different levels of the devil's company.

[oleanderknife]

Hasibe, as she informed the internet at large she would, has spent most of the day indoors (that is, unless trips out onto her balcony to people-watch count), but now she is quietly winding down for the evening.

Comments

[twofoldbeing]

"Mmm. Snapdragons are interesting too - presumption. And something about grace too, which I didn't really understand, but...who am I to question." The flat affect resurfaces briefly, like the surface of water in a dead calm.

He lets go of her entirely and steps back to sit on the edge of the bed, hands loose on one knee. She could move if she wanted; if she went quickly she could probably even get past him, but he can see the place his hand was on her throat even if there's no mark, and that's the point. This is the first time he's actually looked at her and not her reflection, at her profile and her invisible bruises. "I'm sorry, I'm being rhetorical at you, aren't I? Would it be more clear if I just said I have a very vested interest in anyone who might be so close to you, someone who'd send you flowers? Azaleas. Someone who thinks you're ...fragile."

He doesn't even pause, or change his tone or posture, he just is this way, as cold as coal, as nitrogen. "If I said that I would kill him, would that be clear?" A pause, and a smile like the barb at the end of a fishhook. "Because I want to be sure we are."

[oleanderknife]

The silence that follows is one in which she thinks Henry, I'm sorry, I tried, and she might have wanted to, but she is in too deep to simply close all connections with Hyde. Like he's some boyfriend, like he's one of those many guys she spun around her little finger and discarded -- no, this goes deeper than that, and he has informed her of the rules. Her lips part, like she might speak, but instead her tongue touches the corner of her mouth, eyes lowered, staring, frozen, at nothing in particular on the flat top of her vanity.

Hasi takes a breath, inhaling, exhaling. Her posture becomes very good - shoulders back, spine straight, chin up, and she meets her own eyes in the mirror. You made your bed. It's never as simple as you want it to be.

"Yes," she says, and braces her hands against the vanity so she can stand up.

She wraps her arms around herself, like she's cold (she's not), standing in front of Hyde. If she wanted to, if this were some other night, she could bump her knees against his, tumble into his lap, but while it's possible nothing could ever kill their attraction, she's not going to just melt for him right now, not so easily.

"I understand."

[twofoldbeing]

He sits back a little further where other nights he might have sprawled, for much the inverse of the reason she's still upright and they're not tangled together like two sparks fighting to be the last one to burn out.

"Did I upset you?" It's almost gentle; surely she is used to this category of questioning from him now, with his head locked in that familiar tilt. Do I scare you, do I make you sad, do you need me do you miss me because I need you, I always miss you and if I scare you I don't really mind. There is no move to touch her, not yet, but the proximity between them hums like power lines. "It's not that I mean to, just that I need you, and I can't let anyone get in the way of that."

[oleanderknife]

It's just that I need you and she knows what he's doing, she knows this game, and her fingers curl into her palms leaving little half-moon crescents in her flesh, pink and tender, not enough to draw blood. Not yet. Not tonight. She knows what he's playing, and still it draws her in, almost softening her eyes. So she looks away from his face, fixing her gaze on his the bedspread.

"There's no one in the way," she says, acutely aware of him sitting on her bed like he's always been there, every night, instead of just a couple weeks of strange, heated trysts, "I hope you're not planning on going after every client I see, though. I'm supposed to start escorting soon."

She doesn't think she told him that, but he will find out sooner or later if he doesn't know already, and she would really, really prefer not to have any more incidents like this. Maybe some appearance of forthrightness will help.

[twofoldbeing]

"I don't care about that." He sounds almost surprised, like he didn't think about how he was answering at all, and for a second there's Henry Jekyll again in there somewhere, the man who was startled into blurting out how enchanted he is by Hasi's height (the shape, the line of you). "That's ...that's a package. It's something you sell, it's not you."

It is fairly unfortunate for all parties involved that this is a conclusion he has come to instantly; it doesn't bother him at all, these other men and what they want. They don't see her, so they can't really have her. In his particular mind set, as warped as it is, this is negligible and so he's the one who gets it first, Edward Hyde in all his infinite wrongness.

He shrugs and looks at her hands, and then he does move in, but - slow. If she lets him (and this is a game too, this careful soliciting of her permission for something so small when he will not give her back the right to choose who she loves) he'll uncurl her fist and touch the little indentations with curiosity. "I just want your heart."

[oleanderknife]

She is glad, at least, that he understands that part, because if it began interfering with her job she'd be upset. (And even then, she isn't sure what he'll say if she ever gets a call and he's here. Hasi suspects she would have to reschedule, and that doesn't mean she'd be rescheduling Hyde. Their time together is often so limited-seeming as it is.) Her gaze drops to his hand, permitting this even though she's not sure she should.

"'Just,' like it's some small thing. You're right that all I give them is- a fantasy, but other than that, my heart is the whole of me."

Heart and fire and hunger. It's a dangerous combination, but possibly that's why she's here with this man, why she lets him touch the places she's almost injured herself on her palm.

[twofoldbeing]

"I know." He shrugs again, that bare trace of movement that ripples through his shoulders like light through water. "And that's all I want."

Surely it's not too much to ask, not when he needs so much, not when he's made her the center of everything. It isn't fair, it's too much weight for anyone; Atlas couldn't stand up under this. "Everything in me is cold except where you touch, you know."

The examination of her palm slows, becomes an imitation of tenderness, a rough soothing sweep of the pad of his thumb. The way they usually are is so much more combustible, but he still touches her the same way on this scale, like there is something he wants to draw out of her skin.

[oleanderknife]

Damn him, Hasibe thinks, distracted by even that smallest touch; he scared her earlier, and she so seldom allows anyone near enough to rock the foundations of who and what she is, to touch her in any way that could burn her first. Her voice is thick like smoke when she speaks, hazy, soft-edged, like it gets when they're in another state entirely and he's got her against the bed or wall or whatever -- but this is another context, of course.

"Do you want me to touch you, Hyde?"

She should pull her hand out of his and--

And what? Make him apologize? He'd never mean it even if he said it, and he'd make the words into scars. She looks at him, heavy-lashed, eyes bright like amber in the muted light of her bedroom. Outside, in the distance, she hears an ambulance - fire trucks - sirens - and though they sing louder when they cross by a few blocks away, they cannot cross the barrier of her open door, and they do not touch the heat in her eyes when they meet his.

Damn him.

[twofoldbeing]

He'll never say he's sorry or feel real remorse for anything, no conscience binds him to a beating heart - but then his is someone else's in the literal sense, so maybe that's what he wants with hers. Or maybe it's just that he wants purely for the sake of wanting, the ouroboros in all things.

Before he looks up at her he presses his mouth to the pulse in her wrist, just once, a pale echo of a kiss with the red lights of a fire he set somewhere behind them, light in his eyes, in his hair - he's covered in blood no one can see, like the place his lips touched should leave streaks of gore on her hands.

He's already damned, there was never any question of that. The only question is whether he takes her down with him, into the fire, into his eyes full of smoke. "You know the answer to that."

[oleanderknife]

"I shouldn't--"

Her expression twists; she is hurting and she is showing as much, briefly, because he's scaring her and he's cutting off her options and still, still she is here, trapped by his lips on her heartbeat and the need he has for her. Is it pathological, this desire to be needed for more than decoration, for more than performance? You'd think that as a student of the mind, she'd know, but sometimes your own self is beyond analytical objective thought.

"I don't know what to do."

She should run away from him here and now, or the millisecond she gets a chance, but she won't. Instead she doesn't move, remaining stock-still except for how her lower lip trembling is just slightly; this force of strange emotion strikes her suddenly sometimes when she is with him, and she doesn't even know what she's feeling besides the echo of a dream.

(And then she thinks that maybe she stays because she loves him, and that hurts, too.)

[twofoldbeing]

"You don't have to do anything. And you don't have to say anything. Isn't that what I said, Hasi? That I see you--I know you. All you have to do is be here."

The slickquick striking snake flicker is back in his black eyes, in the his gesticulation, like he could be everywhere at once without moving, like surrounding her with the simplest of touches even as he moves his hands to her hips and things become so much less simple so very very quickly.

"Just be here, just -- stay with me and forget. I can make you forget everything outside this room, everything but us." His promises are always threats like his threats are always promises, but this one has passion to it, tangled tight and glowing deep and red. "Let me do that for you." He stops, looks fiercely at her with all the light of hell shining out of that mouth that never stops going. "I can love you, you know. I can love as much as anyone else, and -- I will, if you let me."

It's really not fair.

[oleanderknife]

She doesn't flinch back, when he touches her, but there is a moment like she might. Instead she takes another one of those ragged, shaky breaths, and shakes her head, but she's not saying no, she's saying I can't believe myself. But this is the nice way of doing things where he's concerned, as fucked-up as that is, and she doesn't want to see what happens when it isn't the nice way.

"Twenty-four years," she says, voice thin-frail-soft like a flower petal, "without hearing that. You have no idea how much that would mean to me."

It's really not fair, no.

"Tell me, then, if you do. Say it."

But while she says this she's sliding forward, knees bumping his, her hands on his shoulders, brushing over the collar of his shirt and briefly against his skin - hers is warm, almost feverish.

[twofoldbeing]

"Hasi- you see the city out there?" He doesn't see it, he isn't looking anywhere but at her, like she is all there is, like between his eyes and this steady relentless unceasing stream of words he could stitch her to him forever, and his hands on her hips are like iron.

"I love everything about it - I love the sounds it makes, all the clashing metal and the wind in the trees and things living and things dying--chaos and madness and motion and things that never stop, never sleep--it's this sprawling fucked up gorgeous patchwork of amazing, and it sings to me, every night- but if you asked, if you wanted it, I would burn it to the ground, because I love you."

If she's feverish, then he is actively on fire already, as though when he sent a man to hell earlier he brought a piece of it back with him.

[oleanderknife]

By the time he's finished speaking she has fallen forward, into his arms, into his lap (because, you see, she has absolutely nowhere else to go). She looks at him with a steady gaze and an unsteady mouth, words trembling with their sincerity, similar to the way his burned straight through.

"I realized," speaking soft and quick, "a moment before you said it, that I do love you, and that terrifies me because you could do so much with it. We have an obligation toward what we love, and I don't know what you'll do with me now that I've surrendered to you that way."

But what he requires is for her to be, and that's what she's doing, always most beautiful when slightly tormented, when caught between lust and pain and tears and ecstasy. "But I have. God help me..."

This is murmured into his shoulder, and she'd cry if she could, but instead she just presses closer; maybe tonight he'll make her, if their usual bedroom rituals occur -- for whatever else, he can always give her that release, he can always make her feel everything at once, so alive it's catastrophic, like the last burst of flames from a dying star.

[twofoldbeing]

"Shhh." He makes the little sound genuinely enough, actively soothing - although there's an edge of parody, of teeth to it, like there is in everything sweet that he does. None of that means he doesn't mean it, it just means everything in him carries this swirling black strain of corruption. One hand slides to the back of her neck and down her spine, back again, like brush strokes painting her pliant, quiet, like one surrender just wasn't enough.

And so the question is, what will he do now? "I'm going to make you forget, just like I promised." It's almost kind, a great unspooling length of black velvet over landmines. He touches her bottom lip with the pad of his thumb, and then- well, now when she thinks of the last person who kissed her it won't be Jekyll anymore.

But they don't kiss the same way anyhow.

[oleanderknife]

When she kisses him back it's hard, like she's sinking into him, sliding both arms around his neck and digging her nails in. If she's going to give, tonight, she's going to do it all the way, teeth and soul and hips and heart. He loves her, he says; so does Henry. Is it possible to love two people at once, in reality? Is it a sin? Is it something that she could help?

She wants to forget, so she gives him herself like this, dragging her mouth away only when they've got to breathe, saying his name like a gasp.

"Still cold?" It's murmured into his jawline, as she slides her hand down to undo buttons on his shirtfront.