fic: passage (7/10) (elle/claire)
Title: Passage (7/10)
Rating: NC-17 (language, disturbing imagery, graphic sex)
Pairing: Elle/Claire; side Adam/Elle, Adam/Claire
Timeline: Post-“ So”
Prompt: “envy” at 10_themes
Disclaimer: Not mine, just playing with them
Teaser: Ten stages between one thing and the next, between lust and love.
7, envy
Elle has survived.
The little fires she would start when she was a child and the inferno that burnt down grandma’s gingerbread house; the IV drips and the happy pills that left her feeling nothing, certainly not happy. She had been good enough at pretending to be good that she got to leave her room, had later been strong enough to hold her own among the other agents.
Then Noah had put her feet in a dog bath and she'd zapped herself until little pieces of her head fell into place again.
Struggling to handle that blow, her only foundation violently shaken beneath her, she’d managed to endure her father’s later betrayal, his certainty of her disloyalty when Noah tore the facility open for his daughter.
And none of that matters.
Because in the minutes after Elle sees Adam Monroe leaving the college, Claire Bennet almost destroys her.
It’s more horrible than the medicine taste that she can’t rinse out of her mouth when she wakes up sweaty and alone after a dream she can’t remember, worse than her father turning against her, raising his gun and taking that shot.
Her eyes are blurry and her chest aches, and the brittle thing feels like it’s about to shatter, and she can’t breathe, hands shaking as needles try to push through her skin from the inside out. Unable to drive more than a few blocks back to the Bennet house, she has to pull over, panting with the effort not to collapse into sobs like some child.
Elle tries to think, to process-
But she’s lost count of how many times Claire has crawled into bed with her, fucked her, can only think about how the entire… thing has changed one way and then another, twisting and turning until she’s in knots. She can only remember the flustered moments on the couch and then Claire that first night, body demanding, moving hard on top of her.
She remembers waiting for the next shift, being sure it would become better, only for it to become more painful, Claire’s affection becoming brutal.
And now-
Elle jerks the rearview mirror around before she can catch sight of her own sobbing reflection.
There’s no such thing as a coincidence around Adam, and especially not with Claire.
Claire, who heals like him, who already has grace she isn’t supposed to have, who walks like him now- who surrounds herself in books about bad people and creepy pictures, who pins Elle down and works her open until she can’t even find her own release unless she pretends that the fingers stroking her apart are holding her together instead.
Previous sharp images of Claire with strangers are gone.
Now the Claire is her head is with Adam.
And she knows too much to dismiss the images-
Elle knows how it feels to have sex with him, what it’s like to burn long strips of his skin away and still be able to get what she needs, the frenzied release she could never get from the orderlies she would corner. Playing with him, using him, had taken the edge off and when he’d gotten tired of her, she’d found ways to get what she needed anyway.
Until he’d struck her right across the face when she’d gone too far, clucked his tongue as she lay sprawled out on the floor of his room with her blouse open and her skirt up around her thighs and told her flatly that he was “done with this”. Then he’d dropped back in bed with a bored sigh and ripped away whatever was left of her bruised pride.
Ignored her as if she was nothing, as if she wasn’t real, as if she couldn’t do anything to him-
She’d hurt him days later, done everything she could think of before she father had broken down the door and it hadn’t meant anything because he’d been smiling at her when she’d been dragged out of the room, already healed.
And now Adam’s fucking Claire.
She’s sure of it in a way she’s sure of nothing else in her life, completely certain that he is.
Elle doesn’t know how he’s out of the coffin but he’s the friend she’s been staying with, probably has a nice big apartment where he coos over finding someone with his own power and- and he’s been at the college-
Aw, had he driven her to school after they’d spent the night together?
Had Claire left her and then crawled into Adam’s bed and used him the way she did with Elle, or had she let him touch her, let him do everything he would want to, everything to her that she didn’t let Elle?
Did she spend every night with him that she didn’t visit Elle?
Elle feels like a teakettle, insides ready to boil over.
She thinks about her damp shirt and she feels something like fear, something that she can’t process but also can’t ignore. And now there’s a heat that’s disturbingly similar to what she feels when she dreams about Claire having sex with her the way she wants the other girl to, all the fantasies in her, but it’s jagged, leaves her tasting ashes instead of medicine.
She sleeps and she dreams of Claire, like always.
But the dreams are different now, not just the sex that’s already hard to handle. Now she sometimes goes to visit Claire in Adam’s old room, holds her down and does everything Claire does to her. Other times, she sees Claire and Adam together and she hurts them but it’s useless because they’re still smiling at her when Noah drags her out.
A few times, she walks in on them sitting together on the couch, watching a history show.
Somehow, the last one always feels worst.
Elle’s gone out of her way to be good since Noah took her in.
But now, driven by sleepless nights and desperation that she can’t even understand, Elle wakes up a little before dawn, takes Sandra’s car a few blocks, parks, and then steals a car sitting nearby, sets out for the campus again. She parks near the science building, sits and simply waits, eyes focused on the entry of the parking lot.
When her eyes grow hazy from the focus, she simply rubs them and goes back to her waiting.
It pays off, her spine stiffening when she spots the little car turning into the lot, her chest tightening as she follows the shape, watches the car pull into a spot and then go dead. The door opens and there’s Claire, hooking a bag over one shoulder and wearing dark glasses, long blonde hair pulled into a knot at the back of her head.
Just the sight of her makes Elle grit her teeth in aggravation, trying to hold onto that feeling only to give up and hiss out a breath with something more heated as she shifts, tightens her thighs together on instinct.
Claire sets out for the building and Elle follows the movement, watches the line of her shoulders and the easy sway to her hips as she walks. Halfway across the street, she starts digging into her bag as she goes only to close it again, shaking her head to herself, taking the last steps faster before turning and disappearing into the damn building.
Then she’s gone, and Elle is heated, ready to boil over.
When Elle was with the Company, there was never any limit to what she could get away with.
But now she has to be careful.
If Noah knew what she doing-
Elle has to be careful.
Sitting in her stolen car, she has a wild moment when she imagines hiding in the back of Claire’s and leaving this one here but she dismisses that thought immediately, knowing she can’t sit still long to pull off what she’s trying to do.
No, she’s just going to follow, and hope no freaking police officer catches sight of her plate.
She only has to do it once, and so she sits and waits in the heat of the stupid car as the hours tick by. When her hair begins to stick to her neck, she pulls it up with a pen she found near the cup holder, cracks the window just a little. When the little old man in the security guard uniform in the golf cart drives by, she simply slides down until he’s gone, knowing the back of the car is hidden in the line of bushes behind where she parked hours before.
By the time the sky’s gone dark and the last classes start letting out, she’s half-insane.
Tired, hungry, she starts the car up again when she spots Claire coming out of the building, blank look on her face as she opens the door and gets into her car, starts the ignition and backs out of her spot. She follows at a distance as well as she can, turns out of the lot after Claire and is immediately grateful that there’s no rush at this time of night in this area.
Elle keeps her eyes on the car with a focus she never had in the Company, breathes carefully- and then has to remind her body to do the second one when Claire rolls up to a gated community, stops to fiddle with the keypad and say something to whoever it is on the other end of the speaker. Elle drives by slowly the first time as the gates roll closed behind the compact little car, circles and then drives by the second time.
At the edge of her vision, far inside the gates, she sees Claire’s car parked by another one.
Parked by Adam’s car, the car he’d driven away from the college.
Already sure in her suspicions, she doesn’t expect the pain when it hits, the way she feels the brittle something inside finally come apart, shatter into pieces as she leaves the area. Later, still dazed, she parks on the side of the road and leaves the stolen car there after swiping down the inside with her jacket, even dropping the pen back into its previous place.
She walks to a bus stop and realizes that it’s Wednesday night.
Unless she goes to the college, she won’t see Claire until Friday.
Elle doesn’t know whether she’s grateful for that or not, so she sits in the back of the bus alone and stops thinking.
On automatic, she gets off the bus and walks a few blocks to retrace her steps from earlier, picks up Sandra’s car from where she left it so many hours before, not knowing what she’ll say if Sandra’s up and wants to know where she was.
She has a blinding headache when she lets herself into the Bennet house, and she blames the ache inside on the sharp pangs of hunger that are fueling the migraine. After a day in a hot car and emotions churning what’s left of her ability to think, she’s grateful for the dark of the house as she slides off her shoes, grateful that Sandra’s already asleep and-
And Noah’s working in his office.
Pausing when she notices the blue light through the open door, she takes a few cautious steps and then regrets it when he notices her, sitting behind his desk and spotting her even though she’s standing in the dark. When he gestures, she gives up, walking into the room as he speaks a few words into the phone and then sets it down in the cradle.
Leans back in his chair and studies her as her head pounds.
“Had a long day?”
“I got lost.”
Noah nods slightly, and at this angle, she can’t see his eyes, only her own little reflection in his glasses.
“You should have called, I could have helped you.” She smiles thinly, wanting to go get something in her stomach and then go to bed in hopes of sleeping without dreaming. “Sandra left your dinner in the oven,” he tells her after a long silence, reaching out to switch off his computer, getting to his feet in the dark. “She wants to see you tomorrow for lunch, though.”
“I’ll be here,” she promises mutely, nodding in an effort to make him believe her.
“Do you need anything?”
He’s bigger than she is even now that she’s grown, a sturdy shape that she remembers being scared of when she’d been young and she’d first seen him in the halls. When he’s standing this close, she has to tilt her head back to meet his gaze, can’t break it as he stares her down, looking relaxed and ready to go to bed but still intimidating in the dark.
Elle works hard to keep her voice steady when she finally speaks, assures him mutely, “Nothing.”
Something passes over his face but it’s gone so fast she decides it was never there.
Noah nods and walks past her and then he’s gone, his footsteps fading as he leaves her standing in the dark, the only sound her own breathing, the pain in her head now a haze between her and the world. Unable to muster any real energy, she slinks into the kitchen when she can trust her own feet, pulls open the oven and draws out the pan holding her food.
Slices of meatloaf, mashed potatoes with gravy ladled in the middle, green beans-
Elle works past the first bit of nausea the headache’s causing and despite everything, it’s good, allowing her to work her way through the entire pan with two bottles of water. The worst of the physical pain eased, she puts the pan in the sink and heads upstairs, stopping only long enough to go to the bathroom before climbing into her bed and collapsing.
Her alarm clock blinks until she closes her eyes, turns her face away.
In her dream, when she finally falls asleep, Claire and Adam are sitting on the couch, watching people cut other people open on the television.
Rating: NC-17 (language, disturbing imagery, graphic sex)
Pairing: Elle/Claire; side Adam/Elle, Adam/Claire
Timeline: Post-“ So”
Prompt: “envy” at 10_themes
Disclaimer: Not mine, just playing with them
Teaser: Ten stages between one thing and the next, between lust and love.
7, envy
Elle has survived.
The little fires she would start when she was a child and the inferno that burnt down grandma’s gingerbread house; the IV drips and the happy pills that left her feeling nothing, certainly not happy. She had been good enough at pretending to be good that she got to leave her room, had later been strong enough to hold her own among the other agents.
Then Noah had put her feet in a dog bath and she'd zapped herself until little pieces of her head fell into place again.
Struggling to handle that blow, her only foundation violently shaken beneath her, she’d managed to endure her father’s later betrayal, his certainty of her disloyalty when Noah tore the facility open for his daughter.
And none of that matters.
Because in the minutes after Elle sees Adam Monroe leaving the college, Claire Bennet almost destroys her.
It’s more horrible than the medicine taste that she can’t rinse out of her mouth when she wakes up sweaty and alone after a dream she can’t remember, worse than her father turning against her, raising his gun and taking that shot.
Her eyes are blurry and her chest aches, and the brittle thing feels like it’s about to shatter, and she can’t breathe, hands shaking as needles try to push through her skin from the inside out. Unable to drive more than a few blocks back to the Bennet house, she has to pull over, panting with the effort not to collapse into sobs like some child.
Elle tries to think, to process-
But she’s lost count of how many times Claire has crawled into bed with her, fucked her, can only think about how the entire… thing has changed one way and then another, twisting and turning until she’s in knots. She can only remember the flustered moments on the couch and then Claire that first night, body demanding, moving hard on top of her.
She remembers waiting for the next shift, being sure it would become better, only for it to become more painful, Claire’s affection becoming brutal.
And now-
Elle jerks the rearview mirror around before she can catch sight of her own sobbing reflection.
There’s no such thing as a coincidence around Adam, and especially not with Claire.
Claire, who heals like him, who already has grace she isn’t supposed to have, who walks like him now- who surrounds herself in books about bad people and creepy pictures, who pins Elle down and works her open until she can’t even find her own release unless she pretends that the fingers stroking her apart are holding her together instead.
Previous sharp images of Claire with strangers are gone.
Now the Claire is her head is with Adam.
And she knows too much to dismiss the images-
Elle knows how it feels to have sex with him, what it’s like to burn long strips of his skin away and still be able to get what she needs, the frenzied release she could never get from the orderlies she would corner. Playing with him, using him, had taken the edge off and when he’d gotten tired of her, she’d found ways to get what she needed anyway.
Until he’d struck her right across the face when she’d gone too far, clucked his tongue as she lay sprawled out on the floor of his room with her blouse open and her skirt up around her thighs and told her flatly that he was “done with this”. Then he’d dropped back in bed with a bored sigh and ripped away whatever was left of her bruised pride.
Ignored her as if she was nothing, as if she wasn’t real, as if she couldn’t do anything to him-
She’d hurt him days later, done everything she could think of before she father had broken down the door and it hadn’t meant anything because he’d been smiling at her when she’d been dragged out of the room, already healed.
And now Adam’s fucking Claire.
She’s sure of it in a way she’s sure of nothing else in her life, completely certain that he is.
Elle doesn’t know how he’s out of the coffin but he’s the friend she’s been staying with, probably has a nice big apartment where he coos over finding someone with his own power and- and he’s been at the college-
Aw, had he driven her to school after they’d spent the night together?
Had Claire left her and then crawled into Adam’s bed and used him the way she did with Elle, or had she let him touch her, let him do everything he would want to, everything to her that she didn’t let Elle?
Did she spend every night with him that she didn’t visit Elle?
Elle feels like a teakettle, insides ready to boil over.
She thinks about her damp shirt and she feels something like fear, something that she can’t process but also can’t ignore. And now there’s a heat that’s disturbingly similar to what she feels when she dreams about Claire having sex with her the way she wants the other girl to, all the fantasies in her, but it’s jagged, leaves her tasting ashes instead of medicine.
She sleeps and she dreams of Claire, like always.
But the dreams are different now, not just the sex that’s already hard to handle. Now she sometimes goes to visit Claire in Adam’s old room, holds her down and does everything Claire does to her. Other times, she sees Claire and Adam together and she hurts them but it’s useless because they’re still smiling at her when Noah drags her out.
A few times, she walks in on them sitting together on the couch, watching a history show.
Somehow, the last one always feels worst.
Elle’s gone out of her way to be good since Noah took her in.
But now, driven by sleepless nights and desperation that she can’t even understand, Elle wakes up a little before dawn, takes Sandra’s car a few blocks, parks, and then steals a car sitting nearby, sets out for the campus again. She parks near the science building, sits and simply waits, eyes focused on the entry of the parking lot.
When her eyes grow hazy from the focus, she simply rubs them and goes back to her waiting.
It pays off, her spine stiffening when she spots the little car turning into the lot, her chest tightening as she follows the shape, watches the car pull into a spot and then go dead. The door opens and there’s Claire, hooking a bag over one shoulder and wearing dark glasses, long blonde hair pulled into a knot at the back of her head.
Just the sight of her makes Elle grit her teeth in aggravation, trying to hold onto that feeling only to give up and hiss out a breath with something more heated as she shifts, tightens her thighs together on instinct.
Claire sets out for the building and Elle follows the movement, watches the line of her shoulders and the easy sway to her hips as she walks. Halfway across the street, she starts digging into her bag as she goes only to close it again, shaking her head to herself, taking the last steps faster before turning and disappearing into the damn building.
Then she’s gone, and Elle is heated, ready to boil over.
When Elle was with the Company, there was never any limit to what she could get away with.
But now she has to be careful.
If Noah knew what she doing-
Elle has to be careful.
Sitting in her stolen car, she has a wild moment when she imagines hiding in the back of Claire’s and leaving this one here but she dismisses that thought immediately, knowing she can’t sit still long to pull off what she’s trying to do.
No, she’s just going to follow, and hope no freaking police officer catches sight of her plate.
She only has to do it once, and so she sits and waits in the heat of the stupid car as the hours tick by. When her hair begins to stick to her neck, she pulls it up with a pen she found near the cup holder, cracks the window just a little. When the little old man in the security guard uniform in the golf cart drives by, she simply slides down until he’s gone, knowing the back of the car is hidden in the line of bushes behind where she parked hours before.
By the time the sky’s gone dark and the last classes start letting out, she’s half-insane.
Tired, hungry, she starts the car up again when she spots Claire coming out of the building, blank look on her face as she opens the door and gets into her car, starts the ignition and backs out of her spot. She follows at a distance as well as she can, turns out of the lot after Claire and is immediately grateful that there’s no rush at this time of night in this area.
Elle keeps her eyes on the car with a focus she never had in the Company, breathes carefully- and then has to remind her body to do the second one when Claire rolls up to a gated community, stops to fiddle with the keypad and say something to whoever it is on the other end of the speaker. Elle drives by slowly the first time as the gates roll closed behind the compact little car, circles and then drives by the second time.
At the edge of her vision, far inside the gates, she sees Claire’s car parked by another one.
Parked by Adam’s car, the car he’d driven away from the college.
Already sure in her suspicions, she doesn’t expect the pain when it hits, the way she feels the brittle something inside finally come apart, shatter into pieces as she leaves the area. Later, still dazed, she parks on the side of the road and leaves the stolen car there after swiping down the inside with her jacket, even dropping the pen back into its previous place.
She walks to a bus stop and realizes that it’s Wednesday night.
Unless she goes to the college, she won’t see Claire until Friday.
Elle doesn’t know whether she’s grateful for that or not, so she sits in the back of the bus alone and stops thinking.
On automatic, she gets off the bus and walks a few blocks to retrace her steps from earlier, picks up Sandra’s car from where she left it so many hours before, not knowing what she’ll say if Sandra’s up and wants to know where she was.
She has a blinding headache when she lets herself into the Bennet house, and she blames the ache inside on the sharp pangs of hunger that are fueling the migraine. After a day in a hot car and emotions churning what’s left of her ability to think, she’s grateful for the dark of the house as she slides off her shoes, grateful that Sandra’s already asleep and-
And Noah’s working in his office.
Pausing when she notices the blue light through the open door, she takes a few cautious steps and then regrets it when he notices her, sitting behind his desk and spotting her even though she’s standing in the dark. When he gestures, she gives up, walking into the room as he speaks a few words into the phone and then sets it down in the cradle.
Leans back in his chair and studies her as her head pounds.
“Had a long day?”
“I got lost.”
Noah nods slightly, and at this angle, she can’t see his eyes, only her own little reflection in his glasses.
“You should have called, I could have helped you.” She smiles thinly, wanting to go get something in her stomach and then go to bed in hopes of sleeping without dreaming. “Sandra left your dinner in the oven,” he tells her after a long silence, reaching out to switch off his computer, getting to his feet in the dark. “She wants to see you tomorrow for lunch, though.”
“I’ll be here,” she promises mutely, nodding in an effort to make him believe her.
“Do you need anything?”
He’s bigger than she is even now that she’s grown, a sturdy shape that she remembers being scared of when she’d been young and she’d first seen him in the halls. When he’s standing this close, she has to tilt her head back to meet his gaze, can’t break it as he stares her down, looking relaxed and ready to go to bed but still intimidating in the dark.
Elle works hard to keep her voice steady when she finally speaks, assures him mutely, “Nothing.”
Something passes over his face but it’s gone so fast she decides it was never there.
Noah nods and walks past her and then he’s gone, his footsteps fading as he leaves her standing in the dark, the only sound her own breathing, the pain in her head now a haze between her and the world. Unable to muster any real energy, she slinks into the kitchen when she can trust her own feet, pulls open the oven and draws out the pan holding her food.
Slices of meatloaf, mashed potatoes with gravy ladled in the middle, green beans-
Elle works past the first bit of nausea the headache’s causing and despite everything, it’s good, allowing her to work her way through the entire pan with two bottles of water. The worst of the physical pain eased, she puts the pan in the sink and heads upstairs, stopping only long enough to go to the bathroom before climbing into her bed and collapsing.
Her alarm clock blinks until she closes her eyes, turns her face away.
In her dream, when she finally falls asleep, Claire and Adam are sitting on the couch, watching people cut other people open on the television.