[fic] In Ardennes (1/?)
[Title] In Ardennes (1/?)
[Author] weatherpenny
[Rating] PG-13 (for now)
[Pairing] Eventual Mick/Beth
[Spoilers] Um...Coraline's existence??
[Disclaimer] Not mine. Wouldn't mind buying it and continuing the saga with the aid of hand puppets if canceled, though!
[Author's Notes] Sorry for the delay, guys. Real life was catching up to me! Eh...this part is kind of weird; this story is totally not going the way I thought it would. It's spun so far out of control, I'm thinking that the title doesn't even fit anymore! Anyway, hopefully you'll enjoy this installation (:
Prologue
And then there was the question of vampires and love. Was there some remnant of human romance? Or was it all drive and raw heat? What biological need was there for dead things to kiss and touch softly? Coraline, three hundred years old with smoldering eyes and lips so cold they burned, described it to him once. She didn't whisper it in his ear, but he heard every syllable, every habitual unneeded breath. He heard the slide of her tongue across her teeth. Her eyes glowed in the dark like burnt-out stars, maybe scorched from her internal flame and all her stolen blood.
"I wanted to crawl inside you," she said to him, "when I first met you. I wanted to swallow up that perfect beating heart of yours. You tasted so good, just like I thought you would."
She laughed then, and despite her hungry, flesh-eating words, she seemed playful, young.
"Ever hear the expression 'You are what you eat,' Mick? I wanted you. I wanted us to be one. I wanted to drink you down until you were growing my hair and I was every inch of your skin."
That night, like most nights, they had violent searing sex, as vampires do, as two people do when they want only to hear the sound of flesh on flesh. Maybe that was the sound of love to Coraline; visceral, sharp as nails, soft as guts, but Mick couldn't help but feel repulsed.
He never wondered whether he hurt her. She always hurt him, maybe unknowingly, and maybe that was for the best. She loved him the way she knew how, and in doing so, reminded him why they were not alike. There was romance in him yet, he liked to think: softshoe and slow jazz. He could perhaps appreciate a child in a field of dandelion clocks, a baseball game with all the stadium lights on. There was humanity in him yet: that was what he told himself when he looked at Beth.
Beth worked late some nights and he watched her. He felt uneasy at first. He felt guilty. Then he stopped feeling guilty, and that was somehow worse. He was stalking her, but not even that could make him tense and give up the chase. He wasn't stalking her as prey. That was what made it alright. He wasn't stalking her with the churning, gnashing need to tear her open and revel in her. He was stalking her with the cockeyed ridiculous intensity of a man who needed to know how many cups of coffee she drank, how many times she checked her e-mail, how many times she missed the number 7 on the keyboard, how many times she brushed her hair back with her fingers, how many times she tucked and untucked her legs beneath her, how many times she licked her lips to get the last of the creamer, how many times she checked the clock, how many times she looked at her phone--and who was she thinking of calling? Josh or him?
One night she caught him, maybe by the light of a passing car.
"You're something of a time traveler, aren't you?" she said as though they were already in the middle of a conversation.
"How did you know I was here?" he asked.
She seemed pleased with herself. "Pit anything against women's intuition and even vampire sleuths will lose."
Having been made, Mick moved into the light. Beth smiled at him and put her feet up on the desk, crossing her ankles. The computer screen on her desk went to screensaver. She had been taking a break, dreaming for some time. He'd been watching her dream.
"I was writing your biopic in my head," Beth said. "I was thinking of calling you a time traveler."
"Time traveler," he repeated. He was unable to keep the grin from tugging at his lips.
"Shuttling onward to infinity," Beth said, raising her arm and then dropping it. Her smile widened. "Like Buzz Lightyear."
"You should respect your elders," Mick said. He was smiling now too.
"You're right," she said. "Dr Who would be a more classic."
She tilted her head and her hair fell softly across her forehead. Her desk lamp caught the strands in a golden spray of color, and he was dazzled for a brief moment. Her hands cradled a still steaming mug of coffee. Even though he knew how easily he could break her fingers, bruise her skin, her hands always seemed strong. He could still feel her palm against his face, the ghost of something warm.
"Why were you writing my biopic?" he asked.
"What else would I do with my free time?" she said. "I can pretend to do a whole 60 Minutes thing with you--we'll film it in a library, and you can wear tweed."
"Oh," he said, "I'm afraid I don't look very good in tweed."
Beth laughed into her coffee mug. "I bet you look good in everything. You vampires are too cool for school, remember?"
He didn't reply; he was listening to her swallow, liquid and smooth. It reminded him of her insides. She was saying something, but her voice was drowned out by her veins. He couldn't help but listen to the way her blood rushed lovingly to every crevice inside her. He realized he was looking at her mouth.
"Are you listening to me?" Beth said, but by then he was already gone.
He heard her sigh and return to work almost agreeably, as though she were expecting him to disappear like that. From outside the building, he could pretend that the throbbing he heard was the traffic below. That morning, before he drifted into a dreamless sleep, he thought of the golden light in her hair and her hand on his face.
The next time she caught him, he wasn't as surprised. She'd been distracted all night, her lips pursed, her eyes drifting as though she were lost at sea.
"Don't you want to hear why I think you're a time traveler," she said to the fax machine.
"I'm over here, actually," Mick said.
"Well," Beth said, "I was close, wasn't I?"
He wondered if maybe she occasionally spoke out loud, just to see if he were there. The thought made him smile.
"What happened to women's intuition?" he asked.
She pointed at him, and her fingers glinted. Nail polish, pearly, coral. "Don't distract me. I'm not going to fall for it."
He acquiesced. "Why do you think I'm a time traveler?"
Beth sat back and crossed her legs. "All the things you've witnessed, all the frontiers you've seen pioneered. But deep inside, you can still remember where you're from, can't you? It's a bit like being displaced."
"Like a lemon tree in an orange orchard," Mick said, which only seemed to confuse Beth. "I haven't really seen anything interesting, you know. I've only been alive for 85 years."
"I guess my grandmother probably has a few years on you, huh," Beth said, smiling. "But it's still something. You haven't been moving with the rest of the world, have you? It's like you're..." she frowned a little, grasping for words, "It's like you're orbiting the earth."
"There's a thought," Mick said. "Vampire astronauts."
"You'd be able to see Neptune," Beth agreed. "And NASA wouldn't have to spend all that time trying to make a philly cheese steak that tastes good in outer space. Though...that is a lot of blood."
"I don't know how I'd feel about feeding off space monkeys," he said dryly.
Beth laughed. It seemed loud between the two of them. He was almost overcome with the desire to reach out and bring her close, feel the vibration travel between them in some semblance of intimacy. He could taste her blood still. He could always taste it.
"You're going now, aren't you?" Beth said suddenly.
"What do you mean?" he said.
"You're getting that look in your eyes. The same look you get before, you know," She gestured vaguely. "Before you take off."
"It's getting late," he said.
"Isn't it around lunchtime for you?" she teased.
He smiled. "Then I guess I should go grab a bite to eat."
It happened quite often after that. He wasn't sure how. That was a lie; it was inexplicable and unescapable. When he thought of Beth, he thought of that word she said--orbiting--and thought how fitting it was. Those hazy moments upon first waking led him to conjure up intergalactic metaphors that he was sure Josef would laugh at: comets, eclipses, the mortal coil as depicted by giant balls of earth and several tons of atmospheric pressure. Uninhabitable, insurmountable; the adjectives he thought of depressed him so much so that he desperately needed to talk to Beth. And once he talked to her, he was back where he began: orbiting. He thought about those stars that flare up brightly then collapse, and he stopped going to visit her, choosing instead to do all the crossword puzzles in Josef's apartment. He lasted a week.
"I was wondering if I did something wrong," Beth said when he came back. She was in the middle of reading something about Prince Harry. She seemed bored.
"No," Mick said. "No, of course not."
"What have you been up to?" she asked.
"Crossword puzzles, mainly," he said.
"I've been forsaken for 17 Across?" she said.
"Of course not," Mick said. "No, no. I was just--"
"Kidding," Beth said. She smiled and tilted her head. "Coffee?"
"Kind of working on this whole vampire thing," Mick said.
"Right," she said. "I always forget."
He watched her walk to the coffee machine. She was wearing a charcoal gray sweater. It made her skin seem luminous.
"I hope you're getting paid for overtime," he said.
"Oh," Beth said, and moved her shoulders in sort of a shrug. "What can I do with such tantalizing leads to follow up on?"
She came back and put her coffee mug down on Prince Harry's face. She looked at Mick.
"Crossword puzzles?" she said. "Really?"
"It's a little known fact," he said, "that Josef is a very big fan of crossword puzzles."
Beth struggled with a gulp of coffee. "Josef?"
"Oh yeah," Mick said. "He used to write crossword puzzles."
"That's a lie," Beth said.
"You could ask him," Mick said. "But then he might try to kill you. Or he might try to seduce you. Just to cover his tracks, you know."
"I'm not sure which is worse," Beth said, wrinkling her nose.
She lowered her head and fingered the corners of another tabloid magazine, this one featuring Paris Hilton on the cover. She looked up at him through her lashes, shy, different from how he usually saw her.
"I'm glad you came back," she said.
He thought he heard his heart skip a beat, but he knew that that was impossible. Maybe it had been Beth's heart. The idea was heady and intoxicating, and he found himself taking a deeper breath than he needed. He wished his lungs could still burn. If not his lungs, though, then where was that heat coming from?
"Next time," he said, "I'll bring you some crossword puzzles."
It occurred to him that maybe she was waiting up for him these nights. The same thought must have occurred to her too, and one night, when he got up to get a refill of coffee for her, she looked down at her hands and quietly said,
"Josh and I are having problems."
He put the creamer back exactly where he found it. He adjusted the milk so that it was facing forward in the refrigerator. He handed her back her mug, noticing that it was a green mug instead of her usual blue one, and was careful not to touch her fingers.
"I'm sorry," he said. "I'm sure it will work out."
Beth took a slow exploratory sip of her coffee. He could almost see her roll it around her tongue. Her hair seemed particularly bright tonight.
"I don't think it will," she said. She didn't sigh or hunch her shoulders. She sat very straight.
She was so still and compact, Mick was almost afraid she might blink out of existence. Maybe it was that fear that made him lean forward and allow himself one touch--a hand on her knee. She looked at him and smiled a little. She seemed tired.
"Sit down, Mick," Beth said, her voice soft as her hair. "Stay a while."
So he did.
[Author] weatherpenny
[Rating] PG-13 (for now)
[Pairing] Eventual Mick/Beth
[Spoilers] Um...Coraline's existence??
[Disclaimer] Not mine. Wouldn't mind buying it and continuing the saga with the aid of hand puppets if canceled, though!
[Author's Notes] Sorry for the delay, guys. Real life was catching up to me! Eh...this part is kind of weird; this story is totally not going the way I thought it would. It's spun so far out of control, I'm thinking that the title doesn't even fit anymore! Anyway, hopefully you'll enjoy this installation (:
Prologue
And then there was the question of vampires and love. Was there some remnant of human romance? Or was it all drive and raw heat? What biological need was there for dead things to kiss and touch softly? Coraline, three hundred years old with smoldering eyes and lips so cold they burned, described it to him once. She didn't whisper it in his ear, but he heard every syllable, every habitual unneeded breath. He heard the slide of her tongue across her teeth. Her eyes glowed in the dark like burnt-out stars, maybe scorched from her internal flame and all her stolen blood.
"I wanted to crawl inside you," she said to him, "when I first met you. I wanted to swallow up that perfect beating heart of yours. You tasted so good, just like I thought you would."
She laughed then, and despite her hungry, flesh-eating words, she seemed playful, young.
"Ever hear the expression 'You are what you eat,' Mick? I wanted you. I wanted us to be one. I wanted to drink you down until you were growing my hair and I was every inch of your skin."
That night, like most nights, they had violent searing sex, as vampires do, as two people do when they want only to hear the sound of flesh on flesh. Maybe that was the sound of love to Coraline; visceral, sharp as nails, soft as guts, but Mick couldn't help but feel repulsed.
He never wondered whether he hurt her. She always hurt him, maybe unknowingly, and maybe that was for the best. She loved him the way she knew how, and in doing so, reminded him why they were not alike. There was romance in him yet, he liked to think: softshoe and slow jazz. He could perhaps appreciate a child in a field of dandelion clocks, a baseball game with all the stadium lights on. There was humanity in him yet: that was what he told himself when he looked at Beth.
Beth worked late some nights and he watched her. He felt uneasy at first. He felt guilty. Then he stopped feeling guilty, and that was somehow worse. He was stalking her, but not even that could make him tense and give up the chase. He wasn't stalking her as prey. That was what made it alright. He wasn't stalking her with the churning, gnashing need to tear her open and revel in her. He was stalking her with the cockeyed ridiculous intensity of a man who needed to know how many cups of coffee she drank, how many times she checked her e-mail, how many times she missed the number 7 on the keyboard, how many times she brushed her hair back with her fingers, how many times she tucked and untucked her legs beneath her, how many times she licked her lips to get the last of the creamer, how many times she checked the clock, how many times she looked at her phone--and who was she thinking of calling? Josh or him?
One night she caught him, maybe by the light of a passing car.
"You're something of a time traveler, aren't you?" she said as though they were already in the middle of a conversation.
"How did you know I was here?" he asked.
She seemed pleased with herself. "Pit anything against women's intuition and even vampire sleuths will lose."
Having been made, Mick moved into the light. Beth smiled at him and put her feet up on the desk, crossing her ankles. The computer screen on her desk went to screensaver. She had been taking a break, dreaming for some time. He'd been watching her dream.
"I was writing your biopic in my head," Beth said. "I was thinking of calling you a time traveler."
"Time traveler," he repeated. He was unable to keep the grin from tugging at his lips.
"Shuttling onward to infinity," Beth said, raising her arm and then dropping it. Her smile widened. "Like Buzz Lightyear."
"You should respect your elders," Mick said. He was smiling now too.
"You're right," she said. "Dr Who would be a more classic."
She tilted her head and her hair fell softly across her forehead. Her desk lamp caught the strands in a golden spray of color, and he was dazzled for a brief moment. Her hands cradled a still steaming mug of coffee. Even though he knew how easily he could break her fingers, bruise her skin, her hands always seemed strong. He could still feel her palm against his face, the ghost of something warm.
"Why were you writing my biopic?" he asked.
"What else would I do with my free time?" she said. "I can pretend to do a whole 60 Minutes thing with you--we'll film it in a library, and you can wear tweed."
"Oh," he said, "I'm afraid I don't look very good in tweed."
Beth laughed into her coffee mug. "I bet you look good in everything. You vampires are too cool for school, remember?"
He didn't reply; he was listening to her swallow, liquid and smooth. It reminded him of her insides. She was saying something, but her voice was drowned out by her veins. He couldn't help but listen to the way her blood rushed lovingly to every crevice inside her. He realized he was looking at her mouth.
"Are you listening to me?" Beth said, but by then he was already gone.
He heard her sigh and return to work almost agreeably, as though she were expecting him to disappear like that. From outside the building, he could pretend that the throbbing he heard was the traffic below. That morning, before he drifted into a dreamless sleep, he thought of the golden light in her hair and her hand on his face.
The next time she caught him, he wasn't as surprised. She'd been distracted all night, her lips pursed, her eyes drifting as though she were lost at sea.
"Don't you want to hear why I think you're a time traveler," she said to the fax machine.
"I'm over here, actually," Mick said.
"Well," Beth said, "I was close, wasn't I?"
He wondered if maybe she occasionally spoke out loud, just to see if he were there. The thought made him smile.
"What happened to women's intuition?" he asked.
She pointed at him, and her fingers glinted. Nail polish, pearly, coral. "Don't distract me. I'm not going to fall for it."
He acquiesced. "Why do you think I'm a time traveler?"
Beth sat back and crossed her legs. "All the things you've witnessed, all the frontiers you've seen pioneered. But deep inside, you can still remember where you're from, can't you? It's a bit like being displaced."
"Like a lemon tree in an orange orchard," Mick said, which only seemed to confuse Beth. "I haven't really seen anything interesting, you know. I've only been alive for 85 years."
"I guess my grandmother probably has a few years on you, huh," Beth said, smiling. "But it's still something. You haven't been moving with the rest of the world, have you? It's like you're..." she frowned a little, grasping for words, "It's like you're orbiting the earth."
"There's a thought," Mick said. "Vampire astronauts."
"You'd be able to see Neptune," Beth agreed. "And NASA wouldn't have to spend all that time trying to make a philly cheese steak that tastes good in outer space. Though...that is a lot of blood."
"I don't know how I'd feel about feeding off space monkeys," he said dryly.
Beth laughed. It seemed loud between the two of them. He was almost overcome with the desire to reach out and bring her close, feel the vibration travel between them in some semblance of intimacy. He could taste her blood still. He could always taste it.
"You're going now, aren't you?" Beth said suddenly.
"What do you mean?" he said.
"You're getting that look in your eyes. The same look you get before, you know," She gestured vaguely. "Before you take off."
"It's getting late," he said.
"Isn't it around lunchtime for you?" she teased.
He smiled. "Then I guess I should go grab a bite to eat."
It happened quite often after that. He wasn't sure how. That was a lie; it was inexplicable and unescapable. When he thought of Beth, he thought of that word she said--orbiting--and thought how fitting it was. Those hazy moments upon first waking led him to conjure up intergalactic metaphors that he was sure Josef would laugh at: comets, eclipses, the mortal coil as depicted by giant balls of earth and several tons of atmospheric pressure. Uninhabitable, insurmountable; the adjectives he thought of depressed him so much so that he desperately needed to talk to Beth. And once he talked to her, he was back where he began: orbiting. He thought about those stars that flare up brightly then collapse, and he stopped going to visit her, choosing instead to do all the crossword puzzles in Josef's apartment. He lasted a week.
"I was wondering if I did something wrong," Beth said when he came back. She was in the middle of reading something about Prince Harry. She seemed bored.
"No," Mick said. "No, of course not."
"What have you been up to?" she asked.
"Crossword puzzles, mainly," he said.
"I've been forsaken for 17 Across?" she said.
"Of course not," Mick said. "No, no. I was just--"
"Kidding," Beth said. She smiled and tilted her head. "Coffee?"
"Kind of working on this whole vampire thing," Mick said.
"Right," she said. "I always forget."
He watched her walk to the coffee machine. She was wearing a charcoal gray sweater. It made her skin seem luminous.
"I hope you're getting paid for overtime," he said.
"Oh," Beth said, and moved her shoulders in sort of a shrug. "What can I do with such tantalizing leads to follow up on?"
She came back and put her coffee mug down on Prince Harry's face. She looked at Mick.
"Crossword puzzles?" she said. "Really?"
"It's a little known fact," he said, "that Josef is a very big fan of crossword puzzles."
Beth struggled with a gulp of coffee. "Josef?"
"Oh yeah," Mick said. "He used to write crossword puzzles."
"That's a lie," Beth said.
"You could ask him," Mick said. "But then he might try to kill you. Or he might try to seduce you. Just to cover his tracks, you know."
"I'm not sure which is worse," Beth said, wrinkling her nose.
She lowered her head and fingered the corners of another tabloid magazine, this one featuring Paris Hilton on the cover. She looked up at him through her lashes, shy, different from how he usually saw her.
"I'm glad you came back," she said.
He thought he heard his heart skip a beat, but he knew that that was impossible. Maybe it had been Beth's heart. The idea was heady and intoxicating, and he found himself taking a deeper breath than he needed. He wished his lungs could still burn. If not his lungs, though, then where was that heat coming from?
"Next time," he said, "I'll bring you some crossword puzzles."
It occurred to him that maybe she was waiting up for him these nights. The same thought must have occurred to her too, and one night, when he got up to get a refill of coffee for her, she looked down at her hands and quietly said,
"Josh and I are having problems."
He put the creamer back exactly where he found it. He adjusted the milk so that it was facing forward in the refrigerator. He handed her back her mug, noticing that it was a green mug instead of her usual blue one, and was careful not to touch her fingers.
"I'm sorry," he said. "I'm sure it will work out."
Beth took a slow exploratory sip of her coffee. He could almost see her roll it around her tongue. Her hair seemed particularly bright tonight.
"I don't think it will," she said. She didn't sigh or hunch her shoulders. She sat very straight.
She was so still and compact, Mick was almost afraid she might blink out of existence. Maybe it was that fear that made him lean forward and allow himself one touch--a hand on her knee. She looked at him and smiled a little. She seemed tired.
"Sit down, Mick," Beth said, her voice soft as her hair. "Stay a while."
So he did.