A/N Beta'd by the wonderful StoryWriter831, everything belongs to JK Rowling.
...
For a long, long while, I stared numbly at the space in the window-pane that Lucius's reflection had filled. All that was left was a dark, closed door.
I don't know for how long I stood there, my mind as frozen as my body, as around me the shadows lengthened and night drew in. I blinked when the wall-lamps flickered into life and that was when I became aware of a stabbing sensation in my breast, a dull, rhythmic puncturing of my heart in time with its quickening beat. A heaviness throbbed behind my eyes, like the onset of a migraine, causing my vision to darken and blur.
How could he?
The question barely registered through the white-noise filling my head. But gradually, with each thud of my heart and pulse of my temple, the words grew bigger, louder, slowly eradicating the hissing static until they blazed before me, through me, with searing flames of rage.
How could he?!
My hands balled into fists and I thumped the window-pane, causing the thick glass to rattle violently in its frame.
How DARE he?!
I felt breathless, winded; too choked with anguish to cry, too nauseous to be sick. The food which had sustained me earlier now churned in my stomach as I replayed his last words over and over in my head, uttered with such calm control. '...I want your answer come morning...'
As if I were simply to state my preference between tea or coffee for breakfast. As if he hadn't just given me a choice so entirely impossible to make, that I felt as if I now stood between a rack and a gallows, asked to state what my pleasure might be.
A muffled, jagged scream forced its way through my tightly-clenched teeth. My balled fingers left the window pane to curl around my pounding head. My eyes seemed to burn in their sockets; I was desperate for the relief of tears, but they would not come. There was no relief to be had.
Never, never could I have imagined he would be so callous, so heartless, so...spineless.
Coward!
COWARD!
With one hand offering me freedom, with the other hand snatching away...everything. Everything. For there was nothing, I knew nothing, I remembered nothing else. Everything that there was, was him. I had no other context but that which he had given me.
How incidentally, how casually, he had added the disclaimer that I might never even regain my missing memories. That to choose safety and freedom might equally be to choose a past of perpetual blankness—as if that were the least of my considerations. Did he not understand, did he not see the enormity of such a clause?
'...You have forced my hand, as you well know.'
Perhaps I had. Perhaps I'd been forced to force his hand—but never could I have foreseen that he would have offered so cruel an ultimatum, so wretchedly cruel...
Despair was taking over from rage, I wanted to howl, to sob, to weep, yet still my eyes remained burning and dry.
How could I accept such an offer?
And yet, how could I refuse it?
After all, what good was it to stay here? Pining for a man whose very touch was forbidden me, yet whose presence consumed my every thought? Terrorised by the peripheral threat of the spectral figure of the Woman, bent on doing me some unspeakable harm. Tripping and stumbling over secrets and mysteries like a blindfolded fool groping her way through an endless endurance-course littered with obstacles and untold dangers...
And yet—and yet I felt I was getting closer to discovering...something. I had already made discoveries: the glasshouse, the connection between the necklace and the silver cuckoo-clock...the journal, with its strange words addressed to me...
Could that be the reason for this sudden about-turn? Did Lucius believe I was getting too close to finding the answers I had sought all along? Did he wish to preclude that possibility by having me forget the question itself? Could he be so selfish?
My heart refused to believe it. It begged me to believe that it wasn't his selfishness, but something else which drove Lucius to make this proposition. Perhaps he was concerned for my safety—perhaps, having lost his wife to suicide and his son to accidental death, he simply wished to see me out of the reach of the malignant presence that cast such a long, black shadow over this house and its unhappy inhabitants...
That's the beauty of it, Alice, my rational voice told me. ...If you take up his offer none of these things will even matter to you. It will be as if it never happened.
...But I could lose ALL my memories!
True. But who is to say they couldn't be eventually unlocked through therapy and treatment? And who is to say that, should you choose to stay, you will necessarily retrieve them? You haven't managed to so far. Better to gamble from a position of safety and strength, out of harm's way.
...How can I be sure I'd be out of harm's way? How can I protect myself from something I cannot even remember?
You needn't protect yourself. Lucius has promised to return home and keep you safe from Her—
...But I don't want to force him to return home! He has already admitted that he has no home. To return will cause him humiliation and pain. He will suffer.
He deserves to suffer, Alice! He has made YOU suffer!
...I have forgiven him for that.
Fool! You're still suffering, aren't you? Stay, and condemn yourself to more of the same. You cannot be so masochistic. You cannot be so stupid.
...But what about the journal? I protested frantically. With its words addressed to 'Alice'...to me? Surely I have a responsibility to discover the meaning of that message?
The journal won't exist for you. Nor the necklace, nor the clock. The Woman won't exist.
...HE won't exist!
Yes, exactly. He won't exist.
"I can't," I gasped aloud, clawing at my cheeks in hopeless despair. "I...I can't!"
Yes, Alice, you can. As he said, it would be for the best. You would never know any different. Just...be brave.
I shook my head fiercely. Running away was not an act of bravery. Turning my back and forgetting everything, just when I felt as if I were getting close to finding the truth—there was no courage in that. Surely, the truth was more important than anything else. To run away now would be to abandon that truth.
Ha! What a litany of sweet lies you sing to yourself, Alice! It's not the truth you're afraid of abandoning. It's not even your memories that you're afraid of losing. It's him!
It's him.
It's him.
"Yes," I whispered, my hands sliding down from my face to ball over my painfully-thudding heart. "It's him. It's only him."
At that moment I knew how futile the struggle was. How ridiculously futile. The thought of leaving Lucius, forgetting him, was so unspeakably excruciating that it outweighed every other consideration; every positive, every negative was completely annihilated.
There was no 'decision' to make. It had been made long, long ago, before the world existed, written somewhere in the infinite cosmos, where reason bowed to fate.
The blurry darkness lifted from my eyes and everything appeared to me in the brightest, sharpest definition, as if I stood in blazing daylight. A physical weight seemed to lift from my body and I stood erect and buoyed with a shimmering certainty.
With a great gasping breath, I flew over to the door, wrenching it open and rushing into the hallway.
As I raced along the flagstones my senses continued in a state of hyper-awareness: I noticed the finest hairline cracks in the stones along which I travelled, I perceived the subtlest brushstrokes of oil-paint on the portraits I passed, I could hear the quiet hiss of the wall-lamps beneath my gasping breath, echoing steps and pounding heart. In the few moments it took me to arrive outside Lucius's chamber I felt I had absorbed a lifetime's worth of minutiae, and within each inconsequential detail was indelibly etched the path of my destiny...
Abruptly lurching to a stop outside the room, I immediately grasped for the doorknob, barely noticing the absence of the strange air-shield that had impeded my first venture into his room. My hand closed around the bronze handle and immediately I twisted it and pushed forward, not waiting to knock, almost falling inside in my feverish haste.
"Lucius? Lucius!"
As my eyes adjusted to the darkness, a movement alerted me to a figure rising from a seat near the hearth. Lucius had been smoking and I saw him throw his cigarette into the smouldering embers. With a gulp, I realised that he was only half-dressed, that from the waist upwards there was only smooth, pale flesh gleaming in the dim firelight, like the sculpted marble effigy of some pagan god.
Confusion overtook all else as I became acutely aware that I had never seen him before without at least several layers of expensive material covering him from starched collar to booted feet.
Stammering an apology, I began to retreat as hastily from the room as I had entered it—but Lucius swiftly closed the distance between us and reached over my shoulder to shut the door before I could escape out of it. Shakily, I turned to face him.
"You are here now, Alice," he murmured, bending over me as he brought his other arm up to effectively box me in between his body and the slab of oak behind me. "You might as well tell me what decision you have come to."
I was electrified by the closeness of us, by the heat radiating off his bare skin...his smoke-mingled scent filled me with sublime elation and I closed my eyes and let the sweetness of his proximity flow through my veins, like an addict, tormented by cravings, finally finding her fix...
When my eyelashes fluttered open again, Lucius had leaned in closer again—an inch nearer and he would have pinned me flush against the door. His arms remained outstretched above and beside me and his mouth was so close to my upturned face it was all I could do not to tilt my head and press my lips to his.
He gazed down at me, his irises shining, but his jaw set rigidly, as if hope and doubt weighed equally in balance.
"I...I came to tell you that...I have considered your offer." My numb lips seemed barely to move as I spoke; I felt oddly like a ventriloquist speaking for someone else, someone with a voice as detached and impassive as I was fevered and molten. "But I don't...I can't...I won't accept it."
The flame of hope flared in his silver eyes, but Lucius seemed determined to keep a strict reign over himself. He stared searchingly into my face as if trying, and perhaps failing, to detect or understand something beyond the words I spoke aloud.
"Why?" he asked at last, his voice low and thrumming and imperative. "Tell me why you have come to make that decision."
A surge of incredulous fury swelled within my breast. "Isn't it enough that it is made?" I gasped. "Haven't you asked too much of me already?"
Lucius nodded, but his expression was wholly unrepentant. "Yes..." he replied, his eyes glittering intently, "...yes, I ask too much of you. And no, it isn't enough. You must—I ask you, to give me your reasons why."
An odd, dry sob escaped my throat. "Why do you think, Lucius?"
I could see his jaw clenching. His body straightened and stiffened as if he were bracing himself to receive an expected wound. In a hoarser, harsher tone, he said, "Perhaps you are...afraid that you may never recover your past memories."
I felt my lips curl into a bitter smile, that he could even say such a thing. "Of course I am, you bastard!" I snarled. My hands clenched and I brought them up to violently strike at his bare chest, as I had my bedroom window-pane, hoping I would bruise his heart as he had so injured mine. "What kind of an 'offer' do you call that, g-giving me freedom at the risk of forgetting e-everything? How dare you—you even pretend that it's a fair one?!" I struck again, harder, but Lucius did not so much as move a muscle, I might've been striking a brick wall.
"I don't pretend it is fair," he replied in the same strange, low-thrumming tone. "I know it is supremely unfair—and you have every reason to despise me for making it. ...But it is the best I can do." His gaze bore down upon me, into me, their silver depths scintillating with a myriad of wildly conflicting emotions, none of which I could clearly decipher.
"But why?" I asked, making a final, desperate attempt to clutch at invisible straws. "Why can't you let me go and remember my time here? I would never, never betray you! Maybe I could even help you—I c-could speak for you—p-perhaps even help to get your house back—"
"No, Alice," Lucius softly interrupted me, his expression softening and a smile touching his mouth. "On this matter I can afford you no concessions." There was a tenderness in his eyes which stopped my frantic pleas and a finality in his voice which prevented me from renewing them.
He drew away, taking a backward step, his arms lowering to his sides. I shivered for the loss of his radiant warmth.
"...And so," he murmured, "you choose to stay...but only because you believe the risks outweigh the reward." There was a note of despondency beneath the surface resignation. "You prefer to gamble on the chance that, in time, you will discover the truth in its entirety, whatever the cost may be to either of us..."
I laughed, a strangled, gulping, painful sound.
"No, you idiot!" The words tore violently from my throat, my voice breaking at last. "I choose to stay because I would rather die than forget YOU."
Then finally, finally the storm broke, the dam burst, tears poured down my face in scalding torrents and I sobbed for everything; everything I was losing and everything I was refusing to lose. And as I wept, the euphoria of relief flooded through me, so sweet, so dizzying that I staggered forward and impulsively flung my arms around Lucius's neck, finally, finally shattering the intolerable barricade of distance between us.
Lucius stood very still, galvanised, it seemed, by my vehement confession and impetuous action. For the briefest moment his body remained rigid—and then I felt an elemental change within him, the icy solidity turned to molten pliancy, the frozen disbelief turned to blazing certainty. His arms wrapped about my body, pulling me tightly against his chest as he bent over me, his lips melding to and parting mine, his tongue plunging deeply as he returned my kiss with a consuming ardency that scorched even as it slaked, possessed even as it fulfilled.
There was nothing gentle in the reforging of our connection; it was a raw, bruising re-staking of our claim over one another; a fervent testament to our desperate, dizzying need for each other...one of my hands slid up to entwine in his silky hair, the other slid over the wide, muscular expanse of his shoulders, my nails digging into the smooth bare skin as I sought to assure myself that this was real, that he was real...
Finally, we broke apart. I was gasping and my body shuddered uncontrollably. A fresh spring of tears burst from me. Wordlessly, Lucius folded his arms around my shoulders and brought my head to his chest, and for a long time we stood locked together, my hot, tear-streaked cheek pressed to his heart, its deep, rhythmic thud gradually calmed me, until my wracking sobs abated to quiet hiccups.
At last Lucius spoke, his lips brushing the top of my head. "You turned your back on me, Alice," he said quietly, a catch in his voice. "You cut me to the quick."
"I'm so sorry," I whispered. "I was scared." Then I amended: "I am scared."
Drawing back a little, Lucius tilted my face up to his, his thumb stroking my cheek, wicking away the beads of wetness. "Of me?" he asked me gently.
"No—not you," I replied, although perhaps this did not represent the perfect truth. "I don't know...I can't explain..." I felt a wave of frustration at the block in my mind that prevented me from being more specific. Carefully, I formed a sequence of words to bypass it as best I could. "I'm scared that...something may happen to you, if we...if we're together." I flushed deeply at the obvious implication of that. "Something bad."
A dawning realisation spread across his countenance and in its lucent light he seemed almost to glow. "Then you're afraid...not of me, but for me?"
I nodded. Any further attempt at an explanation was dazzled quite away by his smile. "Foolish girl," he murmured softly. "Did it not cross your mind that I can take care of myself?"
As his mouth again caught my lips, I wondered vaguely why it hadn't crossed my mind. My terror of the Woman had so overwhelmed me, that her taunting threats had seemed like some dreadful prophecy...but perhaps there was nothing prophetic in them at all—perhaps she simply peddled torment and terror for her own twisted amusement and the future remained as flexible as it was unforeseeable...
With Lucius's arms around me and his lips on mine, I had never felt more safe, more certain. My shaken, wrongly-slanting world had tilted back upon its axis and I stood on solid, even ground once more. With Lucius, I was lifted out of darkness, into light.
"You're shivering," he said, when at last his lips relinquished their requiring claim. "Come by the fire."
I didn't tell him it was with relief, not cold. Instead, I allowed him to clasp my hand and gently lead me over to the deep, soft couch from which he had emerged when I first entered the room, an unknown eternity ago.
As I sank down onto the cushions, I noticed Lucius's discarded shirt, jacket and robe thrown over the back of the couch and once again the heat rose to my cheeks as I was reminded of how inconsequential a barrier there was to divide us—only some thin scraps of material. His splendid, lavish clothes had always seemed like an impenetrable set of armour, affording a kind of protection to both of us, and now that he was divested of the main part of it, I felt as vulnerable as if it had been I, not him, who sat half-naked in the flickering firelight.
Lucius had soon gathered me against him and was kissing me again, but now his kisses were slower, longer, lingering...less fervent, and yet somehow more fervid. I arched to the warmth of him: the heat of his bare chest scorched through the fine material of my dress, pressing into the swell of my breasts, causing my nipples to tauten against the fabric under which I had on nothing but a pair of white lace knickers. His hands skimmed over me, brushing the curves of my waist and hips, stroking down my thighs, raising a blaze of heat wherever my blood surged to his caressing touch.
My own hands made a less intrepid journey across Lucius's bare skin, so silken and yet so solid; hard muscles, square joints and taut sinews shifting and moving beneath my wondering, wandering touch.
As my fingers slid down his left arm I felt a strange puckering of the skin, and we both tensed and broke apart. I gasped in dismay upon beholding a long scar running the entire length of his inner forearm, raised and visible in the firelight. It looked like the remnants of a serious burn: the flesh twisted and crimped, the skin mottled red and white.
Softly, I stroked the scar, noticing Lucius's sharply-indrawn breath as I did so. I wondered if it hurt him to touch it. Impulsively, I bent my head to kiss the ruined skin, but Lucius made a soft hissing sound, pulling his arm away and straightening up.
Afraid I had offended him, I began to apologise, but was stopped by Lucius swiftly recapturing my lips with his, kissing me until there was no room for question or thought, until my senses were inundated by the complex scent of him, which had so tantalised and tormented me that I wished nothing more than to drown in its intoxicating familiarity—and indeed, I felt almost drunk; recklessly dizzy, liquified, utterly resistless...
Suddenly he caught my wrists and lifted me easily to stand in front of him. I could feel the heat of the fire warming my back; I could see the flickering flames reflected in his eyes...
His hands released my wrists and slowly, slowly traced upwards, along my bare arms, sliding up over the half-sleeves of my nightdress, his fingers coming to rest along my clavicle bones while his thumbs dropped to skim the low décolletage.
There was a moment of hushed stillness; I think we were both holding our breath. And then Lucius's hands made a slight movement, catching at the wide neck seams and pushing them off my shoulders, there was a whispering woosh! of falling fabric and the too-large dress slipped down my frame to pool at my feet.
I stood before him, shaky, flushed and somewhat petrified, in only my lace underwear. My eyes dropped to fix on my toes surrounded by the wreath of pale material, and yet I could feel his gaze trailing slowly over me. After a moment I could not help but move my hands to cover my bare chest, but this I was prevented from doing by Lucius once again encircling my wrists, bringing them gently but firmly down to my sides.
"You've seen me naked b-before," I stuttered, acutely, woefully, self-conscious.
"I may have seen you," Lucius assented softly, "but I've never looked at you..."
He reached up to brush back my hair behind my shoulders. From beneath my lowered lashes I could see Lucius's eyes: gleaming black pools ringed with a circlet of iridescent silver, moving over my frame...lingering on my breasts, dropping lower to survey the scrap of scant white lace, sweeping down my thighs, my manifestly trembling legs.
His hands drifted down from my shoulders to hover over my breasts; I gasped as he brushed both nipples with his thumbs, sending a thrum of sweet sensation coursing and spooling throughout my whole body, tightening something inside me.
And then his eyes and mine flickered up at the same moment, our gazes catching, colliding.
Immediately he pulled his hands away from my body, as if suddenly burned and for a long moment he simply stared into my eyes, his own engulfing and unfathomable. "You are so...small..." he said hoarsely.
"Oh," I uttered with a gulp of mortification. Of course, I was not what he preferred. His wife—she, whose borrowed dresses were too long, too full-busted, too womanly to fit my deficient, meagre frame—of course, she was his ideal...
I turned away, aghast. "I'm sorry," I muttered, blinking rapidly as I brought my hands up to cover my chest.
"Do not mistake me," Lucius said swiftly, though he still did not move to touch me again. "I only mean, you are so...very young and so...fragile." He swallowed shallowly. "I...I fear I might break you..."
He seemed to be struggling with something inside himself, perhaps battling between conscience and desire, perhaps conflicted by something darker and more painful. A muscle worked in his jaw and his eyes dropped to fix on the clenched fists resting on his knees.
I knelt and caught one balled hand, using my fingers to pry open his. "Lucius," I whispered, "look at me—feel me, Lucius..." His eyes lifted to connect to mine as deliberately I brought his large right hand to lie upon the small curve of my left breast, covering it with both of my own. "Can't you feel my heart beating?" I asked him, and tingled to the sensation of his thumb slowly stroking, his fingers gently impressing into the soft flesh. "I am not made of glass. I am flesh and blood..." My voice caught, and a solitary tear rolled down my cheek, catching along the ridge of my lips. "I am heart and soul and I am real...you cannot break me."
His left hand reached down to tenderly stroke my cheek. "...You little, wild rose..." he said, gazing down at my upturned face, "...where are your protecting thorns? I should not touch you. What right have I?"
"The right I give you," I whispered.
He shook his head, a slight smile curving his mouth. I knew what that expression meant. It meant, 'You cannot give me that right, amnesiac as you are and in my power. You, who never had a choice cannot now make this one.'
Unable to refute the truth, I did not attempt to. "Please, Lucius," I said simply.
The smouldering flame in his eyes seemed suddenly to leap, to blaze. "Do you know what you do to me?" he hissed, an expression of forcibly-restrained hunger etched into every sharp line of his face. "Kneeling before me, naked, pleading?"
Grasping my upper arms he brought me to stand with him and pulled me tightly against his body, so tightly I could barely breathe, bending over me to whisper in my ear. "I'm a flawed man, Alice," he said darkly. "I am selfish, avaricious, impatient...I have little control over myself. ...Go back to your room. You have already forfeited so much to me. Go, now, if you do not wish to forfeit everything."
But I did wish to, I needed to, forfeit all that was left to him. Without him, there was no warmth, no hope...nothing. And so I reached up, closed my eyes and pressed my mouth to his.
A moment later he caught me up in his arms and, with our lips still sweetly fused, he carried me over to his shadow-entwined bed.