Fic: Custom Fit, Tailored Too, Leven Thumps
Title: Custom Fit, Tailored Too
Fandom: Leven Thumps
Word Count: 2000
There is an art to being a woman, Pheobe will tell you, smiling into the dark side of her pillow when she hears her door slide open. Her hands are two folded paintbrushes beneath her head. Her entire body is an instrument to be used, humming and well-tuned. This is why she thinks lithens are such a big joke; you don't need to be a lithen to feel the tug and pull of fate on your body. You just have to be female (come to think of it, she hasn't seen any female lithens.)
The futon tilts away from her when Leven kneels beside her. She rolls over to show him she isn't sleeping. He touches her face like he can't not, and her flesh is illuminated by the light from his eyes, her skin the same shade of honey bread. The familiarity of the movement settles heavy in her stomach.
"I'll tell you," she says in reponse to what he cannot ask.
++
The first time she laid eyes on him, she turned to her friends and she said, "I'm going to marry him."
They tittered at her, stroking her hair the way longings do when they're particularly amused. It can be compared to clapping, she supposes. "But, sister," they say, because she isn't Pheobe yet. "He is a nit."
"And we can produce offspring if he wants me to," she reminds them, tossing her hair dismissively. She stands still and lets them flow away from her, onto whatever trivial things longing adolescents do. She stands still, and she thinks that might be the day she heard the whispering within her mind. She doesn't think she would have gotten the bravery to approach him without it. Longings may be beautiful to behold, but they're one of Foo's creation and as such suffer from humanity's doubts and fears. They're notorious for their cowardise (although they'll be more inclined to call it sound judgment or something similiar. Don't let it fool you. Longings simply do not make rash decisions.)
She was old enough then to know not to let all her luster shine at once; these days, they are learning that coming out of the cradle. Children are easy to spot because of their tell-tale glow, and to avoid behind hunted by the arrows of rants, they learn quickly to camaflouge. Instead, she listens to fate, lets it move her, arrange her in a cross-legged position on top of a rock, and she waits until she heard his footsteps.
She smiles at him. He stops, stares. The way they all do.
"Do you know how to get out of here?" he wants to know. The way no one has yet.
Her smile widens.
++
The first time she's in Hector's bed, she isn't Pheobe. Her name is Kate, and she thinks she might be full-bodied, willing, maybe a little bit pretty -- she isn't sure, as the feel of his fingers on her skin is rather distracting. Each touch is a tiny explosion of desire, of feeling, flooding her maleable mind with images and making her tremble against him. Nits are warm, she learns, arms around his neck and chest lifting with his, and bit by bit, she makes that warmth hers as well.
This might be what it's like to be a sycophant, she thinks, who falls in love with metal.
She isn't sure what he's lusting for; his fiancee, or Reality in general.
++
This is what she remembers most about her time with him. She remembers sitting at his side, keeping her hands busy by making daisy chains or something ridiculous, the way longings always do when they're in the company of somebody fateful. She remembers the flowers, hanging in full blossom and smelling -- for some reason -- of apple pie, the overhang they'd sit on together, listening to the babble of the brook and the muttering of the soil.
"What is your gift?" she wants to know, startling him out of his reverie. It's not often she meets someone who can focus on something other than her for long periods of time.
Hector's sycophant, whose name Pheobe never really bothered to learn, appears crouched in front of her, a frown tugging at the edges of her lips. "Now that's not a fair question," she begins. "Some nits don't develop their gifts until --"
"Lay off," Hector grumbles.
The sycophant bristles, but Pheobe smiles, and asks, "Did you know that your eyes glow?"
++
"You're not like the other longings," Zale remarked, in the kind of tone that didn't make it obvious if he was complimenting her or insulting her.
"The other longings try to stay out of the way of fate, and of nits and rants and everyone who is trying to move it," Pheobe replies with passion. "I refuse. Longings are not made to be shut up, ours powers diminished and our children hunted like the barbarians of old. Foo cannot move without desire."
"Well spoken," the lithen king concedes with a bow of his head, because he is nothing if not fair chances and he is Foo's weakest link. When he looks up, his blue eyes sparkle with curiosity. "Do you know what they say about Hector Thumps?"
"That he is trying to find a way out of Foo?" She lets her head drift to one side. "Isn't that what they all want to do? Hector Thumps, so far, is the only one with the determination to keep trying. Surely you cannot fault him for that."
"Determination?" Zale's lips purse, staring at her so hard she feels her luster begin to slip away from her. "Is that truly what it is?"
But Pheobe does not tell. She has no patience for secrets.
++
She lays with him on the floor, her limbs tucked into the warm crevases of his body. His fingers idly run through her hair. Her head is filled with everything, sounds and thoughts and images and all things in between, blurring against the inside of her skull like rain on window panes, and it makes her so sleepy and peaceful. She doesn't notice Hector's distraction.
"Don't you think that we all play something?" she murmurs, reaching up to lightly run her finger across his five o' clock shadow. "Not just instruments. Sycophants play their burns, trees play the soil, the soil plays the trees. You play the gifts of all the nits. My Hector, the offing." Her eyes burn with pleasure and with pride. "And I play --"
"People," Hector answers. "Men. Women, too. You're a prodigy. All your kind are. It's all very intimidating."
She stares at him, not liking his tone. Or lack of one.
"Pheobe," says Hector, with no regret, no emotion in his voice. "I need you to leave now. My goal all along has been to return to Reality, and I can't do that with you here."
She props herself up on her elbow, unable to believe her ears. "But I made you who you are!"
"Ironic, isn't it? I couldn't have done it without you." He quirks his lips at the ceiling, unamused, unapologetic.
++
Sheer bravado gets her into the very heart of Morfit. She slams the door open and stands there, hair coiling around her head like a basket of snakes.
"Ah," says Sabine with perfect understanding.
"Oh, dear," says his wife resignedly.
++
She hears him return, as clearly as a drumbeat, a clap of thunder. She rises from her bed, ghosts past the sleeping figures of Winter and Azure where they had fallen asleep, heads tilted into each other and beakers of quicksilver held precariously in their lax fingers. She goes outside and stands in the soil.
Beneath her, Foo reverberates as if a giant chord had been struck. Its want fills her from the crown of her head to the soles of her feet like a particularly passionate kiss. Hector Thumps has moved from Reality to Foo and back again. There is a gateway.
She laughs from the simplicity of it all. She doesn't think of how this will effect the rest of her kind, and she will not know of their demise, their extinction until she is the last left, until there is no one to come and rescue her. Right now, all she can think of it is fate, pulling at the tips of her fingers and the ends of her hair.
"Pheobe," whispers the very air around her. "Pheobe....."
"I am here," she answers delightedly. "That is me."
++
She stays with Sabine until after Zale is put ten feet under. She stays with Winter until she has truly, finally reversed the polarity of nit gifts, until they flow from her into her perfect, neatly labeled little jars and her eyes glow with the thought of equality for all. She stays with Azure until Winter turns to him; she swallows, rocks back onto her heels like a child sucked into the tide, relishing for a moment the warmth of love, the flood of touch and lips and hands.
She doesn't return to Hector for many years, as if he is a country she has only seen the airport of and finds a travel guide for underneath her bed.
"I was wondering when you would come," he tells her as she briskly brushes past him to unlatch the window. His back is to her, and in his arms she can see the bundle of his newborn son. One of Hector's long, artesian fingers is being held in a sleepy grasp no bigger than a penny, and the very sight of makes Pheobe's throat work.
"It's time to go, Hector," she tells him with no apology in her voice. "You're an offing. It's time for you to serve the Foo you missed so much."
He sighs, lifting the baby up to press a kiss to its flat, red forehead. He places it back into its crib and wistfully gives its mobile a twirl, as if that's easier than a good-bye.
++
"Before you inevitably betray me and turn me into the driveling, selfish excuse of a man I'll be for the rest of my life, there's something I have to do first. Something that's more important than whatever dark master is calling for us." He takes her face between his palms and kisses her mouth.
++
The whole business with Antsel running away and planting Hector's son in Reality was a bit of a thorn in her side. This was one desire she could never fulfill; as a longing, she wouldn't be tangible in Reality. And it was a little bit annoying when Jamoon stole Winter's invention, and when Sabine cursed Geth into a seed. Nobody's supposed to have that much power.
"Hm," she says, watching Hector pull his hood up over his glowing eyes and walk away. She tests the bars of her cage, but they hold tight. She stretches her legs out, but she cannot reach the soil. She closes her eyes and listens, but nobody's whispering Pheobe inside her mind. "Well. This sucks."
++
It's also a little bit boring. She hadn't the faintest clue how fast fate was moving until Leven Thumps stood before her, youth in his eyes and a sycophant staring at her from underneath his left ear.
++
There is so much of Hector Thumps looking out at her through this boy. He might be the only one she can trust, she decides. Clover's too flighty, too like herself. Winter has no idea what she wants, not like she did before. And the only thing she has in common with the lithen is that they are the last of their kind. Hector had been right, Azure had been right; a chapter of Foo's history was irrevocably closing.
She sees the awareness come to Leven's eyes. She smiles, lets a little bit of luster smudge her features until he sees whatever he wants to see, and when his hand settles on her hip she arches herself up to kiss him.
Player. Pawn.
Fandom: Leven Thumps
Word Count: 2000
There is an art to being a woman, Pheobe will tell you, smiling into the dark side of her pillow when she hears her door slide open. Her hands are two folded paintbrushes beneath her head. Her entire body is an instrument to be used, humming and well-tuned. This is why she thinks lithens are such a big joke; you don't need to be a lithen to feel the tug and pull of fate on your body. You just have to be female (come to think of it, she hasn't seen any female lithens.)
The futon tilts away from her when Leven kneels beside her. She rolls over to show him she isn't sleeping. He touches her face like he can't not, and her flesh is illuminated by the light from his eyes, her skin the same shade of honey bread. The familiarity of the movement settles heavy in her stomach.
"I'll tell you," she says in reponse to what he cannot ask.
++
The first time she laid eyes on him, she turned to her friends and she said, "I'm going to marry him."
They tittered at her, stroking her hair the way longings do when they're particularly amused. It can be compared to clapping, she supposes. "But, sister," they say, because she isn't Pheobe yet. "He is a nit."
"And we can produce offspring if he wants me to," she reminds them, tossing her hair dismissively. She stands still and lets them flow away from her, onto whatever trivial things longing adolescents do. She stands still, and she thinks that might be the day she heard the whispering within her mind. She doesn't think she would have gotten the bravery to approach him without it. Longings may be beautiful to behold, but they're one of Foo's creation and as such suffer from humanity's doubts and fears. They're notorious for their cowardise (although they'll be more inclined to call it sound judgment or something similiar. Don't let it fool you. Longings simply do not make rash decisions.)
She was old enough then to know not to let all her luster shine at once; these days, they are learning that coming out of the cradle. Children are easy to spot because of their tell-tale glow, and to avoid behind hunted by the arrows of rants, they learn quickly to camaflouge. Instead, she listens to fate, lets it move her, arrange her in a cross-legged position on top of a rock, and she waits until she heard his footsteps.
She smiles at him. He stops, stares. The way they all do.
"Do you know how to get out of here?" he wants to know. The way no one has yet.
Her smile widens.
++
The first time she's in Hector's bed, she isn't Pheobe. Her name is Kate, and she thinks she might be full-bodied, willing, maybe a little bit pretty -- she isn't sure, as the feel of his fingers on her skin is rather distracting. Each touch is a tiny explosion of desire, of feeling, flooding her maleable mind with images and making her tremble against him. Nits are warm, she learns, arms around his neck and chest lifting with his, and bit by bit, she makes that warmth hers as well.
This might be what it's like to be a sycophant, she thinks, who falls in love with metal.
She isn't sure what he's lusting for; his fiancee, or Reality in general.
++
This is what she remembers most about her time with him. She remembers sitting at his side, keeping her hands busy by making daisy chains or something ridiculous, the way longings always do when they're in the company of somebody fateful. She remembers the flowers, hanging in full blossom and smelling -- for some reason -- of apple pie, the overhang they'd sit on together, listening to the babble of the brook and the muttering of the soil.
"What is your gift?" she wants to know, startling him out of his reverie. It's not often she meets someone who can focus on something other than her for long periods of time.
Hector's sycophant, whose name Pheobe never really bothered to learn, appears crouched in front of her, a frown tugging at the edges of her lips. "Now that's not a fair question," she begins. "Some nits don't develop their gifts until --"
"Lay off," Hector grumbles.
The sycophant bristles, but Pheobe smiles, and asks, "Did you know that your eyes glow?"
++
"You're not like the other longings," Zale remarked, in the kind of tone that didn't make it obvious if he was complimenting her or insulting her.
"The other longings try to stay out of the way of fate, and of nits and rants and everyone who is trying to move it," Pheobe replies with passion. "I refuse. Longings are not made to be shut up, ours powers diminished and our children hunted like the barbarians of old. Foo cannot move without desire."
"Well spoken," the lithen king concedes with a bow of his head, because he is nothing if not fair chances and he is Foo's weakest link. When he looks up, his blue eyes sparkle with curiosity. "Do you know what they say about Hector Thumps?"
"That he is trying to find a way out of Foo?" She lets her head drift to one side. "Isn't that what they all want to do? Hector Thumps, so far, is the only one with the determination to keep trying. Surely you cannot fault him for that."
"Determination?" Zale's lips purse, staring at her so hard she feels her luster begin to slip away from her. "Is that truly what it is?"
But Pheobe does not tell. She has no patience for secrets.
++
She lays with him on the floor, her limbs tucked into the warm crevases of his body. His fingers idly run through her hair. Her head is filled with everything, sounds and thoughts and images and all things in between, blurring against the inside of her skull like rain on window panes, and it makes her so sleepy and peaceful. She doesn't notice Hector's distraction.
"Don't you think that we all play something?" she murmurs, reaching up to lightly run her finger across his five o' clock shadow. "Not just instruments. Sycophants play their burns, trees play the soil, the soil plays the trees. You play the gifts of all the nits. My Hector, the offing." Her eyes burn with pleasure and with pride. "And I play --"
"People," Hector answers. "Men. Women, too. You're a prodigy. All your kind are. It's all very intimidating."
She stares at him, not liking his tone. Or lack of one.
"Pheobe," says Hector, with no regret, no emotion in his voice. "I need you to leave now. My goal all along has been to return to Reality, and I can't do that with you here."
She props herself up on her elbow, unable to believe her ears. "But I made you who you are!"
"Ironic, isn't it? I couldn't have done it without you." He quirks his lips at the ceiling, unamused, unapologetic.
++
Sheer bravado gets her into the very heart of Morfit. She slams the door open and stands there, hair coiling around her head like a basket of snakes.
"Ah," says Sabine with perfect understanding.
"Oh, dear," says his wife resignedly.
++
She hears him return, as clearly as a drumbeat, a clap of thunder. She rises from her bed, ghosts past the sleeping figures of Winter and Azure where they had fallen asleep, heads tilted into each other and beakers of quicksilver held precariously in their lax fingers. She goes outside and stands in the soil.
Beneath her, Foo reverberates as if a giant chord had been struck. Its want fills her from the crown of her head to the soles of her feet like a particularly passionate kiss. Hector Thumps has moved from Reality to Foo and back again. There is a gateway.
She laughs from the simplicity of it all. She doesn't think of how this will effect the rest of her kind, and she will not know of their demise, their extinction until she is the last left, until there is no one to come and rescue her. Right now, all she can think of it is fate, pulling at the tips of her fingers and the ends of her hair.
"Pheobe," whispers the very air around her. "Pheobe....."
"I am here," she answers delightedly. "That is me."
++
She stays with Sabine until after Zale is put ten feet under. She stays with Winter until she has truly, finally reversed the polarity of nit gifts, until they flow from her into her perfect, neatly labeled little jars and her eyes glow with the thought of equality for all. She stays with Azure until Winter turns to him; she swallows, rocks back onto her heels like a child sucked into the tide, relishing for a moment the warmth of love, the flood of touch and lips and hands.
She doesn't return to Hector for many years, as if he is a country she has only seen the airport of and finds a travel guide for underneath her bed.
"I was wondering when you would come," he tells her as she briskly brushes past him to unlatch the window. His back is to her, and in his arms she can see the bundle of his newborn son. One of Hector's long, artesian fingers is being held in a sleepy grasp no bigger than a penny, and the very sight of makes Pheobe's throat work.
"It's time to go, Hector," she tells him with no apology in her voice. "You're an offing. It's time for you to serve the Foo you missed so much."
He sighs, lifting the baby up to press a kiss to its flat, red forehead. He places it back into its crib and wistfully gives its mobile a twirl, as if that's easier than a good-bye.
++
"Before you inevitably betray me and turn me into the driveling, selfish excuse of a man I'll be for the rest of my life, there's something I have to do first. Something that's more important than whatever dark master is calling for us." He takes her face between his palms and kisses her mouth.
++
The whole business with Antsel running away and planting Hector's son in Reality was a bit of a thorn in her side. This was one desire she could never fulfill; as a longing, she wouldn't be tangible in Reality. And it was a little bit annoying when Jamoon stole Winter's invention, and when Sabine cursed Geth into a seed. Nobody's supposed to have that much power.
"Hm," she says, watching Hector pull his hood up over his glowing eyes and walk away. She tests the bars of her cage, but they hold tight. She stretches her legs out, but she cannot reach the soil. She closes her eyes and listens, but nobody's whispering Pheobe inside her mind. "Well. This sucks."
++
It's also a little bit boring. She hadn't the faintest clue how fast fate was moving until Leven Thumps stood before her, youth in his eyes and a sycophant staring at her from underneath his left ear.
++
There is so much of Hector Thumps looking out at her through this boy. He might be the only one she can trust, she decides. Clover's too flighty, too like herself. Winter has no idea what she wants, not like she did before. And the only thing she has in common with the lithen is that they are the last of their kind. Hector had been right, Azure had been right; a chapter of Foo's history was irrevocably closing.
She sees the awareness come to Leven's eyes. She smiles, lets a little bit of luster smudge her features until he sees whatever he wants to see, and when his hand settles on her hip she arches herself up to kiss him.
Player. Pawn.