Okaaaay.
*Ostentatious throat clearing*
Chapter 4! Wherein our heroes enjoy some long overdue, um, bonding-times. Yeah. All minors please desist reading at this point. Also expect the fic to begin earning its M/Explicit rating from hereon out. Sexuality, in all its dynamic vagaries, is very much a theme in this fic, especially since one of its angles is exploring Saya and Haji's evolving relationship. Nothing too dreadfully traumatic, but no heart-shaped beds and rainbows either.
Feedback is awesome and I crave it like all things chocolate! Thank you so much to everyone who left their amazing comments last chapter - each one makes me all bouncy and revs me up to finish the next installment as soon as possible. Keep those yummy reviews coming guys! :x
From the idyllic era at the Zoo to her Okinawa days as a schoolgirl, Saya's fantasies of a lover were so vague.
Schoolmates failed to capture her interest. Pornography was practically a horror film. Romantic heroes from steamy novels were an impossible daydream. To the extent she'd ever thought about sex at all, she'd imagined it as a ballroom dance, to the soundtrack of soft sighs and sweet whispered nothings.
Her imagination was tepid. She lacked the physical language.
Learning it, she finds, is as twisted and bittersweet as only decades of history can make it.
For a moment, she and Haji stay sprawled together in bed. Mouths caught together in a hungry eloquence of kisses, his long shape draped across hers, long curls brushing her skin. Each touch seems to pull at the lines of her body, a tide of unsteady want.
Yet the cool touch of his lips keeps her anchored.
Lesson one.
A kiss doesn't just pass a sentence between bodies. It is the punctuation that defines its entire structure.
They break on gasps. Haji's entire frame is bunched with strain. But his eyes are soft and full of questions.
"Are you all right?"
"Mm." So far, so good. Her gaze dips shyly. "Could you, um, turn down the lights?"
He raises his eyebrows. I've seen it all before.
"Please?"
He obeys, extending an arm—eyes still on hers—to hit the control panel at the bedside table. The room darkens all around them, the stark lines and smooth surfaces of bodies merging inexorably with the multicolored crenellations of the window.
But Haji stays supercharged and solid. Alive.
"Tell me," he whispers, "Tell me what to do."
Grounding as much as generosity, she realizes. Voice. Touch. Whatever keeps her in the moment.
If she weren't so moved by his kindness, she'd tease: Do your worst.
Instead, she takes his Chiropteran claw, stripping off the scratchy bindings. It is a solid mass of metallic knuckles and iridescent red scales. The black claws are sharp as ravens' beaks. Strange that something so scabrous and terrifying would be so welcome.
Deliberately, she drags the claw beneath her dress. Its coldness sinks into her skin. Her legs and arms are covered in gooseflesh; her tearstained face is blotchy with blushes.
Quietly, she says, "I liked what you were doing before."
Encouragement for him to resume; to be bolder.
In the dimness, Haji's pupils dilate within glowing rings of blue. His concern is palpable. But it is threaded with a recognition of urgency.
Gathering her close, he lets his lips play with hers, until the kiss melts from his, to hers, to theirs. His body, bracketing hers, grows heavy. But she needs that—a mooring against that spacey feeling from before, as if she is floating outside herself, looking on...
At what? A head-spinning shocker? An undeserved gift?
One or the other. It depends on how she seizes it.
Clumsily one-handed, she begins to unbutton his shirt. Yanks the hem from his trousers, tugging on the zipper. Haji makes a tight, unfamiliar noise. Almost a growl. Then both his cool hands are on her, under her dress. Getting to what he wants, even as she works on him. His fingers are steady—but within that shell of steadiness, she practically feels his nerves buzz.
Lesson two.
Need makes Haji mindful, not selfish. A dark articulation of lust in a root system of pure love.
Dress, shirt, belt, trousers, underwear. Everything scatters like plumage to the floor. The coolish air raises goosebumps on Saya's bare skin. Her hands fly up to cover herself, a helpless reflex of shyness. But Haji catches them in his Chiropteran claw, pinning them—tenderly—back.
Stripped of his own coverings, his thinness is intriguing. Bone and sinew, more a streamlined weapon than a sculpture. The ambiance shows up how pale he is, coloring the tracery of scars spanning down his torso to different hues: green, red, blue.
Yet none of it detracts from his allure. In the colorful ambiance, he almost glows.
Lip bit, Saya skirts her gaze lower. The blush turns to a burn. He looks unabashedly, indecently ready. But she can feel how leashed he is.
"We can stop whenever you want," he says, and his voice is a shade hoarser than usual, "Just tell me."
"I d-don't want us to stop."
"Saya—"
"Sssh. Come here."
She coaxes him under the covers. The full drape of his body, bony and cool, makes her shiver. His breath is cool too, gusting shakily across her lips. She parts them to share it—kisses that leave them both punch-drunk and panting. The storm of his hair tangles around their faces; the scent is layered in soap and rosin, same as his hands, but also something sweet as rainfall, which makes Saya burrow into him and never want to leave.
Nuzzling his scarred jaw, she whispers, "You're like a marble bust in this light."
His smile is wry. "Full of cracks?"
"Beautiful. And solid. And, um—" Their eyes meet, and she blushes. "I-I'm not good at this."
"This?"
"Flattering a man in bed."
"Flattery?" He stretches over her, sleek and languid; she thinks strangely of a wolf, all predatory grace and night-stillness, yet with traces of human in the eyes. "Flattery implies deception."
"N-No deception. I'm just—telling you how I feel about you. The stuff that's in my head."
"Why not show me instead?"
Oh, she thinks, a hot tremor racing up and down her body—the shaky, savored realization that he is here, nude, on top of her, and that she is doing this. That they are.
Possessively, she circles him closer. Lets her hands take their own path, tracing down the span of his body. His skin feels smooth as a spill of cream. The fretwork of scars on his body are an intriguing contrast. She sketches them with her fingertips, trying to let each touch talk for her. To telegraph how glad she is to be with him, how giddy and grateful. Haji stays still while she explores. Shivers, and smiles, as if her curiosity charms him. She understands that he will wait forever, if need be—and that excites her like nothing else can.
Lesson three.
Here as elsewhere, Haji will be the only one she trusts enough to shed her inhibitions with. Even if she can barely trust herself.
Tenderly, she traces her bandaged palm from the crown of his skull to the killing-zone along his nape. Strokes down to the spot between his shoulderblades, the secret base where wings unfurl, staying there, circling with her thumb.
I love that you belong to me, she tries to say. I love that you're trusting me with your body.
It is the nearest she can get to: I love you.
Haji's breath hitches gorgeously when her good hand drops to his groin. She takes the tour over rough hair and smooth skin; strange shapes and secret flutters. Hardness. Dampness. Heat. A tiny frisson, half-panic, asks how exactly they will fit.
Then Haji's eyes flick to hers, at once hazy and luminous. Saying, she thinks, Don't be afraid, without a word. Gently, he takes her hand. Carries it first to his mouth, where he sucks on the fingers, and the palm—a long, lewd, adoring drag of tongue that darts down her body, a heat-bloom of delicious shock.
He brings her hand down. Molds her palm more closely to his length, a sword-grip in reverse. The cadence he sets is much the same. A rapid stropping from base to head, again and again, until her own reflexes surface and take command.
Lesson four.
In bed, as in the battlefield, both their bodies are primed for fast motion and wordless cooperation. They are seldom flat-footed for long.
As she keeps on, Haji's skin becomes a wilder temperature against hers. His mouth is the same, hot and unrelenting and frantic.
Then he makes his move. Trapping both her wrists, he pins her hands over her head—but it is a gentlemanly restraint she can break easily. He hums down her neck, along her breastbone, nuzzling under her upraised arms to bite the ticklish pits. Saya's breath spangles into giggles. She tries to squirm away. Then he is swooping in for another kiss, a greedy non sequitur of teeth and tongue, until it becomes more a moan than a laugh bubbling from her mouth into his.
Lesson five.
Taciturn as he is, Haji's touch tells its own story perfectly.
His mouth and hands worship everywhere: the whorls of her ears, the hollow of her throat, the shadows of her clavicles, the cage of her ribs. Her breasts win the most devotion. He frames them in his palms, cool on warm. The way he buries his face between them, openmouthed, says, You are so beautiful. The wet stripes of tongue across the soft undersides say, I want you. The careful teeth scraping at each nipple say: Please trust me.
Mewing, Saya tries to break down her own sense of him into cognition. But it blossoms first into irregular words like Cool and Textured and Smooth, and then into nothing but a disjointed soup of Oh, Oh, Oh, that sluices from her brain down to her groin.
Her fingers sink in his hair, tangling in the loosened curls. She tugs when he nuzzles her sloping belly, as if listening avidly to the gurglings inside. His hands smooth with fascination across her thighs, parting them. When he digs his thumbs, not-so-gentlemanly, into the steel hardness of muscle beneath, her eyes flash red and a high raw sound escapes her mouth.
Lesson six.
Her strongest erogenous zones run parallel to the arterial network beneath her skin. The same spots that ignite her into a defensive frenzy in battle—carotid, brachial, radial, iliac, femoral—transform her body into a surface of liquid sensation at the brush of Haji's lips and fingertips.
And then—oh—he is sinking downward, so graceful, that easy flow of muscle. Holding her by the hips, he burrows his mouth into the moist cleft of her thighs with a hungry sigh. Her legs spasm. Gasping, she half-sits up.
"Don't—!"
Haji's eyes, catching hers, call to mind not slices of sky, but the blue flame of a blowtorch. The sight races up her spine the same way, spitting hot sparks.
"Tell me." He nuzzles the inside of her thigh. "If you want to stop, Saya, please tell me."
"I-I don't—"
She doesn't know what she wants to say. The words are irrelevant, a wash-in, wash-out of sound. Devrais-je arrêter?—Je ne sais pas...
Lesson seven.
They lapse into French whenever they fight—but apparently also when they fool around. Strange, because it's been ages since French was her default mode of communication. But everything about Haji bypasses the layers of ephemera, to occupy the space where she keeps her first memories.
Her first self.
Shivering, Saya slides her hands through his hair: permission, trepidation. Then suddenly his mouth is there. He drags his tongue across her in a long slow stripe. Wet, sloppy, savoring. It is the softest touch—yet so exquisitely shrill that her mind whites out.
Gasping, almost sobbing, she melts across the mattress. Her thighs tremble, clenching round Haji's head. He presses them firmly back, opening her wide. Sets to lapping, over and over, at that one spot that sends heat flaring across her skin, and from deep inside, until the breath goes short in her lungs and her hips stir and stutter. Within moments it builds into a communicatory cadence. His astonishing mouth: kissing, sucking, licking. Her own body: caught in jerky tremors and escalating cries of delight inseparable from distress.
It's almost too much—a sweetness her nerves don't know how to cope with. Like a touch-me-not, her body keeps folding into itself, resisting.
A leftover of the Vietnam massacre. An awful terror clinging to her psyche.
"Ha-Haji." Panting, she tugs his hair with her one good fist. "Come—come up here."
"Hm?" His eyes, pale and catlike, flash across the slope of her belly. "What's wrong? Am I hurting you?"
"N-No." God, no. "But you could, um. Go in now?"
"Let me bring you off first? It will be easier if—"
She whines. "No, it's too much. I—I want you closer. I want to kiss you."
This seems to startle him. But he hesitates for barely a moment before he climbs across her, openmouthed, sipping up the sweat from her damp skin. Arrives to cup her face in both hands, pressing her own salty flavor back to her in kisses.
It would be mortifying—except her body is twisted into knots of impatience. She wants the main event over with now: the pain, the mystery, the fuss. Wants them to get to the next part, and the next, until they are a couple, two normal people with no ugly past holding them back.
They break off on gasps. Haji's eyes hold a hungry and helpless gleam. As if he's waiting for her to come to her senses, shove him off with a scream.
She doesn't.
Instead she tugs him closer, so he is braced on all fours above her. His palms—scale and skin—fit themselves to her kneecaps, spreading her wide beneath the curve of his body. Their eyes meet; his face is trapped in unsteady lines of want.
"Saya—?"
"Now—please."
Haji makes a noise that is like a throat being slashed; a hitch of breath, a liquid gasp. He doesn't enter her right away. He runs the length of himself along her drenched seam, again and again, the light teasing only stirring her higher, making her shiver and mew. Then he pushes, not all at once but in slick, short increments—and it's as if she is being slashed too. Fullness and friction and pain that is like stars exploding red-hot and awful through her.
The pain that comes from stretching muscles she'd given up on. From breaking open places she'd locked up tight.
A cry forces itself out of her mouth. He stops it with a kiss. His eyes are a short-circuited blue, their brightness anchoring her against the sensations splitting through her.
Carrying her into heat, and agony, and life.
It seems an eternity before he is all the way in. Then it isn't a slash anymore but an ache, filling out every empty space inside her. The corners of her eyes trickle tears. Her mouth is gaspy at the electric shock of connection, the way it leaves her pulsing, paralyzed.
"...O-oh..."
"Saya—are you—?"
"...I-I'm fine."
He kisses her wet eyelashes. "...Your face says otherwise."
"Then s-s-stop staring at me!"
Haji smooths a palm over her hair. He is breathing heavily, a living bridge of muscle and bone poured across her. "I can—stop altogether."
"No." It is provoked out of her in a cry; she can feel, in the knots of tension in his musculature, what the offer costs him. "I'm okay. I promise."
He doesn't call her out on the white-lie. Just stays, perfectly still, over her trembling body. Dark hair spills down around his head, strands caught in his eyelashes. She's never had such a perfect vantage to his face. His gaze is hot, possessed, beautiful as the pages of a solved equation. It terrifies her.
Or would—if it were anyone but Haji.
Longing shudders through her; she clutches his arms. "Please. Keep going."
Haji exhales a jittery breath she didn't realize he was holding. Then he begins: a gentle rolling rhythm. She folds herself around him, nails skittering down his spine. Too overstretched for pleasure, no matter how slow he goes. She knows the tricks, at least. Breathe in and out. Unclench her hands and thighs. Match the rhythm of her hips to his.
Lesson eight.
Like a duel or a dance; the steps to sex are surprisingly easy. Nearly second nature, if not instinct.
What frightens her is the escalating sensory overload. The cool gusts of his breaths in her hair. The cool sweat filming his nail-streaked back. The cool slide of his skin against hers. She bites her lip each time he inches slickly out; lets her breath out on an overwhelmed shudder-sob as he sinks back in—hardness and stretch and a splitting burn.
In that claustrophobic moment, his weight isn't a refuge but a trap. She half-wants to shove him off. To scramble out of her own crowded body before it falls into chaos.
I can't do this. It is a scream sounding in her head. I can't I can't I can't—
Then he kisses her.
It gets inside her, water into parched earth. Finds all her negative spaces and fills them with something cool, still, calm. His lips are cool too, and soft, and he holds her head in his widespread hands like a delicate glass bowl he is sipping from. Kisses melting one into the next, each one so precise, yet the total opposite of perfunctory. Each one quieting the high-pitched hum beneath her skin into shivering silence.
Like she is listening, with her whole body, to a language that can only be understood here.
"I love you," he whispers.
Her eyes fly open on a jolt of déjà vu. Through the webbing of hair, his face is the same: cut from another time and place.
The night at the Met, cohering from shards of memory, piercing her consciousness like a butterfly on a pin.
Tears rise. Shivering, Saya folds herself tighter around him, small palms tracing his spine. It still hurts crazily—yet it is the sweetest ache. She'd thought he was lost, hideously, irrevocably, but he is right here and he loves her, and she dares to think she might be whole enough to love him too.
It is the opposite of what she's accustomed to in her blown-apart life: a blessing.
Mewing, she kisses him again. Works her hips, clumsy and coaxing, until Haji shudders against her, begging with his body. He sinks in heavily, rocking deeper. It shocks a gasp out of her; she bites it down. Doesn't dare spoil this. Not when his expression is such a beautiful twist of adoration. Not when she can feel how close he is getting, radiating her borrowed heat. Not when his kisses lure her closer and closer to her own body, so she suddenly comes home to a place where her arms and legs are folded around him, his motions catching something inside her, a dizzy red blossoming that makes her open like a flower in his arms, her cries speeding up by hitches. And then they are moving effortlessly together to the hot unfurling music of vivace and vibrato, sprezzatura and sex.
An insatiable song of call and response.
By degrees, Haji's calm surface peels away. Emotions flutter across his face like the pages of a songbook. Bliss. Despair. Gratitude. Everything spelled out in alphabets and inkblots.
It thrills Saya. The way his gaze goes so bright the rims of her eyes sting. The way he turns radiant in her arms, the spilling colors of an infrared heat-signature. The way his gasps escalate into hiss-groans as she flexes around him, muscles working beneath the skin until his hips start losing rhythm, sweet and wild. She even likes the wet noises of their bodies, slaps and slickness and that friction that makes her burn differently now—a belly-ache of hunger that spins, spirals, spikes into a meow of shock that is sister to satisfaction.
Lesson nine.
Here, or anywhere else, Haji will always embody the elements she's craved for as long as memory stretches, the way someone else wishes for water or shelter or home.
And then Haji's climax surges beneath his skin and leaps out of him, riding on a ripple of taut muscle and a beautiful ragged cry that softens, softens, softens with his entire body, into stillness.
They both tremble as he collapses on her.
Gasping, Saya holds him close. Smooths the juts of his shoulderblades, the ridges of his spine—everything damp with sweat. He is still half-hard inside her, half-crushing on top of her. A moment later, he eases off. There is a shudder at the slow suction of her body emptied of his. She wants to cry at the absence.
But overlaying that is a buzz of joy.
Lesson ten.
There are no lessons to sex—to its hellishness and sweetness that reshapes itself moment to moment—that can be useful for next time. Nothing except the ache, too soon, not soon enough, for a next time.
Sighing, Haji hitches her closer. One leg flung over hers, an arm encircling her, as if afraid she might disappear. Dazed, Saya cozies her head against the column of his neck. Watches the colorful fractals in the mosaic beyond the pearly point of his shoulder: red, green, gold, blue.
A world without change, yet she feels like a stranger in her skin. Stirred-up and heat-soaked and just. Strange.
Until Haji's kiss seals her back in her bones. "...Forgive me, Saya."
"Mmm? What for?"
"Hurting you." His gaze shades, self-reproachful. "I was too hasty."
"Sssh. That was perfect." Sweet and scary and hurtful—yet perfect. And more perfect still: twined together and trading whispers in the dark, like a normal couple. She flushes all over. "It's almost like—I can still feel you inside me. Everywhere. And now it's like... I don't know. Like I used to feel after a high jump. Like something really good has happened."
"I am glad." He swallows. "I feared that—"
"What?"
He kisses her eyelids—first one, then the other. "I feared... I was daydreaming you."
The simplicity of his confession deepens her flush. Reminds her that Haji trusts this new reality as little as she does. Their ugly past crowds in too darkly.
But they have this moment. A chance to go forward.
Burrowing closer, she kisses the scar along his throat, where his pulse ticks. His cooling skin has a saltine, mouthwatering tang. It suits him nearly as much as soap and rosin. Her fangs tingle. She has a sudden visceral image of burying her teeth deep into his neck, the salty richness of blood flooding her mouth—no daydream, but a Queen claiming her due.
Stop.
Bloodlust would be an obscene interloper in the shelter of his arms. Here, now, she wants to keep the two halves of herself—girl and monster—as separate as Venus from Mars.
Then Haji asks: "Thirsty?"
She jerks, then relaxes. He means water, not blood.
"I'm fine. Don't you dare move."
She cozies her head under chin. Shivers as his cool hand finds its way down her body, nestling between her sticky thighs. The gesture startles her—it is so possessive and intimate. A reminder of the easy connectivity between their bodies that goes even beyond lovemaking.
"I can't believe... this was our first time," she whispers. "It doesn't feel like it. More like something that's always been true."
Haji nuzzles her hair. "I would have held off longer. Given you time to get used to—"
"To what? Us? I think over a century's wait is long enough." She tips a kiss to his lips. Draws back, a little, to fix him with a soft burning stare. "Please. Don't erase that. I wouldn't want to, any more than I'd erase our first kiss. I was so sure... it'd be our last."
"Forgive me, Saya. If I could have returned to you sooner—"
"You would have. I know." She pouts into his skin, half-shy, half-sulky. "I'm still mad at you though."
"How do I make it up to you?"
"Kisses are a good start. You give tasty kisses."
A wry smile lights his face. "Do I?"
"Mmhm. Also: tingly. I'd ask how you got so good at them, but—"
He kisses her. The touch makes her think of the balms sold in old herbalists' shops; something cool yet inflaming, glittering as it sinks into the skin.
It is a few moments before she can speak. "There," she breathes against his parted lips. "That's better. Now I'm just... grumpy."
He kisses her again. "And now?"
"...Dis—disagreeable."
"...What about now?"
"...Now—mmm." Her heart flutters in her chest. The kiss is dark and sweet and sultry and seems to melt through her bones, leaving her like a spill of molasses in a bowl. Rocking closer, arms and legs encircling him, she is half-ready to begin this again. Ready to do it as many times and as many ways, until she owns this new reality as easily as her skin.
Haji manages to soften the kiss at the last moment: tender, lingering. Draws back to whisper against her lips, "...You should sleep."
"I'm not tired."
He smooths the tangled hair from her brow. "Perhaps so. But if you keep letting me touch you..."
"And if I do?"
His eyes darken. He takes her good hand and brings it to his groin. The warning is implicitly explicit. Don't start something you can't finish.
Saya shivers. There is excitement, and uneasy awe, at feeling her effect on him. Awe too, at this dimension of Chevaliers that had never occurred to her before. They heal in the space of heartbeats. They are never weighed down by exhaustion or sleep. Yet she'd never imagined that those powers had uses beyond the battlefield.
Or is that nothing to do with Chevaliers at all—but with Haji's appetites as a man?
She shivers again as he looms close, the full glow of his eyes shining on her.
"I mean it," she whispers. "I-I want us to do this every night. Every night for the rest of—"
For the rest of our lives.
Except she is only here for three years, give or take. Three years, barely half a handspan ... how must that time seem to him? An eyeblink. One moment she is here. The next she is gone. While Haji remains where he is, semper fidelis, semper solus, eternally young and beautiful but with no one to share his existence with.
It's not fair.
Furiously, she kisses him again. His weight, half-poured across her, is cool and heavy, but comforting too. A long bony quilt, with his mouth like the best drink of water.
"Every night," she repeats, eyes fluttering shut as he kisses down her breasts, soft nuzzlings of gratitude. "Or evening. Or afternoon. Or—ah!—f-f-forever."
He lets her nipple go with a lazy pop. "Forever sounds good."
"If I could, I would. Y-You know that, right?"
"I do, Saya. Please don't think of it now."
"I try not to. Just—" Her throat clots. "You promised earlier, that you'd never let me suffer alone. I'm sorry I can't do the same for you."
"Ssh. This is a poor line of pillow talk."
"Pillow talk?" Giggling, she traces his scarred cheekbone with a fingertip. "Is that what we're doing?"
"Or failing to." He catches her finger between his teeth. "There are better ways to pass the time."
"Like what—ohh!"
His hand starfishes lower between her thighs. Fingers slipping in, gentle, instantly slick. Her breath hitches. But his touch is tender, mindful of her soreness. She shivers as he begins a whispering caress, his thumb a slow circling where she is swollen and exquisitely sensitive.
"H-Haji..."
"Sssh. Please let me." His eyelids slide down a notch, turning his expression at once ravening and adoring. "You truly are loveliest this way, Saya."
"Wh-what...?"
"Forgetting yourself. Let me give you that, if nothing else."
If nothing else...?
She wants to ask what he means. But his fingers are working their magic, making the tension unbutton from her body, her joints unzipping into erotic languor. She nearly squirms away; it's too unbearably good and makes noises catch rawly in her throat. But Haji is too quick a study, his fascination for her too apparent, his touch too articulately stirring up desires that, in self-denial, she'd kept trying to bleed away into the parched expanse of the war.
Except it seems, like blood, they will keep flowing beneath her surface until she expires.
A hot ache spreads through her mending wrist. Her whole body begins doing a tense undulant dance to his touch.
"Ha-Haji, I—"
"Let it happen, Saya."
His fingers, cool and rough-tipped, become a crooking pressure inside her, thumb teasing with wet sparky flicks that make her rock into him urgently. Her own sounds sound to her like the mewls of an anguished tiger-cat, escalating to a certain pitch, up and then down, so by the end she is voiceless and nearly senseless with her pleasure, well past the verge she allows herself anymore with her own fingers. Shocks of white-hot begin crashing through her, an ink stain spreading in inverse behind her closed eyes.
Something she has felt before. Something she has to get away from.
"Please—I—I can't—"
Except she already is. A wild tremoring gust from the depths of herself, her own high strange cry cutting through her ears like a Valkyrie call. As it shakes through her, she bites hard into his neck. Blood blossoms bright on her tongue. Haji's groan vibrates through her—desire overridden by blind savage need.
Abruptly a vision layers itself over her.
A slither of darkness. A glint of reptilian blue eyes. A hiss right in her ear: Saya.
Terror chews apart the threads of bliss. She wedges her hands between their bodies. "No! No!"
Haji obeys almost before the words leave her mouth. "—Saya? What's wrong?"
She is already stumbling out of bed. On her feet, there is residual dizziness. She sways, wobbly. Doesn't want to be naked, not when it suddenly feels like something dark and winged is swooping for the back of her neck. But there is nothing there.
Haji rises. "Saya—?"
"I-I need to be alone."
Scooping up her fallen clothes, she races to the bathroom. But she can feel him watching her.
Inside, the stark white tiles seem to echo her distress. In the mirror, her eyes seem cored too deeply into her skull, glinting red between the tangle of her hair. She stares in disorientation.
It feels as if her features are unfamiliar, recombining to be another person. Her eyes blue as arctic sky, her voice dancing up Saya's spine like icy butterflies.
Diva?
Her pulse skids in her chest; she forces herself to breathe.
Turning on the faucet, she splashes her face with cold water. Outside, she can hear Haji moving around in the bedroom: stripping off the coverlets, fetching fresh sheets. Thinks, with sick regret, that she could be folded dreamily around him right now, if not for the minefield beneath the waters of her psyche, the triggers as hidden from her as creatures at the bottom of the sea.
Her clothes are piled on the floor. She fetches something from the pocket of her dress.
A bundled-up handkerchief.
Slowly, she unwraps it. Inside, the misshapen stone resembles red quartz, its sharp angles winking in the light.
After the Met bombing, it had always remained with her. In her backpack at school, next to her hospital bed during IV drips, in the pocket of her jeans at the supermarket, in the jewelry box by her bedside at night. When her Long Sleep crept in, she'd placed the item in a sealed case under the floorboards of her room, where it'd sat for ...how long?
Over thirty years. No-one had bothered to poke through her room: not Kai, not Diva's twins, not Red Shield, not even Haji.
She cups the glittering red stone. It is warm from her palms, rolling weightlessly, a beautiful thing carved from blood.
Diva's blood.
A fragment of her twin, before the Met was blown sky-high.
Come with me, Saya...
Abruptly, her knees give out. Crumpling to the floor, she breaks into sobs. The unforgiving edges of the stone cut into her palm. Blood drips across the tiles, as if the rock itself is alive.
"Saya?" A shadow passes over the pencil of light where the door doesn't meet the jamb. "Saya, please let me in."
"Leave me alone!" she shrieks, tear-streaked face buried in her arms. "Please."
Regret hangs in the air. But Haji obeys.
Who turns down orgasms to angst over a crystallized chunk of their archnemesis?
Saya, that's who.
Chapter 5 will, once again, be slow in coming. Expect it to fall some time toward the end of June! Hope you guys enjoyed, and feel free to leave critiques or suggestions about how this tale could be improved! Feedback is my (least harmful) drug of choice! :)