Title: Burnt Offerings

Author: Omnicat

Spoilers & Desirable Foreknowledge: Studio Bones's Darker Than Black.

Warnings: Vaguely described sex.

Characters & Relationships: Misaki x November 11

Summary: November 11 has a better reason than most to smoke after sex. Misaki contemplates her own reasons for not immediately kicking him out of bed for it. / 1104 words

Author's Note: Enjoy!

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Burnt Offerings

A lone trickle of smoke coiled and twisted its way up to the hotel ceiling, palest gray against off-white. The motion was like a slow, disembodied dance, like a lazy stretch of limbs after a nice work-out, like a soft caress or the gentle press of a smooth body. Beautiful in a way, but most of all surreal. Much like the entire afternoon had been.

Being fiercely anti-smoking, Misaki had never been close enough to a burning cigarette for long enough to study the upward drift of the fumes – let alone from below, and less than half a bed away from the smoker. So she studied the smoke now, and the ring of glowing ash that exuded it, its glow waxing and waning at long, irregular intervals, and most of all the lips that curled around the cigarette to fuel its tiny fire. The thin sheet wrapped around her chest like his lips wrapped around that cigarette, barely a barrier, and for once, the man going by November 11 completed his remuneration without complaint.

Distasteful as she found smoking and everything associated with it, she would normally have told him to put the filthy thing out, were it not for the fact that there hadn't been any ice cubes in their drinks. When she had complained she felt like she was going to melt, it had been entirely metaphorical; about him, they weren't so sure, and neither of them was the least bit inclined to try it out.

That was the extent of her indulgence, though. Misaki felt sated and drowsy, but not so much that she would drift away into slumber. The sex had been good, but not good enough to override her professional instincts. A cop doesn't just doze off peacefully after having sex with a Contractor.

Surreal. All of it. Misaki had grown up beneath the fake sky, had been among Contractors all her working life; she had thought she'd outgrown this phase. Then again...

Her eyes drifted. With a view like that, what more did the human animal really need, when the stars aligned and the mood finally struck her?

Then again again: his complexion was pale and the way scars contrasted against his skin unfamiliar. Fair is fair, she hadn't been paying attention before. What had his skin really mattered when he'd pulled his fingers out of her no longer lukewarm drink and dragged them along her throat, the light in his eyes just strong enough to make the chill linger. But the scars were there when she looked, of course, in as great a number as she'd expected of one of his calibre, proof that he was just like she'd always known his kind to be.

But he had always liked to pelt little bits of the fake sky at her and watch her splutter and make faces, and today he had completely buried her under it with his tall, pale body, hot and cold in strange alternation.

One moment there had been the humid warmth that had been hanging over the city all week, and the heat of his flesh, flush bright beneath his skin; the next, that unexpected brush against her ribs or hipbone, the backs of his fingers on the arch of her cheek, his thumb along her clavicle, the palms of his hands around her knees. The thrill of cold, a whisper-thin layer of ice left behind on her skin by the unearthly glow in his eyes. The onslaught of contrasting sensations, the red light that outshone even the blinding rays of the sun falling across his features and tumbling through his golden hair, the mere fact that it was Jack Simon above her, inside of her – it had been like running a fever.

It was exactly like recovering from a bout of delirious fever. As she watched him now, propped up lazily against the headboard beside her, she wondered if delaying his remunation had made him feel the same way. If he had even once thought of taking it any further than a stimulating little shock and shudder.

There had been moments, flashes of thought too bright and sharp to be healthy, when she had been convinced it wasn't a man between her legs, but a thing. A grotesque puppet with features twisted into a mere semblance of humanity by the hands of some unmentionable creature from the depths of mankind's collective nightmares, that gate to hell that had swallowed the city. A Contractor; the blushing schoolgirl in her, easily flustered but staunch in her refusal to defend herself against allegations of prudishness because it was just a derogatory term for a good thing, was horrified and repulsed. Strangely enough, it was the cop in her that had waved those feelings away like so much cigarette smoke. The cop had known countless Contractors, with their endlessly gruesome and bizarre murders and the erased memories of effortless, smooth-faced deceit and seduction in those who survived.

She'd closed her eyes and kissed him back, had snorted an impatient "Obviously!" when he had thought to inform her that his hands on her ass and his erection building between them didn't mean anything. Misaki the cop was secure enough in her skills and prowess as Misaki the cop to make just another thrill of the threat of letting a Contractor nip at her jugular as he kneaded her flesh, of pulling a Contractor's member from his neatly pressed slacks and sending him sprawling on his back.

Misaki the woman had ignored both of the others and just moved with Simon; the proud, the jokester, the smooth talker. Who knew when he would next tone it all down long enough for Misaki to start appreciating the honourable in him and allow his advances without doing a disservice to her self-respect. His handsomely exotic appearance and smoothly rippling muscle were too good to ignore just because of a few stabs of context.

So every so often his hands would turn to shocking, exquisite ice and his eyes would glow with a dark fire. So he lit up a cigarette without even leaving the bed as a courtesy. It wasn't a crime for him to simply be what he was. No stars were falling that day.

It all came down to those little glowing embers, didn't it? The red light of unnatural power in his eyes, the orange-lit tip of his cigarette as he paid for it, the tiny pinprick of light that was his life-sign in the fake sky.

Misaki let him burn his offering to the unknown gods. She could think of worse things than sex and cigarette smoke.

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PSAN: Comments on older fics will always remain welcome. :)