Rita: Double Shot
A belated happy birthday to ledivinemarquis, and Happy Valentines Day, my dear. As a gift, two shots of your preferred poison in somewhat dangerous cocktails. Drink them both down now or savour one later, but be careful, they're quite potent.
Title: The Light and The Darkness
Pairing: Rita/Severus
Rating: R, to be safe.
He likes her stripped of all makeup but her red lips, curls dishevelled and shoulders bare. He likes the way firelight flickers over her throat. He likes her in black and half in shadow. He likes that she taught him everything he knows about what he likes.
She was wearing a corset the first time he saw her, at his graduation ball. Black, velvet and laces. She lurked with a discrete crimson quill and leather bound notebook, sipping red wine with redder lips. That image stayed with him. The corset did not become her on the night any more than the dress robes on the girls his age, but it became her in his mind. She was something dark and decadent and heady, with just that tiny suggestion of wanting to be bound, dominated, ravished. She took over his dreams.
He lifts his hands and a ties a blindfold about her eyes. Sees her breast rise and fall with each ragged breath. She’s always been the one in control, showing him things he’s never thought of, teaching him desire. He’s always been an eager pupil, but he has a new master now. He knows she’s afraid of that, of the fresh wound on his left arm. He knows she knows he could kill her tonight, and he knows she’s only pretending that doesn’t excite her.
“Rita.” He whispers her name against her throat.
“Severus,” she echoes just as quietly.
The night is dark, and he is darker still.
~*~
When she finds out what he’s done, she is inconsolable. She runs from him through the rain-drenched evening, and when he finally catches her in an alley and presses her against the wall, she slaps him hard across the cheek.
Rain has turned her curls to limp tendrils that stick to her face, and when her deceptively strong hand collides with his cheek he sees red, and through it, a thick droplet of water flying off the end of his nose.
“You bastard!” She screams at him, beats her fists against his chest. “What the fuck are you trying to do?! Spying for Dumbledore, turning on the Dark Lord? He’ll find out and he’ll kill you! I could handle it when you were just a Deatheater. I could handle it when you were just a man and not trying to be some sort of hero!”
And her screams have turned to tears. She’s not a soft woman, not a woman who does things by halves. She doesn’t sob and shy away. When she cries, those fists close around his robes and she pulls him hard against her into a brutal, desperate kiss. He feels her hot tears on his skin mixing with the rain.
~*~
She doesn’t wear black anymore because she doesn’t want to be reminded of the dark. She hides behind her pen in the Wizengamot trials, and with every new prisoner and every new accusation, she worries that perhaps Dumbledore’s word will not be enough this time. She hates him, Dumbledore. Hates that Severus has simply chosen one master over another. Hates herself even more, because perhaps if she had not taught him how to desire, he may not have wanted the power the Dark Lord could give him in the first place.
Underneath the reports of death, betrayal and families torn apart by dark allegiance, she submits gossip and trash. Convinces her editors to publish them on the same page. The world needs something to smile about, someone to laugh at, something to take their minds off what is going on in the bowels of the Ministry where it is always night.
So does she. So she writes gossip and shops for handbags in the glorious midday sun while he teaches at Hogwarts under a kinder master than the last one, and she wonders whether it was she who gave him his taste for servitude.
~*~
On the morning she meets the champions he corners her in the broom closet and wraps his long fingers about her arm.
“You would do anything to get what you want, wouldn’t you, Miss Skeeter?” he hisses in her ear.
“Didn’t you do the same in the past, Mr Snape?” She glances sideways at him, and he rips the notebook from her fingers.
They make violent love against the wall of the closet, hot and fast with her skirt up around her waist and her hands buried in the folds of his robes. He bites her throat and she tosses her head back against the wall and comes hard against him.
Afterward, he shows her the Dark Mark, shadowy against his skin, and she doesn’t have the strength to cry. She hates Harry Potter for making them think it was all over when it wasn’t, and she rips him apart in her article just because she can.
~*~
That Granger girl doesn’t know what she’s silenced. Rita has always been an asset to the Prophet. She’s always known what would sell, and Ministry be damned. She’s always held a certain sway over her editors, and she watches the paper turn into a propaganda rag when she’s forced to take leave.
She visits him at Hogwarts and finds the school a totalitarian state.
Oh, how she wants to write about what the Umbridge woman is doing. How she needs that catharsis when she wakes up in his bed before dawn and finds him gone, and she knows he is with the Dark Lord. She wraps herself in the duvet and stands by the window, staring out at the grey, misty grounds. Whispers fog against the glass as she lets her quill write all she would like to say - about the Ministry, about Dumbledore, about blindness and pretending and sending men off to their deaths in black Deatheater robes. Then she tears up the parchment and watches it burn in the fireplace; waits for the sun to breach the horizon.
~*~
In the dead of night he comes for her, presses her down into the sheets and stifles her scream with a hand. He feels her heart beat hard against his body. It’s been days; she surely knows who killed the man by now, and he can feel the fear rippling through her skin. Can feel it turning to excitement, like it always has.
He lifts his hand from her mouth and hears her whisper in the darkness.
“Who? How? Why?” Always a journalist.
He doesn’t give her answers; he’s not sure he knows them himself. It doesn’t matter that Albus asked him in the end. Begged him, in the end. He has no idea how he managed to utter the curse, or who he is now that the old man is gone. Who is a spy with no one to report to? What is a servant without a master? The Order think him a traitor, and he could still be one, if he lets himself.
He remembers the nights that he worshipped her, before he took the Mark. Wonders if he could do it again. She flirted with darkness then, at least on the surface. Liked eyes to follow her, liked to make people wonder. Now she flirts with colour. Colour in the face of fear and the light and dark view of the world. She revels in rainbows and greyness, in finding the darkness in people of light and drawing brilliant reds and blues from the most monochrome of dark figures. People hate her for it, and that’s probably why he loves her.
He kisses her, hard and hot in the dark, and can taste the questions on her tongue. He hopes he is answering them with his own. He feels the scratch of her nails against him through his clothes, the fumbling of fingers in the dark. She pulls at his robes until she can touch his skin, and then there are fingers on his hips, sliding up over his chest, pausing to feel his heart beat. Her other hand finding his shoulder, cupping the sharp line of his chin, and fingernails scraping his cheek.
“As long as you’re here.” Her voice is a whisper, and an offering.
She’s always been able to see the colour in him, even when he couldn’t see it himself. He doesn’t know if he’s ever changed, to her mind, or if he’s always been loyal to everyone and no one to her, because she didn’t care as long as he was there. Ironic that the only woman he’s ever trusted is Rita Skeeter. Ironic that she’s always demanded his honesty, and given nothing but her own in return.
He presses her down and kisses her again. His hands find her in the dark, and she redeems him.
Title: Ink
Pairing: Rita/Bellatrix
Rating: NC-17
Warnings: Blood and a lot of dark kink
She carved the ‘R’ over her left breast years ago with that acid green quill, watching crimson blood well in its golden nib, mixing it with ink, and setting it down onto parchment.
“Rita Skeeter”, she whispered. The quill wrote her name in a shaky font, and blood trickled down over her breast to drip against her belly. She smiled, lifted it again and dug it even further into the wound, traced the letter of her name and mixed the blood with the ink once again. This time, when she whispered her name, it wrote Rita Skeeter, twenty-two, who looks ever so good naked. She felt the pull at her skin, a dark twist of magic, and she caught the trail of blood trickling over her flesh with a finger, and licked it clean.
It bleeds of its own accord now. With every venomous word she feels the magic twist deeper inside her, feels it take part of her soul and bleed it onto the page.
It feels like sex, like power, like the heady spin of a drug. She likes it.
~*~
They check her wand at the door, but they do not take her quill. The dangerous ones are kept in the holding cells of Azkaban until their trials, and Bellatrix Lestrange certainly qualifies as one of those. Guards tell her she has half an hour, and she follows the black-robed frame of a Dementor down the hall.
It’s not paying her any attention, but she can feel the affects of the dark creature nevertheless. It absorbs all the goodness within her, leaving the predator, the bitch, the dark and animal desire with her as it lets her into the cell with Bellatrix.
Who can probably smell it.
The Dementors don’t like the light, so the room is half in darkness when she enters. Its prisoner looks up with a face shadowed by her mane of dark hair. Her eyes are black pools, unreadable in the dimness, but her lips twist into a darkly amused smile.
“Rita Skeeter. Come for your pound of flesh?”
There is a thin bunk along one wall on which Bellatrix is sitting, and a small table charmed so that it can’t be lifted up and thrown. Rita pulls quill and notebook from her bag and lays the book on the table. She lifts the quill’s nib to her lips and sucks. The engraving on her chest burns into her heart. She props the quill on the page, light headed with pain and pleasure.
“No, just your last words as a free woman.”
Bellatrix hisses, pushes herself up, crosses to the table and wraps thin fingers about it. Stares at Rita, not quite sane.
“I’ve always been free, and I’ll always be free! It is the Dark Lord who offers freedom. You are the ones who are blinded and following and tainted with impure blood.”
She stalks back to her bunk and sits, staring across the room. The quill scratches Bella’s words, scratches Rita’s skin like the faintest caress, and Rita steps closer to the bunk. Her voice is a calculated whisper.
“Bullshit, Bella, you never wanted to go to Azkaban.”
“Fuck off!” she hisses acidly. Then, at a whisper, “Be damned if I’m going to let them think I’m beaten.”
Rita knows. They were at school together, after all.
“Voldemort’s most loyal, the most intriguing of Deatheaters, Bellatrix Lestrange, is at once manic and frighteningly sane.”
She feels it pierce her chest and pull, and she steps closer, wanting more, wanting a story; wanting to take what she can from this woman before the Dementors do.
Bellatrix lifts her head, sniffs, and there is a light her eyes even in the shadows. The next moment, a strong hand closes around Rita’s wrist and pulls her down onto the hard little bunk.
“What is that?” A knee presses her down and crazed fingers tear at her robes, ripping buttons undone to expose pale white flesh, breast and ragged red wound. Cold touches her toes, drags at her mind. The Dementor is in the doorway, ready to strike, but Bellatrix stills and it pauses as though considering.
Fingers bite painfully into the flesh of her breast, and Bella smiles. “You’re darker than I thought, Skeeter.” She licks her lips, lowers her head and tongues the wound slowly, tracing the sharp lines and the curve of the ‘R’. Fire; acid and fire in her skin, and the quill stuttering on the page. Heart beating hard in her chest, pain turning to pleasure. The Dementor at the door curls its fingers around the doorframe; Rita digs hers into Bella’s shoulder. Fingernails cut into flesh through flimsy prison robes.
“Do you like the dark, Rita?” Bella hisses in her ear. “It does.”
There is a heavy gold chain around Rita’s neck today, and Bella twines her fingers about it with a smirk as her knee pushes Rita’s thighs apart. Her hand slides under hem of green satin skirt, pushing it up, and fingers play over stockinged thighs and up to push panties aside. She twists the chain in her hand, and it pulls tight around Rita’s throat.
“Tell a story, Rita. Go on, make your quill write.” Her fingers tease Rita’s cunt.
A ragged breath escapes the journalist’s throat, and she tries to speak, tries to think as she feels those fingers roughly stroking her sex.
“There is a promise of violence in her eyes, in her movements, in the proud angle of her chin…”
Bella’s fingers plunge inside her. She twists the chain tighter.
“Speak.”
She can feel the constriction hot and tight around her throat, feel the dark burning in her chest, but she fights for words anyway. There is no happiness; the Dementor is stealing all that, standing in the doorway like a voyeur but blind in all human ways. It’s breath rattles loudly in its skeletal body.
“Defiantly, she claims that she will be free even in Azkaban, that her faith in You-Know-Who has set her above people like you and I. She hasn’t changed since high sch…”
Bellatrix twists the chain tighter, and all words are trapped in Rita’s throat. Her eyes flutter, she feels the blood spilling onto her chest, and Bella is licking it clean again, thumb on clit and fingers buried inside Rita’s cunt to the knuckles, curling up and in and somehow filling her completely with violent thrusts. She twists the chain again, and Rita feels her eyelids flutter. She moans deep in her throat, but Bellatrix doesn’t relent. She pulls the chain even tighter and fans her fingers inside Rita, plunging her tongue into the raw magic of the wound, taking some of Rita’s soul as the chain takes her breath and muscles tighten around fingers.
Black stars before her eyes, and she feels herself coming even as she feels her mind spinning away into darkness.
It feels like dying, like the quill has finally taken her soul completely; like blood and poison and vicious words. She likes it.
Thanks to eleanor_zara for the beta read, encouragement, and inspiration. The entire idea for 'Ink' was spawned from an impromptu conversation over at mrsrobinsonanon with velmaneuwirth, and, of course, from Marquise's beautiful artwork. Some examples where the 'R' can be seen include her Rita Manip and Private Interview. The 'you would do anything' conversation in 'The Light and The Darkness' was depicted in this drawing, and I'm sure she knows which other parts of those stories she helped inspire herself ;). I hope you enjoyed them, Marquise, and I hope we continue to inspire each other with our work. You certainly inspire me.
Title: The Light and The Darkness
Pairing: Rita/Severus
Rating: R, to be safe.
He likes her stripped of all makeup but her red lips, curls dishevelled and shoulders bare. He likes the way firelight flickers over her throat. He likes her in black and half in shadow. He likes that she taught him everything he knows about what he likes.
She was wearing a corset the first time he saw her, at his graduation ball. Black, velvet and laces. She lurked with a discrete crimson quill and leather bound notebook, sipping red wine with redder lips. That image stayed with him. The corset did not become her on the night any more than the dress robes on the girls his age, but it became her in his mind. She was something dark and decadent and heady, with just that tiny suggestion of wanting to be bound, dominated, ravished. She took over his dreams.
He lifts his hands and a ties a blindfold about her eyes. Sees her breast rise and fall with each ragged breath. She’s always been the one in control, showing him things he’s never thought of, teaching him desire. He’s always been an eager pupil, but he has a new master now. He knows she’s afraid of that, of the fresh wound on his left arm. He knows she knows he could kill her tonight, and he knows she’s only pretending that doesn’t excite her.
“Rita.” He whispers her name against her throat.
“Severus,” she echoes just as quietly.
The night is dark, and he is darker still.
~*~
When she finds out what he’s done, she is inconsolable. She runs from him through the rain-drenched evening, and when he finally catches her in an alley and presses her against the wall, she slaps him hard across the cheek.
Rain has turned her curls to limp tendrils that stick to her face, and when her deceptively strong hand collides with his cheek he sees red, and through it, a thick droplet of water flying off the end of his nose.
“You bastard!” She screams at him, beats her fists against his chest. “What the fuck are you trying to do?! Spying for Dumbledore, turning on the Dark Lord? He’ll find out and he’ll kill you! I could handle it when you were just a Deatheater. I could handle it when you were just a man and not trying to be some sort of hero!”
And her screams have turned to tears. She’s not a soft woman, not a woman who does things by halves. She doesn’t sob and shy away. When she cries, those fists close around his robes and she pulls him hard against her into a brutal, desperate kiss. He feels her hot tears on his skin mixing with the rain.
~*~
She doesn’t wear black anymore because she doesn’t want to be reminded of the dark. She hides behind her pen in the Wizengamot trials, and with every new prisoner and every new accusation, she worries that perhaps Dumbledore’s word will not be enough this time. She hates him, Dumbledore. Hates that Severus has simply chosen one master over another. Hates herself even more, because perhaps if she had not taught him how to desire, he may not have wanted the power the Dark Lord could give him in the first place.
Underneath the reports of death, betrayal and families torn apart by dark allegiance, she submits gossip and trash. Convinces her editors to publish them on the same page. The world needs something to smile about, someone to laugh at, something to take their minds off what is going on in the bowels of the Ministry where it is always night.
So does she. So she writes gossip and shops for handbags in the glorious midday sun while he teaches at Hogwarts under a kinder master than the last one, and she wonders whether it was she who gave him his taste for servitude.
~*~
On the morning she meets the champions he corners her in the broom closet and wraps his long fingers about her arm.
“You would do anything to get what you want, wouldn’t you, Miss Skeeter?” he hisses in her ear.
“Didn’t you do the same in the past, Mr Snape?” She glances sideways at him, and he rips the notebook from her fingers.
They make violent love against the wall of the closet, hot and fast with her skirt up around her waist and her hands buried in the folds of his robes. He bites her throat and she tosses her head back against the wall and comes hard against him.
Afterward, he shows her the Dark Mark, shadowy against his skin, and she doesn’t have the strength to cry. She hates Harry Potter for making them think it was all over when it wasn’t, and she rips him apart in her article just because she can.
~*~
That Granger girl doesn’t know what she’s silenced. Rita has always been an asset to the Prophet. She’s always known what would sell, and Ministry be damned. She’s always held a certain sway over her editors, and she watches the paper turn into a propaganda rag when she’s forced to take leave.
She visits him at Hogwarts and finds the school a totalitarian state.
Oh, how she wants to write about what the Umbridge woman is doing. How she needs that catharsis when she wakes up in his bed before dawn and finds him gone, and she knows he is with the Dark Lord. She wraps herself in the duvet and stands by the window, staring out at the grey, misty grounds. Whispers fog against the glass as she lets her quill write all she would like to say - about the Ministry, about Dumbledore, about blindness and pretending and sending men off to their deaths in black Deatheater robes. Then she tears up the parchment and watches it burn in the fireplace; waits for the sun to breach the horizon.
~*~
In the dead of night he comes for her, presses her down into the sheets and stifles her scream with a hand. He feels her heart beat hard against his body. It’s been days; she surely knows who killed the man by now, and he can feel the fear rippling through her skin. Can feel it turning to excitement, like it always has.
He lifts his hand from her mouth and hears her whisper in the darkness.
“Who? How? Why?” Always a journalist.
He doesn’t give her answers; he’s not sure he knows them himself. It doesn’t matter that Albus asked him in the end. Begged him, in the end. He has no idea how he managed to utter the curse, or who he is now that the old man is gone. Who is a spy with no one to report to? What is a servant without a master? The Order think him a traitor, and he could still be one, if he lets himself.
He remembers the nights that he worshipped her, before he took the Mark. Wonders if he could do it again. She flirted with darkness then, at least on the surface. Liked eyes to follow her, liked to make people wonder. Now she flirts with colour. Colour in the face of fear and the light and dark view of the world. She revels in rainbows and greyness, in finding the darkness in people of light and drawing brilliant reds and blues from the most monochrome of dark figures. People hate her for it, and that’s probably why he loves her.
He kisses her, hard and hot in the dark, and can taste the questions on her tongue. He hopes he is answering them with his own. He feels the scratch of her nails against him through his clothes, the fumbling of fingers in the dark. She pulls at his robes until she can touch his skin, and then there are fingers on his hips, sliding up over his chest, pausing to feel his heart beat. Her other hand finding his shoulder, cupping the sharp line of his chin, and fingernails scraping his cheek.
“As long as you’re here.” Her voice is a whisper, and an offering.
She’s always been able to see the colour in him, even when he couldn’t see it himself. He doesn’t know if he’s ever changed, to her mind, or if he’s always been loyal to everyone and no one to her, because she didn’t care as long as he was there. Ironic that the only woman he’s ever trusted is Rita Skeeter. Ironic that she’s always demanded his honesty, and given nothing but her own in return.
He presses her down and kisses her again. His hands find her in the dark, and she redeems him.
Title: Ink
Pairing: Rita/Bellatrix
Rating: NC-17
Warnings: Blood and a lot of dark kink
She carved the ‘R’ over her left breast years ago with that acid green quill, watching crimson blood well in its golden nib, mixing it with ink, and setting it down onto parchment.
“Rita Skeeter”, she whispered. The quill wrote her name in a shaky font, and blood trickled down over her breast to drip against her belly. She smiled, lifted it again and dug it even further into the wound, traced the letter of her name and mixed the blood with the ink once again. This time, when she whispered her name, it wrote Rita Skeeter, twenty-two, who looks ever so good naked. She felt the pull at her skin, a dark twist of magic, and she caught the trail of blood trickling over her flesh with a finger, and licked it clean.
It bleeds of its own accord now. With every venomous word she feels the magic twist deeper inside her, feels it take part of her soul and bleed it onto the page.
It feels like sex, like power, like the heady spin of a drug. She likes it.
~*~
They check her wand at the door, but they do not take her quill. The dangerous ones are kept in the holding cells of Azkaban until their trials, and Bellatrix Lestrange certainly qualifies as one of those. Guards tell her she has half an hour, and she follows the black-robed frame of a Dementor down the hall.
It’s not paying her any attention, but she can feel the affects of the dark creature nevertheless. It absorbs all the goodness within her, leaving the predator, the bitch, the dark and animal desire with her as it lets her into the cell with Bellatrix.
Who can probably smell it.
The Dementors don’t like the light, so the room is half in darkness when she enters. Its prisoner looks up with a face shadowed by her mane of dark hair. Her eyes are black pools, unreadable in the dimness, but her lips twist into a darkly amused smile.
“Rita Skeeter. Come for your pound of flesh?”
There is a thin bunk along one wall on which Bellatrix is sitting, and a small table charmed so that it can’t be lifted up and thrown. Rita pulls quill and notebook from her bag and lays the book on the table. She lifts the quill’s nib to her lips and sucks. The engraving on her chest burns into her heart. She props the quill on the page, light headed with pain and pleasure.
“No, just your last words as a free woman.”
Bellatrix hisses, pushes herself up, crosses to the table and wraps thin fingers about it. Stares at Rita, not quite sane.
“I’ve always been free, and I’ll always be free! It is the Dark Lord who offers freedom. You are the ones who are blinded and following and tainted with impure blood.”
She stalks back to her bunk and sits, staring across the room. The quill scratches Bella’s words, scratches Rita’s skin like the faintest caress, and Rita steps closer to the bunk. Her voice is a calculated whisper.
“Bullshit, Bella, you never wanted to go to Azkaban.”
“Fuck off!” she hisses acidly. Then, at a whisper, “Be damned if I’m going to let them think I’m beaten.”
Rita knows. They were at school together, after all.
“Voldemort’s most loyal, the most intriguing of Deatheaters, Bellatrix Lestrange, is at once manic and frighteningly sane.”
She feels it pierce her chest and pull, and she steps closer, wanting more, wanting a story; wanting to take what she can from this woman before the Dementors do.
Bellatrix lifts her head, sniffs, and there is a light her eyes even in the shadows. The next moment, a strong hand closes around Rita’s wrist and pulls her down onto the hard little bunk.
“What is that?” A knee presses her down and crazed fingers tear at her robes, ripping buttons undone to expose pale white flesh, breast and ragged red wound. Cold touches her toes, drags at her mind. The Dementor is in the doorway, ready to strike, but Bellatrix stills and it pauses as though considering.
Fingers bite painfully into the flesh of her breast, and Bella smiles. “You’re darker than I thought, Skeeter.” She licks her lips, lowers her head and tongues the wound slowly, tracing the sharp lines and the curve of the ‘R’. Fire; acid and fire in her skin, and the quill stuttering on the page. Heart beating hard in her chest, pain turning to pleasure. The Dementor at the door curls its fingers around the doorframe; Rita digs hers into Bella’s shoulder. Fingernails cut into flesh through flimsy prison robes.
“Do you like the dark, Rita?” Bella hisses in her ear. “It does.”
There is a heavy gold chain around Rita’s neck today, and Bella twines her fingers about it with a smirk as her knee pushes Rita’s thighs apart. Her hand slides under hem of green satin skirt, pushing it up, and fingers play over stockinged thighs and up to push panties aside. She twists the chain in her hand, and it pulls tight around Rita’s throat.
“Tell a story, Rita. Go on, make your quill write.” Her fingers tease Rita’s cunt.
A ragged breath escapes the journalist’s throat, and she tries to speak, tries to think as she feels those fingers roughly stroking her sex.
“There is a promise of violence in her eyes, in her movements, in the proud angle of her chin…”
Bella’s fingers plunge inside her. She twists the chain tighter.
“Speak.”
She can feel the constriction hot and tight around her throat, feel the dark burning in her chest, but she fights for words anyway. There is no happiness; the Dementor is stealing all that, standing in the doorway like a voyeur but blind in all human ways. It’s breath rattles loudly in its skeletal body.
“Defiantly, she claims that she will be free even in Azkaban, that her faith in You-Know-Who has set her above people like you and I. She hasn’t changed since high sch…”
Bellatrix twists the chain tighter, and all words are trapped in Rita’s throat. Her eyes flutter, she feels the blood spilling onto her chest, and Bella is licking it clean again, thumb on clit and fingers buried inside Rita’s cunt to the knuckles, curling up and in and somehow filling her completely with violent thrusts. She twists the chain again, and Rita feels her eyelids flutter. She moans deep in her throat, but Bellatrix doesn’t relent. She pulls the chain even tighter and fans her fingers inside Rita, plunging her tongue into the raw magic of the wound, taking some of Rita’s soul as the chain takes her breath and muscles tighten around fingers.
Black stars before her eyes, and she feels herself coming even as she feels her mind spinning away into darkness.
It feels like dying, like the quill has finally taken her soul completely; like blood and poison and vicious words. She likes it.
Thanks to eleanor_zara for the beta read, encouragement, and inspiration. The entire idea for 'Ink' was spawned from an impromptu conversation over at mrsrobinsonanon with velmaneuwirth, and, of course, from Marquise's beautiful artwork. Some examples where the 'R' can be seen include her Rita Manip and Private Interview. The 'you would do anything' conversation in 'The Light and The Darkness' was depicted in this drawing, and I'm sure she knows which other parts of those stories she helped inspire herself ;). I hope you enjoyed them, Marquise, and I hope we continue to inspire each other with our work. You certainly inspire me.