It’s not even sex, it’s her.
She’s there.
She’s really there. She hasn’t left him.
She must have felt some part of that, too. He sees a glimmer in her eyes, a denser wash of feeling, right before the fingers of her free hand run over his jaw.
I missed you, she tells him, a bare breath. So much, baby. So much.
He leans into her touch, closing his eyes. He fights for words, to untangle even some small part of his emotions. I thought I lost you, he manages, barely able to tell her even that much. Gods, Allie. I thought I lost you.
Her light pulls at him, grows softer. I’m here. You can let go. You can let go now.
No. He shakes his head, pulling her against him. Allie… tell me. Promise me you’ll never fucking leave me again. Never.
He tries to make sense of his own words.
She didn’t do this. Of course she didn’t.
So why does some part of him feel like she did?
Is he really angry at her?
No separations… he murmurs.
He watches her luminous eyes as she glances around at the others, and he wonders how much she remembers, if she remembers anything at all.
He wants her to look at him, to look only at him, maybe for the next month… maybe for the next decade… and she seems to feel that too, because her eyes shift back to his face. Worry creases her brow, and she touches his face, then his neck down to the hollow of his throat. He watches her as she touches him, not listening to the others anymore. He wants to run his fingers and mouth over each line and angle in every one of her complicated expressions.
Revik, she says. It’s all right.
No. He shakes his head. It’s not all right, Allie.
You don’t need her–– she begins.
What?
––You don’t need me, she clarifies.
He stares at her, feeling nothing but pain, a sharp desire for the others to go, to get the fuck out of there, leave him alone with his wife. He’s still angry at her, he realizes, but he can’t make sense of that, either. He won’t even try.
Promise me, Allie. Promise me you won’t leave me again.
His wife laughs. As she does, the pain in his abdomen and light worsens.
She caresses his fingers, and it grows unbearable.
He loses whatever resolve he had. Leaning over her, he ignores the others and kisses her mouth, not hard at first, brushing his lips against hers, caressing her face. He feels the possessiveness there, a near warning, maybe fear, maybe doubt.
Warning her... what? To never get hurt again? To never hurt him?
To never leave him.
To never lose that light in her eyes––at least, not where he can see it.
She softens her mouth when he kisses her a second time, almost as if she hears him. He kisses her harder, unable to stop when she returns the kiss. He feels her hands in his hair and on his shoulders, her fingers digging into muscles and skin.
He tries to be gentle at first, restrained, conscious that she’s weak, that she hasn’t eaten, that she’s been lying there too long, but he forgets all that when she deepens the kiss, her tongue hot in his mouth. She melts her body under his, pulling on him, teasing him.
He groans, losing his mind when her hand slides deliberately down his body. She’s massaging him now with her fingers, pulling on him, tugging at his light––
He’s half-lying on her on the narrow bed before he knows he’s moved, pinning her wrists to the soft mattress, pressing his hips against hers, fighting not to bite her as he kisses her throat. Their mouths meet again, longer that time.
Again, he struggles not to hurt her, stopping himself from ripping the shirt off her with his bare hands. She writhes free of his grip on her wrists and he feels her hands on him again, exploring him openly this time, her tongue following her fingers, and he groans, lower, gripping her too tightly.
He’s not going to stop. He won’t be able to. He won’t try to stop this.
He can’t even pretend he wants to.
Our child, Allie, he tells her, panting. We have to find her. We have to––
I know, she says, reassuring him. I know, Revik. It’s okay––
Jon’s not wrong. We’re running out of time.
I know. It’s okay, baby… it’s okay. I know where she is.
The others fade into the background, out of his light, and he barely notices. He forgets about them before they’ve gone. He doesn’t bother to look, or to listen for the click of the door’s latch when it closes. He’s alone with her, and that’s all that matters.
He wants to ask her for sex. He wants to ask her if she wants him, if she loves him… what he can do to her with his body. He wants to know how much she missed him.
He wants to pry it out of her, get her to tell him while he fucks her, tell him exactly how much she missed him and in what ways. He wants promises. He wants a fucking apology. He wants her hands on every last centimeter of his body. He wants her to understand what she’s done to him, leaving him again, without warning, without any way to prepare himself.
He wants to ask if she’ll open her light more, put her mouth on him. He wants to ask if he can tie her to the bed, use the telekinesis.
He wants to apologize. He wants to know if she forgives him.
He wants to know if he can lock her in here, keep her to himself for a few weeks, feed her, fuck her whenever he wants, tease her… if she’ll let him order her around for real, like they talked about before all this happened. He wants to know if she wants it rough or if he can go slow, use his light and his body until she begs.
The questions he has are many, too many.
He remembers the child, and guilt grips him.
Gods. What is he doing? They have to find the child.
Cass has her.
Cass and Shadow––they have his child.
He tries to control his light, his mind, to prioritize, but when he raises his head, he finds himself looking at a different set of eyes.
He blinks down at a different face.
Briefly, he is lost. Beyond lost.
Ripped from his moorings.
That mind-numbing relief he felt, that cautious joy, what encased him in a kind of dull disbelief of hope and love… it turns on him without warning.
It turns into something completely devoid of light. It darkens, then spirals, reaching into a broken part of himself, something damaged, a sick, mind-fucking wave that lives deeper than anything he’s touched in himself since he was a child.
It’s like someone took a gardening trowel and cut his heart out of his chest.
He stares down at a face that isn’t his wife.
He takes it in, understanding what it means, knowing he’s been deceived, that they’re toying with him, screwing with his head. Laughing at him. Laughing at how easy a mark he is, even after all these years, even after everything they’ve taken from him already.
Coffee brown irises stare up at him humorously, from a face more oval and paler, smaller-mouthed than his wife’s. Black, straight hair fans the pillow instead of Allie’s dark brown curls, shocking red dye riding up the ends like flames, stark against the white sheets and the black walls. Cass grins at him, her hand still on his cock, and for a moment he doesn’t pull away.
Some part of him can only stare down, even now, and will it to be Allie, his wife.
I told you, she chides softly, making a pouty face. You don’t need her, lover.
He feels the pain in his heart worsen, grow darker.
Awww, she says, pouting more. Where’s your sense of humor, Revi’?
For a long moment, he can’t speak at all.
When he does, the voice is bereft.
Quiet. Too quiet. He barely recognizes it, it’s been so long since he’s heard himself sound this way. But he remembers it as his.
You don’t want to see what I can become, he says.
Cass’s grin widens. Oh my god, I do, though! I do! You have no idea how badly I do
, Revik! You just made me sooo wet, saying that… even beyond all your nasty little thoughts earlier.
Cass chuckles, grinning wider, her free arm cushioning her dark head.
So Allie was finally going to give it up for you, huh, big guy? Let you lock her up, enact all your dirty, fucked-up little fantasies? Wonder if she knew just what she was signing on for?
His tone doesn’t change. You’re wrong, Cass. You’re wrong about me.
She slides up against him, pressing her breasts against his chest.
No, I’m not, she tells him softly, caressing him deliberately with her palm. Come on. Let me in. Share those fantasies with me. It’ll be fun.
He knows they’re in the Barrier.
He knows that now, but her touch feels physical, immediate.
It makes him recoil, bringing a sharper wave of disgust and nausea, again evocative of childhood, of being Merenje’s plaything, of being turned on and confused and repulsed and afraid, even as he wanted desperately to kill himself.
His pain worsens, along with that disgust, some of it now aimed ritualistically at himself. Logic doesn’t live here, but habit––a habit so deeply ingrained he can’t even see it, unless he’s forced to look at the consequences.
Gods, he wants his wife.
He can’t survive without her. He’ll just fall apart in tiny increments instead, piece by piece, losing everything that finally made him a person.
Aww, come on, Cass murmurs. Is it really that bad? Remember, you weren’t exactly celibate before you met her. Giving him a knowing smirk, she writhes sinuously against him. I know I haven’t forgotten your talents, big guy. I know what turns you on. I wonder if Allie really knew, as much as you like to pretend she did.
The rage that rises in him is beyond what he can feel.
It rips away the last fragment of his control, the last fragment of the man he once was, who he tried to be, for Allie, at least. His hands wrap around Cass’s throat.
All he can think is, he will kill her.
He will fucking kill her if it’s the last thing he does.
In the end, it was the only thing he was ever truly good at.
Cass laughs, watching his face in delight as he crushes her windpipe under his bare hands. Tears pour from his eyes, blinding him. He is lost, swimming in a different, more hollow-feeling disbelief. More grief lives there than he can feel.
He submerges only a fraction of it behind that blinding rage.
They’ll never leave him alone. Never. They always find a way in, a new piece of his heart to pulverize into powdered glass. Cass is just the latest manifestation of that.
Still, Cass enjoys it, he knows.
She gets off on it. She gets off on what she can do to him, how she can make him feel.
He’d once loved Cass, almost as a sister.
Almost like his own sister, whom he barely remembers now.
He’d loved her, he’d let her in, because his wife loved her.
He hears the taunting lilt of Cass’s voice, feels it reverberate through every inch of his aleimi, even as the rage turns suffocating, beyond his capacity for reason.
Come on, Revi’, she whispers. You don’t need her. I can give you anything you need. We can raise your little rugrat together…
Revik screams at her, a lost, broken sound, beyond anything he can feel.
HE JERKED AWAKE.
Panting, fighting to breathe, sick beyond what his body or mind could handle.
His hand hurt, throbbing at the end of his arm, the bones splintered-feeling, even though they’d removed the makeshift cast weeks ago––or was it months?
His leg hurt. His head.
Gods, he wanted to die. Why wouldn’t they just let him die?
For a long moment, he can’t do anything but breathe.
The body has its own ideas about life and death and now Revik’s fought mindlessly to survive, to ride through the pain, which felt worse than anything he’d experienced, anything he could remember, even from way back, when he was a kid.
Which, given his childhood, said a lot.
It felt worse than the last time he thought Allie died.
He heard panting, groaning, barely suppressed cries. A choking sound, a fighting gasp to cry, to express emotion beyond expression, to beg––to scream, maybe.
It took him another moment to realize those were his, too.
The room loomed dark over him, suffocating despite the high ceilings he could feel with his endlessly scanning and probing light. He felt a breeze on his skin from the open window, but the trapped, claustrophobic feeling didn’t lessen.
He felt lost, locked away, underground and forgotten.
She’d left him. Like all the others, she left him in the end.
He fought to free himself, to sit up.
Even now, in this much pain, his mind calculated odds, the distance to the ground from the second story of the Victorian house. He might break his leg if he jumped. Or maybe he’d just be outside, running in his bare feet, running across the grass, maybe to the park where he watched her once, where he desperately wanted to kiss her when she half-tripped and fell into Jaden, looking up at him with those glowing, jade green eyes, when Jaden caught her arms, laughing.
He’d never had any self-control around her.
He’d wanted to kiss her so badly back then––even in that diner after she nearly killed Jon, even in the car when they were running from the Rooks, even as he cursed her for hammering him with questions while he was trying to save her life, to outrun the people who wanted to take her from him, even then.
He wanted to go back to that place in the park.
He wanted to go there, and remember.
He can’t, though. He can’t move.
Hands held him on more than one side.
Wreg. Jorag. Garensche. The fourth set might be Balidor… or maybe Loki. Balidor, who fucked Allie while Revik pined over her, wrote her love letters, sent her flowers, begged her to come back to him. Jorag and Gar, who only wanted to fuck her, who looked at her ass and her light whenever they thought Revik wasn’t watching.
He wanted to kill them briefly, too. He wanted to kill all of them.
He couldn’t hold onto that, either, though.
The pain obliterated everything. It annihilated everything in him, good and bad.
He let out another heavy sob, fighting to breathe.
He feels their lights around him now, feels them trying to soothe him, to comfort him, calm him down––control him. They pull him into the Barrier, inside the warmth of a high-grade security construct over a four-story Victorian house on Alamo Square in San Francisco. They fight to disengage his limbs, to surround him with the light of the Ancestors.
They try to give him any small taste of what they can’t give him––of what no one can give him, ever again.
They’re probably afraid of the telekinesis, he thinks.
Some part of his mind remains logical, even now.
His abilities had come back.
They’d started to heal even as his wife faded in front of him, more dead than alive with every passing day. Balidor had been confused by that, by how fast those structures healed above Revik’s head, how quickly it all seemed to happen once Allie was broken, once their child had been taken from both of them.
They feared him again.
They were afraid he might burn the house down, or maybe start killing all of them––which actually wasn’t such a crazy fear, given the fucked up things he’d just been thinking. But it hurts to think about that, too, and not only because their deaths wouldn’t solve anything.
He doesn’t want to kill his friends.
He doesn’t want to kill the people Allie loved.
He wants to kill that fucking bitch who hurt his wife. Who stole his child.
He wants to rip her throat out with his bare hands. He doesn’t care any more what Allie would have wanted, not when it comes to Cass. He won’t spare Cass in any way for what she once was to his
wife. He knows Shadow got to her, that Shadow is using her to get to him, but the thought has no meaning to him.
Not anymore.
It’s too late for apologies. It’s too late for redemption.
He wants his child, the last thing Allie gave to him.
He will get his child, and then he will kill every single person responsible for what happened to his wife. The world ending doesn’t matter to him. The disease, the Displacement Lists, whatever human or seer civilization they would rebuild after he’d gone.
None of it matters to him.
Not anymore.
He doesn’t know how long he lays there, gasping, staring up into the darkness of the high-ceilinged room, but he can still feel hands on him, light in his.
He feels all of them around him, he feels them trying to reach him, but he’s never felt so utterly alone.
4
ONLY THE STRONG SURVIVE
July 15, 2007
San Francisco, California
“WHAT DO YOU think?” I ask her.
I bite my lip, staring at my reflection in the mirror. The dress looks different on me than I remembered when I tried it on in that thrift store in the Mission.
Now, in the dimmer light of my old bedroom at my mom’s house, that same dress, which seemed so cool and antique-y and unique seems to make my bust look smaller, my hips wider, my legs shorter compared to my body. I can see the fabric creasing strangely around my waist. Instead of forest green, it looks more like muddy gray in this light.
Turning sideways, I try to decide if I like that view better or worse.
I look like a kid. A kid pretending to be an adult.
My mother comes up behind me, laying a hand tentatively on my shoulder.
She helped me with my hair, getting it to behave enough to pin it into an upsweep with hairpins tipped by different-colored glass beads. The effect was supposed to be elegant, but somehow, I can only see the messy parts, the parts where my unruly, bleached white hair escapes all of my mother’s attempts to make it look like something it’s not.
I know it’s not mom’s fault; she’s able to work miracles with her own hair.
Then again, my mom’s hair is beautiful––a dark, heavy mass of curls that look good up or down, or even in one of her casual, knotted ponytails that she manages without a mirror while she’s working.
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