A/N: Hi! If you haven't read They That Are Broken By The Night, I would strongly recommend doing that first, or else this fic won't make much sense, as it's (yet another) AU to that fic!
So this, I suppose, can be described as my fic collection of sorts, all of which relate back to the DISRverse in one way or another. Enjoy funky formats, alternate universes, weird fic ideas, and everything else in between! I hope you enjoy, and thank you so much for giving me a chance. (:
The bliss is feathery.
You're wan in it; in that silken net that she masks you with, in that bliss that stumbles over your skin, like clumsy children, that wades through you, like it seeks its kindred. It is a bliss that imparts wings upon your back, and nestles them back. Stay, there: you are home, you are here.
It's hazy. It's twilight. Those flecks of citrus light enter seraphim from your windows: they shamble, across the bed, like tentative angels, that smear over you and her. Witnesses, that bear you.
Her fingers run up and down your arm. Her nails graze your skin, like skates scratching upon bouncy ice, waiting to do a figure-eight. From shoulder to elbow; from chest to neck.
You are feathery. You are there. In that bliss of yourself. Her fingers twirl upon your skin: sparks shower from her tips, and they last, there, so much, so long, forever.
That night is long gone. You are in mist-morning now; no longer in the dark famine that had blitzed through you and her, vertiginous, desiring, starved and wanting. You are here, now: in contentment that spreads down your skin, like the roll of flesh upon knife, and Maeve: Maeve, Maeve, looks back at you.
She is not an angel: that would be unfair to her. She'd scrunch up her nose with that, so much so that you think she'd have spawned freckles. She's blonde and she's blue-eyed and she's petite. She has wings upon her shoulders, that illuminate in the haunting light when it is night, and you are staring up at her, encroached in bed. But no, she is not that. She is a twisted creature in-between; not of night, not of light, either. She straddles the lines: demon and girl; animal and human; angel and devil. Maeve has ghost-wings upon her back; she has golden hair that haunts the darkness; she has blue eyes that the sea thirsts for and fears.
What she is, is this: she is Maeve.
And she is yours.
You kiss her, there, as she gazes: and her eyes do not take a second to close. She is beautifully sweet, and in her lips is the suckle of the reinvigorating sea, that ambrosia breath twined in her mouth, that hesitant kiss which she takes you in, with: as if she can't quite believe that you- you and her are real, here, now.
(Alive. Despite.)
Her eyes shimmer. Her smile is soft and the sun's rays diffuse on your skin. Her fingers are wrapped around your arm, now. They've stopped dancing. She looks at you, and the moment drifts on, like a paper boat rocking upon the rivers, and her eyes are luxuriant in their glint, her smile is twined with a softness, a vulnerability that's barely dared to make its way onto Maeve's face before.
She looks at you: and the enormity of her love hits you, all at once, of her, smiling at you, framed in her angel-flaxen curls and her pretty blue at you, of Maeve, her, your lover since forever, your girlfriend (that person that kept you alive, then, when you love was illicit and consumed by the wolves), your world (for that was not what she had been, no? When she'd taken you in and taught you how to breathe), your life (half of it, at least, for that was she, the denominator, that constant hand that went with you through hell and plunged you up to heaven, your everything (and that isn't an exaggeration, because that is certainly Maeve: she that had been with you, death and life, now, for forever).
And you the same to her.
She kisses you, there, as if she sees what tumults over your features. And her hand lifts, from where it rests upon your arm, and cups your cheek, so tentative, a sheen of water, and you let a little gasp infuse in your kiss when her shaky left moves itself on your cheek, too.
"Maeve," you murmur, into her lips, and she breaks away from you, momentarily, but then her lips meet yours, again, as if it were nothing more than a breath upon the sea surface, before she dives down into the depths again, and meets you.
She does not say your name. But there is a ghost that grazes upon her lips, like the recital of a canticle, and you can't infer what she says, for her glinting eyes are closed, and so, instead, you murmur, again, "Maeve, oh—"
Her hand continues to shake; convulsions thrown to the wind, as if it were still trembling from the aftershock that made ground upon her bone; that crunched her nerves and turned her entire hand into a mocking shell of itself. A jester, laughing back at her.
(It was in the cold. In the whistle of the forests; after two cannons shook through the wilds. You looked at her, and she to you. The dew-mist stung your skin; the eyes of the wolves were upon you. And your lips pulled: course, it's the wretched girls left in the finale.
Maeve hadn't said a word. Her eyes lifted to the deranged creatures: at their nasal creaks, at the glint of their opalescent-lens, the ones that had viewed and consumed and taken so much of you.
She'd shot a look back at you: sad. Apologetic.
She'd lifted her knife. "Startin' with the hand," she said, with a grin so bright you thought she'd won already. And you braced yourself for the throw, for the metal to slice through the flesh of your palm, for your skin to thud against bark, sharp, and Maeve, ever-so-feral, she'll kiss you, relish you, ravish you, (is this how you'll end?)
Red spirals fall from her left hand. A chunk of flesh falls down to the ground.
Maeve, half a hand left, grinned, so fucking feral. "You tell me,'' she said to the Capitol, something tugging her lips. "What's up next?")
When she breaks away from you, her lips move, a little bit. Her hand—her left hand—brushes over your hair, and your breath struggles at how, her fingers, shivering, loop a strand of your black lock over your ear. A shaky smile breaks on her lips, after her fingers, like they can't sustain the weight of staying up anymore, recedes from your ear.
(She'd cocked her head at you. Gestured to your knife with her hand that was still intact.
"C'mon, Maddie. Together.")
You lift your hand, and curl a lock round her ear. Maeve grins as you do, a giggle frothing at her lips, but there's a solemn glint in her eyes that tells you something else.
You're both up, now, sitting-up-but-not-quite, upon your bed. Your sheets are all tangled and messy from last night, and now it's like a drapery of blue pulled over savanas and ridges. She lets her hand rest on that decline on your stomach. Her lips move, slightly, not really a lip-bite, as she looks down at her left hand, twitching there, like a spasming caterpillar, at its death-knell.
"Yknow," Maeve says, and her voice is mistier than wool, fainter than the morning lights that glide over your bed, as if she fears an apparition, a ghost, perhaps, that suspends above your heads, and pervades a ear in. ''I didn't… thank you. For that night."
(She'd broken down. When you were in the tent. Alone. Together. After the night passed. After everybody had left.)
(What's on your mind? You'd asked. And Maeve let out a breath. Her eyes: like liquid sapphires. I don't want it, Maddie , she'd shaken her head, tears in her eyes. Don't want it. Any of this. Please. M-Maddie. Please. )
When they were done with her. Her eyes were splinters, mosaics of what they had once been, pitiful glass copies, cut-up facets that reflect a cracked mirror of the sea, a parody of Maeve.
And you could not breathe, then.
Her left hand trembles.
"It doesn't matter, now," you tell her, because although that night's inscribed in your head, every word and every second of it (from how Maeve'd cried, heaving like she'd just escaped a drowning, like she was regurgitating the pain that they'd had slicked into her, and you'd remembered, cause you told yourself, you don't want her to make that sound, ever, again) — because, you'd spent hours, then, fostering a somewhere where everything's okay, showing her a place where you're safe.
And now: you're barred away, by the sea, somewhere in a world else. Your words are near-ethereal on your lips, sensual and supernatural, they glint upon your mouth, they beg to be said, and so, you murmur: "None of them matter anymore."
Maeve's lips twitch. She glances down back at her left hand. It's convulsing, still, tiny tremors of feeling that had lingered, that lingers, that persists, always and everywhere. And you tilt your head, just slightly, and you don't hold her hand (because it's a reminder to her, of then). Her right hand lifts, and glides over your hand, up your arm again, like a spindly, shaking ghost, mimicking the dance which it could have done before.
You let out a shuddery exhale. Your heart rattles in the cage in your chest. And Maeve works her way, till it gets back up to your cheek, again, and your breathing jerks out of you, twice.
She looks at you and her eyes glimmer, in the phosphorescent of a dozen seas, plowing one another over, descending over the crevices, the cracks, eroding them, erasing them, away and away as if they had never been there (as if, that night before, that night was—is—nothing at all to her) ; you look at her and your eyes glint, just the same, too, because: that knowledge of what stays in your eyes, because this, this, this:
This is a world, where Levine is dead and the Games are dead and the Capitol is dead and they all are no more. This is a world, where you are with Maeve, where you and her are free, where you and her are together, alive, here, alive. This is a world that you have imagined, that night—those many nights before. And you are with her, in it.
"We're together, now," you say, softly, and those words each are a lilt, a new cadence, entranced with new awe, new wonder, new pride, in them. Maeve's eyes, her eyes, smoothed over by the seas, no longer so sludged and shattered and faceted, is a translucent nebula back at you, in all the strength of the sea and nothing that tells of how it breaks.
"We are," Maeve says to you. There's an abashment upon her lips, in her head-tilt, and the slit upon her lips tell you one thing.
You kiss her.
(And it is your kiss; that kiss that has the taste of the forest in them; that kiss that has lilies and life in them; that kiss that has animal blood; that kiss that has the past tangled inside. And her kiss is sweet and you taste and it's beauty and it's bone and she eradicates all that is past away.)
It is her kiss that ignites a new world.
And there is something about that that is so resplendent, something about that that is so transient, and yet—yet so very beautiful.
(There is something beautiful about being in heaven.)
Thank you so much for reading! Do let me know what you think, if you feel so inclined; if not, thank you so much for giving me a chance, and hopefully I'll see you when the next chapter comes around!
Love, Dawn.