Author's Note: Ha! The first Zoe/Nico fic on the archive! I can't believe there aren't a million shippers for this couple-I thought "forbidden love" and "love-hate relationships" were in? But that's not why I like these two- I like their dark, arrogant, sinister-like characters, and I think they'd work well together, if they had the right circumstances. I'll write something that's not a one shot about this couple...someday.
An Embarrassing Update: It's been pointed out to me that I have some format issues. I swear it was all fine when I published but, eh. Fixed. For any other curious readers, all the quotes are mine. Tense change indicates eternal versus at-that-time emotions, in that contemporary artsy writing way that so many of us...hate.
Deceptionate Gleamings
by Skadi*IdiosyncraticInk
-All of us are waiting, but some of us are finished-
It was a most unholy of couples, everyone agreed as they gossiped over coffee and Budlight in the Big House, some cigars waving here and there (they had come back in to fashion to the great approval of some and the great despair of others.) Really, someone should do something. It's not as if they're completely out of control. In fact, they're are those who have a quite a lot of influence over them! We love them to bits but this won't make them happy in the future years to come (which are bound to come.) We need them to be happy. Nothing good can come of this.
They would say all of this in that sort of monotonous grown-up way they had learned from the adults at their offices, switching eyebrows on the face in a most aesthetically disapproving way, looking out the window onto the peeling white paint porch, past the yellow hued grass hills with wind rattling along bloody colored leaves, to where the two of them were-well, they weren't quite sure what they were doing, but some of the cruder of them had begun to make jokes, which of course set off the feminists and things went downhill from there.
The two of them were in fact discussing the rest of them, plenty of sighs and murmured disprovals knotted into the subject, gently touching each other, fleetingly, in way of reassurance, only proving to worry their doctors more at their heart rate when they were due to show up in October. (But they never do show up, because they aren't ones to be ordered to do anything.)
Nothing good would ever come of anything, they agreed, so what was the problem with their good-for-nothing relationship? (They refrain from using any other word to describe the-kissing hugging touching brushing loving kissing kissing breathing panting kissing-because they are shy people, if temperamental people.)
The girl smiled, full effect, dark humor sliding up to her eyes, bright with the wicked spite and immodest vanity in her nature. Before she had been beautiful, and she still was, but without her princess circlet, her sly intelligence and elegant grace were nulled, leaving only her thrashing power and self-justified pride and contrary arrogance and wild, savage hunting will. (And also the pretty shine of innocence.)
Nico traced her lips, slightly too plump and a little too dark, then felt the bone beneath her cheek.
We hated each other in the start, and we broke that well enough, he whispered, feeling the line of her thick eyebrow. Who's to say we can't break anything else?
The girl laughed-a sound shot with biting wit and scornful defiance and the thrill of running past-and kissed him, a quick kiss, a breathy kiss, a kiss laced with something bronze and something immortal and something impossible. (Does she always have that affect on him? us the spectators wonder, and occasionally one of us will add, And is it good for him?)
Of course, she agreed. Let's start with breaking their doubts.
They looked up to the Big House, the lights on in the grown-ups parlor, their eyes watching them, the music soft and measured, the glasses proper serving size, shoes off to prevent spotting the rug.
They won't understand, he said. They've grown up backwards.
The grey sky broke open, mess and things falling loose and cold.
Nico, she said. Let's run in the rain.
It's raining and it's hot and when they run it's to wrestle time before it starts and takes their frantic, panicked love away.
-Sometimes you feel queer when you look at an old person, because they are you and they've lived so long there's nowhere to go but the beginning.-
She explains things to him, like stars and flowers and gems. He never quite understood their beauty or their shimmer, but now he does and can't help but stop when their light-filled reflections catch him in the eye and wobble in their innocent, ephemeral existence. When he asks how how she knows these things-the sparkles and the twinkles and the glitters-she just presses her mouth up against his in a kiss that gleams.
It's a deceptionate gleaming (and he knows there are more of them between her and him and her.)
-Her favorite thing to break is rules, though she breaks many other things-
He pulled her to him and kissed her, mouth opening and arms yanking and fingers pressing with quick, desperate urgency. She made a small sound, a gasp maybe, a little intake of breath (but she's not the kind to gasp, because it sounds broken and hollow and she will not be broken), then dug her nails into his arms, blood burning, spice burning up their skin as she kissed him back, bodies crushed together and bones shivering and mouths hot against skin.
They sprang apart as fast as if someone had snapped a firecracker, faces flushed and lips red and each other's taste lingering on like some sort of perverse, stolen treasure. They stood. They waited for someone to tell them off or shake their heads with disapproval or tell them they should be ashamed of themselves for the freak of love heating up their stomachs.
When no such shaming came, they seized each other again, holds fierce and kiss hasty and skin burning hot.
-He says Don't touch me, and he's thinking, Don't stop. Don't ever stop.-
The hand was cool, and he knew that the fingers would be slim and the knuckles slightly too large and the nails rounded and polished with a sort of pinkish glimmer. He knew that a few inches up the bony wrist there would be the cuff of a grey shirt, wrinkled at the elbow, stretched at the bicep, sliding up her shoulder and scooping below the jutting collarbone. He knew that by the way the fingertips pressed and the palm hovered and the wrist was stretched that she was trying (and when she tries, she tries viciously) to keep him in place, to hold him down (what he does not know is that she's let one go before, and they flew ahead of her, far out of reach.)
You know, he said, let's go back. I'm tired.
She stopped her counting and turned her head to look at him, the hotel lobby light looking odd on her hair, gold gleaming along the viscously tight braid, threading it a color he never expected on her, highlighting her rigid poise and her strung sinew. (And gold does look good on her, but telling her so might break her heart closer to insanity that he would like.)
You want to go back, she repeated slowly, and her eyes glimmered without the spark. It was a glimpse at the fuel that fired the wild he came to love in her, and it was dark and thick and monstrous and made him want to seize her, kiss every doubt out of her body, but he knew it wouldn't work, no, it would never work. (Because some things are too deep to be healed, and right now love is the worst thing for her.)
Yeah, he said. I want to go back.
Nico, she said softly (she does not breathe or whisper or anything like it, because that's weak and she is anything but), touching both hands to his neck as he stood.
Let's go, he said, and took her hands from him.
But as he watched her walk away to cancel their reservation, back stiff, all posture and strong lean muscle and proud chin and flaring beauty, he wanted desperately to heal her, have her as the first man had her. (But he can only heal with love and right now love is the worst thing for her.)
-Occasionally one looks death in the face and sighs and says, You took too long-
The first time they sleep together (we didn't make love, she says, that's ridiculous. We didn't lie together or go to bed with each other or have sex. We had sexual intercourse and if you don't have the guts to say it, say we fucked) it's when they're on the run again and it's dangerous and it's crazy and it's sudden and they're much too young and they just have to go by instinct.
Nico wakes up thinking, I just deflowered a virgin, and for some reason he doesn't feel too guilty.
She wakes up and thinks, What have I done?
She opens her eyes, and sees the dew glinting coldly back at her.
-Interestingly enough, we all find the knife breathtakingly beautiful-
She has always been the fiercer one, the one who doesn't just steam up when they say-she's controlling he's weak she's seducing he's weak she's evil he's innocent she's beautiful he's lustful-she goes out there and makes some injuries to be remembered.
He has always been the one to reassure her afterward, and the only reason this works (because she is not one to be reassured, not at all, because she likes her truths raw and mean and cruel) is because it's the damn truth when Nico whispers in her ear that he loves her, he loves her, he'll never stop loving her.
(Oddly enough this makes her feel guilty, but she doesn't know why and she certainly never will.)
-But it's true that we laugh at the grotesque clown and not with him-
But it is the truth, and they know it. He will always be the one who murmurs adorations in her ear, even though he could easily break her with a twitch of the heart. She will always be the one who dances, wordlessly, even though she could easily whisper back I love you too.
And the thing is, they're both so full of that wickedness-she with her spite and her arrogance and pride, he with his doubts and hatred and anger-that when they think on their unlikely relationship, they wonder how they of all people could possibly have gotten so deliciously tangled up in this terribly improbable event.
That they, of everyone, could ever find someone they liked, that they could care for, not to mention love (with the sort of rabid passion and fiery devotion and breathless paralysis that's unheard of in most circles), is unthinkable-that they could find someone who felt the same way back-well. The chances are out of a million, a trillion.
It is, quite frankly, impossible.
But they do. (So what, they broke the rules? They've broken much more than rules before.)
They don't know how it's possible they love each other, but they do, gods, they do.
(It's almost morbidly that Nico watches her cry, tears shining on her face.)
-All of us have homes; are all of us welcome in them?-
They bought they house in September, right before Nico's twenty-first birthday, so that she could teach him all about the horrible things you could do while wasted without risking the rest of the population's mental health as well.
It was odd for her to step inside and think, I'm home.
It's not home. (Because home smells of jasmine flowers and silver dust in the air and breathy song burned in candle flame against the apple tree.)
But Nico wrapped his arms around her and whispered again, I love you, and she considered that she could deal with not having a home. He was a good replacement.
The hall light flickered and shined.
-Things get broken; things stay broken-
She sinks deeper into death, gold sparkling in her vision. (She never forgot the gleamings.)
-I can't heal you; and you can't heal me: we'll have to heal each other-
She's waiting in line to be judged, straighter and less weary than most (even in death she's proud and arrogant, and somehow it's beautiful among the broken), but she knows-I'm going straight to hell.
He cuts the line and slips his hand in hers, doesn't look at her. He hasn't been broken, not yet, but she has snapped him before and she'll snap him again and he won't look at her eyes until he knows how they will gleam. (Yes, he'll say it now-he's frightened.)
"Nico?" she says.
He waits.
"Gods," she says, and runs a hand through her hair. "I love you so damn much."