Playmate
She comes over him like a night of velvet and diamonds – whenever she appears before him, it's not long until her heavy perfume takes possession of the air, until the whole of her existence rolls past him like wild torrents of water, blond curls spilling everywhere, supple curves filling up space, opulence spilling toward him, undaunted in her audacity she reaches forward to pull on his hand, teasing, smiling, always holding back secrets –
The story of him and her is a complicated labyrinth neither of them would fully grasp, and it would be a completely different tale depending on whose side you told it from, and they both have bastions of ice hidden inside their hearts that neither fully breached until that final night on Darillium, but even then she knows a simple, universal language by which to make him understand, and exchange what can be exchanged within the confines placed by the tangle of their time lines, the most primal and ancient ways to speak without speaking , for she's a sensual creature, a being caught in the experience of the present moment – But at the same time, she's not the heart-driven fairytale creature that her mother was, a tainted criminal rather than a mischievous, misbehaving girl, she was a cold hard realist broken by the hardness of the world, and as such, she seemed to belong in the dark broken world he wanders in – before finding out where she came from, he worried not for one moment about pulling her in to deep when she seemed already wasted, and he knew for a fact where her path would lead to. He can't imagine her having been innocent, and in fact he would learn that her brokenness precedes her elegance, that her wisdom and independence came after her corruption, and he saw her that way, young stormy thing of raw impulses, that cared not where she had come from or where she would be going, and he had to hold in both his disgust and a darkened kind of paradoxical desire out of love for the person he had seen and would see her become, when she would grow into that once whimsical femme-fatale act when experience and understanding would temper it with a kind of bitter melancholy.
It's not shallowness, in any way, but the way she's wired to perceive the world, to take it all in and fill herself up with it, with all of the pleasure, all of the thrills, all the sensations of pretty things, all the smells and tastes and sounds of the earth – He can't possibly understand it, not this rationalizing, categorizing, abstract sort of being that he is, not him who lives through concepts and equations and far-away bird's eye views, but he can love the idea of it, he can feel fascination toward all the shooting and destructing and stealing that he cannot approve of, the way he's admired the brilliance of many an abomination, and he's still flesh and blood enough for her arms to take hold of him, for the slow rejoicing of her lips to linger, and that way, they make ends meet – and almost irresistibly, he finds himself pulled into her sphere, into those wild waters whose mastery he's still so unversed in after all this time, in all ways overtaken and leaving himself to her lead.
On their first few encounters, he resisted the pain that he knew lay before him, and didn't trust her, besides, not liking the loss of control that their precarious situation had forced on him – He was used to being the keeper of secrets, the one who knows most in the room, and now he knew he was moving toward heartbreak, but could not yet fathom the outlines of how it would happen, and to give in to her was to give in to both of their fates... but yet, despite himself, he's found himself participating, beginning to return her teasing, flirting right back, responding to her touch, not even bothering any more to fight down the pangs of fondness evoked by her sight, and let himself plunge into the sort of abyss he hadn't though he was capable of slipping into, and almost didn't know how to move through, the kind of love that didn't have to make sense, because it took place in the spheres of physical, sensual gut-feeling rather than the intellectual, the kind of person he didn't have to fully approve of because he just understood and could know her through his fingertips, and be certain of her much-tested loyalty without needing to understand in full.
In the midst of all their complications, him and her boiled down to a sacred simplicity in the end, a simple natural intimacy between man and woman, but also, the simple caring between husband and wife, between pieces of a family struggling together through adversity, being there for each other through the hard days that were to come even when, or especially when they were at least partially self-inflicted, the simple, natural love of someone who could roll her eyes at his follies, rage at his faults and still love him all the same, the sort of most obvious devotion that didn't ask how or why.
Him and her was just something that made sense from day to day, in those few scattered days interspersed into both their stories, in the immediate instants it was happening, fighting back to back, running through catacombs side by side, chasing adventure through the veins of history from one moment to the next, a love between an adventurer archeologist and the legendary adventurer she'd come to research, a love between two equal enigmas, natural counterparts, a love between two chaotic rebels that no force could hold, the union betweem two infamous beings that could strike fear into stones, a love between two exquisitely crafted larger-than-life costumes of aura that fit together so glamorously, in great escapes and impressive moments, those moments they stopped themselves to marvel at each other's magnificence.