Cain was drinking.
Cain did not drink. He said it made a man behave like a dog, and led you decisions you regretted the next morning. Sure, he would take a sip during a toast, but the rest of that glass would remain untouched. Cain liked to blame it on all the drunk people he had arrested in his career, but that wasn't it. His best friend had been beaten to a pulp by his drunk father when they were young. Even after all these years when the smell of alcohol got too thick on the air, all Cain could see were the bruises down his best friend's back.
And yet, Cain was drinking. They'd been outside the Sibyl's jar for only a few moments and all DG wanted was to be in her mother's arms and her make this go away. She drew a breath and closed her eyes to steady herself, and when she opened them again she was in Lavender's reception room. Somehow she'd carried them all there with a wish, another leap in skill and power that she wished she didn't understand.
They'd told Lav and Ahamo all about this new twist and fate, and like the quintessential mother, Lavender sent them all to bed. DG knew that her mother would be up until dawn discussing with various historians and Priestesses, and she would give the summation of any important details in the morning. Lav's attempt to protect them wouldn't grant them any sleep though.
So here was DG sneaking into the family sitting room, with Cain's back to her as he stared out at the night. He was in his shirtsleeves again, having fled his bed so distraughtly that he'd left behind his jacket, fedora, and gun. The white light drifting in from the city enhanced the line of him, making him look more like one of the glistening marble statues DG had seen in her art history class than any human man. Though she had been expecting to see the whole group in here, maybe even Ahamo taking a break from the scholars, that part of that Conall had gone and made her feel ashamed of was grateful it was just him.
"Where are the others?" Cain started at the sudden sound, and that took DG back even more than the drinking.
"They couldn't stand sitting anymore, so they're trying every method they can think of to evesdrop on the Queen's meeting." His shoulders tensed when DG spoke and didn't leave to join the rest of the group. He was drinking, and he was jumpy, and her presence didn't soothe him. These were all new events to her and she wasn't enjoying any of them.
"So..." Excellent DG, just excellent. This is really the extent of things you can think to say to him? It's Cain! Just open up your mouth and say something. Anything! She tried to speak again and actually choked on a jumbled sort of mumble. Maybe talking wouldn't be the best sort of thing right now. Who really needs words anyway? Action. Action was the way to go.
DG stuck out her chin and strode over to the spot Cain had staked out by the window and just stood next to him, letting her shoulder brush up against his arm. This should signify her willingness to let him stew in silence if he so chose, but if he wanted to something so ridiculous as actually communicate his feelings rather than bottle them, she would be here to listen. Considering the rather nice conversations they'd been sharing and the fact that a few hours before they'd discovered that they'd been friends for several lifetimes, she assumed that Cain wouldn't put up as much of fuss as he usually did.
She should know better than to assume when dealing with Wyatt Cain.
Cain flinched away from the slightest hint of DG's touch, and she was beginning to think it had something to do with her. Cain turned and walked away from DG, downing the scotch in his hand that he had been ignoring and walking to the bottle to fill it up again.
"You don't drink." He kept ignoring her and pouring. "Cain, you don't drink. And you don't let your friends run off to do break several laws without you to protect them. Inside a palace or not." Yup, still ignoring her. "And now you're pretending that I'm not here!"
DG stormed after him and grabbed his shoulders, twisting him around. Her arms wouldn't have done the trick, but the force of her magic flung him with such might that his glass slipped from his hand, and startled him enough that he caught her eye.
It was awful. Cain had the haunted look to him that he hadn't had since the very moment he stepped out of his tin suit. "Wyatt, what's wrong? Tell me what's wrong!"
DG had the briefest of thoughts that it was time to tell Lav that her powers had grown beyond her ability to control and maybe they should be asking these late night visitors, who were telling the Queen all about their former lives, some more specific questions about what sort of powers DG should be on the lookout for. Because at this moment, DG, princess of the Realm, was reaching in the mind of Wyatt Cain, Tin Man, and seeing in broken fragments exactly what was haunting him. She was fairly certain of two things at this moment: 1) No was supposed to be able to see a memory so vividly without mechanical interference, and 2) Cain was going to be pissed.
She was kissing him. Only it wasn't her, and it wasn't him. She was experiencing it, but it felt like the sensation was coming through a filter. The kiss was messy and hasty, like they'd spent too long putting this off, and if they stopped to think about what on earth they were doing they would stop themselves again.
Her skin felt like it was on fire, lighting up each time his hands clenched on to her arms. Ozma's arms. Not DG's arms. She needed to remember that. This was not Wyatt, and this wasn't DG. It was Xavier's mouth devouring Ozma, Xavier spreading fire up and down Ozma's spine, and Xavier catching Ozma when her knees gave out beneath her and carrying her to a bed in a trashy hotel far from Central City.
Some part of DG could feel her body standing in a room next to Wyatt, looking into his eyes and conducting possibly the worst invasion of privacy he could imagine. These weren't even Cain's memories he was having to suffer through, they belonged to a former life and now that Conquest was roaming free, just jetsam on the tide of the mind finding its way to shore. However, part of DG desperately wanted to ignore the reality she was tied to and sink into this memory.
"Stop..." It was breathy, and though the voice had the pitch and tenor of Cain, it wasn't him. She felt Ozma desperately try to ignore him, kissing him harder and pulling him back down on top of her. "Stop ... we can't do this, Oz." She kissed him again, leeching the words out of his mouth.
"No! You have a husband. You have a daughter. We can't do this to them." DG recoiled at the sudden influx of reality. She knew Ozma had married a Gilliken prince, but in the heat of this moment that had fled her mind. This was an affair. She had cheated on her husband with Cain. She felt sick to her stomach.
"They don't have to know, Xavier. In the morning you ride off to protect the border and no one has to know that anything happened." He shook his head and began to pull back from her, but she seized his lapels. "Don't think about them. Think about us. Think about all the time and all the love we've wasted! I just want one night with the man I love Xavier."
He chuckled. He was actually laughing at her in this moment. "This isn't about love, Oz. We're not capable of things like that, you and I. We fit together too perfectly to ever really walk away, but don't make this about love, it's not in us."
She wrapped her hand around his face and stared him down. "If I loved anybody, it would be you."
"And if I loved anybody it would be you. But we don't. And we're not going to trade your marriage for something less than that."
He climbed off the bed and went to retrieve a jacket that had dropped t the floor sometime in the kissing, but she kept staring at the ceiling. She whispered, "I want you," and he froze.
He very slowly turned back around to meet her eyes and said, "What?"
"I don't know what love is supposed to be, and I don't know why we're not like normal people. But I know that I want you, and I know that's enough."
He was on her in a second, as the kisses got more violent and tense, knowing they were doing wrong and not caring anymore. DG started to lose her grip on the memory, feeling Cain fight back with magic that this lifetime didn't possess. The reverb of Cain throwing her out of his mind sent her sliding back a few steps, and Cain couldn't stop himself before reaching forward to stop her from falling.
His arm wrapped around her waist and his fingers intertwined with hers for a moment before he dropped the connection like he'd burned. "That's why I'm drinking. I keep seeing stolen glances, and covert kisses, and all the times they met in that damn motel room! It's on a constant loop in my head! I stopped fighting it, because when I try and make them shut up I catch glimpses of when he played with her daughter, and took her husband out to dinner. He was best friends with her husband, did you know that? He loved her husband like a brother. Drinking makes the feelings less intense."
DG reached out to hold Cain's hand and comfort him, but stopped herself before she touched him. "But they didn't love each other."
"They didn't love anybody. They weren't all friends out of love, Ozma, Xavier, Dorothy, and her husband, they felt like they belonged together. Love had nothing to do with it. They didn't experience the regular run of human emotions. They didn't feel it when people died, or when their children were born. They felt survival and need. The things animals feel, Deeg, not what makes you human!"
Cain put his hand to his head, as though the memories were pounding on his skull to be set free. "I don't understand it! We feel the whole gamut of emotion. We're completely human, and it's almost as if they didn't get it quite right last time. The Sibyl said how they've never been merciful before, I don't understand why they would want to be as human as we are."
DG wound her fingers through Cain's before she could stop herself, and all she could think about was how touching Cain didn't feel twisted like Ozma kissing Xavier had. Touching Cain felt right. He didn't pull away this time, but he looked down at their hands with sadness in his eyes.
"I don't where he ends and I begin, Deeg. All my feelings should be my own, because they've been more complicated in the last month than anything he ever felt in his whole life, but I don't know. Maybe it's just my soul trying to process his feelings in a way that I would understand. I don't know if he's trying to live through me, or if I've got what his emotions would have been if he had been human. I just don't know."
She couldn't help herself. She had to know. He was going to be pissed as all hell, but she would never forgive herself if she didn't do it.
DG reached up and lightly kissed Cain. It was just for a moment, not long enough for him to tense up and pull away, but enough that DG now knew for certain what Wyatt Cain tasted like.
She pulled back and softly licked her lips, soaking in his taste for a moment before giving Cain a small smile. "You don't taste like him. I know that if we had never known about these people, I never would have doubted what I feel, and I don't doubt it now. I don't know if what we're feeling was born of someone else's life, but I know that you don't taste like him, and that you don't look at me like he looked at her.
"For me that's good enough." DG slipped past the Tin Man and back to her room.