Anywhere But Home|tag: lucy/complete

[LUCY "KITTY" HARRIS]

With a vengeance, this was the trial through which her reserve was challenged. A trial executed with barefaced ambiguity and heralded by the retreating surf of the isle in which her feet grounded. There was a query to address, however, that called all of her resistance and struck it from her in the same fell blow. A query posed in a hushed tone, like that of a heady secret, speaking of its treacherous nature and with all the potential of conjuring that terrible tide of calamity that could breathe life to her nightmare.

Was it even within the realm of possibility for them to trust the emotions that swelled within them? Or better yet, was it even wise of them to do so? Wisdom in matters of the heart where logic could stake no claim nor determine the outcome was not entrusted to either of them, she surmised. Neither could play the charge if both knew not how to navigate those troubled waters never braved before. All Kitty knew was that her action, spawned by a moment of vulnerability, carried with it consequences that reached far beyond her grasp or comprehension. Even with this known to her, not a shred of regret could be summoned.

A thrill of a disquieting temperament had thrummed through her, given its bearing by the uncertainty of how her actions might be received. Kitty had initially deemed it a grave error when she first noticed the seeming paralysis of Henry, heaved into a perplexing stillness by her kiss. A sound reaction and one she wouldn’t begrudge him considering that she herself had had no precursor of that particular undertaking. Her kiss had been executed on impulse, spared of any thought that might have discouraged it. As such, there was very little expectance on her part and no real sense of urgency for reciprocation. Before she pulled away and denied herself more of that blessed contact, however, she was quick to perceive a sliver of his response. Although, she vowed not to trust that perception for the time being. Whether what she had felt was real or imagined, she had yet to make concrete.

When his fingers closed between hers, she found the assurance of mind she had been searching for. A slow smile spread, beckoned forth by a surge of relief and the acknowledgement of the gesture. There was no recoil, no resistance. No sense of urgency or force. No sickness of self arising from detached touches and a violation of being. Vacant of demoralization, the air in the apartment was clear, free from the lechery and turpitude with which Kitty was all too familiar. That awareness in itself was unnerving to her core. Such tenderness had thrown her off balance and to gain her footing again, she was something more than uneasy.

Circumstances bid for a renewed sense of fortitude and, with skillfully veiled hesitance, she answered the call.

“You wanna know some of the differences between you and them, Henry?” she asked, opening her eyes, with as relaxed a tone as she could muster. The question hinted at more significance than face-value presented. Kitty had made it a point early on in their friendship to illustrate her aversion towards conversing about her nightly rendezvous with strangers. It was a boundary that had been set through mutual understanding and respect for that boundary was upheld for the most part. Nevertheless, conditions changed and on no other occasion had they changed as drastically as they had that night.

She reclined her forehead from his, raising their clasped hands beside their faces. Unclasping her hand from his momentarily, she slid it leisurely up and down his palm, fingers brushing against the length of his and then returning them to their place between his fingers. “It’s this . . .” she stated, willing his gaze to their hands gesturingly with her eyes, hinting at the sentimentality of the moment.

Once acknowledged, she closed the space between them and let her eyes flutter closed once more. Just short of kissing him, she allowed her lips to linger close to his, so close that when she spoke next, they brushed against his own almost as if she were tracing the words onto his lips. “. . . and this.”

With that, their lips met again. Only this time, her mouth moved against his and encouraged him to reciprocate, building with passion that had been kept even from her own self. Serpentine flames seized her guard and reduced it to ashes, leaving in its wake a woman stripped of her pretenses, tentative to allow the closeness that her heart desired.

[ricketts]

In this looking-glass, Henry's face was pale as befitted to the occasion, and his gaze rested complacently to the south. So softened, mournful, and tender, that his affection returned as he met again with her Paris-green eyes. There was something childish and foolish in these small wranglings. Those whispers, they wore his patience away. He tensed, vowing again not to make himself unhappy, or restless, or cross, but to take Kitty's goodness as he saw it, believing in it.

According to her dear speech - which even Henry smiled at and did not deny - the best of men were very disagreeable at times. His lips parted, and he breathed thin through them with eyes fastened upon her, waiting for her to go on. Her voice was infinitely sad and tender. There was neither anger nor resentment in it, the great womanliness of her, the ability to suffer in silence, and the dignity of such a silence touched him strangely. According to her speech, there was just the two of them in the world.

His hand touched the hair at her temples, moving it away from her face. In matters as this, his vitiated being did not know how to seize. Did not know how to seize the advantage of personal grace or know how to heighten any charm. The chief reason of his failing success lay in the fact that, in the game of love, he shrank from every artifice, all duplicities, and falsehoods that might further any cause. A great portion of his strength lay in his capacity for being alone, save for a head full of voices. They liked to jeer, and deliberately confuse. But then Kitty kissed him and there was peace.

With a tear in his eye and a quiver on his lip, Henry held her cheek on his palm. It seemed as though they were alone together in the world. In the moonlit gloom they kissed, near, nearer, and at length he put his arm around her gently, not drawing her toward him, only letting it lie around her waist, as though it had a right to be there, heart to heart, in the stillness of the night. Leaning futher back into the sofa thus, he felt his breath quicken with the rise and fall of her chest and shoulders because of this caress. By an indefinable instinct, Henry turned from her twice before their lips met again in a long kiss of passion and content.

[LUCY "KITTY" HARRIS]

(If at certain points while reading this you feel a sense of confusion, don't worry. You're not the only one. -_-)


There was a palpable desperation in her kiss, merging with the swell of affection she laved. Illusionary was the perception, elusive the billowing sensation of returned passion. Questioned was its validity, the security drawn from it, and the truth in it all. Hesitant of it as she was, there was to be no denial of the truth transcribed from her lips to his.

They painted gentle flames across the closing distance between them and she now recognized the feeling ghosting along her flesh. It was the raw burn of a fire fed with an endured mutual suffering, deprived of oxygen and thus having been quelled all this time. Until there was recognition in both of the tormented did those flames burn in glorious technicolor. Burning, smoldering with arms extended outwards in an embrace were the memories forged in years past that manifested in a singular form of betrayal. Betrayal of the spirit of the young woman, tainting her with an inky blackness. A beauty once thought ruined was not such anymore. That imagined fire consumed her, killing something in her and it was the something that she had been attempting to murder for such a long time. That something that held her fast whenever she tried to wriggle away from its grip, the grip that prevented her from genuine human connection. Trust someone of an equally damaged, if not more so, nature to be the perfect murderer.

Finding herself in the rapture, there was a barrage of all too consuming thoughts that threatened her renewal. His touch, tender as it was, spurred in her the ever-present comparisons. Her body was not her own. It belonged to whoever could afford themselves the ignominy and as such, the hands of men were always rough. Calloused and violating contact propelled by seedy lust with hooded eyes of accusation.

Whore. It was what she had risen from the rubble of a destroyed self as and yet it seared her still. Like an invisible blood-letting dagger, it sliced her and left unseen scars in its wake. Her powers of deflection and misdirection only extended so far and with not a doubt in her mind she knew that Henry could see it as plainly as she could see the hurt in him. How he could still hold her, kiss her, care for her with the intensity she seemed to read from him she did not know. Perhaps his reasons mirrored her own. There came a time when suffering in solitude became too heavy of burden to carry. If they could suffer together, then perhaps they could find it within themselves to rejoice together as well. For a moment, just for a moment, she allowed the thought to pass in silence without reducing it to ashes with her secondary cynicism. It was the most peaceful moment she had ever experienced and so she sought to preserve it.

His caress, illumined by the moonbeams streaking through the windowpanes, was guided by her yearning. She encouraged it, deepening their kiss to illustrate that clearly, because it banished the sensation of other touches upon her flesh from men who’d helped to destroy her. She wanted for his touch to replace theirs, to purify her again. So while in matters where corporal bliss was concerned she stripped him of his innocence, he restored hers. He made her feel pure.

Inclining into him more so that her chest rested lightly on his own, Kitty leaned him further back upon the sofa, lavishing him with the tenderness of her lips. Forgetting for a moment in time of Henry’s inexperience, she pursued that binding element that she loathed with any other man. She broke from his lips and began trailing kisses along his jaw line, committing the taste of him to memory. Her hands found themselves at the collar of the robe he wore and with as gentle of an approach as she could muster, she began sliding open the fabric to reveal the bareness of his chest to her seeking hands. Kitty stopped just short of that, however, when she felt the muscles beneath her palms tense.

Opening her eyes and stilling her motions, she willed her gaze upward to his perpetually gloomed eyes with a genuine and understanding recognition. To be gentle and patient, that was the charge of her. Leveling her face with Henry’s, she whispered as if she feared the world was listening and would betray the secret of their ardor, “Do you want me to stop?”



(Well, there you go. The product of sleep deprivation. I’m reminded of the summer just now. -.- Also, this probably shouldn’t have given me as much muse as it did, considering what the song is about. Ah well, it’s sexy and junk. >D)

[ricketts]

Henry's own heart was too full of the busy trembling fancies natural to his position to speculate overmuch on the heart of Kitty. He was left alone with her and with her, her - who ever since her arrival had kept a steady watch over him. Perpetually under this guardianship, gentle, though strong, she held his fluctuating spirit firm, and filling it with all cheerful hopes and tender thoughts. It was bitterly sweet to turn a few moments. He seemed to grow a better man every time he saw Kitty.

As she went away with her movements, Henry seemed to swell with some bursting emotion. In fact, it was too much for him, and as she parted his robe he suddenly felt his breath catch in his throat, releasing a strangulated breath. Kitty noticed, and threatened to attract frozen-face attention.

Only Henry had not the courage to confess, what he thought was a foolish doubt. 'Um, s-sorry I ... ' That this something which he felt towards Kitty, was a something which as yet he himself did not quite understand. 'I jus' ... '

Henry looked uncertain, as though not sure what his engagements were; but his perplexity cleared; and he looked tight-lipped at Kitty. He was grateful, of course, having longed for a companion like her all his life. It was the only time heaven had been good to him, and too, it seemed .. right. One only unutterable terror he had, which by an unfortunate chance was sensitively alluded, but Henry was much too occupied now to have it forced back onto his mind. It was harder to live through these bad times, than know something better.

The young man, boylike, looked up at her, his hand unconsciously treating her cheek to a gentle caress. ' .. Nothin'.'

In the true sympathy of heart, a look alone appeared to affect contrariwise his troubled mood. His hand dropped imperceptibly from face, to just under the sharp point of her chin. Henry, who had not yet learned the joy or pain of reading momently the changes of a beloved face, slowly perused. 'Nothin' ... ' He said again in a sort of dreamy rapture, and in a way of conclusion, met her for a kiss midway.

(Henry spoke. YAY.)

[LUCY "KITTY" HARRIS]

(Slight god-modding and an abrupt ass ending. Long intro and then short reflection. A bit out of place, I'd say. Apologies. Xmas party was calling and I needed to head out so I was like "f*** it" and just left the ending like that. xD)


Kitty was not so much a fool to cast off the verity of the mystery that was Henry Jekyll. She’d known it when they first met, when her sad green eyes had met his sad eyes of ethereal blue. His eyes were filled with secrets and when they cried as they had that night in the enclosure of his humble home, the tracks of his tears spoke for him. They spoke a language she could recognize, but not accurately interpret. He had been someone whom she could not typify, someone who even while he’d sat right beside her seemed so out of reach. It had frightened her and thrilled her all in the same breath. There was a mystery to challenge her own and in that connection their bond had strengthened.

The trouble with mysteries was the obsession; obsession propelled by the need for truth. Most could only be puzzled by a mystery for so long before passion for it waned and submission took them asunder. Only those with enough mad drive stayed until the mystery withered them entirely or they stumbled upon the truth after all. If one were to ask Kitty which group she would consider herself belonging to, it would take but one look into Henry’s eyes for her to answer with complete honesty.

He uttered uncertainties that unnerved her, uncertainties that traipsed past quivering lips and caused the fear in her heart to swell. His gaze had since wavered and it was then that she recalled his mystery. He was veiling his eyes for reasons unknown to her. Perhaps he was afraid of what she might find there. Perhaps she felt the same. But his gentle caress upon her cheek to which she unconsciously leaned into suppressed her fear as did his gentle admission that his hesitance had been for naught. She recognized that he’d hidden once again, but she made a decision in that moment to give him the benefit of the doubt. To who’s benefit she did not rightly know, but the passion in her was too greatly heightened for her to pay him heed.

With his caress he traced designs upon her flesh that the flesh left unattended envied. Her lips, his lips; both mouths moving in synchronicity. Her hands continued in their previously halted endeavor and parted his robe completely, fully exposing the pallor of his torso. Ever gently did her fingers touch upon the skin of his chest, sliding upwards and with a purpose which was all too known to her. She wanted to commit every part of him to memory and that started with a touch.

The asphyxiation of flawed perfection left her lungs gasping for even a sliver more of him and so when she broke from him once again, her intent was as clear as her quickened breath. Her lips turned their attention to his jaw and trailed down to the supple flesh of his neck, tenderly placing open-mouthed kisses. He tensed every now and again and when he did so she made it a point to slow and reduce the fervor behind her attentions to help him feel more at ease. A considerate lover that not a soul aside from Henry could testify to, just as she preferred.

Pulling away from him momentarily, she met his half-lidded gaze with her softened expression. Her fingers expertly undid the lacing of her corseted top, keeping her eyes on him all the while as she briefly dissettled his arm around her waist and shrugged the top off. Moving a hand behind her back and unhooking her brassiere, she slowly slid the straps of it down each arm and removed it with just as much ease, sending it to join her top on the carpet.

Kitty waited a beat, sensitive to his reticence and reserve, allowing him to take in the sight of her bare flesh and putting off any further advances until he showed her that he indeed wanted her to continue. His arm returning to its rightful place around her waist, where on her hip the makeshift spider tattoo laid claim, was gesture enough for her to carry on. She flashed him a broad smile, rewarding his approval with another passionate kiss, her naked chest pressing against his own as she closed the distance between them and leisurely straddled him so that his back was leant against the armrest of the sofa.

Their kiss grew ever passionate, bursting with the most narcotic of emotions. She could feel his spirit being restored, a spirit considered slain that was quickened back to life with feverish need. Not tonight was she to be seduced by the treachery of ruin and gloom’s synchronized duo. No, with her lips she laid bare a soul so deprived of attention and renewed him as he saw fit to renew her. With blind faith did she entrust her affection to him, asking what only a mortal heart such as his could deliver. She, for the moment, cast away her pursuit for reason for his care towards her. For now, she remained grateful that he had the strength to care for her at all like no else had before him. What good to her was the reason when his lips upon hers told her what would words could never? Surely words could betray her and leave her a broken fool, but a kiss, his kiss was the more honest. Truth was there in their joining, in their all-encompassing fire. It burned brighter still as the last of their reservations fell away and their ache for each other overcame them.

*************

Never had there existed a greater peace. Peace of mind, body, and soul shared with one who had thieved all of the aforementioned and was met with no objections. Henry and Kitty laid together in the aftermath of their long-overdue expression of mutual surrender, in the serenity of night that excluded all others. This moment was theirs and theirs alone and she reflected on it as she rested her head against his chest, snugly tucked at his side with an air of lethargy coiling about both of them.

When he had been inside of her, both shallowly panting and gasping, she had reached behind his back and ran her fingertips through the skin of his shoulder blades. Looking for something. She had looked for the remnants of the charred, burnt wings that she was convinced existed. There was a moment when she almost felt something protruding from his back when there was nothing to be found. Phantom wings. She felt it in her hands and when he breathed in her ear, when she felt their sweat mingling in the midst of that passionate act they performed with such searing heat, she felt it burn hotter and hotter. The stumps of soft, hacked off feathers kept on burning under her touch. She could distinctly recall it glowing orange red until she stopped gripping it tightly.

The smallest of smiles tugged at her lips as she rested with him, eyes closed to gather what she could. She imagined that her heartbeat matched the rhythm of his. Sated and peaceful. She imagined that her body securely fit into the crook of his embrace as if she was made to fit into his arms. Amorous and beautiful.



(Lucy didn't. YAY! Musey muse brought to you by this love. >D)

[ricketts]

There was an interval of silence. From time to time, a gust of wind shook the window-panes and bore fitfully with it the distant roar of the city and the rumbling of car wheels. The light was cold and limpid as spring water; shadows were gathering thickly in the corners of the room and in the folds of the curtains; from pieces of furniture, here and there, as dull ashes kindled.

His spirit flew back from the misty dawns and, casting his eyes to the ceiling, assumed a look of enchantment as the woman drank at his neck. Nothing could revive a man so much. Abandoning himself with half-closed eyes to the utter sweetness of it, he became aware of his hand streaming loosely over the surface of her collarbone. To the round edge of her shoulder, a small length down her arm, and across. Just above her chest, he sensed a disturbance. It felt like an indication of a mark, something that had healed. A scar.

Inhaling the perfume of her violets, which sent through Henry a wild thrill of ecstasy, he came away warm from her kisses and she rose. Rose with the exultion of a touching song, soared with a strain to the topmost summits of rapture, and flowed wide into the infinite. The two turned simultaneously and she looked down over him with swimming eyes.

The woman, calm, broad and solemn, dominated by a wonderful and pathetic melody, lingered in a certain monotony full of plaintive weariness, before baring her full supple radiance.

Henry purposely stopped to gaze, the colour of his eyes glittering as if cut in pure diamonds. With a smile so faint that he hardly caught it, he answered by folding that arm back around her and pulling her in. These forgotten sensations rose up once more out of the depths of his consciousness, and, for an instant, a wave of the old desire swept over his soul. None of these miserable things were true.

****************************

Henry's nervous perturbation was so great that he feared every moment to betray himself. All his pleasure was embittered at times down to his inexperience. He could not exactly analyse his discomfort; he could neither gather himself together and overcome it, nor put it away from him; he was swayed in turn by the charm and the fascination exercised over him by each of this woman without being really dominated by her.

He had a vague sensation as of some empty space, in which heavy blows perpetually resounded followed by dolorous echoes. His thoughts seemed to break up and crumble away into a thousand fragments, as the image of Kitty, and the warmth of her, melted into and destroyed them. For however long. The first movement expressed after a while of quite was a small nestling, as Henry gently rubbed his cheek into Kitty's hair.

'Kitty,' He said at last, and gently. Without any of the anger or bitterness that he had at the beginning of the night, but with seemingly that same audible quiver of emotion. 'I've .. never told someone tha' I love them before.' There was a note of grave, sweet sadness in his voice.

[LUCY "KITTY" HARRIS]

A tender beauty, smoldering embers existing for the sole purpose of reminding her of the bastion he had made ruins of. With an enflamed touch, as if the tips of his fingers were possessed by spectral flames, he had withered her tense guard. So there she lay, naked of her defense in every sense of the word and while the sensation spoke of promises, the foreign awareness was all too clear. Neither was truly acquainted with the whispering ardor that enveloped them, that flooded their hearts with a winding presence.

Kitty, securely tucked at Henry’s side, had never shared such intimacy with any man before and meant it. This lover’s embrace and the sweetness of the moment was newly experienced and received with pronounced hesitance. The warmth, both corporal and divine, was settling and unsettling alike; a duo of paradoxical imaginings that did little to still the fretfulness of her reservations. Those minutes of still peace had flitted by with little else but the rawness of the moment to testify to its existence at all. What lay in its wake was a heart swollen with enchantment and a mind riddled with apprehension.

How strange it was to feel clean of the experiences that had marred her before. Even stranger to feel like his hold on her could protect her from the last two years. Two years of living just to breathe, of bearing witness to the barbarism of human nature. Sex and violence was her world and in that world she knew her place. In that world, you were either a monster or had monstrosities committed against you. There existed no other option and for the longest time, she had not the will to challenge that belief. Until there was Henry, wrought with all of his perfections and imperfections; a shade of a world that she had never glimpsed before.

It was with those radical notions in mind that she was torn out of her reverie. Responding with merely a hum of acknowledgment, she waited for his words to shatter the silence forged between them. His admission was one that not only shattered their silence, but drove her out of her warring state of mind. Her eyelids fluttered open and the caress of her fingertips on his bare chest stilled instantaneously.

Love. There were certainties in life such as the cold embrace of death; death, with a garland of black roses like a crown upon his head wilting like the spines of old men, curling his finger and beckoning a person near. Love was not one of those certainties. It was pure faith, blind and muted. To love was to give leeway to the greatest rapture and the rawest of heartache fathomable; driven by a need to soar, but stunned by a fear of falling. That was the opposition that felled Kitty.

Love was not a word never used on her before, though the significance was tarnished by circumstance. There had been times in which the lascivious affections she laved in order to make her living were received with proclamations of love. Through lust-filled expressions of approval from those men, she could make out that one word, false as it was. They were devoted solely to the sex she was to provide for them. It was not her that they loved. Spider, with his honeyed words and cunning tongue, had declared his love for her before and had been proven insincere. Spider was in a committed and enduring relationship with riches. It was not her that he loved.

Silence reigned for a moment, only disturbed by the low and steady drum of Henry’s heartbeat pressed against her ear, asking a question she was not sure of the answer.

So what was love to Henry?

Exhaling a breath that shook her from her stillness, she continued her caress, gentle and tender as her mind exhausted words for her to speak. With a voice of sweet melancholy, she admitted, “If I told you, you’d . . . you'd be the first I’ve told.”

Another question posed itself from that fearful and quivering admission.

So what was love to her?

[ricketts]

All day he had longed for freedom, on and on, with craving for the open sky, for solitude, for green silence, beyond these maddening walls. This heedful silken coming and going, these voices, this reiterant yelp of a single peevish bell - would they never cease? And above all, betwixt dread and an almost physical greed, he hungered for night.

But Henry, quite unmindful of the shock, continued in a kind of heedless reverie, as he lay with his arm softly coiling the crown of Kitty's head, the still visionary thoughts that passed in tranced stillness before his eyes. He longed beyond measure for freedom that until now he had not even dreamed existed outside the covers of some old impossible dream. The invisible flocking presences of the dead, the shock of imaginations that had no words, of quixotic emotions which Edward Hyde had stirred in that low, mocking, furtive talk beside the broken stones of his heart. Was the change quite so monstrous, so meaningless? How often, indeed, he remembered curiously had he seemed to be standing outside these fast-shut gates of thought, that now had been freely opened to him.

Kitty's voice had the effect of a dream of candle-light and reverberating sound and clearest darkness, and after she spoke, Henry slowly smiled and shut his eyes. He was going away. Away from the strange deliberate phantom with the unruffled clear-cut features and bright blue eyes.

Thinking of the night, its secrecy, its immeasurable solitude, he began in a dull voice, 'Strange beside the pond, you look long and lovely. Like I remember you,' He was too tired for anything more than a whisper, but it was a low, mellow whisper nonetheless. Sweeping softly pieces of her hair, he sang in his far-away voice. 'I was on my break, you had time to spare. And so we tried to ... talk, or maybe just sit. Mmm-mmm.'

'Cause things look beautiful, when they're away from you
things look beautiful, when they're so new
and thinks look beautiful, when they're away from you
they seem to stay away from you .. '

From there Henry broke off without another word, and tiredly sighed. For no reason in the world, unless to spend a moment or two longer lying with her.


(I guess that was kinda coming, huh? )

[LUCY "KITTY" HARRIS]

(Yeah, that was. But you know what wasn’t? THIS FECKIN’ POST. >< You’re lucky that the rain was knockin’ about and gave me muse in the process. Too much of it if you judge by post length alone. >P But then you went and ruined it with FT beautiful distractions. Shame on you. See if you can tell where in the post you fucked me over. >D Fuckin ‘ell, I talk too much. So does Lucy, as this post will demonstrate. -.- Without further ado, I give you unnecessarily lengthy cheese. P.S. Muse was brought to you by the weather and this angst.)



A night of tempest, one that arrested a soul’s ponderings, had flown by with unexpected results. It was through all of this tamed uproar and emphatic surrender of self that a thrill of alarm manifested once paid heed. With Henry’s voice crooning what amounted to a kind of beautiful lullaby and gentle confession, received in much the same manner, the moment they shared seemed lulled to a sweet sedation, ignorant of maddening realizations of the world that awaited them outside these walls they’d forged. Body, mind, and spirit affectionately gripped by the soul that lay alongside her, she relished his touch and smiled a dreamy, sleepy smile, pallid cheeks tinted with a hint of a blush.

His voice, she now acknowledged, was always one of a beautiful melancholic tenor. An uninterrupted sorrow drew out the words he spoke, the voice that uttered melodies, even the voice that laughed. It was as if he was forever weighted by the pain he both grudgingly bared and veiled alike. Chased by that phantom of gloom, every quality of his was affected. He was sullen, painfully so, and all too accustomed of retreating into himself. This acknowledgment bound forward, driving her back into her mind and out of the moment in which she’d lightly nuzzled the crook of his neck, her smile faltering more noticeably with each passing second.

This somber disposition of his that seemingly overtook every aspect of his life had reached its tipping point this night. She had bore witness to his remedy for it and was almost taken asunder herself by his near success in that regard. Once again she fell upon her plaintive meditation. Kitty had not forgotten that terrible secret he kept hidden from her; its torturous niggling would not allow her to, just as he was not allowing her to glimpse it. Wounded she had been by his refusal, but she had initially made an effort to conceal her sentiments. Her musings led her to the discernment of the lies that had already traipsed past his lips, one most notably that hadn’t been meant for her ears. Why the secrecy? Did he imagine that, without condoning or condemning, she couldn’t possibly understand? Did he not realize that within everyone there existed their own flaws and fears, much as they festered in him?

Her frown had deepened now, despite his amorous caresses, and she lay very still beside him, a slow-pulsed unrest rising out of his voice of song itself, lingering languidly about the moonbeam streaked room, inhaled and exhaled with each gentle rise and fall of their chests. His voice died away with one last sigh and she was tempted to lighten the mood just as she always did when circumstances bode too overwhelming or destructive, but she relented. Words needed to be spoken that were not cheapened by the safeguards that Kitty utilized to detract from her vulnerability. And so, after a moment that passed in silence, she spoke.

“You know, we’re all incredibly flawed, Henry.” Kitty’s voice adopted that same sort of melancholy of his own voice, almost as if she had borrowed it directly from the source. Her pensive eyes fixed on the darkness not illumined by the light of that pearly orb claiming the night sky and she didn’t dare to move. Not rigid in bearing, but just simply stilled; perhaps consumedly drowned in the thoughts that now rose to the surface and spilled past her rosy lips. “That’s what connects us to everyone else. Sometimes, though, we forget that. Sometimes we want to. We find it difficult to just believe that we aren’t completely alone. It’s not that we don’t want to. It’s just that too much has happened and we can’t believe that anyone, anywhere out there, can understand.”

There was an echo of woeful acceptance present in her unexpected discourse, something intensely personal that she had mustered the courage to share with Henry. She allowed him the time to mentally digest that before she finally stirred. Positioning herself with her chest scarcely hovering just above his chest, arms on either side of him propping her upper body, and her face, framed by the locks of umber hair that fell before it, intimately close to his own.

Kitty began again, but with a slight turn in focus. “This person that you . . .” she trailed off, reluctant to put his own feelings into words for him, especially one of such magnitude. Instead, she settled on a much tamer word. “. . . care about is not Kitty.” Watching for hints of confusion upon his face and seeking to rectify that, she took his hand and brought it to the right side of her head, guiding it along the elongated and raised scar that the hair that grew over it concealed, her eyelids lowering over her eyes to subconsciously hide a weakness. “This person is someone whose name I don’t know, from some life I can’t remember.” A bit hazily this was an attempt to remind him of her own flaws, that even though this scar could be felt externally, it was more than skin deep. She did not know who she was, but she did know that it wasn’t Kitty. If people were the sum of their memories and she had no memories, aside from the destitution she’d accumulated in these past two years, to speak of, this name of hers was soiled beyond measure. Somewhere in the recesses of her mind she could hear Jane quoting to her just as she’d done before. That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet. Perhaps she could find that comforting if she could ever succeed in convincing herself of it.

Parting her hand from his, though leaving his to the attention paid to her scar, she let her eyes flutter open. However, her eyes darted away from his with what she spoke next in the softest of voices. “This person loves you more than she could ever show you, but to even start she . . .” Trailing off again, Kitty arrived at the realization of exactly what it was she had been subconsciously doing with the way in which she was phrasing her words. By speaking like she was talking about someone else, she did exactly what she had been internally disapproving of with Henry. Distancing herself, guarding herself, hiding herself. It posed little difficulty to strip one’s self of clothing and claim to be naked; she knew that better than most, but to open your soul to someone, to let them into your every vulnerability and strength, that was to be truly naked. Therein dwelled the fear. Swallowing once and returning her gaze to his, she ventured both. “I . . . I love you, Henry, but I have to love every part of you, even the parts you think will ruin you in my eyes.” A kind of heady release, a purging of some sort, overtook her and it was both thrilling and terrifying all at once. There it was, laid out for him in as plain as the words she spoke would illustrate for him. It somehow did not feel it was enough to convey what sentiments she harbored for him, but it was certainly enough to ruffle her affectation of calm.

Diving into speaking again as she felt unnervingly fixed upon, she journeyed through her maelstrom of disquiet and emerged the calmer. Raising one hand to his cheek, she touched upon it with a tender caress, her eyes meeting ones of a forlorn twilight. “I know you’re not perfect, just as I’m not. I don’t want you to be. What I want you to be is brave because it’s bravery that can allow you to let me in completely. I’m willing to let you in. That’s the only way we can ever have a chance, the only way either of us can be bettered.” Leaning in just slightly closer for emphasis, she uttered with a compelling tone, “Better for yourself, not for me.”

Kitty sounded weary of her own voice by then, but felt all the more liberated for having permitted her thoughts to cross the boundary she kept fortified. This night had exhausted them both and it might have been cruel to solicit a confession from him, especially when he had made one just as grand and considerably less deathly though still formidable if placed upon heavy thought. There was, however, still something she wanted, nay, needed to hear from him if she expected to drift to a relatively sound slumber of the worriless and he expected her to finally cease her chatter. This something she had never fathomed she would ever have to address, but was in dire need of addressing.

Searching his eyes for what they couldn’t hide, she articulated straight from her fears, “It’s been a rough night. You’re tired, yeah. These kinds of nights will do that to a person. About what started this night off in the first place, you don’t have to tell me right now, but there is something I need to know.”

A dreadfully grave timbre that almost sounded on the brink of breaking rang out with the effort she was making to keep from faltering just at the notion. “Can I trust that when I close my eyes to sleep tonight, it won’t be the last time I’d seen you here, breathing, al- . . . alive?” And there was the heartbreak she couldn’t force out of her voice, that she couldn’t banish from her eyes; eyes that glistened with the vulnerability she loathed so completely.



(GAH, I NEED TO STOP VOMITING WORDS AND CHEESE. AND YES I QUOTED ROMEO AND JULIET. THAT IS SO AWKWARD. xD But dude, upside? This thread after your post? DONEZORZ. ANOTHER ONE DONE AND DUSTED. SHIT YEAH, WE RAWK. *pops collar* Feel free to godmod in your post as much as you like to make it more conclusionary. ^^)

[ricketts]

Sincerely Henry believed, that his life was wrecked for ever. He did suffer from insomnia, even with his seemingly good constitution, for weeks, which proved the poignant insistency of his grief, making thinking a disease instead of a healthy function.

He performed his duties mechanically, rigidly, like an engine stoked from the outside. He no longer had pleasure or interest in them. The flavour was gone from life; it had become a necessary burden, to be borne as best he could. Tonight Henry questioned the right of the moral law that asked him to bear it, under the circumstances. He looked at the blue water beneath him, and longed to be beneath it, sharing the fate of his once-clear head. He wanted to die. At twenty four.

Even now, when he had someone to share his wrecked life with - would it help him, or make him worse than ever?

At least, for however brief a time, he was a man again. Physically and - for now - mentally sound, doing all reverence to the listen to Kitty - a flawless angel in the retrospect, while finding natural solace as she crept over him. He touched her face with his forefinger and he seemed to sink, dreamlike. When he would consent to recognise the world of affairs again, and the claims of youth and manhood against it, he found, but there was no need to specify all the things he found. Henry would raise his eyes up to her every now and then, his finger venturing cautiously about her cheek and neck. He listened to her, ignorant of the details of the tragedy of his life, she scented a mystery about him. It was, by the way, a particularly sympathetic night - soft, still, solitary, with a full moon. They both felt it.

He looked for a moment at the vague trace of a scar left on her that the silver light had just touched, and there was danger of rupture to the delicate thread of the topic that was weaving so charming a onversation. And yet he yearned to talk about it, and now, and to this particularly sympathetic woman, who was not giddy or difficult, but, like himself, experienced in the troubles of life, such as weighed him down. There was something about her that irresistibly appealed to him, and he did not know what; a few words from her, backed by the nameless influences of the hour, unloosed his tongue.

The listener, listening intently, here put a quiet answer. 'If you're here breathin' wit' me.'

He looked at her, and she looked at him. At this moment they seemed to have known one another intimately for years. The moon again. Still in his dream, Henry settled down to last word the in the same whisper. 'Tell this person f' me, I love 'er too. So much.'

And at the last smile the worst of the trouble seemed over, instead of just beginning.


(Yo broseph, I think we're done 0: )