a/n this didn't really come out how i wanted but here it is anyway
Everyone's addicted to something, in some way, shape, or form. What are the things you can't go without?
Hmm. Olive oil, obviously. Ouzo. The sea. Good, fresh honey. Baklava.
Damn.
Sophia breathes deeply into the hand propping her head up and her sea green eyes drift closed, fine dark hair tickling her shoulder as they do. What's that game where you can get to one thing in six steps, no matter what it is? Clearly, she'd just lost. She blinks her eyes open.
Or won, depending on where you're standing.
Sadiq is where he usually stands, dark hair and darker eyes both a mess, belligerent and plastering his dirty opinion on everything as always. Sophia stares at him, silent in the suffocating chaos of a disrupted meeting, her fury rising slowly but steadily. Why is he so damn loud? Would it kill him to keep his thoughts to himself, for once?
He'd like it, that she would be able to think of him from any random thought. That he'd stamped his ownership onto her, body and soul, left his fingerprints inside of her so deep that she doesn't think she'll ever be able to wash them off.
A sharp bang echoes off the dreary walls of the conference room, the ironic eggshell color reflecting the sound of a chair fallen over from someone standing up with instantaneous outrage at someone else's thinly veiled insult. Sophia is silent in between the mess of haphazard papers strewn about the mahogany table and the flickering of the projector sputtering and dying out as some blessed god of a man finally contains the verbal disaster area and calls for an early lunch.
Sophia lets her hand float down to the table, wishing she could feel the grain of the wood through the gloss. Sadiq and whoever is enabling him continue arguing out the door.
She stays quiet but she feels like shouting.
Cleo finds her there a few minutes later. She isn't wearing her headscarf today, Sophia notes as she turns to her. Cleo continues to stare, asking a question with her eyes, warm and dark like coals from a fire. Not quite patient, not quite understanding. Just there. A bystander, ever present. Taken for granted. Words become useless over time, Sophia knows, when they fail to encompass the depth of your experiences. She stands so they can go to eat lunch together.
It should have been a warning. Sophia had forgotten that Cleo could speak this unspoken language, too.
Sophia knows that if she goes back to the meeting she'll most likely fall asleep, so after lunch she goes back to her hotel room instead. Cleo will make excuses for her. Sadiq will come looking for her. She simply takes comfort from the familiarity of routine and takes a nap.
When she wakes, it's five in the evening and she is alone. No one has called her and she has not received any surprise visitors. A break in the routine.
Deviation from the norm, she muses as she drags the blankets halfway up the bed, implies an invocation for extreme behavior. One may use logic or caution, but not both at once, if at all.
Logic. From Greek: logikós, of speech or reason. Logo-, word, speech, and –ic, in the style of.
Sophia goes down to the lobby and sees several of the people from the meeting at the bar across the hall. She steps outside and spots a small bar across the street, checks the time on her phone, then wonders why she even did that, knowing that he doesn't give a damn about what time he starts heavy drinking. Or why. Or if he's even allowed to.
The room is done up in swirling shades of amber, it looks like, because the only lights on in the place seem to be coming from behind the bar. The tables and chairs lining the edge of the room are cast in shadow like flames had raced through them and left the walls covered in soot. There are two lone drinkers here and there besides the sorry broad-shouldered figure slumped on the bar.
It's amazing how his mere presence is enough to make her angry, really. A subconscious reaction, a conditioned response.
Her footsteps are soft as she approaches the bar, but the look in her eyes is dangerous enough when she stops right next to him that the bartender glances between them once and bows out gracefully to the back room.
"The fuck's his deal?" Sadiq grumbles, eyes unfocused as they follow the hasty retreat.
"The fuck's yours?" She responds calmly, taking a seat. Regardless of how she feels, her emotions hardly ever reflect in her tone—partially because of her perpetual sleepiness but also because words seldom portray her true emotions accurately.
The look on his face when he side eyes her informs her that he knows exactly how she feels. She narrows her eyes. He gives a wobbly smirk.
"Thought you didn't want me hangin' around, princess."
He lifts his glass to his lips with a slight sway and her glare loses heat like he didn't turn the tap off all the way and left it dripping.
She should hate this man, she thought as she stared. He'd taken away centuries of her life. He'd humiliated her. He'd raised her. He'd hated her. He'd loved her.
Selective memory. The last one seemed to be all he chose to remember.
"What are you drinking?" he asks, as if he'd buy her a drink.
She gives the barest of smirks. "Ouzo."
He raises a brow and looks down at the bar, sticky and paint peeling.
"Raki's better."
"Your face bleeding onto the concrete would be better."
He laughs then, taking comfort in the familiar banter the best he drunkenly can.
"Ouch. What'd I do to deserve that?"
She is silent as he takes another sip, leaning his head back and closing his eyes.
"Why do you do this to yourself?" Her voice is flat as he brings his head up to look her up and down with his dark eyes, unable to meet her own.
"Mm," he says as he stares into the bottom of his glass, swirling the liquor gently. "I deserve it, don't I?"
He looks her in the eyes then, and her gaze hardens like the tap just turned to ice. She shakes her head once.
"No. No. You don't get to be sorry. You don't get to feel bad about what you've done. You take it and own up to it. You admit that you did it. Because nothing is going to change what happened. And it's an insult to the rest of us to think you deserve forgiveness."
His dark eyes are haunted, pained. He raises a hand to her face and strokes her cheek with his thumb, just under her eye. Like always. His tan skin is too-warm and she is shivering. The rest of his hand wraps gently around her neck and fire races up her veins, strangling her like a vice. Her world narrows to his existence. She breathes. His touch burns.
The last reserves of the Greek independence well up from nowhere and somehow she wrenches herself away with enough force to bring her to her feet.
It's unnerving, really, just how much she wants him.
He trembles without her, all his muscles and strength reduced to weakness. She shakes her head again. She can't take this. She is utterly furious.
"Why do you always break on me?" she whispers. "You shatter like glass, I touch you and you come apart in my hands like the only thing that's holding you together is me! Just—stop, stop doing this to me!"
"Maybe I'm broken because you're the one that broke me." His voice is raw, pained and bleeding as he stands. "And I'm the one that broke you, too."
His hands on her arms are too hot as images of fire, grief, despair flash through her brain like gunshots. She stares at the man she'd spent decades of her life with and wonders how she'd ever lived with him, ever lived without him. She loves him and hates him but either way you slice it, she has four centuries' worth of familiarity with him, and that doesn't just go away over night.
She opens her mouth but doesn't speak, because of course there are no words for this. There never have been. That's why he kisses her instead.
He kisses her like he did the night she snuck out of his bed to join the resistance. He kisses her like he did the first time, when she was sixteen and screaming in his face that she would have her freedom or she would hang. He kisses her like he knows they both lost something when she left.
She swore she would never let him in again. But he knows her so well, and she is too hot for these clothes and this bar and this universe. Addicted. If they put their broken pieces together, they'd have enough to make one whole person from the ashes.
Caustic. Greek. From kaustikós, burning, of kaíein, to burn and –ikos, ending -ic.