you're too young & eager to love

I wanted to write an Augusta piece that focused on the major men in her life - Maximus, Harrow, Radomir, and Baldric. ... But then I wrote this.

Oh well. It just feels good to write something! Even nonsense.

--





for i think of you, flung down brutal darkness …
i think of you, with your hair disordered and dripping.
and myself, rising red from that embrace.
- Conrad Aiken


Cracks in the world.

Floods and dust.

It has not rained in months. The floods are coming. The water should cleanse, but it’s dirty somehow.

Augusta turns her face into it, feels the water trickle down her neck, slicking her hair to thick, cold molasses across her shoulders. Her skin is too thin; it does not protect, because the rain still gets in. Through the pores, until it feels as though she’s drowning in it, and into her mind, where it turns everything bright and dancing and liquid, where it washes away sense.

She starts to shiver, here, on the edge of the wasteland, only half protected by her man-made shelter and sheets of rock on a thin precipice of mountainside. There are cracks in everything. Rain pours down from the sky and tries to purify. Runs down her arms, as she raises them in agony or exultation.

Augusta feels as insubstantial as paper. Feels thinner than her true self, worn thread-bare by other people’s expectations, by the looks in their eyes.

If she cries, the sound of her tears become lost in the rising winds, in the threat of thunder on the horizon. She’s thinking about heaven and hell, those perceived final destinations from centuries past. She knows hell is supposed to be hot. Hot like the burn of alcohol down the back of her throat. Hot like sex, making the sweat spring up and the bedsheets too close and the weight of men above her stifling. But there’s a thin line. Augusta remembers from her father’s books, the ones she read as a child. Hell, like the sex that sends one there, can be cold, and silent, and absent.

Heat drives away the cold.

*

Radomir holds her open, his hands huge against her thighs, pinning her fragile weight to the stone-tiled floor. Her skin is still wet from the rain but now she shivers from raw fervor. He stops what he’s doing with his tongue, grins with swollen lips when her nails rake, impatiently, across the back of his head. He bites the inside of both her thighs, and Augusta laughs, calls him a good boy.

She feels him shudder in response to her claim, and he loses rhythm for a few short moments, drawing in a shuttering breath before returning to his task. Her hands are more gentle now, smoothing over the backs of his scarred shoulders, one of her legs wrapped around his side, her hips lifting as his mouth draws her nearer and nearer to the only death she has ever known. Radomir wraps a solid arm around her to hold her steady, and Augusta can hear the soft murmur of her own name being whispered into her skin.

It breaks her. She shatters completely, finds her breath returned to her at long last, and is reborn.