shuffled the papers together into a more orderly stack on his lap, then began to thumb through them.
"Porter? No." He wasn't going to carry anyone's luggage around and be ordered about.
"Waiter? That's...Oh, no. I don't do 'frilly'." He gave Ken a look as if to say, "Not even for you."
Bartender, dressmaker (which made him think Carly was having a bit of a laugh -- or so he hoped), shop clerk, massage therapist, all of those ads were summarily dismissed (though he passed the latter to Ken, with a comment that maybe they should pass that along to the disgruntled, now unemployed whores).
Then he came upon the ad from Claire's. It was not laid aside as the others had been, rather Ran held it up between forefinger and thumb, and read it. And reread it.
Then he passed it over to Ken.
"The ad just says that they need a clerk and names a wage, but it doesn't say what sort of clerk. What sort of place is it?"
"It's an ice cream shop," Ken replied, trying to make himself glance up from his cruller, despite the fact little of his cruller remained.
And avoiding the eyes of the boy who's backside he had so recently... err... encroached upon?
OK... ooops. I'm sorry.
He sneered at himself with his lips lost in the coffee cup. Looks like we both mess up then. You're mad 'cause I wouldn't let you before is all. C'mon. It's just a little pat, I didn't mean anything by it.
And I wasn't the one who sat on...
Yuriko shortly offered protest to his earlier assertion, "And ice cream shop! Now that's the understatement of the season if I ever heard one!" And then to Ran, her eyes lost in a frosty chocolate rapture. "Claire's has the tastiest, creamiest, fluffiest, I'll-never-live-another-hot-day-without-it ORGASMIC ice cream ever!"
She then regarded her doughnut with the same sort of look children gave Brussels sprouts, as if the little ringlet no longer pleased he now that she had taken to thoughts of Claire's goods.
"And pretzel cones!" Primera chimed in.
"Mint chocolate chip on one of those after a swim! Oooooh!" Ken, who still hid behind his coffee, blew bubbles in it with his laugh. "Now look what you've done! I want some right now!"
"No way!" his secretary insisted, "Dark chocolate raspberry with marshmallow."
"Or French Vanilla apricot rolled in sprinkles!" Yuriko sighed, pining away and looking ready to sob.
"Whatever happened to just chocolate?" Fiona shrugged as she re-appeared beside the table and started sweeping up her mess.
"Claire's has twelve kinds of chocolate ice cream if you total up what they serve on different days of the week."
"Thirteen if you count the All Saint's Day Fatal Hallow's Brew. That's got more chocolate than milk in it!" Ken exclaimed. And then sighed, faced Ran, looking the puppy who knows it has made a mess of his master's shoes. "The thing about Claire's though, besides Claire herself is well... lotsa people stop by, and from everywhere in Valdemar. It's the landmark. More people usedta go there then the church! And you're bound to get a lot of umm... attention."
"This," Prim concluded, "Is assuming Claire hasn't gone off on one of her... err... eccentric tirades?"
A tiny smile darted across Ran's lips at that, one squelched when he finished off the last of his croissant. "I find I'm becoming used to the notion of eccentricity. Terra seems to breed people who are so more often than aren't." Ran set his cup down again, and looked from face to face in the chuckle-smattered pause that followed, his gaze lingering upon Ken when at last it settled on him. The same tiny smile graced his features, glinting wistfully in his eyes.
It took an effort for him to look away. He went back to shuffling through the papers, simply to give himself a diversion.
"I'll probably get a lot of attention no matter where I go, being the companion of the Villa's owner. So...even though I had thought to check out the restaurants in town exclusively, I don't think it will hurt me to go there too."
Even though I don't like ice cream...
What if I have to taste it all, on the principle of a salesman knowing his product?
.....
He pulled the ad out for Chez Blaise, and regarded it with a worried frown. I guess I might find myself in frills after all.
The image of himself wearing something pink and chiffon and layered in ruffles in public popped into his head, thus making his stomach do somersaults in disgust. The ad fluttered to the small stack on his lap like a dead leaf.
On second thought...No.
Ran set the papers on the table next to his cup. "But I won't be finding anything if I don't leave now, so..." He got to his feet, made an awkward little bow to the group, then looked over at Ken. He fancied all eyes were on him, expectant, and he had an idea just what it was they wanted him to do.
But he couldn't bring himself to kiss him -- especially not in front of everyone, so instead he lowered his head next to Ken's, his lips turned towards his ear, and whispered, "I...I'll be back before dinner."
Then he kissed him, quickly, on the soft skin behind his ear. Stood up and walked out.
It was too early and too hot, but he had gone out anyway, embracing desperation, someone he figured he was friends with, or at least the fuckmate of. He kept expecting to hear cicadas, he had passed so many lazy afternoons knowing their songs, and knowing their symphonies and wishing to break their green glass bodies into little tiny pieces and leave them scattered all over the ground.
No such things troubled Valdemar.
He, on the other hand, paused along the cracks in the sidewalk, sought out the tiny coin that was winking in his eyes and kicked it as far out into the street as he could manage, taking a tearing of thistle leaf with it. No one had here bothered to pluck the tenacious daffodils and weeds from the tickle lines in the concrete. But no one fell, because there had never been one square of perfectly flat paving in Valdemar, there never would be, and they seemed to like the meadow people who came to town as much as they liked the Antiterrans.
In the shade of one of the rust-streaked birches that stood grasping the shade of the alleys and bearing the lover scars of better days, he stopped and combed the hair from his eyes.
Shoulda put on my headband before I booked it.
The tree he stood beneath rustled and a carriage passed out on the road -- two of the old gentry out to wander the water-dirty glass and peeling paint of the antique shops who now lived in the rows of the Victorian houses built years after their namesake and in a place she would have fainted to know of. They had been past their prime the minute they were built. Now they only looked ready to creak if he would follow those two inside, find the old bottles, and the dolls left to cabinets. The rustled kettles and the attic midnight guests from the past.
He started walking again, hands stuffed in his pockets, and he sang, because he liked the way the people he passed tasted when they heard him.
Rhiannon rings like a bell through the night
And wouldn't you love to love her
She rules her life like a bird in flight
And who will be her lover
All your life you've never seen
A woman -- taken by the wind
-- Would you stay if she promised you heaven
-- Will you ever win
All on a lazy summer day, too slow for ordinary words or even long drives out on the countryside which would, as they always did, end up nowhere, under the denim sky, listening for door mice.
He swung down the slope alongside a chipped brick building and came through the basement into a health food store which, from the street, had not a sign of life, and nothing to even suggest it was there unless one was deliberately looking for the washed out numbers painted on the curb.
He frankly didn't remember the place, and had to wonder how he'd gotten there now. The place was rife with stunned innuendo, the airy gasps of people who knew each other's faces but not their names, wondering over what could not be wondered over. He considered joining them, but in the end went back to the street.
Small town gossip had a flavor as spicy verdant and oaky as the true physical decay of the visuals -- the townhouses standing arm in arm despite that beyond them and their little fib of a city emptiness abided like a spirit in their iron-bothered trees, only now and again graced with a side road that veered off into someone's neighborhood where there would have been children playing in the woods, after all they icky bugs that made nice toys...
Something he just wasn't in the mood for.
He had come almost to one of the many edges of Valdemar, one of the ones near the reality office, but his appointment to go through the church wasn't for many hours yet, so he spun on his heals and went the other way.
And how he had missed it the first time, ah, that was left to the mystique of the normal, the ability of such places of this to hide whatever they liked in plain sight, so the ladies in their princess garbs and the men in their overalls and ruffled could always, always laugh and remark how delightful serendipity had made five minutes of their lives.
He went straight into the shop and bought it.
Then he remembered he hadn't ever used one before, went back inside, bought a pair of gloves and while he was at it, lent himself whatever the clerk knew of it.
IT was a bike. The most ordinary bike in the world. No hand breaks, no, speed shifts; no re-engineered kinks in it's body, nothing fancy about it's wheels. Not a touch of modern efficiency. It squeaked. Its seat was very uncomfortable. It was just an ordinary bike with a frame tinted the color of cream soda bottles.
"I'm in love," Schuldich declared.
He had never seen anything so utterly frivolous and unsafe. At least not in his possession for any substantial length of time. He purchased it at once for what he found to be a more than reasonable price.
Then he rode it speeding down the first hill he came too. And ran himself into the half-dead rhododendron someone had permitted to grow into the sidewalk, since after all, the house behind it was just as scraggly and unsettled by its boundaries. Spitting petals and not a hint of apologies, he pulled his new toy back up and sped back the way he had come from for the second time that day, the bell chiming in his hand, the taste of chocolate coke playing on his mind.
"Ohayo, Aya-kun!"
He waved and pedaled up beside him.
Of course, Ran had seen him coming before he'd even hailed him, and he had drawn to a halt directly in front of the thrift store whose outdoor bins of long unsold clothing and knick-knacks he'd been rummaging through. All at once, he felt as if he were no longer in Valdemar but in some centuries old European city; Amsterdam, perhaps -- a place where bikes were the preferred method of transport. And Schuldich wasn't his most reviled enemy but some free-spirited student, coming to meet his friends for an afternoon of strong coffee and joints and fevered debating in one of the many cafes that dotted that fair city.
But then, those violet eyes went from soft and daydreaming to icy and furious. He became aware again of where he was, and who the man with the perpetually unkempt hair was, and his blood turned to rivers of fire in his veins. Tension fairly radiated from his lean frame. Schuldich remained all smiles and goodwill.
"I'm not going to ask you what you're doing here, and why you DARED to approach me, because I don't give a damn. I loathe you, and you know why I do."
His hands curled into hard fists against his thighs. Ran was so tempted to strike him, so desperate to, that he very nearly screamed.
To his credit, he didn't do either. Merely mentally passed along his wish that the German would die painfully and soon; that Schuldich only laughed at him made him that much angrier.
"Stay the fuck away from me, Schuldich."
Ran rigidly stalked off down the sidewalk at a fast clip, still tense and very wary and expecting him to attack.
"I wasn't laughing at YOU!" Schuldich protested, dismounting his bike, which would have been a perfectly mundane action, except that he had never gotten off a bike before, had neglected to help himself to any ideas regarding getting off a bike, and lost his balance straight into an inconvenient tree.
He staggered backwards then, amid the clatter of his bike falling and skidding along the sloping stones. The hand which grazed the place where his forehead had known bark came back bloodied and dirty.
Again, shoulda put on my headband before I booked it.
But then again, there were times in the world even he could forgive his mistakes and those of others.
The clear blue raspberry wellspring of Aya's incarnate revenge made the present moment one of those few, fit to be poured in a decanter and kept as a reminder, until Saffie found it old and sweet or the both of them lost patience with its novelty. He raised his gaze to find the other redhead had stopped between a pair of grates and even while he tingled with wicked joy on the inside -- outside he was all white gold and carnelian, slung back and smooth cold, salty and sanguine and still... caught by Schuldich and no other.
"I was laughing at myself! No! Really! You don't' even know, do you? I used to do that!"
A breezy pause where their eyes nearly met, two crystals of two different worlds. The Weiss boy ripped his away at the last second and kept his skin so very, very white.
You want to rip me to ribbons. I want to rip you to ribbons. But you want me on the street and I think I could make it to bed with you. It's all about waiting.
Speaking of which, he found his brow was still bleeding.
"No, no! I mean, what you were thinking about. I kinda picked it up since I wasn't paying attention. The part about me being some kinda weekend Sophist in Amsterdam. I used to do that, kinda. Right here too! Or near here. You know if you leave Terra from Valdemar you end up in Chicago. I lived there. With Saffie. We went almost every day."
"What part of 'Stay the hell away from me' don't you understand?"
Ran whirled about, and coldly met Schuldich's eyes again, turning on him the full force of his hatred with that look. "I don't care about you. I don't care about that brat sister of yours. I don't care about where you used to live, or what you used to do, or where one ends up when one leaves Terra from here!"
I only care about your death. Or haven't you realized that yet?
He started to turn around, but stopped, giving him another evil glare. "Let me give you some advice: Such a pastime as bike riding is much too wholesome for the likes of a bastard like you, but I suggest you keep it up. With any luck you'll end up killing yourself before sunset."
...And save me the trouble of doing it.
Pity it's not nightfall. Pity I don't have time to bother with you anymore.
But I have more important things to do than deal any further with you and your damned nonsense.
With that Ran took his leave of Schuldich, stalking angrily down the sidewalk and around the corner as fast as he could, eager to put as much distance between them as possible.
Schulidch waited until Aya had passed from his line of sight, and probably out of earshot. As for the dozen or so people who stood watching this departure by now, he did a few little tricks for them.
He clapped and announced in a sing-songy preschooler's voice. "YAY! That went better than expected."
No interests remained for him in town. Only one thing in the world had his attention any longer and with a sigh he went off to mind it for once. The morning was just ending in the arms of noon.
He righted his bike, spit washed his forehead and whistling, started back to the hotel.
The freezers of Claire's ice cream abided in what could loosely be called the center of town. Loosely, since the town carried itself with such an irregular shape, giving it a center was rather like deeming a tree to have a tail. There were several piazzas or squares dotting the inner streets, but not a one matched another, nor did they occur with any certain frequency, or leave any pattern on a map.
Pointing out that Claire's stood in ONE of these was futile if it was anything. Pointing out that the building it occupied had once been home to a notorious B+D club, and that the ice cream freezer was in fact the former "Dungeon Theatre" room was also futile, since the memories of the town chatters were short, thusly did no one recall the place unless pressed, nor was the information at all relevant, as the place had been, slowly over the years, been redone almost in its entirety now -- one leaf from the tree of the fa‡ade at a time.
Presently, the creamy red brick from underneath the previous garish burgundy and black paint faced the sun. The awnings were new last year, baby boy cyan with no more duct-tape patches, though the door beneath them had been set with crackle glass beside a host of mismatched bells and the magic-marker "Help Needed" sign. Only the old puzzle-fitted wooden floor remained to be in disrepair, which it did quite will, gave the otherwise innocuous and painfully beige interior some character. No two seats had the same color though, nor two tiles on the ceiling above. This in direct conflict with the fact all the people who minded the shop wore red aprons... of the practical sort.
Most of them seemed to Ran to be former heralds, or the children of heralds. Girls, or at least people with the immediate appearances of girls. One had come out from behind the glass case to mind him. She was not worth noticing at once -- painfully normal and interesting only in that, since so few people of Terra made that claim. The counter, however, still had a velvet lining -- a miraculously clean velvet lining! It had obviously once been part of a jewelry store, now rigged to be kept at a reasonable temperature for the rainbow of beneath its hood. The ceiling and the chairs paled in comparison to the many hues of its contents.
"You know, you wait right here, and I'll go find Claire," the girl told him.
Just then from the back came a billowing hurricane of psychotic laughter, "YES! Yes! I told them they were fools! FOOOOOOOOOOOLS! Abject jackasses! I've done it! Whohoo! I've really done it."
This followed by a billowing hurricane of smoke.
"Oh shit..."
"But it tastes good!"
"Really it does!"
"How dare you say that! It's not... ice cream! It is of the heathens! Heathens I tell you! It's a milkshake at best! Curse you, oh laws of thermodynamics!"
A woman shortly emerged from the tiny hall which lead back to the freezer -- a small, rather round woman with neatly curled, albeit singed, grey hair, and delicately cut pink glasses. She had a bit of a limp, and quite obviously no care for it.
"Umm... Claire?" The girl who had escorted Ran in began.
"WHAT IS IT!?"
"This... ah... chap here would kinda... umm... like an interview..."
Claire blinked, took a moment to rub her eyes and then padded over, thin lips parted in disbelief.
"My stars, I do believe you're right! And at the same time wrong... after all..."
"Eeeeeeek! I'll get back to work! I'll get back to work!" The girl fled leaving Ran at least metaphorically alone with the owner of Claire's ice cream.
"I wonder what that was all about," she mused plainly to herself. "Damn kids. No sense of adventure OR drama!"
Ran stared at the woman before him -- a woman who looked more like a mad scientist than a frozen confection creator, what with her I'm-too-smart-to-care appearance. Of course, perhaps one needed to be mad to go into such a fickle trade as selling homemade ice cream, even in a pleasure haven like Valdemar.
As Claire whipped out a pad and pencil from the wide pouch on her apron and began writing frantically, Ran glanced around the shop, wondering over the odd decor. She muttered and fussed to herself and gnawed occasionally on her pencil, as if he weren't even there.
When he concluded his examination of the room around him, noting with a faint show of horror the wildly patterned floor, he found himself being rather intensely scrutinized by his would-be employer. He gave her a questioning sort of look.
"What the hell's up with your hair, kid?"
He pursued his lips in an offended sneer. "What's it to you?"
"It looks funny."
"I don't care what you -- "
"And that color! Oh, no! That has to be a wig!" She boldly reached for one of his eartails, but Ran jerked back before she could clutch it.
"Do NOT touch me!"
At that, Claire cocked a brow, and looked the now-quite-put-out Ran up and down. Then she slapped him on the arm, hard, and laughed. "That's one hell of an attitude you got there! You're hired."
His mouth fell open in surprise, and he stood as if frozen on the spot -- that is, until she made to go back into her laboratory. Only then did he start after her. "Wait! What do you mean, 'I'm hired'? We've barely spoken."
"We said enough to each other for me to make up my mind."
"But what about..."
"What about what?"
"Well, my questions. I do have some."
She shooed a tiny 15-year-old girl with waist-long, inky braids away from her work table, barked out a request for another case of chocolate chips, and then flipped open one of the black-leather bound journals she had stacked up in one corner. "You got questions? Alright, then, let me hear them."
"Okay. About the pay..."
She spun off that answer and several more with the air of someone giving a much-rehearsed speech. "Seven an hour with a fifty cent raise after three months. Every holiday and third Sunday off. Vacations when I say you can have them Thirty minutes for lunch guaranteed irregardless of how many hours you work. No insurance, but one doesn't need it here. Next question."
Ran was a bit taken aback, but he quickly recovered. "Which shift do you want me to work?"
"Which shift do you want to work?"
"I'd like mostly days."
Claire snorted. "We're only open days. No one wants to eat ice cream at nine o'clock at night, kid. They're too busy doing other things." With that, she nudged him sharply in the ribs with her elbow and tossed him a wink. Then she went back to her books and her measuring, as if he wasn't there at all. Or so he thought.
"Is that it?"
"Um...Yeah."
He waited for a second or two, expecting her to tell him when to come. But she said nothing along those lines, merely mumbled to herself as she worked.
"Claire-san?"
"Huh? Oh, are you still here?"
"I need to know when to show up."
She pushed her glasses back up on her nose with the back of her hand, and ended up streaking them with a thin stream of cream; She didn't seem to even notice it.
"Tomorrow morning. 10 AM. Don't be late." She jerked a thumb at the rack of aprons by the door. "And be sure to grab one of those on your way out. You lose it, burn it, whatever, it'll come out of your pay."
"Uh...yeah."
She tossed him an absent wave as he turned to leave. As the door swung shut, he heard another explosion come from the depths of the rear workroom, followed by a whoop of delight.
It wasn't until he was halfway home that he realized she had never asked for his name.
"Thou jest! You can't be out of Butterscotch VSOP! It's not even CLOSE to Friday and I simply CAN'T have eaten the entire batch by now. You know I'm one of the only people who goes for that sort of thing."
"I'm sorry but that drum... it kinda... we were working on the rainbow chocolate chip surprise and..."
"You blew the bloody thing to hell?"
"Well, actually it was hit with a few bags of rock salt and died a horrible melting death, but that was BECAUSE of the explosion."
"A butterfly flaps its wings in Africa and the someone in Europe loses a war. I see."
The girl and the counter and her disillusioned customer both hung their heads. He removed his tremendous, mauve-feathered hat and held it to his breast.
Claire came out of the back room and thumped them both over the heads with the flats of her palms, just enough to make them look up.
"This, my dear, is a true dramatic!" She announced to her blond little employee. "You should be more like him."
"I daresay I wouldn't like that one bit." The customer huffed and crossed his arms, thusly mashing said verbose hat, though as everyone knew he had had it for some years now, it had doubtlessly seen worse.
Claire deadpanned right along. "Except for the part about his being a picky bastard."
"I am not a picky bastard, I am an..."
"You are Lord Vyx who can't live one day without his hit of soused ice cream! Now off with you! You're scaring the customers."
A silence of pouts which dissolved into giggles.
"I really think that job would go to that new guy." The girl at the counter mumbled to herself as she sorted a handful of coins dropped off by a pair of plainly smitten heralds.
Vyx, who had already jangled the door on his way out, ducked back in and leaned across the side of the counter, hands propped in his gloves as he insinuated himself into her daydream. "What new guy?"
"Dunno, Claire forgot to ask his name. As usual. So I can't really call him the new guy, since he probably won't be coming back after... you know."
"After the lady horseman of Armageddon did tread upon his pride and doubtless sanity as well."
"I heard that!" Claire complained from her open office door. She was taking a moment to add some more tape to the poster over her desk, and to pluck the salt form the old. Said poster read "The enemy" and bore a picture of a cone of frozen yogurt.
"You really need to get some manners!" Vyx yelled straight back. "I, for one, would have liked to have known his name! That way I could have called him by it when we DID meet face to face."
"Oh?" The girl at the counter began, laying one finger aside of her cheek, "well, what would MY name be then?"
"Ah, your name is Crecens, it means to shine, for you do, even in the presence of the old fog in my brain."
"My name is Ann."
"Like I said, old fog," And with that he got from his odd little perch so as to be out of the way if she decided to strike him as well, though counter to any instincts of self-preservation he might have had, he ambled closer to Claire's office. And asked of her, "Was there anything else about him?"
"NO!" this shouted for the tear she had added on her own to her precious battle directions, "I mean, yeah. Real skinny, this just brilliant head of red hair... funny cut, like long in the front. Earrings, didn't match, not that anyone's do around here. Purple eyes, funny accent. Pale enough to be gothic. All the good stuff."
This got her a cocked eyebrow, though she didn't look up to get any sight of it and it fell away into audacious wandering wonder anyway. "Purple eyes. Now I REALLY want to see him!"
A gruff little snort. "He sounded like he had a boyfriend."
"Why you lewd little dame! I only wanted to see them! I do like purple you know. Why, that's it! Which way did he head off?"
"Towards the Villa," Ann sighed with her head in the counter as she fished out a third scoop of vanilla almond ripple.
"In which case, adieu, ladies, I am sending myself on a quest." Instead of tipping his had, he put it back on, and so, naturally got it caught in the door the moment he tried to pass through and so left amid fond snickers rather than more typical goodbyes. He twirled his walking stick then, cracked it on the pavement and started off for his impromptu stroll.
Anywhere else humans abided and he would have been calling attention to himself, going about in the velvet gear of a troubadour, perhaps even the farce of a troubadour, all in shades of violet. The trailing cloak which he knocked from his shoulders as he went along for it kept tossing up around him oddly in the breeze. Not to mention that it was entirely too warm to be wearing such a thing.
"I should have tied my hair back," be bemoaned in between greeting two people, neither of which he knew, but they were on the same sidewalk and that was good enough for him. This rather than any lament for his doubtlessly roasting garb. He also apologized to the Terran grey sparrows which lived in one of the parks, for he could not sit and listen to them to-day, nor feed them young Cream Lassies plucked from his garden, or what was left of it.
He hadn't, in truth, expected to find anyone even vaguely matching the description Claire had given him. It had all been a good joke, a good excuse, something to keep up the image to himself more than anyone else. A chance to try out a few side streets he hadn't been down in awhile.
So naturally, he stood flabbergasted at a corner upon finding a very thin, pale, redheaded boy gazing in the window of one of the better to do antique shops. One carrying a red apron. A very familiar red apron.
He followed him for about a block, keeping a respectable distance which grew less and less so, for the boy almost at once began to walk faster as he set to going after him, as if he knew straight off Vyx was behind him.
Vyx shrugged and tried another approach.
"Pardon me, but you're the chap Claire just hired, aren't you? She sent me after your name."
Ran turned around then and got his first real look at the man who'd been tailing him, having only seen him in flashes of faded iris and violet in the glass of various shop windows. And he looked.
And looked.
He almost asked him where he'd left his lute.
His eyes narrowed suspiciously. "She didn't seem to care about my name before. Besides, I'm going to see her tomorrow, so she can ask me then if she wants to know so badly."
"And anyway, I'm not in the habit of revealing my name to strangers."
Warily, Ran turned around and resumed his journey towards the Villa.
Vyx clapped his hands together, not that this made much of a noise, as his hands had been encased in lavender leather. "Why! That's just splendid! All the more excuse for me to stop by to-morrow and wonder myself silly about it in the mean time."
Though figuring himself deserted, he proceeded into a disturbingly honest aria, which, like his applause, caught the attention of no one and nothing besides accomplishing little aside for providing show. Not that Valdemar was in dreadful need of more of that.
"I do wonder what sort of name a boy like that would have! And of course it won't be any of the ones I think of. Therefore, his name is not Tuyen, which means 'angel' in Vietnamese. Nor is it Tenchi -- the Japanese version of heaven and earth. Would that I knew the words of those tongues for 'enigma' and 'violet' I would call him that in the mean time to myself! And for no other reason than it is so delightfully peculiar to find an ice cream boy so concerned with privacy. Not it makes the whole affair any less noble. Farewell, sir! We shall meet again upon the morrow!" he finally called to what he assumed would be a now vacant sidewalk.
It wasn't.
Bowing to the audience he didn't have with a sweep if his pewter hair, he concluded, "I am Lord Vyx of Valdemar since no Ezzaria exists here. Just so you know."
"What makes you think I wanted to know?" Ran muttered under his breath, not that the dashing Lord Vyx could probably hear him given the distance between them.
But even now being out of his hearing and his sight, he didn't feel easy. And why?
He's going to come to the shop tomorrow just to find out my name?
Ran snapped at a pair of giggling boys who decided to include him in their game of tag, ducking and racing in circles around him. The two of them feigned fright, and scampered away in the opposite direction, giggling madly and not caring a bit that he was annoyed. He watched them until they reached the oak grove, where one boy grabbed the other and kissed him.
Damn. Why me?
In the foyer, a few of the former call boys were carrying numerous, effusive bouquets of cattails, orange lilies, Queen Anne's lace and red stocks, ones meant solely for the Villa's decor and not as a part of the new shop. Prim was directing them in their tasks.
Don't tell me...
Don't tell me I have an admirer...?
He groaned quietly. And it would be a grown man and not a harmless teenage girl...
I could quit...No, I can't. I have to have a job, and at least I don't have to work nights or wear silly aprons at that one.
I want to spend my evenings with Ken...Even though...
Well, I'll have him there, at least.
As Ran ascended the staircase, he spied Carly striding across the landing towards the West wing, on her way to nooks unknown, and he returned her smile with a nod.
And I have to repay him for all the things I've bought. I can't let him foot the bill for my upkeep.
I can do it on the sly...
Sneak a bit of money here and there into his pockets when he isn't looking...
And...With my first paycheck, I'll buy him dinner. Just the two of us, in a quiet restaurant.
The thought of having a moment alone with Ken lifted his spirits a hair. And his interest was piqued afresh by the sight of a vase of a bright jumble of flowers before the outer door: red tulips, heliotrope, red chrysanthemums, jasmine, white lilies and pink eglantine. The note only read:
{Dear Ran,
Since we decided this morning to make the Villa look more cheerful, we felt that you guys should have some flowers too.
Prim }
Ran stepped through the front door holding the vase, and, after setting the unexpected gift down on the lowest step, he removed his boots in favor of the black slippers he had left to one side of the stairs. Not a sound came from behind Fiona's drawn velvet curtains, and not sound came from above.
He called out anyway. "I'm back."
(ooc: I went looking up flower meanings on the web. Apparently cattails mean peace and prosperity, stocks mean lasting beauty, Queen Anne's lace means haven, and orange lilies mean wealth. In the bouquet Ran found, red chrysanthemum means I love, jasmine means amiability, red tulips mean a declaration of love, heliotrope means faithfulness, white lilies mean purity and sweetness and eglantine means poetry. The lilies are a reference to Ken, as there is some part of him that has been untouched by what has happened to him, and the eglantine blossoms are for Ran as sort of a blessing, since he isn't glib, but wishes that he sometimes was.)
"You really didn't have to come back," Ken admitted rather dolorously, one hand still typing that the keyboard by his feet.
Sauly shook his head, "I didn't say that. In fact, I didn't say anything. I just showed up with the kids," He meant Mori and Mari, "We can't go back with the others after all. We're traitors to them. And we wouldn't if we could. Maybe we're just tired, maybe I'm too old, but we decided to show up today, Carly or no Carly, Hidaka-dono or no Hidaka-dono. And we don't want ANYTHING."
He was all but shouting. Ken was somewhat surprised by his furious vivacity on the matter. And touched, in an odd, sort of ill way. "If you're sure."
"I'm a whore, Mr. Whores are never sure."
They had a somewhat amiable nod between them and he stalked out just as Ran called up the stairs.
Ken punched a few selection boxes on the screen and answered. "Okaeri! That was fast! I'm up in the spare room but watch your step, we kinda decided this is gonna be the computer room for awhile."
Indeed, the chamber was presently icinged with wires, sprinkled with surge protectors, and holding three laptops, a scanner, two printers and several reams of printouts.
To the silence he took to be his lover -- "We ah... decided to sell most of the junk online back on Antiterra. Kami-sama bless Ebay!"
"I got a three hundred dollar bid on that chair from the rose room!" Mori called.
Ken tossed him a thumbs up, but no more. Instead, he finished tweaking one more auction posting and stood on his knees which were cold and achy from sitting so long. He stumbled, but once the child had glanced away, took up his boyfriend's hands. "Well, how did it go, sweetheart?"
A little pause as words were pondered between them.
"I missed you," He giggled a little.
Ran's gaze wandered forlornly over the space that he had just that morning called his own. His would-be sanctuary, and later -- hopefully -- a room for Aya-chan had become a techie's dream. Even if it were only temporary.
Of course, such changes could turn out to be permanent. The business would have to have a computer somewhere for both Prim to keep up with the books, and Ken to keep up with orders. Just where did he think it was going to be stored?
Just who the hell do you think you are, Ran? Making all these plans, when...
This isn't really your home.
Now, is it, Ran?
He forced his attention back onto Ken, and became aware that some of the happiness had melted from his expression, that Ken's hands had grown a bit slack in his. Instinctively he clutched at them, entwined his pale, slender digits with his lover's own.
"It went fine. I got the job at Claire's."
Ran gave Ken's hands a squeeze, then let them go. He walked over to the laptop his lover had been working on, and watched the bids come in for a cherrywood dresser. Just then, Mari came bounding in to tell Ken that the antique dealer on Kellan lane would take the monstrous, purple and pink wardrobe in the Lilac room off their hands if they couldn't find a bidder, but he didn't know about the rest of the furnishings in that room. Ran crouched down beside one stream of printouts, and pretended to read it. In reality, he was listening to their exchange. He couldn't quite believe that this Ken was the same Ken he had come to know.
Or maybe he was, but you didn't see it.
Was it because he didn't show that side of himself? Or was it because I was too blind to notice?/
You've got it under control, don't you?
A feeling of blind euphoria, the sort one feels when newly in love, went coursing through him. One so intense, that the resulting letdown was enough to make him want to go somewhere dark and quiet and lock himself in, away from everyone.
Away from Ken, the source of it all.
Mari ducked out at last. Ran took his departure as a sign to make an exit of his own. He rose to his full height, and daintily sidestepped the tumbled mounds of printouts on his way to the door. Suddenly, telling Ken about Schuldich, and Claire, and Lord Vyx, and the bouquet on the stairs that their considerate ladies had left for them seemed terribly unimportant.
So he pressed a hasty kiss to his cheek, dealt a quick squeeze to his shoulders.
"You're clearly busy, so I'm...going for a walk around the grounds."
The words "I'm never too busy for you" stumbled on Ken's lips and in the end he bit them down and simply smiled back, patted Ran's back. He didn't think in a thousand years he could have executed that little line with the deftness it deserved to make it anything but empty, crass; fluffy as a DQ PWP.
"Alright, sweetheart. Mind you don't fall over any shonen joro."
He left then, all but leaving a trail of gleaming ice behind him on the air, only the sensation, and nothing of the true meaning of the chill.
Ken turned away form the places he had taken to himself to find Mori, still curled up in the corner, was actually blushing.
Something he had seriously doubted whores did.
The boy laid his computer aside and regarded his new employer with deep wise eyes that seemed to have been cut from a sleepy owl. "He's shy, isn't he? There's nothing the matter with either of you."
Again, the open parry of his speech made a stumbling about face. There was no need to live in a fishbowl even if one was a fish and surely, since the boy spoke the truth, Ran wouldn't want their troubles locked up in glass cases for everyone to see.
"Yeah, he is. But..."
"Hey, they don't call the sex business public relations for nothin'."
"That's very true."
"I'll leave next time."
"Alright."
[OOC: Shonen joro -- boy whores.]
Carly plopped her cheeks in her hands as she leaned against the railing and stared to her upside-down twin below her, short joined by such mimicry as Ran, who passed her once again. She wondered where he might be off to, but didn't ask.
Even if she could have.
Or follow.
She just hoped he would stand somewhere she could see him from the windows.
Sauly passed her too, trod upon the trailing lace of her good funeral cloak she had worn to Kira's wake, and she thumped him over the head with her fan.
"Sorry, Carly," he moaned.
Half a smile for him.
"You know, I don't think you have to be here. Ken's nothin' like Kaze. He's not gonna ass anything up. At least not for awhile. We'll take care of it. You CAN go home. I mean, I'd want to, after a service like that."
She only pointed to the back room as explanation as to her continued haunting.
Wondered instead why it had been so long since anyone took her for a ghost.
Since before Kaze walked the silver bowers leading to the audience chamber.
The boys were gone now from the rolling, stretching expanse of green that was considered the front yard, having had fled away to lie entangled in some secret bower and pass innocent kisses and gentle touches back and forth. Ran found he wasn't all that sorry to find himself alone.
He gravitated towards the straggle of trees where he'd seen them kiss, lured there by the sight of their shady cloaks, all spread across the sun-deprived ground like blankets.
Like purple blankets.
As he neared the mouth of the woods, he found the ground before it littered with violets. Not one bland patch of grass to be seen. It was, for the most part, untouched save for those few broken blooms that had fallen under the youths' bare feet. These, Ran plucked free from their useless stalks, and dropped the amethyst-tinted stars into the well of his cupped palm. Brushed them with tender fingers.
Beyond the violet carpet lay the densest forest he'd ever seen. All green and brown and silent. Sunlight only dappling here and there, where ever it could. The sort of place nymphs and fairies and elves would inhabit, locked in peace and free from man's blundering.
He wondered if he started walking down the winding, worn path that led around their mossy trunks, would he find himself in yet another world? Would he find a rusted, bent lantern post and a grizzled faun waiting for him beneath it, one who would escort him back to his cozy little den for cups of brisk black tea and plates of sandwiches?
Or instead, would the nightingale finally call to him, ready to take him to oblivion at last.
He knew he would not, knew it would not. Knew he was foolish for even entertaining such fancies.
Slowly, he rotated his hand, and let the blossoms fall back to earth. Dusted his hands off on the legs of his jeans as if they'd been tainted by the veil of death hovering over the tiny flowers. Another foolish notion. Ran's hands had been thus tainted long, long ago, and they would never be clean.
He jammed his paws into his pockets, and picked his way around the fragrant spread. No destination, no purpose, no reason.
That is, until he spied something else that caught his interest.
It was a windfall branch, not too bent, of one long, slender length. A few spindly, leafy twigs dotted it here and there. Ran picked it up and weighed it thoughtfully; it hung in his hand like a katana, albeit much lighter in weight.
Like a shinai.
Ran experimentally sliced through the air with it before lowering it to his side again. Then, he toed off his battered, unlaced sneakers, the ones he hurriedly slid into prior to leaving the tower, and dropped into stance, with the stick resting across his bent left arm as if it were a newly drawn katana.
Then, he launched into a much practiced exercise, the stick brandished like a sword. Ran fought off an imaginary enemy; let his hurt and anger and bitter pain rise up, only to beat it down -- for a little while.
Reminded himself of what he really was, what he would always be...
A murderer.
Crawford had chosen to stay inside, as he knew that horrid Carly woman was skulking about, and she was the last person he wanted to see. Nor did he want to be subjected to weeping maids and caterwauling mourners, especially since he'd had enough of them in his visions during the night.
He'd taken his breakfast in his bedroom, as he'd risen around noon and wasn't in the mood to see anyone, and he was still there, the dishes piled up on their tray in the corner behind the locked door. He was now dressed in only his bathrobe, and was sitting in a chair in front of the window, staring down at the fountain but not really seeing it.
He was restless. He felt as if something was missing, like there was something important that he needed to do, but...
He couldn't remember what it was.
He'd been in such straits before, and there was very little he could do to break himself free of the rut save for casual sex.
And committing murder.
The latter was, after all, something he was extraordinarily talented at accomplishing. Problem was, of course, he couldn't indulge in such an activity in Terra. The consequences were rather dire, the punishment being up to and including permanent banishment from Terra (if not death). Crawford was rather loathe to leave a place he considered the closest thing to Paradise anyone could ever hope to see.
But as for Anti-Terra -- it was still no holds barred. He'd found that the Powers That Be of Terra didn't care one whit about what its inhabitants got up to on Anti-Terra, so long as they behaved themselves when they returned. So from time to time, Crawford would take a brief trip, a week or two at the most.
With Estet out of the picture now, there were a few options left to him. He could always play the part of a thug, hide in an alley and wait for some unsuspecting victim, but it was so unglamorous to do, standing amidst garbage cans in the dark, and only end up with a couple of twenties -- if even that. And a couple of twenties would only last him for one day, as extravagant as his lifestyle was.
Crawford had been rather relieved to find that, upon returning that first time, he hadn't had to stoop to such measures. He hadn't had to go looking for work at all, once he'd gotten the word out that he was back in the assassin trade. And all it had taken was a few appearances at certain places -- those exclusive nightclubs of which he was still a member. After that, the offers came in, discreetly.
That first time, he'd felt like the most beautiful debutante at a ball.
He would accept the highest bidder, and would without fail, make the hit within the time he'd state in his reply. Would come back with a couple thousand more (if not higher) to the good -- not that he really needed the money. He and his associates had been crafty enough to electronically steal a nearly all of Takatori's monetary wealth the night of his death; Nagi was most proficient as a hacker, could even get in and out again without a trace. Crawford had taken half and invested it and wisely, to increase their profits that much more.
But it always made him feel that much more secure knowing that he had a second source of income...Just in case.
He knew the time to make another trip was coming upon him, and he knew the time to go would be after they'd settled in to their new digs. He'd tell Schuldich...Or no, he'd simply leave a note on his bedroom door (as he knew the other man wouldn't be sleeping with him), stating that he was going to Chicago to see to their finances, and that he'd be back in a few days? A week?
And while he was at it...If he was going to stay that long, why not make it a pleasure trip? Maybe that pretty Hidaka-dono would like to join him...
Schuldich sneered at himself, and only because he could quite make himself abandon his bike anywhere outside Ashkevron Plaza, so amid a myriad of protests from the red-eyed, still blubbing staff, he wheeled it up to his room with him, already pondering riding it down the steps if he got the chance. He also thought of naming it, which made him gag at his own bathetic change of self.
Although, there might have been other incursions past this, and he might only have felt the surface of it, the preconscious at best...
Who am I kidding? I know. Whatever.
Taped to their door he found a little note in his sister's handwriting detailing his companions' whereabouts.
Nagi -- Pool (outside)
Bradley -- Pouting (room)
Saffie -- In garden
Farie -- With Saffie (in garden)
This he wadded up and stuffed in his pockets, doubtless to turn up in the wash after the ink form it had washed into his jeans and ruined them. The bike he propped by the quiet fireplace. His rose Saffie had brought him the night before he sat down and held for awhile. The silence of it all was tickled his nerves and wanted to send him cart-wheeling or singing over something...
Unlike some people, I don't like being tickled.
He washed his face but didn't bandage the cut on his forehead. He thought of changing his shirt, but he liked the faint aroma of his own just blooming sweat. A few threads of his bangs were gummed together with blood and he didn't notice them.
Well... one time is as good as any other, hell is a nice place, people are nothing but memories.
"Whatever."
But his eyes feel into focus on something which had been laid out across the hotel vanity -- something white against the blue. A cloud. And one he knew. Very well. Better than most people would have admitted. One someone must have put there on purpose.
Saffie you little sicko.
He smiled, fished the credit card out of his wallet, left the wallet on the dresser and carried the card and the cloud to the main room.
It didn't really surprise him the locks on the room doors were so easily violated.
Hehe. Visa -- it's everywhere assassins want to be.
But it also joined the dirty dishes. Was shut out.
Brad stood by the white pane of the window... at least it seemed white, blinding white, compared to the red ones in the hall outside, the white robe, his white skin. His pale, pale blue eyes that Schuldich met for only a half a second as he walked over to the bed. Step by step as if waiting for the floor to crack. It didn't. With the bed between them, he spoke.
"Can't spend all day in here, can you? You'll waste it."
He realized he couldn't hear the birds outside. Must have been the side effect of shutting in the noises of whatever lovers had any interest in that bad.
"Not being old."
Still no birds.
"I said that because it's what I'm afraid of."
Not a one.
"Getting old."
He gave up and threw the cloud on the covers.
It turned out to be a hairbrush with a sloping, ivory handle.
Crawford dropped his gaze from the sight of his lover's face to the bed, and the brush that floated atop the turquoise covers like a row boat on a river. Three steps and he had it in his hand; the handle was cold and slick to the touch. He turned it over and over in his hand, remembering the last time he'd seen it.
"I knew you took this that night," he said, lifting his eyes to Schuldich's tiger-green ones, "but I didn't know you'd kept this all these years. I never pegged you to have a sentimental streak."
Nor did I expect you to tell me this now.
He paused, momentarily stunned by the irony of his remark. No, he hadn't expected Schuldich to be sentimental or so open, how could he have? He didn't know his own lover.
And I admit it.
Which leads to the question of, "How can I call you my lover if I don't know you?"
How can I profess to feel anything for you?
He walked over to the dresser, with the brush in hand, and laid it down.
You've been inside my mind, though. So you know how I can.
He glanced at the door, considered locking it, but scrapped the idea. If anyone wanted in badly enough, they'd find a way. Schuldich had.
Crawford looked over at him, his nails clicking softly on the lacquered wood as he drummed his fingers across its edge. He lurched away from the dresser, where he'd been leaning, and slowly walked over to where the redhead stood. Stopped just a foot away from him, hands in pockets, and gazed intently into his eyes. Crawford found the scent of him clean and earthy...and arousing.
But then, he'd always had.
"I suppose someone else might say 'Oh, you shouldn't worry about that, Schuldich,' or 'That's years off yet!', but I won't. It's insulting to say such things, and that's a very real fear. One that's hard to let go, I should imagine...Like the fear of dying."
He reached out and skimmed the curve of his cheek from bone to chin with the pad of his thumb.
"I know that nothing I could say would drive that fear away. But I will say that..."
His thumb skated down his throat, skipping away when he swallowed.
I know what you will look like then...
Crawford laid the flat of his hand on Schuldich's chest, and just as lightly let it slide down to his waist, only to fall back to his side.
And I also know that despite all the other lovers we've had and will have...
This affair won't end by me leaving you.
Not a breath passed Schuldich's lips and no refraction of a feeling come upon him suddenly. Not a purling thread of silence words could not touch.
He had other ways of fingering such frightened, virgin places.
None of which he found he felt compelled to use.
Bradley had left his shields well... halfway up perhaps worked, thought it wasn't quite that. No, more like... it was more like he had called to his lover from an upper window of some grand estate.
Between then, they might have had a full grin.
Between them, they would have a grand estate.
He knew that.
Just by the tickling chiffon flavor of what he had been presented in way of thoughts. He reached no deeper, left the roses but the window went unsullied by touch of impatient suitor.
But then he found himself wondering just as Crawford was, over something in himself and... how did he know in the first place the companion he had kept for so long was up to that if he wasn't reaching into him at all?
Because he himself had been just that... himself, who did not exist outside of the possibility of existing. Liked to know the future only by connotation. Knew he would be broken and grey. Someday. Now that someone had answered this with any staunch derision and not so dusted it with the milk of innocence and bloom... he didn't ask, exactly what had been seen. He hadn't with the grownup visitant of his sister either. He could take surprises. He didn't get many.
Schuldich found he had wandered over to the dresser. That didn't take him as anything extraordinary. But he scooped up the brush again and held it out as he approached Brad.
Shrugged.
Whatever you want. Brush my hair, or batter my ass. Let's see you figure it out.
::Yeah, I know, Brad. How you can. Do. Maybe always will. But how long, that's usually your department so...::
He reached over and popped his fingers in Bradley's mouth, running the exact ministrations of their previous moonlit encounter. Only he got to be Crawford this time, down to the tickles of the fingertips against his canines.
Crawford held still while Schuldich explored the slick cushion of his mouth. Lapped at the inquisitive digits. Then he clasped his wrist and pulled his hand away, kissing the palm before he released him.
I could tell you how long. I could show you. It's all there waiting to be seen, like pictures in a photographer's studio.
And it was so, because he had seen that part of the future -- of him, as old, but thankfully not so bent, and even wealthier than before. And Schuldich was with him. Two devious old bastards in a rambling brick and marble mansion.
But then, he didn't want to press it. If Schuldich didn't want to know, he certainly didn't have to look.
And...It was all too clear to him that, for once, the present was more important than the future.
A twirl of the brush and Crawford left Schuldich for the bed. After arranging the pillows between his back and the headboard, he leaned back, legs sprawled apart and bent at the knees. He patted the terry cloth well his robe made on the coverlet with the bristle end of the brush.
"Come here, Aubrey."
Schuldich toed off his shoes and mounted the bed from the opposite side as his lover, crouching over it like the cat he knew he was taken as occasionally, despite the months he spent watching cats, chasing cats, nibbling the considerations of cats like dainty slivers of halva.
His fingers worked against the satin though, did not catch it like claws. In fact, they left nothing but clear shadows on the covers, and did so for some time. Just watching, inching closer with a cool and bright deliberation. Noon on high was as good as any evening, sweeter to ruin, smashing crystal brilliant.
Sometimes, just like Brad when he was sunblind.
Speaking of which, he hung back for he waited, and he dove no deeper into the blue ice mirror he knew, for it seemed fraught with fluttering rain even on this resplendent day. He stopped and reveled in his love of downpours. Trying the drops on his senses, he found them filled with fragments of a life he had not known yet. And so he thought to his lover...
::I find it odd you don't worry about the differences between past, present and future. I suppose you're just confident about what you think of them. Three little boys, one stretched back in your lust forever, one dies when you kiss him over and over. And one will wither, but not right now until he is present. Too bad.::
::But that's too much for right now. Present is... candy.::
::You know me and candy.::
So he came and slunk up between Bradley's thighs. Taking his place between his legs, smoothing the rob beneath his fingers, and finally Bradley's toes.
He felt like he'd just managed to tame a wild animal, given the cautious way Schuldich had settled himself in the circle he'd made with his body. Such an occurrence was an odd one at best, having him just sit with him for no other reason than because he could; because he wanted to. It had always amazed him just how perfectly he fit against him, like they were pieces of a puzzle.
Okay, okay, I know that was corny. Even though...it's true, for me.
Sunlight sifted through the windows, pouring into narrow rectangles onto the floor just past the sill. Still, even in the glow, his hair looked dark.
But even in relative shade, it was glorious -- the color of bourbon in candlelight. He gingerly slithered his hand through it, let it fall back into place. Then he repeated the act with the brush, moving it just as slowly downward, carefully working out the occasional knot.
And in the doing, he lowered his half-mast shields completely. Just in case.
A pass of the brush laid bare the milky column of his neck, and Crawford sought out the warm skin with his mouth, briefly, before resuming his ministrations.
"I've always wanted to do this. I never thought you'd let me."
Still smiling from the touch of Brad's self-sarcastic little quip, Schuldich very, very slowly turned his head, enough so that he could catch little fog sprites of his lover along his lashes- which he could tint, which he could dye as black as the coat of a witch's cat, but hadn't today. He knew Aya hadn't noticed the slight difference, Crawford had, but made not remark saw the trace passage in his mind which said he knew it.
"Well, I'm always up for new things in bed and I mean, what the hell, we're ON the bed." A small chortle.
Actually I got the idea from my little kitty, that I could try being a kitty if... if you ever got around to asking. He seemed to like it. He got all French silk inside.
Well, it's sure nothing like frigging myself with the handle but...
The bristles grazed past the henna curtain and caught on the place still damp from the kiss he has received. He got another one and the long, slow glide of Brad's smallest finger straightening the edges of his mane. No motherly and selfish affection here. Just Brad. Being his perfectionist self.
Just the same.
I guess... I like this too.
He could almost feel his fingertips through his t-shirt.
"I'm actually mousy blond, you know."
"Yes, I do know. I saw an empty bottle of henna once in the trash." Crawford raked his hand through Schudich's hair, watching the russet strands drift from his fingers. "And you know what?"
He rocked forward, and parted his hair away from his ear, and whispered, "It doesn't matter to me."
Crawford laid the brush to the side, and leaned back, examining the tempting expanse of clothed back that Schuldich had presented to him. He laid his hands on his lover's shoulders, fingers spread wide across them and palm flat. He could feel the warmth of his skin through the soft fabric. Felt the shift of his muscles as he breathed. Crawford slid his hands down to his shoulder blades and began to gently knead the flesh there.
"Because you're still Aubrey Marlow, no matter what color your hair is."
If you insist.
Schuldich was biting back a sigh. He hated sighing, even over the tiny conversations the inimitable profundities of merely existing seemed to bring up at coffee shops and edges of beds, especially his bed, since he and the one he shared it with seemed to defy the mistakes and rectify the beauty of merely being.
You don't quite think that's who I am.
And you would be right.
Since there is no certainty about that, or... anyone...
That being my fault.
He grinned to himself, considered drifting back against the fingertips which plucked upon his muscles, and did, only a bit, mostly to keep from stretching.
"Well..."
"I never did hide my henna bottles, so they had to turn up sooner or later. But there's a difference between honey blond and platinum blond and dirty blond. Yellow blond. Mine's kinda grey, so I'm already old there. Heh. I knew you were curious. That's why I brought it up."
He contemplated a half-bare thigh before sinking one of his hands against it, ghosting long, lazy circles over the surface.
"Also why I let you call me Aubrey. Because you're curious. You want to know why I'm going to do about it."
Crawford flipped the robe away from the leg Schuldich was stroking, laying it bare to his hand completely. Then he resumed his inching massage down the redhead's back.
I rather like that, you know.
"And what are you going to do about it, Aubrey?"
Grey, huh?
Grey, grey hair and those startling eyes...
I think it'd suit you, somehow.
A smile touched his lips briefly as his hands reached the small of Schuldich's back.
But then you know that.
Slowly, so carefully that perhaps Schuldich wasn't aware of it right away, Crawford edged his fingers under the hem of his lover's t-shirt and laid them on his skin, groping upwards in hard circles.
"I like this too."
"I haven't decided yet," Schuldich announced with a snide little chuckle.
Brad chuckled too.
And then they both laughed outright at each other. He'd felt Nagi come in a few moments ago, but said nothing, done nothing. They boy stood in no predicament save his own existence and no need to be fucked stupid then and there.
He had caught the intent pull the shirt from his back just a moment before the act transpired, but for it, Schuldich simply reached down and slid two of his fingers into the under-crook of Braldey's knee which he rubbed before switching to the other. The sensation of the blood being pushed from his skin and then rolling back as his lover's fingers traced their way up his spine was surely warm, and yet no more than the earliest mentions of snow melting somehow.
And it tickled a little. Like he had a fur coat on inside out and it was brushing against him as he moved.
"My hair, my hand or my back?" he teased then, knowing full well Crawford had meant the fact they were touching each other at the same time, even if he had intended only to bring up his back.
Hard to do that with me, isn't it?
He turned over his shoulder again, only to get a little scowl and have his head turned around to straighten the muscles in his neck.
"Ok... well, you wanna switch places or do the other side?"
You who has to know it pisses me off when you call me Aubrey.
And still it kinda doesn't bother me.
It does and it doesn't.
Wouldn't sound like you to anyone else.
It does to me. And I guess that's why... I know... what you're asking, every time you say it.
Small revenge. He reached around, dragged Brad over his shoulder and sucked on his lips for a moment.
Crawford's hands crept down Schuldich's back, and slithered around his waist; felt not an extra ounce of flesh. He kissed him wholeheartedly, then pulled back and pretended to contemplate Schuldich's question.
It was a hard decision to make, really, for both options sounded most appealing.
"I think I want your hands on me right now. The other side can wait."
And if we don't get to that now, there's always later...
For if you go to Savil's room at bedtime, I'll be coming in after you to carry you away. Literally.
Besides, she'll have another offer, one she won't want to refuse.
Places now switched, with Crawford settled between Schuldich's legs, he bowed his head when he felt the other's hands touch his neck. The collar of the robe he wore was pulled downwards, the belt loosened just enough for Schuldich to lower the garment to the middle of Crawford's back. He nearly sighed with pleasure when the redhead went to work; had to bite his lip to keep silent.
Schuldich chuckled knowingly anyway.
"...Quiet..."
You don't know how long it's been since I've had a massage.
::Oh yes I do!:: Schuldich replied. ::You haven't had one since... the week they talked you into joining Estet when you chose to exorcise your new benefit package for the first time.::
He didn't have to flop around the sheets to the other side of Bradley to see his eyes roll.
::I usedta convince my roomies in college to give 'em to me. The Estet boys never appealed to me. Neither did my roomies but eh, university students can't be picky.::
::Which makes me wonder why I ever became one.::
A moment where their skin parted otherwise, for he had drawn away for the sole purpose of admiring the creamy silk of Crawford's back... something he suddenly realized he really didn't see all that much of. He almost caught himself remarking that Schuldich was a sissy and Schuldich was still, after five years, a damn sucker for those baby blues HENCE the rather peculiar situation whereby he hardly knew his own lover's back, but then he realized Bradley wasn't thinking about such a decidedly random thing -- rather, he was wondering what was taking so long to get his damn backrub.
The telepath shrugged to himself and fell back to work, starting the second time by running the tip of his nose along the edge of his neck, feeling the feathers of his hair fall over his eyes as they closed -- the reverb of his own breathing.
And then his fingers, all of them, met the lowest curve of his back, nudged it with their heels until it popped beneath them before falling into the faint dip below the back of his ribs, leading up to his shoulder blades, the little outward swing of them...
It was the sort of back Queen Anne dinner chairs were made for. The old Queen Annes that lasted forever and ever and for this, he did his best to make it feel as if he was trying to touch the muscle underneath and not simply the skin.
Even though that too he relished admiring.
Just like the rest of him.
Even the sudden spells of smoothness his fingertips barley registered. The spiderweb of dim snowflake flashes that ran over his shoulders like the halter of a cloak.
::KenKen's not so special, is he? He's not the only one with marks on his back!::
Bradley's of course, were older than Saffie and had been treated into near invisibility.
Schuldich ignored them for the chance to let his fingers creep around and snatch that Bradley's unguarded nipples.
"Mmmm..." Vixen.
Keep that up, and I'll...
Those hands petted and pinched again those sensitive buds. Schuldich's lips wandered over the crook of his shoulder. He felt him grin against his skin.
All right. I warned you.
Crawford turned in his arms, and gathered Schuldich in his own. Kissed him languorously, tongue to tongue.
He had forgotten all about those scars, had forgotten he'd never really let Schuldich see his back before. Just glimpses of it in and out of the bath, flashes just before covering it over with a shirt.
He had almost forgotten why and how they had come to be there on his shoulders.
Crawford tensed up, remembering, only to be clucked at scoldingly. Schuldich's fingers dug in harder over the tightened muscles until he started relax. He hung his head with a sigh, his hands holding fast to his lover's hips.
"My father was rather handy with his belt."
That is, until the day I was taller than him and could fight back.
He nuzzled his chest through his t-shirt.
But Savil was beaten?
He mentally traced over the remembered lines and curves and milky skin of the man he held so close, but couldn't recall any such marks marring Schuldich's body.
But then, not all abuse left visible scars.
Crawford raised his head to stare into those clear, chartreuse eyes.
"Were you?"
Schuldich blinked with a distinctive slowness -- the sort one takes after time forfeited to daydreams or trances not wholly orgiastic. As if he was just now seeing after a long time looking elsewhere than Terra or Antiterra. Bradley's words had awakened him like the finger snap of a hypnotist.
Pulled him from the starry bedroom bitter wine of... Bradley. The memories that had darted over the surface of him -- lacewings insisting to live one more moment in the realm of silver frost that ate them up, banished them, drew crystallized concoctions of time and eternity from their lifeless, frozen bodies.
Crawford had never gotten that stale taste he couldn't stand. Not like most children in his situation. The shallow vinegar puddles he hated to call sentient and had despised a long time ago... but that was another story. Now he was wondering again.
Brad was many flavors -- some only the faintest touch like sugar, some too fantastically wild to be called anything but sweet, some not outright pleasant but nonetheless inviting.
Brad was an acquired taste.
One who happened to be curled up in his arms. Schuldich balked inside for a moment and almost threw him onto the covers...
I mean, why not? All the better to strip you later.
...but the raven threads of his hair were simply in no mood to leave alone.
So he wrapped one leg around him and lost his fingers to the silky jet. His head fell back to his chest and he held it there.
With half a chuckle -- "Does the fact my mom usedta leave her sex toys where I could get at them count?"
Crawford started.
::Oh COME ON! Even boring suburban housewives get frustrated and take it out on themselves with vibrators!::
::Although my mom...::
And suddenly his gave Bradley his very best gleaming smirk.
His lover's shields still down, he made him no offer, no pretense of delicacy. Simply filled his mind's eye with memories. He felt himself like he had flopped down to watch home movies with someone. All that was missing was the popcorn. He watched the memories too then.
He was standing on a curb in the rain.
::Damn wet back in Chicago.::
The door of the school bus squeaked shut behind him and he started home. Home happened to be one over several beige siding and red brick houses. Together, they looked like different permutations of the same few blocks and bits of glass for windows, just painted to look like houses. The one he walked inside had nothing remarkable whatsoever to the fa‡ade.
Inside though, he surveyed a disturbingly clean living room.
Pink living room.
::As you can see, you get to do most of the decorating since I'm not exactly descended from anyone with that talent.::
Not to mention empty and lit only by the rose glow of the curtains. The feeling of a smile spreading over his face as he wandered to the kitchen, which was downright dark. Except for a little neon yellow note on the fridge he had to get on his toes to reach.
[Aubrey -- Aunt Lu fell going down the steps again and might have broken her ankle. I had to take her to the hospital, but I'll be back by five. Be good sweetie! Mommy loves you.]
The note went right back to its perch and Aubrey dragged his books back to his bedroom, left them at the door, before heading to another chamber -- one with worn blue carpet, a plate glass window dappled with rain and still complaining about being soaked, a king size bed... and a huge oak armoire inlaid with a motif of arrows and flowers, not to mention three mirrors -- one oval in the door, longer than he was tall, and two smaller eyes. The space had a dead and quiet feeling. The bed looked like it had never been slept in but it smelled... and unfamiliar trace to both of them at first- a man and a woman holding trysts at midnight when all good boys are fast asleep.
::The armoire was a family heirloom. It would have been mine to torch.::
Aubrey went straight up to it, sideways so he didn't catch in the mirror at once, but he opened up the door as though it was his to raid, reached around to the darkest corner and pulled out a rather worn esprit shoebox.
Which opened revealed quite the assortment of adult toys, laid out like dolls rather. With a clatter of plastic, he fished around until he came up with the purple plastic wiggler, which he tossed on the sheets, making the first dent they seemed to have received in days.
Then he pulled off his clothes and threw them on the floor before heading to the adjoining powder room. Click, the lights were on and Brad got to see Aubrey looking at himself in the mirror.
A short-haired seven year old imp wearing the dirtiest, most unseemly bad-child grin as he rooted around in the bottles which lines the dresser, picked out a white one and drained it of some blue goop.
::That's actually anti-frizz cream. It smelled good.:: (Inclusions here of another recollection -- of the first time the bottle had been wafted beneath his nose -- sharp and woodsy and a bit femmy was its contents.)
The slippery concoction within now having spilled on his fingers, he worked it to a thin foam in the palm of one hand as he strode back to the bed which he literally jumped onto, trying to keep the gel from meeting into the white bedspread.
Flopping back against the pillows, he drew his ankles -- ankles which looked thin enough to be snapped in two with little difficulty, apart, hung one over the edge of the mattress.
::And yes, I really could do this without looking.::
One hand braced him against the wall, the other curled up, draping itself with his pilfered foam before reaching down between his splayed thighs. Little double shocks of sensation trickled over his mind.
::But that's what you get when you do it on your own.::
He got himself as slippery as he could before he even tried sliding a finger in, and even then, the faint flush of his cheeks nor the blooming stiffness declaring his ready.
"Ouch!" he hissed in a smooth, wet voice.
::Umm... forgot that part, got myself with my nail.::
But he took only a moment to bite off the troublesome edge before grinding his teeth and forcing himself open. Half lidded eyes on the clock. Aubrey found it was already half past three.
He also found his hips shuddering and working his still fingers closer inside.
"Alright... alright."
Without other prelude, he kicked the wiggler over, licked the tip and worked it inside, watching himself bob in response as more and more of the purple shell vanished within him. In typical child logic though, he rubbed the last of his makeshift lube into both arms, shuddering at his own touch, before finally reaching down and throwing the switch onto high.
It squirmed.
He squirmed, bracing it inside him with one hand.
Bracing Bradley against him with the other in a wholly different time.
It wasn't hard to figure out just what Schuldich and Crawford were up to, not that Nagi really cared all that much. They could fuck each other in the graveyard for all the interest he had anymore.
The door fell closed and locked with a sullen look, and Nagi shrugged off his wet trunks and damp t-shirt; dropped his towel on top of them. Then, dragging the blanket off the bed, he wrapped up in it, and went to his window.
From his room, Nagi could just see the garden -- particularly, the little girl who was now sitting upon a bench swing in an ivy-and-clematis shaded alcove, with a charmed, psychotic young Irish man on his back at her feet. He watched as Savil slipped off one of her black patent-leather mary janes and rubbed Farfarello's stomach with her stockinged foot. She puzzled him so, confused him terribly, and ever since last night, when she had curled up in his lap as if it were the safest place to be in the world.
And him the most fearsome of the four, the only one for whom the phrase "looks could kill" was the truth.
He hadn't been able to get her off his mind ever since then.
What really got to him was that she didn't want anything from him, not really. Never laid any physical or emotional demands upon him. She didn't give a damn about his powers except that he could amuse her with them when he wished -- and lately that was often.
And damned if he couldn't figure her out.
Nagi picked up his headphones from the bedside table, and slipped them on. The first few notes of Pierrot's "Creatures" cd filled the shielded walls of his brain as he pulled a chair up to the window, and took a seat.
All the better to observe and ponder the enigma that was Savil Marlow.
Farfarello howled with delight as her toes danced a waltz and then a tango over his chest, wandering back over their old steps in more and more inscrutable patterns. His limbs began to flail helplessly in the air, and his tongue lolled away form his pale lips.
Then his silver lame ears began to go all cockeyed and with a bit of a huff, she made to right them at once. This of course, involved her getting off her swing, something she had little interest in doing! Not to mention something she had to try with only one shoe on.
Her shod foot stamped into the grass and she worked the forward half of the sole into the earth until she was certain it would not slide out from under her and then rose upon those still bound toes, like a heron still unsure of rushes it has chosen to keep its vigil in.
Only herons do not hop about in any effort to keep their balance.
Somehow, she didn't fall over, but rather managed to reach over and adjust her dog's ears AND pat him, all before stretching out after her shoe.
Which lay laughing at her just out of reach.
Well... perhaps.
It was almost as if it fell into her fingers of it's own accord. She tasted yet another new curl of befuddlement when she did not put it on at once, but laid it on the bench beside her, where the other Mary Jane came up, quite possibly to reprimand the first for being so foolhardy as to go flying into the lawn.
As for Farfie, now that his rapture had ended, he rolled over with a whimper, only to find his face in some wild mustard the gardeners hadn't gotten to yet, and which he shortly began to sniff as if his ordinary human nose found canine graces to them.
Her stockinged feel tossed upwards as she rocked herself forwards, and her skirt blew all wrongways. "Do those smell yummy to you Farfie? Huh? Those smell yummy?"
He bit one off and chewed it noisily.
"Silly doggie!"
As for Nagi, he tasted quite lovely in the mean time.
She told him so.
And nearly startled him out of his chair.
::Silly Nagi.::
Nagi stood up and opened the window, pushing the framed pane back against its shutter. He then leaned out the sill, one end of the blanket dangling down from the cavity like a wind-tossed banner.
I didn't think you were listening to me, Savil-chan. You looked as if you had other things to entertain and befuddle you.
I think that's quite obvious.
Another spate of chirping giggles rose from her tiny corner of the garden. Farfarello perked up from his ravagement of the mustard greens to give her a quizzical look.
Now who's being silly?
He smiled down at her despite himself, but only for a moment.
You remind me of someone.
She was like you, in a way.
Okay, maybe she wasn't nearly as smart, and maybe she was far more...screwed up.
But...
...Still...
The faintest hint of a breeze wafted past his face, ruffling his hair, and Nagi caught it with his fingers. Felt the little ripple swirl about his fingers and away like a snake. He sensed other currents, higher up, pulsing with power and beckoning for him to call upon it.
So he did.
That same hand he lifted to the sky and pulled with his mind, and the wind fell into his clutches. It was all so effortless, really.
With a wave, he directed the cool, rain-scented gust down over the garden, avoiding Savil and her bower as he moved it across the roses. Unseen fingers picked them, stripped them of thorns, and summarily deposited them at her feet, on her lap. All yellow and white like sunshine.
::Oh Nagi-chan...:: The delighted sighs her thoughts came swinging over into his could have known no other word-bound thoughts -- the enchantment and the long-awaited records of what the earthly traces left. The smell of the sap and the nectar of the flowers, the undercut of mustard where she stood and the sense that the air around her had been so close to the spaces leaving Terra for good for the reaches of space. The single teardrop facet of sadness that all kindhearted afternoons know.
Especially when transmuted to emotion.
If she could have sent the wind back with a message, she would have, but the winds of the material world did not obey her. Only the immaterial.
His shields were down, so she doused them with illusion first -- indistinct phantoms of sprites and dryads, dissolving into each other and ultimately proving too unstable for her purpose. So she offered him all the sweets her mind had known, in recent past and his eyes grew wide, his tongue did not know what to make of it all.
As a telepath, she was most disappointed.
As a sister of Schuldich...
Speaking of timing.
::Silly! Yes! I'm silly! Very silly. And I am many people, I can remind you of anyone. But you don't mind.::
Saffie bent and took to her breast an armload of incarnate sunlight.
::And I like that.::
A petal blew up against her lips and she swallowed it with a giggle.
::That you're strong enough to follow all of us.::
Nagi just blinked.
::Me especially.::
Another voice, another taste...::Speaking of windows at country estates!::
::SCHUBABY! GRRR!::
::Go on.::
::You too.::
They winked with their eyes that never really closed, and in a few heartbeats she had, in her stockinged feet bounded over to the wall, bearing an armload of her flowers -- she dared call them hers -- and leaking yellow petals all the way. No trellis grew beneath the barren grape vines there -- it had rotted away leaving them sure of themselves enough to let others pass. Her toes worked into the blank spaces hidden among their leaves, buds and unborn berries rubbed off on her dress. She climbed them all the way up to his window, and stood there.
Stunned blue eyes on stunned blue green eyes.
Then she kissed him on the end of his nose.
Not to mention outright fell backwards into the arms of the open air.
"SAVIL-CHAN!"
Nagi scrambled to catch his Juliet, but only came away with his hands full of stems and leaves and torn petals, all of which scattered away.
Another wind he hurriedly called down, a much fiercer current than the last, full of lightning and thunder instead of gentle rain. It swept down from the heavens and encircled the little girl and snatched her away from the Earth's cruel embrace. Borne her up in lazy spirals, pulled so by the will of Schwartz' mage. Nagi threw open the other pane with a glance, and guided the air current towards him.
The two frightened children stared at each other for a heartbeat through the gaping hole, then Nagi lunged forward and scooped Savil up in his arms, and drew her inside.
The window closed with a hollow thud! All went quiet outside as the wind faded away.
Nagi clung to her, his face pressed against the top of her shining head.
"Never, never do that again."
The flowers between her breast and Nagi's tumbled away. One by one, as if being moved away by more than the careless forces of gravity. His was bare underneath, hers quivered so hard was her little heart thrumming away.
When enough of the blossoms had bounced harmlessly on the carpet, she leaned over, felt his with more than her mind.
It was just as fast, but failed to still, after hers had wound down. Her vertigo had ended, and her anticipation of meeting the grass a bit sooner than she had in mind.
Nagi's thin, white arms still held her, his breath still stirred her hair.
You certainly feel a lot more substantial this close up.
There was hardly anything to hold in his wheeling mind though, he felt that way too, about himself, from the inside out. She reached over and fastened her uncertainty to his so it ran in little loops of neon around them both.
The only thing otherwise she could have held were the oh so familiar chocolate pearl wavelets of another's bedroom.
"You should hear Brad and Schu-baby in the next room, they're being ridiculous."
She felt a still-clinging bud pop between them as she scooted even closer.
"I was so scared... I wasn't ever really scared until the other day, but now... that wasn't nice being afraid. I won't do it again."
It's stamens spilled all over them then as she got to the tips of her toes and pecked her Nagi-chan on the lips.
"Danke."
"...Sure."
And I'm glad.
Some sensations aren't worth experiencing.
Nagi bent forward hesitantly and kissed Savil on one pink-flushed cheek. She smelled like lavender to him.
And some are.
He slowly untangled his arms from her tiny body, and quickly hitched the sagging comforter up over his own, unpeeling a few clinging petals from his chest in the process. He slung the long, dangling end over one shoulder.
The roses lay scattered all around and between them. Nagi knelt down as gracefully as possible, looking more like he were an angel wreathed in cloud rather than a boy who'd suddenly been made aware of his nudity.
"I'm sorry your roses were destroyed. I'm sorry I ruined them."
He reached out and sifted through the satiny, fragrant heap with one hand, brushing aside trampled blooms after torn until he struck gold.
One unbroken rose, petals tightly furled and as yellow as freshly churned butter. Nagi held the flower out to her.
"It wasn't a complete loss, after all."
"But I never would have had any roses at all if you hadn't given them to me!" Saffie protested.
The hand that came to her cheek found its way there after the blush she could not seem to write upon herself, rather than any attempt to capture the kiss before it made off after its own concerns.
But with her free fingers, she entwined the naked blossom and brushed the nails of her naked Nagi-chan, knowing full well her smile was too old for her, but so were her lines in whatever play the world had picked for her to-day. So was the world, and the way she held her shoulders, even if the two had nothing to do with each other.
Then once more the heron, rather than the child or the old woman, she rose to the toes of one foot, the blossom twiddling her cheek.
"Why would it be so odd I was in love with you, hmm? I know what you're thinking of it, and why, but to put all those memories together with this. What you are to me is nothing like what you are to anyone else, even yourself. So maybe I don't care for you at all, but rather, the halo of you in my own mind."
The petals bashed her temple as she wondered once more. "But how could either of us tell the difference? And what would we do if we could? I've heard they write sonnets about this sort of thing, and that it is better to leave them to sonnets in the first place."
"Probably so," Nagi replied, sinking back onto his heels. "And it would be best to leave it to those who know the mechanics of such things, for they will best understand what it is to love. It is a poet's trade, is it not, to know the workings of the human heart."
And so, I am no poet.
I've never loved anyone save for my mother, and I...
I don't know if I love you.
"I simply can't bear the thought of you dying."
Time hung like a shivering leaf as they stared into each other's faces, one somber, the other quite merry. Then, Nagi waded to his feet. He gathered up the skirt of the blanket in his arms, clearing his ankles, and made his way to the closet. Pulled out a too big t-shirt and jeans. The latter he managed to put on without dropping the blanket.
"Tonight, if you like, I'll come and sleep with you again."
"I should like that very much indeed," Saffie replied, with an all too certain nod. The sort one usually gives if offered ice cream on a hot day.
But there had been answers of hers before that. The two of them together in the hall of mists that was their suite, where their guardians were merely phantoms with no insistence of being obeyed. The yellow rose of some substance more precious than gold or pure energy.
Moments where she had stood beside him, in body and in mind, tickling his senses with small visions which had bothered her, been wrought by her, in the past.
The last was of a singing rabbit rowing down a river of strawberry sherbet under a tangerine sky. The rabbit sang about being in love with a flower, and how sad it was that they could not be wedded officially at the woodland church, owing to a strict code of rabbits not being able to marry produce.
But they could still be together, the blue bells and the lady's slippers insisted as he passed to visit his beloved.
Nagi followed her when she wordlessly left the room.
And Crawford found himself breathless and aching and wanting so badly to moan. His hands had worked themselves under Schuldich's shirttail, to palm the velvety smooth skin of his back. He rolled his head, and, through the thick cotton, placed a kiss on the center of his chest. Felt nothing but heat and the hard flatness of his breastbone; the throb of his heart.
"..Ohhh...You were a bad, bad boy."
He moved the few inches over kiss by kiss, until he found the half-erect nub of a nipple, and clamped his mouth down over it to suckle greedily. The cloth tasted of detergent and sweat, and still he tongued it, dampened it, and felt the flesh beneath it respond to his caresses. Felt his lover's chest heave when he gasped.
Crawford raised his head in a rush and bit down on one side of Schuldich's neck; laved the mark he'd made with broad swipes of his tongue.
"I'm not surprised, though."
He arched up to kiss him on the cheek, the robe falling away from his body as he moved, pooling around his waist and hindering his arms' movement. Impatiently, he dragged them free, shook the sleeves off to wind Schuldich into a fierce embrace, one that included a hungry, melting kiss.
"I'm not surprised a bit."
Schuldich's one attempt to make some verbal comment to his lover's lewd little whispers went under and drowned in a flurry of wet clicks of their lips. With a shrug, he unhooked his shirt, threw it aside, knocked over a very pricey looking lamp and threaded his arms between Bradley's.
They paused only a second, panting and drawing a single gossamer thread of saliva between them, both casting bare, disinterested glances towards the heap of porcelain and wire.
"Ah, fuck it, we always break somethin'!" With that, the telepath snatched Crawford up by his ears and proceeded to shove his tongue down his throat, breathe as hotly as he could into his mouth.
And still so lightly run his fingers over the loose threads of his hair. Arms still locked, he found himself being eased onto his lap, tangled up with the drooping folds of his robe.
::Well, obviously, being bad is something I never grew out of.::
As further proof, not that any was needed, he ground his stiff little buds onto Braldey's, and ignored his lips long enough to hear him groaning at the rough caress.
Laughing, he treated the wet, hot penis he recovered from the discarded bathrobe much the same way with the crotch of his jeans.
"You should hear the kids in the next room! You think WE get carried away. They're actually acting like kids for once. It's disgusting."
Still forcing their laps together, he offered a live broadcast of Nagi and Saffie's fresh brewed cherry tea afternoon. With each other, and the first spun sugar clouds of something one generally would not have expected from two young psychics who had all but been raised as siblings.
::And if they were brother and sister, I still wouldn't care. Would you?::
Asked in tandem with a few empty little thrusts. "I don't think THEY'LL be getting to any of this soon, not that that bugs me either, but what about us, hmm? Who'd like a nice, long, blow job?"
"...Me." Crawford's breath jammed in his chest when Schuldich thrust into him again, and he answered with another bruising little nip on his chest, another lap of his tongue.
And no, I don't care. In fact, I'm rather surprised he'd come to feel that way about her.
Him being Nagi, that is. Which has no --
Schuldich had ground into him again, teasing now since he'd made his offer and was accepted. Crawford cupped his shoulder blades and pulled him closer.
"That's so deliciously distracting."
Fuck it, so are you.
Crawford crushed him in his arms, tracing over the swell of his lower lip with his tongue before dipping it inside his mouth.
There's one thing I want to say before the game begins.
He pulled back a little, and caught and held the other's eyes.
Thank you.
With that, Crawford flopped back onto the bed, and gave him a wicked grin.
Schuldich grinned back, albeit with what his lips seemed to take as an impersonation of his usual snide self. But he was red in the face and panting. For a handfull of idle seconds, he wondered if he would actually get a bit of sex flush.
The thought of it though, whatever the cause, made his jeans even more uncomfortable than they had been before. As he places himself astride his lover's knee, he offered him a little brush of just how uncomfortable he was, swooping down in slow motion as he did so, to rather set his teeth to one hip for a split second. Only his hair fell over Bradley's cock.
Schuldich leaned upwards then, and yawned. On purpose. Just for a chance to put his tongue on display. He curled and wiggled it most enticingly as his jaw stretched.
Ah, it was nice to get Crawford in bed with his glasses on.
But then he settled rather on finding his way up from his teeth marks with wandering steps of his tongue which came to his lover's navel at last -- something he had to admit he did not pay especial attention to, though that changed presently and he popped his lingua inside, mouthed the edges, felt the his stiff member brush his neck as he worked and kissed and slurped.
The space he worked in though began to creep open, spreading over his bare stomach, his hips, his thighs.
All of his crotch, washed all over and nibbled. All the little places most bedmates never got to.
Crawford tried unsuccessfully to arch, to wriggle under the onslaught of Schuldich's torment, but the German had him pinned down tight on the mattress. No matter how he strained against him, eager to break free enough so he could touch his lover, it was no use.
So at last he gave up, and slumped into a boneless heap in his arms. Turned his face to one side and moaned. Even his lover's hair was in on the act, trailing down and tickling places where Crawford craved the firmer touch of his hands. He murmured a breathless plea to that effect.
Schuldich only laughed.
Crawford groaned again as his teeth made contact with his skin, and hitched one leg around his lover's waist.
...Oh...
Imp. Devil. Tempter.
It's no wonder I...
...I do hope you plan to put that hard-on to good use...
::Hey now! You said you wanted me to suck you off! Why the nerve it musta taken calling ME a vixen! What a finicky little Prima-donna you are!::
He took a moment to leisurely hoist one of his lover's legs, and then bestow an second oddly placed bite. The first had been at the meeting of his waist and his thigh. The second on the bit of tender skin which preceded his rosebud if he reached back after it.
That got him a yelp and a heel smacking against his back.
Schuldich was only more delighted and made this well known.
::The kids must think we're having a tickle fight.::
::Hmm... well, not today at least. It's not like we couldn't try that sometime.::
The loop of his arms about his lover's waist tightened, and his perch on one of his knees he recaptured and thrust away at for a few moments, as if he had found much more forgiving skin there.
But just the same, his lips now inched their way across the crinks of Bradley's lower belly, coming at last to his shaft, which he bathed with the tip of his tongue, tested with the tips of his fingers, drawing the wetness of his arousal away and tweaking it between two fingers.
"Hmm... I wonder where I should put this while I get to work? I bet it would taste like all the wine you've ever drunk if I put it in my mouth. I bet it would look pretty if I drew something on your stomach with it. But it would be in the way, both those places, wouldn't it?"
A sideways embrace of his lips he laid upon Crawford's tingling member.
::You know, I do like a steady fuck. But a steady playmate is much more fun. Guess where this is going!::
In one breath, he had his consort held all the way at the back of his throat, and his ass breached by his dampened fingers.
Crawford groaned under him. His fingers clawed at the spread beneath him. He felt him laugh in his head, but the redhead gave no further acknowledgement than that.
But then, Crawford was given something other than conversation to focus his attention on.
"My sweet...!"
Uhhh...Aubrey! I thought you'd never get around to doing that.
He gasped in momentary pain; his fingers weren't quite damp enough for utter comfort. Still, he loved it: Little shocks of pain rippling through him as he was invaded and stretched. Crawford bent his free leg, and planted that foot on the mattress to give Schuldich better access.
"If...we ever do get around to tickling, I...Mmm...I'm the one who gets to do it to you."
"With a feather first, and then my fingers."
But only after I've stripped you naked and have handcuffed you to the bed posts.
::You keep thinking like that and you'll make me cum all over my pants!::
The both eased away from their lusty torments a moment, and raised eyebrows to one another's sex-drowsy looks. The flavor of his message had been nothing close to the usual half-mocking staccato sugared popcorn he tended to use in bed. Even he hadn't realized it at first, Schuldich.
But he really was suspiciously close to ruing yet another pair of jeans. If it wasn't bad enough the zipper was grinding into his tip whenever he moved, he could feel it was sticky beneath him.
But Bradley twitched in his mouth and so he unsheathed his teeth and went to nibbling his lover's bare body, only the smallest pinpricks of bites along the hot flesh, some all but uttered through his tongue and it sought fresh ways to curl around him.
His free hand he took then, and unfastened his zipper. The bedroom air seemed heavenly cool now to his naked waist, almost as much of a respite as palms would have been to it. But he left himself be for the time being and nudged his lover's legs onto his shoulders, reaching inside him with both of his first fingers and holding him open for a little visit of his tongue before settling back to mouthing his member and pinching at his sweet spot.
::You keep thinking like that, and I might just cum on your dirty little secrets alone.::
Promise?
Crawford's feet fell to Schuldich's sides, and he stroked the muscled flesh there with his toes. Brushed against the waistband of his jeans. The fabric shifted ever so slightly with every tap, barely creeping. He knew all too well how that part of his lover's anatomy felt to the touch, and he saw himself squeezing those firm, pale globes, his tongue simultaneously sweeping zigzags across the broad line of his lover's back.
Schuldich blew on his dampened sex, and made him squirm.
...You know, I think I have done you a disservice. There are so many things I'd like to do to you, with you, in a bed, in bathtubs, but I rarely do them. It's always...Oh...Right there! Crawford let out an appreciative gasp.
He in turn thought of Schuldich sprawled naked and wearing a blindfold while he sucked him off -- in between sips of hot coffee. It would be like they were melting together with every pass of his mouth.
It's always about fast screws. Push you up against some wall and take you..
He closed his lust glazed eyes with a moan. His hair fell into his eyes as he twisted his head to the side.
Not that I don't like doing that, but...
...Oh, yes, and I like what you're doing...
He angled one foot around his waist and scraped lightly at his skin, moving downwards over his stomach; managed to graze the heavy denim that covered him. He imagined Schuldich's swollen sex, and how it must be aching fiercely by now.
There's a lot to be said for taking it slow.
Thought about how delicious he tasted, and got another series of nibbles over his inner thighs for it.
I've changed my mind. If you cum anywhere within the next few minutes, I would prefer it happened within me.
Schuldich had always known that some truth lay in the supposition that one's opinion of coffee was the same as one's opinion of sex.
He had always known that coffee was one of Brad's more subtle turn ons, and that after a few cups he was always delightfully energetic... well, wherever they happened to end up that wasn't bed.
Actually, the fact they had this time reached sheets, so to speak, was quite unusual.
But anyway, the sudden image of himself, tied up with all the proper sub gear, strung up in a kitchen chair and feeling java warmed lips coast over his turgid sex...
He eased away from his lover's present erection and lay between his thighs, moaning as if slowly taken there and then by immaterial hands. Sometimes the way people imagined sensations, for themselves or anyone, anything, that certain make-believe potency. A softly cutting softness through his belly, just barely touching on the flesh that burned with true sensation in the midst of any of his lascivious encounters.
Bit him only a little, and finally rose to his knees, passing the back of his hand over his brow and looking out through his split fingers with a mute and steady look of sheer seduction.
"We're going to have a house now, Bradley. Not just one suite of rooms to ourselves but a whole building fit for us to ravage and learn all the secret corners of. All the places where we fit just right. Where we can ravish each other."
His jeans fell clear of his waist as he slid along the sprawled whiteness of his lover, skating his hand over whatever space of skin took his fancy along his road. They were both breathing very hard, almost in time.
He bent then, and drew off Crawford's glasses -- the exact opposite motion of a priest steeling a circlet of gold on some kingling's head. He laid them on the nightstand, where the lamp had once been.
"In the mean time, I think I'd enjoy coming somewhere inside of you. Let's say we do a little soixante-neuf? We don't usually get around to that, now do we?"
Brad seized a fallen lock of his hair, dragged his down and bit at his lips.
::You're always so eloquent about your replies. Very well.::
Still half-wearing his pants, he pulled his lover down from his pillows, further towards the edge of the bed and actually finding his feet upon the velvet bench there. This left him enough room to brace his knees to his shoulders, plant his bare feet against the wall as he smirked down on Crawford's blind blue eyes. The tip of his own member was weeping, and not only for going raw as it had been ground into the underside of his zipper. Brad's tongue flicked after it before he had even started to settle himself.
Which he finally did, easing into his waiting mouth, slithering over his whole body as he uncurled upside down upon him. Sank inside him, fucked his throat, even while embracing his legs as he swallowed him once again.
And sighed into him as he lost himself to the long and slow for many, many beauteous moments which ended without cries, without shivers. In silence, they had spilled into each others mouths, and only then, purring.
They lay now in a tangle of arms and legs and cotton, wrapped in diffused sated bliss, curled side by side like the Fish and smelling of sex. One of Crawford's hands lay proprietarily on Schuldich's nearest thigh, a stream of vapor snaking from his mouth at intervals.
"Remind me to make other such suggestions to you in the future, won't you?"
He slid his hand higher, over the swell of one buttock; gave it a squeeze. Schuldich made some murmur by way of reply, and Crawford sat up with a quiet chuckle. His lover lay on his stomach, red hair spilling over one bent arm and away from his face. Just a few strands jetting across his forehead, over his throat. Crawford bent to lick him on the cheek. Then he too stretched out on his side next to him, one arm bent under his head.
Two naughty little boys now, instead of just the one. Crawford felt like laughing out loud.
So he did.
That was...
He made a gesture as if to imply he was at a loss to describe it, it was so splendid. Crawford reached out to rake his fingers through the thick, fiery curtain.
I regret that we didn't go in for that sooner.
...I can hardly wait until we move in to our new home.
"I had the most delightful vision just after..."
Schuldich perked one brow in question.
He accompanied his narrative with visuals. "Well...Our two kitties are outside playing in a somewhat romantic setting. I saw a soccer ball being kicked around, kisses being exchanged, serious conversation. And so on."
Yes, I know it's only a field.
I say that because closets can be romantic. All that's really needed are a little chemistry and some imagination.
Of course, I don't think I have to explain any of that to you.
He draped an arm over Schuldich's back. Let his fingers glide down the dip of his backbone. Dropped a kiss on his shoulder.
Whispered in his ear.
"I say, Aubrey. Care for a game of soccer? Or would you rather lie about in bed with me for awhile longer?"
Schuldich's glance wound down to the arm which had passed across him. A curiously weighty arm... or close. He was still in the careless spell of great sex with eyes too bright to see clearly with and muscles like quick silver.
And I did some of my best assassin work like this after quickies in the car.
Cool. Just... cool.
He finally realized the lopsided grin which had bloomed where Crawford's vocabulary ended was still smearing his face. And he left it there.
His arms stretched, fingers purposefully grazing his lover's ass. When he spoke, it was more too the mattress.
"Let the kitties chase down a few bluebirds of happiness, eat them an' suddenly realize the damn things don' agree with them. B'sides, I already harassed Aya today an' I was always more of a fencing sort. Don' get drunk people hurling beer bottles at you if you fence, unless you're me."
Rather abruptly, he rolled onto his back, still remaining with in the confines of Bradley's grasp, wrists slumped on the velvet bench above him now, as if he floated on the surface of a lake rather than a bed. Crawford started playing with his hair again, smoothing it out over the sheets. He thought so too.
"You know, I just an idea..." He didn't say what though, they had both suspected the next sound in their room.
Someone rapped on the door with their palm.
"Schu-baby, Bradley! It's getting late and we were supposed to go to St. Catherine's to-day! I left clean pants outside the door for you. Unless you just want Nagi-chan and I to make all the decisions regarding where we're going to live. If that's the case, then where's the checkbook again?"
"ACK Noooooooo!" Schuldich histrionically replied. "We'll be up! We'll be up!"
It was two sets of footfalls which retreated from their chamber door, but only one laugh. They grinned manically at once another, hesitating all too long before rising from the bed. The telepath performed once again, his usual gratuitous stretches, bending over fully with his pants that could swing no lower if they liked.
"Saf wants me to tell you we're still allowed to do whatever with him. She doesn't mind."
Back to his full height, he hovered, way to close to Brad who was groping for his glasses still, despite having missed the display.
"In the mean time, I'll meet you downstairs in a few minutes."
Then he left.
Ah, too late.
Crawford had donned his glasses just in time to catch the merest hint of his lover's swaying ass as he made his exit. He lounged on the bed for moment, finishing off the last of his post-tonguing cigarettes. A quick crush of its fragile remains, and he sauntered to the closet. Picked out the first pre-coordinated outfit he found: Something leftover from his days as Takatori's guard. Something that was grey and said "Up-and-coming tycoon."
No sooner did he get it on, than he realized he'd made a mistake. He wasn't up-and-coming anymore. He was already there.
The jacket and tie wound up back on the hanger. He changed the dressy silver shirt for a black polo, and padded off to the living room.
There was one more little thing he wanted to do.
During an earlier exploration of the living room, he'd found a folder full of fine paper in one of the drawers in the bureau behind the sofa. It was of woven cotton and not wood pulp, as soft as petals. Bright white like snow. He slid three sheets out of the folder, and a pen, and then began to write:
{Dear Ken,}
Oh, yeah, like that informal touch...
{In honor of your new position, and in hopes of becoming better acquainted, I would like to invite you to my new abode, St. Catherine's, on Saturday next at 7 pm for cocktails.
It will be a casual, highly private affair. If you are interested in my offer, then please RSVP care of the hotel. I will be here for the next day or so.
I do hope to see you then.
B. Crawford}
He waved it a few times, guarding against smudges, and then folded it neatly and slipped inside one of the matching envelopes. Addressed it "Hidaka-dono, The Villa" in his precise hand, and after slipping on his shoes, left the room.
Downstairs, he paused at the front desk to hand the letter over to the concierge, with directions to have it delivered only into the hands of Hidaka-dono.
Then he walked over to where his family awaited him.
Oh, I know he won't accept, he thought at Schuldich as he draped an arm over his shoulders. I don't care either way.
I only wish I could be there when he receives it.
From Many Years Ago...
Night had only just fallen -- the dull whirr of the last plane into Valdemar airport had passed as the only unnatural sound in hours. The two clerks wrote with feathers, made feathers in the ledger, at least until he switched off the lights. Stunned moans rose from them both, and he laughed.
Seeking out his matches, he lit the candelabras which stood dusty all around the room.
And they laughed.
He would never be able to make up his mind which one he wanted tonight.
Maybe both, right there on the burgundy carpet...
There came a knock on the door and he had to fight the rusty hinges as usual. He should have guessed someone was coming, the way the old birch floors wailed like banshees when anyone heavier than the most emaciated catamite tread upon them.
"Koichirou-dono?" The specter of the page called from the twilight of the old stone stairwell. "Mademoiselle Carly is here to see you."
"Really?" Terrans were not accustomed to calling on one another after supper hour. It was just now nine, but hints of the sunset still lingered, captured by the aurora and held up like candles themselves. He swaggered a little towards the threshold of the gold and silver chambers, peered out, thought he could see her there at the foot of the staircase. He smiled and straightened his hair. "Well then, send her up at once."
For appearances sake, he closed the door again, but waited by it, surrounded. Scratch, scratch, scratch. A firefly landed on the tapestry on the back wall and shone as a star on the brow of the maiden there.
Carly let herself in without so much as a knock.
He chuckled in courtly surprise and held out his arms, seeing his own cufflinks on his own blue suit that so clashed with... well, all of Valdemar. A businessman thrown carelessly back in time. "Carly-sama! To what do I owe the honor this evenfall?"
That didn't mean he had to talk like one.
She was all in white -- a fitted satin thing with a gauze overskirt. She did not even tip her head to him -- her mulberry eyes saw straight through him to the dark lawn or the even darker reaches beyond- the outside velvet. One step towards him she took.
"May I do anything for you?"
And another.
"I must say I'm surprised to see you. I heard your servant had just gotten back from an errand, and I'd assumed you wished to speak with her after whatever she had gone seeking..."
Carly slapped him as hard as she could.
Her white-powdered hand had bent him over double and made off with his breath for the time being, so he only saw the motion of her dress against her as she left -- not her ever serene visage, not the way she held her knuckles as if she adored them. The two clerks rose to follow her, and he shooed them back to their seats.
He finally fell to the rug and sat there, contemplating the blood which had trickled from the inside of his lip.
"And here I thought she'd known all along."
"Known what?" The elder of the clerks asked.
"Koichirou-dono! Are you in trouble with that woman? I'll send the whores after her, every one. Whatever has she done? It's always..."
"Nothing and no one," their employer replied. "And please, don't bother. It's of no trouble. Carly-sama hasn't opened her mouth since before you were born, I doubt she'd start now." And then, as he kissed the handkerchief he had been handed. "Besides, whoever would listen to a straight woman on Terra?"
Yuriko thought she was horrified, thought she was elated, thought suddenly she really did know the woman she had worked for, in that she knew nothing of her and accepted it.
"Hey, Carly!" she called to her, half-falling from the landing where she had paused to ponder her swiftly departing figure. "I said Ken was alright. What's going on?"
She slowed before the doors leading from the stairwell -- looked up to the broken dome of the ceiling as it leaked night onto both of them.
"Carly...?"
The doors opened before her and the jasmine and myrrh of the main hall beyond came fluttering in firelight and reflections from the old, bare window, or where it had been before the glazier had stripped it down to begin anew.
"If the Su-dono mentions someone by name, they are never alright. Tell no one where you have been."
Yuriko stood blushing by the broken banister alone.
She had only been with the Mademoiselle for five years, and had already heard what might have been her voice.
There were those who boasted twenty years and no such honor.
She tried to memorize the way it had stirred her senses, and only then followed her out to the carriage.
Ken took a break.
Dono or not, he figured he deserved one, and the fact his mind had carved out such through the myriad of order emails a path to scamper down disturbed him to no end.
But he went up to his bedroom for a few minutes anyway, and sat across the windowsill. He's always liked the windowsills in Valdemar just because he could do such a thing if he liked. They hardly made such wide ones any longer, or if they did, filled them with bottles and knickknacks that sun bleached.
He reveled in the remembrance that Ran hated clutter and would never so sully his ledge.
To bad both of us won't fit.
The voices the keyboards downstairs had held silent came up and began to tickle him inside -- places maybe he rather would have left alone. Places maybe he wanted to reach in and fondle himself sometime when no pain of interruption lingered.
I wonder where Ran went off to.
I hope he comes back soon.
I hope he comes back.
OF course he will! You're not on Antiterra! Geeze, you leave your post for a few damn days and already you go so soft you can't even let him leave the room.
Yeah, and maybe I'm just sick of chocking all this down before! Maybe I'm just sick to hell of...
Why are you so mad?
I... I'm not mad!
...
Woul I'm NOT! And I did not leave my post, I came home.
You're right, you aren't mad. You just don't know what you want.
Ran! And everything about him.
Not about him.
And I DID NOT Leave my post. I WILL NOT go back there. I'm home, and I'm staying home. I'll be one of those little old ladies who lives shut up in a house that's all dust and dead things.
The hinges on his door squeaked and so yanked from his contemplations, he tumbled to the floor, having jumped too far sideways.
"Hey Ken...?" Yuriko began.
"Umm... yeah, what is it."
"You've been up here and hour, we were worried."
"An hour? You're so pulling my...?"
She shook her head.
"Damnit."
In the hour that Ken had spent upstairs, Ran had slipped back in to the tower -- not bothering to announce himself -- and had entered the bathroom without any one across the hall noticing -- or so it had seemed to him. Prim and the twins were perusing the various printouts, monitoring the auctions, while Fiona sat in one corner nibbling on an apple and thumbing through the weighty tome slung across her lap.
The vase he had gathered from below, and now it rested outside the bathroom door; his makeshift shinai he'd brought in with him for safekeeping. Only the quickest of showers he'd permitted himself, and now he was in the antique, two-seater, clawfoot tub, immersed in steaming water. Just the remedy for muscles that were sore from a long overdue workout.
Now if only his troubled life could be so easily eased.
After his one-sided duel, he'd spent a great deal of time thinking about Ken. He was still thinking about Ken now. Or rather, trying not to think about him.
Trying not to think about how he might have made a mistake in coming, about how Ken might not really love him; about how much he did love him.
Trying not to think about how roomy the tub was, and how he wished he was there with him now. How he wished...
But wishes were pointless.
Ran felt like so much dead weight. Felt useless...
As if in mockery of him, Ken's voice drifted down from somewhere above, and he heard the familiar slap of his feet on the stairs. Heard his crackling tenor rise and fall in muffled conversation with a richer, alto one. Yuriko's alto. He heard them pause in the hallway just outside the bathroom door, a shuffling scraping noise, a burst of voices sounding in unison, and then nothing. Silence.
Ran tried to force his mind back on how the water felt on his skin, on how good it felt to practice again, but he couldn't. His thoughts kept drifting back to what was going on beyond those walls.
His eyes fluttered open, and he sat up, ladling water twice more over his fiery locks, and then he got out to dry off. With the towel still draped around his shoulders, Ran donned the bright blue yukata he'd bought before coming to Valdemar and opened the door.
"Well... I'll be damned," Ken chuckled, tracing his forefinger over the squiggles of blue ink in the latest volume of the ledgers Fiona had been attacking all afternoon, not to mention baptizing with squirts of apple juice on occasion... so far she had missed this page.
The page where his own name shone on the guest list in blinding, peacock blue.
The joke had actually been that Kaze's name was, by quirk of fate, underneath his own.
He'd only half heard it, been sure it was typical harlot inanity, but he laughed, because he felt like laughing.
They all looked surprised he took his former position so lightly.
"I didn't know you ever cam here," Yuriko bantered, scrubbing the top of his head with her knuckles.
"Itai! Itaiiii! It was only for a few nights, see?" Ken found himself obliged to lean against the wall as he avoided her childish judgment. He waited for her to haul him out of his tipped crouch, but she didn't. Just stiffened her gaze for a long moment.
"And look who's on the other page! Isn't he that actor who just got married back on antiterra?" Mori, sing-song flitting in his voice, presented.
"Sure is. Ha! Dumb bitch, falling for marrying one of us!" Mari added.
"You mean I'm not allowed to run off with one of you?" Prim inquired, leaning in between the twins, who both shrieked and took off chasing her through the bracken of the wires about the room. Yuriko ducked around the other way and scooped her up, ducking out the door and thusly relocating the pursuit to less delicate downstairs chambers.
"Hullo Ran!" She called after herself.
"Bai Ran!" Prim corrected.
Ken, his hair still a disgraceful mess from his latest noogie, pulled himself up, and stretching, padded over to his lover.
"Hey there! When did you get back, sweetheart? Did you have a nice walk?"
"Um..." Ran mumbled, staring after the retreating sweethearts thoughtfully, "Yeah, I did."
And what the hell was that all about between you and Yuriko-san just now?
He tore away from the giggling shadows of two of their ladies to look upon Ken instead. He was smiling, yes, but something wasn't right. Something he couldn't put his finger upon.
He filed his misgivings away for later pondering, and cupped Ken's face between his hands on a desperate whim. A quick glance over his shoulder showed Fiona still curled up in the corner reading. Ran gave her no more thought after that.
He closed his eyes against Ken's shocked blue ones, and took his lower lip between his own, sucking at it gently until he felt him open his mouth, felt the wisp of breath as he gasped. Ever so lightly, Ran darted his tongue inside to meet Ken's. He stroked it lovingly, tasting deeply of his beloved until he was melting inside.
Then he retreated.
Their bodies had never touched.
Ran released him just as slowly as he had taken him.
"You never told me you'd been here before."
"It w-was only one night and n-nothing spectacular happened," Ken stammered.
Unlike just now...
Sugoi...
His hand came up and batted at his cheeks, which felt quite chill suddenly, inside and out, where they had been touched so gently both places.
"I don't really know why I didn't tell you."
Barring the fact you'd get upset and I never wanted that, Ran! I never wanted you to feel bad ever again but...
"Slipped my mind. Since I hardly recognize the place. It didn't used to look like this."
What a jerk you must think I am. And you would be pretty much right.
Aww Ran...
"Guess I just forgot."
The floor made not even one attempt to creek beneath him as he padded up before his beloved, leaning in close from the tips of his toes. Close enough to feel the water vapor leaving him.
But no, not quite against.
"I also forgot to tell you what a great kisser you are. And that I'm REALLY sorry for."
This he spoke only to his lover's lips, and if his ears caught the words as well, so be it.
"You're a great kisser."
Saully, from outside, returning with a slew of orders from the disgruntled townsfolk, glanced upwards to the window of the third floor of the tower. Just in time to see his Hidaka-dono lean in coax Ran's lips apart just long enough to graze the surface of his teeth, recapture whatever flavor he might have had.
Back inside, he said to him. "Y'know, umm... since we'll both be working tomorrow, we're not gonna see a whole lot of each other so... you wanna go do something? For a little while? You've already gone for a few walks so... I dunno."
An evil little chuckle.
"I'm not good at this. Sorry again. Maybe just find somewhere to sit and talk? I'm no good at that either..."
Ran didn't feel much like talking or sitting or anything save for evacuating the villa and then setting fire to the whole damn heap. The devilish gleam in Ken's eyes made him change his mind.
Or rather, it made him decide to hold off on hosting another cookout.
"I don't know, you've always been better at talking than I have."
And I thought I was doing something special! If I knew that bastard had brought you here, I would never have chosen this tower.
No wonder you don't want to sleep next to me...
Damn, damn, damn...
He threaded his fingers through his bangs, pushing them away from his face and pinning them there on top of his head. Sighed. Let his hands drop back down to his sides in resignation.
"We could...go see the sights of Valde -- No. This place probably hasn't any pleasant memories for you, so..."
"Um..." Ran glanced off in the direction of their bedroom, as if he'd just remembered something.
"You know, I never really had a chance to be a kid. My father thought that I should spend my time on my homework, or my chores; the only thing he didn't mind me doing in my free time was reading, and even then, only certain sorts of books. Any other pastime was frivolous. He hated frivolity, you see. Hated dreams and fancies."
I even think he hated Aya...
"I guess that's why I'm so dull at times. I never had any dreams, never played pretend. I know nothing of magic."
He gave him a sad little smile.
"So that's what I want to do today, Ken. I want you to show me some magic."
He leaned over, brushing his lips against Ken's cheek on the way to whisper, "Take me somewhere quiet and secluded, and teach me how to play soccer."
He nibbled at his earlobe.
"Show me how to be a kid."
Ken, long lost in the mirth of some kind of relief, laughed and combed at one of his lover's eartails, only to at once regret his joyful response. It was really a grave request from a grave boy, asked in a tone suggesting one of the two of them would die within the hour.
"Now that," he insisted at last, "Is somethin' we both agree I got some talent in! Ok then, go upstairs, put on something comfy you don't mind getting dirty and meet me... on second though, we need a ball, don't we?"
So they both took the stairs to their bedroom. Ran left only a handful of deliberate seconds to pick something out before heading into the bedroom to change. Ken got the soccer ball out of the trunk without much fuss.
But he as he held it aloft, weighted it in his hands as if it was made of clear quartz and fashioned for a gypsy, he was reminded that those few strands of grass had come once from the land they called Japan, and been struck at by the dainty toes of a little girl named Savil.
Who happened to have a brother named Schuldich.
In some ways, it was really the perfect ball for the occasion. He finally remembered he had no shoes on, and so laced on the sneakers he had worn that day before they came to Terra.
Ran waited for him in the lower hall and together, with no more than fond and cloudy looks between then, they trailed down the steps and out the back door. Onto the aventurine hills with their scotched patches and the traces of escaped ribbons from the sheets. They walked for a long time. He didn't really know where they were going but he seemed to be leading.
Seemed like he should say something. The breeze begged at his lips and the ground murmured under it's green sheets. A few grasshoppers buzzed and flew away before them.
"Hey Ran? You know I... I don't mean this like it sounds I do but I... well, you really have to stop thinking that my memories are just gonna eat me up and then I'll go away. Maybe... it's not like this for you but... I think, and I think I know, that home can't all be smiles. Otherwise it wouldn't be home. This is my home, and maybe it's not all great when I look back but... it's not all bad either. And it's been a long time. Things fade. I only ever saw one room of the villa and I think they tore it down. The entryway didn't have colored windows when I was here. It's the same place, but it's totally different. And you're there. So I'm alright, OK? And I mean it."
He wanted to take up his sweetheart's hand, but somehow his palms felt dirty suddenly. Maybe it was just being outside.
Ran kept silent still after Ken's admission, just watched him lumber along ahead of him, occasionally tossing his soccer ball up and bouncing it on a knee, or heading it. He had no reason to doubt him, for Ken was one of the most honest people he'd ever met, but it still faintly bothered him that his love had been there with Kaze.
At least, though, it seemed that they hadn't shared that bedroom. Their bedroom. The thought that they might have had given Ran the notion to refuse to sleep there ever again. Even if it meant spending his nights on the sofa.
Ran quickened his pace just enough to catch up with Ken, and his hand shot out to cup his elbow. Slid up and around to hook over his shoulder. He felt him tense up a little, but he made no move to withdraw.
Some things he'd just have to get used to.
"If you mean it...Then okay. As long as you are happy, Ken, that's really all I want."
He darted forward and kissed him warmly on the cheek, then his hand fell off its perch, accidentally grazing Ken's hip.
They had arrived.
It was a lush, grassy expanse, wide and long, and edged here and there with trees; every once in a while, he heard the chirrup of sparrows, the croaking of ravens. It was level, and perfect for such a pursuit as they intended.
He stooped to tighten the laces of his battered sneakers, glancing up at Ken with an adoring sort of smile.
"I take it you've been here before?"
Ken sidled over to a tree, only half aware of the fact he had reached back and taken Ran's hand, pulling him up beside him as he leaned against the bark of the ancient oak -- the kind that supposedly exists only to be photographed by composition students, or have stories regarding dryads told about it.
"I honestly don't know," He finally admitted. "I think I was. But there used to be black-eyes susans here, I swear. I was trying to pass this place..."
A deep sigh and he leaned this way and that, trying to pop his back which felt cranky after a long day of sitting on the floor trying to type one-handed. His lover got pulled around with his a little, and he felt his fingers creak in his own, heard the pulls the scratchy bark was making in his shirt.
"See? This is what happens when you head the ball too much. Suddenly, you're twenty and you can't even remember the color of your own mom's hair, or where you left the keys to your bike."
He thumped the trunk beside him though and finally tugged Ran after him as he strode out into the dead center of the field. Though now that it came to putting the ball he carried down with any deliberation, he held it tight against the ground for a moment before finally surrendering it to the grass.
"I'm kidding. My mom was blond. I always left my keys under my table at the shop."
Which pretty much meant things had come down to it. He blinked as if not only just where he was, but just what he was doing there eluded him.
Although, while still a member of Weiss, he had been subject to such spells of "what am I doing here" "what's going on" "how did I get here" and so on and so forth.
As if his willing suspension of disbelief regarding himself had up and run off with his sense of time. He guessed they were married with a few kids by now.
At any rate, he found himself standing in the middle of a grass field, and happening to be across from a painfully beautiful boy he had once called a pain in the ass to several people and now knew as his lover, in an odd and childish way, which was alright, at least for now, since he had asked for lessons on how to be a child.
Ken didn't know if such things fit in such forms.
Or if he could just up and teach Ran how he usually handled teaching children.
Of all things, suddenly.
He looked like he was waiting to hear some holy scripture regarding the most forbidden and arcane secrets of swordplay as written down by a long dead Chinese scholar.
"OK, number one rule of soccer is that you can't touch the ball with your arms. Anything else is OK, although, I wouldn't say go and bash it with your head on the first try. It hurts, I'm just used to it. Now, when you kick the ball, don't use your toes, or at least, try not to. No one's going to notice if you don't quite make it. But your instep works better. You kinda wanna get it under the ball, like this and almost... spoon it up."
He demonstrated then, by kicking the ball over to Ran.
Part of him just had to know what he'd do about having his personal space infringed by such a frivolous thing.
Even though that was the point, wasn't it?
The ball spun dizzily across their patch of ground, and Ran stopped it with one foot as he'd seen Ken do in the past. He tapped it experimentally, testing the angle of his foot to the ball, painfully aware of Ken's critical regard. Then he tapped it back, and again, dribbling in place to get the feel of it.
It felt like nothing he'd ever known. So easy to learn how to use, so hard to perfect the moves it could be used for. People cheered or cried to see such an ordinary object fly into nets; marveled at the prowess of the players. That 8 year old boys could do things with it that he could only imagine, on summer green fields such as they were on, shamed him.
There were so many things to rue; so many things to release. Ran ceased dribbling, and simply stared down at the dew-slick, black & white sphere nestled in the curve of his right foot.
A ball, it was, but to Ken it was more, he knew. It was all his hopes, his dreams, the ones that hung just out of reach. The ones he would never fully realize, but were firmly planted in his heart.
He knew it was all those things, for he'd seen it in his face everytime he participated in, or viewed, a match.
Ran let fly with a sudden slap. The ball whirled more-or-less straight into Ken's field of play. He raised his head as Ken caught it, eyes half-shut against the sunlight.
Whether it was the beauty of the day, of his coach, the fact that he'd just made an almost perfect shot, or the fact that Ken had held his hand longer today than he ever had earlier, Ran was compelled to make a few confessions.
"I know about your keys. I know you always liked to wear the blue aprons because the black ones didn't have pockets. I know how you take your coffee, and how you never like to make your bed because you think it's pointless." He cocked a brow at him. "Which it isn't, by the way."
"...I know how you feel about this game. The beautiful game, some call it. I never considered it as such until..."
He gnawed at his lip for a moment, as if trying to decide whether or not to continue. He did. "I used to come and watch you play whenever I could. I'd go visit Aya, and then I'd drop by the field. I'd stand in the shadows of the trees where I figured you couldn't see me."
It was only years of training, eons of afternoons practicing, eternities of sunburned cheeks and probably the grace of luck. which prevented Ken from dropping the ball.
He suddenly went very, very red and it seemed that Aya very, very much regretted having spoken. He didn't know about Ran though, he was still smiling, somewhere beyond those amethyst eyes.
Which couldn't seem to at all figure out just what his own blush meant.
"I'm surprised," Doubly so, for the sound of his own words... he knew them. He knew that light quality, the deep set sense of you're my friend even though you're small.
But Ran wasn't... not at all, was he?
"I guess... you figured right. I ah... I never had any idea. I know you used to follow me sometimes, when I was out on missions but I really, really didn't know you..."
The ball ended up back between his feet and he nudged it over to Ran, rather like a puppy might have offered up a slipper it had thoroughly chewed. He sensed no true embarrassment, no small violation of another's eyes. Nothing, only the creeping, inky regret, blotting out all those children's eyes, Ran's eyes, and so many months in the perpetual spring of the Koneko. He sat down, stretching his legs out before him, leaning towards them, but not against them.
Regret, because he couldn't boast such knowledge of his sweetheart. He couldn't even claim to have fancied him at first. All those years ago. A few weeks of genuine hate lingered there. His hands lingered din the grass, coming up with a few tufts of white clover.
And he couldn't take those feelings back in his own mind.
All he could say was that he had been wrong. Or part of him had.
This was not just some guy who had encroached on his turf at Weiss, not just some impulsive bastard who deserved a good clout in the jaw for being an idiot. Not just some man who had that soft scent of blood to him.
This was a little boy. Not even just some tender-hearted man locked up in the shell of a swordsman ideal. Little boys followed people around they cared for, regardless of whether or not it was good for them. Little boys pouted and stuffed their hands in their sweaters, and brooded over the faintest touch of sadness in another and had that little whine when they couldn't control what was going on and just couldn't talk sometimes and were always pushing and pushing to see where they'd end up and just so many other little things. Even the way he moved, the way he looked, since Aya sure as hell didn't look 21.
"I don't really think you need to learn how to be a kid. I think you know and you've just forgotten. Ran, come sit with me and gimme a kiss."
Ran stood there, feeling even more like a fool than before. Why, oh why did he speak up?! Why didn't he just be quiet and sullen like he always used to be? Why --
Why the sudden change in Ken? What had he done to cause the change? If he had done anything...
Ran didn't know if he wanted to know the answers.
He didn't want to go to him, wanted to turn and stalk away as he usually did when things got too heavy -- but he didn't. Instead, he stared down at his sneakered feet, so dingy in the broken grass. He saw them flying across the grass, across the pavement, all the way to...Where?
Where would he go anyway?
He wondered if it were the time to dwell upon such things.
One shy look at Ken told him it wasn't.
Ran scooped up the ball, and carried it away, dropping it carelessly onto the grass beside him.
He knelt on the grass next to him, one hand flat on the ground, one hand clutching at Ken's shoulder for balance.
Ran hung there for a few seconds of uncertainty before leaning in to capture Ken's mouth with his own, briefly, before suddenly pulling back to mutter, "Why do I have the feeling that you've just insulted me?"
"I dunno, probably because I did." Ken chuckled to the silhouette of Ran which hovered just above him -- a familiar outline tinted here and there with only the deepest gules... there against a sky so blue it made his eyes ache. So he closed them and for the first time in days, gave into his touch alone.
Reached up and caressed one of the all too-warm cheeks of his beloved.
"Even though I didn't mean it that way, Sweetheart. I really didn't."
And his wandering fingers finally crept through his hair, settling with a certain tentative firmness on the arch of his neck.
Tugging him down to the earth where he lay.
"I was never afraid of you, Ran. I'm not now. I tried to say something but, it's just..."
Stretching up on his back, he reached his lover's lips and stroked them lightly with his own.
But he had no time to finish what he had been intending to say, for the boy he had brought with him to Terra buckled in his arms as if he was about to dash away. He clutched at him, and his hands were brushed away. He waited to feel him flee and did not.
Ran sank down beside him as if following a glass wall placed between them, the angles of his form matching that of his own -- but were not close enough to fit together. As if he held all the air closest to him, or wanted too.
"Oh damn it all to hell!"
He laughed between slapping himself and snatching his lover's chin in his hands, reaching over and kissing him square on the lips. Giggling against him with the giddy thrill of his little prophecies fulfilled. Being just that impulsive and absurd.
Or maybe just being himself.
Damn that too.
"I want you to hold me, Ran."
Again, he rubbed at his thin, creamy lips.
"I want to hold you."
A small, slick little chirp as he tickled his tongue.
"And kiss you."
He did once more.
"It's just..."
Just not enough. He petted the inside of his lips for so long with his own, he wondered, when he came up gasping, if he even recalled whatever he had been about to say.
"Do you think you could... be alright with just that?"
"Because it's not that I don't want touched it's..."
He thought of whispering it to his ear, but only nuzzled it instead. Spoke full and open as he could.
"I can't... I haven't been able to.. you know, get it on with anyone."
Rolling his eyes at himself, he finally snuggled back down in the clover where he had been in the first place.
"Being the lover of a brothel owner with no sex drive can't be fun. It just sucks but..."
A grim little smile.
"I'd really like if you'd just let me stay beside you for awhile. That's all I want. And I wanted it back in the Rolls too. I just..."
Lost it...
And there's no point explaining it anymore than that.
He rubbed at one of his eyes then, trying not to look away.
"Hey, I'm pissed at me too."
And then he sniffled a little because he realized in spite of the smile, his fingers were a little wet.
"Didn't we already do this?"
Ran solemnly touched his fingertips to the damp skin at the corners of Ken's eyes. Stroked his cheek. "Yes, we did. Seems like...that's all we do. Or want to do."
"At least, sometimes, that's what I want to do."
He cautiously he wrapped an arm around Ken, and drew closer to him. "I want to kiss you, hold you. But...As you don't want me, I do want you." He bit his lip, shifted his eyes to the carpet of clover they were lying on, gathering his nerve to continue.
It took another kiss and a few strokes of his hair before he could bring himself to speak again. When he did, it was as Ken had; he looked him in the eye, and forced himself to hold his gaze.
"It's hard on me to just kiss you, and not be able to do more. I'm not trying to make you feel bad, but it's frustrating. You were right when you said it's not fun."
"Especially when I wanted...I wanted you to be..."
He closed his eyes then, cheeks burning bright with shame.
"I wish you'd touch me. Take me to our room some night and undress me, and just touch me. Kiss me while you do it. Make me..."
"Make me..."
Ran hesitantly opened his eyes, but couldn't quite bring himself to meet Ken's, so afraid was he over what he would see in them.
He suddenly, intensely hated himself for being needy, for wanting. For being so insensitive when Ken was hurting so badly. It was all too much to bear, and Ran could bear a lot.
"I'm sorry, Ken," he choked out.
With that, he broke free from his arms and leapt to his feet, and sprinted away.
Only Ken's fingers trailed after Ran, and only for a moment. The came back to him smarting with the shadows of the trees which had crept over the space where he was lying, and perhaps would end up lying for a very long time, he suddenly supposed. A deadened peace pulled up around him -- indolence and bird song behind which he could almost hear the meadow growing.
Not a footstep. Not a breath besides his own, and he tasted the air only slowly now.
Doesn't the sun feel nice today?
It was not only nature then, which deepened him, played silhouettes with his emotions, and no one sole eccentricity of their own.
For some odd reason he thought of Brad, but only for a split second.
There is something kinda comforting, about knowing the future.
Hmm... I guess that's why, I didn't... before... and I went all sudden on him.
"Oh yeah, like that bit in the Rolls was any better."
The grasshoppers shrugged to one another, having not the faintest idea what he was talking about.
As clear as his heart had suddenly become, it brought with it the sense his head remained cloudy, so no use going about on a sunny day, not now, not right away.
But he smiled to himself, and snuggled down against the arms of the warm earth, for there was no one else about. Time grew thin and passed without much notice, out there in pure alone, lost between the sky and the woods and wherever he happened to be, chancing moments on sleep that wouldn't quite come, might never have been meant to be for him, but still, even just after midday, bringing tidings and creamy blue chains of sheer intuition that brushed his cheeks, or maybe only...
"Eh, Ran?"
Then he was sitting up. Then he found something perched upon his nose.
But it fluttered away and dissolved into the heavens. Everything seemed far to blue, the butterfly included, there, he, tossed by himself in the clover with his blue eyes the sky had done no justice to.
He rubbed them, made himself see.
"He, I thought it was too early for Window Panes..."
But there one was, not five feet away, nestled in the curve of a somewhat familiar stalk -- a double cabochon of pastel indigo, scintillating in and out with the beating of its wings, which only became clear is the light would crouch upon them just one way.
"Hey there! What are you doing up?"
But it was there, kneeling before him, princess like on the throne of a single black-eyed susan who had been left on display amid a patch of dying dandelions.
"What are you...?"
He had not even laid his fingers to the creature there, but the way the afternoon displayed her, she seemed to break into two pieces and go falling away. He jerked away. But then there she was, against a cloud, diving for one of the trees where the moths who ate of her lovers lived.
One thing more Ken saw imperfectly, that day, that hour, whatever the time was.
He grabbed the ball and took off then, even if it had been years and he would wake to find anyone who had ever known his name, dead, and glad of it.
"Ran! Ran! Don't run away from me Ran!" This breathless cried, as if he had always been far past winded when he started to run, started falling down the ditches he did not remember.
"Please don't run away! I don't know what's the matter with me! I told you that always, I know I did but Ran! Ran! Ran where are you?"
But then, however long he had chased that lone figure, the orb around him, that sense of emptiness, broke open, admitted a single gossamer thread. He'd found a sneaker and he knew who's it was, but not how he had lost it.
They stood watching one another. Ran perched atop a stone, pausing in the middle of relacing the shoe that was still his. Ken about to fall down the gentle slope of the hill into his arms. Down into the shade, with no one else around.
He did. And found for all his wavering fear, for all his steps so rushed, his heart was still, and the shivers had retreated in truth to their icy bedroom simply to watch.
"There's no one around, Ran. Let me, just let me... consol you."
"You've had enough of me for one day."
His hands slid up under his lover's shirt then, and pulled it away.
It looked to have been there almost as long as Terra had -- Saint Catherine's. The cobbled footpaths nearby all spun from it's doorways and curled away into the meadows -- pale white crusaders into the grass and the satellite starbursts of the nearest mansions. Celestial analogies aside, the church somehow maintained an earthly visage whose gaze told tales of the long years that had been taken to bind the countryside to it and the breeze tickled ribs of the distant woods. The rough grey granite of the outer walls wore patches of moss and errant ivy between the dark gleamings its windows became from the outside. The sucher between it and the ground -- the garden ring, had not been tended; stood overgrown and poked through with the pagan hearts of dead branches. The few additions to the back rooms had been made in hurries, and so had walkways between them instead of halls. From above they must have looked like an archipelago in an emerald sea.
The realtor in her plum suit might have crossed this as if long before Fate had declared she would do so in memory of all futility of trying to find a reason to bring anyone there, find someone to abide within those walls, or hold services, even if whatever rights passed were for the souls of the trees and grace of the spirits unnamed in Christian mythos.
Saffie though, even if she had spent most of her life on Terra, gazed about with soft eyes as the keys rattled in the rusty locks of the front door. As if she had come not upon blue skies and a table full of ruins and whispers below it, but rather some banished corridor in a house she thought she knew.
She also hung very close to Nagi in the drizzling stillness of the place, flitting about him like a summer wind. Schuldich heard nothing from her and sought no more than that. But he kept nudging Brad in the ribs whenever her fingers chanced to brush just above the surface of Nagi's skin.
Brad just looked awfully lost.
"Right this way, please," the realtor offered, parting half of the entryway. The two children, nearly on her heels, drew off to the wildflowers beside the path and let their guardians pass first, more taken with the obliviously beautiful afternoon than they had chance to be oblivious themselves to the two elder lovers who had their hands in each other's pockets.
But the first thing any of them came across within were the two fonts on either said of the doors, both of which still held traces of holy water.
"You're supposed to cross yourself with that if you're coming to a service here, but I don't suppose..."
"We'll be doing that. Well, no, not like the saints were thinking, if there were saints. But still, since this is a church..."
::And you can't ever pass up an opportunity to play in the water!::
He and his sister, almost in unison dove for the left of the little bronze dishes. Their fingers parted the surface at the same instant and made a very satisfying little slurping noise which rang like the song of a whole shower in the chambers beyond. She filled her palm with the water, he dusted himself with a few drops and went about crossing himself, albeit quite backwards.
"Hey, this doesn't burn!" He remarked to Bradley with a wry grin.
Bradley refused to take his eyes from the spaces they had entered and in fact, pushed the realtor aside as if she were some bothersome insect encroaching on a potential photograph of his.
Savil threw some of the liquid in her face just to make sure before blessing Nagi and twirling away over the dusty purple carpet which ran upwards to the alter between the two lines of pews which crossed either side of the sanctum. One scratched over the bare stone beneath it as Schuldich gave it a little kick to see if it would move. He wondered if that really was cedar he smelled as it budged from its place for the first time in many a year, or if it was only the dead angels of incense which drifted on the endless air, for the church bore to it a spectacular sense of vastness, like the open bower of a grove of trees in Europe, and still retaining a stringent age. It was not, in fact, anything close to the reaches of such holy places he had passed in Europe, but it was all in the light. The sanctum was all but blinding, even as day broached on evening, and the colored rays which fell upwards to the spiraling arches of the ceiling seemed to open the place to the wiles of whatever mystic realms abided in the hearts of whoever would pray there.
He didn't know just why, but he flopped down on the pew he had just bothered and tried to remember if he knew any prayers at all. The plaster of the walls sighed somewhere, knowing better than he did that he, in fact, did not. Ah well, he could always borrow some.
As for his sister, she had risen over the few steps to the alter, and come to stand on her tiptoes behind the enrobed column on which balanced and enormous bible with a cover of scarlet. It had a lock which crossed the gold-brushed edges of its pages, one which had been left open and more or less undisturbed... and also for more days perhaps than whatever savior the pages spoke of had even lived, for their ink had faded away to almost nothing, both the Latin on the left and the English on the right. Something about some silver, but she couldn't see how much on either page, nor who had kissed who else. It sounded saucy though. A hope had passed her mind that she might persuade Nagi to stand beside her and try to make out those words, but she already sensed him behind her, otherwise occupied.
There were two long tables in the half-chamber below the gallery; the narrow walkway which ringed the hazelnut curves of the ceiling. Two tables there, one bare and white with a plate of glass atop it, the other dusted once with gilt in places, more simply quite dark where it could be seen. There was a whole meadow of dead flowers in its arms- the sorts which come only the very soonest of spring and then run away crying before the snow even melts, not to be seen until the next thaw. Nagi sifted through them with his mind, as if seeking something.
"There can't be any roses," She told him. "Roses are for june."
With a shrug, he dusted her with the pearly dust the eldest blooms has shrunk into. She giggled. He almost smiled. They parted a moment and drew the faded wreathes from the brows of the two statues there- she disrobed the marble effigy of Catherine herself, he the virgin, patting the snake beneath her foot. The find the hidden stairs then, behind a lace curtain and rose up the spiral to the gallery above. Two chairs there, like thrones of old, taking up either side of an enormous, brazen crucifix in soar need of polishing. Verdigris came down with the stale blooms they drew from it's arms.
They watched their guardians below. Bradley paced the place with a look sheerly spiritualized. But that could not be, for Bradley knew no such religion and didn't care.
He kept giving the platform of the alter a slow creationist look, as if he could not find the true meaning of some melting Hebrew word.
Schuldich had long ago gotten bored with himself and now paced the chamber counting the windows. He found all seven stations of the cross, for fourteen of the windows in all. The first occupied the east wall and the latter the west so the images played out in some kind of order through the day. But they were not the only images leaded into the walls, for flanking the seven on either side, were somewhat larger images, these without the regular castle window shape of the last and first days of Christ, two more on either side of the alter, where the wall behind them had doubtless been brought in just to space them a little of the southern light. The seventh Saffie pointed out to him -- above the door hovered the crystallized depiction of Saint Catherine herself, bound over a wheel and a backdrop of flowing violet wrought of at least fifteen separate purples. He whistled. She was faerie venus of Victoria, and bare breasted.
He also gathered up the realtor who had been tapping her foot in the corner, waiting for her watch to run down.
"Who are all these extra people? Horribly martyred saints?" Schuldich inquired with a yawn.
The woman nearly dropped her paper in surprise, but nonetheless jumped to his attention like a nun eager to convert someone. "Well, yes, mostly. But! These windows were put in by the same glazier who did the Villa, only they are fifty years older, some of his first work. He painted every shard himself. They say Catherine is really a cousin he left on Antiterra."
He gave her a lewd smile. "Start on the west wall."
So she took him to the first depiction -- a woman in a grey robe, grey herself, but with burning blue eyes tossed towards heaven and the face of tender, wild disobedience. Around her kneeled paupers bearing candles and pulling black scarves from their eyes. Behind her, ultramarine in long, crescent loops, though the unnamed ice of her eyes dimmed it to nothing. "Saint Dymphna, Patron of Lunatics."
"Farfie's Saint," The telepath murmured to Bradley who had come up behind him so as better to hear the names of his walls.
They passed seven scenes of woe to get to the saint she played shepherd with -- A rather nondescript fellow drowned out by the sonata of flame tongue cut orange around him, which he did not seem to mind. In one hand though, he carried herbs which would not burn. And a ladle.
"Saint Laurence, Patron of cooks."
"I wouldn't eat him."
They had come to one side of the alter now, the side the virgin shared with a lovely boy in very thin white. He rather resembled Botticelli's Sebastian, save that his face was more human, his hair auburn, his near-naked body free of wounds. He sat in a halo of emerald branches, writing, though apparently regarding a fox who waited patiently at his sandaled feel.
"St. Ciaran of Clonmacnoise. He trained a fox to carry his papers..."
"...but it ate them?"
Licitness of laughter aside, the hall was shortly filled with the chitterling of swallowed giggles.
"More or less. Moving on..."
A pale beauty here, set in clear water, plainly on display, more so than even Catherine, for she was naked in a tub that overlooked a garden of unicorns. Such undo fancy, but then again, a host of angels, Eastern angels spun of rainbows, did play for her dead and glorious body and on instruments surely born of heaven for they had no names on earth.
"Saint Cecelia, Patron of music."
Schuldich wondered if he could have her dark floss replaced with the farm girl blond of his beloved Stevie.
But onto a canary backdrop, of some city, any city, pieces of cities with greek proportion and the trim of china. A second boy, blond as butter, bleeding cherry stood cuffed among a faceless crowd, stung with...
"Cobblers awls, I suppose?"
"Yes."
"Ouch."
"So went Saint Crispin."
Another seven scenes and there she was. The last of them. Rapunzel with pink hair, perched upon a vanity stool. Only in the mirror could one see the cat-eared gentlemen her comb was aiming for.
"Saint Minver, who threw her comb at the devil."
"I don't remember that! Do you remember that, Saffie?" He joshed, swinging away from the realtor a moment to espie his sister peering behind a second lace curtain, one which was falling apart in her hands.
"No, not at all, and that bothers me. More than this door I can find no key for."
"That?" Their escort laughed. "That leads to the corridor that goes around the original bridal chambers and the bell tower. It's not locked."
Schuldich's eyes lit up as if he had been added to the pantheon the church presented. "Bell tower? Are there still bells in it?"
"But of course. As I said, it is fully intact, I..."
But he had already sprinted off, whisked past his sister and Nagi. Footsteps then, which had a hollow, crumbling feel to them, sounding for the first time on very neglected stairs, sounding in a room which had not known footfalls until they had come, but how long before them? Just how long.
The silence died. A fluttering noise, a host. Angels? Angels once again, still on this place? Still in a land where even the most ordinary people called themselves demons? A hoot of glee.
And the bells rang. And the saints did not design to care. And it was good.