1k Marathon - Day 1
Mocha #24. Take it or Leave it
Story : knights
Rating : PG
Timeframe : 1260
Word Count : 2446
Well....this piece is a LONG time in coming - as in I started it in OCTOBER! This goes along with a series of pieces I posted back then :
Ski/Tristan : On My Knees
Rune/Lyssa : Look But Don't Touch, Read My Lips
This is the aftermath of both altercations. And yes, this is the canon version.
He took the bottle from under their bed. The strawberry liqueur, the last of what she’d managed to tuck away. It seemed a stupid gesture, a pathetic attempt to hurt her. A bottle? Really, that was the best he could do? But there it was in his fist, swinging at his side as he stormed through the fort.
Not sure just where he was headed, he had a vague memory of stairs, more than one set of them, he thought. And, before long, he found himself at a dead end and a door, trying to mentally trace his steps and find a place for it.
One direction was as good as another. He gave the door a shove and was greeted by the expanse of twinkling stars across a backdrop of inky black. He took a breath, stepped outside, and nearly tripped over the pair of legs spread in front of the door.
“Rune?” The voice that called to him was weary, the sound slurred. He caught himself, stepped carefully around her feet, and met Ski’s gaze as she studied him. “You look a fright.”
She was slumped against the wall, eyes rimmed with red and a bottle in her hands. “You’re one to talk,” he said. “What’s gotten into you?”
“Myself.” She turned the bottle this way and that with a sigh and a frown. “I have been a fool. Again.”
“Me too.” He eyed the empty stone beside her. “Can I join you?”
“Misery does love company. You will have to forfeit the bottle though.” She lifted her own, and the moonlight shot straight through the glass. “I seem to be dry.”
“You sure you haven’t had enough already?”
“Quite.” The empty bottle set beside her, she made an attempt to gather her skirts from the floor, only succeeding in their becoming more rumpled.
Rune shrugged and settled beside her. “Don’t see what I need it for.”
“Why bring it then?” said Ski, as the bottle passed from his hand to hers.
He shrugged again, leaned back against the wall, and folded his arms as Ski worked the cork from the bottle. “Seemed like a small strike against her,” he said. “Not much more I could think…” He paused to stare as she lifted the bottle to her mouth, tipped her head back and gulped the spirits as if they were water. “…to do,” he finished, blinking. “You know, you might want to slow down with that.”
Ski lowered the bottle and dragged the back of her hand across her lips. It was a gesture he’d seen from her sister more times than he could count, but from Ski it was almost comical. She eyed him over the top of the bottle. “So what’s she done now?”
“More like who.”
“Figures,” she said, and he took the bottle back from her and brought it to his own lips. “You know, Lyssa would call that a waste.”
“Good,” he said, and took another gulp.
There was a hand straining for the bottle as he tipped it back for another. “I can put it to use.”
She frowned as he set it down out of her reach, his hand still curled around the neck. “Not until you tell me what’s eating you.”
“Tristan,” she said. She frowned at the bottle for a moment, and when he made no move to hand it over, she sighed. “He asked me to marry him.”
“And…?” He lifted it barely an inch from the floor.
“And I turned him down. Obviously.”
“Obviously.” She all but snatched the drink from his hands as her held it out to her.
Ski took a gulp, paused for breath, took another, and set the bottle down, this time out of his reach. “Can you just imagine it?” she said. “Presenting him to my mother? Dragging him to court? The ridicule he would endure!”
“Ski, he loves you.”
“For how long?” Tears were welling in her eyes now. She sniffed and wiped her hand across her nose. “You have lived it. Do not try to tell me that after a few days at court you didn’t wish to crawl out a window. We are talking a lifetime of that. What is wrong with me? Why did I ever lead him on to begin with?”
“Did you tell him all that?”
She blinked her watering eyes a time or two and turned a bleary stare on him. “Pardon?”
He could just see the man, down on his knees, big dopey grin plastered across his face. “Did you tell him all that? Or did you just spit in his face?”
“Oh,” said Ski, her features hardening in anger. A tear slipped free and she batted it away with her fingers. “So, shall we drag into the light every infraction I have ever made?’
“I didn’t really mean…” He trailed off with a sigh. Then he lunged across her for the bottle, which she relinquished without a fight. “Look, I have my own problems right now.”
“Lyssa,” she said. There was a long pause as she watched him turn the bottle over in his hands. Not much point in drinking it. “And Wyatt?”
“Lyssa.” He fought the urge to slam the bottle down, and numbly stood it up between them instead. He thought about turning a bit of magic on himself, but quickly dismissed the notion with a shake of his head. “It doesn’t really matter much who else. It seems there will always be a someone else.”
“You know that’s not so.”
“Right.” His eye itched. He rubbed it, wiped his hand on his pants. “Like you know Tristan won’t hate you for dragging him around court the rest of his life.”
Ski heaved a sigh. “What right do I even have to accept such a proposal? What right does he have to make it?”
“Huh?”
“It’s been what, six months?” She’d pulled her knees up to her chest, laid her chin on one, and folded her hands around them. “What does he know of me? And he wishes to marry me?” She drew her hand across her eyes again with another loud sniff. “And I want to say yes. At least I think I want to say yes. But what do I know of him? It all seems some frightful, wonderful dream. And now it dares me to wake and try to pull it into the light.”
She snatched up the bottle again, and Rune shook his head. He eyed the swiftly diminishing supply of liquor as she gulped it down and muttered, more to himself than anything, “What is it about the two of you and commitment?”
If Ski heard the comment, she pretended not to. The hand that swung the bottle about was beginning to shake, and the tears rolled slowly down her cheeks. “I have been waiting for love all my life, and when I find it, I foul it up. I throw it away.” Barely managing to find her lips with its mouth, she took another swig from the bottle. “This is love…I think. If anything ever has been. And how do I treat it? I should have left marriage what it was, a business arrangement, a practicality. Should have done as I had planned before…before I met you.” Her voice trailed off, hand and bottle stilled, and her eyes fixed on something beyond the parapet. The stars, the moon, nothing at all; he wasn’t sure.
“Right,” said Rune. He tried to ignore that last bit, but he found himself edging away just the same, a hand creeping to the back of his neck. “You’d be happy back at court with a mess of little Terrels running about your knees.”
She never took her eyes off whatever if was out in the distance, but her face soured and she took another drink. “It didn’t have to be Terrel, I suppose.”
“True. Your mother spent the last five years offering you more perfectly good men than-”
“That was after you.”
Rune did not like the turn this conversation had taken. He made a swipe for the bottle as she continued to gesture with it. “How much of that have you-”
“I loved you, you know.” She clutched the near empty bottle to her breast and met him with wide, bleary eyes.
“Ski, you’re drunk.”
“Doesn’t mean it’s not true. Look, I’m not trying to start something here. I have Tristan now, or I did. And you have Lyssa. But…” With a sigh, she set down the bottle alongside the one she’d finished earlier. There wasn’t more than an inch of the red liquor on the bottom anymore. “Do you have any idea how much I envy the both of you? How you manage to keep things working so well.”
“Yeah, things are splendid right now.”
“And tomorrow you’ll both be behaving as if nothing’s happened.”
“And the next day she’ll be in bed with someone else. Look, I don’t want to talk about this anymore.” He shoved himelf to his feet.
“You know that’s not true. But if you wish…”
“You know what I do know?”
“Hmm?”
“I know you’ve had far more than enough to drink.” She made a face at the hand he held out for her. “Can I help you back to your room?”
“And what about you?”
He turned the hand over flat and held it still for a moment. “Sober,” he said.
“Hmph.” She pitched forward, laid her hands on the stone, and made to push herself up. “You know, I’m really not so bad off. I can-” Hands and legs wobbled and slipped in all different directions as she shoved off from the floor.
Rune caught her by an arm as she fell. “Yes, of course you can.” He shook his head and pulled her to her feet. “Here.”
She swayed in his grasp and shuffled her feet as if she were testing whether her legs might hold. The answer clearly being that they would not, she slumped against his arm with a sigh. “Always the gentleman, aren’t you?”
Rune shrugged. “Apparently I just like being superior,” he said, to which she responded with a snort like he might have expected to hear from Lyssa. “You think so too, do you?”
They made their way back through the door and down the stairs in a slow, shuffling pace, Ski groping the walls with an outstretched hand while leaning heavily on Rune’s arm. He was concentrating on keeping in step with her, trying to focus on the walls and the floor and not let his mind wander. It wasn’t working. There were words that were sticking too well to be ignored.
“You knew it was Wyatt,” he said. “What more is there that I didn’t know?”
“Nothing.” Her foot nearly slid from the step, and Rune tightened his hold on her arm and met the bleary gaze she offered him with a glare. “I know he fancies her. I doubt there’s anything more to it than that.”
“You doubt?”
Ski frowned and made a shaky move for the next step with her foot. “I thought you didn’t want to talk about this anymore.”
“I don’t,” he said, falling back into their awkward forward motion. “It’s just…she kissed him. Well, he kissed her, but she must have given him a reason to.” He lunged to catch her again as she missed the stair. “You know, next time you feel the need to down a couple of bottles of spirits, I suggest you do it a bit closer to ground level.”
“There you go again,” said Ski with a giggle.
“Huh?” he said, then “Oh.” Ski just laughed. “You’re not helping, you know.”
“I’m too drunk to do anything right, remember?” she said, as they stumbled into the hall.
“Very funny,” he said, and he pushed her forward as she returned to feeling her way along the wall.
“You know,” she said, alternately leaning in and stepping away, "there’s something terribly familiar about this whole situation.”
“There is, isn’t there.”
Somehow they were at her door a lot faster than he’d reached the roof before, and he wondered how many circles he’d gone in on his way up. It was a familiar scene indeed, standing in the hall, not wanting to let her go for fear she might just collapse right there on the floor. And then she turned on him with a look that sent a chill up his spine and brought him back six years in an instant.
“You know,” she said, her hand sliding shakily along his arm. “What I said before? I meant it. I loved you.”
“Ski-”
“I did.”
It was surreal. He’d let go of her arm, figuring she could stagger the last few steps into the room, but she was still clutching his, staring up at him with a look he couldn’t quite place, pressed close enough that he could feel the warmth of her body and smell the liquor on her breath. He pried one of her hands off of him but she didn’t move. “Why don’t you sleep this off. Talk to Tristan in the morning.”
“I…I don’t want to be alone right now.”
He thought about his own empty bed, about tossing and turning in it all night under cold sheets. He shook his head. He’d go back to the roof, sit with the bottle and his thoughts. And where was Lyssa? Had she found somewhere to hide out for the night, or was she-
“I don’t want to be alone either.” He caught the hand he’d just removed and gave it a squeeze. He hadn’t seen her once in all his wandering. Had she and Wyatt found some quiet corner? Had she moved on to someone else?
“Don’t leave me alone.” Ski leaned in. She slid her other hand up his arm and around his neck. He could taste the liquor on her breath and then he could taste her lips, and his arms were sliding around her waist.
Rune pulled away, blinking and shaking his head, as if he’d been doused with ice. “I’m not doing this,” he said. She stared back at him, her mouth moving silently, her hands still on his arms. “And you’re not either.”
He propped her against the doorframe, shaking a bit now himself, and still she said nothing. “Talk to Tristan.” He gently relieved himself of her hands and she let them fall to her sides. “He loves you.”
“And you?” She found the knob and forced herself straighter against the wall.
“I have enough of my own problems,” he said, and he turned and strode back down the hall.
Story : knights
Rating : PG
Timeframe : 1260
Word Count : 2446
Well....this piece is a LONG time in coming - as in I started it in OCTOBER! This goes along with a series of pieces I posted back then :
Ski/Tristan : On My Knees
Rune/Lyssa : Look But Don't Touch, Read My Lips
This is the aftermath of both altercations. And yes, this is the canon version.
He took the bottle from under their bed. The strawberry liqueur, the last of what she’d managed to tuck away. It seemed a stupid gesture, a pathetic attempt to hurt her. A bottle? Really, that was the best he could do? But there it was in his fist, swinging at his side as he stormed through the fort.
Not sure just where he was headed, he had a vague memory of stairs, more than one set of them, he thought. And, before long, he found himself at a dead end and a door, trying to mentally trace his steps and find a place for it.
One direction was as good as another. He gave the door a shove and was greeted by the expanse of twinkling stars across a backdrop of inky black. He took a breath, stepped outside, and nearly tripped over the pair of legs spread in front of the door.
“Rune?” The voice that called to him was weary, the sound slurred. He caught himself, stepped carefully around her feet, and met Ski’s gaze as she studied him. “You look a fright.”
She was slumped against the wall, eyes rimmed with red and a bottle in her hands. “You’re one to talk,” he said. “What’s gotten into you?”
“Myself.” She turned the bottle this way and that with a sigh and a frown. “I have been a fool. Again.”
“Me too.” He eyed the empty stone beside her. “Can I join you?”
“Misery does love company. You will have to forfeit the bottle though.” She lifted her own, and the moonlight shot straight through the glass. “I seem to be dry.”
“You sure you haven’t had enough already?”
“Quite.” The empty bottle set beside her, she made an attempt to gather her skirts from the floor, only succeeding in their becoming more rumpled.
Rune shrugged and settled beside her. “Don’t see what I need it for.”
“Why bring it then?” said Ski, as the bottle passed from his hand to hers.
He shrugged again, leaned back against the wall, and folded his arms as Ski worked the cork from the bottle. “Seemed like a small strike against her,” he said. “Not much more I could think…” He paused to stare as she lifted the bottle to her mouth, tipped her head back and gulped the spirits as if they were water. “…to do,” he finished, blinking. “You know, you might want to slow down with that.”
Ski lowered the bottle and dragged the back of her hand across her lips. It was a gesture he’d seen from her sister more times than he could count, but from Ski it was almost comical. She eyed him over the top of the bottle. “So what’s she done now?”
“More like who.”
“Figures,” she said, and he took the bottle back from her and brought it to his own lips. “You know, Lyssa would call that a waste.”
“Good,” he said, and took another gulp.
There was a hand straining for the bottle as he tipped it back for another. “I can put it to use.”
She frowned as he set it down out of her reach, his hand still curled around the neck. “Not until you tell me what’s eating you.”
“Tristan,” she said. She frowned at the bottle for a moment, and when he made no move to hand it over, she sighed. “He asked me to marry him.”
“And…?” He lifted it barely an inch from the floor.
“And I turned him down. Obviously.”
“Obviously.” She all but snatched the drink from his hands as her held it out to her.
Ski took a gulp, paused for breath, took another, and set the bottle down, this time out of his reach. “Can you just imagine it?” she said. “Presenting him to my mother? Dragging him to court? The ridicule he would endure!”
“Ski, he loves you.”
“For how long?” Tears were welling in her eyes now. She sniffed and wiped her hand across her nose. “You have lived it. Do not try to tell me that after a few days at court you didn’t wish to crawl out a window. We are talking a lifetime of that. What is wrong with me? Why did I ever lead him on to begin with?”
“Did you tell him all that?”
She blinked her watering eyes a time or two and turned a bleary stare on him. “Pardon?”
He could just see the man, down on his knees, big dopey grin plastered across his face. “Did you tell him all that? Or did you just spit in his face?”
“Oh,” said Ski, her features hardening in anger. A tear slipped free and she batted it away with her fingers. “So, shall we drag into the light every infraction I have ever made?’
“I didn’t really mean…” He trailed off with a sigh. Then he lunged across her for the bottle, which she relinquished without a fight. “Look, I have my own problems right now.”
“Lyssa,” she said. There was a long pause as she watched him turn the bottle over in his hands. Not much point in drinking it. “And Wyatt?”
“Lyssa.” He fought the urge to slam the bottle down, and numbly stood it up between them instead. He thought about turning a bit of magic on himself, but quickly dismissed the notion with a shake of his head. “It doesn’t really matter much who else. It seems there will always be a someone else.”
“You know that’s not so.”
“Right.” His eye itched. He rubbed it, wiped his hand on his pants. “Like you know Tristan won’t hate you for dragging him around court the rest of his life.”
Ski heaved a sigh. “What right do I even have to accept such a proposal? What right does he have to make it?”
“Huh?”
“It’s been what, six months?” She’d pulled her knees up to her chest, laid her chin on one, and folded her hands around them. “What does he know of me? And he wishes to marry me?” She drew her hand across her eyes again with another loud sniff. “And I want to say yes. At least I think I want to say yes. But what do I know of him? It all seems some frightful, wonderful dream. And now it dares me to wake and try to pull it into the light.”
She snatched up the bottle again, and Rune shook his head. He eyed the swiftly diminishing supply of liquor as she gulped it down and muttered, more to himself than anything, “What is it about the two of you and commitment?”
If Ski heard the comment, she pretended not to. The hand that swung the bottle about was beginning to shake, and the tears rolled slowly down her cheeks. “I have been waiting for love all my life, and when I find it, I foul it up. I throw it away.” Barely managing to find her lips with its mouth, she took another swig from the bottle. “This is love…I think. If anything ever has been. And how do I treat it? I should have left marriage what it was, a business arrangement, a practicality. Should have done as I had planned before…before I met you.” Her voice trailed off, hand and bottle stilled, and her eyes fixed on something beyond the parapet. The stars, the moon, nothing at all; he wasn’t sure.
“Right,” said Rune. He tried to ignore that last bit, but he found himself edging away just the same, a hand creeping to the back of his neck. “You’d be happy back at court with a mess of little Terrels running about your knees.”
She never took her eyes off whatever if was out in the distance, but her face soured and she took another drink. “It didn’t have to be Terrel, I suppose.”
“True. Your mother spent the last five years offering you more perfectly good men than-”
“That was after you.”
Rune did not like the turn this conversation had taken. He made a swipe for the bottle as she continued to gesture with it. “How much of that have you-”
“I loved you, you know.” She clutched the near empty bottle to her breast and met him with wide, bleary eyes.
“Ski, you’re drunk.”
“Doesn’t mean it’s not true. Look, I’m not trying to start something here. I have Tristan now, or I did. And you have Lyssa. But…” With a sigh, she set down the bottle alongside the one she’d finished earlier. There wasn’t more than an inch of the red liquor on the bottom anymore. “Do you have any idea how much I envy the both of you? How you manage to keep things working so well.”
“Yeah, things are splendid right now.”
“And tomorrow you’ll both be behaving as if nothing’s happened.”
“And the next day she’ll be in bed with someone else. Look, I don’t want to talk about this anymore.” He shoved himelf to his feet.
“You know that’s not true. But if you wish…”
“You know what I do know?”
“Hmm?”
“I know you’ve had far more than enough to drink.” She made a face at the hand he held out for her. “Can I help you back to your room?”
“And what about you?”
He turned the hand over flat and held it still for a moment. “Sober,” he said.
“Hmph.” She pitched forward, laid her hands on the stone, and made to push herself up. “You know, I’m really not so bad off. I can-” Hands and legs wobbled and slipped in all different directions as she shoved off from the floor.
Rune caught her by an arm as she fell. “Yes, of course you can.” He shook his head and pulled her to her feet. “Here.”
She swayed in his grasp and shuffled her feet as if she were testing whether her legs might hold. The answer clearly being that they would not, she slumped against his arm with a sigh. “Always the gentleman, aren’t you?”
Rune shrugged. “Apparently I just like being superior,” he said, to which she responded with a snort like he might have expected to hear from Lyssa. “You think so too, do you?”
They made their way back through the door and down the stairs in a slow, shuffling pace, Ski groping the walls with an outstretched hand while leaning heavily on Rune’s arm. He was concentrating on keeping in step with her, trying to focus on the walls and the floor and not let his mind wander. It wasn’t working. There were words that were sticking too well to be ignored.
“You knew it was Wyatt,” he said. “What more is there that I didn’t know?”
“Nothing.” Her foot nearly slid from the step, and Rune tightened his hold on her arm and met the bleary gaze she offered him with a glare. “I know he fancies her. I doubt there’s anything more to it than that.”
“You doubt?”
Ski frowned and made a shaky move for the next step with her foot. “I thought you didn’t want to talk about this anymore.”
“I don’t,” he said, falling back into their awkward forward motion. “It’s just…she kissed him. Well, he kissed her, but she must have given him a reason to.” He lunged to catch her again as she missed the stair. “You know, next time you feel the need to down a couple of bottles of spirits, I suggest you do it a bit closer to ground level.”
“There you go again,” said Ski with a giggle.
“Huh?” he said, then “Oh.” Ski just laughed. “You’re not helping, you know.”
“I’m too drunk to do anything right, remember?” she said, as they stumbled into the hall.
“Very funny,” he said, and he pushed her forward as she returned to feeling her way along the wall.
“You know,” she said, alternately leaning in and stepping away, "there’s something terribly familiar about this whole situation.”
“There is, isn’t there.”
Somehow they were at her door a lot faster than he’d reached the roof before, and he wondered how many circles he’d gone in on his way up. It was a familiar scene indeed, standing in the hall, not wanting to let her go for fear she might just collapse right there on the floor. And then she turned on him with a look that sent a chill up his spine and brought him back six years in an instant.
“You know,” she said, her hand sliding shakily along his arm. “What I said before? I meant it. I loved you.”
“Ski-”
“I did.”
It was surreal. He’d let go of her arm, figuring she could stagger the last few steps into the room, but she was still clutching his, staring up at him with a look he couldn’t quite place, pressed close enough that he could feel the warmth of her body and smell the liquor on her breath. He pried one of her hands off of him but she didn’t move. “Why don’t you sleep this off. Talk to Tristan in the morning.”
“I…I don’t want to be alone right now.”
He thought about his own empty bed, about tossing and turning in it all night under cold sheets. He shook his head. He’d go back to the roof, sit with the bottle and his thoughts. And where was Lyssa? Had she found somewhere to hide out for the night, or was she-
“I don’t want to be alone either.” He caught the hand he’d just removed and gave it a squeeze. He hadn’t seen her once in all his wandering. Had she and Wyatt found some quiet corner? Had she moved on to someone else?
“Don’t leave me alone.” Ski leaned in. She slid her other hand up his arm and around his neck. He could taste the liquor on her breath and then he could taste her lips, and his arms were sliding around her waist.
Rune pulled away, blinking and shaking his head, as if he’d been doused with ice. “I’m not doing this,” he said. She stared back at him, her mouth moving silently, her hands still on his arms. “And you’re not either.”
He propped her against the doorframe, shaking a bit now himself, and still she said nothing. “Talk to Tristan.” He gently relieved himself of her hands and she let them fall to her sides. “He loves you.”
“And you?” She found the knob and forced herself straighter against the wall.
“I have enough of my own problems,” he said, and he turned and strode back down the hall.