you're too young & eager to love (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
impertinences) wrote2021-12-24 10:12 am
impertinences) wrote2021-12-24 10:12 am
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Goodness gracious, I have not posted since June. Let's lessen this lapse.
This "piece" has been sitting, half-made, on my computer for months. I can't say I actually finished it. It's more of a bunch of random snippets/moments lumped together that, at some point, I was going to try to weave together into a cohesive piece but ... alas, the momentum has gone. I can't even remember my initial plans. Nonetheless, I cannot deprive the world of Augusta and Radomir!
“Do you love?”
“Not easily,” she says honestly and plainly, with no hint of pity for herself in her voice.
“Why not?”
“Love makes a sacrifice of the future. It requires too much. It’s a weakness.”
“And you are not a woman prone to weaknesses.”
“No.” The corners of her mouth hint at a smile. “I am not.”
Augusta watches Harrow slice into a cheap cut of steak, the meat tough and overcooked. There are no vegetables, no grain, not even a solitary butter-smeared slice of bread to accompany the meat. The kitchens were raided on the night of the escape, left mostly bare; the supply routes have been suspended until investigations can be concluded and order reinstated. There is little to enjoy at the moment—no more elaborate dinner parties with freshly imported oysters and beef roasts, no more music, no more finery. Augusta does not feel the loss of decadence like Harrow does; she has a small supply of goods (slices of canned stewed tomatoes, whole pickled beets that stain her fingertips, flaky strips of smoked fish) they’d brought with them from the mountain bunker, which she eats contentedly in modest portions while overlooking the compound’s paperwork in the privacy of her own room, and Radomir has made an easy hunting ground of the scorched periphery.
They still haven’t been able to restore the central power, and the emergency lighting casts dim red glows throughout the cold hallways, into the dark bedrooms, everything made bloody. Nearly a third of the staff has disbanded, fled into the night like the escapees, fearful of Harrow’s retaliation or the scent of failure or both. The fires had destroyed almost half of the holding cells and the evaluation center for incoming detainees, along with the entire east wing of the compound. Countless precious documents, equipment, medical supplies, experimental data … gone. Obliterated. Wiped from existence. Not to mention the subjects themselves. They’ll be dope sick from the medical procedures, half savage from the fighting dens, loping across the desert in a blind desperation for freedom. Those are the lucky ones. The ones who were unable to flee have not been fed since the incident; they sound like kenneled dogs, braying in their self-pity, waiting for the whip or the bludgeon.
When she thinks of how this has happened to him, to them, Augusta resists the desire to pinch the bridge of her nose and sigh, the gesture of an exasperated school matron. But Harrow does exhaust her, even now, as he eats slowly, without vigor, stiff-shouldered and reticent. There are shadows beneath his eyes, violet blooms from too little sleep and too much worry. Roman’s betrayal had been a knife to his ribs, Kim's disappearance a strike of the whip across his back, Arletta's absence weighing like a noose around his throat, but losing his swan ... this is what has broken him, has broken the compound in heavier, more weightier ways than he can stand to acknowledge. He buries the self-loathing in bourbon; she can smell it on him. Her brother is fraying, slowly, but inevitably.
She has always despised those who cannot make progress.
Their past is a bullet wound, leathery scar tissue that she likes to tear open and stitch back together when she feels indulgent.
“I think,” he says, running his calloused hands slowly from the heels of her feet in his lap to her well-defined calves, “that you are rarely satisfied. Then. Now. Especially now. You eat accomplishment the way starving men devoir their dead. With urgency.” He pauses for a second then grins up at her, slowly, somewhat rakishly. “You lack the guilt in the aftermath though.”
Radomir speaks with a candidness bred from years of companionship. His tone is calm, unhurried, more thoughtful than didactic. Augusta, sitting in an oversized leather chair that had once belonged to her father, smiles. It’s a rare genuine smile, a full-mouthed smile rather than her more familiar and more frequent upturn of the corners of her mouth. This one actually reaches her eyes, their peculiar amber color making her seem feline-like in the glow of the firelight.
“Go on,” she says and pushes her feet into his chest. It’s an invitation to let his hands roam further, which he accepts.
Radomir has a wide reach. He’s caught men and women with his hands. He’s snapped necks and crushed skulls and broken whole fists. But now, his fingers are gentle, skimming higher across her naked legs, almost up to her knees. She has such long legs, her body slim and athletic, devoid of the sinuous curves other women possess but lithe and capable. There is not much softness on her, which he has always liked. “You have an admirable indifference.”
This makes one of her thin eyebrows lift. “And?”
“You take great care to project a brutal aura, and most of it is genuine because of who you are.”
“Perhaps I would not be who I am if it weren’t for you. Perhaps I learned brutality from you.”
It’s his turn to grin, dark and savage. “Or I learned it from you.”
“What else?” she asks as her legs slip open to welcome his traversing hands now that he’s moved from sitting to kneeling in front her knees, his significantly larger body casting her half in shadow.
He dips his head and presses his full mouth to the constellation of freckles scattered above her left calf. “And there is something about you that I would like to break if you would let me.”
She lets out a guttural sound that could be laughter but isn’t and pushes herself suddenly up from the chair, more into his space, her hands cradling both sides of his face, her nails blunt against his cheeks and jaw and hairline. Her legs widen, her knees caging his hips, and when she kisses him it is not gentle. Her teeth tear his bottom lip. The taste of his own blood in his mouth, coppery and bitter, fills him both with disgust and need, and his hands greedily reach for her waist, but Augusta dips her head away from him to catch his gaze.
Augusta does not look at people—she weighs them, measures them. In an instant, she is calculating a person’s worth, his usefulness, her flaws. She has records on every Vries employee and business connection or supplier; in fact, Radomir cannot remember the last time he had to supply her the name of some approaching diplomat or politician. He is proud that she has not assessed him in this way in almost fifteen years, that he alone has risen above her scrutiny, has earned her trust with his own devotion. Which is why his gaze, in comparison, is full of unconditional loyalty and contained ferocity.
But the look she gives him now is willful, heady, icy.
“I am not my brother,” she asserts. Her nails dig into the sides of his jaw and cheeks, painful in the way they hold, finding the tender spots by his teeth to dig into. “I am not undone by my beasts.”
“No,” he agrees, breathing harder.
“If I held a knife to your throat, you would let me cut.”
“Yes.”
She pushes her fingers into his mouth.
“What do you want?” he asks.
“I want everything,” she replies.
He is mountainous. His whole body seems to occupy the width of the hallway as he walks too heavily on the plush carpet. The stink of the fighting pits clings to him, the fetid smell of compacted blood and sweat and grit and pain. The smell assaults her, but Augusta’s face is impassive as she leads him, barefooted, into her husband’s bathroom. The opulence of the estate disorients him, she knows. The fresh air had done the same while the midday sun had nearly blinded him. His entire body is thrumming with the overwhelming burden of freedom.
Despite the guards’ concerns, she’d had him unmuzzled and unchained once he’d been delivered from his cell. The handlers had shorn his overgrown, tangled hair, but they’d left him in rags and unwashed. His own filth does not seem to bother him, but he still walks as though he’s shackled with slow, shuffling steps. He holds his arms in front of his wide chest, his hands dangling like impotent weapons in front of him, wrists close together. When he enters the bathroom, Radomir stands still and stiff by the door. He looks around slowly, takes stock of the two windows, of the second exit to the right of the open marble shower that leads into the palatial bedroom, then looks to Augusta for direction.
“The bath,” she says softly. “We have to get you cleaned up. Baldric does not appreciate when his household staff fails to maintain a certain level of appearance.”
She’s had the oversized tub drawn, and the steam drifts up from the water temptingly. The room smells slightly of sandalwood and citrus. The towels folded by the small cart near the tub are plush and startling white, the type of cleanliness and luxury only obtained by the wealthy.
Radomir nods mutely and undresses without modesty. When he sinks into the bath, surprisingly cautious in his movements and barely contained by the smooth porcelain sides once submerged, the water pools over the edges and spills onto the granite floor. He leans against the back and stares straight ahead, his expressive eyes boring holes into the cream-colored wall. Everything here, he thinks in a tongue he can no longer identify, is without blemish. He feels all the more cumbersome and dirty.
When Augusta places her smooth hand on the top of his scarred shoulders, he jerks beneath her, startling. More water splashes around him.
“Shh,” she soothes, her fingertips hovering above his feverish skin.
She washes him herself, slowly, kneeling behind him to work her fingers into the thick muscle of his neck, shoulders, arms. He does not feel worthy, but still she takes each one of his hands in hers and scrubs the blood and dirt away from beneath his torn nails. She cleans his chest and back with a rough sponge that scratches pleasantly against his skin. Augusta has to empty the tub twice, refilling it each time with scaldingly hot but blessedly clean water, and eventually he is made anew.
The unbridled current thrumming through him has lessened some, lulled by the steam and the feel of her hands as she quietly and efficiently works, but his entire body becomes rigid when he hears rather than sees the clasp of the belt synching her thin waist unhook and the rustle of her falling dress.
She slips into the bath, into his lap, her smooth arms looping around his neck, and he cannot breathe. He cannot see. He cannot think. He could be drowning. His jaw is clenched, and he curls his fingers around the edge of the tub until his knuckles are white, until he could break the porcelain itself.
“Do you love me?” she asks, her mouth pressed painfully close to his ear, her voice a whisper.
He falters, and a line worries itself between his eyebrows. He turns his eyes away from her, the only part of his body that he dares to move, as the rest of him craves to bury inside of her, to find oblivion inside of her. “It is not right ...” he croaks, his words dry from an unused throat, as scratchy as rust.
She leans her forehead against his temple, her breath soft on his skin.
“It is not the right word,” he corrects.
“Try.”
“You are me. My entirety.”
She makes a pleased hum of a sound, a noise that shivers against his cheek, and he wants to lose himself in her appreciation, her acknowledgment of his well-doing. He wants, too, to put his killer’s hands around her delicate waist, to bury his nose into her dark hair, to lick from her collarbone to her pink mouth. He wants to devour her until she has nestled, safe and eternal, against his rib cage.
This "piece" has been sitting, half-made, on my computer for months. I can't say I actually finished it. It's more of a bunch of random snippets/moments lumped together that, at some point, I was going to try to weave together into a cohesive piece but ... alas, the momentum has gone. I can't even remember my initial plans. Nonetheless, I cannot deprive the world of Augusta and Radomir!
“Do you love?”
“Not easily,” she says honestly and plainly, with no hint of pity for herself in her voice.
“Why not?”
“Love makes a sacrifice of the future. It requires too much. It’s a weakness.”
“And you are not a woman prone to weaknesses.”
“No.” The corners of her mouth hint at a smile. “I am not.”
Augusta watches Harrow slice into a cheap cut of steak, the meat tough and overcooked. There are no vegetables, no grain, not even a solitary butter-smeared slice of bread to accompany the meat. The kitchens were raided on the night of the escape, left mostly bare; the supply routes have been suspended until investigations can be concluded and order reinstated. There is little to enjoy at the moment—no more elaborate dinner parties with freshly imported oysters and beef roasts, no more music, no more finery. Augusta does not feel the loss of decadence like Harrow does; she has a small supply of goods (slices of canned stewed tomatoes, whole pickled beets that stain her fingertips, flaky strips of smoked fish) they’d brought with them from the mountain bunker, which she eats contentedly in modest portions while overlooking the compound’s paperwork in the privacy of her own room, and Radomir has made an easy hunting ground of the scorched periphery.
They still haven’t been able to restore the central power, and the emergency lighting casts dim red glows throughout the cold hallways, into the dark bedrooms, everything made bloody. Nearly a third of the staff has disbanded, fled into the night like the escapees, fearful of Harrow’s retaliation or the scent of failure or both. The fires had destroyed almost half of the holding cells and the evaluation center for incoming detainees, along with the entire east wing of the compound. Countless precious documents, equipment, medical supplies, experimental data … gone. Obliterated. Wiped from existence. Not to mention the subjects themselves. They’ll be dope sick from the medical procedures, half savage from the fighting dens, loping across the desert in a blind desperation for freedom. Those are the lucky ones. The ones who were unable to flee have not been fed since the incident; they sound like kenneled dogs, braying in their self-pity, waiting for the whip or the bludgeon.
When she thinks of how this has happened to him, to them, Augusta resists the desire to pinch the bridge of her nose and sigh, the gesture of an exasperated school matron. But Harrow does exhaust her, even now, as he eats slowly, without vigor, stiff-shouldered and reticent. There are shadows beneath his eyes, violet blooms from too little sleep and too much worry. Roman’s betrayal had been a knife to his ribs, Kim's disappearance a strike of the whip across his back, Arletta's absence weighing like a noose around his throat, but losing his swan ... this is what has broken him, has broken the compound in heavier, more weightier ways than he can stand to acknowledge. He buries the self-loathing in bourbon; she can smell it on him. Her brother is fraying, slowly, but inevitably.
She has always despised those who cannot make progress.
Their past is a bullet wound, leathery scar tissue that she likes to tear open and stitch back together when she feels indulgent.
“I think,” he says, running his calloused hands slowly from the heels of her feet in his lap to her well-defined calves, “that you are rarely satisfied. Then. Now. Especially now. You eat accomplishment the way starving men devoir their dead. With urgency.” He pauses for a second then grins up at her, slowly, somewhat rakishly. “You lack the guilt in the aftermath though.”
Radomir speaks with a candidness bred from years of companionship. His tone is calm, unhurried, more thoughtful than didactic. Augusta, sitting in an oversized leather chair that had once belonged to her father, smiles. It’s a rare genuine smile, a full-mouthed smile rather than her more familiar and more frequent upturn of the corners of her mouth. This one actually reaches her eyes, their peculiar amber color making her seem feline-like in the glow of the firelight.
“Go on,” she says and pushes her feet into his chest. It’s an invitation to let his hands roam further, which he accepts.
Radomir has a wide reach. He’s caught men and women with his hands. He’s snapped necks and crushed skulls and broken whole fists. But now, his fingers are gentle, skimming higher across her naked legs, almost up to her knees. She has such long legs, her body slim and athletic, devoid of the sinuous curves other women possess but lithe and capable. There is not much softness on her, which he has always liked. “You have an admirable indifference.”
This makes one of her thin eyebrows lift. “And?”
“You take great care to project a brutal aura, and most of it is genuine because of who you are.”
“Perhaps I would not be who I am if it weren’t for you. Perhaps I learned brutality from you.”
It’s his turn to grin, dark and savage. “Or I learned it from you.”
“What else?” she asks as her legs slip open to welcome his traversing hands now that he’s moved from sitting to kneeling in front her knees, his significantly larger body casting her half in shadow.
He dips his head and presses his full mouth to the constellation of freckles scattered above her left calf. “And there is something about you that I would like to break if you would let me.”
She lets out a guttural sound that could be laughter but isn’t and pushes herself suddenly up from the chair, more into his space, her hands cradling both sides of his face, her nails blunt against his cheeks and jaw and hairline. Her legs widen, her knees caging his hips, and when she kisses him it is not gentle. Her teeth tear his bottom lip. The taste of his own blood in his mouth, coppery and bitter, fills him both with disgust and need, and his hands greedily reach for her waist, but Augusta dips her head away from him to catch his gaze.
Augusta does not look at people—she weighs them, measures them. In an instant, she is calculating a person’s worth, his usefulness, her flaws. She has records on every Vries employee and business connection or supplier; in fact, Radomir cannot remember the last time he had to supply her the name of some approaching diplomat or politician. He is proud that she has not assessed him in this way in almost fifteen years, that he alone has risen above her scrutiny, has earned her trust with his own devotion. Which is why his gaze, in comparison, is full of unconditional loyalty and contained ferocity.
But the look she gives him now is willful, heady, icy.
“I am not my brother,” she asserts. Her nails dig into the sides of his jaw and cheeks, painful in the way they hold, finding the tender spots by his teeth to dig into. “I am not undone by my beasts.”
“No,” he agrees, breathing harder.
“If I held a knife to your throat, you would let me cut.”
“Yes.”
She pushes her fingers into his mouth.
“What do you want?” he asks.
“I want everything,” she replies.
He is mountainous. His whole body seems to occupy the width of the hallway as he walks too heavily on the plush carpet. The stink of the fighting pits clings to him, the fetid smell of compacted blood and sweat and grit and pain. The smell assaults her, but Augusta’s face is impassive as she leads him, barefooted, into her husband’s bathroom. The opulence of the estate disorients him, she knows. The fresh air had done the same while the midday sun had nearly blinded him. His entire body is thrumming with the overwhelming burden of freedom.
Despite the guards’ concerns, she’d had him unmuzzled and unchained once he’d been delivered from his cell. The handlers had shorn his overgrown, tangled hair, but they’d left him in rags and unwashed. His own filth does not seem to bother him, but he still walks as though he’s shackled with slow, shuffling steps. He holds his arms in front of his wide chest, his hands dangling like impotent weapons in front of him, wrists close together. When he enters the bathroom, Radomir stands still and stiff by the door. He looks around slowly, takes stock of the two windows, of the second exit to the right of the open marble shower that leads into the palatial bedroom, then looks to Augusta for direction.
“The bath,” she says softly. “We have to get you cleaned up. Baldric does not appreciate when his household staff fails to maintain a certain level of appearance.”
She’s had the oversized tub drawn, and the steam drifts up from the water temptingly. The room smells slightly of sandalwood and citrus. The towels folded by the small cart near the tub are plush and startling white, the type of cleanliness and luxury only obtained by the wealthy.
Radomir nods mutely and undresses without modesty. When he sinks into the bath, surprisingly cautious in his movements and barely contained by the smooth porcelain sides once submerged, the water pools over the edges and spills onto the granite floor. He leans against the back and stares straight ahead, his expressive eyes boring holes into the cream-colored wall. Everything here, he thinks in a tongue he can no longer identify, is without blemish. He feels all the more cumbersome and dirty.
When Augusta places her smooth hand on the top of his scarred shoulders, he jerks beneath her, startling. More water splashes around him.
“Shh,” she soothes, her fingertips hovering above his feverish skin.
She washes him herself, slowly, kneeling behind him to work her fingers into the thick muscle of his neck, shoulders, arms. He does not feel worthy, but still she takes each one of his hands in hers and scrubs the blood and dirt away from beneath his torn nails. She cleans his chest and back with a rough sponge that scratches pleasantly against his skin. Augusta has to empty the tub twice, refilling it each time with scaldingly hot but blessedly clean water, and eventually he is made anew.
The unbridled current thrumming through him has lessened some, lulled by the steam and the feel of her hands as she quietly and efficiently works, but his entire body becomes rigid when he hears rather than sees the clasp of the belt synching her thin waist unhook and the rustle of her falling dress.
She slips into the bath, into his lap, her smooth arms looping around his neck, and he cannot breathe. He cannot see. He cannot think. He could be drowning. His jaw is clenched, and he curls his fingers around the edge of the tub until his knuckles are white, until he could break the porcelain itself.
“Do you love me?” she asks, her mouth pressed painfully close to his ear, her voice a whisper.
He falters, and a line worries itself between his eyebrows. He turns his eyes away from her, the only part of his body that he dares to move, as the rest of him craves to bury inside of her, to find oblivion inside of her. “It is not right ...” he croaks, his words dry from an unused throat, as scratchy as rust.
She leans her forehead against his temple, her breath soft on his skin.
“It is not the right word,” he corrects.
“Try.”
“You are me. My entirety.”
She makes a pleased hum of a sound, a noise that shivers against his cheek, and he wants to lose himself in her appreciation, her acknowledgment of his well-doing. He wants, too, to put his killer’s hands around her delicate waist, to bury his nose into her dark hair, to lick from her collarbone to her pink mouth. He wants to devour her until she has nestled, safe and eternal, against his rib cage.