Disclaimer: I do not own Revolution nor am I associated with any of the cast or crew.
Title Inspired By: "Don't tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass." ― Anton Chekhov
Prompt: Dancing under the red moon, nbc_revolution's Halloween Bingo-a-Thon
The Glint of Light on Broken People
Much of the day had passed in relative silence, their mutual sour moods made worse by clothes still soaked through from the rain the night before. Daylight had faded early and they made camp beneath a half-dead oak somewhere in northern Texas. "Blood on the moon." Monroe shifted by the fire, his voice quiet but harsh in the cold press of night, as he sliced into a bruised apple from the orchard they'd pilfered at the crack of dawn.
Charlie did her best to only glare more furiously at the flames before her curiosity got the better of her and she rolled onto her side, head propped up on one hand and eyebrow raised in a silent question.
"Superstition. It means blood's been spilled, or going to be." Monroe tipped his head back, squinting at the sky, fog curling before the red-rimmed moon as it peeked out from behind bare, sprawling oak branches.
She followed his gaze, upper lip curled in disgust or boredom. "If that's the case, it ought to be cherry red every night, thanks to you."
"Thanks to you too."
Philly and Atlanta sprang to mind and she knew he could see it on her face. He could cut her deeper with four small words and a raised eyebrow than she'd ever be able to cut him and with that they fell back into bitter quiet. The moon rose high and quick and the flames burned down to a heated glow, pierced through with blinding white. "Must be close to Halloween by now," she murmured finally.
"It is Halloween," he corrected. Digging into his pocket, he flipped a small leather-bound book at her. "Always keep track of the days. Keeps you sane, when you're on the move like this."
"Sanity's always been your strong suit," she agreed in a drawl that made her sound more like a Matheson than she ever had, but thumbed through the stained pages, filled with meticulous, handwritten months and crossed out numbers. The crackling of the fire filled the space between them as she wondered what he'd done on each of those hundreds of days, where he'd been and who he'd hurt. "Halloween used to be my favorite holiday, when I was little."
He cut another slice of apple, nicking his thumb in the process, a tiny bead of blood springing to life on dirty skin. "One year, in junior high, Miles and I egged the principal's house on Halloween. We got suspended for a week but, oh, we were heroes when we came back." A choked laugh escaped him, as though he didn't quite remember what laughter was supposed to sound like or feel like.
"But after the Blackout-"
"Yeah." Monroe sucked the blood off his thumb. "After the Blackout."
"What did people used to do on Halloween?" she asked, voice small, still holding his makeshift calendar up over her face. "I mean, grown-ups."
"Party. Drink. Girls would dress up in slutty costumes. You'd have sex someplace dark and grungy and wake up with a hangover from hell. It was a real peach of a holiday."
Charlie cleared her throat, tugging her legs up nearer her chest, thighs pressing together. "Seems a waste to have sex someplace dark and grungy when you had clean sheets and beds on hand."
His lips twitched and he tossed the apple core into the fire. "Yeah, well, at the time it was part of the charm. Little did we know how sick we'd be of rutting in the dirt in a few years."
She flushed, lips pressed together. "What's the charm in dirt?" she blurted before she could stop herself, teeth sinking into her tongue too late.
"Oh, I don't know." Monroe leaned back on an elbow, watching her from the corner of his eye. "Jeans jerked down around your thighs so you can hardly move, a girl you don't know slammed up against a tree, screaming for you, leaves in your hair. It might be all you've ever known but I can remember the appeal."
Charlie's eyes darted away, her skin colored pink in the firelight.
"You have- known it, right?" he pressed, mouth drawn into a twisted smile.
"Yes!" Charlie groaned, chucking his makeshift calendar at him. "You're sick, you know that? Miles is gonna have your head when we get back and I'm going to enjoy every second of it."
"And that makes me sick? Admit it, Charlotte, you're not much better adjusted than I am."
"Take your stupid superstitions and your redemption quest and shove them, okay? Do us both a favor." Flipping onto her other side, she tucked an arm beneath her head and glowered into the wisps of fog curling around their campsite as if he might actually think her suddenly asleep.
"Just like your mother. Always a sharp word but, you know, she could never follow through on it either."
Charlie shifted, her back to him and her legs crossed tightly together, the grinding of her teeth drawing a smirk onto his lips. "Follow through on what?"
He didn't respond, only snatched another precious apple from his bag like there was an indefinite supply and drove his knife into its dark, bruised flesh. She flinched at the squelch of apple skin giving way beneath his blade and clenched her jaw even tighter. "Follow through on what?"
"Whatever it is you want to do to me, Charlotte." She could feel his eyes on her, on the silhouette of her profile, firelight dancing across the shape of her body.
"Torment, maim and kill?"
"Yeah. Sure." He stomped a beetle scuttling a few inches from her thigh and her body snapped to attention, sucking in a sharp breath of smoke and mist. "For Christ's sake! What in hell do you think I'm gonna do to you?" he demanded, flinging his knife down so it bounced off a rock beside the fire.
"I need to get some sleep. Take first watch and shut up about it." It wasn't an answer, but then, he didn't exactly need one. They both knew what she thought and it had all been said before: sociopath, cold, empty, killer. No need to waste the breath on repeats.
Monroe bit into his apple with a grumble, but must have found it suddenly tasted of bitter spite and powerlessness because he spit out the bite, chucking the apple into the shadowy dirt with more force than necessary. He didn't have to take her orders; he could have left her there to starve and found Miles on his own and yet there he sat, planted beside her in the dirt with his knees up, so close he must have been able to see the rise and fall of her chest. At some point during the night, she drifted off to a restless sleep, black dreams pressing in on her.
The touch of his hand on her arm jolted her awake, after how long, she wasn't sure. Charlie scrambled to her feet, slipping in the grass but ready to kill if she had to, until her eyes focused on him. Her shoulders sagged in ironic relief, hands falling back to her sides. "Your turn," he barked, voice low and rough but practically booming in the silent fog.
She huffed, irritation and sleep deprivation warring with her sense of self-preservation as he sprawled in the dirt, one arm pillowed beneath his head. It irked her how he could lay there like that, face smooth and unworried, after everything he'd done, although she was bright enough to know he wasn't really asleep.
Charlie paced by the fire for an hour or more, stepping past him every few seconds with the toe of her boot skimming his abandoned knife with each pass. Indecision all but dripped off of her and she wondered if he could sense it, if the way his breathing had grown slow and even was just the result of his morbid curiosity about what she was capable of.
She held out nearly ten whole minutes before she stooped to pick up the knife, weighing it in her hand as she stood there for long, drawn out seconds and minutes, blocking the fire so the shape of him was flooded by only moonlight. Charlie gnawed on her thumbnail as she stared at him for too long, the overwhelming desire to sleep more distracting than her desire to kill him where he lay. She never saw his hand snake out around her ankle, jerking the ground out from beneath her feet.
"Just can't quite bring yourself, can you?" he mumbled, eyes closed as she toppled down, knees landing in the dusty, almost-mud on either side of him. She grunted, fingers tightening around the knife but he had it out of her hand before she could do more than scrape at him, harmless and struggling.
Peeking open blue eyes, he wrenched the knife from her grasp, scratching her palm, though neither of them really noticed: blood on the moon, blood on their hands, no new thing.
You don't know me, Charlotte. Maybe she did after all.
He tossed the knife aside, large, rough hands closing around her wrists as she sank back against his propped up thighs, turning her face to the moon. Deep down, Charlie knew he was right, though whether she could admit it to herself was likely another story. She was growing more like her mother every day: accustomed to and unfazed by defeat. She would have other opportunities. She'd be patient, wait for him to slip up, and then it would be his own knife at his throat. "You're bloody, thanks to us," she whispered to the sky. In spite of her vivid imagination, the moonlight was as bloodless as ever and rays of it streamed over her skin, over dry, chapped lips and curves she was still a bit unused to, though not unaware of, having never had the chance to explore them properly outside of rebel camps and dingy bars.
In her mind, she was bathed in cherry red, straddling his chest in the dirt, with leaves in her hair and clothes that smelled like smoke and his hands moved from her wrists to her thighs without either of them realizing. Charlie let her hands fall to her sides, palms up, a thin line of blood drying and crusting there on her skin as she stared down the sky. "How did you know about that? About the blood on the moon?"
Monroe shook his head, as if trying to focus, and when he answered, she felt it was with some semblance of truth. She wasn't sure why he bothered; they both knew she wouldn't have known the difference. "An apothecary, in Baltimore. The moon was red the night we marched on the city and as we were raiding her shop, she told me it was a bad omen. I think Miles slit her throat. Guess I always believed it after that."
She shuddered, whether at the thought of her beloved uncle as the killer she had never accepted him to be or at the brush of his thumbs against the inside of her thighs, even she wasn't sure. "She probably made it up, just to scare you."
"If she did, it didn't work. He still slit her throat." Charlie flinched without looking down, though even she could feel the spike of pleasure that shot through him at her discomfort.
"Didn't it, though? You're still talking about it, all these years later. Of all the people you've killed, how many of them have made that kind of impression?"
Monroe cleared his throat, glancing away. "You're too smart for your own good." His hands slid to her hips to push her off, to force space and air and shafts of moonlight between them, but she stopped him, thighs clenching on his body and her eyes dropping to his face.
"Clearly not smart enough."
"Says who?"
"Here with you, aren't I?"
"If I learned anything from your mother, it's that the smartest of women can be stupid for the sake of things they shouldn't want."
"Sexist prick."
"You sound like her."
Charlie frowned, shrugging her shoulder. "I wouldn't really know."
A shadow crossed his face at that, as if, maybe, he were truly sorry for forcing her to grow up without a mother. "Are you planning on moving?"
"Not really." Lifting one hand, she ran her fingers through his curls and watched him shiver and swallow and glance away like a nervous boy.
"Charlotte." She didn't move away so he grabbed her wrist, holding it just above his face, fingers too tight and the copper scent of her dried blood too close. His nostrils flared as he studied her face, their bodies poised and silent in the dark. "Don't do something you'll regret."
Charlie scoffed, dark hysterical laughter bubbling out of her lips. "You're not serious, are you? This whole redemption thing is really shit."
"Watch your mouth." It was uncomfortably and ineptly paternal, what with his hand digging into her hip, damp tank stretched over bruised skin as he dragged her down to his chest. Fingers still wrapped around her wrist, he twisted her arm behind her back; her wince was as much arousal as it was pain.
"Gets me into trouble all the time," she muttered, eyes locked on his in a battle, though nothing so civilized as wits or guns.
"I'll bet." His voice dropped and she could tell he ached to drop his eyes too, to her aforementioned troublesome mouth, to the soft curve of breast beneath her top, to the taut press of her hips against his. An owl hooted overhead and his gaze darted away to the sky for a fraction of a second. Charlie's lips twitched into a grin, head ducking swiftly to press her mouth to his pulse point, sweat and dirt and alcohol mingling on her tongue.
Monroe groaned through grit teeth, grabbing a fistful of stringy blond hair and yanking her head back. A gasp tripped off her lips, parted and wet. "Why?" he demanded.
"Worried I'm gonna off you while you get off?" Charlie quipped, nails digging into the dirt beside his head.
"Cute." His grip tightened on her wrist, twisting her arm further back and drawing the slightest grunt of pain from her. "Why the sudden switch? I'm not saying I won't fuck you but you damn well better give me a reason."
She barked a short, harsh laugh, shaking her head. "Maybe I want to get your guard down. Maybe because it'll piss off my mom. Maybe I'm just horny. What does it matter? We both know you're going to make it to Willoughby alive because that's who you are. You've got nine goddamn lives."
Monroe narrowed his eyes at her, brilliant blue suddenly dimmed to what she imagined a stormy sea must look like just before a hurricane. "You really think you're so invincible, don't you? Most people dance that close to me, they get sliced to ribbons."
"I'm not most people. I'm a Matheson." Something shivered beneath his skin and Charlie had to smile, slow and calculating. "Matheson and Monroe. Call it your destiny."
Abruptly he appeared to make up his mind, the storm leaving his eyes as he released her arm, hands dropping to the button on her pants. She thought she didn't really want to know which part had made him give in. Monroe shoved her pants down around her thighs, cold October air stinging her bare skin. Her brain caught up to her body and she was already undoing his pants, his hands skimming her ass, tangling in her hair.
With a bit of fumbling and clanking of his belt buckle, she had his pants open and he was hard and silky in her hand and for a moment the idea of it, of sex with Monroe, was almost too much but that was all he gave her: a moment. He hooked a hand beneath her knee, jerking her up over him, smearing her wetness across the thick, dirt-streaked fabric of his pants.
He didn't ask if she was sure, didn't give her a chance to think or the courtesy of foreplay (though, perhaps, that was exactly what they'd been doing since she opened her eyes in that drained out old pool.) Just wrapped a hand around himself and thrust inside her.
Charlie sucked in a sharp, wheezing gasp, palms pressing flat against his chest, her legs tucked neat and tight against him. "Jesus Christ."
"Just like Halloween's past," he grunted as he thrust up into her, plucking a leaf from her hair.
Charlie shook her head, once, twice, lips pressed together in a thin line as he dragged her along with him, fierce and fast. She gripped his shirt in a fist, gesturing to herself with one hand, features twisted in concentration. "No slutty costume."
"Oh, don't lie, Charlotte. You always," pausing, jaw tense, he hooked his fingers in the front of her tank so they just brushed skin and tugged her closer, "wear a mask."
She shuddered above him, sweat gathering beneath her breasts and behind her knees, lips hovering just over his. "Pot, meet kettle."
Monroe surged up, teeth sinking into her bottom lip and earning him a yelp and a moan. Her body clenched on him, dripping, searing, and he swept his tongue inside her mouth, running over the ridges on the roof, along the points of her teeth, against her soft, pliant tongue. His arm slipped around her, free hand gouging into the tender skin of her thigh as she pressed her palms to his face, stubble scratchy and brutal.
She trembled over him, saw the backs of her eyelids, edging one of her hands between them to press between her legs, all awkward jerks and slick strokes until she was nearly coming.
"Charlotte-" The sound of her name mumbled through clenched teeth barely pierced the fog in her brain and his hand gripped her upper arm, wrenching her back to the present with a whine. "Charlotte, get off."
His hips bucked against hers and, dragging her down for a rough kiss, he bit her tongue, blood slicking her lips as she jerked away. "Wha-" Monroe's hand tightened on her arm, features strained, and her eyes shot wide with realization. Scrambling up, she lifted herself off him with a wince and tumbled onto his chest, fingers already sliding back up her thigh.
He reached behind her, bodies twisted together as he worked to bring himself off with one hand. Charlie pushed two fingers inside herself, teeth sinking into her already-bloody bottom lip, and knotted her hand in his shirt as she rocked against him. Monroe hissed through his teeth, arm bumping against her thigh in a regular rhythm that set her moaning and gasping.
She tipped her head so dark blond hair streamed down her back, mouth falling open in a cry of deeply-needed release or possibly self-loathing or most likely a little of both. Her free hand slid blindly over his chest, nails biting the side of his neck before tangling in damp, unruly curls. Charlie clung there as he came beneath her, muscles uncoiling in tense waves. Her eyes stung and her thighs burned but with each jerk between her legs he brought her closer and soon she was coming hard, splitting her lip with her teeth.
His mouth brushed the scar tissue on her arm, the brand that marked her as one of his pawns, his playthings, and she shuddered above him, yanking too hard on his hair. When she finally opened her eyes again, fingers still knuckle-deep inside her quickly cooling body, she found him watching her, his face shadowy and haunted in the moonlight. He nipped at the brand, tearing a wrung-out whimper from her, before pushing her away, bodies beginning to stiffen and cramp.
Charlie rolled off him with a groan, jerking her pants up as she collapsed in the dirt and the weeds. Chests heaving, they lay there in relative silence, staring up at the moon, ring of red glinting on their faces. A cricket chirped in dried grass behind them and the breeze whistled through the dying oak, nearly invisible against the black sky.
"Think she's judging us?" Charlie asked finally, folding her hands over her stomach.
Monroe lifted his head, eyebrows knit together before he followed her gaze to the moon overhead. He dropped back to the ground, the backs of his fingers brushing her arm. "I think she's jealous of us, all cold and alone up there."
"No way. She's free. We might have made her bloody but at least she doesn't have to live down here and walk in endless circles with you."
"You don't know much about planetary orbits, do you?"
Charlie turned her head to frown and glare, ignoring the pleasant soreness spreading throughout her body. "You're a real bastard, Monroe."
Sitting up on an elbow, he reached over her, arm brushing her breast so her nipple hardened traitorously beneath her thin, damp tank as he retrieved the last apple from the bag. Monroe sunk his teeth into the apple with a crisp snap, blue eyes all too piercing in the eerie black of three a.m. as he met her glare head on.
Charlie swallowed hard, the first to glance away. "This didn't mean anything. It was just- just something to do. Until I can kill you."
"Yeah, right." He laid back, gesturing to the moon, a silent, lonely witness. "And none of that blood is on you either. Nobody does denial like a Matheson."