Cinis Cineris
by lawless
September 2063
Cairo
Her grandson says that she has a visitor. He does not tell her the name for he does not know her. Lauren has never spoken of her. She has never spoken of the past at all, choosing instead to live for every moment, never staying in one place for too long; nearly defeating the impossibility of perpetual motion.
Until Egypt.
Though it is less a choice, more circumstance. (The strain of her anguish follows her even here.) But she is old now and she is tired. Her body is confined to that white bed. In this white room with a single narrow window, she thinks about her life before and wonders if things could have been different. For years she lived in agony, and then she didn't anymore. Yet, she has no recollection of healing; she experiences it only as a loss of memory, a hollowed out space where her presence used to be.
"Nana?" Dark brown eyes bear down on her questioningly, worriedly. "Are you awake?"
Lauren stirred from her hospital bed and obliged him with a smile. "Yes, Ethan."
"Did you hear me?" Her grandson asks. "You have a visitor. A young woman. She won't say her name but she says you know her."
A vague sense of uneasiness pours over her brain, seeping through her throat to settle sullenly around her heart. For a moment, she almost calls him back but Ethan is already at the door, opening it to allow the person inside. Lauren's eyes hone in on the achingly familiar figure standing there.
Her hair is shorter than when Lauren saw her last (god, how long has it been? twenty? thirty years?) and she is wearing different clothes. The well-cut suit gives off the image of a powerful woman – a queen though she has forsaken that title a long time ago. Her eyes are dark and almost black and as they take in Lauren, they seem to suck the light from the room.
She is beautiful. God, she's forgotten how beautiful. The kind of beauty that shatters hearts with a look, a glance, a smile.
"Lauren?"
Her voice strikes her as a knife and Lauren wonders if she is bleeding internally.
"Go ahead," Ethan tells her.
The succubus turns to give him a slow, silky smile. Her cast of face changes under the young man's scrutiny. She looks girlish, almost sweet, her dark, wavy hair framing her cheeks. Lauren observes Ethan's fascination without blame. After all, it is succubi nature to habituate and to literally become that which tempts people to think them irresistible.
"I'll be outside if you need me," Ethan finally says to Lauren before he leaves, taking one last look at the dark woman, closing the door behind him.
Alone now, Bo crosses the room to Lauren's bedside. Her tread is quiet as a prowling cat's, her eyes shadowed and hooded. As she draws closer, Lauren pulls the sheets a little higher to cover her breasts. Dry and flat as they are, she does not wish to display them under the thin hospital gown.
"Lauren," she says her name like a caress, her gaze searching. "Are you in much pain?" Bo doesn't wait for an invitation as she pulls up a chair and sits, taking Lauren's hand in her own.
Her touch is as she remembers it.
Lauren stares at her who haunts her dreams even now. In the brittle hollow of her ribcage, she senses something stutter to a stop then start again. Lauren doesn't realize she hasn't spoken a word until Bo gently prompts:
"Lauren, won't you speak to me?"
"Bo," Lauren sighs her name instead, "what are you doing here?"
"Hale told me."
Lauren closes her eyes and breathes. The siren, her old friend – though she was the only one old in that equation. The corners of her lips curve up at the thought. Lauren may have eschewed the fae from her life but it doesn't mean they have stopped watching her, tracking her every move, forever alert to the possibility of what she may do – what she could still do.
"You should've called for me sooner," Lauren hears Bo say. The doctor's eyelids flutter open and her gaze rests on the succubus' face. "I would've come," Bo says with familiar conviction.
Lauren's lips curve in a bitter smile. Even now after all these years, after countless failures, disappointments and heartbreaks – Lauren has lost count how many times she'd had her heart broken in all the years she'd known and loved the succubus – Bo still sounds so certain.
("…you belong with me," she said with the fierceness of a child. It was terrible seeing her like this – all sadness and longing. And passion so strong it shattered Lauren's resolve. For a moment, Lauren doubted herself and the choice she made. She thought, if she let her – if she stayed – she would break her heart so thoroughly, there would be nothing left to salvage. So she did the only thing she could: she wrenched her heart out and sent her away.)
"I didn't want you to see me like this." Lauren unconsciously touches the thin wisps of her hair with her fingers.
"You're beautiful." Bo does not see her as she is, an old woman whose body has shriveled and whose organs are failing her one by one. She sees the young doctor, brilliant and full of heart, telling her that she did not have a defect and she needed no fixing. She sees herself touch her, stroke her hands, feel her throbbing response beneath the current of consciousness that vaguely unsettled.
('Do you want me to stop?' She half-whispers in a tone that promises countless pleasurable things to come…if she only succumbed. 'No,' she whispers back, delirious, half in love and already completely doomed.)
Sixty years ago. Perhaps more. Lauren supposes Bo's memory of that first meeting must be more vivid than hers.
"I remember," Bo says as though reading her mind. "I remember everything." She leans forward, her bangs falling and brushing her forehead, her eyes dark and somber. "I can recall it to you, if you wish."
A stab of longing lanced through Lauren's heart.
Bo sits on the bed and touches her face. "Are you in much pain?" She asks again, brows furrowed.
After swallowing the lump in her throat, Lauren replies, "It's painful to see you as you are now. I'm looking at the past."
Bo takes her gnarled hand and puts the palm against her cheek. "Feel me. Am I not real?" She asks in earnest. "I'm not the past, Lauren. I'm here. Though you send me away, I will always be here."
"Yes," Lauren answers, dropping her hand to her side. "Such is your reality, Bo." She makes a small gesture. "This is mine."
"It doesn't have to be." There is a tremble in her voice. "Your youth, beauty and spirit. It lives in me. I can bring it back. And once again make you mine…."
Lauren smiles. "And how many times will you break my heart this time? Into how many pieces?"
Bo rears back, lip lifting in a snarl of surprised anger, high nostrils flaring, a hint of blue glowing beneath the dark of her irises. For a moment, Lauren sees her as the dark queen, the cruel, ancient fiend with the monomaniacal desire to subjugate. She wants to flee, to scream: this is the monster that scarred her soul and blighted their love.
But then Bo catches herself and the blue glow is gone, replaced by tears that refuse to be shed. "I don't think I can bear it." Her hands tremble, as do her lips.
"You know it has to be like this."
"I loved you," Bo says with a fierceness borne out of desperation. "I love you still. I will always love you."
Lauren closes her eyes. She sees her as she was – as she is.
(Under the harsh, white light of the lab, Lauren looked at the woman who sat naked on the examination table in front of her.
Her eyes were half-closed, watching the doctor beneath dark lashes that brushed lovely, high cheeks. Dark eyes, dark hair, there was something exotic about her look and yet so ordinary. She was every girl she'd met before but more – so much more. She looked languid but at the same time throbbing with a current of consciousness that vaguely unsettled. Her face was fiercely dark yet strangely alight. She seemed surrounded by miasma so like pleasure, painful and acute, that Lauren felt a curious tickling in her stomach. It was an almost hurtful sensation, piercing through her skin, slicing through muscle and the fragile bones through her sternum to rest in her heart.
Save her, she thought, sensing without seeing the sadness and loss in the lines of that stunning face.)
"…I've borne the pain for as long as I could."
When Ethan returns a few hours later, the succubus has her face buried in the pillow beside Lauren. The room fills with the sound of weeping.
Once, she had a great love. But she is married to death.
END
edited to add:
AN: Standard disclaimers apply. Thanks to my beta reader, Badge825, who fixed my grammar and helped keep this vignette focused.