Post by max on Feb 2, 2010 20:19:15 GMT 10
Title: Heroes For Ghosts
Rating: R
Length: 1,381
Competitor: Uline
Round/Fight: 1/H
Summary: So this is grossly OOC but… meh. Uline, Kel, the ending of things. Smut, but not as explicit as it could be, I suppose.
I should mention – I’m sick so I really don’t have the strength to read through this, so if there are any WTF bits, um… yeah. I’ll fix them but not right now.
=====================
In the back of her mind, she knows this is only going to lead to ruin. That they will not come out of this whole. One day, she thinks she might even succumb to the futility of it all.
Today is not that day.
She knocks on the oak door, admiring the old swirling grain of the wood as she steps into the room without waiting for an answer. There is Keladry, sitting on the bed with her hands clasped loosely around a cup of tea, and she doesn’t look up when she says ‘It’s not a good time’ because, really, dusk has fallen, and the only people who steal through the palace at this time are expected, and she doesn’t need to.
Uline locks the door behind her, nonchalantly pulls off her – Kel’s really – wine red coat and drapes it across the clothes rack before she deigns to reply.
‘I can go…’ and it is not so much an offer as it is a challenge, but this particular lady knight has never enjoyed such games, and a pair of hazel eyes the exact dreamy green the Hannaloff runs in spring meet her own just long enough to let the reproach sink in before she sighs without sound (a loosening of shoulders and ripple of honey-brown hair) and her eyes return to her tea. Or the contents of her teacup, anyway.
‘That doesn’t smell like willow tea,’ Uline remarks lightly, taking a branch of candles and setting them on the low table next to the bed.
‘Probably because it’s sake,’ Kel says eventually, sentence left trailing somewhere in the gloom (because she always waits longer than anyone else to light lamps, leaving shadows to blossom and deepen across her room until only the silver curves of her eyes are left catching light), inviting a hesitation that makes Uline pause at the hearth, glowing splint in her hand. ‘Dom… came to visit me.’
Pieces that had been hanging invisible in the air suddenly materialise and fall into explainable patterns.
And although she is considered eloquent and intelligent, and one of her greater gifts (and she has many, or so she is told) is her ability to say the right charming thing even in the worst of times, she has not been prepared for the shadow of a blue-eyed boy (he will never grow up and it is more disability than charm) to fall here, and all she can say is
‘Oh,’ like some kind of fool, until she adds an oh so ladylike ‘Ouch’ as the taper left burning in her hands reaches her fingers, to be dropped onto the flagstone floor.
Then Kel is holding her hand with scarred, calloused fingers, pulling her over to the window where the light is best, brows creased in delicate concentration before she brings Uline’s fingers to her mouth and sucks on them gently for a moment that is too drawn out for the older girl’s liking – not for the sensation, but the gesture behind it.
‘Better?’
Her fingers tingle.
She nods.
Keladry leans in to steal a kiss but she moves away, eyes cautious. ‘We have unfinished business, you and I,’ quoting The Wandering Bard, although she knows Kel hasn’t read it. Dropping the pretence she crosses her arms. ‘What exactly happened when Masbolle came calling?’
And because she knows how deep Kel’s infatuation with that man once ran, has accepted that she is at best a poor third in Keladry’s affections, and has accepted that this is all she can hope to be, she doesn’t leave then and there.
She sacrificed her dignity to this love a long, long time ago, so instead she sits in the younger girl’s window seat and braces herself for the blow.
‘He asked me to dinner.’
‘And you said yes.’
‘It… it would have been churlish to refuse.’
Shrinking in on herself, suddenly cold. ‘I hope you had the dignity to accept gracefully, rather than come over as eager as a puppy,’ the unspoken I hope you've learnt that much hanging between them.
‘Ule… don’t. Please.’
‘It would be churlish of me, I expect. Thank the gods I’m not expected to be chivalrous.’ And she stresses the I’m just enough for it to cut.
‘You know I love you,’ comes the protest from behind a pair of none-too dreamy hazel eyes. ‘You always said this would… would – ’
‘So what if I did?’ she demands, eyes suddenly flashing anger, and Keladry, wrong-footed, takes a step back. She is taller than Uline, but the older girl’s passions sometimes (always) overwhelm her. ‘What if I’m not ready for this to happen today? Tonight? Now?’
The candles remain unlit, but she has adjusted to the darkness, walking Keladry backwards into the plain whitewashed plaster wall until she has the younger girl pinned there, their faces so close together that all she can see are the whites of Keladry’s eyes, feeling her lashes brushing on her skin and the air they breathe is each others’ anyway, but it isn’t enough, never enough, and all of a sudden the space between demanding Keladry man up (and the irony doesn’t escape her) and leaving in a whirl of dignity befitting of her 25 years is filled by her hands on Keladry’s wrists as she tries to inhale the essence of honey-brown hair and rough calloused fingers from a mouth that holds the lingering taste of rice wine, and all there is left is the pulling at of clothes to fall to the floor in the dark, the pulling of bodies together and the clawing of skin, as if she can imprint the mark of Keladry on her forever.
Whispering, ‘I love you. Gods I love you.’
Whispering, ‘Don’t leave me.’
Pulling Kel on top of her, ignoring a fearful ‘I’ll squash you,’ because she wants to be ground into paste so fine as to permeate the pores of this girl’s skin, and all the control and brightness she has cultivated her entire life hasn’t prepared her for this level of urgency and despair and it is unbearable to be teetering on the brink of the end of her life so young and the tide of this running through her own body makes her beg Keladry to relinquish her fear of hurting her, love her without thought for pain, because that is all she will have left by the time the sun rises anyway, and there is now no reason for her to hope for anything more.
The moon rises. Keladry’s colour lost to the silver light, face buried in the crook of her shoulder, beneath her hair (turned to a cloud of dark spun sugar by sweat and spilt rice wine) and because she has lost Keladry, she disentangles their limbs and retrieves her clothes from where they had been flung. Kel, still exhausted only registers these things properly when she sees Uline pick up the coat Lalasa made for her, in the days when she was a different person and she sits up, supporting herself with a trembling arm, and asks, ‘What are you doing?’
Uline doesn’t look at her, fumbling with the curious knotted buttons, unable to see in the dark. ‘Making an exit,’
In one of those lightning quick movements Kel is so good at she is barring the door, a sheet bunched around her waist like a Sirajit depiction of the Goddess herself and Uline’s world begins to tilt again as Kel wraps her arms around her, mouth against her hair, saying,
‘Please, Ule,’
Saying, ‘Just tonight,’
But if tonight is all she has, then tonight is everything she has to lose. One last time she caresses the beautiful body, kisses the chapped lips, then there is the grain of the oak door – lost to the dark – and the unlit passageways and gardens of the Palace.
There are no lovers out in this moonlight, only wishes she knows she is meant to be beyond longing for. She is beautiful, she is wealthy, she is admired and envied and wants for nothing, walking down through the temple district, surrounded by the tolling of the midnight bells, but staring up at the moon they have compared her to all her life, Uline finds herself, praying,
I wish, undone.
I wish.
Rating: R
Length: 1,381
Competitor: Uline
Round/Fight: 1/H
Summary: So this is grossly OOC but… meh. Uline, Kel, the ending of things. Smut, but not as explicit as it could be, I suppose.
I should mention – I’m sick so I really don’t have the strength to read through this, so if there are any WTF bits, um… yeah. I’ll fix them but not right now.
=====================
In the back of her mind, she knows this is only going to lead to ruin. That they will not come out of this whole. One day, she thinks she might even succumb to the futility of it all.
Today is not that day.
She knocks on the oak door, admiring the old swirling grain of the wood as she steps into the room without waiting for an answer. There is Keladry, sitting on the bed with her hands clasped loosely around a cup of tea, and she doesn’t look up when she says ‘It’s not a good time’ because, really, dusk has fallen, and the only people who steal through the palace at this time are expected, and she doesn’t need to.
Uline locks the door behind her, nonchalantly pulls off her – Kel’s really – wine red coat and drapes it across the clothes rack before she deigns to reply.
‘I can go…’ and it is not so much an offer as it is a challenge, but this particular lady knight has never enjoyed such games, and a pair of hazel eyes the exact dreamy green the Hannaloff runs in spring meet her own just long enough to let the reproach sink in before she sighs without sound (a loosening of shoulders and ripple of honey-brown hair) and her eyes return to her tea. Or the contents of her teacup, anyway.
‘That doesn’t smell like willow tea,’ Uline remarks lightly, taking a branch of candles and setting them on the low table next to the bed.
‘Probably because it’s sake,’ Kel says eventually, sentence left trailing somewhere in the gloom (because she always waits longer than anyone else to light lamps, leaving shadows to blossom and deepen across her room until only the silver curves of her eyes are left catching light), inviting a hesitation that makes Uline pause at the hearth, glowing splint in her hand. ‘Dom… came to visit me.’
Pieces that had been hanging invisible in the air suddenly materialise and fall into explainable patterns.
And although she is considered eloquent and intelligent, and one of her greater gifts (and she has many, or so she is told) is her ability to say the right charming thing even in the worst of times, she has not been prepared for the shadow of a blue-eyed boy (he will never grow up and it is more disability than charm) to fall here, and all she can say is
‘Oh,’ like some kind of fool, until she adds an oh so ladylike ‘Ouch’ as the taper left burning in her hands reaches her fingers, to be dropped onto the flagstone floor.
Then Kel is holding her hand with scarred, calloused fingers, pulling her over to the window where the light is best, brows creased in delicate concentration before she brings Uline’s fingers to her mouth and sucks on them gently for a moment that is too drawn out for the older girl’s liking – not for the sensation, but the gesture behind it.
‘Better?’
Her fingers tingle.
She nods.
Keladry leans in to steal a kiss but she moves away, eyes cautious. ‘We have unfinished business, you and I,’ quoting The Wandering Bard, although she knows Kel hasn’t read it. Dropping the pretence she crosses her arms. ‘What exactly happened when Masbolle came calling?’
And because she knows how deep Kel’s infatuation with that man once ran, has accepted that she is at best a poor third in Keladry’s affections, and has accepted that this is all she can hope to be, she doesn’t leave then and there.
She sacrificed her dignity to this love a long, long time ago, so instead she sits in the younger girl’s window seat and braces herself for the blow.
‘He asked me to dinner.’
‘And you said yes.’
‘It… it would have been churlish to refuse.’
Shrinking in on herself, suddenly cold. ‘I hope you had the dignity to accept gracefully, rather than come over as eager as a puppy,’ the unspoken I hope you've learnt that much hanging between them.
‘Ule… don’t. Please.’
‘It would be churlish of me, I expect. Thank the gods I’m not expected to be chivalrous.’ And she stresses the I’m just enough for it to cut.
‘You know I love you,’ comes the protest from behind a pair of none-too dreamy hazel eyes. ‘You always said this would… would – ’
‘So what if I did?’ she demands, eyes suddenly flashing anger, and Keladry, wrong-footed, takes a step back. She is taller than Uline, but the older girl’s passions sometimes (always) overwhelm her. ‘What if I’m not ready for this to happen today? Tonight? Now?’
The candles remain unlit, but she has adjusted to the darkness, walking Keladry backwards into the plain whitewashed plaster wall until she has the younger girl pinned there, their faces so close together that all she can see are the whites of Keladry’s eyes, feeling her lashes brushing on her skin and the air they breathe is each others’ anyway, but it isn’t enough, never enough, and all of a sudden the space between demanding Keladry man up (and the irony doesn’t escape her) and leaving in a whirl of dignity befitting of her 25 years is filled by her hands on Keladry’s wrists as she tries to inhale the essence of honey-brown hair and rough calloused fingers from a mouth that holds the lingering taste of rice wine, and all there is left is the pulling at of clothes to fall to the floor in the dark, the pulling of bodies together and the clawing of skin, as if she can imprint the mark of Keladry on her forever.
Whispering, ‘I love you. Gods I love you.’
Whispering, ‘Don’t leave me.’
Pulling Kel on top of her, ignoring a fearful ‘I’ll squash you,’ because she wants to be ground into paste so fine as to permeate the pores of this girl’s skin, and all the control and brightness she has cultivated her entire life hasn’t prepared her for this level of urgency and despair and it is unbearable to be teetering on the brink of the end of her life so young and the tide of this running through her own body makes her beg Keladry to relinquish her fear of hurting her, love her without thought for pain, because that is all she will have left by the time the sun rises anyway, and there is now no reason for her to hope for anything more.
The moon rises. Keladry’s colour lost to the silver light, face buried in the crook of her shoulder, beneath her hair (turned to a cloud of dark spun sugar by sweat and spilt rice wine) and because she has lost Keladry, she disentangles their limbs and retrieves her clothes from where they had been flung. Kel, still exhausted only registers these things properly when she sees Uline pick up the coat Lalasa made for her, in the days when she was a different person and she sits up, supporting herself with a trembling arm, and asks, ‘What are you doing?’
Uline doesn’t look at her, fumbling with the curious knotted buttons, unable to see in the dark. ‘Making an exit,’
In one of those lightning quick movements Kel is so good at she is barring the door, a sheet bunched around her waist like a Sirajit depiction of the Goddess herself and Uline’s world begins to tilt again as Kel wraps her arms around her, mouth against her hair, saying,
‘Please, Ule,’
Saying, ‘Just tonight,’
But if tonight is all she has, then tonight is everything she has to lose. One last time she caresses the beautiful body, kisses the chapped lips, then there is the grain of the oak door – lost to the dark – and the unlit passageways and gardens of the Palace.
There are no lovers out in this moonlight, only wishes she knows she is meant to be beyond longing for. She is beautiful, she is wealthy, she is admired and envied and wants for nothing, walking down through the temple district, surrounded by the tolling of the midnight bells, but staring up at the moon they have compared her to all her life, Uline finds herself, praying,
I wish, undone.
I wish.