When You Are Gone: Hex fic
Title: When I Am Gone
Fandom: Hex
Pairing: Thelma/Peggy
Rating: NC17
Summary: Peggy can't admit just how much she wants.
Notes: Written for mmebahorel as part of the Yuletide 2006 challenge. Thanks to ravenedgewalker and kitkatdoll for beta reading; any errors, of course, remain wholly mine.
During The Release
Peggy: We're freaks of nature, Bunty. We're not meant to be.
Thelma: But I like being....
Peggy: You love her, don't you?
Thelma cried like a child, her face ridiculously open, all wide unhappy mouth and sticky tears. Had no one ever taught her to be ashamed? Without meaning to, without conscious thought, Peggy leant forward and pulled Thelma back into her arms, tugged her face down against her breast, and rocked her like the child she seemed.
Thelma's ridiculous hair was rough against her throat; she dipped her face down and kissed it. She felt absurdly helpless, and absurdly responsible. It annoyed her that it hurt to see Thelma weep - nothing had hurt her much since she died, and if memory served very little whilst she was alive, though what it was like to be alive at all had begun to fade. And there was an odd little tug under her breastbone when she thought of what she had said, at the realisation of love, a tug that was part envy and part loneliness and partly something that her mind shied away from completely almost before she knew that it was there.
She was crooning, she realised to her horror, murmuring some old lullaby that her mother or her nurse had sung to her, all moon and stars and mothers' arms. She'd always thought she had the maternal instinct of a brick; what was it about this child-woman that brought such tenderness welling up in her? She kissed Thelma's hair again, smelling chemicals and sweetness and the impossible warmth of the girl's body, lifted it and kissed the back of her neck, softly furry with fine hair. She could smell herself on Thelma, too, bitter lipstick and the mossy mousse de saxe accord of her perfume that still lingered after eighty years. She breathed in the smell of them together, new and old and dark and sweet, knowing already what she was going to do.
Thelma lifted her smeary face and Peggy kissed her, quite softly. She tasted of wine and pork scratchings and whatever sticky cosmetic it was that clung to her lips, of chocolate and toothpaste and tea. Search as she might, sliding her tongue into the soft crevices of Thelma's mouth, she couldn't find a hint of rot, nothing of the grave, no cold lake water or split blood. It wasn't right, and she kissed the thought away, again and again, and kissed the tears from Thelma's cheeks and throat.
And was she crying herself, were some of the tears her own? But I like being. She couldn't say that, hadn't been able to say that even before she died. No, it was the thought of Thelma, Thelma put out like a light, gone in a moment. The cartouche was solved; why would Peggy herself cling to this pitiful half-existence?
Thelma's breasts slid too easily out of the neck of her dress, and it wasn't like the other times they had done this, there was no laughter and no pretence ("Down on your knees, girl, and scrub my floor!"), only the chamois softness of Thelma's skin beneath her hands. The hardness of a nipple against her palm - Thelma gasped, and Peggy wanted to hear it again and pinched and twisted until she did, until Thelma whimpered in her ear, sounding like a child again, desperate and needy. She put her face down between Thelma's breasts and breathed that warm scent in, rubbed her face on the skin, marking her like a cat. We're not meant to be.
Thelma was straddling her thigh now, the pressure of her crotch hard against Peggy's hip, rubbing restlessly, and Peggy could feel the damp of her even through layers of cotton and silk, and she could smell her too, salty as her wretched pork scratchings, and Peggy wanted to put her face down and breathe that in too, mark herself with it so she would never forget. Instead she slid her hand under the elastic of Thelma's knickers, the angle cramped and awkward, fingers chafing on crisp hair until she touched slickness and Thelma gasped again.
She felt Thelma's fingers brush against her own breast and caught the seeking hand away with her free hand, holding it hard away from herself. "No," she murmured, into the smell and feel of Thelma, "no, no, let me." She didn't want there to be another thought in Thelma's head, not of Peggy's pleasure or of fallen angels or of (Cassie) anything else at all, and she revelled in the feel of wet and soft and hard and slick all mixed together and Thelma gasping and grunting in her ear, childlike even in her pleasure until Peggy herself couldn't think of anything else either except the woman in her lap and the smell, feel, touch, sound of her, forever, forever.
She would go quickly, quietly, before the morning came. She didn't want to wait for whatever happened, whether that whatever meant vanishing into nothing or another coil of Azazeal's millennia-long plot. Once Thelma was gone, away to the hospital where they did such things to women as a girl Cassie's age would never have known of in Peggy's time, she would leave, slipping out into the coolness of the air with Thelma's slickness still drying on her skin.
She had never been one for waiting - not before, and not now - or for taking second place. Thelma, who had never truly known what it was to know oneself a freak of nature, would never understand that hardness, the struggle that underlay it. Thelma would most likely never understand why she had gone, if she remained to think on it at all. Would probably never even wonder, if she did remain, caught up in Cassie and Azazeal and the living world that Peggy had long since left behind.
And yet she knew, as Thelma's hard breath against her ear slowed and stuttered, that Thelma was as hungry as she - touch-hungry, heart-hungry. The difference was that Thelma was still soft enough to admit it, without eighty years of drifting silently through the echoes of her own life.
She knew, as well, that she herself was not the answer to that need. But she would take a piece of Thelma with her when she went, the sound of her in pleasure, the grotesque vulnerability of her tears, and in its place leave, for a little while, the memory of touch.