Post by max on Oct 17, 2010 20:59:10 GMT 10
Title: Illuminate Me
Rating: PG-13, to be safe
Summary: A look at how the second generation do the love gig. Numerous pairings, peculiar and otherwise.
Warnings: If age gaps are your squick, I'd advise against your reading any further.
Notes: Very silly, but I'm sleepy.
1. (Because you're mine)
This is what it means to be drawn into another mage's working: captivation of eyes and fingers that sparkle with a glitter that isn't stone, which she loves, or water, which she hates, but something alien and wildly unrecognisable, and frighteningly familiar. He is everything she is not – everything to which she has all her life been indifferent to – only now, when she is almost seventeen and the glare her habit throws off in the zenith of the day makes her want to close her eyes, instead they latch onto him as if he is the last solid thing in the world.
And when he meets her gaze, or the white catches his focus, she feels terrified in a way that makes her want to throw herself over the rails of ships all over again, just to feel his hands around her waist, firm and indifferent and taking her youth entirely for granted. Saving her from the pull of the core which still, sometimes, calls to her, from some lythosypha she had thought had been purged, deep in her insides.
'There is more water in people's bodies,' he says one impassive autumn day when she blurts this out in an inarticulate rush (because Kurchali will never fall from her lips as easily as the other languages do, weighted, as they are, by old pain), 'Than they ever realise.'
From the way he says it, she knows he is trying to be kind, but words have always hurt her more deeply than any of the scars across her back where she was beaten, or her soles when they were flayed and she stares at him, mute with anger, and she kisses him, as if to prove how nephrite-hard she really is.
It doesn't work.
2. (Make me into anything)
Pasco is filled with all the flicker-quick movements of birds, and sometimes she wonders, if she were able to get a glimpse at people's skeletons in peacetimes as well as war or plague, whether or not his bones would be as hollow. While she's at it, she thinks she'll pluck out his heart – like dead-heading a rose – and peel back its layers to see whose name really is tangled through his roots.
He says it's her, of course he does, the nights when he swings himself in through her open window and touches her body with the reverence she herself only reserves for peonies, but in the way her mind always flies for larks and cranes when his hot, barely-a-child's mouth meets her skin, she knows he is substantiating her body for someone else's – another woman, whose temper burns brighter than the sun and whose love for incorporealities has taken her far from here. She makes him stop saying he loves her – says she'd prefer instead to hear him yammer away about his magic and his harriers and Summersea and Sandrilene – but that's all she can bear to deny him.
His heart is in her hand: it would be so easy to destroy.
3. (Like ice, like fire)
She grows at Winding Circle, in a way none of the other children who have ever been through Discipline ever have; her murdered family an ache which loses its shape as she moves on into a world of oceans and cycles of rebirth and the women who can make cloth and vines and the sky's own veins follow them like puppies.
He has no time for her as a child, and the feeling is mutual between them – the time she spent travelling with him outweighed by her incongruity at someone ever wanting to leave the temple city (and he does, recurringly) – until she is sixteen, and Trisana is honoured at Lightsbridge, and she travels to the university, along with her siblings, and he sees her there, built along her Tharian mother's lovely lines, with the magic an ebullience throughout her frame. And she sees him seeing her, the golden-eyed man, with the power a mantle over him, and an articulation in the movements of his body which seem to promise secrets, as clearly as light.
She goes to him for that clarity, and between the brush of his moustache against the soft skin of her stomach and ease with which their bodies fit together, she takes away an affirmation clearer than anything she ever could have imagined (in the marks on her shoulders. The smell in her hair).
She leaves in the dawn (because the traders do), magic in the clatter of horse hooves, and magic in the tender haze of the aquamarine sky, morning a revelation, and This is the revolution, she stops herself from saying aloud as the world – burgeoning, blue with distance – opens, like a flower, scattering petals before her feet. Everything is a radiance: quantifiable.
Rating: PG-13, to be safe
Summary: A look at how the second generation do the love gig. Numerous pairings, peculiar and otherwise.
Warnings: If age gaps are your squick, I'd advise against your reading any further.
Notes: Very silly, but I'm sleepy.
1. (Because you're mine)
This is what it means to be drawn into another mage's working: captivation of eyes and fingers that sparkle with a glitter that isn't stone, which she loves, or water, which she hates, but something alien and wildly unrecognisable, and frighteningly familiar. He is everything she is not – everything to which she has all her life been indifferent to – only now, when she is almost seventeen and the glare her habit throws off in the zenith of the day makes her want to close her eyes, instead they latch onto him as if he is the last solid thing in the world.
And when he meets her gaze, or the white catches his focus, she feels terrified in a way that makes her want to throw herself over the rails of ships all over again, just to feel his hands around her waist, firm and indifferent and taking her youth entirely for granted. Saving her from the pull of the core which still, sometimes, calls to her, from some lythosypha she had thought had been purged, deep in her insides.
'There is more water in people's bodies,' he says one impassive autumn day when she blurts this out in an inarticulate rush (because Kurchali will never fall from her lips as easily as the other languages do, weighted, as they are, by old pain), 'Than they ever realise.'
From the way he says it, she knows he is trying to be kind, but words have always hurt her more deeply than any of the scars across her back where she was beaten, or her soles when they were flayed and she stares at him, mute with anger, and she kisses him, as if to prove how nephrite-hard she really is.
It doesn't work.
2. (Make me into anything)
Pasco is filled with all the flicker-quick movements of birds, and sometimes she wonders, if she were able to get a glimpse at people's skeletons in peacetimes as well as war or plague, whether or not his bones would be as hollow. While she's at it, she thinks she'll pluck out his heart – like dead-heading a rose – and peel back its layers to see whose name really is tangled through his roots.
He says it's her, of course he does, the nights when he swings himself in through her open window and touches her body with the reverence she herself only reserves for peonies, but in the way her mind always flies for larks and cranes when his hot, barely-a-child's mouth meets her skin, she knows he is substantiating her body for someone else's – another woman, whose temper burns brighter than the sun and whose love for incorporealities has taken her far from here. She makes him stop saying he loves her – says she'd prefer instead to hear him yammer away about his magic and his harriers and Summersea and Sandrilene – but that's all she can bear to deny him.
His heart is in her hand: it would be so easy to destroy.
3. (Like ice, like fire)
She grows at Winding Circle, in a way none of the other children who have ever been through Discipline ever have; her murdered family an ache which loses its shape as she moves on into a world of oceans and cycles of rebirth and the women who can make cloth and vines and the sky's own veins follow them like puppies.
He has no time for her as a child, and the feeling is mutual between them – the time she spent travelling with him outweighed by her incongruity at someone ever wanting to leave the temple city (and he does, recurringly) – until she is sixteen, and Trisana is honoured at Lightsbridge, and she travels to the university, along with her siblings, and he sees her there, built along her Tharian mother's lovely lines, with the magic an ebullience throughout her frame. And she sees him seeing her, the golden-eyed man, with the power a mantle over him, and an articulation in the movements of his body which seem to promise secrets, as clearly as light.
She goes to him for that clarity, and between the brush of his moustache against the soft skin of her stomach and ease with which their bodies fit together, she takes away an affirmation clearer than anything she ever could have imagined (in the marks on her shoulders. The smell in her hair).
She leaves in the dawn (because the traders do), magic in the clatter of horse hooves, and magic in the tender haze of the aquamarine sky, morning a revelation, and This is the revolution, she stops herself from saying aloud as the world – burgeoning, blue with distance – opens, like a flower, scattering petals before her feet. Everything is a radiance: quantifiable.