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 Posted: Sun Jan 31, 2016 9:53 pm
Chel took a somewhat pathetic moment to sniffle and then obliged him, rolling onto his stomach; not just her face buried in his shirt but her chest and stomach too. A full body burial (the place where she hid), a final small death (french jokes aside).
"Love you, Hawthorn," she spoke into his skin, like she could send the words across his whole body and have it be not only a sentiment but an action. "M'just a crybaby. Want too much."
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Posted: Sun Jan 31, 2016 10:01 pm
"Love you too, Hawthorn." Cheesy, awkward, genuine. He enveloped Chel in an embrace, wanting nothing more than to let her sink in beneath the skin. "You've earned some hardcore good karma," he said. "Life's going to pay it back, babe. Or if not, I'll force it to."
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Posted: Sun Jan 31, 2016 10:04 pm
It was the type of atmosphere that would never be captured again. Light rain, echoing halls, warm love. The kind that led her to say things that were potentially mushy and almost to the point of being out of character for her.
"It already did. Y'know. With you and stuff."
And that was probably as close as you were going to get.
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Posted: Sun Jan 31, 2016 10:10 pm
"Mm-mm." That wasn't enough to him, not after what she had been through. (And sometimes that was just the problem, that something wasn't quite ever enough, not even him.) "But it's a good start. 'S'got 60 years for it to catch up to the quota."
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Posted: Sun Jan 31, 2016 10:19 pm
"More than 60," she encouraged him softly. Chel lifted her head enough to look at him for a moment before settling back in their entwined position. It was hard to tell where Chel began and Jack ended even with their vastly different tones.
She closed her eyes for a moment and let his heartbeat match the rain. All was quiet; a commodity rarely acquired by hunters. They'd moved out of the dorms because of the noise and Jack's dislike of close quarters with other hunters, but even out in the towns it was never really quiet. Maybe even worse; every noise that sounded struck a sort of paranoia- has something finally broken in?
It ended up being much longer than a moment, not that Chel could tell. What had been a few minutes to her seemed to bleed into the night as when she looked up there were stars in the sky and even the frogs had stopped.
Her jeans had gotten uncomfortable though and it begged a disentanglement. "Hey... you awake ...?"
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Posted: Mon Feb 01, 2016 7:13 am
Against his better judgement, he fell asleep in such a position. Both yesterday and today had worn down his edges just enough to let him close his eyes. But it was a light sleep: the croaking and rain had permeated it, and now Chel's voice broke through.
"Mm." He thumbed her back sleepily. "What's up?"
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Posted: Mon Feb 01, 2016 8:11 am
"I had an idea," she said, breaking their embrace momentarily to get rid of the jeans before coming back to it. It was a bit colder this way, but less uncomfortable.
"You don't sound awake." If he wanted to sleep, he should sleep.
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Posted: Mon Feb 01, 2016 8:41 am
"Idea" paired with the sound of jeans coming off had him stirring some more. He pushed back against the wall and yawned, stretching until his joints popped. "Sorry you're so cozy," Jack mumbled, blinking awake slowly. "Let's hear it."
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Posted: Mon Feb 01, 2016 9:26 am
Chel freed one arm from him to summon the artifact, putting a layer of metal between them.
It didn't require much explanation beyond that except Chel did say, "Only f'you'll let me." That was, she had discovered, how it worked. Both participants had to be willing.
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Posted: Mon Feb 01, 2016 2:13 pm
He glanced at the artifact and felt a mixed pang of thrill and uncertainty. The last time they had tried it had been without knowing the limits, but it had proved to be a highly vulnerable place they found themselves. Memories could be shown, or at least snippets of them, and there was that instinctual fear of his about blurring his identity, even for a little bit. On the other hand, in some ways it was even better than sex—or at least in letting him express the love he couldn't put to words. And he knew Chel wouldn't offer if there wasn't something similar for her.
Jack cupped one side of her face and put on a sleepy grin. "I'll try not to be too sappy."
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Posted: Mon Feb 01, 2016 11:38 pm
"Be as sappy as you want," she told him, putting a hand over the one that touched her face, "Honeymoon gift."
What happened next would have looked like Chel falling back asleep, but had Jack peeled back her eyelids he would have seen a milky greenish-white. It was no more than falling asleep though; using the artifact felt like falling into a dream. She had no memory of how she'd appeared in the dream, only that that was where she was now.
Sunlight streamed through small holes in a tree canopy. She stood in a meadow of sorts, the strong scent of pine in the air. Yet the artifact space was a mixture of memories; it couldn't create new places, only recreate that which it's users had inhabited before. Maybe she'd been here on a mission or maybe it was one of Jack's memories.
Like before, details were hard to place. Everything blurred from one memory to another (the scent of pine became summer camp became campfires became bonfires on the beach-) and it was all open, raw, overwhelming. It was impossible to focus on any one thing.
She blinked a few times to clear her vision before sighting him; only a few feet in front of her and the only thing concrete in the vision. What resulted could only be called a wildfire from where he was standing. Emotions weren't contained inside but rather shared outwardly. Jack would not only see but feel the overwhelming eruption of everything thus far. Her pangs of pain she'd felt earlier, the hazy affection they'd shared all day.
She opened her mouth to say something- but what to say?
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Posted: Wed Feb 03, 2016 9:21 am
It was at once relaxing and stressing: to have no physical restrictions keeping him from expressing himself, but to have the same innate fear of giving out too much (no boundaries, no privacy); to be in a safe place all their own, but to also slowly bleed together until identity became a minor detail; to know just how much Chel loved and longed, but to be overwhelmed at the same time when it evoked his own strong feelings.
Even when shared outwardly, however, Jack's manifested in something a little subtler. Less fire and more almost gravitational, a magnetic tug to make two ends meet. The compulsion of the river feeding the rapids, whose depths were deep and unstoppable. A riptide that could steal and swallow whole the unwary beneath unforgiving waves. If Chel wanted to burn him up, he wanted to drown her.
His hold was tenuous, but Jack was nothing if not always trying to keep composure in the face of vulnerability. Knowing talking was pointless here, he extended a hand out.
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Posted: Wed Feb 03, 2016 7:11 pm
Rather than making a beautiful scene, Chel vaulted the distance to pull his tall frame down into an embrace. Hands weren't enough, words couldn't capture no matter how many palaces they built out of paragraphs.
Her throat closed and she choked for a moment; it wasn't the kind of thing she could later describe (not that she would share anyone) except with three words: really ******** good.
It wasn't just loving him, but loving herself- something that other people could never understand. It was how she knew that any marriage, any definitions and labels for their relationship meant nothing compared to how they actually felt. For once Chel allowed herself to let it flow freely; to not restrain herself behind her perceived lax behavior, but instead be intense and unrelenting.
She knew somewhere in the back of her mind that this was a mistake. That no moment would compare in the future, that reality itself would be duller in juxtaposition.
Just a little longer was all she asked. Let her drown him. Let him be the hurricane he always was, the storm to her bolt of lightning. Better to sink on the ocean floor than resurface to an absent rescue boat.
To answer the question of how much Chel loved and longed: a whole damn bunch.
She only realized she hadn't spoken when her lips tried to move again. How long had they been standing there? Moments? Minutes? s**t. "Karma's good."
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Posted: Sun Feb 07, 2016 8:11 am
He was thoroughly unused to being open in general, sometimes even around his wife. But this was something else entirely, and what he thought he had prepared for, what little control he had mastered over himself, was obliterated in seconds. His attention seemed to bounce from one thing to another, to squeeze every moment he couldn't put into words together until it was a mixed concentration that filled the infinite and small space around them. The cliff in China and in her room on Christmas and in the snowy graveyard in the dream, denial and reluctance trumped by rare impulse (don't stop); every little moment she had ever thought Lina would be an obstacle, laughable then and absolutely nothing now; and then from there every little fear that had stemmed from the past, that he would make the same mistakes, that she'd pull away for the same reason, that in the end this too would be taken away.
And when he realized it was starting to get off topic he pulled back, and it was like jerking awake but more subtle. Was he holding himself together or was he just holding her? Or were they still standing just barely apart, or were they meshed together as one, or were they somewhere in between? It didn't seem to matter when he felt how radiant she was when she loved herself, and he couldn't help but pour a little of himself into that current as well, let himself get swept away in the rarest of moments for Chel so that neither of them could forget.
(How were they going to go back to simple, crude, physical bodies after this?)
"Karma's really good," Jack agreed almost breathlessly.
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Posted: Mon Feb 08, 2016 9:41 am
(It gave a new meaning to the addage of marriage- "two becoming one.")
---
When morning comes it's damp in more than a few ways. A heavy mist had set in over the moorish land thanks to the rain last night and made it hard to see more than 10 feet in front of them. In other words, it was perfect graveyard weather.
She walked with his arm over her shoulder (not hand in hand, not an arm hooked around his- together). Conversation had thusfar been quiet (save Chel's natural background chatter) and there was a sort of reverence over the morning.
Eventually, as they reached the other end of the moat to the bank on the other side, Chel said, "we only got a few hours and we gotta go back for the TV and s**t." A poke to his side. "So you better find some good s**t quick.
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