Kali
Title: Kali
Pairing: Elle/Reid
Prompt: like a child via cm_het_drabble
Rating: PG13
Warnings: One naughty word, spoiler for L.D.S.K.
In religious art, the Madonna wears a halo to mark her divinity, her purity, her goodness. It's made of Light, warm in tone. Golden, usually, to represent the richness of her love and selflessness, her position as Queen of Heaven and Mother to the world.
Elle is made of light, too. Hers is the lowercase kind, though, sharp and flashing and brilliant. The sort of light you hate in lavatories and dressing rooms because its gutting honesty magnifies your flaws and makes you ask questions about yourself that you don't really want answered.
Elle's light doesn't coddle, doesn't forgive, doesn't make any promises. She isn't maternal. Her apartment is clean because she's never there, not because it matters.
But even a cold light throws heat, and she does. She pulses with it like a faulty circuit, her body temperature a good two degrees higher than normal, her veins running with an unpredictable charge. Sometimes when he touches her, it's a quiet hum against his skin that's almost soothing: white noise, or the buffeting of a fan. Sometimes, though -- sometimes she sparks, grips his nerves with a fierce, paralyzing jolt that hits his spine and lights it up like a slot machine.
It always feels good, but it never feels safe. That's all right, though. Spencer doesn't need a Madonna. He's always preferred Kali.
But what he forgets sometimes is that Kali is a Mother, too; that her love comes with an unmatched ferocity; that she will pause with her blade through the neck of an enemy to gather her baby to her breast and sing it to sleep.
That is, he forgets until he puts a bullet through Philip Dowd's head and watches him die with his eyes open, then lies about how okay he is for three weeks afterward. He forgets until he is at work past midnight on a Tuesday, hiding from the unsettling acoustics of his empty bedroom, and Elle comes out of the darkness in her pajamas with her office key dangling from one finger. He forgets until she sits down on his desk and says I knew you'd still be here, says I couldn't sleep with you rattling around in my head like a fucking skeleton, says come here, baby, it's all right and pulls him into her body so that he can hear the heaviness of her heart.
Elle's light isn't a glow. It's the sort of light that throws itself into all of the corners and flushes the monsters out, turns the menacing shadows back into the objects that you recognize, reveals things for what they are. It illuminates memory.
Spencer closes his eyes against it, but it's still there, stubborn in its insistence that he feel, that he look, that the world is just as he left it before night fell: chaotic, gory, magnificent.
It's okay, Elle whispers into his hair, and though he never really got to be a child, he imagines that it might have felt a little bit like this.
Pairing: Elle/Reid
Prompt: like a child via cm_het_drabble
Rating: PG13
Warnings: One naughty word, spoiler for L.D.S.K.
In religious art, the Madonna wears a halo to mark her divinity, her purity, her goodness. It's made of Light, warm in tone. Golden, usually, to represent the richness of her love and selflessness, her position as Queen of Heaven and Mother to the world.
Elle is made of light, too. Hers is the lowercase kind, though, sharp and flashing and brilliant. The sort of light you hate in lavatories and dressing rooms because its gutting honesty magnifies your flaws and makes you ask questions about yourself that you don't really want answered.
Elle's light doesn't coddle, doesn't forgive, doesn't make any promises. She isn't maternal. Her apartment is clean because she's never there, not because it matters.
But even a cold light throws heat, and she does. She pulses with it like a faulty circuit, her body temperature a good two degrees higher than normal, her veins running with an unpredictable charge. Sometimes when he touches her, it's a quiet hum against his skin that's almost soothing: white noise, or the buffeting of a fan. Sometimes, though -- sometimes she sparks, grips his nerves with a fierce, paralyzing jolt that hits his spine and lights it up like a slot machine.
It always feels good, but it never feels safe. That's all right, though. Spencer doesn't need a Madonna. He's always preferred Kali.
But what he forgets sometimes is that Kali is a Mother, too; that her love comes with an unmatched ferocity; that she will pause with her blade through the neck of an enemy to gather her baby to her breast and sing it to sleep.
That is, he forgets until he puts a bullet through Philip Dowd's head and watches him die with his eyes open, then lies about how okay he is for three weeks afterward. He forgets until he is at work past midnight on a Tuesday, hiding from the unsettling acoustics of his empty bedroom, and Elle comes out of the darkness in her pajamas with her office key dangling from one finger. He forgets until she sits down on his desk and says I knew you'd still be here, says I couldn't sleep with you rattling around in my head like a fucking skeleton, says come here, baby, it's all right and pulls him into her body so that he can hear the heaviness of her heart.
Elle's light isn't a glow. It's the sort of light that throws itself into all of the corners and flushes the monsters out, turns the menacing shadows back into the objects that you recognize, reveals things for what they are. It illuminates memory.
Spencer closes his eyes against it, but it's still there, stubborn in its insistence that he feel, that he look, that the world is just as he left it before night fell: chaotic, gory, magnificent.
It's okay, Elle whispers into his hair, and though he never really got to be a child, he imagines that it might have felt a little bit like this.