Lost Girl Fic: Revelation
Title: Revelation
Author: myrth
Rating: PG
Fandom: Lost Girl
Pairing: Bo/Lauren
Disclaimer: Not mine, I’m just playing with them and I promise I’ll put them away when I’m done.
Summary: Lauren didn’t think she’d have a chance to explain, but by some miracle it was standing in front of her.
Note: I wrote this to fit after eps 9, 10 and 11 and since I haven’t seen 12 I can’t speak to that one. Thanks to my beta for her sage advice and superior grammatical skills. This little minx of a show is very addictive. Also, I haven’t explained why Bo has had a change of heart, think of it like a choose your own plot device :)
Bo, I wasn’t instructed to sleep with you. I chose that.
Dr Lauren Lewis stared at the words on the page, freshly produced from the pen in her hand, and screwed up her nose as she balled up the page. She tossed it aside to join a pile of its companions with a grimace. Ill worded thoughts screwed up and thrown away. She felt uncomfortable now with the choice to try to put her explanation on paper at all. The succubus had been avoiding her, and writing her explanation had seemed like a good idea a few hours ago. Now she just felt foolish and awkward. This was a path for love struck teenagers.
She’d begged Bo to let her explain what seemed like betrayal, but the young succubus wouldn’t listen. Not yet. Lauren wasn’t sure what would happen when Bo did listen though. She didn’t know if she could explain the situation in a way that wouldn’t result in the impulsive Fae putting herself in further mortal danger.
With a sigh the doctor pushed the paper and pen away and left them on the desk as she left the room - a small office attached to her lab, in darkness.
Intending to leave the lab, Lauren was surprised to find someone standing in the shadows near the examination table in the darkened room.
“Can I help…”
She started but the words stopped as Bo turned and stepped into the light.
“Bo.” Lauren said, then words once again failed her and she ended the thought with a tight smile. Her heart jumped, hammering into her throat any time she saw Bo. Hope raced through her mind warring with the expectation of disappointment.
“Hi,” Bo said, with a serious and uncertain expression.
Lauren had gotten used to seeing hurt, accusation and anger in those hypnotic dark eyes. She was surprised not to find it there now.
Bo’s eyes darted around the room and to the floor and she shifted uncomfortably. Lauren waited, unsure and wary of why Bo was here and too afraid to speak for fear that Bo would leave.
“So, how are you?” Bo said finally, and then visibly cringed under the weight of the awkwardness as her face coloured.
“I’m fine,” Lauren answered automatically.
“Wow, I’m so not good at this,” Bo said stepping closer, the nervous energy around her making her seem jittery.
A crease appeared between Lauren’s eyes as she tried to figure out what was happening. “Is everything alright?” Was all she could think to ask.
“Can we talk?” Bo asked, ignoring the doctor’s question and stepping closer again. If Lauren reached out she’d be able to touch the warmth of Bo’s cheek.
Hope blossomed once more in Lauren and she sent a silent thanks to the universe while panicking mildly at the same time. She still didn’t know what she was going to say, but she no longer had to wonder if she’d have the opportunity. Lauren didn’t think she’d have a chance to explain, but by some miracle it was standing in front of her.
“Sure,” she said ducking her head in a bow like fashion with another smile. Lauren hid behind those smiles when she knew words were too dangerous, or they just wouldn’t serve her.
“Not here,” Bo said quickly, eyes flicking around the lab “This place is too… Sterile.”
Lauren wasn’t offended; she knew the lab environment didn’t welcome everyone like it did her. The thrill she got from discovery, pulling apart the fantasies of others, examining fables, were her home. It was one of the things she struggled to put into words, but Lauren was at home in the lab. It was her safe place.
“Okay,” she answered with a nod and shrugged out of her lab coat, to reveal bare arms. A tank top and jeans were what she wore under her doctor’s coat this day. She wasn’t supposed to have come in, planning instead to spend time in the forest, but it hadn’t worked out that way. Sometimes the call of an idea was too hard to resist.
She missed Bo’s reaction to her as she grabbed her leather jacket from the coat rack, carefully hanging her lab coat on the hook. The succubus’s appreciation was evident on her face for only a moment, before it was replaced by a nervous smile.
Bo drove and Lauren was surprised when they stopped at the succubus’s place. She hadn’t expected an invitation into Bo’s space again, hoped but hadn’t expected it so soon. She followed Bo in and sat on the couch, remembering vividly the last time she’d been here. A slight blush settled across her face.
Bo didn’t offer wine this time though, but rather sat next to her, still not relaxed. Lauren waited, unwilling to lead this conversation now that it was upon them.
“So are you just about girls or…?” The question was just filler and they both knew it.
“Well, yes... I think so. I haven’t been with anyone in a really long time though.” She said, hoping it wasn’t the wrong thing to say.
“No?”
Lauren shook her head with a gentle smile.
“It’s difficult with my duties to The Ash to find someone outside the Fae, and the Fae aren’t that big on humans in case you haven’t noticed.”
Bo’s face took on several shades of pissed off, which Lauren had come to recognise over the last few weeks.
“I don’t get it, Lauren. Why do you put up with it?”
“He isn’t the enemy you think he is. The Ash is fair and honourable.” Lauren tried to explain the truth as she knew it to be.
“Honourable Lauren? Really?” The hurt was back in her eyes and Lauren understood that Bo blamed The Ash.
“I should have been clearer, Bo. I’m sorry I wasn’t,” She snorted and looked down at her hands, folded in her lap “I’ll keep saying that if I have to. I didn’t answer well when you asked me why I was with you.”
“Lauren, I don’t want to…” Bo moved to get up, but Lauren held her wrist.
“Bo, please. Please just let me explain and then if you wish I’ll go and I won’t try to see you again.”
Bo sat back down slowly, looking ahead, not at Lauren, her jaw working in anger. The hurt was still raw.
“The Ash didn’t tell me to sleep with you.” Lauren looked up from staring into her lap and sighed. “I did that because I wanted to Bo. I haven’t wanted like that in such a long time. Maybe I’ve never wanted like that.” Lauren allowed her genuine surprise at the discovery to show in her expression. “The Ash’s direction was to stop you from killing Vex, because Bo, they would have had to kill you and I couldn’t let that happen. I was serious when I said it would have started a war.”
Bo’s eyes flashed in anger again.
“Who is The Ash to interfere Lauren? They were going to let Luanne die for nothing more than wanting to live her own life.”
“I understand why that makes you angry Bo, but it’s not that clear cut. There’s so much you still don’t know.”
“I don’t think I want to know,” Bo muttered, increasingly fed up with the veiled machinations of the Fae.
Lauren sighed again and dragged her hand through her hair in frustration. “Bo, you don’t understand. I chose you over The Ash and I have done it more than once; but I can’t leave The Ash or openly defy him. It’s not a choice. My life depends on it. I did what I thought was right, and you may have good reason to, but please don’t think that what I feel for you is not real. It’s so real it frightens me.”
The anger left Bo’s face a little and she made eye contact once again. Lauren took a chance while she had it.
“I admire your choice to remain unaligned, I really do. But it’s just not a choice available to most of us.” Usually so aware of her own awkwardness with words, Lauren needed to make Bo understand this one thing. Her eyes were intent as she tried.
“Everyone has a choice, Lauren,” Bo said, indignation in her voice. “I don’t understand how you can stand to be his slave.”
“Because,” Lauren sighed, “there are politics at work here that have been going on for thousands of years. I prefer not to see it as slavery. The Ash has given me the opportunity to do the work I love for centuries. I’ve been able to do things no other human ever has.”
Bo blinked in confusion. “Wait… Centuries? What does that mean?”
Lauren smiled again and looked down, then up at Bo again through a lock of hair that had fallen across her face.
“I’m two hundred years old,” she said, aware that she was putting them in danger by revealing so much “Well, two hundred and four to be exact. And I shouldn’t even be telling you that.”
Bo’s jaw dropped open slightly in surprise and her eyes automatically looked Lauren up and down - looking for evidence. “Holy shit!” she exclaimed after a moment “How is that possible?”
“I told you there was a lot you don’t understand yet. The world of Fae is amazing and some of the things that are possible are incredible. It is a world most humans will never even know exists. As a scientist, the opportunity was too great to ignore. And, well, opportunities for women in science were not, shall we say, abundant in my day.” Her smile was self deprecating as she revealed what had been her true motivation. In the 1800s the world had been a very different place.
“But how… I thought you were human?” Bo’s expression held the confused wonder of a child discovering that the world was quite a big place for the very first time.
“I am,” she nodded to reinforce the point “Certain kinds of Fae have the power to prolong life. And I mean compared to the life spans of some Fae, 200 hundred years is barely worth noting.”
“So The Ash...?”
Lauren just nodded, understanding the unfinished question.
“I don’t just work for The Ash, I’m bound to him. It’s not uncommon in Fae culture for an elder Fae to select humans to preserve. I prefer to think of it as employment rather than slavery, but nothing is that simple. That’s what I’ve been trying to explain. The rules of the human world are observed out of a need to maintain the secrecy of Fae, but Fae culture is not the same. The rules and the politics are not the same.”
Lauren could see that Bo was trying to process the information she was receiving.
“But how?” Bo questioned after a moment, a guarded look of fear had settled on her astonished and beautiful face. Lauren’s gut twisted with dread that this was about to go terribly wrong again.
“I gave up my human life willingly. The Ash saved me from…” Lauren quietly said, sensing that it needed to be said, but still struggling with a memory two centuries old, “...hell.” She finished after a moment of trying to find the right description.
She didn’t know how she’d given too much away but the change in Bo’s expression told her the succubus had understood the concept if not the context of what she’d left unsaid.
“But the truth is that I traded my life for the chance to do what no human has ever been able to: to study the mystical, the fantastic. To begin to understand it all from a scientific point of view and it has been incredible. The Ash offered me that and I didn’t hesitate and I don’t regret my choice.”
“Wow, Lauren, I didn’t know.” Bo said, and Lauren began to hope that the young succubus would be able to start beginning to understand after all.
“I’m not Dyson, Bo. I don’t have the luxury of defiance when it suits me. But the way I feel about you… I’ve come as close as I ever have to losing The Ash’s favour and I’ve pushed the boundaries further than I ever thought I would.” Lauren had taken Bo’s hand as she spoke, her eyes passionate with the conviction she held in what she was trying to say.
Bo’s fingers tightened around hers in response, and Lauren’s inner self danced a little dance.
“I still don’t understand. How is he keeping you alive? Is it like vampire stuff? You’re just frozen in time?”
Lauren laughed a little.“Not quite. I’m still aging, but at a much, much slower rate. I’ve only been able to really get usable data in the last decade thanks to computers. As near as I can estimate, using modelling algorithms, I age the equivalent of a year per century.”
Bo looked stunned again, and pulled her hand away.
“Bo?”
“Sorry, I’m just trying to take it in. That’s… that’s a lot to absorb.”
Lauren tried to figure out what to say next, she wasn’t used to this, to personal entanglement.
“So I’ve grown up like a human - aging I mean. Does that mean that you’re going to outlive me?”
“No, that’s unlikely. The aging process doesn’t work the same way in the Fae. There are variations, but generally once a Fae reaches maturity and has learnt how to feed properly, their aging process slows down significantly. I haven’t dealt with any other succubi, but based on the incubus I treated, you can expect a much slower aging rate than mine. The energy you take from others when you feed metabolises in your system and slows down your aging, Bo. It’s one of the reasons you need to feed.”
“You’re kidding?”
Lauren just shook her head.
“So what do you have to eat?” The fact Bo made the connection so quickly took Lauren by surprise. “We all feed in some way right?”
“I need a regular intake of The Ash’s blood.” She said before her internal sense of secrecy could stop her.The look of horror on Bo’s face made her want to take the words back and bury them.
“I don’t actually drink it from him,” Lauren said scrambling to get back to the easy energy between them. She hadn’t realised how much she missed it.
“Ew no, please, I don’t think I want to know.” Bo looked nauseous and freaked out.
“It’s quite simple really,” but Lauren chose not to continue the technical explanation, feeling the need to tackle the biggest mountain while she still had the chance. “Now do you see why I can’t just leave? Why I have to do things the right way?”
“You’re bound to The Ash for your life.” Bo said, her expression now a complete mystery to the doctor.
“I chose to be with you Bo. That was my choice alone.” Lauren said softly. It bothered her that she hadn’t made that point clearly enough.
Bo looked up and met her eyes, and the flame Lauren had feared she had destroyed was again glowing faintly in the succubus’s eyes. Desire mixed with something deeper, something still fragile.
“I get that,” she said “Now.”
Lauren smiled in response.
“It was still a shitty thing to do though.” Bo said quietly, not quite able to let go of the hurt “I wanted… I wanted our first time to be special.” Her voice strengthened with seeming clarity.
“I’m sorry, truly.” Lauren said taking a chance and taking Bo’s hand in hers once more and imploring the younger Fae to understand with her eyes “I was selfish, I know that. But I didn’t know if I’d have another chance. If you’d broken the treaty and gotten killed...” Lauren couldn’t finish the thought out loud yet, it was revealing too much.
Bo brought her free hand up to lightly trace Lauren’s cheek as her eyes roamed the doctor’s face, there was a familiar heat in them once more. Bo’s voice held the seductive tone that made Lauren’s heart rate double and her breath difficult to catch. “You’re going to have to make it up to me, doctor.”
Lauren couldn’t speak. The succubus wasn’t using her natural abilities, they weren’t needed, they never had been. Her senses for Bo sharpened and heat flooded her. She was captive to the other woman and could only follow with her eyes as Bo leaned in slowly and kissed her.
It was a soft kiss, not quite chaste, but not demanding. A sound of relief and wanting escaped Lauren as she moaned softly into Bo’s mouth. The sound encouraged the succubus and she slid her hands into the doctor’s hair, pulling her closer.
Bo broke the kiss, pulling away with a soft sigh. Her face was flushed and lips red and her hands remained tangled in the silken blonde strands of Lauren’s hair as she regarded her seriously.
“I want this,” She said, eyes dropping to the doctor’s lips momentarily emphasising her meaning “But I want the whole deal. I want something real, not just a food source. I didn’t think it was possible, but you showed me I can have that and I want it.”
Lauren brought her hand up to cover one of Bo’s and returned the intense stare.
“I know Bo,” she said almost in a whisper lest speaking too loudly would ruin the moment. She allowed her lips to curl up in a small smile, not trusting any further words.
Bo held her stare a moment longer before leaning in and kissing her again, hungrier this time, demanding entry. Lauren accepted the demands and put her heart into the kiss, communicating with her actions and losing herself in the taste of the succubus on her tongue.
She offered a silent prayer of thanks to whomever may be listening and asked for the strength to put all of her faith in Bo. Lauren Lewis knew too well that trust was a double edged sword.
Author: myrth
Rating: PG
Fandom: Lost Girl
Pairing: Bo/Lauren
Disclaimer: Not mine, I’m just playing with them and I promise I’ll put them away when I’m done.
Summary: Lauren didn’t think she’d have a chance to explain, but by some miracle it was standing in front of her.
Note: I wrote this to fit after eps 9, 10 and 11 and since I haven’t seen 12 I can’t speak to that one. Thanks to my beta for her sage advice and superior grammatical skills. This little minx of a show is very addictive. Also, I haven’t explained why Bo has had a change of heart, think of it like a choose your own plot device :)
Bo, I wasn’t instructed to sleep with you. I chose that.
Dr Lauren Lewis stared at the words on the page, freshly produced from the pen in her hand, and screwed up her nose as she balled up the page. She tossed it aside to join a pile of its companions with a grimace. Ill worded thoughts screwed up and thrown away. She felt uncomfortable now with the choice to try to put her explanation on paper at all. The succubus had been avoiding her, and writing her explanation had seemed like a good idea a few hours ago. Now she just felt foolish and awkward. This was a path for love struck teenagers.
She’d begged Bo to let her explain what seemed like betrayal, but the young succubus wouldn’t listen. Not yet. Lauren wasn’t sure what would happen when Bo did listen though. She didn’t know if she could explain the situation in a way that wouldn’t result in the impulsive Fae putting herself in further mortal danger.
With a sigh the doctor pushed the paper and pen away and left them on the desk as she left the room - a small office attached to her lab, in darkness.
Intending to leave the lab, Lauren was surprised to find someone standing in the shadows near the examination table in the darkened room.
“Can I help…”
She started but the words stopped as Bo turned and stepped into the light.
“Bo.” Lauren said, then words once again failed her and she ended the thought with a tight smile. Her heart jumped, hammering into her throat any time she saw Bo. Hope raced through her mind warring with the expectation of disappointment.
“Hi,” Bo said, with a serious and uncertain expression.
Lauren had gotten used to seeing hurt, accusation and anger in those hypnotic dark eyes. She was surprised not to find it there now.
Bo’s eyes darted around the room and to the floor and she shifted uncomfortably. Lauren waited, unsure and wary of why Bo was here and too afraid to speak for fear that Bo would leave.
“So, how are you?” Bo said finally, and then visibly cringed under the weight of the awkwardness as her face coloured.
“I’m fine,” Lauren answered automatically.
“Wow, I’m so not good at this,” Bo said stepping closer, the nervous energy around her making her seem jittery.
A crease appeared between Lauren’s eyes as she tried to figure out what was happening. “Is everything alright?” Was all she could think to ask.
“Can we talk?” Bo asked, ignoring the doctor’s question and stepping closer again. If Lauren reached out she’d be able to touch the warmth of Bo’s cheek.
Hope blossomed once more in Lauren and she sent a silent thanks to the universe while panicking mildly at the same time. She still didn’t know what she was going to say, but she no longer had to wonder if she’d have the opportunity. Lauren didn’t think she’d have a chance to explain, but by some miracle it was standing in front of her.
“Sure,” she said ducking her head in a bow like fashion with another smile. Lauren hid behind those smiles when she knew words were too dangerous, or they just wouldn’t serve her.
“Not here,” Bo said quickly, eyes flicking around the lab “This place is too… Sterile.”
Lauren wasn’t offended; she knew the lab environment didn’t welcome everyone like it did her. The thrill she got from discovery, pulling apart the fantasies of others, examining fables, were her home. It was one of the things she struggled to put into words, but Lauren was at home in the lab. It was her safe place.
“Okay,” she answered with a nod and shrugged out of her lab coat, to reveal bare arms. A tank top and jeans were what she wore under her doctor’s coat this day. She wasn’t supposed to have come in, planning instead to spend time in the forest, but it hadn’t worked out that way. Sometimes the call of an idea was too hard to resist.
She missed Bo’s reaction to her as she grabbed her leather jacket from the coat rack, carefully hanging her lab coat on the hook. The succubus’s appreciation was evident on her face for only a moment, before it was replaced by a nervous smile.
Bo drove and Lauren was surprised when they stopped at the succubus’s place. She hadn’t expected an invitation into Bo’s space again, hoped but hadn’t expected it so soon. She followed Bo in and sat on the couch, remembering vividly the last time she’d been here. A slight blush settled across her face.
Bo didn’t offer wine this time though, but rather sat next to her, still not relaxed. Lauren waited, unwilling to lead this conversation now that it was upon them.
“So are you just about girls or…?” The question was just filler and they both knew it.
“Well, yes... I think so. I haven’t been with anyone in a really long time though.” She said, hoping it wasn’t the wrong thing to say.
“No?”
Lauren shook her head with a gentle smile.
“It’s difficult with my duties to The Ash to find someone outside the Fae, and the Fae aren’t that big on humans in case you haven’t noticed.”
Bo’s face took on several shades of pissed off, which Lauren had come to recognise over the last few weeks.
“I don’t get it, Lauren. Why do you put up with it?”
“He isn’t the enemy you think he is. The Ash is fair and honourable.” Lauren tried to explain the truth as she knew it to be.
“Honourable Lauren? Really?” The hurt was back in her eyes and Lauren understood that Bo blamed The Ash.
“I should have been clearer, Bo. I’m sorry I wasn’t,” She snorted and looked down at her hands, folded in her lap “I’ll keep saying that if I have to. I didn’t answer well when you asked me why I was with you.”
“Lauren, I don’t want to…” Bo moved to get up, but Lauren held her wrist.
“Bo, please. Please just let me explain and then if you wish I’ll go and I won’t try to see you again.”
Bo sat back down slowly, looking ahead, not at Lauren, her jaw working in anger. The hurt was still raw.
“The Ash didn’t tell me to sleep with you.” Lauren looked up from staring into her lap and sighed. “I did that because I wanted to Bo. I haven’t wanted like that in such a long time. Maybe I’ve never wanted like that.” Lauren allowed her genuine surprise at the discovery to show in her expression. “The Ash’s direction was to stop you from killing Vex, because Bo, they would have had to kill you and I couldn’t let that happen. I was serious when I said it would have started a war.”
Bo’s eyes flashed in anger again.
“Who is The Ash to interfere Lauren? They were going to let Luanne die for nothing more than wanting to live her own life.”
“I understand why that makes you angry Bo, but it’s not that clear cut. There’s so much you still don’t know.”
“I don’t think I want to know,” Bo muttered, increasingly fed up with the veiled machinations of the Fae.
Lauren sighed again and dragged her hand through her hair in frustration. “Bo, you don’t understand. I chose you over The Ash and I have done it more than once; but I can’t leave The Ash or openly defy him. It’s not a choice. My life depends on it. I did what I thought was right, and you may have good reason to, but please don’t think that what I feel for you is not real. It’s so real it frightens me.”
The anger left Bo’s face a little and she made eye contact once again. Lauren took a chance while she had it.
“I admire your choice to remain unaligned, I really do. But it’s just not a choice available to most of us.” Usually so aware of her own awkwardness with words, Lauren needed to make Bo understand this one thing. Her eyes were intent as she tried.
“Everyone has a choice, Lauren,” Bo said, indignation in her voice. “I don’t understand how you can stand to be his slave.”
“Because,” Lauren sighed, “there are politics at work here that have been going on for thousands of years. I prefer not to see it as slavery. The Ash has given me the opportunity to do the work I love for centuries. I’ve been able to do things no other human ever has.”
Bo blinked in confusion. “Wait… Centuries? What does that mean?”
Lauren smiled again and looked down, then up at Bo again through a lock of hair that had fallen across her face.
“I’m two hundred years old,” she said, aware that she was putting them in danger by revealing so much “Well, two hundred and four to be exact. And I shouldn’t even be telling you that.”
Bo’s jaw dropped open slightly in surprise and her eyes automatically looked Lauren up and down - looking for evidence. “Holy shit!” she exclaimed after a moment “How is that possible?”
“I told you there was a lot you don’t understand yet. The world of Fae is amazing and some of the things that are possible are incredible. It is a world most humans will never even know exists. As a scientist, the opportunity was too great to ignore. And, well, opportunities for women in science were not, shall we say, abundant in my day.” Her smile was self deprecating as she revealed what had been her true motivation. In the 1800s the world had been a very different place.
“But how… I thought you were human?” Bo’s expression held the confused wonder of a child discovering that the world was quite a big place for the very first time.
“I am,” she nodded to reinforce the point “Certain kinds of Fae have the power to prolong life. And I mean compared to the life spans of some Fae, 200 hundred years is barely worth noting.”
“So The Ash...?”
Lauren just nodded, understanding the unfinished question.
“I don’t just work for The Ash, I’m bound to him. It’s not uncommon in Fae culture for an elder Fae to select humans to preserve. I prefer to think of it as employment rather than slavery, but nothing is that simple. That’s what I’ve been trying to explain. The rules of the human world are observed out of a need to maintain the secrecy of Fae, but Fae culture is not the same. The rules and the politics are not the same.”
Lauren could see that Bo was trying to process the information she was receiving.
“But how?” Bo questioned after a moment, a guarded look of fear had settled on her astonished and beautiful face. Lauren’s gut twisted with dread that this was about to go terribly wrong again.
“I gave up my human life willingly. The Ash saved me from…” Lauren quietly said, sensing that it needed to be said, but still struggling with a memory two centuries old, “...hell.” She finished after a moment of trying to find the right description.
She didn’t know how she’d given too much away but the change in Bo’s expression told her the succubus had understood the concept if not the context of what she’d left unsaid.
“But the truth is that I traded my life for the chance to do what no human has ever been able to: to study the mystical, the fantastic. To begin to understand it all from a scientific point of view and it has been incredible. The Ash offered me that and I didn’t hesitate and I don’t regret my choice.”
“Wow, Lauren, I didn’t know.” Bo said, and Lauren began to hope that the young succubus would be able to start beginning to understand after all.
“I’m not Dyson, Bo. I don’t have the luxury of defiance when it suits me. But the way I feel about you… I’ve come as close as I ever have to losing The Ash’s favour and I’ve pushed the boundaries further than I ever thought I would.” Lauren had taken Bo’s hand as she spoke, her eyes passionate with the conviction she held in what she was trying to say.
Bo’s fingers tightened around hers in response, and Lauren’s inner self danced a little dance.
“I still don’t understand. How is he keeping you alive? Is it like vampire stuff? You’re just frozen in time?”
Lauren laughed a little.“Not quite. I’m still aging, but at a much, much slower rate. I’ve only been able to really get usable data in the last decade thanks to computers. As near as I can estimate, using modelling algorithms, I age the equivalent of a year per century.”
Bo looked stunned again, and pulled her hand away.
“Bo?”
“Sorry, I’m just trying to take it in. That’s… that’s a lot to absorb.”
Lauren tried to figure out what to say next, she wasn’t used to this, to personal entanglement.
“So I’ve grown up like a human - aging I mean. Does that mean that you’re going to outlive me?”
“No, that’s unlikely. The aging process doesn’t work the same way in the Fae. There are variations, but generally once a Fae reaches maturity and has learnt how to feed properly, their aging process slows down significantly. I haven’t dealt with any other succubi, but based on the incubus I treated, you can expect a much slower aging rate than mine. The energy you take from others when you feed metabolises in your system and slows down your aging, Bo. It’s one of the reasons you need to feed.”
“You’re kidding?”
Lauren just shook her head.
“So what do you have to eat?” The fact Bo made the connection so quickly took Lauren by surprise. “We all feed in some way right?”
“I need a regular intake of The Ash’s blood.” She said before her internal sense of secrecy could stop her.The look of horror on Bo’s face made her want to take the words back and bury them.
“I don’t actually drink it from him,” Lauren said scrambling to get back to the easy energy between them. She hadn’t realised how much she missed it.
“Ew no, please, I don’t think I want to know.” Bo looked nauseous and freaked out.
“It’s quite simple really,” but Lauren chose not to continue the technical explanation, feeling the need to tackle the biggest mountain while she still had the chance. “Now do you see why I can’t just leave? Why I have to do things the right way?”
“You’re bound to The Ash for your life.” Bo said, her expression now a complete mystery to the doctor.
“I chose to be with you Bo. That was my choice alone.” Lauren said softly. It bothered her that she hadn’t made that point clearly enough.
Bo looked up and met her eyes, and the flame Lauren had feared she had destroyed was again glowing faintly in the succubus’s eyes. Desire mixed with something deeper, something still fragile.
“I get that,” she said “Now.”
Lauren smiled in response.
“It was still a shitty thing to do though.” Bo said quietly, not quite able to let go of the hurt “I wanted… I wanted our first time to be special.” Her voice strengthened with seeming clarity.
“I’m sorry, truly.” Lauren said taking a chance and taking Bo’s hand in hers once more and imploring the younger Fae to understand with her eyes “I was selfish, I know that. But I didn’t know if I’d have another chance. If you’d broken the treaty and gotten killed...” Lauren couldn’t finish the thought out loud yet, it was revealing too much.
Bo brought her free hand up to lightly trace Lauren’s cheek as her eyes roamed the doctor’s face, there was a familiar heat in them once more. Bo’s voice held the seductive tone that made Lauren’s heart rate double and her breath difficult to catch. “You’re going to have to make it up to me, doctor.”
Lauren couldn’t speak. The succubus wasn’t using her natural abilities, they weren’t needed, they never had been. Her senses for Bo sharpened and heat flooded her. She was captive to the other woman and could only follow with her eyes as Bo leaned in slowly and kissed her.
It was a soft kiss, not quite chaste, but not demanding. A sound of relief and wanting escaped Lauren as she moaned softly into Bo’s mouth. The sound encouraged the succubus and she slid her hands into the doctor’s hair, pulling her closer.
Bo broke the kiss, pulling away with a soft sigh. Her face was flushed and lips red and her hands remained tangled in the silken blonde strands of Lauren’s hair as she regarded her seriously.
“I want this,” She said, eyes dropping to the doctor’s lips momentarily emphasising her meaning “But I want the whole deal. I want something real, not just a food source. I didn’t think it was possible, but you showed me I can have that and I want it.”
Lauren brought her hand up to cover one of Bo’s and returned the intense stare.
“I know Bo,” she said almost in a whisper lest speaking too loudly would ruin the moment. She allowed her lips to curl up in a small smile, not trusting any further words.
Bo held her stare a moment longer before leaning in and kissing her again, hungrier this time, demanding entry. Lauren accepted the demands and put her heart into the kiss, communicating with her actions and losing herself in the taste of the succubus on her tongue.
She offered a silent prayer of thanks to whomever may be listening and asked for the strength to put all of her faith in Bo. Lauren Lewis knew too well that trust was a double edged sword.