In an alley.
Night.
Hands on her. His face, so familiar, so alien. Dark eyes, honey eyes. Supple, twisted mouth. Oh god, that mouth.
"No, please, no, don't," and she bleeds where he hits her, tears mixing with crimson on her face. Hands, warm and strong and shaking, slide beneath her shirt and he holds her down, heavy on top of her, the ground cold beneath.
"Shut up. Shut up." He's crying, too, and his tears are hot on her cheeks. She turns her head, shaking it, shaking, eyes closed.
"Don't do this, please, please, no," but he doesn't listen, he just kisses her hard enough to bruise and he's saying things, saying things that she can't understand.
She drifts. Her underwear are torn. She drifts.
It was a chance. One chance in a million. She saw him out of the corner of her eye, walking off a bus ahead of her on the street. He didn't recognize her at first. She's dyed her hair. It's blond, now. She wanted to change her appearance as much as a simple drug changed her DNA.
"John," she'd said. "John."
And now it's John and she's on the ground, under him, crying and seeing him cry, and she's powerless. Helpless.
But so is he.
Stronger, though, as a human as well as a… what they'd been.
"No," she says again, softer now, but he kisses her into silence and she kisses him back because it's the night and no one can see them and no one can save her.
There are footsteps and a man's voice and he covers her mouth with his palm.
"What the fuck are you looking at," he says to the person she can't see, and his voice is a shaking, broken, bitterharsh slap against the warm summer air. The footsteps hurry away, and she remains on the ground, trapped, his hand hard against her mouth, her split lip stinging sharply.
She knows why the man didn't help her, didn't stop, but hurried away from this ugly little scene. She knows how wild his eyes are, how his blond-streaked hair is matted with sweat, how her own hair is tangled around her face. She knows this picture they paint here on the ground is cruel and distasteful and animal, and she knows John's voice is a warning. Not a warning against him, oh no. He's no danger to humans anymore, except perhaps her. A warning against something else in him, something unimaginably wrong, a disease that's spreading to her beneath him and will spread in the night because the night softens everything but allows even the most disturbing
(rape, lust, murder, neglect)
things to happen right beneath the noses of the civil.
When he takes his hand away, she doesn't speak again. He's tearing her shirt and she lets him, her hands on his back, feeling his skin beneath his thin sweater, feeling the scars there that he'll never let anyone see. She feels the guilt again, the horrible, awful, all-consuming guilt because she's alive, and the rest of them aren't.
In his eyes, she sees his guilt as well, eating at his soul, darkening the honey of his irises, making him hate himself as he hurts her. He's punishing her, and he's ruining himself here on the ground, in the night.
Suddenly he's off her, scrambling back, one hand wiping at his mouth because her blood is streaked on his lips.
"Oh god," he says, and she looks at him, lying sprawled on her back with her skirt hiked up and her underwear torn, legs akimbo, exposed to the darkness. In his face she sees a forest where despair has been allowed to grow unchecked, weeds of disillusionment and horror and ugliness climbing viciously to a ripped gray sky. "Get up," he says, back of his hand hiding his mouth. In the fogged moonlight, she sees dozens of scars on his bared forearm. They blur together like music notes against the thin paleness of his skin, creating a throbbing song that she can feel in the roots of her teeth. It is a haunting modern piece, filled with jagged crescendos and a rhythm of low, humming lentamente con fuoco.
She gets up, pushing herself to her feet, silent and aching and trembling. She smoothes down her skirt with one hand, roughly, not looking away from his face. One side falls down to its proper length, the hem at her knee, but the other side is bunched and knotted and clings to the broken elastic of her panties, baring her thigh. She doesn't notice.
He kneels on the ground, staring at her with a look of such mad, terrifying regret that when he moves towards her, still on his knees, she can't move. He grips her by the hips and presses his face into her belly and she feels the cold of him, the cold that isn't cold because he's warm against her, seep into her bones. It's a numbing chill that makes her want to run, run far away from this place, but his hands don't let her and the chill makes itself at home. It settles into her blood, her marrow, nausea making her stomach lurch.
"I hate you," he grits into the fabric of her shirt. "I don't hate you. I couldn't stop thinking about you during the war." She puts out her hands, shoves at his shoulders.
"Stop," she says, as if he'll listen. He didn't listen when he was on her, his hands beneath her shirt, his mouth everywhere. He looks up at her and she sees the cold like a physical thing, now that his fire is gone away. It lives in him, a sultry, venomous erosion and he's pressing it, with his words and his tears and his harsh, bittersweet kiss, into her.
"I want you. I hate it. Love me, Kitty," he pleads. "I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Just love me." She wants to be sick. It curls in her belly, the hate, the disgust, the lust, the guilt, the fear. The night.
"You tried to rape me," she says in an icy whisper, her fingers curling in his hair. He doesn't answer, but kneels there on the dirty ground, hands tight on her hips, shaking with it.
She rips herself out of his grip, stumbling backwards into a melted pathway made of light from the lazy, sly-eyed moon. She can still feel it. The cold. It's in her now, licking at her spine. Pressing kisses against her thighs where her underwear hangs in tatters. He stays there, on his knees, mortal and human and shattered and uglybeautifultrash against the shadows of the past.
When he stretches out a hand, her hate and her need and the cold, that murderous cold, make her take it. She is surprised when, upon this new, simple contact, there is a flash of warmth.
They stay there, a girl in torn clothes and a bruised, bloodied lip and a boy on his knees with thin, razor-scarred arms and a soul so gray both light and dark sink into it and are eaten by the shadows.
In an alley.
Night.
AN: 'lentamente con fuoco' means 'slowly with fire' in Italian.