Note: Betaed by Her Royal Cheesyness, without whose efforts the following drabbles would have been bereft of coherent tenses and bits of logic. Heck; without whom they wouldn't have been written/posted in the first place.
Thanks, Cheese. 8)
In addition, thanks to Kenzie Daughter of Hermes for the pre-beta, and Miss-Li-Ding for the L and J prompts. XD I think this post counts as a collaborative attempt.
Game
It's hard for her to watch.
Lara makes every man (and most women) who come within three feet of her into gibbering, desperate prey. One little half-smile, a small flick of her fingers, and everyone around her is hungrily anticipating her next move. Justine can't blame them. After all, her employer is sexuality personified.
And she stands barely two feet away from Lara, making note of her every word, eyes tracing her every move and generally experiencing the entirety of the discomfort she can possibly experience from being completely celibate for three years.
Sometimes she thinks that Lara deliberately tries to make her go crazy. Then she tells herself not to be dense, and that Lara is trying to get her to break her streak, because that's what she does for fun. Then she tells herself that she's exceedingly valuable as an assistant, and Lara wouldn't want to risk her… strengths for anything. Then she decides it's probably a combination of the two.
She'd been inducted into the skewed universe of White Court politics by Thomas, who was as good at it as anyone else in his family. And then things had happened, and now she's become so deeply embroiled in the plots that a monster chainsaw can't get her out of the mess. She knows that makes him uncomfortable (to put it mildly), but it's some way for her to actually be useful, so she doesn't mind.
Lara stretches with a languid smile, and the man she's talking to gulps visibly. Justine gives him all of five minutes before he succumbs to her charms. She gives herself all of half an hour before she absolutely has to go take a freezing shower somewhere.
The whole scenario… drives her into irritation. Not quite insane, because she knows what that feels like and this is not much like it. A little, yes. Not much.
But still. If she can feel useful and actually do something for a change, it's worth it.
History
It wasn't that she wouldn't stop asking, but she wouldn't stop looking at him understandingly while he refused to answer her questions either. It was inevitable that one night, he'd finally give in and tell her everything. When he does, she listens carefully, barely making any sound.
When he finishes, she moves even closer to him (an impressive feat) and threads her fingers through his for a moment. Then she leans over him and onto the bedside table, and pulls his pentacle amulet towards her.
She says nothing, but the set of her mouth is grim. It's not an expression she normally wears.
"Justine," he starts.
"She shouldn't have abandoned you," she says. Firmly.
"It wasn't an option. I doubt she'd have lasted long if she'd stayed here."
"Still," she says, and there's a trace of stubbornness there he knows he'll never argue out of her. So instead he says nothing, pointedly indicating that the conversation is over.
After a while, she sighs and tells him about her own family. Or whatever she can remember of them from between all the hysteria and stupors. It's her way of apologizing, but she never quite loses the tightness around her eyes whenever his mother is mentioned.
Illusion
At some point, she leaves her home. It isn't like she goes there for anything except getting screamed or cried at, anyway.
It's when she moves in with him that she starts to realize how ridiculously complicated his life is. There are evil relatives, feedings, murders, plots within plots, alternative food sources crawling out of the woodwork…
That irritates her, how he has three girls hanging off him at any given time. It doesn't matter that it is positively monogamous by White Court standards, and that she herself didn't precisely confine herself to just him. Something about him flares up this steady, stubborn possessive instinct in her.
Which is just ridiculous, really. She might be his, more or less, but he's definitely not hers. Thinking she has any claim over the man who practically hunts her is laughable. Oh, she's sure he cares, but not to that extent…
But at least, she notices, his relationship with her has lasted much longer than with anyone else.
Jellyfish
She's grinning at him, half guileless and half sensual, and it's all he can do to stop himself from bounding across the table and devouring her already.
And then she holds up that orange squiggly thing and his lust dissolves into a heartfelt groan. "You promised," she reminds him, dark eyes shining and grin growing wider.
"Can't you settle for a burger?"
"Thomas," she tells him, "we're in China. What is the point of being here if you just to stay in the hotel all day and refuse to try out new things? We can do that in Chicago."
He looks suspiciously at the plate of orange wriggly things.
"I tried frogs' legs once," he tells her, "I didn't like them much."
"If you looked at them like that before you ate them, I'm not surprised," she says, and pokes the dish towards him. "Please?"
He wants to say no. He really, really does. There's a part of him which is strongly advocates getting up and walking away. Whatever happens, she'll just shrug it off and follow him. He knows that.
But there's that smile, and the way she tucks one strand of dark hair behind her ear, the way her eyes light up whenever she sees something new-
Thomas sighs and pulls the dish towards him, and the part of him which berates him for being weak is overshadowed by the way his heart skips a beat at her triumphant laugh.
Kevlar
It isn't like Thomas never got into fights before he almost killed her, but she's sure they never happened to this degree. But then, Harry has lots of enemies, and Thomas has generously labeled them as his enemies too; probably part of the unwritten elder-brother code of the universe.
And Harry Dresden has a tendency to be up in his neck in boiling supernatural shit at any given point of time, his talent for it only second to his aptitude for burning down buildings.
In retrospect, she should not have been surprised when she'd first seen the state of the second bedroom in his Gold Coast Apartment. Cleaned, disassembled guns, wickedly sharp-edged things, half-made explosives. She should have remembered that he couldn't just walk into the Raith armory and pick out what he wanted anymore.
She rarely had the chance to go to his apartment, and the next time she comes back it's after he's left, to see what she can salvage of the life he had been living for four years: the Wizard of Oz poster that had made him laugh, the old (but sharp) saber he'd picked up from god knows where, and a couple of pairs of worn-out jeans he claimed to hate but tended to wear all the time anyway.
She steps into his armory to collect him his favorite shotgun (because she knows he gets attached to his weapons), and freezes (rather like he does, when she thinks about it) when she sees it, spectacularly clashing with the knives, raw explosives and ammunition.
A white scarf, inexpertly knitted and very, very familiar. It's folded carefully and tucked into a small glass case, right up there on the central worktable.
She feels tears pricking her eyes as she adds it to her bag.
Lingerie
"Could you pass the popcorn?"
He grunts and gropes around blindly with one hand, reluctant to even budge an inch from the cozy tangle of limbs he's caught up in. Consequently, he almost knocks the bowl over when he finally finds it. He catches it at the last moment, and hands it to her without disentangling any of his arms and legs from hers.
Justine thanks him, and removes her free hand from his chest to take the bowl. There's some movement as she rearranges herself – her upper body, mostly - and settles her head down even deeper into his chest.
They focus on the movie again, shrouded in complete silence except for the occasional noise of popcorn being chewed on. He idly wonders if she's paying even less attention to the movie than he is, but dismisses the thought when she laughs at whatever's happening on the screen.
Maybe it's a good movie. Who knows? He's just a lot more interested in absorbing the way they're wound around each other, halfway between being propped up and lying on their backs and apparently ignoring the fact that it's a large bed and that they really didn't have to be piled into one small lump in the middle of it.
It's glorious. He can smell her perfume; it's more subtle, but still similar to what she used to wear when she was younger. He can almostfeel her skin through the thin veneer of her gloves, especially when her fingers are laced through his like that. And he can feel her; her weight on him, her breathing. The little tremors that still run through her when she presses herself to him.
It isn't quite as good as skin-to-skin contact (he isn't deluded enough to think that), but at least he doesn't risk getting fried this way. He is doubly insulated by his full-sleeved sweatshirt and her full-sleeved pyjama top, hood pulled up and everything. Plus, there's the footsie pyjama bottoms. He was developing a heretofore unsuspected appreciation for footsie pyjamas these days.
She tilts her head back to look at him, smiles with all of her face, and burrows more into him. Until it's almost like before and he can fool himself into thinking that it's almost as good.