ENTRY FOR 'THE SOFTER SIDE OF VILLAINY' CONTEST
TITLE: The Edge of Crimson
SUMMARY: As with all things, the love affair commences with a game.
PAIRING: Didyme/ Marcus
WORD COUNT: 3478, according to MSWord
RATING: M for violence and sexuality
DISCLAIMER: None of the characters presented in this story belong to the me. They are the property of Stephenie Meyer, her publishers and Summit Entertainment. No copyright infringement is intended within this fan-created work.
AUTHOR'S NOTE: I extend my thanks to Idylchild, who inadvertently inspired this fic by mentioning decapitation one time too many.
The night unravels in inky skeins and the black pulse of fever-dreams. Heat tints the air itself crimson while scorching summer gouges long-nailed fingertips into Velathri's gloom long after moonrise. There is no comfort to be sought in this silence, drawn and pinned, Marcus thinks, and lets his head rest against stone. Granite turns to chalky mist beneath his hands, and he wonders why the iron-reined discipline of a diplomat has forsaken him so readily.
Somewhere nearby, a girl shrieks as death blossoms from within, grotesque in its grace. Her brother's words are a soothing susurrus, the whirling of compassionate wings as he cradles her in lifeless arms.
Perhaps, if Marcus' roiling thoughts seek honesty's harbours, he will confess that it is only this that torments him, the agony of the exquisite creature whom Aro calls his sister. Her beauty is a painful thing, so breathlessly elegant that he fears to touch her, certain that hairline fractures will splinter her skin asunder.
"You have lost your mind," his snow-haired brother says, words carrying winter's bite.
"More than usual, Cai?" Marcus questions, endeavouring to keep his speech light, fractured by glass-shard confusion.
"Do you not understand? Aro may call you brother, but his affection for you is a mere shadow of his love for his sister." The warning is well-reasoned, a prickly reminder that Didyme is an ideal in her sibling's eyes, a precious, shell-delicate memento of a childhood consigned to the mists of memory.
"I fail to grasp the reason behind your sudden interest in my affairs," Marcus murmurs, curious.
"He will not readily give you his consent to court her. She is his treasure, and you, old friend, are only his right hand," Caius says, and for once, he veers from the course of bluntness into the still waters of tact. Nonetheless, his meaning is carved in sharp strokes; Aro will deem Marcus unworthy.
"You are correct, I suppose," he concedes, though his tactician's mind seeks honeyed phrases and linguistic arabesques to alter circumstance in his favour.
"Such grudging agreement," Caius smirks. "I do not believe that you will let the matter rest."
"Perhaps not."
"I wish you luck, then," he grins, before tangling into the shadows of a summer midnight, drunk with the mad glory of a shivering world unfurled before him.
[-]
"Ah, Marcus, walk with me a while." Aro is cheerful, invasively so, tugging Marcus by the sleeve until their strides are matched.
"Of course, brother."
"Tell me, have you spoken with Didyme?" Aro's curiosity shimmers between them, but there is an evaluation waiting in the wings, an exchange of opinions that will be forced through touch if Marcus refrains from truthfulness.
"Some pleasantries were exchanged," he says carelessly, as though covetousness and desire had not fought a barbed battle behind his eyes every time his gaze fell upon the fawn-eyed woman in question.
"And, your opinion?"
"Your sister is more intelligent and engaging than you are, I'm afraid," Marcus teases, certain that Aro's fraternal pride will be soothed by levity.
"So I have been told. Perhaps I was being imprecise—what do you think of her gift?"
Condemnation's bite is not quite erased from Aro's tone, and he senses the rootless displeasure in his companion's mind, tossed and unsteady as driftwood. Didyme, then, is a disappointment with her tentative talent that is only her temperament glorified.
Marcus bites a smirk away, and the gesture is obscenely triumphant. "Its scope is limited, perhaps," he concedes, wondering where to find stronger words, to sunder Aro from his sister.
"Indeed, I must admit that it leaves my expectations unfulfilled," the man at his side muses, affecting a penitent tone, as though such a confession has slipped unbidden from his lips, after nights of rumination turned restless.
"Contented men are not warriors, and dividing loyalty between two siblings cannot be wise, nor an even foundation for a coven," Marcus says, silver-tongued and perfectly, kindly soothing.
"Precisely. Nonetheless, it is such a pleasure to have little Didyme by my side."
Aro's bond to his sister frays, unbraids, loosens into curled strands, and Marcus stands victorious. It will be so much easier, he is certain, to obtain the love of a woman fallen from favour, relegated to the cobwebs and catacombs of her brother's affections.
[-]
Marcus watches Didyme.
His gaze darts over her skin, looping under it in hasty whipstitches and revealing the bloodless hollows beneath, until Didyme senses herself not merely desired, but devoured. He wants her, she notes with distant dispassion, so terribly that longing steals the somnambulant serenity of his nights from him, and with time, his mind will follow.
Perhaps he is a blessing, this too-tall, jet-haired peacemaker who carries his soul in cupped hands, she decides. Her brother, a stranger who shares her laugh, is distant of late and his pale lieutenant has little interest in her; she is not foolish enough to believe in an easy eternity without a reverent guardian.
When Marcus speaks to her, words gentle as water dancing in silvery strokes over her flesh, she observes him through the butterfly crescents of lowered lashes. He offers to teach her how to feed, to slaughter and elude mortal eyes; her smile turns faceted, distorting the light into tessellations.
[-]
In the blackness, two figures gather in a butterfly knot. Ebony cloaks them, winding hair creeping from cowls and whipping like ribbons, while obsidian eyes seek, starving and certain.
"What has your brother taught you?" Marcus asks, knowing that the answer will reveal idleness, a shocking indifference to granite-grave laws on Aro's part.
"How to sip blood from a goblet." Didyme's eyes sparkle with the smile of a cherished sister who is accustomed only to coddling at the tender hands of her elders, never carelessness.
"An unquestionably epic feat," he says, and wonders how this sweet girl with shoulders like wings will respond to the barbs that have always speckled his speech, the roughness of scrapes and scars.
Her eyebrows bow, sardonic lines upon porcelain features. "What wrong have you committed to be appointed my tutor?"
"I volunteered," he admits, and hopes that she can read nothing of infatuation, only duty and perhaps casual kindness, the sort easily tossed towards a guest, in those words.
"How noble." Sun-speckled laughter shadows her words, gloriously, luminously distorting. "Teach me."
The demand is frightfully authoritative, Aro rendered in miniature and softness, and Marcus cannot help but obey. "It is easiest to bite here," he explains, and allows cool fingers to trace a tight circle upon the stone of her throat, the blue pooling beneath her ear. Such intimacy is lightning, the first touch he has exchanged with an immortal woman with neither condemnation nor sightless lust marking his vision with its filthy fingertips. "You will not need to tear through heavy muscle and the blood will flood the wound with the heart's pulse."
"May I?" she asks, appearing by his side on a cat's padding feet. Marcus does not understand what it is that she wishes to do, but agreement follows any of her requests, undeniable as moonrise.
She stands on tip-toe and lunges for his neck, her teeth closing some infinitesimal distance from the vein that carried his lifeblood years ago. "Caught you," she declares, satisfied, and he agrees in a dozen ways.
Her first hunt becomes a blazing, blistering thing, too feral for a reputation of gentleness to remain. As bodies are casually tossed upon stone, shattering bones and denying discovery, Marcus grins and thinks that it will be far easier than he fancied to forge and temper Didyme into something exquisite and foreign, a creature entirely beyond the scope of Aro's greedy grasp.
[-]
Marcus finds that camaraderie's chord is struck readily between Didyme and himself. She is bright as her brother, eternally curious but kinder, perhaps. She devours knowledge as readily as blood, but there is no shade of undue experimentation in her quest for comprehension. Occasionally, he must acknowledge that his besotted mind crafts a clumsy, too-vivid mosaic of her virtue, that she watches him with eyes like those of a fox in winter.
It has been far too easy to ignore such unsettling truths of late.
As the march of full moons turns into a year, Marcus realizes that he has turned into something obedient, a toy and a pet beneath Didyme's fingers. Such a thing must be concealed, he reasons, until the same fate can be visited upon her.
[-]
Nightfall is exquisitely languorous at summer's beginning, a stretching, somnolent thing that bathes the open sky in wounded violet. The shadows linger, tapering and slender, and the quiet mortals of the hills forget that their land is haunted by creatures who favour the black. Upon evenings such as these, hunting becomes simple, a mere search for wayward humans who are too far from their homes for screams to resonate, and Marcus delights in this.
"You have been feeding at my side for nearly a year now," Didyme remarks, turning earnest eyes to her companion. His infatuation has sparked a grander inferno, or perhaps the blame can be placed upon her golden gift. Nonetheless, she considers herself victorious in this one-sided game of her own devising.
"Do you dislike my company?" he wonders, something raw and stumbling entering his tone.
An immortal who does not fear to bare his sentiments with adolescent innocence is a rarity, and Didyme cannot help but smile.
"I was merely trying to determine whether I was a burden to you. Forgive me the clumsiness of the gesture," she says, knowing how pretty her mouth is when set in an apologetic bow.
Marcus' smile is gentle, and she allows her attention to fall upon different matters.
"Wait a moment," she says, listening. The grin that follows is luminous, and she tangles her fingers through his. A certain awkward inelegance marks their shared gait, but the journey is brief enough to excuse it.
Didyme pursues the tell-tale pulse of two mortals who have wandered amongst the trees, lovers seeking solitude and shadows. The young, fawn-eyed creatures are so blissfully caught in one another that a hissing of leaves and steps lighter than breath elude their hearing entirely. Strewn scraps are all that remains of their garments, pooled on the ground beneath the girl's flimsy spine, drawn and arching at the pull of her lover's ministrations.
It is a delicious choice of victims, Marcus thinks, for the blood of the lustful is heavier, more pleasing than that of the fearful, the enraged, the lying.
At his side, little Didyme watches with aquiline anticipation until the boy's hips falter in rhythm and edges of shrieks mar his partner's mewling. Only then does she unfurl herself from the night and slip into the stars' corpse-light, unnoticeable until small hands are at the boy's throat. He is parted from his lover with the needy dampness of sweat-slicked skin, and then a vampire's lips whisper something into the cup of his throat.
Didyme's bone-brittle fingers tangle in earthen hair, dragging and exposing the struggling man's neck. When the first bite splits skin from bone with a seamstress's skill, a sigh of something akin to pleasure leaves gasping human lips before it is stolen by a scream. The delicate immortal twined beside him lets her hand tumble to his arousal in gossamer examination, before a brow is quirked at Marcus, in invitation or perhaps contest.
Marcus' vision seeps into crimson contrast, and his arms are suddenly chains around the writhing, wrathful mortal girl. Her blood and flesh carry the silken sweetness of summer; even in such a moment, he remembers to compare them to Didyme's and find them wanting. Nonetheless, because he has never been unkind to the dying, he threads cool fingers between her willowy thighs, plucking and skilled. The girl caught against him spasms madly, all distorted, marble-misted eyes and tortured gasps; he cannot tell whether the greater or smaller death rends and wrenches her asunder.
Only then, satisfied and carmine-eyed, does he glance at Didyme.
Her feeding is far from tender. Seemingly displeased with the blood's slow pooling at the throat, she has bitten deep, revealing bone and knotted, heaving sinew in near decapitation. A trail of small, butterfly bites leads to the boy's chest, where ribs are splintered and the heart revealed. The ebony-curled creature laps at spilling crimson as the pulse stills and the final paroxysms forsake the corpse beneath her. With a leonine smile, Didyme is suddenly, intricately woven in Marcus' arms.
She presses a red-rimmed mouth against his, then turns the kiss into a barbed thing, all teeth and a starving, lapping tongue. His lips taste of blood's delirium and Didyme's abandon, utterly intoxicating and so poorly judged that his diplomat's dignity chants of fraternal ties and dishonour.
Caution turns to naught when fragile hands loop beneath his cloak, the woollen weave of his tunic, and turn the fabric into ribbons. Her legs caught around his waist, Didyme plays the monster to his willing victim, teasing and tearing at his throat, while he allows lovers' nonsense to leave his lips, a hundred nights of poor poetry reduced to hissed endearments.
The press of apple-sweet breasts against his chest is torment, undeniable in its innocent seduction. Before Marcus dares to reach for the pins of her cowled robe, he allows her feet to touch the dew-damp earth and wonders.
"Are you certain, little one?" There is such exquisite fever in the kill; to confuse and succumb is only second nature to the newly born.
Didyme's eyes turn defiant. "I am not your little one." Her own hands pull her tunic aside, allowing cold light to blanch bruised-plum nipples and dark curls silver.
"Yes, you are. Little and delicate and lovely," Marcus whispers, punctuating the epithets with kisses to the wings of collarbones. There is too much of a difference in stature between them, a jarring leap between a nymph of a woman and her too-tall lover; he lowers them both to the ground. Strokes of drying crimson call to him, gloriously displayed on skin that he wishes to taste; Didyme guides his lapping tongue over her mouth, her arching chest.
As Marcus explores her nipples with aching adoration, only daring to use padding fingertips and eager lips, he sees that Didyme's hands are idle, fishbone wrists resting uneasily upon his shoulders. It is a sudden, snowy reminder that she is untouched and unschooled, except by overheard words and fumbling investigation conducted during the hunt. He tangles one of her palms in his hair and places the other upon the plane of his stomach; her feathery touch does not risk wandering lower.
Didyme's eyes darken from spilled wine to flooding ink as he drags his fingers down, bestowing tickling caresses upon her belly, the quirked angles of her hipbones, the apex of her legs.
"Please," she murmurs, uncertain what it is that she seeks and Marcus feels something terribly tender, unwelcome in this crimson-rimed game, cast a shadow upon his thoughts. Such tremulous trust is never offered readily; he watches the ribbons of her desire knot into a different weave.
"Will you assume, if only for a moment, that I know what I am doing?" he asks, seating her between his knees, spine pressed close to his chest as though she were a precious thing held together only by protective hands.
Didyme smirks, entirely her brother's sister, though she is bare and beautiful against her lover's flesh. "If the results are sufficient, perhaps."
His mouth falls to hers, and Marcus shivers as her hand cradles his cheek, seeking reassurance. A heavy palm dances over her, stroking and caressing marble in ways that promise to delight her, while long fingers dart between sticky hips.
Immediately, she turns to ice then curves, startled or perhaps betrayed by terrible want.
"More," she whispers, a cadence and a prayer as his fingertips feather and seek, setting a rhythm that alternates between the soothing and the mad. Her thighs move in symmetry with his touch, twisting and thrusting until her breath is stripped to sobs and starved mouths consume her from within. Ebony hair tumbles everywhere, her hands twining in elegant arabesques made purposeless by pleasure, and then Didyme falls, clenching around Marcus in a mirror of possession and hissing what that could be his name, or something entirely different.
She is afraid that lucid sleep has stolen her mind when she meets his gaze, for so much affection brightened with lucent joy cannot appear in circumstances as calculated, as scheming as theirs.
Nonetheless, she cuddles close for a stretching moment, made languid by contentment.
"Your turn," she announces, egalitarian, and he laughs.
"How very democratic, my Didyme. I do not think Aro would approve."
She shoves his shoulder then, and realizes that she does not know how to begin a seduction that centers around Marcus, elegantly alien between her fingers. Perhaps he senses uncertainty as a tremor weaves itself through his eerie gift, for he lays her down and drowns her with kisses that taste of copper and something darker that she cannot yet identify as his.
All she remembers then is her lover's warm weight draped over her, the bow of her legs cradling his hips, a moment of hurt that makes her whimper and then, sensation that is unimaginable, crafted in a furnace's heat with something akin to grace. There are words spoken that she cannot recall, and Marcus's spine wears a crest of scratches for some time, but all that matters in the aftermath, Didyme decides, is that her lover threaded her fingers through hers when he first entered her, and cannot seem to let go.
[-]
The night relinquishes its place to a fitful dawn, shy and slate, promising a storm to fill the thrumming lull. It is only then that some semblance of propriety returns to Didyme, a reminder that she must remain behind old stone during daylight, that her brother will fuss if she appears to disregard his edicts.
She has not expected such difficulty in disentangling herself from Marcus' embrace. Although she has told him nothing of import, and he has likewise restricted his words to simple things, the staccato of lovers' endearments and sweetness uttered only between moonrise and morning, there is some strange affinity between them, fierce and flawed.
When she rises, Didyme slips and says, "I am fond of you. More than I thought I would be."
"Should I be flattered?" Marcus chuckles, helping her swathe her shoulders in the fraying fabric of a midnight tunic.
"I am not often surprised by people," she admits, fishing for her gift's glow to conceal the moment's uncertain footing.
"If it carries any meaning, I was fond of you long before this," he says, cruelly blunt.
Silence curls around them then, and they examine the carnage night's retreat reveals.
"What do we do about this—?" Didyme asks, prodding a corpse with dainty, dancing toes, "—and where are my sandals?"
Marcus cannot help but laugh, alight with wine-mad glee. "We should build a pyre," he suggests, but neither of them have the will for anything but a gentle return to their home, indulging themselves by carving fledgling adoration upon the stark granite of beloved flesh. "Or," he amends, "we can depart now, and leave the mortals with tales of a beautiful girl who robs men of their hearts and lifeblood in the shadows."
"You omitted her lover from the narrative," she chides. "He is far too clever at attaining what he desires to remain forgotten."
"Or whom, in this case," Marcus corrects, though his granite heart is flame between brittle ribs.
"I just offered to tolerate your eccentricity, to endure Aro's inevitable wrath and flippancy is your response? I expect to see gratitude," Didyme says, an echo of rose petals scattered upon her cheeks.
"I imagine the protocol in this situation is to kiss your feet and thank the gods," Marcus grins, kneeling before her and finding the porcelain of an exposed leg with an eager mouth.
"Your grasp of the concept is more than a little misplaced."
"You will have to forgive me, my sweet," he breathes, kisses gliding up and up while she turns into an impatient cat, mewling, arched with anticipation. "When I visited Graecia with your brother, I learned nothing of medicine. My comprehension of anatomy is abysmal."
She murmurs something about his ignorance being outstripped only by his cruelty, but the words are lost to him when Didyme drapes a slender foot over his shoulder and he feathers his lips upon skin and silk to make her shiver.
Minutes later, she tumbles into his arms, soft and silent as snow. There is much that needs to be said, Marcus thinks, but sleepy, silver caresses remind him that he much prefers this peace.