the turning of the beast.

VastThu 12:57AM CST
At home, he was rarely in before 2am. Here, away from his father's watchful eye, it seems to have only grown worse.

In the gray shadows of the pre-dawn he stumbles into the loft. His shoes are kicked off messily, one thudding against the wall. His motorcycle jacket is dropped over a chair, where it slithers and falls to the floor. The living room is dark, but the floor-to-soaring-ceiling windows are drawn open, letting in the light of the city outside. Shadows are long. Couches crouch like panthers in the dim. The motorcycle helmet cracks down on the marble floor.

If all that didn't wake her, the knock of his knuckles on her bedroom door certainly would.


EvangelineThu 01:09AM CST
Except, perhaps, for a knowledge that has been lost, with his absence from home. Or perhaps he never even knew, the sanctity of his parents bedroom suite an area not often breached in the house. The scrape and clatter of objects as her son’s entrance leaving a wake of miniature destruction does not penetrate the smothering blanket of sleep – deep, protective, calming sleep. Slumber like a prison.

Nor does his fist pounding on her door.
All that answers is silence.


VastThu 01:21AM CST
Patience: he gives her a moment. Two. Three. Moments drift by like so much flotsam on a river. He raps again, politely, lightly, and then waits with his back to the door.

Then, with still no response, his patience burns to its end and he turns to pound on the door with the flat of his fist. The wood jars against its frame. In an older house, dust would be sifting down. "Mother!"


EvangelineThu 01:46AM CST
Inside, eyes flash open wide - luminous as they catch the fragments of city light which filter through partially parted drapes, like a bright stream across her face. For a second, they are unseeing, staring [-- memories forged too many years ago] and glassy, like some delayed reaction before the sheets scatter and fall to the whip of her limbs as she sits bolt upright, the cacophony of his presence shredding apart her slumber [--peace. As if it were ever claimed.] Beneath that slender rib cage, her heart is racing like a stampede as fear clutches tight and strained, mingling like contaminated water through the disorientation streaming through those features.

It clears quickly, to panic - and the door is flung open a half minute later, to the sight of the woman he calls for, wants, dark hair unbound and hanging silken to her waist, the white night slip she wears almost merging into her pale skin, and slipping over curves and planes to the floor. It would not be often that he saw her like this - it would not be often that any saw her like this beyond her husband, in such unguarded state.


VastThu 01:57AM CST
Heavily, the whole of his weight seems to be leaning on the doorframe, supported by one forearm slung against it. The door opens and he sways in a dangerous three inches before drawing himself up sharply. His breath smells of liquor. He's been drinking more since she moved in, though she, of course, would not know this. As far as she knows, he always drinks like this.

"I rid myself of her. The girl. I dumped her. Dropped her like a hot potato. Gave her the boot. Walked away." He's drunk. It's not in the words which do not slur; not in the balance with, apart from that initial faltering (...drawn.), doesn't so much as waver. Nonetheless, a mother's instinct is never wrong about such things.

Drunk. "You should be proud of me."


EvangelineThu 02:13AM CST
Like star sapphires are the colour of her eyes, dark and fathomless yet drenched through with striated pale lights - how much texture of that reflects in the gaze of her son she has dwelled on in the past, now. But years change a man, and in so many ways he is now beyond her. Though she may stare into his now, the fumes of alcohol like a barrier forcing her step back and the wretched flare of her nostrils, there are deeper shadows that tell no truths, framing his gaze in deception and making him so much like the more ominous figure of his father, rather than the fragile shaping of she.

"I..." Her lips compress, the last remaining remnants of sleep fading fast from those large, jewel-like orbs - whatever sparkle remaining crystallising into distance. "This is not the time to be discussing this, Sevastian." Soft, but firm, there is what could be perceived as a thread of anger, coursing the lull of French in her tongue to be more edged. "We shall talk in the morning. You clearly need your sleep."

End of discussion, she withdraws, her hand on the door and the last sweep of her gaze, as that bedroom entrance closes.


VastThu 02:19AM CST
His arm flashes out. The heel of his hand slams into the door, slams it open, slams it out of her hand to crack against the wall. This is what he's born and bred for after all, isn't it? War and violence, and all the rest of it, the Silver Fang pride, the Galliard traditions -- all that, just smoke.

"Why, maman, it is the morning." Sharp contrast to his sudden violence, his tone is light, even jocular. His breath comes sharp and shallow, sips of air spaced by deliberate pauses, each one flaring his nostrils. His lips are parted or peeled back, one or the other, and within his teeth are shadows, glints. He regards her from the vantage point of his greater height. "Did you speak to her?"


EvangelineThu 02:35AM CST
You would think one such as she would dissemble under the rage, the sudden flare of violence that pulses through that hand that pushes against that door that slams into the wall. She starts, a faint jerk – a light pitter patter of a tremble coursing through her frame. And then, nobly her chin lifts. In sheer and utter icy indignation. Think you she has not weathered this storm before?

“You are angry, Sevastian. I will not talk to you in these circumstances.” Those eyes do not drop, nor falter, unwavering is their grip on his face. As rigid a line as the slender straight of her shoulders. “You need sleep, I suggest you have it. Then we shall talk.”


VastFri 12:10AM CST
He laughs -- "I'm not angry, Mother." A beat. He lies. He's at his angriest when he smiles like that. He's at his most dangerous, drunk, smiling like that. "I simply wish to speak now. And need I remind you, I am no longer a child, and you, dear Maman, in fact sleep under my roof tonight."

A patriarchal society, the Garou.


EvangelineFri 12:41AM CST
A roof given to you by your father.

The words thread themselves around the tip of the tongue, and tightly they are bound, and even tighter held. But not from her eyes, which shadow in brief, flickering remorse – almost imperceptible except to those who know her and the minute changes that may detail over the porcelain mask of her face. Instead, she says nothing at all, but turns on him and walks further into the bedroom – the light from without in the hall and the dawn rising behind the expensive blinds and drapes of the windows creating a cocoon around her body, dark and uneven bruises, more pronounced then that signal of withdrawal.

“Yes, I spoke to her.”

The way she speaks, that accent slipping and hiding - furtive - like a silver sheen of a fish through water in its careful and mild neutrality. Like she does not know the threshold on which he stands, and would carelessly, thoughtlessly breach it. Or that she knows it full and well, recognises the smile, the intensity in his eyes and the guise of placating that ingratiates his tongue – attempts to hers – defended from by the removal of him from her eyes. Implicated dismissal.


VastFri 12:43AM CST
He follows her.
Inner sanctum.
His parents' room.
Correction.

Her room.

And the door is rescued from the wall, against which the knob has made a sizeable dent. He nudges it softly toward shut. It stops halfway there, the hall high a wedge of brightness on the floor of which he, silver-furred king-to-be, takes no part.

"And?" he prompts, relentless.


EvangelineFri 12:52AM CST
"We spoke while you were in the other room talking to your father."

Its her head that cants back towards him first even while her back remains turned away and she steps forth towards the window, fingers reaching for the drapes. The sweeping length of her pale neck hidden from his face by the flow of her hair, but not her jaw or the high casting of her cheek, or the lashes that briefly sweep down like guilt to fan her skin. Yet nothing in her speech suggests it - kept mild, toned light, as if there were truly no reason for such anger.

With the tug of a cord, the drapes sweep open and the muted illuminations of the morning spills through. "I did not realise you were ... with the girl in the first place, Sevastian." Such fawned innocence. It rides well on that face [--like maidens and unicorns.]


VastFri 01:06AM CST
It's not quite morning yet. The sun has yet to rise. Nonetheless he grimaces in the sudden glow. He was turning into a creature of the night, driven from the light. He was turning into a fucking vampire.

At her protestation, he scoffs -- loudly, laughingly. There is a chair in front of her vanity, some feminine, scroll-legged, thing; perhaps hers, perhaps something he bought to put in her room because he thought it fit her. Either way he drags it out and drops down, straddling it, slouching and defiantly unkempt, his broad shouldered and muscled frame dwarfing the furniture. His motorcycle jacket is unzipped; he's shirtless beneath, a scratch from a barfight with bottles and glasses angrily red on his skin.

"You forget," he mocks, lightly, "I am not my father, to be so easily gulled by your false innocence. He learned from whatever sorry excuse of a mother he had, running off to war every day. I learned from you."

From her vanity he lifts a mirror. In it his reflection is pale from lack of sleep, his jaw heavily shaded with beard. Around the edges he can see her, and in her he sees himself: the same well-moulded mouth; the same vivid dark eyebrows, though hers arched over eyes much darker than his ungiving blue-gray glitter. He tosses the mirror down negligently, so casually that one expects it might simply float down and land softly.

It shatters like a bomb.

Conversation continues as though it had never paused, his good humor thin and false. "So, what did you speak of? Women talk, I'm sure. But do share; I'm curious."


EvangelineFri 01:41AM CST
The morning, the night: predawn of the city has this way of swimming the two into a blend of one. Not like the rustic rural life, where the bright gleaming reflections of electrified urbanity are diminished to the glow of a blanket of stars – every single droplet caught by the naked eye - from the great single beacons to the blur of light shadows. Smears. Those bright shining jewels, amongst the masses.

In modernity, it is lost.
[But not to them.]

From him, she remains turned, her fingers twining tight around the cords of the blind and staying there, until even the motion of that rope is ended. His words beating against her back, and when that mirror shatters, she flinches – a recoil refused refuge in recovery, the stiffness of her spine so erect beneath the tremors of that gown. This one, she cannot hide – and so it’s a long drawn out moment before she finally turns. Schooled, glacial etiquette.

“Women talk.” She echoes, a smile curving the full of her lips into a smile that gives nothing and retracts even more. “What a typical way you speak of it. But if you know that much, then I am sure that you can guess. We talked of the ballet, of course. And you. The two things we have so blatantly in common.” A step towards him, despite the shiver that runs like an insect’s crawl along her back and the nerves that tingle like fire. She steps towards him, and her eyes fall on the cuts beneath the jacket, her expression changing in an instant, turning more soft – a gasp - more sharp. “Where have you been? You have hurt yourself.”

Distance, closed as a hand reaches out to the skin, and the blood.


VastFri 01:55AM CST
"No, no." They wield their smiles like blades; he was his mother's son, indeed. "Don't change the subject, Mother. What did you say to her of me?"

Her hand reaches out. He looks at it as though he couldn't be sure whether it was a priceless jewel, or a venomous snake. He jerks, a tiny sharp twitch as his hands close hard on the back of the chair. There's a sense that he might want to jerk himself away from her, as far as possible, or slap her hand away. His mind falls backwards into childhood: a tumble from a bicycle, or his riding mare; scraped knee; mother's gentle cool hands, and his father's stern rebuke -- Stop that, Evangeline, you're coddling him again.

Vast does not jerk away. Quite the contrary. Her touch on him is a study in contrasts, her fingertips cool and soft, his skin hot and scraped, roughened, scratched. He inhales sharply as though he had been holding his breath.

"Why do you do this to me," he says; it's almost a groan. "Why do you chase my girls off like that. Why do you interfere, mother? What does it matter if I keep mistresses." His pale eyes flash up, suddenly cruel. "You think father does not?"

Straight to the heart, that arrow.


EvangelineFri 02:10AM CST
Against his flesh, her touch is still. Where she had been prompted by embedded maternal instinct and halfway dropping down to further pry apart his jacket and examine the wound that mars the body of her son – however light, however a scratch – her eyes fly up to lock with his, wide-eyed in shock and the shimmer of moisture, age grinding through the slow sink of her knees and the sagging folds of that cotton gown.

In French, a response – a course of incoherent whispers shafted by the love that has grown, that she bears. In English, it does not even gain voice – just the formation of pliant lips around a word entrenched with her denial.

No.

But she answers him, and this time aloud, with her gaze dropping - fleeing - away. “Because you are already taken. You are already promised to someone.” She need not say it, the hand behind this move is as stark and known as the contours of her face. His father’s will.


VastFri 02:42AM CST
In the moment her eyes lock on his there's something like naked victory there, in those pale, pale eyes. Her whispers, her denials, are overridden ruthlessly, mercilessly. Even if she were to slap him, he would not stop. "Yes. Didn't you know? Oh, I believe you didn't. What a pity. You know now. The maid, the one he personally requested to tend to your chambers? Where do you suppose he fucked her? And Madeleine Lane, the stockbroker that took care of the portfolios. She took care of more than that, Maman. I would have told you sooner, except--"

His turn to reel.
His turn to stare.
His turn to go silent, arrested in mid-sentence.

"Taken."

Seconds tick by.

"Promised?"

And then fury. He stands in an instant. Her hand falls from him if it hasn't already. He whips the chair out from beneath himself and, in an arc of sheer power, swings it over his head and smashes it against the hardwood floor. Wood cracks and snaps. The chair explodes apart. The searing energy of his violence hangs in the air. She must've always known Vast is not one to settle, not one to mate, and certainly not this young - barely twenty. She must've always known, but even so, the reaction seems superlative. Too much. Too angry.

He is not finished. Fury. Raw and red. He grasps her painfully, bruisingly by the arms, hauls her up, shakes her until her teeth click together. "You drove her from me because I am already promised?" He's almost screaming in her face. "You drove her out because"

and abrupt like that his voice drops to silence. He shoves her away, viciously, sending her wheeling backwards to stumble against a desk, a bed, a nightstand, a lamp, something. Sevastian pushes his hands over his head, hissing between his teeth -- drops his hands, slaps them down against his thighs. Paces like a caged thing, wheels, lashes out again, randomly, without pattern and without warning, an aftershock of violence here and there, a vase smashed, a picture torn off the wall, the destroyed chair kicked aside.


EvangelineSat 01:46PM CST
Echoes.
[Hear its shatter.
The high keening screech of glass.
Like a scratch.
And the breaking of crystal.]

The hands which hold her are strong [--of the father] and the rage which beats her burns [--of the father] and for all the love she would bear him, it’s a scream that is choking the breath in her throat and stuffing it down like the slow, dirty suffocation from rags. Drawn out [--because maidens and unicorns and their wicked silver saws] is piercing her flesh like needles, and all she wants to do is scream.

Or seal her lips, her nose forever.
[--because they end up all the same.]

“Seva--“ The pleading is cut off with the shakes, when her fragile, fine-boned body resembles that of a limp, dead doll in the violence of his hands. Her teeth click, clench, at the brutal ministrations of her son – tears forming and leaking beneath the closed frail lids of her eyes. Banished are those bright-formed jewels, banished is she from him, when he throws her away, discarded like another of his women. So easily [--think you she chases? When it is he who rejects?] that figure is tossed, across the mirror he splintered and those cutting fragments, embedding like crimson blooms into her legs, and against the edge of the bed, smacking hard, and soundless when she crumbles boneless to the floor.

So silent, her weeping is nothing.
Swallowed by his storm.


VastSat 02:05PM CST
Like any natural disaster, this one has a beginning, middle and end. So it is with him.

After the initial storm, and after the reckless, casual violence of the aftermath (...a priceless vase. a worthless scrap of wallpaper ripped off the wall. all things fall under his hands, now or later, scattered across the floor) -- after all that, when his rage is spent, he eventually ends at her vanity, where he began. A final blinding flash of violence erupts from nowhere: he sweeps the surface of the vanity clear of makeup, perfume, lotions, everything and anything she may have accrued upon its surface. Beads and bottles crash and scatter on the floor. It's his sudden, unpredictable surges, like some machine of war malfunctioning grotesquely, that makes him so terrible.

Afterwards, he stands bowed with his hands braced against smooth wood tabletop, his head down between powerful shoulders quivering with the strain of too much anger, too much rage, too much [.lust.] for anyone to bear. His back to her, his body taut from shoulder to lean hip, from thigh to foot and shoulder to wrist, his reflection in the cracked mirror of the vanity is almost that of a stranger's. He scarcely recognizes the eyes like lightning under storm-cloud eyebrows, dark and heavy, drawn together, drawn low. He hardly recognizes the mouth, lips sneered back, teeth bared.

But it passes.
It passes.

Can't quite say whether he abandons his rage, or comes to recognize it. Can't quite say which is his truer face: the monster or the man-boy. He straightens abruptly, passes a hand over his face as though to wipe away the passing moments, and turns. For a strange moment he feels detached. Unattached. Who is that weeping by his mother's bed? The moments seem terribly, starkly clear: the details all vivid and knife-edged. Adrenaline rush. He can feel the minute crunching of glass under his bare feet when he crosses the room to her, but he scarcely feels the pain. His mind is closed to himself. If asked what he felt, what he thought, what he thought he was doing or was going to do or has done, he would not be able to answer.

He's a stranger to himself.

When he leans down, bends down, drops to his knees beside her, he's calm as a mountain lake, gentle. His touch on her leg, drawing fragments of glass out from skin, is not quite that of devoted son. Carefully, he helps her up to sit on the edge of the bed.

"Mother, I'm sorry." Perfect penitent: he remains kneeling before her, reaching up to wipe the tears from her cheek. "I never meant to hurt you."

(don't they all say that?)


EvangelineSat 02:17PM CST
Its that same harbour that she herself has withdrawn into – so different in its cause, but of the same walls, the same substance, that same isolating enclosure. Like a quarantine against the infection of his rage. He lifts her, she is malleable in his hand and unresisting – not a stir or shudder or escape of sound – so still that it could be death that resides cooling in translucent, too-pale flesh. Those eyes stay downcast, dark lashes sweeping light against his fingers where they seek to rid the tears. Rough, soft, whatever his touch: they sting. And another falls, jerked loose by her cringe.

Between parted lips, a breath: slow and calming, to be drained in her voice.

“I know.”


VastSat 02:31PM CST
Somehow the touch of Vast's hand on her cheek changes. It's not in the strength or roughness of his grip, but in the timbre of the contact itself. At some point his other hand joins the first; two hands on her face, her face cradled in his hands, and him rising on his knees, straightening his body to be nearly face to face with her. Surely she can feel the tension in the air. In him. Surely she can see the fixed (fixated) intensity of his stare on her. Surely she can feel something not quite right.

Not quite filial.

He seems to be breathing too fast, too deeply. Every inhale flares his nostrils. His lips parted, his breath splits between nose and mouth; he breathes with every ounce of his being. There's a sense of impending disaster. "Mother," he says -- quiet, but not soft, choked, and she could swear he leans forward into her, arches forward as though he wanted to --

[kiss her mouth.]

--get even closer, his hard lean abdomen pressing against her knees, a quiver in the taut muscle beneath tanned skin. Then, the moment breaks, and (quite un)like a child he wraps his arms around her waist and presses his cheek to her lap, his chest to her legs, shuddering. Perhaps he weeps -- perhaps it's something else. Perhaps it's all dependent on what she wants to think of it.


EvangelineSat 03:00PM CST
Like a butterfly effect…

Against her he shifts, that moulding of his palm flat against her face and the warmth of his flesh suffusing through wet, smooth cheek, drying away the remainder of those tears, through contact. Not another spills over, but the dew remains in those lashes – still minute trembling, still lowered in retreat – but for a second, like a mirror is she: his reflection. And without thought, her head nuzzles against his touch, her lips brush against that palm, her breath is hot against his skin: and now moisture is in the curve of that mouth - salty and supple - in a moment of haze and the desire of comfort.

So like his father.
So different.
So wrong.

Then her eyes open to be snared by his own, and though it would be that those lips press lightly shut, and a kiss caresses the inner palm of one hand in her own sweet begging of forgiveness, the deeper layers and raw emotion are met with stunted confusion. Evangeline cannot interpret his gaze; nor she can she ever understand it: but in that stark and brief passage of time he has given it to her to be locked and held close. Like all she would hold that she has of him – even this: the rage, the violence, the burst of inherent brutality and the ability to sunder and ruin and devastate. Simple interpretations of a kin, and a wife, and a mother: to monsters. And in his eyes she sees a truth well beyond.

It is the thread of her fingers running over his head that signals no ill: no real hurt, no hate. At least, it should signal this – it is her intent, the tread of those fingertips along the curve of his strong cheekbone in slow, lulling strokes; the feel of her pulse and its measured beat; the whisper of words to cleave him close once more.

“I…” In his pain, is hers. In words. “… can try to speak to your father. It need not be for a long time yet. Maybe not at all.” But even for Evangeline they resound hollow in her ears.


VastSat 03:16PM CST
Sometimes it's easy to forget certain details.

That while she has known him since he was an infant, before, since he was a foetus, an embryo, a cluster of unformed cells floating in her womb -- while she knows him, root to stem to leaf, he is no longer the infant he was.

He is full-grown now, larger than she, stronger. The arms that encircle her waist could crush her. The musculature of shoulder and back is solid, ungiving, hard as oak. Her hands run over a head almost clean-shaven, and on his cheeks is the rasp of beard. Every time her hand strokes over his head, his hands tighten on her back.

And he just can't help himself.

He takes her hand suddenly. Motion like a rattlesnake: he moves, he grasps, takes her hand from his scalp and brings it to his mouth, fervently, his cheek pressed to her lap, her legs warm and bare beneath the nightgown, modest cotton a thin layer between. He kisses her palm, lip and tooth and tongue, not quite as she had kissed his. Her kiss begged forgiveness. His begged something else entirely.

"I don't care about father." He had to make her understand this. His eyes are pale and hot in the almost-darkness. "I don't care about him," and his eyes shut as he kisses her hand, her palm, her wrist.

His entire body shudders against her. He makes some sound -- was it her name, Evangeline? -- and then turns his face to the seam of her thighs, his hot breath penetrating the thin veil of her nightclothes, thin and diaphanous, through which the shadow of her slender body could be seen. A memory flits in and out of his mind -- boarding school, preparatory school, three years ago, four? Friends home for the weekend, visiting mother; his young beautiful mother, and his friends, looking at her, stared, and that night, in his room, made comments that made him strike out and beat them down and twist their arms up behind their backs until they screamed for mercy, and then for forgiveness.

And then the next day he had looked himself, and had been looking ever since.

The memory is gone, flushed from his mind. It had barely existed. He's lost track of where his hands are. His fingers are digging into her flesh, gripping, grasping; he rubs his face over her like a blind thing. Someone groans. Was it him? Some part of him screams that this is wrong, unforgiveable, but that part of him is far away, distant, and he really doesn't care at all.


EvangelineSat 03:29PM CST
“Sevastian?”

When he first grabs her hand and kisses against it, she had not been startled and it had been a smile that coated those lips, tipping their pure shape into crescent fondness. It freezes on her face when those lips do not cease, and there is a moment when she still, even then, could have believed it for acceptance, or forgiveness, or some (-- any --) emotion that could be borne from the relationship of a mother to her child. Not like this rotten, misshapen core taking shape when his head buries in her lap and when the intensity of his eyes is the dawn of realisation in hers. When that mouth is a hunger against her thighs, burning into the flesh as if the cotton were not there and those arms around her are vice-like, demands stealing in their grip. She cannot grab his hair and yank him back: her fingers scrabble and scratch against the bristle of his head as they instinctively try to do just that. And her voice - again - sharper.

Horrified.
Yet a whisper.

“Sevastian? What are you doing?”

Their strength does not match his, they could be furtive and useless against his own: in the end it will be he that decides. But that does not stop her from trying, placing her hands against his face and pushing, urging, him away. Rising panic [--do not look up. do not see her face. do not see vulnerability there.--] would embed those fingers heedlessly into his flesh, into his shoulders, and attempt to wrench out of his grip. The longer it takes for him to release her – if at all – the deeper the hysteria carves.

VastSun 03:19AM CST
"Shh--" her hands on his face, on his shoulders, resisting, like moths fluttering against a pane of glass, a sheet of rock crystal, very nearly useless. "Shh," he tries to hush her, quell the horror, still the disgust churning like vomit in the back of his own throat. "Shh -- Evangel... hush."

I can't help it, he tries to say; what comes out is a strangled sound, not a word at all. Her one hand is still caught in his. Her other is caught, pulled away, caught again, pulled away again, and then finally caught firm, and all the while he rubs his face against her thighs, and then her stomach, her breasts, breathing in great heaving pants against her skin, and through the cotton of her nightgown.

"I don't care about father." This seems to be the only coherent sentence he can form, and he repeats it like a mantra, muttered low while his hands moved of their own will, his body of its own will, his mind disconnected, a receptacle for sensation, horror quenched somewhere deep, forgotten. This, and then, a little later, "You followed me. Forget about him."

It seems too late to regret now, for him.
It seems too late to walk out, now.

At some point he'd released her hands to put his hands on her waist and pull her closer. Her hands pushing on him, now: he grasps her by the wrists again, harder this time, firmer, and rises on his knees to kiss her mouth or, if she does not allow that, which she surely would not, kiss her neck, her throat, something, everything, while he tries to bear her down beneath his weight, her wrists to the counterpane of the bed, or the sheets if they were turned back, and then changing his mind, her wrists brought up, her hands brought to his chest, his bare skin beneath the unzipped motorcycle jacket -- and his flesh jumps and shudders under her touch, his ribs heaving with his breath -- all the while his eyes shut, blind in the darkness, blind to the details and the truths. "Please," he begs, without knowing what the fuck, exactly, he asked for; or perhaps, without wanting to think of it.


EvangelineSun 04:14AM CST
All she ever wanted to do was paint.
[Because illusion is a harbour.]

Holed up in a room blessed with ample light, in the attic it had been, looking over the grounds without. Amongst trunks, and dust, and white covering sheets, the patterns of upholstery with their hidden stains on furniture discarded but never thrown. The motes used to dance in the light that shafted through that high, arching window – tickled by the leak of a playful breeze, that would go on to stroke at her face, at the paint which dried thick on the canvas. A brush, wedged back deep with every touch, its sable hairs soaked in chosen hues, the mirror of that colour like a scratch on her cheek, a remnant of her distraction, and the dream-lost look in her eyes.

The love of faces. They were immortalised by her interpretation: where each nuance, each shadow, each filtered emotion, is struck raw by the craft of her hand. One of the father. One of the son. The landscapes, the scenes, the objects had been less – but there is one of the attic she loved, the sunlight dappled in its open streaming: she can still taste the age on her tongue. And the smell of the oils, as reality was captured and in her mind took life, more vivid to her now than it could ever be, more ideal than it ever should. The letter had arrived that day: formal, and agreement.

Ripped from one family, to form another.
She sees him in his face.

Hot tears spill onto the surface of his scalp as his lips breach the thin covering of her gown from her thighs, to her belly and the fine-taut muscles strung there, quivering along the slope of her breasts. Across her cheeks, they fall: soundless against his deep gulps of air, where her own breath is a panicked and stricken flutter edging in and out and in from the cavern of her mouth, each escaped exhalation - she cannot still the air - a pleading whisper of his name, a pleading whisper of denial – all fragmented by shock.

When he captures those wrists, she is cold – so still. When he leans back, she is non-responsive – and something in the way she acts, it fathoms automatic. A war waged with instinctual response and the truths of what is happening now. Like father, like son: like sleek supplication and fawning submission, and the confusion that love is because he the husband is all that she has. That love is her dependence.

To only be broken now.

That moment against the mattress, the embrace of sheets and softness that long lost the warmth of her sleeping body and the length of him against her. None of this triggers a response – nothing, except the strip of shallow restraint to powerless compliance. In the press of her hands flat against his naked chest – not even that, the pulse of her skin against his, the mingling of his warmth: accepted. It’s his last penetration. He begs: a whisper against the slope of her ear.

He begs.

And she answers. “Stop it… stop it!” One hand snatches back, the other pushes against, “Get off me, Sevastian!” Panic. “Get off me” The glint of that wedding band as her hand rushes back slapping him hard. Beneath him, her body writhes in the grip of hysteria, jerking and shoving and twisting to get free.


VastSun 0 AM CST
Her sudden resistance has him dazed. She shoves -- he stares, uncomprehending -- then the crack of her hand across his cheek snaps his head to the side. There's a rumble of something that could be a snarl deep in his chest, and then she's fighting under him, striking out and lashing out, hand and foot, twisting like a fish out of water until he can no longer keep his grip on her, and pushes himself up, and is pushed off, and falls gracelessly on his ass at the foot of her bed.

He sits there as though stunned, staring, legs akimbo, jacket awry, as some dawning knowledge breaks across his face. Where he was. What he had done. What he had wanted to do. What he would have done, had she not -- had she not --

The imprint of her hand is red on his bloodless cheek. He raises a hand to it. The fingertips quiver. It's just adrenaline. It's just shock. It's just horror, and suddenly his face twists with self-revulsion, and he doubles over to the side to dry-heave and retch.


EvangelineSun 05:19AM CST
The heat of his body no longer suffocating her own, she curls on her side, fingers reaching out and clenching into the sheets, into the mattress, nails scraping against the ungiving stretch of that cotton surface. She hauls her form into the middle of the bed and curls tight into herself, the tears shuddering like a flood across the round of her cheek, leaking damp and squeezed through the refusal of her lashes. They spill over to soak into the mattress and slide against her neck, the rivulets coursing salty and warm into her hair, and cooling abruptly when they leave her skin.

In the entanglement of her bed clothes, the twist of sheets beneath her, and the uneven, silken flow of her dark, dark hair, she could seem a lost child. So small with those fragile, snap-easy bones – so damaged in her weeping, shredded heart. Where illusion bleeds reality, and no-one knows their place. Deep, gulping breaths, they shudder through her frame to the sound of the dry-retching of her son, calming in their steady flow. It is a release from the madness that had threatened to keep her through each renewal of oxygen to enter into her lungs, and those nails clench once more against the sheet, furrow against the surface, then push herself up.

Next to him she stumbles and he would feel her slender arms around him, her body pressed against his – not quite acceptance, never that, but the tune of instincts that she need only feel, and never think. Maternal, to her son. To herself she draws him, the leather of his jacket cool through the thin fabric of her gown and the scrape of its zipper harsh against the press of her breast: and still the tears have not stopped. Where the last words of hers in his ears had been encased in panic and horror, this time she murmurs French, stunted at first – choked and barely coherent – before forming shape in the role she adopts.

Because she knows it so well.
[All else is her oubliette.
Her void.]


VastSun 06:02AM CST
She draws him to her -- he goes unresisting, heavy as a sack of grain, his weight slumping against her, warm and heavy and solid. She encircles him in her arms, the slick firm leather of his jacket sharp contrast to the soft fabric of her nightgown, and still his response is delayed, sluggish, his breath a rasp in his throat. He half turns away, another retch rising in his throat, and then she murmurs to him, haltingly, then smoother and smoother, taking shape, shaping into form.

And it's like a switch is flipped. Suddenly he bursts back to life. His arms tighten around her furiously. He rears up like a viper and it's her that's dragged to him, his face turned into the arch of her neck, buried in her unbound hair. She can feel his chest expand to creaking against her as he inhales, inhales, breathes in like he could breathe in forever and never have to exhale. When he does exhale, it's a groan, wordless, don't need words, raw need. Motorcycle jacket and jeans, it leaves precious little space of skin; a strip where the zipper is open, and his face, and the palms of his hands roving, pushing over her back and gripping at her spine, pulling her firmly against him. There's no question that he's hard. Not when he rubs against her, gasping, holds her by the hips and rubs her belly over his loins, through what felt like a million layers of clothing, but were only in reality four, or less.

But it's only for a second.

Then, firmly, even violently, Sevastian disentangles. He can't seem to peel her arms away fast enough. He shakes her off, throws her off, pushes her back, scrambles back himself, onto his feet, backing up until his back hits the wall.

Swallows, difficult. Throat is dry.

"I think... maybe you should," he makes some gesture, grimaces, cannot seem to look her in the eye. "I think you should go back to New York."

Pause. With deliberation, "...mother."

Then he's turning to get out, leave, get the fuck out of her room before her presence saturating the air, the perfume, the lotion, the shampoo, the very scent of her, choked thought and human morality from his mind.


EvangelineSun 07:48AM CST
Mother.
Wife.

Two words that embody her position.
Two words that symbolize her life.

Had she been a discarded child – misaligned, hated, bruised or emotionally beaten - that she could be cast so superficial: left without the personality birthed in figures bred to lead, figures who knew their roles and fulfilled it with a vibrancy which she is just but a shadow of now? That sliver of backbone from which they drew their strength. So often it came in the form of their selves – something internal, inspired, concrete. Complete. Their own deep-dwelling supply of water, when all around them the world became fetid waste. She was not like that. Oh, she could seem to, to those stranger eyes: those who knew her in public, never knew her youth. They who viewed the pristine woman who would smile when she was beckoned, ensured the workings of her husband’s life, the comforts, the details: the things that were beyond her mind. Play hostess, play confidante, play support where it was due. Play roles: never be them. Own them like clothing, but never let it seep and leech into her skin. No, there were only two. And they could not truly be discerned as more than they were from the rest. Not to outside eyes.

Against her body had been her son and so tight in her embrace. Those first moments, when Evangeline had held him – there had been desperation that had moulded her arms, unrecognised for what it truly was. Maternal instinct, crafted and so finely honed and cleaved to, that to bring him back into her fold [--her illusions are her power, her illusions are her strength, her illusions are the way he can shatter her in rejection of the definition of who she is --] would prompt that first forgiveness, and the wash of her own denial.

The wrap of those arms had stretched [--because not since he was young has she touched him like this: never the need, never the freedom--] over his broad and masculine shoulders, full grown and not even then does she notice, not through the fine tremors of her form. The way her mind is scrabbling to re-erect some reflection of their binds: blanking out, falling in, smashing against his will. And breaking off in pieces.

[Had it always been this way? This mother, this pinnacle of strength and core of his younger years, desperate in her own need of him?

Fucking weak.
Fucking pathetic.
Just another battered wife.

Turn Vast, and see what you make.]

When he tosses her, she stumbles and slides against the bedroom floor, the gown tripping the clumsy stagger of her feet and a tear ripping through the tormented cloth. When he flings those words, and leaves, she scrambles to her feet – the grace she harnesses so close dismantled in the light of what has happened. Against her, she can still feel him, the burn of his rage and his passion branding where they had touched. But she does not even think about it, a dredging sob gasping harsh from her throat, the tangle of her hair like a wild river down her back. She throws herself against his back, her hands grasping and the French like a violent torrent pouring from her lips, between the strangled chokes of her breath. Against him, her hands are grasping claws, biting and snagging into the leather of his jacket with the same keening fear that liquids her eyes and her cheeks.

No.

[don’tleavemedon’tpleaseSevastianaiménopleasedon'tleavemewhatwilliaiménonono]

Not just a role.
Everything.


VastMon 01:38AM CST
He was almost. Fucking. There.

The door can't be more than two paces away. The door, to be opened, to be walked out of, to be slammed shut behind him, and if she was smart, she'd lock it. Buy plane tickets. Never look on his face again while they were alone.

But no. She throws herself at him. We all have demons, don't we. And hers: a phobia of solitude. A phobia of not mattering. Understandable. She builds her life around others, and one by one, the underpinnings were coming undone. The structure cracks open. The moorings come unhinged.

It all comes apart.
It all comes apart.

He stumbles when she hits him, collision course: he puts a hand against the door for balance and it's some sort of slow motion underwater war, when he turns to her, against her, it's his back to the door, and it's her before him begging him not to go, and what, really, did you expect would happen?

The filial son, taking back his hurtful words (lies?); soothing her without ever stepping outside the bounds of propriety? Brewing her tea, maybe, serving her on a silver platter until her pieces were put back together again.

Vast was never, ever born to put things back together. Silver Fang, Garou, Galliard, eye of the storm: he was born to tear things apart.

What did she expect, really?

This is what she gets: his strong hands closing on her slender shoulders. His strength pulling her against him. His mouth on hers, more war than love, bruising, brutal, tooth and tongue, her hair caught between them, swept aside, his hands in her hair and on her back, crushing her against him, and now it was she with her back to the door, which has not opened.


EvangelineMon 02:43AM CST
Cocoons of shadows and light.
Cocoons of comfort and morality.
[--chrysalis crashing--]

Cocoons wrapped around her body, keeping safe her mind, stroked free by that first touch - lashed free by this craving maelstrom. Of sickness. Of hunger. Of loathing. Of lust. [Tainted by the blood--] like a streaked, ripped butterfly caught in his fingers with the wings no longer working.

She's so fucking beautiful.
[.... to caress. to love. to possess.
You want to be just like your daddy.]
Make her dull.

Its so hard to tell which panic crushes her more. The promise of abandonment that drove her feet through the glass on the floor, flecking that skin with blooming scarlet and scratching trails, like a harpie's angry claws. Or wild, reviled passion [in any form. in any form. in any fucking form.] that snatches her against that door and pins her there in its web. Against him she's beating, her fists pounding hard - against him she's crying, tears soaking her cheeks and wetting his skin and slipping off the leather of that jacket like warm, imprisoned rain. Pain twisting through her gut, wrenching afire through her nerves, and it could be so easy to just give in - to keep it all - to slip into a guise and just pretend that everything is all right.

She almost does.

That mouth against her own - he can feel that moment of caving submission - that moment when something inside her breaks and starts scrambling behind the shelter that her mind hastily erects. Distance, repression - and the blanket of another place, far far away from here. Yet its not complete, as that struggle drained from outwards, begins to turn now inside. Because this is not how its meant to be - and because before she could still survive in the end. This isn't just a fucking moment. This isn't just a fucking moment, to pass as quick as it came. To be righted once it was over, to be forgotten and positions maintained. This isn't just a fucking moment, where he'll step back and she will look at him with detached eyes. Pretend that all is right. All is normal.

You're right. Its a war.
And his name is a fervent, pleading whisper dragged from her throat.

Like poison.

[-- Like if he stops,
She will lose.
And if he does not,
She can never win.]


VastMon 04:05AM CST
And were he any other man, and were she any other woman, to stop now would be unthinkable. Beyond impossible.

A ribbon of fur snakes down his arm, rippling forth and vanishing from shoulder to wrist. The change is so close upon him. The frenzy is so near. His mouth on hers is bruising, punishing; she scarcely has a chance to plead, and what, really, is a plea of mercy to a monster?

[he is a monster.]
[he is not a monster.]

He is --

He couldn't even name it to himself. He must've torn her gown by now. If she looks in the mirror, later, if she can, she'll find the marks of his desperate, frantic caresses on her body, everywhere, grasping, groping, squeezing, like she were immaterial, like she were a shadow, a liquid, smoke forever slipping through her hands. She'll find her lips swollen and cut, bite marks on her neck, her shoulders. She'll find where his toenail had scraped her skin when he tried to kick her legs apart, mindless in his lust, in his pursuit of something almost, almost, never in his grasp.

Maybe that's the truth: he wants to be the father who never quite seemed to accept him. And she's just the tool. But really, who dissects such perversions?

And when it comes down to the line: she is his mother. the source from which he is sprung. the root of his existence. and he loved her long before he lusted for her.

Were they any other, this could not end the way it does. But they are who they are, and so, gradually, with a sound like a sob against her ear, he folds his arms about her and gathers her close, crushes her close, so close that it's an effort to breathe, that her ribs creak, that her heart hammers against his bare chest as though the barrier of torn nightgown were nothing. He's shuddering like a stallion in heat, shaking against her; it's nerves, it's shock, it's horror, it's terror.

I won't leave you. I'm sorry. I didn't want to hurt you. You need to get out of here. I can't stand this anymore. -- all this and more, things he could say. But none of them come to voice. None of them can cross the barrier from mind to mouth. In the end the least and most he can do is hold on.


EvangelineMon 04:47AM CST
The desert yearns for it: the red earth cracking beneath the fire of the sky, dust swirling hot and parched and dry, the merest breath sending crushed pieces tangling through your hair, itching and scratching and sapping your energy. The very graze of their touch like sandpaper, sucking all moisture to the surface, just to be shrivelled by the blaze of that merciless sun. Occasional relief [-- occasional love --] against this barren wasteland in the form of heaven’s shower, but its still devouring the core to the bleached exposure of aging bones. You cannot hate it. You cannot fight it. Not when it is too late.

All you want is the rain.
Never the flood.
Never the storm.

There had been no hope to fight him, not when she had been sinking in her own skin, hiding behind those pale-veined eyelids. The pummelling fists against his jacket – she probably cut her hands against that zip, against his skin, nails grooving mindless into his flesh when she tries to push him away. Eating at the shallow wounds already there, tearing the tissue away even more. The blood against his chest, the blood furrowed stolen beneath those fingertips and the blood which smeared on that torn, corrupted gown – hanging off her skeleton: that melange of fragile, sickly beauty.

Useless.
[It is what she amounts to.]
She cannot even play the roles.

His mother’s weight is nothing in his arms, sagging against him she could be like a ghost – so lifeless is that fading form. The slump of her body and she would collapse if he let go. That face burrows deep against him hiding the ruined Venus: the features that will scald her when she sees them in him; that body that kills her - so tight against her son, curves and hollows flattened into shapelessness and cloaked by the ashes of her hair. Gulping breaths ease to shallowness, heated and faint through her open mouth, against the base of his throat. She says nothing at all.

Just silence.
Muted, rasping, silence.

[And the turning of the beast.]

Deep, deep down, she knows this for what it is. She knows this is the Eye.