REPOST
Originally posted in fellow_shippers on Nov. 6, 2003. Reposting for archival purposes only.
Title: Elemental
Pairing: Cate/Liv
Rating: NC-17
Summary: "Natural" elf-love... minus the elf part, really.
Disclaimer: Falsehoods.
Beta merci beaucoup: raynemaiden & crystal_blitz
Elemental
"At which the bushy Teade* a groome did light,
And sacred lampe in secret chamber hide,
Where it should not be quenched day nor night,
For feare of euill fates, but burnen euer bright."
~Edmund Spenser
[* = torch]
In the mirror: her eyes.
Cate. That's where she is. The Cate she is: fragile, uncertain and acquiescing. Framed in oval, she is all awkward angles. In her eyes she sees the thin white lines of reflected light, a faint glow, and thinks of splintery fiberglass, angel hair.
But if she pulls back, Cate as Galadriel comes into focus, filling the mirror, overflowing. Cate as Galadriel: calming as still water, imposing as fast rapids, piercing as ice. Tolkien's water goddess, in the costume and in the flesh. Here is a Cate she would want to be, like Elizabeth, the commanding spitfire Virgin Queen. Spenser's Faerie Queene. Now the Elven Queen. These were women who burned through life, forward, bold, decisive, leaving nothing untouched. Inside them, Cate ignites. Outside, she feels doused. Inadequate. They are impossible idols to emulate in real life. However, she could always play pretend. She could mirror them and become another woman: Cate plus other. It gives her a presence of strength and a strength of mind that she could not claim as her own on her own.
* * *
Her finger pokes the plaster frame and she shakes her head. 'Props, masks, fantasies,' she thinks. 'Not reality. Cheap, lightweight dressing. Playthings. No, not real.' She sighs and scans the empty room. "I need air," she says aloud to no one, and casts a sideways glance to the mirror before she walks away, heading out of the warehouse.
She turns a corner of the warehouse to find a blur of beige and gray and white. In full Arwen costume, Liv is sitting on a scrolled Rivendell bench in the corner, beneath the Exit sign, holding a full script upright in her lap with one hand as if she were going over lines. But the flush in her face and the too quick motion of her other hand to grasp the opposite side of the book tells Cate what Liv was really doing. And Cate can't help but laugh, bubbly and rich.
"Ngila won't like it if you stain your dress, Livvy," she says, mischievously.
"I was... I was just...." Liv's voice is thin and questioning. The disobedient child.
Cate lowers her head and offers an askance, knowing look. Her smile is like a grimace pulled upward at one end, a 160-degree angle. Liv recognizes the coy smile, the twinkling eyes. She thinks of the Galadriel Light.
"Cate... is there something you want here?" Liv is impatient. She pushes her lower lip in and out, rolled beneath her upper lip. Neither chew nor pout. Cate grins wider to see her draw her index finger in a languid sweep across her mouth, the faintest hint of fingertip plunging inside her mouth. Cate knows this drill: Liv is a predictable one. A tease. She gives the appearance of girlishness, but radiates a passion and fiery drive that always gets her what she wants.
Cate has seen this part played out before, has mastered it herself. She stretches her bare toes firmly into the dimpled concrete, firming her stance. "Hmmmmm," she feigns mulling over her thoughts. One long pale finger taps playfully on her lips. Then stops. "Want," she says, looking hard at Liv, "you."
Blinking hard, Liv mouths the word, "what." It tapers off, without a sense of punctuation.
Cate's strides are swift, determined. One motion gets her in front of Liv, another lays the book on the ground. To Liv, it is a flash of lights, too fast to comprehend. And then it is just Cate. The movement halts before her eyes, but her head throbs with a racing pulse.
Cate can see the vibration on the delicate translucent skin of Liv's temples, beaded with sweat. She extends one finger to touch the pulse point and Liv's eyes close. Cate's finger lowers, falls more than slides, down Liv's cheek, downy and pinkened. It travels down Liv's neck, swanlike, arching. It traces Liv's stark white collar bone, dips tipfirst into the hollow of her neck. Liv is heaving as Cate lowers her finger, with slower and slower pacing, into her cleavage, outlining the swell of one pale breast. Cate stops when her palm pushes into the top of Liv's dress, starchy bodice fabric unyielding. She thinks of the pomp of this situation, the costume drama, and laughs lightly to her self, eyes bright. Liv smiles in response, eyes still closed.
Cate continues with her touch, her finger pressing harder now into the material of Liv's dress, drawing a slow line down Liv's stomach, bumping over ornate buttons. Her finger stops at the navel, pushing into it. Liv's eyes are open now, alert. She holds her breath as she watches Cate carefully gather the skirt in even pleats. Up, up, up. Fold after fold. When it's up to her waist, cool air on her naked legs, Liv breathes out.
Cate's finger is on her again, pressing between her legs-the pad of her fingertip plunging into coarse hair and soft skin, spongelike-then cupping her full-handed. "Fuck," Liv whispers, exhaling.
"Mmmm," Cate coos, and lowers herself, hands splayed to hold back the awkward bulk of skirt. On her knees, she rests her chin on top of Liv's lower thigh, playfully gazing at her.
Liv reaches her hand down as if she can't trust the sensation, the physical shift between her legs; she must read it like braille beneath her hand. She thinks, 'I am stiff and swollen and... no, still swelling, and hard. As hard as can be. Girl-hard.'
Liv allows herself to meet Cate's gaze. Cate is patient. She will wait for approval, the right sign of compliance. Liv blushes. Her whole body shoots color vertically head to toe. An obscene pink. Teasing. Not enough acquisition to be red. Red is full. This color says: fill me up. And Liv's lips fall open and her head falls back.
Cate strokes Liv's hand where it rubs furiously with tight, flattened fingers as if Liv is too overwhelmed to focus on details. Under that stroke-steady and precise-Liv slows down and goes limp. This is Cate's cue. Her nose is dragging up Liv's heated thigh until her eyelid is brushed in damp hairs.
Liv is thick and mahogany, comfort and shelter. Cate smiles against her thigh, noting Liv's careless stubble. 'Not so prissy girl after all,' she thinks, and shudders, stomach a sudden fiery cauldron. She imagines the blood in her own veins. She imagines it loose, running free of vessels, a slow, hot, concentrated liquid: Cate is made of lava. She settles her moist-burning lips on Liv and kisses her with brush fire.
Liv is wet enough to douse her flame. Cate can feel it on her lips, and tests the waters with her tongue. Dense water, colloidal. She swallows roughly and thinks that her mouth has never been so dry.
She bares her teeth and readies the lava within her. Liv lets out a sharp, hoarse cry as Cate bites down hard on her clit. 'It is an elven cry,' Cate thinks, hardly what she expected from this squeaky, helium-voiced girl. It's an ancient howl, and Cate's alto moan is the response to Liv's call: crackling wood in the sparked air.
Flicker. Cate imagines candles and flames and drafty, murky rooms, but no connection between these-just pinpoints and blackness. Liv is sulphur beneath her, around her. She imagines herself snuffed out, and twists Liv's small slick shaft in her teeth, fighting for more burn.
Cate grinds down-back and forth, back and forth-and Liv is shaking, her muscles taut and brittle as freshly cooled glass, straining above the seat, suspended and strung. All her weight totters on weak balances: curled feet and breakable neck. The iron of the chairback bites her lower neck in cold, raw licks. But it is cool, cool water-near, yet not near enough to quench the slow burn of her cunt. She wants to move, can just feel the metal between her legs, can see herself straddling the chair and rocking, rocking into its hard release of metallic coolness-its solidity. Instead she has skin: pliable, insufferably formless skin. There is no hold, no purchase. Neither liquid nor solid; more like air. However tangible. However there. Liv no longer feels the puncture of teeth. She is licked in a flame she cannot put out.
'I don't want it out,' she thinks. Inside her head, Liv's voice is shrill, uncertain-the voice she knows and recognizes as her own. It has identity in it. But the groans and harsh panting seem foreign: these sounds do not match what her ears are accustomed to, and she filters this as not me, NOT ME, where am I?
'We are everywhere,' Cate thinks. She knows how to disengage, maintain self from other. She knows how to crawl up inside herself, away from windows and let the light exit the room, darkness a pillar of safety between her and the wilderness. Make enough room to let someone else in. But that is exercise, that is profession. Now-with Liv pressed to her face so close she cannot find separation, with Liv in her mouth, herself in Liv-Cate surges forward from the inside out to meet the world head on. Her yell is animalian. She gasps for air and bites and gasps and suckles; fire, air, water, earth swirling in and out and around her. Her hands dance like bonfire between her legs, wild and diabolical and aimless. She rolls into the friction and up out of it into Liv. Waves and layers. Her clit is so raw from rubbing she is sure it will crack. At that thought, she smiles into Liv and flicks her tongue. She smells the hint of coolness in the air, a smell like ozone but thicker, almost rain. She imagines hardening, splitting lava. She imagines herself in layers of fire: at the molten core, a swell of lips that press and shiver rapidly like her own mouth. She plunges down and back up, leviathan of flame in a world of flame. She knows there is more to the world, as she knows there are more colors than red, but behind her eyelids there is only that one. Darting in and out of Liv, she waggles her tongue to taunt the world, to set it ablaze.
Liv is being eaten by fire, disintegrated. Red covers her world and she coughs it up, gasping to swallow blue. Cool blue. Her hands are patting and clawing at the front of her dress. 'Extinguish,' she thinks and the word sits behind her tongue, wet and silver and shimmering. Her hands pull one breast free of fabric, breaking buttons, but it is not the relief she expected. She seeks more, kneading and gripping, tugging and thumbing and pinching her nipple, hard and solid and burnt. Seared.
"Cate," she slurs in a long, whisper-thin growl, consonants muddied under the wash of relief.
Cate opens her eyes when she comes and the world is metallic gray around her, dotted with disappearing red. The fading red of Liv's mouth, Liv's neck, Liv's nipple against the pale sheen of fabric. Liv's skin is smeared pink, pulsating with desperate breaths, dotted with gooseflesh. Cate sees her skin pool into cream. 'Sweet Liv,' she thinks, and drapes her tongue over the clit and pulls up, mouthing the labia in a loose, slow suck.
Air. Nothing but air seems to exist, and yet there isn't enough. It seeps into Cate and she sucks it down like water. "Need," she gasps, and presses her hands into Liv's thighs, gripping hard, pushing herself. She stands on quaking knees, slumped at the shoulders. Liv thinks she could be an illusion, a ripple on the water. The lines of her features are blurred, her face sunken. 'Where are the angles?' she wonders.
Liv is sharpened before Cate, who winces at the clarity of the image: Liv's arm a crooked v-shape of 60-degress, her legs parallel, between them a triangle, her breasts concentric circles, her mouth a thin line. Each eye looks too round to Cate, like fierce perfect holes, and she has to turn away.
Cate is halfway to the stairs, when she thinks she hears her name. Pulse pounding in her ears, she holds her breath, and listens.
"Cate." The name pierces. She turns around and Liv is smiling at her-the child smile-head cocked to the side. Liv rolls her lips beneath her teeth, wetting them. "Cate," she repeats, softer, beneath thick, black lashes. She walks to Cate with light, measured steps, arms crisscrossed over her chest, hands open and cupped slightly near her elbows. She reaches toward Cate.
Liv's hands are hot on Cate's arms. Her lids grow heavy. The warmth on her mouth is heavier still. Liv kisses Cate in slow, imperceptible movements. Hardly a kiss, but a touch. Liv can feel Cate's pulse between them, moving their lips together and apart. It is indistinguishable from her own.
The last thing Cate feels is a flutter of eyelashes against her cheek and the warmth is gone. Cloth drags against the floor. The sustained rasp of it echoes in Cate's ears when she opens her eyes again, though Liv is gone, the exit door clicking shut behind her.
Her exit. Suddenly the thought of air is too much. Her arms still burn where Liv touched her, and she places her hands over these spots to trap the heat, hold it in. She goes back the way she came.
* * *
Passing the mirror, Cate stops and walks to it, cautiously. In it, she sees herself: blond wig tousled and damp, askew on her forehead. Cheeks bright pink and full. Lips swollen and slightly cracked. Her eyes are vivid, they seem as if they are dancing, incapable of staying put in her skull. She thinks perhaps she just cannot focus, and blinks. She leans closer toward the mirror. White reflected light stars her eyes, lines intersecting lines. They seem to spin. She reaches one hand to her neck and strokes its length absently with one finger. The coolness of her own touch makes her skin shiver, and she laughs at this. It's a hearty laugh-'solid,' she thinks. Everything seems solid and clear.
Cate stares into her own eyes. They look alive, radiant, passionate. "Power corrupts," she says out loud to herself, slowly grinning. In the mirror, her face glows, still full-blooded. It is a face she recognizes in part, though it's not the same. It shimmers with something new. This is her old glow meeting the newer one-her inner self coming up to congeal with the mask.
Cate: in the mirror. Her eyes.
Title: Elemental
Pairing: Cate/Liv
Rating: NC-17
Summary: "Natural" elf-love... minus the elf part, really.
Disclaimer: Falsehoods.
Beta merci beaucoup: raynemaiden & crystal_blitz
Elemental
"At which the bushy Teade* a groome did light,
And sacred lampe in secret chamber hide,
Where it should not be quenched day nor night,
For feare of euill fates, but burnen euer bright."
~Edmund Spenser
[* = torch]
In the mirror: her eyes.
Cate. That's where she is. The Cate she is: fragile, uncertain and acquiescing. Framed in oval, she is all awkward angles. In her eyes she sees the thin white lines of reflected light, a faint glow, and thinks of splintery fiberglass, angel hair.
But if she pulls back, Cate as Galadriel comes into focus, filling the mirror, overflowing. Cate as Galadriel: calming as still water, imposing as fast rapids, piercing as ice. Tolkien's water goddess, in the costume and in the flesh. Here is a Cate she would want to be, like Elizabeth, the commanding spitfire Virgin Queen. Spenser's Faerie Queene. Now the Elven Queen. These were women who burned through life, forward, bold, decisive, leaving nothing untouched. Inside them, Cate ignites. Outside, she feels doused. Inadequate. They are impossible idols to emulate in real life. However, she could always play pretend. She could mirror them and become another woman: Cate plus other. It gives her a presence of strength and a strength of mind that she could not claim as her own on her own.
* * *
Her finger pokes the plaster frame and she shakes her head. 'Props, masks, fantasies,' she thinks. 'Not reality. Cheap, lightweight dressing. Playthings. No, not real.' She sighs and scans the empty room. "I need air," she says aloud to no one, and casts a sideways glance to the mirror before she walks away, heading out of the warehouse.
She turns a corner of the warehouse to find a blur of beige and gray and white. In full Arwen costume, Liv is sitting on a scrolled Rivendell bench in the corner, beneath the Exit sign, holding a full script upright in her lap with one hand as if she were going over lines. But the flush in her face and the too quick motion of her other hand to grasp the opposite side of the book tells Cate what Liv was really doing. And Cate can't help but laugh, bubbly and rich.
"Ngila won't like it if you stain your dress, Livvy," she says, mischievously.
"I was... I was just...." Liv's voice is thin and questioning. The disobedient child.
Cate lowers her head and offers an askance, knowing look. Her smile is like a grimace pulled upward at one end, a 160-degree angle. Liv recognizes the coy smile, the twinkling eyes. She thinks of the Galadriel Light.
"Cate... is there something you want here?" Liv is impatient. She pushes her lower lip in and out, rolled beneath her upper lip. Neither chew nor pout. Cate grins wider to see her draw her index finger in a languid sweep across her mouth, the faintest hint of fingertip plunging inside her mouth. Cate knows this drill: Liv is a predictable one. A tease. She gives the appearance of girlishness, but radiates a passion and fiery drive that always gets her what she wants.
Cate has seen this part played out before, has mastered it herself. She stretches her bare toes firmly into the dimpled concrete, firming her stance. "Hmmmmm," she feigns mulling over her thoughts. One long pale finger taps playfully on her lips. Then stops. "Want," she says, looking hard at Liv, "you."
Blinking hard, Liv mouths the word, "what." It tapers off, without a sense of punctuation.
Cate's strides are swift, determined. One motion gets her in front of Liv, another lays the book on the ground. To Liv, it is a flash of lights, too fast to comprehend. And then it is just Cate. The movement halts before her eyes, but her head throbs with a racing pulse.
Cate can see the vibration on the delicate translucent skin of Liv's temples, beaded with sweat. She extends one finger to touch the pulse point and Liv's eyes close. Cate's finger lowers, falls more than slides, down Liv's cheek, downy and pinkened. It travels down Liv's neck, swanlike, arching. It traces Liv's stark white collar bone, dips tipfirst into the hollow of her neck. Liv is heaving as Cate lowers her finger, with slower and slower pacing, into her cleavage, outlining the swell of one pale breast. Cate stops when her palm pushes into the top of Liv's dress, starchy bodice fabric unyielding. She thinks of the pomp of this situation, the costume drama, and laughs lightly to her self, eyes bright. Liv smiles in response, eyes still closed.
Cate continues with her touch, her finger pressing harder now into the material of Liv's dress, drawing a slow line down Liv's stomach, bumping over ornate buttons. Her finger stops at the navel, pushing into it. Liv's eyes are open now, alert. She holds her breath as she watches Cate carefully gather the skirt in even pleats. Up, up, up. Fold after fold. When it's up to her waist, cool air on her naked legs, Liv breathes out.
Cate's finger is on her again, pressing between her legs-the pad of her fingertip plunging into coarse hair and soft skin, spongelike-then cupping her full-handed. "Fuck," Liv whispers, exhaling.
"Mmmm," Cate coos, and lowers herself, hands splayed to hold back the awkward bulk of skirt. On her knees, she rests her chin on top of Liv's lower thigh, playfully gazing at her.
Liv reaches her hand down as if she can't trust the sensation, the physical shift between her legs; she must read it like braille beneath her hand. She thinks, 'I am stiff and swollen and... no, still swelling, and hard. As hard as can be. Girl-hard.'
Liv allows herself to meet Cate's gaze. Cate is patient. She will wait for approval, the right sign of compliance. Liv blushes. Her whole body shoots color vertically head to toe. An obscene pink. Teasing. Not enough acquisition to be red. Red is full. This color says: fill me up. And Liv's lips fall open and her head falls back.
Cate strokes Liv's hand where it rubs furiously with tight, flattened fingers as if Liv is too overwhelmed to focus on details. Under that stroke-steady and precise-Liv slows down and goes limp. This is Cate's cue. Her nose is dragging up Liv's heated thigh until her eyelid is brushed in damp hairs.
Liv is thick and mahogany, comfort and shelter. Cate smiles against her thigh, noting Liv's careless stubble. 'Not so prissy girl after all,' she thinks, and shudders, stomach a sudden fiery cauldron. She imagines the blood in her own veins. She imagines it loose, running free of vessels, a slow, hot, concentrated liquid: Cate is made of lava. She settles her moist-burning lips on Liv and kisses her with brush fire.
Liv is wet enough to douse her flame. Cate can feel it on her lips, and tests the waters with her tongue. Dense water, colloidal. She swallows roughly and thinks that her mouth has never been so dry.
She bares her teeth and readies the lava within her. Liv lets out a sharp, hoarse cry as Cate bites down hard on her clit. 'It is an elven cry,' Cate thinks, hardly what she expected from this squeaky, helium-voiced girl. It's an ancient howl, and Cate's alto moan is the response to Liv's call: crackling wood in the sparked air.
Flicker. Cate imagines candles and flames and drafty, murky rooms, but no connection between these-just pinpoints and blackness. Liv is sulphur beneath her, around her. She imagines herself snuffed out, and twists Liv's small slick shaft in her teeth, fighting for more burn.
Cate grinds down-back and forth, back and forth-and Liv is shaking, her muscles taut and brittle as freshly cooled glass, straining above the seat, suspended and strung. All her weight totters on weak balances: curled feet and breakable neck. The iron of the chairback bites her lower neck in cold, raw licks. But it is cool, cool water-near, yet not near enough to quench the slow burn of her cunt. She wants to move, can just feel the metal between her legs, can see herself straddling the chair and rocking, rocking into its hard release of metallic coolness-its solidity. Instead she has skin: pliable, insufferably formless skin. There is no hold, no purchase. Neither liquid nor solid; more like air. However tangible. However there. Liv no longer feels the puncture of teeth. She is licked in a flame she cannot put out.
'I don't want it out,' she thinks. Inside her head, Liv's voice is shrill, uncertain-the voice she knows and recognizes as her own. It has identity in it. But the groans and harsh panting seem foreign: these sounds do not match what her ears are accustomed to, and she filters this as not me, NOT ME, where am I?
'We are everywhere,' Cate thinks. She knows how to disengage, maintain self from other. She knows how to crawl up inside herself, away from windows and let the light exit the room, darkness a pillar of safety between her and the wilderness. Make enough room to let someone else in. But that is exercise, that is profession. Now-with Liv pressed to her face so close she cannot find separation, with Liv in her mouth, herself in Liv-Cate surges forward from the inside out to meet the world head on. Her yell is animalian. She gasps for air and bites and gasps and suckles; fire, air, water, earth swirling in and out and around her. Her hands dance like bonfire between her legs, wild and diabolical and aimless. She rolls into the friction and up out of it into Liv. Waves and layers. Her clit is so raw from rubbing she is sure it will crack. At that thought, she smiles into Liv and flicks her tongue. She smells the hint of coolness in the air, a smell like ozone but thicker, almost rain. She imagines hardening, splitting lava. She imagines herself in layers of fire: at the molten core, a swell of lips that press and shiver rapidly like her own mouth. She plunges down and back up, leviathan of flame in a world of flame. She knows there is more to the world, as she knows there are more colors than red, but behind her eyelids there is only that one. Darting in and out of Liv, she waggles her tongue to taunt the world, to set it ablaze.
Liv is being eaten by fire, disintegrated. Red covers her world and she coughs it up, gasping to swallow blue. Cool blue. Her hands are patting and clawing at the front of her dress. 'Extinguish,' she thinks and the word sits behind her tongue, wet and silver and shimmering. Her hands pull one breast free of fabric, breaking buttons, but it is not the relief she expected. She seeks more, kneading and gripping, tugging and thumbing and pinching her nipple, hard and solid and burnt. Seared.
"Cate," she slurs in a long, whisper-thin growl, consonants muddied under the wash of relief.
Cate opens her eyes when she comes and the world is metallic gray around her, dotted with disappearing red. The fading red of Liv's mouth, Liv's neck, Liv's nipple against the pale sheen of fabric. Liv's skin is smeared pink, pulsating with desperate breaths, dotted with gooseflesh. Cate sees her skin pool into cream. 'Sweet Liv,' she thinks, and drapes her tongue over the clit and pulls up, mouthing the labia in a loose, slow suck.
Air. Nothing but air seems to exist, and yet there isn't enough. It seeps into Cate and she sucks it down like water. "Need," she gasps, and presses her hands into Liv's thighs, gripping hard, pushing herself. She stands on quaking knees, slumped at the shoulders. Liv thinks she could be an illusion, a ripple on the water. The lines of her features are blurred, her face sunken. 'Where are the angles?' she wonders.
Liv is sharpened before Cate, who winces at the clarity of the image: Liv's arm a crooked v-shape of 60-degress, her legs parallel, between them a triangle, her breasts concentric circles, her mouth a thin line. Each eye looks too round to Cate, like fierce perfect holes, and she has to turn away.
Cate is halfway to the stairs, when she thinks she hears her name. Pulse pounding in her ears, she holds her breath, and listens.
"Cate." The name pierces. She turns around and Liv is smiling at her-the child smile-head cocked to the side. Liv rolls her lips beneath her teeth, wetting them. "Cate," she repeats, softer, beneath thick, black lashes. She walks to Cate with light, measured steps, arms crisscrossed over her chest, hands open and cupped slightly near her elbows. She reaches toward Cate.
Liv's hands are hot on Cate's arms. Her lids grow heavy. The warmth on her mouth is heavier still. Liv kisses Cate in slow, imperceptible movements. Hardly a kiss, but a touch. Liv can feel Cate's pulse between them, moving their lips together and apart. It is indistinguishable from her own.
The last thing Cate feels is a flutter of eyelashes against her cheek and the warmth is gone. Cloth drags against the floor. The sustained rasp of it echoes in Cate's ears when she opens her eyes again, though Liv is gone, the exit door clicking shut behind her.
Her exit. Suddenly the thought of air is too much. Her arms still burn where Liv touched her, and she places her hands over these spots to trap the heat, hold it in. She goes back the way she came.
* * *
Passing the mirror, Cate stops and walks to it, cautiously. In it, she sees herself: blond wig tousled and damp, askew on her forehead. Cheeks bright pink and full. Lips swollen and slightly cracked. Her eyes are vivid, they seem as if they are dancing, incapable of staying put in her skull. She thinks perhaps she just cannot focus, and blinks. She leans closer toward the mirror. White reflected light stars her eyes, lines intersecting lines. They seem to spin. She reaches one hand to her neck and strokes its length absently with one finger. The coolness of her own touch makes her skin shiver, and she laughs at this. It's a hearty laugh-'solid,' she thinks. Everything seems solid and clear.
Cate stares into her own eyes. They look alive, radiant, passionate. "Power corrupts," she says out loud to herself, slowly grinning. In the mirror, her face glows, still full-blooded. It is a face she recognizes in part, though it's not the same. It shimmers with something new. This is her old glow meeting the newer one-her inner self coming up to congeal with the mask.
Cate: in the mirror. Her eyes.