just_muse_me | 16.5.2. Lost
16.5.2. Lost
Co-written with straight2point
[Follows about a week after THIS]
Harri couldn't stand it. She couldn't stand sitting, and she couldn't stand standing, and she couldn't do anything because she'd either find her head down the toilet, or be ready to get herself off with something eleven inches long and powered by batteries. What she wanted was a good, proper fuck from something ten inches long and attached to Marcus Fraser, but that didn't seem to be about to happen. Not only because she'd neglected to call him, or because she'd run off to Princeton for a few hours.
She missed Aiden already. At least Aiden had known to keep feeding her tira misu and let her watch gay porn. He also didn't make her feel like a complete freak. The times that she'd tried to go to work, she felt like she must have had a third eye for all the looks that she was getting. She hadn't told anyone there, but the fact that the great Harriet Ryan kept running off to the ladies to be sick either meant she was pregnant, a piss pot, or bulimic. All of which constituted funny looks and office gossip.
And hiding out in her apartment probably wasn't making it any better. Harri rest her hand on her stomach and looked down at it. She wasn't showing yet, she wouldn't be for another couple of months. She still wasn't sure what to make of it. She just knew it might be better if Marc was here, but she couldn't bring herself to call him. She wasn't going to be that woman. Clingy and desperate. Harriet Ryan didn't cling to anyone.
Marc's week had been, to put it lightly, fucking atrocious. He dealt with the news that he had once again knocked someone up the best way he knew how - by throwing himself so deeply into work it was basically impossible for anyone out of the Service to access him. He did not think once about the baby because denial was not only blissful, but it was going to keep him sane for the week. But then he went from being in LA to Tokyo to Dubai to suddenly home. Lately, home wasn't where the heart was. Marc wasn't exactly sure where his heart was anymore. There had even been, for the briefest of seconds, a moment he contemplated going to England to see Izzy. It was stupid and it was painful. He was so fucked up in his head that he didn't know who he was anymore. But as he got home, he knew enough to know that even if he didn't know himself, his sperm was apparently still completely effective.
He now had a week off work and that thought alone scared the shit out of him. He needed the rest and he needed to recharge after the continuous timezone hopping. If he didn't, he would regret it. Alex was still deep undercover in Princeton. Marc had only spoken to him once or twice during the whole week. No leads in the Campbell thread had became any more known. That wasn't something Marc needed to worry about right now. Right now, he had no work and too much time. Somehow leading to him standing on Harri's doorstep.
Again.
He pushed his finger against the buzzer and then rested his forehead against the door jamb while he waited. It couldn't possibly get worse, could it?
Harri managed not to turn the air blue this time as she answered the door, but her mouth did drop open as she saw Marc. Why it always came as such a shock when he dropped by, she didn't know. She stared at him, saw how exhausted he was, but before she could stop herself she pulled him inside and captured his mouth in a kiss. She needed to know there was still something there, still something that was theirs. Well, besides the kid she was apparently carrying.
Marc kissed her back, but even finding energy to put passion behind it was a struggle. Inevitably, he pulled out of it, but it wasn't a negative action. His hands were still resting on her arms as he looked over her face, trying to make sure she was okay. He took the baseball cap off and threw it somewhere off to the side. "Are you alright?" he asked softly.
Harri didn't need the passion to know he was still here voluntarily, and that he still cared. "Right now I'm peachy. Ask me again in five minutes." She gave him a tired smile, and leaned in to brush a kiss to his cheek. "Come and lie down with me?"
Marc nodded, no protests apparently coming this time. Whether it was tiredness, resignation, or the fact he might be finally getting comfortable with her, it was hard to tell. "I need to talk to you about some things. Things I need you to know. I'm not going to be all fucking cryptic this time. Straight facts. It's important... it's... why I didn't take things so well."
Harri took his hand, and lead him through her apartment to the bedroom, her white sheets and bed spread a mess from her restless sleeping. "Do you want to tell me before I lie down, or should we lie down so I don't collapse?"
Marc sat down on the side of the bed and folded his hands together so he could rest his elbows on his knees. "You might not want me lying in your bed after I tell you," he mumbled with a shake of his head. "Look, it's going to raise a whole lot of James versus Marc shit and I don't even know who to tell you who I am anymore. I'm Marc because I've been told I am and hell, Marc even comes with his whole Encyclopaedia Britannica of instruction manuals. But that's not relevant. I'm just one person with a whole bunch of fancy personas. I'm one body. I'm one brain. Everything in my life as James or Marc is still in that one brain. I-I'm one sperm source..." he added looking up at her helplessly. "I think it's just going to be easier for me to be James in my private life with Marc's name and Marc's constructed persona everywhere else. And you're my private life, Harri. You need to know what I'm bringing from James."
"So you want me to call you James now?" she asked as she avoided the bed and sat down in the chair she kept in her room. This way she could face him, and then she'd be able to judge if she wanted him in her bed. "I can't imagine any of this is easy for you, and I'm sorry I've been such a bitch and a complication. I never meant to make things harder..."
Marc folded his arms across in front of him now like some sort of psuedo self-hug. He wet his lips and shook his head. "I don't care what you call me, love. It's not overly important. Ali still calls me James. She has a mental block to the whole Marc thing, which is fine. I get it. The dark contacts freak her out too, which I also get. I couldn't look at myself in the mirror for a week and a half after I first took the new persona. I just need to be me when I'm out of any scrutinising and analytical view. And you're the least complicated thing in my life right now." He let out a slow breath. "I've been married twice in the past."
"Can I call you Frances? How about my sexy gooseberry?" Harri was smiling a little, but as he continued the smile faltered and she pulled her knees up to tuck them under her chin in a protective move. "You've been married... twice?"
Marc nodded silently, his eyes dipping a little as he did. "It gets worse," he warned quietly.
Harri waited quietly. Her stomach churned, and she couldn't begin to say if it was morning sickness, or nerves. "Okay..."
"I'm technically still married, only not really. Sounds fucked up, I know, so I'm going to elaborate before you have a chance to freak out, of which you would have every right to if I just threw it at you like that and left it." Marc rubbed his head and then pushed his fingers through his light hair. "James is technically deceased, so the marriage would've severed at that point making my wife a widow. It's not even like it sounds. She was my FBI partner before I joined the service. We were sort of fucking in secret but no real relationship had formed beyond her being my best friend with benefits. We went undercover... in Vegas," he told her with a wry look. "It was a tough case and we got totally off our faces on Tequila and tied the knot in the Little White Chapel of Love. We only realised the next morning when we found the marriage certificate and wedding rings. We filed to have it annulled, but it was during the transition of me preparing to go to Australia and fake my death. There was some bureacratic fuck up with my passports because I always had joint citizenship for my job. I used to be a liaison with the US consulate in Australia when I was with the FBI. But anyway, I discovered in transit that the annullment had been stuffed up and Izzy and I were still married. By that point, I had pretty much kissed my life as James goodbye, so I just did nothing about it. A-And that's it, basically. Well, on the marriage front, anyway. The other marriage was just nothing really. Ended in divorce two months after it happened. I was 18. I only married her because... because she was pregnant."
She was still sitting there quietly not even sure what she was thinking. Marc--James--whoever always had this way of throwing her curve balls. And most of the time she was glad of it, loving the face he kept her on her toes. But this? "Are you... is she the one that you said didn't mean anything to you anymore? You don't want to find her? She's your wife... are you really sure that--you had a kid?"
"Romantically, no," Marc said quietly. "She'll always mean something to me. We were very close. I just don't think we were meant to be in love. We were far too alike. I walked away from that life resolutely. She moved to England. This is how it is now. It was extremely complicated. We were partners for over two years before we even started trying to get our acts together and even then it just never clicked properly. And no, I didn't have a kid. She lost the baby. The marriage wasn't going to survive it. We were young and stupid. We weren't really in love. I just did the right thing but it was a mistake. She's been married for about eight years now to some bloke in DC. Has a bunch of kids and all."
Harri unfolded herself, once foot planted on the floor as she leaned forward. "And all that is why you think I won't want you sharing my bed?"
Marc shrugged. "I don't know. I haven't been thinking much at all lately. It got to the point that you should know. You should also know that when Ali first found out she was pregnant, I found the ultrasound photo she has on her mantel now and thought Izzy was pregnant with my kid. Needless to say, I wasn't so equipped to rationally deal with the news you gave me a week ago. I think my brain fizzled out on that front when I was 18 and my girlfriend was telling me the condom broke."
Harri pushed her fingers through her long hair and moved off the chair to set on the bed. She tugged on Marc's arm, bringing him with her as she lay down. She was too tired to sit up. Too tired to think too much on any of this, but he was telling her more important secrets and they deserved her attention. She slid her arm around him and kept her face close to his as she looked at him. "I don't care. I mean, I do. It all serves to make you who you are, and the man that I've met... and the man I love, but I don't care. Not in the way that you might think I do. If it's over with her, that's okay. I believe you when you tell me that. Same as if you told me you wanted to go find her for romantic reasons, then I'd probably let you go. But the truth is I need you. I want you. I do love you. And no, you didn't take the news very well, but I understand. I was in denial too, and trying to get Riley to tell me he was wrong. I just wouldn't believe him. I still don't know what we're going to do about all this, but I just know that I still want you in my life. I need you in my life."
"Nothing can change, Harri," Marc had to tell her, turning his head on the pillow to look at her. "I can't walk away from this investigation. Too much is tied up in my leads and the circles I've started to move in to get them. I'm always going to disappear without word, maybe sometimes for months on end. I won't be able to drop things to come home if the kid is sick. I could see through eight different countries in a week. I still go to work and still shoot bad guys. And there is always a chance I might never come home. You keep saying you need me, but it's not as simple as that, Harri. How can I possibly give you all you need with this?"
"I just need to know that when you're home, and you're here, and you're that private James that I do have you. I can handle everything else if I just know that you want this, you want me. And if you don't come home... I'll just explain it to the kid, cry a bit and then do things on my own." She rubbed her hand against her stomach and sighed. "And I need to know that when you're here that your dick is mine, because I am already so damn horny I'm about ready to rub against the furniture and slap my own ass."
Marc scrunched his nose up. "You're going to have to climb on and ride me then, because I'm not sure I even have enough energy to get it up," he said with a small snort. "Are you telling me you want to keep the kid?" he went on to ask softly, his blue eyes intent on her. "Even if I can't committ to full-time fifty-fifty parenting?"
Harri was already working on his fly, apparently willing to test his ability to get it up. She didn't mind climbing on and doing all the work. "Yes, I am. I saw your face when we spoke about getting rid of it. Maybe I wasn't prepared, but I'm not going to kill something that's inside me. I'll do seventy-thirty, or eighty-twenty. Whatever it fucking takes." Her hand slid inside, and she raised her eyebrows at him. "So does this mean you're willing to take the baby and me on? Along with your work?"
"Can I get back to you on that after I've slept for at least forty eight hours?" Marc joked, grunting a little when her hand started working around his cock. "This time yesterday I was in fucking Dubai."
Harri leaned in to kiss his lips softly. "Stay here. Forget about Dubai. Forget about everything... You can sleep while I take care of both of us."
Marc felt like he should've protested, but he didn't. He just nodded with a quiet, "Okay, then."
All muses referenced with permission
Muse | Marcus Fraser & Harriet Ryan
Fandom | Original Characters
Word Count | 2,674
Co-written with straight2point
[Follows about a week after THIS]
Harri couldn't stand it. She couldn't stand sitting, and she couldn't stand standing, and she couldn't do anything because she'd either find her head down the toilet, or be ready to get herself off with something eleven inches long and powered by batteries. What she wanted was a good, proper fuck from something ten inches long and attached to Marcus Fraser, but that didn't seem to be about to happen. Not only because she'd neglected to call him, or because she'd run off to Princeton for a few hours.
She missed Aiden already. At least Aiden had known to keep feeding her tira misu and let her watch gay porn. He also didn't make her feel like a complete freak. The times that she'd tried to go to work, she felt like she must have had a third eye for all the looks that she was getting. She hadn't told anyone there, but the fact that the great Harriet Ryan kept running off to the ladies to be sick either meant she was pregnant, a piss pot, or bulimic. All of which constituted funny looks and office gossip.
And hiding out in her apartment probably wasn't making it any better. Harri rest her hand on her stomach and looked down at it. She wasn't showing yet, she wouldn't be for another couple of months. She still wasn't sure what to make of it. She just knew it might be better if Marc was here, but she couldn't bring herself to call him. She wasn't going to be that woman. Clingy and desperate. Harriet Ryan didn't cling to anyone.
Marc's week had been, to put it lightly, fucking atrocious. He dealt with the news that he had once again knocked someone up the best way he knew how - by throwing himself so deeply into work it was basically impossible for anyone out of the Service to access him. He did not think once about the baby because denial was not only blissful, but it was going to keep him sane for the week. But then he went from being in LA to Tokyo to Dubai to suddenly home. Lately, home wasn't where the heart was. Marc wasn't exactly sure where his heart was anymore. There had even been, for the briefest of seconds, a moment he contemplated going to England to see Izzy. It was stupid and it was painful. He was so fucked up in his head that he didn't know who he was anymore. But as he got home, he knew enough to know that even if he didn't know himself, his sperm was apparently still completely effective.
He now had a week off work and that thought alone scared the shit out of him. He needed the rest and he needed to recharge after the continuous timezone hopping. If he didn't, he would regret it. Alex was still deep undercover in Princeton. Marc had only spoken to him once or twice during the whole week. No leads in the Campbell thread had became any more known. That wasn't something Marc needed to worry about right now. Right now, he had no work and too much time. Somehow leading to him standing on Harri's doorstep.
Again.
He pushed his finger against the buzzer and then rested his forehead against the door jamb while he waited. It couldn't possibly get worse, could it?
Harri managed not to turn the air blue this time as she answered the door, but her mouth did drop open as she saw Marc. Why it always came as such a shock when he dropped by, she didn't know. She stared at him, saw how exhausted he was, but before she could stop herself she pulled him inside and captured his mouth in a kiss. She needed to know there was still something there, still something that was theirs. Well, besides the kid she was apparently carrying.
Marc kissed her back, but even finding energy to put passion behind it was a struggle. Inevitably, he pulled out of it, but it wasn't a negative action. His hands were still resting on her arms as he looked over her face, trying to make sure she was okay. He took the baseball cap off and threw it somewhere off to the side. "Are you alright?" he asked softly.
Harri didn't need the passion to know he was still here voluntarily, and that he still cared. "Right now I'm peachy. Ask me again in five minutes." She gave him a tired smile, and leaned in to brush a kiss to his cheek. "Come and lie down with me?"
Marc nodded, no protests apparently coming this time. Whether it was tiredness, resignation, or the fact he might be finally getting comfortable with her, it was hard to tell. "I need to talk to you about some things. Things I need you to know. I'm not going to be all fucking cryptic this time. Straight facts. It's important... it's... why I didn't take things so well."
Harri took his hand, and lead him through her apartment to the bedroom, her white sheets and bed spread a mess from her restless sleeping. "Do you want to tell me before I lie down, or should we lie down so I don't collapse?"
Marc sat down on the side of the bed and folded his hands together so he could rest his elbows on his knees. "You might not want me lying in your bed after I tell you," he mumbled with a shake of his head. "Look, it's going to raise a whole lot of James versus Marc shit and I don't even know who to tell you who I am anymore. I'm Marc because I've been told I am and hell, Marc even comes with his whole Encyclopaedia Britannica of instruction manuals. But that's not relevant. I'm just one person with a whole bunch of fancy personas. I'm one body. I'm one brain. Everything in my life as James or Marc is still in that one brain. I-I'm one sperm source..." he added looking up at her helplessly. "I think it's just going to be easier for me to be James in my private life with Marc's name and Marc's constructed persona everywhere else. And you're my private life, Harri. You need to know what I'm bringing from James."
"So you want me to call you James now?" she asked as she avoided the bed and sat down in the chair she kept in her room. This way she could face him, and then she'd be able to judge if she wanted him in her bed. "I can't imagine any of this is easy for you, and I'm sorry I've been such a bitch and a complication. I never meant to make things harder..."
Marc folded his arms across in front of him now like some sort of psuedo self-hug. He wet his lips and shook his head. "I don't care what you call me, love. It's not overly important. Ali still calls me James. She has a mental block to the whole Marc thing, which is fine. I get it. The dark contacts freak her out too, which I also get. I couldn't look at myself in the mirror for a week and a half after I first took the new persona. I just need to be me when I'm out of any scrutinising and analytical view. And you're the least complicated thing in my life right now." He let out a slow breath. "I've been married twice in the past."
"Can I call you Frances? How about my sexy gooseberry?" Harri was smiling a little, but as he continued the smile faltered and she pulled her knees up to tuck them under her chin in a protective move. "You've been married... twice?"
Marc nodded silently, his eyes dipping a little as he did. "It gets worse," he warned quietly.
Harri waited quietly. Her stomach churned, and she couldn't begin to say if it was morning sickness, or nerves. "Okay..."
"I'm technically still married, only not really. Sounds fucked up, I know, so I'm going to elaborate before you have a chance to freak out, of which you would have every right to if I just threw it at you like that and left it." Marc rubbed his head and then pushed his fingers through his light hair. "James is technically deceased, so the marriage would've severed at that point making my wife a widow. It's not even like it sounds. She was my FBI partner before I joined the service. We were sort of fucking in secret but no real relationship had formed beyond her being my best friend with benefits. We went undercover... in Vegas," he told her with a wry look. "It was a tough case and we got totally off our faces on Tequila and tied the knot in the Little White Chapel of Love. We only realised the next morning when we found the marriage certificate and wedding rings. We filed to have it annulled, but it was during the transition of me preparing to go to Australia and fake my death. There was some bureacratic fuck up with my passports because I always had joint citizenship for my job. I used to be a liaison with the US consulate in Australia when I was with the FBI. But anyway, I discovered in transit that the annullment had been stuffed up and Izzy and I were still married. By that point, I had pretty much kissed my life as James goodbye, so I just did nothing about it. A-And that's it, basically. Well, on the marriage front, anyway. The other marriage was just nothing really. Ended in divorce two months after it happened. I was 18. I only married her because... because she was pregnant."
She was still sitting there quietly not even sure what she was thinking. Marc--James--whoever always had this way of throwing her curve balls. And most of the time she was glad of it, loving the face he kept her on her toes. But this? "Are you... is she the one that you said didn't mean anything to you anymore? You don't want to find her? She's your wife... are you really sure that--you had a kid?"
"Romantically, no," Marc said quietly. "She'll always mean something to me. We were very close. I just don't think we were meant to be in love. We were far too alike. I walked away from that life resolutely. She moved to England. This is how it is now. It was extremely complicated. We were partners for over two years before we even started trying to get our acts together and even then it just never clicked properly. And no, I didn't have a kid. She lost the baby. The marriage wasn't going to survive it. We were young and stupid. We weren't really in love. I just did the right thing but it was a mistake. She's been married for about eight years now to some bloke in DC. Has a bunch of kids and all."
Harri unfolded herself, once foot planted on the floor as she leaned forward. "And all that is why you think I won't want you sharing my bed?"
Marc shrugged. "I don't know. I haven't been thinking much at all lately. It got to the point that you should know. You should also know that when Ali first found out she was pregnant, I found the ultrasound photo she has on her mantel now and thought Izzy was pregnant with my kid. Needless to say, I wasn't so equipped to rationally deal with the news you gave me a week ago. I think my brain fizzled out on that front when I was 18 and my girlfriend was telling me the condom broke."
Harri pushed her fingers through her long hair and moved off the chair to set on the bed. She tugged on Marc's arm, bringing him with her as she lay down. She was too tired to sit up. Too tired to think too much on any of this, but he was telling her more important secrets and they deserved her attention. She slid her arm around him and kept her face close to his as she looked at him. "I don't care. I mean, I do. It all serves to make you who you are, and the man that I've met... and the man I love, but I don't care. Not in the way that you might think I do. If it's over with her, that's okay. I believe you when you tell me that. Same as if you told me you wanted to go find her for romantic reasons, then I'd probably let you go. But the truth is I need you. I want you. I do love you. And no, you didn't take the news very well, but I understand. I was in denial too, and trying to get Riley to tell me he was wrong. I just wouldn't believe him. I still don't know what we're going to do about all this, but I just know that I still want you in my life. I need you in my life."
"Nothing can change, Harri," Marc had to tell her, turning his head on the pillow to look at her. "I can't walk away from this investigation. Too much is tied up in my leads and the circles I've started to move in to get them. I'm always going to disappear without word, maybe sometimes for months on end. I won't be able to drop things to come home if the kid is sick. I could see through eight different countries in a week. I still go to work and still shoot bad guys. And there is always a chance I might never come home. You keep saying you need me, but it's not as simple as that, Harri. How can I possibly give you all you need with this?"
"I just need to know that when you're home, and you're here, and you're that private James that I do have you. I can handle everything else if I just know that you want this, you want me. And if you don't come home... I'll just explain it to the kid, cry a bit and then do things on my own." She rubbed her hand against her stomach and sighed. "And I need to know that when you're here that your dick is mine, because I am already so damn horny I'm about ready to rub against the furniture and slap my own ass."
Marc scrunched his nose up. "You're going to have to climb on and ride me then, because I'm not sure I even have enough energy to get it up," he said with a small snort. "Are you telling me you want to keep the kid?" he went on to ask softly, his blue eyes intent on her. "Even if I can't committ to full-time fifty-fifty parenting?"
Harri was already working on his fly, apparently willing to test his ability to get it up. She didn't mind climbing on and doing all the work. "Yes, I am. I saw your face when we spoke about getting rid of it. Maybe I wasn't prepared, but I'm not going to kill something that's inside me. I'll do seventy-thirty, or eighty-twenty. Whatever it fucking takes." Her hand slid inside, and she raised her eyebrows at him. "So does this mean you're willing to take the baby and me on? Along with your work?"
"Can I get back to you on that after I've slept for at least forty eight hours?" Marc joked, grunting a little when her hand started working around his cock. "This time yesterday I was in fucking Dubai."
Harri leaned in to kiss his lips softly. "Stay here. Forget about Dubai. Forget about everything... You can sleep while I take care of both of us."
Marc felt like he should've protested, but he didn't. He just nodded with a quiet, "Okay, then."
All muses referenced with permission
Muse | Marcus Fraser & Harriet Ryan
Fandom | Original Characters
Word Count | 2,674