There's a new world shattering the silence. A new world I'm afraid to see.

[sendmyscourge]

One more midnight passes.

The firstborns are ripped out of their dreamworlds and dropped back into Chicago, disoriented and confused, but otherwise okay. With them, comes the return of all the tech and vehicles that were down while the plagues were going on.

As the sun rises, all that is left of the plagues are the corpses of monster and humanoid,

Comments

[superiorspectre]

Still. There's a difference between things that are known and things that are felt. There are layers of damage all the rationalization in the world can't touch.

Sark may know he's safe, but the way he's fumbling, he's not feeling it, not completely. Safer, perhaps, but not safe.

With certain lines of work, certain lives, you start to realise that the only time you're truly safe is when you're dead. She can feel that on him now more than ever.

So when he kisses her, she kisses back, matching the desperation at first, and then letting it wind down into something slow and easy. If he needs to prove something he's welcome to, but there's also this -- slow, deliberate sensuality, the process of learning him, softness of skin, the muscle underneath, the way he moves, the way he feels against her.

There's only one other person she's devoted that kind of effort to, but for different reasons. With Tosh, once upon a time, Suzie learned her body in the same way she learned a new and curious bit of technology, to make certain it was safe, to catalogue it in her own mind as something beautiful and wonderful to be explored and appreciated and seen as something other than the enemy.

With J, it was to redefine him on different terms, though she never reached the same extent with him that she did with Tosh, or that she plans to with Sark.

Where Julian is concerned, this isn't so much to reassure her as it is to remind him.

This is your body. This is the strength it contains, and these are the places that are soft and feel things more intensely, and all of this is yours.

When she finally breaks away, it's to flip the lock on the door, and then make her way silently to the bed.

"Top drawer, over there," she says, nodding at a nightstand.

Ostensibly, that's just the location of the condoms.

It also happens to be where she keeps her gun, and she suspects that, on some level, knowing that will do him good.