All's Hell That Ends Well
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Author's Notes: This was written prior to Burning Tides and relies on Graves and Twisted Fate's old lore.
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In the Shadow Isles, there was no square inch of land that didn't hold someone's remains. Yet they still had graveyards. This one was on the far side of the islands, atop a cliff buffeted by storms throughout the year. In the winter, it was almost impossible to reach, even by the dead. In the summer, no one wanted to reach it.
That was just the way Evelynn liked it.
Twisted Fate's body lay before a marker so old barely a nub of stone remained. His hat covered his face, obscuring how badly the shotgun blast had torn into him. His left hand was missing - Graves had taken the hand with the cards as proof of his kill. She'd let him keep it. If anyone in the League discovered that she'd taken Twisted Fate's body... She didn't care what they thought, but someone (Mordekaiser) might have stopped her.
Fate would have to find a way to work around his missing hand when he came back.
Evelynn bet her life he'd come back. What did he have to lose?
Everything she could do was done. She had his body, she had the power and the knowledge to request his return. She even had the favor of the cold darkness to come back from making that request. But she couldn't bring him out, not if she wanted him to be himself and not her puppet.
Twisted Fate would have to climb out of the grave himself.
Evelynn shuffled his cards while she waited. It gave her something to do with her hands, and she thought his cards would give her a better idea when he was coming back than his body would. Twisted Fate's symbol was his cards, and in the Shadow Isles, symbols were everything. (Which was why Evelynn had no symbol and left her grave unmarked. Let the others bend to his will. There was only one person she allowed to have any hold on her.)
After years in Valoran, the silence of the graveyard was eerie. The dead here rested too heavily to rise as wraiths, and the dirges of the ghost-cicadas wouldn't begin for hours yet. There was only the sound of shuffling cards and the distant cry of sea gulls. It was easy to let her mind drift and her spirit sink into the earth... It had been so long since she'd truly rested. How many hundreds of years since she clawed her way free of her coffin?
Twisted Fate's cards died in her hands.
The sensation jolted through her, yanking her back from the temptation of the grave. The cards withered and crumbled, then burned. Color and paper were consumed, but shape and spirit held. A ghost of a card deck coalesced in her hands.
She glanced up sharply - Twisted Fate's corpse hadn't moved.
Evelynn watched for a long while, and the cards flickered in her hand, but his body didn't move.
Damn.
When she had come back, she'd made for her corpse with single-minded intensity. She'd had one goal, and she'd needed her body for that. She hadn't wasted time wandering in the shadows between life and death. Hecarim had admitted a similar experience to her.
She'd needed her body. Twisted Fate didn't think he did - and he'd find out too late he was wrong.
In the Shadow Isles, wandering spirits were prey.
Evelynn would have to give him a reason to need his body.
She tucked his cards into her brassiere then laid down beside his corpse. She pressed against him, her eyes fluttering shut as she remembered - the insolent smile when he teleported away from her killing blow; the charming smile when he asked her to dinner after the match; the furrows she'd raked in his back their first time, and the bruises he left on her hips; the feel of his heartbeat as he taught her how to cheat at cards; laughing together at a successful hunt; him foolishly drawing the entire enemy team off after she broke an ankle in the match (as if getting killed wouldn't have solved that problem much faster than hobbling someplace safe enough to cast a recall spell); the way he screamed in pleasure, the way he begged for more pain; his oh-so delicious tears when she told him it was over.
"Fate," she husked in his ear. "Come here."
"Evelynn?" His voice sounded far away, drifting in through a crack in the door of a tomb.
She slid her fingers down his chest, never minding the gore. "Haven't you missed me?"
There was a long pause. But the hair on the back of her neck stood up.
Her hand slid down further to cup him.
A shudder ran through his body. Corpse-light flickered along the stump of his left arm, outlining where flesh and bone should have been.
"I've missed you," she whispered in his ear.
"You're fucking with me, aren't you?" Corpse-light burned away into a spectral hand.
Evelynn smiled lazily. "If I was fucking with you, Fate, you wouldn't have to ask."
Twisted Fate took his hat off his face and turned to glare at her. "Don't tease me."
A corner of her mouth lifted to expose a flash of teeth. Did her cardshark think she'd gone to all this trouble out of the goodness of her heart? If he did, he had another think coming.
Evelynn raised her leg with the effortless grace her long-dead dance-masters had taught her, drawing his eyes up and away from her face. Then, faster than he could react, she laid it across him and rolled to straddle his hips. His eyes widened, and the ghostly cards pulsed against her breast. "This isn't teasing."
His hand curved around her ass, and she felt him respond to her, saw the light in his eyes intensify. She rolled her hips, making him gasp, and leaned down to gently bite his lower lip. It quickly turned into a kiss, all lips and teeth and the desperate hunger for a semblance of life. A shock of cold across her back made her jerk. Twisted Fate groaned and tightened the grip of his spectral arm, holding her against him.
Evelynn wriggled against him, enjoying the way he groaned and sucked in his breath. In revenge, he began to trace designs on the leather covering her ass, leaving trails of sensation that made her bite and hiss.
"If this isn't teasing, what is it?"
"You have to ask?" She laughed, and he laughed with her. His hand slid up her back, leaving a trail of ice, and she dipped her head to kiss him again- Only to snarl as he tangled a hand in her hair and yanked her head back.
"What's the catch?" Fate demanded.
Evelynn smiled sweetly. "You're pulling my hair."
He eased his hand from her hair and rubbed her neck. He never enjoyed the way she made him scream when she was unhappy.
"What's the catch?" he repeated. "You've been telling me it's over for years, Evelynn. What's changed, and what do you want?"
"Nothing." Her nails dug into his arms. "Everything. But there's no catch. You've already paid."
"The hell?"
Evelynn leaned down, brushing her lips from the corner of his mouth to his ear. "Graves killed you."
Fury blazed in Twisted Fate, pupils flipping to spades, teeth bared to tear out a throat. The cards pressed against her skin pulsed hot and black. It was more rage than he'd ever shown in life towards his ex-partner. But no one living could hate like the restless dead. "He didn't. I don't feel dead."
"You do." She sucked on his earlobe. "You just don't know what feeling dead means in the Shadow Isles."
"Damn it, Eve, stop distracting me-" Spectral fingers slid down her spine, trying to find the clasp on her top. "-We're trying to talk here."
Not trying very hard, but her cardshark always did have more balls than brains. "You're dead, Fate, and I'm not the one who killed you." She smiled and nipped at his cheek. "You and I both know I would have if we'd stayed together."
He groaned, pupils fading from spades to hearts to black. "So you let Malcolm do it."
"You let him do it," she corrected. "You could have gone back for him after you got your magic. It'd have been a beautiful swindle."
He stilled under her, head cocking slightly. "... Huh. Guess I could have."
She laughed softly. "This is why I love you, you know. You're just as much a monster as I am."
"No one can be as much a monster as you are, darlin'." He gave her ass a squeeze, smiling like he knew where every card in the deck was.
Of course he did. They were tucked between her breast and the leather of her brassiere.
She made a pleased sound and rubbed against him, enjoying the shivery feeling as his spectral hand finally undid the clasp on her top. "Maybe. But now we'll be monsters together."
He went still again, and she almost bit him. But, for the first time since she had met him, Twisted Fate looked uncertain. Quietly, he asked, "Forever?"
"For as long as we both want," she corrected.
A cocky grin spread over his face. "Forever. An' you're wearing too damn many clothes, Evelynn."
-End-