amateur cartography. (nel + murdoch)

[Nel Sayo]

She didn't say anything for a long while.

It wasn't uncomfortable silence, like what he'd said had shocked her, or upset her. It was a thick, ponderous silence, while she thought about it. Nel was a creature of instinct, but she wasn't stupid, and she knew when a thing was worth thinking about. He was right; she didn't wonder about whether or not to continue arguing with him. And she knew, from those moments the previous night in which he didn't kill her, but how he wanted to, that he understood in a visceral way what life had been like for her. What not knowing had cost her.

But she'd taken Syon's last name, and wrestled that into an identity before she'd even known what the word meant. Really known what it meant, really understood that she hadn't had one before then, hadn't been much of a person on her own. Trying to be a person on her own was proving particularly difficult. The idea of walking across the island of her own people knotted a weight in her belly that pulled the rest of the world down around her in tatters and ribbons of what life could've been, but wasn't.

"It's the mark of Avalis," she said quietly, before she'd even realized that she'd decided to tell him. "Second sight. Divination. The mark of one who can...see."

She wasn't as ignorant as she wanted to be, unfortunately.

"I know that because they bought me for it. 'Cause, you know...eventually, they figured that I'd be their little...crystal ball. Shake me up, get the sparkles going, and then I'd tell them their future. But I couldn't ever do any of that, even when I tried, so...they bought and sold me for other things. I know what the price is, Doc."

She just wasn't sure if she was willing to pay it.

"I just. I dunno. Haven't decided yet. Maybe the jungle is a bad idea."

A sigh through her nose, and she curled up on her side and delivered him her back, rubbing her cheek against the pillow in the same way a puppy turns in circles before curling up on a blanket. Choosing a good place to rest, though this could hardly have been called good. She just didn't know what she had left.

[Murdoch]

He finished off the bread and shoved his boots on as she talked, dark eyes flickering up to catch her profile every now and again.

In the end, it was her decision. He liked her, would never admit that aloud because that might make her stick around, and he couldn't deal with that. She needed to go, preferably somewhere far away, but that didn't mean he wanted her to just run off and get herself killed. Which might have been the first time in over a decade that he'd actively wished someone would stay alive instead of just not caring if they were dead. Which was a big improvement over fantasizing about choking the life out of her. He always was nicest in the mornings.

He shifted from his chair onto the bed beside her, peering down at her as he slid a hand beneath her cheek and tilted her face up to look at him. "I'm going out," he murmured, "so if you're gone before I get back, best of luck to you."

He lowered his head and pressed a warm kiss to her mouth - because, well, he probably wouldn't ever see her again, and this was something he could take to remember her.

[Nel Sayo]

She'd shifted easily to look up at him, utterly malleable under his hands, despite the previous night's events. That was just her innate ability to trust people, born of a sincere desire to love and be loved, to enjoy people for who and what they were, to believe in the best parts of humanity even when they spared her no hope at all. When her eyes slid up to find his, they were still clouded with thought and memory. Bright, but distant. A patch of sunlit sky through gathering clouds.

She started to say something, but whatever it might have been got swallowed when she realized his face was coming closer to her own.

No flinch or fight when his mouth met hers. A rapid flutter of her eyelashes in surprise, accompanied by a short intake of breath through her nose. The simultaneous instincts to run away as fast as she could, and to pull him down atop her. The urge to shove him backwards, but also to seek comfort from him. It was all very complicated, but her mouth answered his in kind before her brain could really catch up with it.

She sat up in the middle of it, perhaps deepening the kiss in the process, so that when they parted they were nose to nose, and her eyes were looking wide and straight into his.

"I'm not gonna go before you get back," she murmured, because they both probably knew it already. She didn't ask him to stay with her, or tell him that she wanted to stay with him, because she presumed that what she wanted didn't matter enough to him, in the end. And he'd do what he would do, as he always had. She understood that, was okay with it, had reconciled herself to it the same as she'd accepted what and who he was when she'd hugged him. Couldn't help it. "Unless you want me to."

His house, his call.

[Murdoch]

He sighed a little through his nose when they finally parted; her mouth had been as cool and perfect as he'd imagined. She caught him with those ridiculously blue eyes, though, and he had to do a quick reevaluation of just what exactly was going on. What would be most beneficial, what he needed, what he could get away with and not have to give anything he didn't want to lose. He was mercenary in his calculations, but more to himself than to her; he was even more cruel in his control of himself than he was to those around him.

But he was also used to thinking on his feet, so only a moment or two passed before his hand slid a few inches down her throat, a soft caress against skin and scale that left fingertips trailing beneath the collar of her shirt.

"Or I could stay a while longer," he said huskily, eyes catching hers again after having dropped down to stare at the perfect curve of her bottom lip. "And you decide what to do in the morning." Yes, sure, tomorrow, they could think about that tomorrow. No point getting up in the middle of the night for that.

[Nel Sayo]

Her eyes dropped to his mouth when he spoke, and snapped back up to his face as his fingertips coasted across her skin.

She knew more than saw that he was calculating; the ache still lingering along the slope of her cheekbone reminded her that nothing was ever free, not even those things that he didn't mean to do to her. She paid the price every time she tried to get closer to him, and this wouldn't be any different. Softer, maybe, but no different.

A swallow worked its way down her throat, just a faint ripple beneath the white plane of her skin. She lifted a hand, firelight striking the iridescent scales patterned along the back of her palm as she tentatively touched his face. Just the breath of her fingertips over the curve of his jaw, the ghost of a caress. Like the first glance of sunlight across one's skin when they've been inside too long.

"I got apples for breakfast tomorrow," she murmured, at length. Her eyes on his again, earnest and heartbreakingly sincere. If he just wanted to use her, she could handle it. If he just wanted her for one night, she could fall in love with him for that long, and then let it go. But if he seduced her into more than that, if he played her for a mark and pretended to give more than he was actually willing to, if he hurt her, she wasn't sure she'd bounce back like she usually did. Because he was mercenary with himself, but she didn't know how to be, and had no weapons left to use against him.

[Murdoch]

Her words carved a smile across his mouth, roguish and charming and still very dangerous no matter how gentle his hands were now.

She'd gotten breakfast. For all her talk of where she should go, she'd at least done that.

In any other person, that might have struck a warning bell. Any man with a heart and an ounce of decency would have seen that look and let her go. Murdoch had neither.

"My second favorite fruit," he whispered, dipping his head to lay a soft, careful kiss along her cheekbone where he knew she still bore the pain of his previous madness. Soft enough to be an apology. Then his lips trailed down to catch hers, fingers sliding over her shoulder and up into those lightning curls. His other arm slowly snaked around her waist and pulled her close against his chest as he dove headlong into her destruction, or his redemption, or any number of wonders and horrors between.

[Nel Sayo]

She didn't fight him for even a second; it wasn't in her nature to fight against something she wanted. For all Syon's hard work, Nel could hardly have been called virtuous, anyway. Careful and meticulous in her ability to conceal her own activities and desires, but by no means a fainting flower.

Dimly, she knew that apples weren't even Murdoch's second favorite fruit. That was all right; as long as he kept lying and trying to deceive her, she could take it all in stride. Some people wanted true love, and other people just wanted love, false or faked or just for a night, because that was simpler. Nel had rather given up on the former, and had learned to be sated by the latter. The minute he looked at her with genuine tenderness in his eyes, that was the moment she'd know she was in trouble.

So she let out a shallow breath when his lips brushed the high arch of her cheek, and her fingers had curled into his hair even before he kissed her again. A shift brought her body flush up against his, and a gentle rock of her hips tilted them back down towards the mattress, a noise emanating from the back of her throat that was some combination of surprise and desire. More an invitation than anything else.

[Murdoch]

He fell against her, upon her, into her, subsumed her in a gently rocking wave of passion that was filled with perhaps some of his most honest moments. It was always thus, when he lay with a woman - he was able to shed some of that bitterness in exchange for simple pleasures. It was why he loved gambling, and thieving, and most of all women; he could lose himself in it, forget the demons that tortured him for those few minutes or hours.

In this, Murdoch gave as well as took. He was no slouch when it came to pleasing a woman - he'd learned, well and early, that it only brought him more of these wondrous sensations if he ensured that his partner came away as blissful and sated as he did. And he'd been trained these last ten years by the women of the Golden Dragon, which was no mean education.

But... it was different with Nel. She moved with him in a way that was uncanny, all soft white skin and shining scales that glittered in what candlelight remained before it sputtered out. Every pleasure he'd ever found with a woman, and some he hadn't dreamed of but that set him adrift, trembling and lost to his own senses.

There were a dozen times when he felt that touch of fear that had made him shove her away the first time, but he'd long since lost control of his senses, couldn't have stopped himself if he wanted to. And every time he felt it, she instinctively soothed him, laid a kiss to his brow, a hand to his cheek, some indecipherable touch that should have made it worse but somehow made it better. Perhaps most surprisingly, for all that his passions should have run dark and violent, her hands were guided by Avalis to softness, gentleness, the thousand quiet caresses and tender kisses that a lifetime of hell had denied him, that he would never have confessed he needed, that he'd never even known existed.

When his passion finally mounted to near-impossible heights, and he knew his body wouldn't stand much more, the danger finally showed itself - dark eyes met hers, and there was something softer there behind the walls, something amazed and confused and terrified and comforted at all once, the child he'd been long ago hidden so far behind the mask of the man he'd become that even Doc didn't remember him.

And then the world shattered into a thousand pieces, white, opalescent, lightning flickering behind his eyelids.

He finally collapsed onto his back, confused, bewildered, and utterly sated. He was, of course, asleep within minutes. And in sleep,as they had every night, scarred arms instinctively reached for the presence he felt, grasping for closeness and comfort as he never let himself when awake.

[Nel Sayo]

Nel probably had a thousand, thousand thoughts during the course of their love-making, but all were superseded by an awe-struck Oh, every time her instinct moved her one way or another and he reacted to it. Every arch and shift, every breath, and every blush of her skin against his and she sank deeper into the communication of their bodies, the build of their efforts, and her mind could hold less and less to what may or may not have been dangerous here to either of them.

It had been like this before, for her, but often she didn't even know her partner's name, let alone the darker spectrum of his personality, the harder touch of his hands. It had been better that way; it had been easier for her to lose herself and then leave it behind in the morning. This was different, and she let it be so, let herself give him what he wanted even when he found himself surprised to want it. Firm when the rhythm took her there, and soft as it lulled back once more.

When it as over, and he rolled onto his back, she lay there as spent and sated as he was, aching and content and warm from her toes to the top of her head. The thought of leaving flickered like a rapier strike through her mind, momentarily illuminating every very serious consequence that could settle over them by morning. She sighed, exhausted in so many ways, and clenched her eyes shut against the realization that she had to go. That this could be a gentle ending to what might otherwise turn into a grotesque and ill-fated tryst between two people who couldn't possibly hope to have anything gentle between them for very long.

Then his arms were around her again, and her heart sank. She'd touched the softer parts of him by accident, and she knew it. But there was no use regretting it; the damage had already been done. Either he'd drag her out of his apartment by the hair in the morning, or he wouldn't. So she just let him haul her close, and tucked herself against his side, asleep mere seconds after the rhythm of her breathing met and matched with his.


THE END!

[Gossamer]

. Character: Nel Experience: 1 XP Cartography (using/reading map), 1 XP Trip Planning Lore: Surrendering to Her Own Desires, Identifying and Accepting Reality in any given Situation Character: Murdoch Experience: 2 XP Seduction Lore: Accepting Personal Weakness Additional Note: These two are so much trouble for each other. Nice job on the sex scene too. .