first steps, and all those that come after.

eileen

That weekend at the cabin was surreal to the point of being -- well -- magical. A strange lovely trip or a dream and when Eileen wakes up in her soft cushy bed surrounded by its almost-sheer white curtain that diffuses light from city at night and then creates an airy, ethereal glow around her when the sun rises. She squeezes her pillow gleefully as consciousness begins to let in the sound of an airy, folksy song that is actually sung by Eugene Levy and Catherine O'Hara. It's sweet and hokey and for a moment she just curls up there, hugging her pillow and smiling and snuggling back against Dane's chest, further into his arm, the reality of which does not for one moment suggest to her half-sleeping mind that anything at the cabin actually happened.

She yawns, and only smiles more when it all settles in: yup. They went to a cabin and he played with the stars and they went fishing and she swam and she took some E and wandered around and they played Two Truths And A Lie and she won but really they both won because the whole point of the game is to know each other better and then they made -- something that yes, yes, she would describe as -- sweet love and they have slept together THREE WHOLE TIMES NOW.

Eileen sniffs deeply and slips her hand under his hand, wherever it has fallen. She squeezes it gently until she's certain he is at least slightly awake and whispers that she's going to go to work soon. He doesn't have to get up. He can stay here if he likes and she'll leave him a key. But she's already wriggling away as carefully as she can because if he's drowsy she has no intention of making him alert because it just seems so nice to think of him lazing away in her bed even though that also

makes her want to strip them both naked and -- well, to tell the truth, just rub their bodies together, slowly and warmly and lazily the way you should on sunny mornings.

So she gets up, and she goes to take a quick-quick shower in her tiny closet of a bathroom, brushing her teeth with her ladybug toothbrush because she'll get a matcha green tea thing and a pastry at The Balcony Cafe anyway. Eileen transforms, whether Dane is up to see it or not: she straightens her hair, which takes for. ev. er. She pulls the top half back and behind her ears, twisting the locks and clasping them in a barette across the back of her head. She puts on light makeup, focused mostly on her eyes, and she dresses conservatively, in dark colors, which add a healthy 5 years to her appearance. Her heels aren't too high. She has a small purse and blazer that matches her skirt folded over her arm when she's ready to leave, and on that blazer is a little magnetic name plate with her name, title and department next to the seal of the Art Institute of Chicago:

Eileen Cotton
Assistant Coordinator, Architecture & Design Society
Architecture & Design

Maybe he drives her to work. Or sleeps in her bed and she takes transit the way she always does. Either way, or in some entirely other way, Eileen seems very happy.

--

The next time they get together is a couple of weeks later, early June, and they've been quiet. He's a little more communicative this time, if only to avoid getting smacked seven times in a row. Then he asks her for coffee, and:

I'm in SF!

A few moments later his phone chimes again, not with another text but with a picture of Eileen outside, in sunglasses, giving him a double thumbs-up with her mouth in a wide open HEEEEY! sort of grin. Her fingernails are powder blue. The picture is crooked. Behind her is wide open sky, a grassy lawn, some trees: a backyard.

And a third message, a third chime:

Visiting family! Back on the 16th!

He gets other pictures during that time, at random. Sometimes it is sushi. One time it is a picture of her and her brother Colin standing on what looks like either a deck or a gazebo. Colin is blowing bubbles. Eileen is standing nearby in a blue flannel, looking rumpled and analytical, like they are in some kind of competition and she's sizing up her opponent's technique. That is probably not what is on her mind, but WHO KNOWS. She sends him a picture of a page in a book, of all things, only that page is photography of stars and that picture is of Sirius and its orbiting white dwarf and her message is a forlorn little:

miss you :(

Hell: one photo later that same day is of a backgammon board. Its message states PWNING DAD'S FACE AT BACKGAMMON WHAT WHAT so she must be okay despite the sad-face.

--

So on Saturday the 16th, it's something like nine-fifty-two at night, Dane's phone rings. Rings! Like an actual call is coming in. Which it is. From Eileen.

"I'm back!" she says, as soon as she gets him on the phone, chipperly. Where is she? Oh, she's on the plane still. "We just landed. There are like four billion people between me and the... bridge-thingy from the plane to the...the whassit. The terminal. But we're all standing up!" she sounds positively gleeful about this. "Can you come see me? You don't have to. I'm just back and we could have coffee or something. We should hang out and stay up all night and if you don't like going out -- you don't seem like you like going out, sorry, but you don't -- we can hang out on my balcony or something or go to a playground. Do you want to?"

There's a long enough pause that she seems like she's going to let him talk, then: "Please say you want to, okay?"

Thomas Dane

Eileen's apartment is a tiny cove of miracles. It's miraculous that so much fits into so little space. It's miraculous how the city lights are transformed into something diaphanous and lovely by the bedcurtains. It's miraculous how dawn turns everything rosy and warm, and

it is miraculous when, before Dane's sleepy eyes, Eileen makes herself someone completely different. Someone conservative and professional and ... well. Not at all the sort of girl you'd expect to live in a tiny, magical shoebox. And go on spontaneous fishing trips. And be charmed by tiny stars dancing around her lover-to-be's fingertips.

He reads her nametag as she stretches over him to reach something on those shelves behind the bed: actually lifts the nametag with a finger and squints his bleary eyes to see it. Assistant Coordinator. He thinks it sounds rather impressive. "I love the art institute," he murmurs, yawning. "I had no idea you worked there."

A little later, he is schlumping out of bed and into last night's clothes. Some of them, anyway. Enough that he won't be arrested on the streets. "I'll drive you," he insists, when she says she can just take public. "I'd love to stay in your little nest, but I'll drive you."

And so he does. They part in front of the Art Institute, their tender little goodbye kiss watched over by those stone lions on their pedestals.

--

The next time he contacts her, she's in San Francisco. And she's sending him pictures, and one of them makes his heart twinge, but most of them make him laugh and maybe roll his eyes just a little. In a good, fond way.

--

His phone rings the night of the 16th. This is a rare occurrence, which perhaps surprises no one. Dane, with his rather forbidding demeanor, can't really be expected to be popular. It's so rare that he's briefly bewildered by the sound, and then recognizes it. Picks up:

"Thomas Dane."

-- she's back! He's confused. Where is she? Oh: on the plane still. Just landed. Standing! Come see her?

"I'd -- "

-- but she goes on, she excuses him preemptively, she tells him he's sort of a recluse, she says they can hang out on her balcony or go to a playground. He's a little stunned. He starts to answer again:

"I'd -- "

-- but no. Please say-- she says, and this time, he interrupts her:

"I want to." Very firm, that. Very Thomas Dane, Adeptus Majoris. And beneath that: very subtly, very slightly Thomas Dane, who isn't all sorrow and flame, who is sometimes -- secretly -- still hope and starlight and crippled, cramped tenderness. "I'll come pick you up right now. Which terminal?"

--

So it's about ten thirty at night. Traffic was light on the I-90. O'Hare is getting quiet for the night, though not quite shut down yet. Dane's Audi pulls to the curb and the driver-side door pops open. The man himself comes curbside, a rather nondescript man all told: moderate height, perhaps a hair taller than average, though he carries himself with a slight stoop to his shoulders; moderate build, perhaps a touch on the thin side if anything. Moderate brown hair in a totally ordinary cut. Dark, lambent eyes, though. And a perpetual quasi-frown as he scans the crowd which, at the sight of Eileen,

miraculously turns into a smile that he is quite obviously controlling, lest it turn into an outright grin. Perhaps it's not her apartment that is a cove of miracles after all. Perhaps it's just her.

eileen

Yes, getting her keys necessitates picking them up from a bit of glazed pottery that sits beside an all-white Buddha on Eileen's built-in shelves, and getting to those shelves necessitates crawling back up onto the bed in her skirt and blouse and heels and leaning over Dane who she is trying very hard not to completely wake up, but he plays with the nametag on her jacket and says he had no idea. She wrinkles her nose at him, squinting her eyes, pursing her lips, essentially screwing up her whole face, and says:

"I thought I told you. Well: I work there!"

Which she is, especially getting out of an Audi in front of her workplace not so very long later. She's even a few minutes early. Dane kisses her in the car, and it always surprises her when he kisses her, delights her: she is leaning over to hug him and thank him again for the weekend and the cabin and the fish and all of it because it was really really really wonderful, and he kisses her. Eileen breathes in at the feel of it: of lips on her lips, of Dane's lips on her lips, the warmth he contributes to the process, the way he makes her heart start trip-hammering like he's flicking a switch.

She's smiling, eyes alight and lips pursed, when they draw apart, and she kisses him again. This second one is quick and as darting as a tropical fish, and then she's off, smoothing her skirt when she gets out of the car and slipping into her jacket as she heads inside.

--

It's nearly a month before she actually sees him in person again, and that's when she's hanging out outside of the terminal at O'Hare. All that hair of hers is bound up in a bun atop her head and it's messy and youthful. She is wearing flip-flops. She is toting a roll-along hard-shell suitcase that pictures a field of multi-colored tulips beneath a blue sky and puffy clouds. There is also a cross-body bag hanging at her hip, the strap and the purse all of a single piece. She is wearing very wrinkled blue shorts with white stars on them, these soft things that are just shy of being boxers -- actually, no, those may be boxers. Okay. Her shirt is an enormous silver thing that seems more like a pillowcase with some advantageous holes cut into it, it's so loose and shapeless and hanging off her shoulder where he can see a tank-top strap and all of this is schlubby and pajama-esque and she's pulling it off like it's couture.

That's her, standing outside in wait, looking this-a-way and that-a-way annnnd this-a-way again and AUDI HELLO. She bounces on her feet and then comes his way as quick as her feet can go, and it's not so busy now that they are being irritatedly waved on by one of the people working there but still it's a lot of cars and people and so when she stops beside him and wraps both of her arms around his waist and squeeeeeezes him it's only for ten seconds instead of one hundred seconds.

"Hiiiii!" she's saying, beaming, tears in her eyes out of nowhere from the sheer rush of kaleidescopic emotion. She breathes in very deeply, her face pressed into his stomach, then they really have to scoot: put the suitcase in the trunk and put Eileen in the passenger seat and put the car into gear gogogogogo.

Thomas Dane

Well. The traffic cops want him to gogogogogo. Eileen might want him to gogogogogo too, just because she is bright and frenetic and so very Dynamic that she practically defines the term. But Dane, damn it, has his dignity to preserve, and after that sudden onrush of a hug, after lifting Eileen's suitcase into the trunk, he actually goes back around the car at a purposeful-but-not-hurried pace. He pretends not to see the waving person. He puts the car in gear and puts down the handbrake and -- after checking carefully over his shoulder and in the mirrors -- pulls steadily into traffic.

There's no conversation for a while as he focuses on driving. On changing lanes, on finding the I-90. When they're comfortably on the road -- on the same road, for that matter, that they took back into the city when they came back from camping -- Dane reaches behind Eileen's seat and pulls out a bottle of water. Hands it to her mutely.

"So, San Francisco, huh?" The conversational opener sounds a little stilted even to his ears, but he can't help it. He's not very good at this sort of thing. Picking up his ... friend/lover at the airport. After a month of not seeing her. Or maybe just: having a normal conversation.

eileen

What Eileen wants... well yes, fine, okay: dynamic. She wants to see him and then she does and so she wants to hug him and so she does and she wants him to hug her back and maybe he does but it's okay if he just awkwardly pats her back or her head or stands there at a loss because all of those would be Dane and she just wants to hug Dane, mainly. And then she wants to pull down his pants and unbuckle his belt and give him a blowjob which startles even her. Startles! Because she's perfectly sensual and sexual and they're both quite aware of the fact that she's Very Attracted to him, but it's not a thought that has ever entered her mind before: greeting a friend/lover at the airport and promptly dropping to her knees. Eileen puts it away, because there are myriad reasons not to follow that desire to its enactment, but there are also myriad questions she has to ask herself around having the desire in the first place.

Never let it be said that Eileen isn't thoughtful. She's extremely thoughtful. And considerate. And tries so hard to be kind that killing a fish made her break down in heart-wrenching sobs.

So it's a rather thoughtful and less frenetic Cultist who scoots her butt into the seat of the Audi, slips her feet from her flip-flops, and curls up in the passenger seat. She is overwhelmingly tired all of a sudden, or maybe just cuddly -- she's still working that out, which it is, or if it's both, or if it's a sine wave of one to the other -- when Dane hands her that bottle of water. Her eyes brighten as she takes it. "Thank you!" she says, twisting off the cap to take a few long drinks.

Oh, he's so awkward. She grins. "Yup. Vacation time to visit the fam. We had sort of a mini-reunion, I visited some friends, all that. There's this huge -- like huge -- Cultist collective out there. I mean they work a lot with Akashics and Dreamspeakers and even Verbena --"

like the Verbena are so different from the Cultists, some Hermetics might say,

and yes they fucking are, Eileen might say, because the Euthanatoi have a closer mindset to the Cultists than most Verbena do,

"-- but they have a lot of crashpads and festivals and they're all over the whole place just like... feeding on the historical energy there and creating new energies and some of them do this thing where they magic-sneak themselves over to Alcatraz and like, steep themselves in the spirit-memory of incarceration and injustice and violence and fear and all that stuff so they will embrace and appreciate freedom that much more. We didn't do that when I was out there, I was mostly with family and all, but I spent some time with them and made a bunch of friends who might come visit later, like some are coming for Lolla and might crash with me."

Not tired anymore then. She beams at him. "Isn't June, like, the best month? It's beautiful. Pretty much everywhere." Then again, knowing Eileen: all the time is beautiful everywhere.

Thomas Dane

Cultists and Verbenas and Dreamspeakers and Akashics in San Francisco. Dane's cynical side is just so very surprised that he can't even vocalize it. Eileen might catch a tiny little smirk on his face, though, for which she would be wholly justified for thwacking him, though perhaps not seven times.

She tells him what she's been up to. He points to the cupholder in the dash when she starts looking for a place to set the bottle. They pass under highway signs pointing out Chicago, Rockford, Milwaukee. They take the branch leading to Chicago.

"It's been pretty hot here," Dane says, thoughtfully. "I guess it's been nice, though. Who's back home for you?"

eileen

"This!" she says, aghast. "This is not hot. You just wear too many clothes and don't drink enough smoothies."

She doesn't smack him. A bit of wryness at a bunch of hippies and tree-huggers and medicine men and meditating monks in San Francisco is nothing she hasn't experienced. She just smirks back at him, exaggeratedly, wrinkling up her nose like an angry squirrel and waggling her face at him to boot.

In actuality, she doesn't set the bottle down. She hugs it to her chest, all curled up on the passenger seat like it's okay to put your feet on furniture. Which it totally is, were you raised in a museum? Ugh.

"I just said! Family and friends and people from school and Cultists and all that." Eileen leans over and quite suddenly but quite uncomplicatedly inhales him, taking an enormous deep breath and then releasing it softly with a shiver. She puts her chin on his upper arm and smiles at his earlobe. "How have you been?"

Thomas Dane

"Well, I meant -- "

see: he wanted to say he meant who was this amorphous friends-and-family of hers. Her mom? Her dad? Brothers, sisters, cousins, grandparents... he doesn't get that far, though. He starts and suddenly she's right there, startling him with her sudden proximity and her vibrance and her chin on his arm. His bicep stiffens a little in her grasp, then relaxes.

"I've been well," he says, conservatively, giving it some thought before he continues: "The Chantry had an assignment for me last week. I found myself a little surprised to discover you weren't my partner. And a little disappointed. I think I missed your incessant chatter." -- and he smiles, faintly, to show this is a joke.

He doesn't complain about her feet on his upholstery. It's leather: as much as people freak out over leather getting dirty, the truth is it's actually fairly easy to wipe clean. Unless you bleed on it or something. Then all bets are off.

"Have you had dinner yet?"

eileen

Well of course her mother and father and at least one of her brothers and maybe other people who knows but who wants to hear about a mini-reunion or her highschool friends? Eileen doesn't assume he wants to hear about that, though sometimes she thinks he might want to hear about a million other things. Or maybe it's just so normal to her: family, friends, brothers, parents, whatever. That's just life stuff, but she forgets that his daughter is dead and his wife is... wherever she went. It's not normal to him.

"I had peanuts," she says brightly. "And a coffee. And a little thing of Jameson. And then some more peanuts."

This, after everything else. Then she circles back around, after taking another drink of water: "What was the assignment? Who was your partner? Did you see Charlie at the chantry? Is he still growing the little paradox-plant from your hand? Oh! Did you know that you can bind a person's soul -- their essence or pattern or whatever word Hermetics use for it -- into objects against their will?"

Thomas Dane

"I'm not too fond of peanuts," Dane says, which is of no consequence at all except: well. It's one more thing she didn't know about him before that she does now.

And then:

"It was a cookiecutter treasure hunt. I was paired with a Dreamspeaker. Totally incomprehensible fellow. I think I was just there to provide firepower, no pun intended. In the end I wasn't strictly necessary. We were in and out in under an hour."

Even in profile, she can see his mouth curl, slight as it is. "I've seen him around," he says. "And yes, he's still tending to that bizarre thing. I keep waiting for it to grow fangs and eat him alive, but so far so good."

Quirk. A sidelong glance. "I've heard of it. What makes you bring it up?"

eileen

"I'm not either. I was just hungry." She pauses, thinking, then musing: "I like cashews and almonds and I like butter pecan ice cream but that maybe doesn't count. I think everyone likes cashews though. That's why they're so expensive."

Eileen reaches over and puts her hand on his leg. That's where her hand is while he's driving and telling her about the treasure hunt and the Dreamspeaker and Charlie and the plant that is not growing fangs but, Eileen might suggest, probably likes classical music. She isn't stroking him off. She isn't sliding her hand slowly upward and shuddering when she finally touches him. She's not doing a damn thing, in fact, though her touching him at all was probably startling. It was a bit out of nowhere, her hand coming to rest on top of his thigh. Also: it's completely awkward. Since she's not massaging him and she's not just resting her hand there like an old lover, there's an inherent tension to it that vibrates under her skin, makes her heart thud harder if not faster, makes her feel curious indeed, which is why she keeps it there.

It's out of nowhere, and startling, and awkward, and curious, and it feels about as poignant as holding hands.

"I was doing research while I was in California," she says, looking at her hand and her chipped powder-blue nail polish. "And as it turns out, William Wentworth the First wrote a treatise on it like a hundred years ago,"

which may mean 100 years ago or may be Eileen's typical hyperbole. She looks from her hand to his face. "I don't know what happened to William Wentworth the First, but he wrote a whole book about pattern-binding. It was all very abstract and talking about spirits and stuff, but I read some excerpts and dude, it is completely clear that he was talking about binding people. Even Awakened people. If I had to guess, I'd guess that William Wentworth the Third's grandfather got himself blacklisted pretty hard after writing something like that and actually showing it around to other mages."

Eileen shrugs. "I wasn't looking for stuff about his grandfather, just nosing around about dubya-dubya three, and sort of stumbled onto it. And by 'I read some excerpts' I mean that it is really hard to read a Hermetic book from ridiculously stupid long ago about something that freaky-deaky while the room is full of ganja and someone is trying to paint your toes." Not toenails.

A beat. "It's really ticklish. And cold."

Thomas Dane

That hand on his leg doesn't make him jump, but perhaps the possibility is there beneath his skin. A tightening of that muscle group. A prickling awareness in his skin. It is awkward and it is startling and neither of them are moving, they're both like deer in the headlights of What Happened Last Time.

Then Dane takes his hand from the wheel. She might think he's about to shift her hand carefully and unsubtly back to herself, but -- then his hand simply covers hers. And the awkwardness eases just a little.

A moment later, an entirely different tension ripples through Dane. He frowns, those dark fire's-heart eyes of his glowering through the windshield.

"Why am I completely unsurprised that Wentworth's grandfather was involved in that sort of thing?" It's a rhetorical question. He's quiet a second. "It worries me a little that you were digging into his past. It makes me paranoid that word might get back to him somehow. It's bad enough that you were there with me that day. I don't want you to become a target."

eileen

What Happened Last Time was that Dane nearly mauled Eileen alive in that bed in the cabin. And even when he recoiled from mauling her, he brought her off so... sensually, so erotically, that she hasn't forgotten a moment of it. Nor has she forgotten the way he breathed in and rubbed his face the morning after when she was stretching on the bed or telling him to look for her panties. Nor has she forgotten how very nice it was to wake up to him three mornings in a row, each one with his arm around her. Or how his lips feel, even if it surprises her every time he kisses her.

On the mouth. Or any old place.

All that is to say: of course she's thinking about it, stuck on it, stuck on him and conveniently forgetting her worries or uncertainty that came about in a diner over pie when she was like hey I don't wanna be with anyone but you and the thought of you being with someone else makes me freak out a little and he was like hey it's cool if you're with other people I JUST WANT YOU TO BE FREE and she was like wait what I kinda want you to freak out a little too WAIT I DON'T WANT YOU TO FEEL BAD LIKE THAT and she was kinda augh and confused for a while.

Why bother thinking about all that? Well, obsessing over it. When she's been high she's thought about all that. She's considered it. She hasn't run from it, she just... chooses when to run towards something else for a while.

Eileen lifts her fingers up and laces them with his from underneath, smiling. The song The Ants Go Marching pops into her head out of nowhere, but she refrains from humming it aloud.

"I wasn't digging into his past," she insists, "I was just looking up stuff. You don't get a magical alert every time someone magic-Googles your name, do you?"

A beat. "You don't, do you? That's kinda overboard, Thomas."

She scoots over on her seat, a little closer to him all over again. Her tone is peaceful. "If I'm a target, I'll be a fast-moving one. Plus, I'm kind of a badass. Did you see the destruction I was wreaking on my father at backgammon? Wentworth won't know what hit him."

Another beat. "If we play backgammon." Brightly: "Which I would suggest, as a healthy alternative to a duel."

Thomas Dane

"I don't," he assures her -- insisting a little because he doesn't want her to think he was paranoid or something. "But I have colleagues who very likely do. So it's possible.

"And," he adds, wry, "somehow I doubt Wentworth would find that an acceptable alternative. -- Hey, do you want to come back to my place?" This comes sort of out of the blue. "It's not a playground and it's not your balcony, but it does have a balcony."

eileen

She grins. She teased, he bit. She wants to hug him, but he's driving. So she'll wait. She'll hug him again later and think about this very moment, looking at him in profile, looking at that dimple that so rarely becomes visible because he so rarely smiles enough to draw it out, and how he insisted that he's not paranoid, he's not! And she believed him, utterly, and wanted to hug him anyway because... because, because. Because he's Thomas.

Out of the blue, which shares a border with whatever color they're in now while they talk about horrific practices from hundred-year-old Hermetic documents and so is an easy transition for Eileen to make:

Hey, do you want to come back to m--

"Yes."

y place? It's not a playground and it's not your balcony, but it does have a balcony.

Eileen is nodding after her interjection to the affirmative. "Yes. Yes I do. Also my balcony is technically maybe more like a fire escape."

She breathes in deep and her hand is sliding down from the top of his leg to the inside of it, a firm pressure that indicates the resistance it takes not to do anything else, just as her withdrawing her hand after that indicates the same.

"We can go now," as though her ready-for-whatever-ness weren't something he could probably rely on pretty easily, "we don't have to go back to my place first. I don't have a cat or dog or fish or anything. I got some of those air plants that live in little terrariums and don't need much water, though. They're awesome."

Thomas Dane

As with so many things out of Eileen's mouth, Dane isn't entirely sure what she refers to when she talks about air plants in little terrariums that don't need water. That makes little sense to him, and so he chalks it up to Eileen and just leaves it be. There are too many things, typically, in any given sentence she speaks for him to respond to them all. He picks and chooses.

"Technically maybe like a fire escape, huh?" he echoes, that repressed little smile of him turning smirk-like for a moment. He glances at her again, sidelong. She is close to him. He kisses her between her eyebrows, spontaneously. "Well, my balcony is the real deal. But I think your apartment, and its fire escape, are perfectly charming nonetheless."

Her hand runs to the inside of his thigh. She hears him take a small sip of air. Then his hand tightens on hers -- it's hard to tell whether it's meant as a fond squeeze or a gentle deterrence. Either way, she's drawing back a moment later and he's looking again at her, a brief glance that mingles gratitude and disappointment.

"Almost there," he tells her, though she hasn't asked.

--

He lives, as she might recall, in Lincoln Park. Not far from the zoo, actually, and certainly not far from that enormous, oceanic lake. This late, the water is black; the far side is too far away for any lights to reflect across the water. There are boats and ships out there, though, tiny pinpricks of light on the black. She would be able to see them later if she looked out his windows. Off his balcony.

They park in a small, cramped lot beneath the building. It takes real skill, or at least a lot of practice, to wedge the Audi in between his two neighbors in one try. Both of them have to turn their bodies sideways to squeeze out of the car. Dane pops the trunk and pulls Eileen's luggage out, and he insists on carrying it or pulling it along for her.

The building is neither the tallest nor the newest nor the fanciest in this area. It is nice, though: an early-90s affair of glass and concrete, with elevators that at least make a reasonable attempt at luxury with their hardwood panels and muted lighting. They ride directly up from the garage, Dane swiping a keycard to get up to the residential floors. He lives on one of the uppermost levels, though not the very top. The hallway is quiet. He's quiet too, taking her down the hall and around a short corner to his door. 2105, his unit number.

"We can order some delivery," he says as he opens his door and pushes it wide for her to precede him. "Do you have a preference?"

His apartment isn't terribly large. It's not miniscule either. It sits on the corner, one wall looking out over the lake, the other looking south to the lofty towers of the city. There's a nice kitchen, a single bedroom. A guest half-bathroom and another bathroom inside the bedroom. Also, a small living room, where he has a single lonely couch and a flatscreen TV that looks very, very rarely used.

And a treadmill. For those days when it's just too damn cold to jog along the lake.

eileen

At some point she will take him back to her sunny cove of miracles and show him the miraculous air plants that only grow roots for stability, that live and breathe and breed like any other plant but do so without soil. She'll show him the blown-glass ornaments with open sides that she has put a bit of gravel and a bit of moss and tillandsia into and how she has also adorned these little terrariums with miniature rain boots and garden tools because fairies.

And it will be hard to tell if she actually believes in fairies or not.

Kissed between the brows, Eileen scrunches up her face but it actually makes her glow inside, warmth spreading from the center of her chest outward, everywhere, still she's pretty sure she's glowing golden and soft in the car. Maybe that's why she touches him like that, aching and not bothering to conceal her aching. She draws back though, as she does, and soon enough they're in his parking lot.

She carries her shoulder bag and he telescopes the handle of her tulip-covered suitcase. There's not much need to insist; Eileen seemed to forget she had the thing until Dane went to take it from the trunk. "Oh!" she says, seeing him wheel it along. "Thank you!" And carries her water bottle up with her, wiggling in place from side to side to some music in her head as they ascend in the elevator. She looks everywhere, at everything: the sort of lights they use for his elevator buttons, the ceiling, the paneling, all of it.

"I forget what you do for a living," she says, which isn't really the same as asking, since it actually sounds very much like she's not concerned about discovering it, or rediscovering it. She beams when he mentions delivery. "We could get Thai food! And there's this place called Insomnia that will deliver cookies, Thomas. They come in like, a pizza-ish box. It's so coo--hey!"

They are at 2105, and going into 2105, and she is going in ahead of him, darting into the darkness. She turns in place in the middle, looking at everything, lights on or off, then smiles at him. "No model airplanes!" Which she knew. She was right about that one.

Thomas Dane

"My income tax return says I'm a self-employed private consultant," Dane says, "which is an evasive way of saying I get paid by various parties for my services. I get most of my compensation directly from the Order and the local Chantry, but the Sons of Ether pay fairly well too. The Dreamspeakers, not so much. And the Akashics keep trying to pay me in so-called artifacts that I'm pretty sure are worthless, and probably fake."

There's a wry sort of smile on his face as he hangs up his keys, takes off his shoes. She's darting into his condo, looking every which way. He flicks a light on for her. She discovers he has no model airplanes. He quirks an eyebrow.

"Did you really think I had model airplanes?"

eileen

That makes Eileen sad. She seems like she might say something: her mouth is screwed up, lopsided, uncomfortable. Her hands rest on the front strap of her bag. He asks if she really thought --

"No," she says. "Just. I was thinking about our game by the lake is all."

Thomas Dane

Turning away from the minutiae of getting home, Dane frowns as well. "Did I say something?"

eileen

Her mouth's corners are turned down. It's not a natural, normal-seeming expression. She wrinkles her nose a little, which takes the oh my god what is happening edge off a bit.

"Just... how much people pay you. And like. How it kinda sounded racist. Only Tradition-ist. It's the most stereotypical Hermetic thing I've heard come out of your mouth and it was weird. And then it was like you forgot... playing with me and talking to me and stuff. Which is sad!" she says, her eyebrows going up, her shoulders going up and then down, despite the brightness of her tone.

Thomas Dane

All of which leaves Dane awkward, at a loss. They are across the room from each other, but even if they weren't, he wouldn't know what to do. He's hardly the type to instigate hugs of apology.

Instead: a small movement of his shoulders, unhappy and unsure. "It's true I was extrapolating trends into generalizations," he says, "which is usually a good way to get proven wrong. But I didn't mean to offend you. As for playing -- I have to admit, I'm not sure... I don't..."

He trails off. There's no easy way to say it: I don't remember what you're talking about.

eileen

Eileen is stunned and hurt and both of these things are so evident on her face that it's painful to look at. "Two truths and a lie! You don't have model airplanes and you didn't go skydiving for your twenty-first birthday and you once won a hot dog eating contest!"

Thomas Dane

Thomas

blurts out a laugh.

And then, obviously horrified, he jams a fist over his mouth and tries to make it a cough.

eileen

Well, she doesn't storm across the room to start hitting him. She doesn't burst into tears, either. She just looks at him, wanting really bad to join in the laughter even if she doesn't know where it comes from, not wanting to dampen it, but ow and that's why he was asking about who is back home because he doesn't even remember and it's only been a month and ow, ow, ow.

So she looks, again, like she's momentarily frozen in time, elongating this moment like pulling taffy, feeling the crushing ecstasy of pain rooted in things like rejection, which is rooted in Fear, which makes her remember:

-- it is folly to bow to terror.

Eileen sniffs deeply. If she were a stronger time mage that endless loop of a moment would have been an eyeblink for Dane and an eternity for her, but since she's just an apprentice, it's an uncomfortable eternity for him while she stretches that moment with the simple magic of thought and silence and internal reflection. She still looks unhappy, but the fear is leeching out of it, the sharpness of the pain, bringing a shoulder-rounding calm that is

like watching a miracle.

"What do you remember?" she asks softly.

Thomas Dane

"I remember the stars." This is no less a blurt than the aborted laugh. It does not stumble on its way out, though, and it is not loud. "I remember waking up with you and feeling happier than I had for a long time, every time."

He thinks a moment. "I remember going to the store because neither of us had remembered to bring food. And fishing. You cried when you killed the fish. We fought too, at some point. You went off and you came back. I'm almost certain you got high as a kite out there. You were back down when you came back, though. We had dinner.

"I can't remember if that was the night when we -- " he leaves off there. The corner of his mouth moves a little, rueful, embarrassed.

eileen

The apartment is small, but they are still several feet away from each other within it. Eileen, he may have noticed in the elevator, left her flip-flops in his car. Or maybe he notices it now, where she stands barefoot in his living room, tendrils of hair hanging around her neck. It's summer outside, but it's cool in here, cool and dry and clean. Everything here sort of fits where it is, except for her tulippy suitcase and her: all of her, messy and barefoot and young and raising her eyebrows at him when he trails off, as if to say and?

But she doesn't wait for an answer before she asks, with genuine concern, her brow furrowing and her head tilting: "Do you have brain damage?"

Thomas Dane

Dane is caught somewhere between affront and confusion. "No. What?"

eileen

"I didn't mean it bad!" she says, looking miserable again. "My brother --"

the one that now she thinks he has forgotten completely,

"My brother Colin?" Eileen repeats, searching his face. "He's brain damaged. From when he was born. I would not say it like an insult or to be mean. Just... you don't remember all this stuff I told you or everything that happened and it wasn't that long ago and I thought maybe something happened to you.

"My grandfather had a minor stroke and he actually recovered really really well but his memory was shot, and Colin takes a long time to get things in his head well enough to remember them, so I wasn't -- I wasn't -- asking that to be rude, I'm just really sad because you don't remember much and if it's because something happened to your brain I don't want to be impatient with you or take it personally but if that's not it then I'm kinda taking it personally."

Eileen takes a breath and holds it a moment. "And it hurts my feelings."

Thomas Dane

"I'm not brain damaged." He's repeating himself, he thinks. Great way to prove he doesn't have brain damage. "I just don't have every little detail carved into my memory, Eileen. It's not because it wasn't important to me. I just don't work like that. I like to think I remember the important things. Maybe not every word that was said or what came before what, but -- I remember the important things."

He's repeating again. He exhales. It's almost a sigh. "How about we just sit down and maybe order some dinner?"

eileen

"I know," she says quietly. "It just hurts my feelings."

Eileen shrugs. She can tell he's mad. Or annoyed or frustrated or something. But that's the truth of it: he doesn't remember every detail. He remembers the important things, or at least the most important things, the things that are Most Important to him, because that's not how he works. And her feelings don't stop being hurt, because that's not how she works.

She looks down at her toes for a moment when he suggests just sitting down and eating dinner. She looks at him after that moment. "I'm not saying this to be passive aggressive or whatever, but I could also just go home. I know it's gotten weird now, and it seems like it's over nothing, but for what it's worth, I'm not mad at you or anything, I'm just a little hurt and sad and confused. A lot of it is because I have feelings for you, and it makes me pretty sensitive. And it might be better if I leave if that's pissing you off, because then we're just gonna end up in this... sort of loop, where me being sensitive annoys you and you being annoyed makes me sensitive and so on."

Taking a deep breath, she exhales slowly and shakes her head. "I can try to not be so sensitive, but I think that'll only work if you try not to be annoyed about it."

Thomas Dane

"I'm not annoyed," Dane says automatically, and then stops. "No; I am annoyed. I'm sorry. But I don't want to be. I just don't want you to read so much into everything. I suppose that's a fundamental difference between us, though. You see all the details, and they all mean something to you. I think that's a good thing. But I'm not ... like that. And it doesn't mean that you don't mean something to me."

All of which is a lot of talking without quite getting to the point. The answer to her question:

"I don't want you to go. I'd rather you stayed. But I would understand if you left."

eileen

Isn't that just the major difference between them, in any sense that matters? It's not that he's an Adept and she's an Apprentice. It's not that he's a Hermetic and she's a Cultist. It's not their ages or their upbringings or their histories or jobs. It's not that the very essence of their souls are different. It's this: the heavy, intense spikes of not just his magic but his outlook against the broad, sweeping look she takes at the world, and yes: every detail is so important to her and means so much and is written into her very bones by the time she has finished absorbing it. Including, but not limited to, the fact that he once won a hot dog eating contest, he is not afraid of chickens, his parents are divorced, all of these details only made more important by the fact that he is more important to her.

"I'm sorry I'm sensitive," she says, just like he apologized for being annoyed. Neither of them can truly help it, and neither of them truly want it. She doesn't apologize for reading so much into everything, and her brow flickers with a frown at the way he phrased that, the way it did at his phrasing of every little detail carved into my memory, Eileen. He says it's a good thing a moment later, which might mean he's just talked himself into a circle, negating the statement that he doesn't want her to do it.

Her head tips, because she's confused.

She decides that it doesn't matter if he doesn't want her to read so much into everything, because what he said after is truer: it's a good thing, and she thinks it's a good thing, so it's not like it's going to be something she stops doing in hopes that it will make him like her more.

Even if she really does want him to like her more. So much that it makes her chest ache.

Eileen shrugs, shakes her head. "I don't wanna go, even if things feel kind of awkward right now. I think it would help if you came, y'know. Away from the door a little."

Thomas Dane

It's a little backwards: she's the one standing smack in the center of his living room. He's the one edging around the door, like maybe he'll bolt any second. But then maybe that's the truth. Eileen: open, curious, adoring and attentive of every little detail, everything life has to give her. Dane: closed, cautious, wary and defensive more often than not. Wounded, battered, hardened until his view on life is like the thrust of a spear.

He huffs a humorless little laugh. And he comes away from the door a little, shedding his shoes at last. He turns on a couple lights, too. The night outside, the beautiful skyline and the black lake, are replaced by their reflections in the glass.

"Don't apologize for being sensitive," he says, gruff-quiet. "I'm sorry I didn't remember."

eileen

He's taller than she is by quite a bit, and so far he has only seen her in some heels of a reasonable height when she left for work the last time he saw her, which -- other than in photos from her phone -- was a long time ago. And she looked so tidy and conservative and pretty then. Now she looks messy and wild and pretty. He steps out of his shoes, which makes her smile. The lights come on, and Eileen wonders in the back of her mind if this is a bit of defense, too.

If it is, or if it isn't, she leaves it alone. She smiles up at him as he steps away from the door a little bit, standing right where she is. That smile still in place, she lifts her hand up and beckons to him, palm up and fingers fluid in the air, curling towards herself encouragingly.

Thomas Dane

Thomas Dane. Dane the bringer of fire. Dane the destroyer of worlds. Dane the socially stunted, Dane the awkward: Dane the wary, looking at her beckoning fingers as though uncertain of what subtle magic she might weave next.

He does come to her, though. After a second of pause, and then with a faint self-deprecating huff. It's almost like he's afraid of her, he thinks, which is of course absurd because

he's not afraid of her. He's afraid of what she might do, what it might mean, what he might want, what that might mean. Above all, he's afraid of attachment, those bonds humans can't help but form, that hurt so badly to break.

Two or three steps take him to her. And he spreads his hands in a little gesture: here I am.

eileen

He is totally scared of her.

She smiles up at him, at his gesture, and then she hugs him. It's not a tight, firm squeeze with her face buried in his stomach as at the airport, over quickly because they needed to load up in the car. She wraps her arms around his waist, rests her head against him, and closes her eyes, and just stays there.

"Shh," she says after a while, though he didn't say anything. She's whispering: "I'm listening to your heart."

And so she is, the steady lub-dub of it that resonates inside of him even when her ear doesn't quite reach his chest. She stays where she is for some time, keeping him in her embrace, until such time is Time and always was the time for her to tell him quietly, not-whisperingly: "I forgive you, Thomas."

Thomas Dane

So there he is: a little stiff in her embrace, uncertain of where this is going or what she's doing or --

and then cautious, cautious, cautiously putting his arms around her. Uncertain. Cautious. Wary, awkward, afraid: these are the words that describe him tonight. Every night, really, beneath that hardened exterior, that stony shell of mighty fire-mage. She tells him what she's doing. She's listening to his heart. "Don't be silly," he starts to say,

but then stops. No. She can be silly if she wants. It's not silly, anyway.

A little later, she does something wholly unsilly, unchildish, unfrivolous. She forgives him, and a sudden sting springs to his eyes. He can't quite explain it, wouldn't be able to put it into words if he tried: how badly he needs to be forgiven. For hurting her. For hurting anyone, everyone, ever. For everything.

His arms tighten suddenly, almost involuntarily: like spasming to protect a wound. He says nothing, but he buries his face in that thick hair of hers.

eileen

It would only be silly to listen to his heart if he didn't have one. He does, though, and she could prove it to him if she moved his hand to his own pulse to make him feel what she's listening to. And she could prove it to him if she could share her ability to see every layer of the universe the way she does, show him what it is like to expand the senses so utterly that you perceive colors without names, hear noise like song, sense the health or the lack thereof in the body, the mind, the soul. She has never made him the subject of how extra her sensory perception really is, because if she did, she might know him better than he knows himself for that moment, and that isn't a right he's given her.

It's not silly to listen. It's Sleeper magic, the simplicity of nature itself, the wonder and awe that comes with it. How incredible, the heartbeat, the mechanics of respiration, the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems, sunrise and set, the orbit of the moon. How miraculous he is, to be so wounded and so living, so vicious and so tender, so horrific and beautiful. She

loves him a little,

as she loves so many, so much, so entirely.

--

Dane only gradually enfolds her in his own arms, but when she says what she says, his reaction is as spasmodic and automatic as the internal functions of his body keeping him going, the clench of his heart, the bellowing of his breath, the rush of white blood cells to the rescue upon receiving a wound, the release of endorphins and adrenaline rushing through you to try and save you, even when you don't need saving.

He holds her tightly, and buries his face in her messy top-knotted hair.

"It's okay, Thomas," she says quietly into his chest. "It's all okay."

Which is what she's said to him before. The night when they --

Thomas Dane

"I'm sorry," he says again, muffled in her hair. Every time he says it he sounds like he means it more. Means more by it. "I'm sorry. I wish I wasn't like this--"

but then he cuts that off because he doesn't even know what that means. He's quiet then, quiet but with a shudder to his breath as he pulls it in. For a long time after he hugs her tight like that, and now he wishes he hadn't turned on those lights because they're so bright, he feels so exposed.

It's a little easier when he closes his eyes. When he turns his face to her and hides, if only for a little while.

eileen

She goes on holding him. What else would she do? Not what else would anyone do, but: this is Eileen. She doesn't tell him to stop saying he's sorry and she doesn't tell him that how he is is just fine and he shouldn't want to be otherwise and she doesn't tell him how to not be like he is. She holds him, her hands on his lower back, lights or no lights, and she thinks maybe she won't go manage to miss seeing him for a whole month because clearly he should see her on a regular basis like therapy and that makes her a little amused and happy but she's not about to say it aloud.

A rather long time passes before they part, and when that time comes, it's initiated by Dane. Drawing a breath or loosening his arms or whatever he needs to do, in the end he starts to ease back and she tips her head back to look up at him, smiling. Gently. A little achingly.

"If you ever wanna talk to me about wishing you weren't like... however you think you are? I'll listen. But if you don't, that's okay too. Sometimes the past needs to be explored, and sometimes the past just needs to be the past."

Thomas Dane

It's quite some time before they part. Before Dane re-gathers what strength he needs to draw that breath,

loosen those arms,

straighten his back. He lets go with something like a sigh, quite different from those exasperated and annoyed sighs a moment ago. A quick scrub of the back of his hand across the tip of his nose, and then --

-- then Dane aches. Furrows his brow, makes him frown that pained frown of his. "Sometimes I wish you wouldn't be so unconditionally giving," he says, which is quite possibly one of the stupidest things he has ever wished for. "It makes me feel like I'm taking advantage of your kindness. I can't imagine that I'm bringing anything to the table that's worth what you're so willing to give me."

eileen

She lifts her shoulders in a very big shrug, her hands falling away from his back and sides to sit palm up in midair. "A nice car? I don't know. Figure out something you like about yourself and then tell yourself that's what I like about you."

Eileen beams at him. "I just like you. And I don't think being kind is something I'm bringing to the table or whatever, it's just... what I'm like. You don't have to be like me and I'll still like you."

Thomas Dane

It's hard to argue with that sort of uncluttered sense, even if Dane suspects it's doesn't quite make sense at all. He thinks about it a moment, and then he laughs under his breath.

"Well. I like you too, Eileen," he says. And on that note: "Let's get some food, huh? Before you drop dead of eating nothing but peanuts."

eileen

"I will not drop dead of eating nothing but peanuts," she tells him firmly. "I am not allergic. Do you know some people are allergic to pickles? Not cucumbers. Just pickles. And not the pickling... juice... stuff. The brine. It's something about pickles specifically."

She shakes her head, shrugs: "Science," like you might say Men! or Women! or Insert Group I Just Can't Even Deal With Anymore Here.

"Are we getting Thai food and cookies?" she asks, slipping her bag off, swaying it over to drop it on the couch.

Thomas Dane

"We can get Thai food," Dane says, "but I'm not sure about cookies for dinner."

Her bag goes onto the couch. Dane's place looks barely lived-in: like he has a housekeeper that comes by once every two weeks or so, straightens everything out, and then he just leaves everything straightened out. That bag on the couch is the messiest thing in the room. It's also the one thing in the room that makes it look like something other than a model house.

For his part, Dane goes to sit on that couch. He picks up the remote control for the TV. Then he sets it down again. He reaches under the coffee table and he pulls out a laptop, sleek and lightweight, which he flips open and directs to Grubhub. Pulls up some local Thai place -- and they are not few, not in Lincoln Park -- then flips the computer around and hands it to Eileen.

"You first," he says. An deadpan: "No pickles. I'm allergic."

eileen

The look Eileen gives him is both patient and a bit aghast. "The cookies would be for dessert, Thomas." Duh.

He goes to the couch, sitting a cushion or two away from her bag. The laptop comes out and she leans over, scrolling quickly and then picking so rapidly that it seems like it must be random and maybe it is and maybe she just knows exactly what she wants, which happens to be ram long song with chicken, a potato curry puff, and a Thai iced tea. She wants the ram long song to be a 4 on a scale of 0 to 5 in terms of heat and only when she has tapped in her order does she straighten up and look down at him for a moment.

"You're not really allergic to pickles, are you? I didn't mean to make fun of you if you are." So worried. So tender. So concerned. So utterly and completely full of shit that she can't even help but grin a moment later.

Thomas Dane

"I'm not--" he starts to reassure her, but then she starts to grin and he realizes the joke is on him. "Oh, very funny." He grabs the laptop from her -- "grabs" -- and then makes selections of his own. Basil duck. Coconut-curry shrimp. Some sort of drink.

"I have ice cream bars in the fridge," he says. "That should suffice for dessert." And he hands the laptop back. "Just send the order in when you have everything you want. My credit card info is in there."

eileen

"But Thomas, they deliver cookies until three a.m.. Why would you not take advantage of something like that!" She shakes her head, mindboggled at him. He starts to hand the laptop back to her and she looks at him, then looks at her order, then looks at him like she wants to ask him how much he thinks she eats.

Instead, she pulls up her top, and the tank top underneath it, enough to expose a couple of inches of her belly. It's nothing he's not seen before. He knows she doesn't have piercings on her navel or her breasts or further south. He knows she has no tattoos. She waves her hand around her midsection. "It doesn't fit very much," she explains, "unless it is cookies, and then it fits everything. I probably won't even finish the ram long song, to tell the truth. But then I have leftovers!"

Yay!

The tank is tugged down, form-fitting as it is, and the larger overshirt is dropped. "Silly."

Thomas Dane

"Oh fine," he surrenders, "we can get cookies if -- "

oh god she is taking her shirt off again. Dane does that thing where he goes quite still and looks anywhere-but-at-Eileen; draws in half a breath and holds it until he reminds himself not to hold it. He lets it out, slow and steady. She's dropped her shirt by then, and he covers up the moment by fiddling with some bit of lint on his pants.

"We can get cookies if you really want," he finishes. "But if you end up bouncing off the walls from the sugar, it's not my fault."

eileen

It's hard not to notice how frozen he gets, how deer in the headlights, thinking she might be undressing in his living room, oh god oh god oh god don't look don't look don't look. She feels a surge of -- let's call it as it is -- pity for him, but it's not a condescending emotion in Eileen. It's just compassion, even when it doesn't stop her from showing him her stomach anyway.

They could talk about cookies, and he does, and she smiles. "I bounce off the walls anyway. You miiiight have noticed." Eileen gets on her knees on the couch, her feet hanging off the end, facing the back instead of the television. "We don't have to get cookies. It's like a dozen at a time and it's ridiculous, because they're huge."

She tips her head. "Do you mind if I go wash up? And wash my feet?"

Thomas Dane

"We can get them," he's all insistent on cookies now, as if this might prove that he's not all stilted and dull. "You can bring a bunch home if we don't finish them. Which we won't.

"Go ahead," he nods her toward his bedroom, then realizes he's being an awful host and gets up off the couch to show her the way. "Bathroom's this way," he says over his shoulder, leading her into his bedroom with its nice modern furniture and its barely-lived-in atmosphere. His bed is large and neat. There's a small desk in here with an all-in-one computer on it. Also, the promised balcony.

"Do you want to shower?" He turns on the bathroom light: granite counters, glass and tile in the tub/shower. "I'll find you a towel."

eileen

"Let's wait until like, one in the morning," she says, grinning. "They'll taste better."

She has not sat down since they came in. She only kneels now. Dane nods her in a direction, and she looks over her shoulder curiously. But oh: he's not such a bad host. Or maybe he just doesn't want her rooting around in his bathroom. Eileen slides her legs back and puts her feet to the carpet, standing up as he does and following him.

Everywhere they go she looks and looks and looks. She looks at his bedroom and his bed and the balcony and her heart does a little backwards somersault. He asks her if she wants to shower when he flicks the light on in his bathroom and it does it three more times. She exhales a breath, slightly vibratory, and then smiles, her cheeks pinking slighlty. "That's okay," she says.

There's a sight of the tip of her tongue when she licks her lips. "Wanna pick a movie or something to watch while we wait for food? And eat? Something you haven't seen. I don't talk during movies! So you won't have to worry."

Thomas Dane

"I like it when you talk," Dane says simply. "I don't mind if you talk during the movie. I'll go pick something out."

The bathroom isn't large. They shuffle around each other so she can get in to wash her face, wash her feet. Her feet, he thinks bemusedly, as though she were some pilgrim from the old testament. He leaves his bedroom door open, the lights of the living room a faint square on the ground.

--

When she comes back out, he's on the couch again. The TV is on, and he's put on -- it looks like Lincoln. Of course he'd pick a movie like this. He looks up as she approaches, smiling a little. "Hey," he says. "Food's coming in about twenty minutes. And I put in an order for cookies at one."

eileen

"Okay," she says, smiling like that, soft and hopeful, as he skirts by her. She mostly-closes the bathroom door and then all-the-way closes it, resting her brow against it for a moment and exhaling. Her entire body feels like it aches suddenly. She thinks of touching herself, certain that if she does she'll come in a moment, come as soon as her fingertips slide over her skin, until her skin and the universe meld together and she holds entire galaxies inside of her, and there is no edge.

She breathes in and exhales a second time, and she uses the toilet. She washes her hands and then she hops up on the counter, feet in the sink, washing her soles and between her toes. She dries them on a towel, hopping back down, and then swishes hot water in her mouth a bit. She reaches up and undoes the bun in her hair, finger-combing that long thick hair into its long thick waves.

For a moment, she thinks about taking off her shirt. Just the top one. Because the tank top underneath skims her body and hugs her breasts and she knows it would be too much so she leaves that draping, hanging pillowcase on, smiling a little before she turns off the light and slips out of the bathroom. She wants to throw herself on his bed and muss it up and roll herself into the blankets but she doesn't do that, either. She walks out to the living room again, her hair down being the most visible difference, and then crawls onto the couch beside him, right beside him, curling up against his side and resting her head on his shoulder like that's what he's made for.

"That's like two hours from now," she muses thoughtfully, and the 'like' is ridiculous: right as she's saying that, the clock behind her is flicking from 10:59 to 11:00.

Thomas Dane

Maybe she expects him to stiffen at her head on his shoulder. God, he wouldn't blame her if she did expect that: he's acted like some sort of repressed monk every other time she's come close to him. He doesn't stiffen, though. He watches her as she comes closer, her hair down, her feet probably still a little damp from being washed. He can't get over that: washing her feet. He doesn't know why it charms him so.

She curls up on the couch next to him. And he opens his arm, and she lays her head on his shoulder, and he folds his arm around her and

it's all very natural. Very nice.

"It's exactly two hours from now," he corrects her gently, smiling. "I thought you were a time-mage." And he clicks play on the movie, reaching back behind his head to turn off the last light in the room. It's dark, then, nothing but the flicker of the television's glow and the distant downtown lights.

eileen

"I'm an everything," she says blissfully, sinking into the comfort of Dane not-stiffening, not-flinching but just accepting her as though this is the most natural place she could rest her head, which it totally is. She

is asleep in eleven minutes. Not because she finds the movie slow or boring and not because she's even particularly tired but because she starts thinking about being wrapped up in his arm at the cabin and how long it's been and how well she slept after days in the sun, in the water, after the fire and s'mores and fish and how glorious she felt when he leaned over her, kissing her and her body, fingering her to make her feel good, to make her arch, how warm he was and how settled she felt. The thoughts sink her down with them into that heavy, languid comfort that the darkness only seems to encourage, and like casting a spell on herself, she tries to recapture it by falling asleep against his side.

Of course she wakes when the intercom buzzes or his phone goes off or someone knocks, whatever happens. He has to go let the delivery person hand over the enormous brown bag of food, stapled at the top with a receipt, and Eileen yawns and stirs and blinks her eyes many many times, rubbing them out and then she's

Eileen again, gleeful at the Thai iced tea and the curry potato puff. She completely interrupts the movie at one point because the heat of her food makes her get up and do a strange little dance, but then she just eats more, because it's very very good. She eats almost all of it, drains that iced tea, then some water, then asks for and thanks him for a few bites of his shrimp and his duck. It's shortly after midnight and they are done eating -- though they perhaps have not eaten everything -- when Eileen, once again curled up to his side, twists her head up to look at him and whispers:

"Is this boring?"

Thomas Dane

Dane is well aware when Eileen drops off into sleep. Her breathing evens out; her head grows heavy on his shoulder. He smiles to himself. He doesn't wake her.

Not until -- twenty minutes later or so -- his doorbell rings. Then he gets up, easing her off his shoulder ever-so-gently. She hears him going to the door, hears him thanking the delivery man. Hears him coming back with their food, undoing the stapled-shut bag, opening it to take out all the many things they ordered.

They eats. Eileen ordered something ridiculously hot, and she does a ridiculous little dance because of it. Dane just looks up at her with a faint little smirk, clearly biting his tongue on a serves you right or similar. For his part, his curry is mild and his duck is tangy-sweet. He certainly doesn't need to get up and dance until his tongue stopped stinging.

Eventually they've had their fill. Dane has some of his dinner left, and Eileen is curled against his side again, and the movie is playingplayingplaying and Lincoln is freeing the slaves, debating the Senate --

is this boring? Eileen wants to know. Dane starts awake because: yes, he was also asleep. "Hm?" A hand rises, wipes at his face, his eyes. "Is what boring? The movie? I don't know. I fell asleep. So ... maybe that's a yes." And he yawns.

eileen

If she had realized he was asleep, and not just still and settled and warm and perfect and absolutely everything she thinks she could possibly want in that moment, Eileen would not have woken him. As it is, she does wake him and she doesn't regret it at all. She smiles at him and yawns, too, because -- did you know this? -- they are contagious.

"Kiss me instead," she whispers.

Thomas Dane

Darkness or sleep or the lateness of the hour has lowered his guard. Or maybe it's just that he wants to, and so he does:

does as she asks, though not immediately. There is a small pause. Lights from the flatscreen glow off the side of his face, shift the shadows beneath his brow, lateral to his nose. He takes a small sip of breath, and then -- leans in, closes his eyes. His lips touch hers very, very softly indeed. It's the most tender, gentle kiss one can imagine, as quiet and sacred as a psalm.

eileen

By now she has come to expect that he will hesitate, achingly, pull back, say her name with a trio of dots after it, followed by a sigh. But then: she half-expected he would tense up and withdraw from her when she curled up beside him. She never seems to stop seeking that closeness with him, even when time after time it seems he is rejecting it. Maybe she just knows that he wants it, too, or that he needs her to keep trying even while he struggles, or that he does not mean it as rejection. Or she can't help herself.

Or doesn't try to help herself.

He doesn't hesitate, or pull back. He kisses her, and she breathes in as he does so, because the fact of his kissing her alone is enough to make her breathing hitch. But god: the way he kisses her, the way he has kissed her some small handful of times. She loves the way he kisses her, and it makes a soft shiver go through her even before she starts kissing him back, moving her lips under his, parting them gently in invitation.

Thomas Dane

Oh, but that's an invitation he doesn't --

cannot

-- take. She feels it then: that hesitation she has come to expect. That pause, that pulling back. It's in a stilling of his lips, the faintest quiver there. It's in his hands coming to her face, cupping her jaw ever so gently as his mouth parts from hers.

Not his brow, though. That remains as it is, skin to skin. His eyes are closed. He breathes slowly, steadying himself for a moment. "Eileen," he whispers, and it is regret, it is ache, it is want, it is apology. "Eileen."

A moment goes by. Another. With an inhale he draws back a little. Enough that he can see her by the light of that flickering television screen. Lincoln speaking to the Senate. Lincoln speaking to his wife. Lincoln and his sons, Daniel Day-Lewis's craggy face so inhabiting his character that one almost forgets the actor. Neither Dane nor Eileen are paying any attention, though.

"I like you so much," he whispers. "And I wish I could meet you where you are right now. But... I can't. Not yet."

eileen

It's hard not to think of it in terms of what she could do differently to make him do something differently. If she didn't part her lips, if she didn't let her hair down, if she could make herself stop looking at him the way he does, maybe he would... something. Be okay. Maybe he wouldn't pull away.

She's accepting it though, even as he's stilling his lips. She gently closes her own to kiss him again, and that is when his hands come to her face, touch her skin, making a shiver of tenderness and want go down through her. God, she wants him so badly. She loves him, quite dearly and uncomplicatedly. He doesn't think he can please anyone, make her happy, make anyone happy, even himself; he makes her so happy, though. It's everything she can do not to slide herself onto his lap, wrap him in her arms, try to make him feel as good as he makes her feel.

As he says her name, her eyes flicker open, catching light from the television screen and reflecting the pictures back in her irises. Her lips are parted, her expression waiting.

Does it hurt that she doesn't look surprised?

Perhaps a little confused. Saddened. A little wounded. "Where am I?" she asks him, matching him whisper for whisper.

Thomas Dane

The smile that touches his face is sad. They are still so close. He hasn't drawn away; he hasn't locked up in himself. Shut down. Reeled back.

Maybe that's something.

"Somewhere bright." They're both whispering still. "Somewhere beautiful and full of love. Sometimes I think even your sorrow is bright, Eileen. And that's the opposite of where I am right now. Where I've been for so long that I think until I met you, I forgot what it was like to not be here.

"I don't want to be here forever." His throat moves; he swallows. There's a glimmer in his eyes, a shine that he blinks away as he -- for the first time -- looks away. Just for a moment. Then those intense dark eyes of his are back on hers. "But I'm not ready to come out yet. I don't know ... how to take that first step."

eileen

There's no way she can understand. The relationships she's had in her life are nothing like what he had with his wife, whose name he doesn't -- or can't -- say. She has never had a child, only to lose that child. Eileen is not a stranger to sorrow, but the things that have been cut and torn and burnt hollow in Dane are still living, rooted, and vibrant in her chest, in her mind, in everything she touches. There's no way she can understand.

At least she knows it.

She looks so sad, but then: nothing she feels, nothing she experiences, is ever very hidden. She looks sad, and when he says he doesn't want to be where he is forever, she remembers him saying I wish I wasn't like this. He can't know it, but the sadness in her eyes isn't, right now, even for her own benefit.

Eileen moves up on her knees and wraps her arms around his shoulders. She puts her face against his jaw, closing her eyes, while Lincoln talks to people. For several long seconds, she just holds him, and only after that long while, she murmurs:

"I think you're already taking it." She sniffs, and draws back gently, her hands resting on his shoulders. "There's just a lot coming after."

Thomas Dane

This embrace, he gives himself over to without reservation. He returns without hesitation. His arms slide around her, close tight. He's lean and wiry against her body, his immense strength leashed in mind and will rather than muscle and bone; those hands of his that pulled glimmering stars from the depths of his own despair spreading over her back.

When she draws back, her hands rest on his shoulders. It feels a little like a blessing, he thinks. He smiles that aching smile of his again. "Do you think so?" he echoes, gently teasing; then it subsides. He looks at her. "Yeah," he agrees. "Maybe I am."

A small pause. He shifts, he settles his back against the couch; stares unseeingly at the television, his thoughts turned inward. "I don't expect you to stay with me and wait," he says quietly. "I'd understand if you didn't want to see me anymore." There might be more to say, but the rest is selfish. He keeps it to himself.

eileen

The truth is that the oft-denigrated, sometimes too-accepting, usually too-much-of-everything-and-that's-the-point Cult of Ecstasy has always been a gathering of shamans. They are the other side of the same Wheel that the Euthanatoi turn. They are not usually healers of the body, as the Verbena and some Choiristers, but some of their greatest rotes have the ability to unfold time while reaching into the heart and show someone the outcome of their actions, the consequences tomorrow, next week, a year from now, ten years, a lifetime. They can unfurl it the other way and show themselves and others how things came to be as they are, and when you can look at someone as a child and know their heart then, hold that truth in your mind simultaneous with the truth as it is now and the truth as it could be in the future,

one might understand why they are so slow to judge.

Of course it feels like a blessing, when she holds him, lays her hands on him, and tells him that the road is long, but he is already on it. And what a selfless, holy blessing it is: because his arms around her make her want to weep, make her want to dissolve, make her want to bless him a thousand other ways. She doesn't. She gives, because he needs, and because he needs more than she does. And so shall the seer recount their deeds.

Those hands slide gently, slowly away from him, even as her chest feels as though it's caving inward. Her brows tug together, and her voice is quiet:

"I don't think I should."

Thomas Dane

As expected, as wise, as practical as that is -- it makes something in Dane crumple on itself, too. A fundamental truth: it is hard to let go of what you like. What you adore. What makes you hurt less. What makes you remember what it's like to stand in the light again. He winces, and then he tamps it down. Her hands leave his shoulders. His palms graze her forearms for a moment, and then he

lets her go.

Just a couple of nods, first. It's all he trusts himself with. And a little later: another nod, slower. "I think maybe you're right. I think anything else would be selfish of me, and self-sacrificing of you." A small pause. "I'll look for you, though, if you'll let me. After Wentworth. After ... all of it. If and when I make it out to where you are."

eileen

It's when he's nodding that Eileen can't bear it. She says, aching but rushing: "For a while. I --"

And there are tears in her eyes, of course there are, but she smiles anyway, which makes the tears something beautiful and miraculous, or maybe the smile is. She says it quietly, for the first time and just in case and not to argue with him or convince him otherwise but because it's true and he should know it especially if she's going to go curl up in her cove and her job for a few months and just cry every time she thinks of him:

"I love you."

The tears well up as though from a spring before pouring out of her on those raw, tender little words, drip-rolling down her cheeks while her throat closes up.

Thomas Dane

So he doesn't get past those first couple nods. Those uncertain ones where he's at a loss with himself, unable to quite look her in the eye, unable to figure out where or why or when or how everything might be able to come back together again, be okay again.

She interrupts him, though. The words rush out of her, bring his eyes back to her, light those eyes up with something that aches to see because it's not fury and it's not wrath and it's not bitterness and it's not grief. It's not even guilt. It's

hope,

and an aching sort of joy, and

by the time she says what she says the corner of his mouth is turning ruefully up. He reaches out to her, wipes those tears from her cheeks as gently as he kissed her a moment ago. Wants to pull her to him. Fold her in his arms. Hold her to his heart. Wants to -- doesn't. He doesn't think he has the right, or the ability. Not right now. Not yet.

"And I think I love you, Eileen," he says softly. "I just have to remember how. And I have to ... forgive, forget, let go of everything else."

eileen

Dane does see the truth for what it is, just then: he doesn't have the right to hold her right now. To pull her close and give her comfort, to make her feel loved and wanted and close to him. Not when with the other hand he is pushing her away, no matter how gently he's trying to do it. It would be a sort of lie, to offer her that while withholding what she really needs from him. A cruel joke, a clumsy twist of a knife.

There's hope and joy in his eyes, but only tears in hers right now. She turns her face from his hand brushing over her cheek, pulling in a shaky, sharply pitched breath because she is trying so hard not to sob; her head shakes a little, her eyes closing when he tells her

what he does.

"I have to go," she says, her voice strained from sadness, her lithe little body unfolding from the couch. Her bag is on the other end; she's picking it up as she stands, wiping her cheeks with the blade of her hand, sniffing. Her feet are still bare because her flipflops are still forgotten in his car downstairs. "Please don't... offer to drive me or walk me out or... or call me or text me or anything, okay?"

Eileen isn't looking at him, not til those last two syllables. He's seen her cry from beauty and joy and empathy but not like this, not just pain, and it's horrible. Her hands go out in front of her, low by her hips, pushing at the air a little. "Just leave me alone for a while."

Which isn't angry. But isn't a question. Or a request, despite the pleading note underlining the words. She thinks she should sit calmly down and hold his hand and they should talk and she should tell him that she forgives him -- of course she forgives him -- and that eventually it will be okay and maybe later they can be friends, all that, but right now she can't stop crying, and she can't do anything but nod, and walk away like running away, going to her suitcase by the door.

Thomas Dane

When she stands, so does he. It's some reflex of courtesy, or maybe something more like instinct: to stand because someone you care deeply for has stood; to move with them because they

are leaving.

He doesn't follow her, though. Not when she's holding her hands out, warding him off. He stays where he is, their food on the coffee table, the television lit on the wall. He makes a small, unhappy gesture of his hand. "Okay," he says, very quiet. "Okay, Eileen."

She grabs her suitcase. She was right to tell him not to offer to drive her, see her downstairs, walk her to the door, any of that. He wants to. He wishes they could have gone to the playground. Sat on the balcony. Been together, been -- friends. There's the catch, of course: right now, she wants him, she wants to be more than friends, and he

just

can't.

So he watches her go, instead. Watches her walk away like running away, grabbing her colorful little suitcase. He wonders what she's going to do about her feet. "There are flipflops -- " he says, making a gesture at the doorside closet, but: he doesn't follow, he doesn't show her, he doesn't even stop her if she just leaves.

He hurts, though. Which he supposes is fair: he's hurt her, too, and he knows it.

eileen

There's nothing else he can say -- maybe nothing else she could bear to hear, nothing that would be fair of him to say. Don't go, perhaps, implying that he wants her to stay, they can be here together, when Here isn't even really the same place for them. Just a little longer, maybe, the playground or the balcony or back to her place to sleep together One Last Time, until just a little longer is just a little longer and longer and longer and somewhere down the line she's not just hurting or wounded but turned inside out. He could ask her when she'll see him again or when he can contact her or if she thinks Maybe One Day, but they're questions she can't answer and he does not need answered right this second anyway.

The handle of her suitcase telescopes upward when she grabs it. Now's the time for the dramatic gesture, on either of their parts: to rush together and embrace, to kiss, to promise to try, to apologize, to do a whole lot of very stupid shit.

Eileen sniffs, and opens his door and rolls her suitcase out with her, letting it close behind her. Dimly he can hear the soft thump of the wheels outside, but down the hall the sound retreats from him and he doesn't hear the ding of the elevator. Not until much later, when someone comes by with his cookie delivery.

--

Wild, ecstatic thing that she is, Eileen still isn't going to go back home barefoot at like... midnight-something. She has an app and she summons a taxi from her phone in the lobby, tears still streaming down her face. Whoever is downstairs, even a passerby neighbor, offers her some tissues and asks if she's okay -- she has no shoes, this little hipster -- and Eileen says no, but she's going to go home and she will be later on, of course until she thinks about cookies or someone talks about stars or asks her if she'd like to try the fish and then she's going to erupt into sobs all over again.

The person in the lobby is very confused when she tells them this, and hands her the rest of the little packet of tissues, patting her shoulder and moving on as she murmurs a thank-you and blows her nose. The cab arrives and she asks if she can sit in the front, and the driver is from Haiti and tells her, after a bit of her story, that this is a very sad thing, that man is a fool, he is not going to find a prettier girl, but she will have many boyfriends, yes? Eileen just starts sobbing again, and the driver uncomfortably drives her the rest of the way home, helps her get her suitcase out of the trunk, watches her until she gets to the door because something in him makes him want to protect her.

Eileen loves her apartment, and the mere sight of it when she goes inside makes her break down. She ends up crying herself to sleep in her clothes, sobbing into an ever-wetter spot on her pillow until she feels so worn out, so wrung out, that she can't keep it up anymore. Her insides hurt. Her head throbs. And in the morning, she feels hungover, which is just dehydration, which actually can happen from enough crying. She spends the rest of the day in bed. She checks her mail. She does some laundry. She sits at the edge of her couch with her legs tucked up and her arms around herself and just stares at one of her little air plants for a very, very long time.

--

At the chantry, Dane works with other mages. He sees her once, two or three weeks later and only through an upstairs window, sitting out in the courtyard garden with Charlie. She's not crying. She's just sitting and talking. She even smiles. But she's not there when he gets downstairs again.

If he asks -- though it's unlikely he will -- it sounds like Eileen is assisting mages who do research more than field work. She spends a great deal of time with Roman, the Cultist Master at the chantry. There is a long stretch during midsummer when both of them are gone.

It's nearly October when he hears from her again. Directly. It's a text message, and it's just

hey

followed by a second message, which is just

do you want to go to the zoo?

Thomas Dane

Left behind in that small, well-appointed condominium of his, it's minutes on end before Dane stops listening for -- he doesn't know what. For the elevator to ding. For her footsteps to come back. For her knuckles on the door, any number of impossible things.

None of them come. Eventually, he turns the television off. Turns out the lights. He is in bed, fitfully asleep, when the cookies come. Bleary-eyed at the door, rumpled, for a moment he can't remember why they're here.

Then he remembers, and it hits him like a punch in the gut.

--

He doesn't attempt to contact her. He knows better than that. Months go by, and he works with other mages. He is assigned to this job and that, this partner and that. He is sent here and sent there, a glorified errand boy, a human tac-nuke. Once, coming out of the office of his Order's Master, he sees Eileen downstairs in the garden. His little paradox plant has grown large and strong. Charlie has grown stronger too, even though sometimes he still sits in a corner listening to sounds no on else can hear; even though sometimes at night he still screams in terror until someone comes for him.

Healing takes a long time. Dane knows that better than anyone. He passes on from the window, and when he goes downstairs some ten or twenty minutes later Eileen is gone,

like a fairy,

like she was never there at all. So he talks to Charlie a little while instead.

--

In late summer he leaves Chicago for a while. A job takes him to the eastern seaboard, and when it's done he doesn't come back immediately. He spends a little time, takes a little time for himself. Sees some people. Visits some places. Ties up some ends that have lain loose too long. He's not sure it helps, but all the books and all the movies say it will. So he goes on faith, because really, he doesn't have a lot else to go on. At the very least, it doesn't seem to hurt. Not very badly, and not anymore.

It's late September by the time he comes back, and the weather is turning cool. He asks about Eileen. He declines her contact information when it's offered.

--

It is almost October when his phone chimes. It is a text message, and it is not from the Chantry. The name makes his heart do a little flop. It is just one word.

He's trying to think of a response when a second text comes through. And this one,

this one makes him smile.

I'd love to.

--

They meet in front of the lions. He is wearing a light leather blazer and his hands are in this pockets. His shoulders are a little stooped. His hair is short and his eyes are dark and his body is lean and his nose is a little overlarge; in all, it gives him a faintly hawkish air.

He smiles when he sees her. She is eating cotton candy. They come together, and he doesn't hold her hand, and if they hug it's a little awkward. But the day is bright overhead and the lake is blue in the distance, and the Lincoln Park Zoo is full of children and their families.

Let's go see the polar bears, he suggests,

and strolling side by side, taking the time to enjoy the walk and the afternoon and the company, they do just that.

eileen

It's the first time he's seen her in cooler weather. Her tights are thick enough to count as leggings and her boots go halfway up her calves, wrapped and wrapped and wrapped in leather straps. She's bundled in a flannel so large it's like a dress, is a dress, belted and everything, and a denim jacket over that only it's got a soft warm lining and a hood so it's sort of like a hoodie + denim but it's tricking you. Her hair is still very long and her eyes are still so beautiful and her mouth goes so easily into smiles.

When they hug, Dane is awkward. Eileen is just hugging him, as she has ever hugged him, and then she draws away but doesn't try to hold his hand. She doesn't finish the cotton candy but tosses the cone, hands in her pockets. They go to see the polar bears, and they talk about how they've been.

His trip to the eastern seaboard. Her trip back in time: yup. They talk about Charlie. They end up going to get some soup at a cafe, on a whim because it's cool outside and they're both getting hungry. And it feels okay. There are stiff moments, moments when he can feel her in retreat from him, moments when he can tell he's too close, it's too close.

Would be nice to say that afterward they start spending lots of time together, but they don't. Not yet. But after that first time, when he asks if they can hang out again, Eileen smiles. She nods.

I'd like that.

back to chicago.

eileen

Eileen slept deeply the first night, and seemed to half-smile even while unconscious, especially while Dane's arm sneakily snaked around her middle and stayed there. When she woke up he was making breakfast and they were playing, playful, or at least she was and he was tolerating it and occasionally going along with it.

This second morning out at the little cabin on the little lake in the middle of nowhere, Eileen wakes up from a dead sleep and yawns before anything else. She doesn't even open her eyes. Her pillow is warm and breathing steadily and holding her close. Because of that pillow, some of her first thoughts are memories. Some others are fantasies. What did happen and didn't happen mingle together for awhile and that's okay. There's some pale blue fire swirling around his fingers.

God. He was kissing her, licking her breast, muttering sweet filthy nothings in her ear and fucking her with his hand, teasing her clit and stroking into her pussy, going at her til he made her come. Thomas was. Thomas who always looked away if she were stripped down, or who got all uncomfortable when she fed him a bite of bacon from her fingertips, who seems so gently, openly happy with her sometimes that it's really sort of bewildering when he suddenly gets all wonky and onoz and goes behind the shed to self-flagellate and possibly chant like some sort of self-loathing monk.

Thomas, suckling so tenderly on her nipple, working her panties down her legs, groaning oh god at his hand's discovery of how wet she'd become.

Eileen, smiling and wondering to herself, fights off a grin and a blush to her cheeks at the thought. She snuggles down closer and more firmly to Thomas's side, making a light and happy mmm sound as her arm wraps around his torso. If she were worried about being fair, she'd probably get up and make him breakfast and coffee and start packing up the cabin and that way they could get back to Chicago at a semi-reasonable hour, but Eileen cares more about joy than justice. She's pretty sure that the chances of Thomas being weird and possibly even unhappy and all kinds of other things today are greater than the chances that he'll be happy and lazy and horny upon waking, more eager to roll her over and fuck her than get going, asking her when he can see her again, sleep with her again, how about tomorrow, tonight, how about now. And that will... well. She'll deal with whatever.

But chances are, she thinks, he won't begrudge her enjoying these few waking moments of bliss. So she snuggles. Makes what are referred to in common circles as 'happy noises'. Wakes him up, most likely, by alerting him to the fact that he still has a naked twentysomething wrapped around his body.

Dane

Dane's reaction upon awakening, in fact, is neither panic nor happy-lazy-horniness but simply ... a slow-stirring thoughtfulness. He awakens by degrees. Grows alert by degrees. At some point he notices he's mostly naked. At some point he notices he's not alone. At some point he notices the other body in bed with him is naked, is twentysomething, is female, and has a small mole on her clavicle. At some point he puts it all together and comes up with the solution to that equation:

Eileen.

And then he remembers those dizzy moments in the darkness. That boldness he didn't know he still had in him. He remembers the sounds she made, the way her body moved, flowed like ocean waves. He remembers how she clung to him when he tipped her over that edge

and how her eyes glimmered in the pale firelight he conjured, after.

Dane's eyes open. Sunlight drenches the tiny cabin. His arm is around Eileen, and he leaves it there. He breathes quietly. He thinks about what this means, whether this means anything at all. She's the first woman he's touched for so long.

His voice is fuzzed with sleep: "Does this ... change anything?"

eileen

She can feel him waking. It's something everyone has in common, no matter if they wake from a nightmare or if it's peaceful, no matter if it's quick or slow. It's in the breath. There's a reason yogis focus so much on that. There's a reason why it's such a part of meditation, such a part of music. Something changes in Dane's breathing, subtle and deep and then external, audible, tangible in the way his chest moves.

Eileen aches with tenderness for it, and her arm over him remains where it is, surprisingly strong and firm and heavy for someone so light, someone whose feet barely seem to touch the ground at times for pure joy. She is also incredibly warm, the two of them slightly sweaty under the blankets despite the chill of the morning air. They slept so close. Are so close, right now. That doesn't make her ache, at all.

After a time, he asks a totally understandable and yet unimaginable question. It's a very big one wrapped in a tiny package. It is also sort of endearing, in how stupendously stupid it is.

"Of course," Eileen says quietly, and because they're her first words on this new day there's a smoky rasp beneath the brightness of her voice, a fog resting low on the dewy ground before sunlight blazes it away. She doesn't move, not even to prop herself up and look at him. Who needs to look?

At least she's honest. But also philosophical: "Everything is always changing." Her hand moves on his skin, an echo of the way she stroked his back, his sides, and his arms while they were kissing. While her legs were tucked around his waist, bare chests together. Just an echo. "But we decide how we change with it."

Dane

The last time Dane lay here like this, it was his wife beside him. And even that was years and years ago. Toward the end, with the Ascension War turning dark, with hope fading -- toward the end she didn't come out here much at all. She didn't like it anymore, and besides, she was always busy, always involved with something or other, she didn't have time for this sort of thing. Dane still came out here sometimes. Usually alone. Once he brought his daughter. He closes his eyes; sometimes he has trouble remembering what she looked like. She was so small...

Dane opens his eyes again. He wonders if this counts as a sort of betrayal. He's still a married man. He doesn't know where his wedding ring is, either. He takes a breath, his chest rising against the warm weight of Eileen's arm. She is so warm. He can't remember if he's ever felt skin so warm; a body so inviting, so effortlessly passionate. Her sensuality is like a fire, something wild and natural and uncontained and unashamed. He thinks of the way she sighed, taking hold of his car, and wonders if that was when he first began to want her.

"I'm afraid," he says softly. And he stirs, shifting his head a little, looking -- if not quite at her face, then at least at what he can see of her. Her arm. Her shoulder. Her body beneath the comforters. "I'm afraid I'll hurt you, or you'll hurt me, or someone will hurt both of us because of our involvement with each other."

eileen

It never crossed Eileen's mind that there was a possibility -- however dim -- that Dane would wake up and mistake her for someone else, some ancient memory of this place, these scents, this bed. She never considered the chance, because she has never seen him before in that instant before he is completely awake. She knows now that, at least this morning, he was quiet. It was a slow, thoughtful thing.

They talk about him like he's some kind of loose cannon. He sneers, he looks down on non-Hermetics, all of that stuff. He's violent. But there's so much else going on. And he wakes quietly. He wakes thoughtfully.

Eileen tips her head on his arm. She moves down a bit, still holding his body, and now she can see his jaw, his cheekbone, his eyes. He can sort of see hers, though mostly the slope of her forehead, the curve of her ear, the corner of her eye. A bit of nose. He can feel her cheek move against his side when she speaks. They have not moved away from each other. She knows that now, too. But this is where she differs: she sees, senses, experiences, but no meaning is wondered over or assigned. It just is.

He's afraid, and that Just Is, too. And the first thing he's afraid of speaks volumes about his self-loathing, however deep or shallow that may be. And the fear that she might hurt him is, while not necessarily greater, more immediate than the fear that something or someone will hurt them both.

"That's okay," she tells him, first. That's what she said to him last night, looking up at him after that torrent of desire and maybe even need that overtook him before he shied from it, recoiled from it because he was plummeting over a cliffside without so much as glancing below. Terrifying.

"It is good to be afraid," she says quiet, like a recitation. "It is folly to bow to terror." The movement of her mouth changes; she is sleeping on his left side, and she kisses the bumps of his ribs that she can just barely make out beneath his skin. It is okay. All of it is okay.

Eileen is quiet for a few moments, then: "We can talk now," she tells him gently, "or we can take a little time. Back in Chicago, or in a few days, or a week, or so on. It's also okay if you want some time. And nothing will happen that we don't both... come to, of our own free will." She slowly lifts her head, looking at him fully for the first time since waking. "There might be pain. But that's okay, too." Her voice is so quiet, so steady and still. Her hand moves to his face, his hair, stroking through it where it is short-shorn around his ears, silky bristles against her fingertips. "Good things can come out of pain, too."

Dane

Dane laughs. It's soundless; it's more a gasp, a huff of breath, than anything else.

"Sometimes I wish you'd teach me how to be so ... forgiving of whatever it is life throws at you. Everything rolls off you, like water on a duck. Even anger doesn't last. Nothing seems better or worse, more or less important, than anything else. But that scares me, too." He's quiet a moment longer, wary of what he's about to say. Unable, ultimately, to resist saying it:

"It makes me wonder if that's how you feel about what's happening between us, either. Not better or worse than anything else. Not more or less important."

eileen

He laughs; she smiles. His laughs are like rasps. He doesn't guffaw or bellow or even chuckle. It's like the sound is trying to escape from him, like there's so much of a struggle in him to feel the thing itself to begin with that by the time it hits air it's weakened by the struggle and the journey. It doesn't make her pity him; it just makes her want to encourage him. Cheer him on. You can do it, you can do it. You can laugh. There now, didn't that feel good?

In a way, he compliments her -- or at least she feels complimented. The words 'teach me' don't pass from most magi's lips to Eileen's ears very often, particularly not from Adepts and certainly not from Hermetics. What praise, to be asked to be a teacher. What honor. She likes that he calls it forgiving, because that is very much what it is. It isn't the same as 'accepting'.

Eileen is gearing up to tell him that sometimes you just gotta fake it til ya make it, and that a great deal of the time she is taking a deep breath and biting her tongue and reminding herself of great, deep truths to keep herself where she is, that there has to be some kind of even keel in order for her to ascend and descend on the waves and currents of passion. It's hard to be what she is, do what she does, live the way she lives. If it were easy, well, everyone would do it.

But she never says any of that because Dane admits, wary of it, that he's not sure if, essentially, he's special. If this matters. Because for him this is such a great risk, such a great chance for pain he can scarcely imagine enduring again. Would he make it this time? Would he come through? What would even be left of him, then?

This is what Eileen thinks of. This is what she sees and hears. So she wants to suddenly lean over and kiss him! Kiss him like last night, drown him with it, burn such thoughts and fears out of his mind. Surprise!

Of course that's rather dramatic. And not really all that useful. Or considerate. Or... dealing with the problem. It looks like a running-toward but she knows it's a running-away. So she stays where she is, steady as a beating drum, beating heart, waves in between tides rhythmically moving over the sand. In and out, as reliable as breath.

"I'm afraid, too," she confesses, and it seems like a rare thing for her, to be afraid -- and admit it. "I'm scared that you might want things from me that... I don't know yet if I want them or just you, and if I want them...or you... that maybe I'm not actually ready and it will get one or both of us hurt or hurt other people and I don't want to be something that hurts you."

The words are agitated, but Eileen still seems quiet, lazy from waking, untroubled...mostly. She leans over and nuzzles the side of his face, rubs her brow against his prickly jaw. "But I do know I haven't felt like this before," she says, much softer, almost a whisper. "I don't know if it's better or worse or what it means because it's new. But it is... different... than anything else. Very different."

Dane

It would insult Dane terribly if Eileen actually tried to encourage him like that. Prickly, proud Hermetic: he'd feel talked down to, patronized; he'd be angry.

But she doesn't encourage him like that. She does it more subtly. She doesn't laugh at his feelings, the few times he expresses them. She doesn't make him feel weakened or lessened by them. She allows him to have those feelings, and she encourages him, in truth, every time she smiles because he's made her smile. Every time she looks happy, or sad, or aching, or overcome, because of something he's said or done or otherwise expressed. Revealed.

Even so, she can feel a sort of drawing-away and drawing-in when she speaks of how she feels. The irony of that: one moment he says he's afraid she doesn't feel differently. The next he can't bear to hear her speak of her feelings because they're so raw, she wears them so openly, he can't imagine how or why or isn't she afraid someone will hurt her for it?

"I wish I had your courage," he says,

and saying it, sits up. The blankets slip down his body. He's a little more tanned today than he was yesterday, though not by much. He rubs his face for a moment, then turns to look at her over his shoulder.

"I'm going to go back to not talking and thinking about everything so much," he says. "I'm going to just try to ride this out and see where it goes ... if that's all right with you."

eileen

She bared quite a lot there. Showed a level of vulnerability that's deeper than lying naked in bed with him or letting him touch her, penetrate her, see her undone. It's pretty bad timing for him to curl back in on himself, metaphorically at least, and then sit up and kinda disentangle himself and say he's not going to think or talk about this, if that's quite all right with her.

Eileen feels a bit angry at him, because the truth is, she's quite hurt by it. Would have been a different thing if he'd not told her he isn't sure he's special, would have been different if he hadn't sort of indicated that he'd like to be told if he actually is special, and she feels betrayed. He was vulnerable. She told him the truth. He pulled away. He says he wishes he had her courage and she is upset, she thinks: you don't, you don't and it makes her sad and lonely that he doesn't.

Her arm doesn't resist him sitting up. She thinks for a moment about it, but she doesn't even come to a conclusion before it's too late to draw him back. She watches him, as he sits up and as he rubs his face and as his hands drop and as he looks back at her, down at her.

The blankets pulled away and bared her a bit but she doesn't turn or hold herself to cover up, hide her breasts. Her nipples are hard in the chill, though, even if it isn't cold enough to make her get goosebumps all over. Her hair is spread behind her and across one pillow, and her shirt is wedged between the mattress and headboard, panties... um... still missing. Reminders, all of it, everything, of last night.

She feels something strange and unpleasant. Realizes it's guardedness. Feels sickly, so she doesn't say anything with it. There's a lot she could say and she's trying, she really is, to come up with something to say. None of it feels right. She wonders, always wonders, how anyone can live like this, feeling like this all the time. It rots in her like a cancer. It sours the air and makes it taste foul.

Eileen finally finds something that feels right to say, and something that doesn't taste lousy on her tongue, and something that feels like it breaks that sickly, weak shell that grew over her like scales when hurt took hold. And she says it in a whisper, like a call more than a plea:

"Thomas..."

Dane

As the silence grew longer he'd looked away from her. He felt, with a keenness he was not prepared for, the wall that rose over her. He felt the unfairness of what he did, and he felt shame.

He cannot help but look back when she says his name, though. She is the only one he can easily remember who uses that name, and every time it draws him like a lodestone. He looks at her, his brow troubled, something sad and ashamed in his eyes. He takes a breath, lets it out,

and letting it out, sinks back to the bed beside her. He faces her this time, lying on his side. He puts his hand on her face and he puts his brow to hers, and without a word, with an infinite tenderness that most would not suspect him capable of, he kisses her.

eileen

She disarms him. Disarms everyone, it seems. Charlie, so panicked that he shut his body down as a final guard against further pain, warming suddenly to her touch, coming back to life because it was safe then, it was okay to come back, it was okay to be so damaged and broken and terrified. Eileen has had guns lowered in front of her. Knives dropped. Spells aimed for her, crackling on the fingertips and tonguetips of witches and magi and shamas, have been released into nothing as the will to harm has seemed, suddenly,

so empty.

She has some kind of a gift. Or a great deal of courage. A surprisingly strong will. She has something to her that makes even her own pain slip away from her, fall off of her, because she cannot bear to feel it embedded in her heart. Eileen is something special. Dane knows it. Everyone who meets her knows it, even if they never say it aloud or allow themselves to truly believe in it.

And yet, despite that courage he talked about, the gift, the what-ever-the-hell-it-is, it's so easy to hurt her. The way she was with the fish, killing them to prepare them for dinner. The way Wentworth used her, froze her, because she was the weakest target in the room. The way she looks at Dane when he looks at her, til something makes him turn away in... shame. The way she feels so sad, suddenly, because she made him feel bad.

They say compassion is when you feel as sorry for the man with the stick as you do for the dog he is beating.

Dane comes back to her. And that was the call, soft as it might have been: come back, come back. He returns, flowing with his breath, down to her side. There is that pain in her eyes still, only now it is less her own. She, too, is afraid of being hurt. She, too, is afraid of hurting him. They share those things.

He puts his hands on her face and she puts her hands on his shoulders, moving nearer. Their brows touch, and though he is not a mystic this does have meaning to and for Eileen. He finds her mouth coming towards his when he shifts to kiss her, already opening to his lips, as though she knew, or simply

as though she wanted.

It's very soft, and it is so gentle -- so tender -- that it leaves her raw, opened up and aching from the fear and the longing and the gratitude. She has to take a breath when it ends, a little ragged, as her brow sets against his once more. A shiver goes through her.

"Thank you," she whispers to him, one palm against the back of his neck. "I just... wanted you to know I'm not immune. To any of it."

Dane

Eileen is something special. Dane knows it. And on some level, some deep-seated, half-unconscious level, he fears this above all. Because if she weren't something special, she wouldn't matter so much. If she weren't something special, she couldn't hurt him, and he,

cold as it sounds,

wouldn't care so much if he hurt her. And if she weren't something special, then he wouldn't have to worry that he might begin to feel something for her that's as deep and soulcracking as what he felt before. For his wife. For his family. He wouldn't have to worry that this, too, may be some sort of betrayal.

There's so much guilt in him. Guilt and shame and fear that somehow, he's betrayed someone, everyone, who's mattered to him. He wishes he could just let it roll off his back. He wishes he could be immune to it -- except

she isn't, either. And he knows that, felt it when she looked at him like that; felt low and rotten and unfair.

"I know," he whispers back. "I'm sorry. I just ... I'm sorry."

eileen

Of course,

she just smiles. There's a sadness to it, the same strange sadness that has hung across this bed like a canopy since waking. But she smiles at him, touching him, so very close to him, and rubs her face across his, rough and animalistic and reveling in the scratchiness of his jawline against her smooth cheek, erupting in joy at the fact that they are, despite everything, mostly naked and tangled up in bed together on a crisp summer morning.

"You're more than sorrow," she says quietly, purringly, as she hugs him tightly against her -- um, still quite bare -- chest, her head resting on his shoulder, her arms wrapped around his arms and his neck. "You are, can't fool me."

So she squeezes him, and withdraws, and looks at his face. "And... just in case it's confusing because I got all hurt a second ago... it actually is okay if you just don't want to think or talk or worry much about it. This. Us. Whatever. Sometimes just taking things as you find them is the way to do it. And that might even be the best way for you to... unfold."

Her hands on his face. She kisses him. His mouth, then his face -- cheekbone, temple, brow -- in a flurry of soft adoration. "I forgive you. It was a small harm."

Dane

In spite of himself, he laughs. He turns his face and he drops a kiss to her body, nuzzling a moment, laying his head down again. "I am," he agrees softly, which is something he wasn't sure he'd ever say. "I'm more than sorrow."

She forgives him. They draw apart a little. She kisses him and he closes his eyes under that tender assault, her lips brushing all over his face. When she stops, he opens his eyes again, finds hers. His hand finds hers too. He holds her fingers gently, tenderly, as though by this alone he could keep her from slipping away again. Could keep her from sliding behind that terrible, clammy wall of guardedness again.

Anyone else would be a fool not to guard herself. But on Eileen, it feels as unnatural and sickly as oil on an otter.

"Thank you," he says. It's almost grave; almost formal. But then the corner of his mouth turns up again, softens the edges of those words. They are such different people, tending toward such opposites. It's a small miracle, he thinks, that he finds himself here at all.

"We should eat," he adds after a little while, "and then pack the car. You can drive the first leg if you want. And maybe when we get back to Chicago you can invite me up for coffee again sometime."

eileen

Eileen never dwells long in sorrow. Eventually is does slip off of her, just as he said, even if she isn't immune. It just never quite gains a foothold, clings to her, stays. She chooses this instead, and 'this' involves holding him, playing with him, kissing him, smiling with him and eliciting a small laugh from his mouth, a kiss from his lips.

They are as close as lovers, he thought the first night here. It's still hard to say if they're lovers or not, but that closeness won't seem to be denied.

She nips at him tenderly, small white teeth at his lower lip before she draws back, finally, from all her joyful ministrations. She smiles warmly at him, her eyes twinkling a bit, though this is so the norm for her that it would be more remarkable to see the light and color drain out of them than appear.

"Maybe," she muses, to his shoulds and his cans. She doesn't elaborate, speculate, extrapolate on any of them. She has her own ideas of what they should do, and what he can do, if he wants, and what he can maybe do again sometime. At the moment it's terribly tempting to stay right there, tempting him terribly all over again. Makes it hard to move to go do things like eat and pack and drive.

Must be why she's running her hands over him, lightly, though at the moment it's just his shoulders and his arms. Distracting, all this nudity and near-nudity. Eileen presses her lips together, smiling at him, then bursts into a grin, laughing at herself, at her own desire, at how obvious she is, at how wonderful it is to be so obvious about such a wonderful, enjoyable thing.

"I'll cook this time," she tells him, and kisses him, "if you find my panties."

Dane

Dane, sadly, is not nearly so open this morning. Not that he was particularly open last night, either -- but at least he was bolder, he wanted, he dared.

Now, he accepts the tiny kisses she strew all over his face. He returns that soft little kiss of hers, but when her hands start to wander, when she starts to touch him, she can feel him tensing a little. It's not revulsion. It's not that at all. It's a strange sort of worry, though, and an odd brand of self-consciousness, as though being able to see by day means he can also be seen, and if he's seen then, then...

he isn't sure what, really.

Eileen stops, though. And he's grateful to her for it. He relaxes as she bursts into a grin. He cups his hand behind her neck to holds her near for another second as she kisses him yet again -- kisses her back, as if he wants her to see, to understand, that just because he has hangups and issues and can't right now doesn't mean he doesn't want her. It doesn't mean that at all.

He smiles wryly as she makes him an offer. And he sits up again, slower this time. "Well, I don't know," he says. "It better be a good breakfast, with a tough job like that."

eileen

As bright as she is, as happy, Eileen wouldn't lie or fool herself about last night. What it was. What it felt like. There was connection... real connection. But not as far or as deep as it could have been. She knows she can go farther there than Dane can, right now. It's a struggle not to leave him behind and break what was, even for a little while, holding them so close together. She knows what it meant when he didn't want to be inside of her. She understands that he wasn't ready for that, not yet and potentially not ever. He held back. He protected himself. He couldn't connect too deeply to her, open himself like that, risk that much.

But there was connection. And he did open to her, at least enough to be with her, stay with her when she came. He let her lift him up a little with her.

Right now, Eileen senses his body curling in on itself a little, something between shyness and true fear, and all she wants to do is hold him when she feels it. So she does. She holds him, wraps her arms around him, hugs him firmly and dearly, because she understands. She isn't immune to that fear, either. And it is somehow not hard for her, not hard at all, to forgive him for it.

This time when he sits up she isn't pained by it. He isn't squirming away, bolting like a rabbit into the underbrush, but just... easing out of bed. They can't stay here forever. She just smiles this time -- no, grins -- and flops backward, reaching behind her to grab the t-shirt that's stuck between mattress and headboard. It feels decadent. It's one of her favorite parts, this lazy, exposed reaching for discarded clothing, rising up from bed, hanging out with someone after a wonderful combination of orgasm and sleep. She slips into the t-shirt, which only falls far enough to just barely cover her. It's inside out, but that doesn't matter.

Eileen rubs her foot gently against his calf under the sheets as they're getting up, crawling around. She kisses his cheek, sitting on her knees. "I'm not a very good cook, so it's okay if you don't find them. They were pretty wet anyway. I'll heat up some water and we can wash up. Heating water is definitely one of the cooking-things I have down. I can also do coffee and tea and, um... cereal... and, uh... instant oatmeal..."

She's clambering around and getting out of bed as she says this, giving a small yelp at the cold floor on her bare feet, then laughing. "Oh, it's going to be so late when we get back to Chicago. This is awesome."

Happy. Happy, happy Eileen. She does what she promised, pumping a large pot full of water and setting it on the stove. Dane has to take care of the fire part, and while the water is heating she uses cold water to wash her hands and splash on her face. She starts working on coffee, using the clanging metal percolator with delight, digging around in the icebox and box of food for something to make a decent breakfast with. The fact that she's not a good cook does not seem to stop her: she said she would and she wants to.

But oh, her brain is disorganized this morning. She cracks eggs into a bowl to whip them up and then halfway through goes to use a washcloth and warm water to clean up, stripping out of her t-shirt and rubbing the washcloth over her naked body. Still naked, she goes to finish putting the eggs in the pan and stir them around briefly, then decides it's too cold and goes to get dressed in clean clothes -- underwear, denim cutoffs, a tight blue tank top, a schlubby oversized striped t-shirt with the hems cut off, which is all very 80s -- and then she wants to stir the eggs more, and the coffee is done, and she's completely forgotten bacon.

Put it this way: in the end, the food that Eileen was in charge of is not very good, with the notable exception of the coffee. The coffee is great. The scrambled eggs are flaky and crispy instead of fluffy, the bacon is overly oily and sort of chewy, and the toast is burnt. She laughs, but is a little embarrassed, apologizing for breakfast in the end.

Dane

One might expect him to draw away from that hug. Dane, who couldn't even look at Eileen the first time (and the second time, and the third time) she was naked. Even though he wanted to. Oh yes. Let's admit it now: he wanted to. He didn't, because he wanted to. Because he was honorable or something; but also because he was afraid to. Afraid to want. Afraid to lust. Afraid of where it would lead him:

right here.

Not so bad, then. Not so bad a place to be. But even so: she hugs him, and he laughs softly. He wraps his hand around her arm, squeezes back. But later on, when they're getting out of bed, when she's sitting up in bed and bare, naked, the sunlight fuzzing in the tiny fine hairs on her body, he can't look at her again. It's too much for him; she's too much. Too beautiful, too healthy, too there, too her. He's losing his mind.

He looks away, he rubs his face the way he does, he gets up and pulls on a pair of jeans before she can see how hard she's made him, just looking like that.

Later on she cooks. He gets down on all fours and digs around under the bed, looks for those missing panties of hers. It's a long search and it's fruitless; in the end her panties remain as lost as they ever were. He gives up. He washes up, brushing his teeth and washing his face in ice-cold water. She said earlier that those panties were pretty wet anyway, and he has to kind of ignore that because it might melt his mind otherwise.

A little later they sit down to breakfast. She keeps apologizing. He takes up his fork, looks at her, shakes his head.

"Stop it," he says quietly, smiling. "This is fine." A bite: flakycrispy eggs. Oilychewy bacon. He eats it anyway. It tastes good. He's not imagining it: it does. It's okay if it's because he likes her so much. It's okay if it's purely because she's here, and she's her, and who she is

is pure joy. Complex, glistening, iridescent joy.

"This is great," he says, not lying. "Sit down and eat."

eileen

Fairly, for his sake, Eileen isn't staring at him. She's energetic, bounding from bed to floor to stove to water to back again, cooking, flitting about the room. Clothing comes off and comes back on, swooshes of pale fabric across the air before it lands on her body. And somewhere in there, Dane is hard as a rock for her, thinking about her, thinking about how wet she was, how unashamedly she wanted him, how open she was, how freely she can talk about it even in the cold, harsh light of morning.

He never let her finish, yesterday out on the lake. She was describing some fantasy to him. Something far rougher, far deeper, than what they did last night. And even last night seems surreal, like it didn't happen, because the world hasn't shattered apart come sunrise as a result. Did it really happen, if the world didn't end?

Some kind of dirty-laundry monster has absorbed her panties into its shadowy depths. Eileen doesn't seem to mind. They're just things. She's forgotten about them. She hasn't forgotten his fingers, surrounded in pale blue fire, fueled by her desire and his magic. She likes his magic. She loves it a little. She loves him a little, and this is not the first time she's thought this but it also won't be the last. She's quickly becoming infatuated.

Except: Eileen is okay with it. Eileen feels safe in that freefall. And if she doesn't feel safe -- that's okay, too. Not feeling safe is exhilirating. It's ecstatic.

"I keep thinking about learning how to cook better," she tells him, sitting at the table now, washed up and hair combed and coffee steaming, "but there's so many other things going on that are more interesting. And I almost feel like I'd be stealing someone else's art. There are people who have devoted their entire lives to this." She is thoughtful, eating slowly. "Sometimes I feel that way about the different spheres, the arts, just... magic. I don't know that I could devote everything I have to time, or to mind. I don't think I will ever be the best at anything. I'll just be sort of okay at everything."

Dane

In this more than anything else, they are different. He specializes so narrowly, and so deeply. He is driven to succeed. He wants to be the best -- no use dissembling about that, now. He was so furious when Wentworth made a fool of him, so angry and so shocked and so frightened when he did his best, gave it his all, and found that all that might and all that magic and all that will was simply

not good enough.

She's quite different. She does not want to plunge deeply into any one thing. She doesn't think she'll ever be best; she doesn't sound like this bothers her. She'll be sort of okay, she says. At everything.

And he's eating his eggs, chewing on his bacon. She's forgotten to pour any sort of drink. He gets up and gets some milk, comes back with it, gives her a glass and gives himself a glass. She's dressed now, more or less. He's still in jeans, his upper body bare, all leanness and intensity. He thinks about what she says.

"I don't think I could handle that," he says then, truthfully. "I'm ... the sort that wants to be the best, if only in a few things. But if I think about it objectively, there's nothing wrong with your way. Maybe it's even better." His shoulders shrug: pulling the muscles of his chest and back with it. Everything moves together. Everything fits together. That's the basic truth of the world; even he, who only sees the world in tiny slices, understands that. "Sometimes," he says, "I think maybe I've sacrificed breadth for depth."

eileen

It does bother her. Not greatly, not crushingly, but... it makes her pause. Makes her wonder enough to mention it. To never be the best at anything hangs on her shoulders as she says the words, and she's looking at her plate, eating the reasonably edible food, and some of the brightness has gone out of her eyes and expression as she thinks on this. He may miss this as he gets milk, but she smiles up at him when he brings it to her.

"I don't know that I could deny one thing for another. No matter what choice you make, you lose something. In everything."

She reaches over, touches his brow, stroking two fingers across it. A strange gesture, a strange little touch. "I could confess things to you," she says quietly. "And that's different."

Dane

He doesn't understand what she says. She can see that. Somewhere along the way she's lost him -- so swiftly, too. He smiles a little; it's a little unsure. She touches his brow and his eyes close, as if waiting for benediction. Then they reopen. He takes her hand, he brings it to his mouth. Kisses her fingertips.

And he admits it. She doesn't know what courage this takes for him: Dane, Adept of the Order of Hermes, glorious wayward son of House Flambeau. He says it, just like this:

"I don't understand."

eileen

Yesterday morning, at breakfast, he wouldn't have done that -- kissed her fingertips, closed his eyes, taken her hand like that. Yesterday, all day, he wouldn't have unfolded to her like this. They're in each other's space nonstop this weekend, but for a brief break while he fished and she...took drunks and wandered around half-naked. After weeks of not even talking to each other, after a few meetings where they tried to do a little good in the world despite themselves. He never would have done this, any other time but this morning. He may never again.

It does take her time to answer him. He doesn't understand, and she grasps that she isn't being all that transparent. But she did mean what she said: she could confess things to him. That's different from everyone. Of course he doesn't understand that: compared to Dane, Eileen is an open book. She hides nothing. Even when she's hurt, even when she's vulnerable, she is willing to show that. She's able to lie there, naked and sweet and still wanting, and ask him to please come back.

"That's okay," she says simply. Because she could -- she could tell him how she feels, what she thinks of, what she really is afraid of and what Her Way actually entails -- but she doesn't. This is her fear. This is her holding-back, as opposed to his: she doesn't yet.

She leans over the table, kissing that mouth that confesses that its mind doesn't understand. "Let's pack up and head out," she says, and she's still quiet. "I already want to make love to you again."

Again. That in itself is a bit of a confession.

Dane

Willingly, he receives that kiss and returns it. Yesterday morning he might have shied away. Tomorrow he might again. But for now, Dane is warm; he is receptive. The morning light touches him, makes him beautiful in his own way: this damaged, wounded, hardboned will-worker, who hides his battle scars beneath that arrogance and that entitlement common to all of his Tradition.

She knows better though. He is not all sorrow. She knows better. And his mouth doesn't taste like sorrow. It tastes like softness, and tenderness. His lips touch hers; enfold hers. His tongue skims the seam of her lips. It is is gentle. When she draws back she makes a confession that darkens his eyes. He swallows; he looks down at his crisp eggs, his floppy bacon.

"So do I," he says. It's so quiet. "But I'm too... conflicted. I'm afraid I'll regret it if I did. I'm afraid it'll ruin something precious."

His eyes come back to hers. He wants her to understand. He can't tell if she understands, but he wants her to. A breath, in, out. Then he stands.

"Let's go," he says, decided.

eileen

There's something tenuous about this morning, though not brittle. What matters is still there -- at least, the thing that matters. They do care for each other.

It's a good thing the table is narrow, with all the leaning across and reaching across they're doing. Eileen, at least, can't seem to help herself but try to be close to him. Perhaps he finds it stifling; if he does he isn't telling her so. He pulls away and something tells her it isn't because he doesn't want the affection. He does want it. Maybe he doesn't think he deserves it. Eileen doesn't know why. There must be a reason; she hasn't earned the right to ask what it is yet.

The touch of his tongue on her closed lips makes them open, not to invite so much as to emit a soft pant. She's touching his cheek, her heart quickening, and that's when she draws back, telling him what she does. That she wants. That she craves. That it's him. Again.

They should go. She licks her lips as she draws back, as though to taste him, swallowing. It's going to be different when they go back. This place is set apart, private, with quiet and solitude and beauty everywhere, steeped in memories. Back in Chicago she has a job, he has work for the Tradition and for the Council, they have the chantry and enemies and friends, all of it. They have distractions there from this, whatever 'this' is. It's safer. It's a good choice to make, to go back now -- and like she said. Every choice you make, no matter who noble or good or wise, means something else is lost.

Dane can't tell if Eileen understands, but all he can do is hope. She seems to.

Let's go, he says, and so they do. They pack up, picking at the food, though as it cools it becomes even less palatable. Some of it goes into a cooler, some of it into a box, some is tossed. The bed is stripped. Dane calls someone about the septic tank before they go. Eileen finds her underwear and laughs, yelping happily. What dishes they used, they wash and dry and put away. It's a strange thing, turning this place livable within an hour, sealing it for what feels like forever within the same amount of time. Closed up, shut away, locked into silence. It makes Eileen feel sad and surreal and fascinated.

They store the canoe better this time, safer, less likely to rot. Eileen insists.

"Wait wait wait wait wait," she's saying, as Dane is closing the trunk of his car and walking around to the front. She waves him over to her, and then she's making him move around until they're posed in front of the lake, the edge of the cabin visible behind them. "This button," she says. "You have to do it because your arm is longer."

It takes a couple of tries to keep it from being blurry. But the end result is a picture of the two of them, angled the way such self-taken shots always are. There's the blue of the sk and the blue of the lake, the green of everything else, the dark brown of the cabin barely visible. Mostly, the frame is taken up by their faces, close together, . Eileen is laughing, looking more at him than at the camera, because he took it while she was trying to tell him that you have to smile, Thomas, you do!

Then it's okay. Then they can go.

Dane

They pack up. There's an inherent sadness in it, and it's one Dane understands. There's something about being here - away from it all, secreted away, hidden, safe. There's a quiet joy in coming here, making it livable, making it a home. Making it a warm, secret place where they shared secret warmth. There's a quiet sorrow in putting all that away again, and though he could assure her they'll come back, he'll bring her back here soon ... well. The last time Dane packed this place up, he wasn't expecting to be away for quite so long.

She wants a picture. He doesn't really. Not because he's just that camera-shy -- though he's certainly no exhibitionist -- but because he has an odd little superstition about it. Doesn't want to take a picture here like it's a memory they'll need to save. Doesn't want to take a picture like maybe they won't come again. Still; she coaxes, he relents. In the end his smile is not unlike the one on his dossier. A little crooked, a little wry, a little sad,

but a little fond, too. That's different from the smile on his profile.

They get in the car. She drives the first leg. He pokes around in his music collection until he finds the song he's looking for. He plays it for her without explanation, waiting to see if she'll recognize or, if she doesn't, if she'll like it. He grins when she does, one or the other. "Your theme song," he says.

They decide to have lunch on the road. Save a little time. He's driving by then, and she helps him juggle his burger, his fries, his drink. He pretends to omnomnomnomnom! her fingers at one point, which makes her laugh. Dinnertime finds them crossing the Mississippi into Illinois. They find a roadside greasy-spoon, where he orders chicken-fried steak, which may either delight or disgust her or both. He gets a cream soda, too. He's a little tired from the drive then, quiet but not really withdrawn. He lays his arm along the back of his booth, looks out the window. He's grown a bit of scruff on his jaw over the last few days. It suits him.

Eventually, feeling her watching him or wanting to watch her, he looks back at her. He smiles a little. "Thanks for coming with me," he says quietly. "It was special."

eileen

Eileen has never seen the dossier on Thomas Dane, Adeptus Majoris of House Ignis. She's never asked to see it. She sees him, though. The smile on the picture in her phone delights her -- the other two photos are blurry messes, one of them because she's laughing, one because Thomas is half cut out of the picture. But she stares at the one that works for awhile, grinning happily, before jumping up and kissing his cheek, which

doesn't need to be photographed.

They slip into the car and she wiggles into the front seat, squeezes the gear shift as though saying hello, giving it a hug, or... something. Mirrors are adjusted and air conditioning is turned on and then she's yelling out the window at the cabin: "Goodbye, cabin! See you later!"

Since she's driving, Dane starts flicking through music. When the song starts, Eileen begins bopping her head to it, two beats to a side, and any question of whether she knows it is erased when she starts singing along. Her shoulders waggle and occasionally her hair flicks side to side with her bopping. Yes, she knows it, and when he calls it her theme song, she cracks up. "Yeah, but are you saying you're Trouble, then?"

A grin flashed his way. They eat on the road, and she insists on sharing a milkshake, she steals some of his fries when she finishes her own, yelps when he omnoms her fingers. "You're like, twelve," she tells him, and offers him the last sip of milkshake. She naps for awhile after that, curled up in the passenger seat, legs tucked up, arms wrapped loosely around herself. He knows she's awake when she gives a great yawn and informs him that she needs to pee. By then it's dark, and they're back in Illinois.

The diner is in the middle of nowhere. There's a truck stop over there and a convenience store and not much else. It's black all around, and outside you can actually see stars here and there. Eileen is eating salad and a bowl of fruit, and the salad isn't much to look at and the fruit is mostly cantaloupe and honeydew and a few grapes, but she's quite pleased with it. She doesn't seem to think much either way about his chicken fried steak. She does wonder a little how often he goes to the gym, or if it's just because of the trip that he's eating this kind of stuff. It doesn't really matter; she's just letting her thoughts wander as they eat.

The scruff does suit him. But right now she keeps thinking about Dane + Fucking = Good, so it's possible that she'd think just about anything looked good on him.

So it's also possible that she's watching him when he turns to her, feels her. She smiles. It doesn't bother her to be caught, she doesn't look away, doesn't blush. Just smiles, like he's answering something she's said. "Of course it is," she says back to him, changing just enough,

little time mage that she is,

to tell him how she feels. She's propped along the edge of the table, leaning forward, cheek against her fist. "I'm thinking...maybe I won't be with anyone else til... we figure this out more." She's quiet, or at least on the quiet side. Glances down at her plate, thoughtful and perhaps even a bit shy. "Not that I'm like... really out there very much as it is, and it's not a huge part of ritual for me, but... " her eyes do flick back up to him, grey as doves. "Would that bother you?"

Dane

You're Trouble, then? she teases - and it makes Dane blink, then laugh quietly. "Yeah," he says, sounding pleased with the notion. "I guess I am."

They eat on the road. And later she naps, and he helps her find the recline button for the seat so she can curl up a little more comfortably. When she wakes she's tucked under a light jacket. It's one of his, pulled out of the back seat and laid carefully over her.

Later on they eat in a diner. And she wonders how he puts away meals like that and stays looking like he does; on the thin side if anything. He doesn't go to the gym, though. He's not the type to stand in a room of mirrors and flex all day. He runs: shoes beating pavement along the shoreline, an hour most mornings. It helps him clear his mind of dreams and cobwebs. It helps him focus.

He focuses: she changes the time, was to is. His mouth moves, and he gives her that faint, fond little smile of his. "Yeah," he says quietly, agreeing. A little later, she tells him what she's decided. And his eyes change a little. A furrow between his eyebrows; not worry or anger or anything like it. Something a little like concern maybe. Or compassion.

"You can do whatever you like, Eileen. You can be with anyone or not be with anyone as you like." He's quiet a moment, thinking about this; coming to realize this with some surprise, himself: "It wouldn't bother me either way. Isn't that strange?"

eileen

Truthfully, she hasn't decided. She's thinking about it. She... well. It's hard to say. This is the first mention she's made that maybe, unlike the stereotype or maybe just unlike the image she projects, Eileen isn't quite as Free Love as many Cultists. At very least, she's not out there inviting people home at the drop of a hat. She mentions ritual, which is apparently a thing, but even Hermetics use wands and chalices and just try explaining how that isn't actually about sex. She doesn't expect it to shock him, and if he were shocked that Eileen isn't fucking up a storm every other night she might be rankled. But she is a little shocked at his reply.

He seems to be thinking about it, and then he tells her that, well... he doesn't care. That it doesn't bother him either way, and he asks her if that's strange, and she says quite easily: "Yeah," but it's quiet, "it kind of is."

Dane

That answer makes him a little self-conscious. His mouth twists; he rubs a hand behind his neck, then drops it to pick up his fork. He carved off a bit of 'steak'; dips it in gravy. Eats.

"I myself would have thought the very thought of you being with someone else would have burned me up with jealousy. But it doesn't. And it's not because I don't care about you, or because I'm not attracted to you. I do. I am. You know that.

"It's just... I don't know. I suppose it's a sort of trust. If you did decide to go home with someone, I'd imagine you had your reasons, and good ones at that. You're spontaneous, Eileen, but you don't strike me as a fool. And you're always so eager for pure experiences. Unblemished joy. I wouldn't want to keep you from that.

"It might bother me if you found someone else that you really felt something for, though. And I don't mean to suggest you might indiscriminately sleep with men -- or women -- that you feel nothing for. I just mean: really feel something for. Something deep and aching... like what we feel. If you found that with someone else, that would bother me."

eileen

And thus Eileen is officially in over her head.

Not to worry: she's been primed for exactly this much water over her head for years now, by ending up in over her head more times in twenty-odd years than most people can claim in a lifetime in and out of wars and marriages. But it doesn't mean that for a little while, right now, she's not ...confused. A little hurt in a way she doesn't entirely understand. Worried that she's going to hurt him by her own confusion. And here she was trying to fix that, keep it from happening. Keep things clear and pure and organized until they made more sense. Filtered. Until Dane could figure out what he really wants.

Until she could, too.

Then there he goes and tells her that. And all the follows it. About how he thought -- but it doesn't -- and it isn't -- because he totally does.

She knows it's childish, or selfish, or something, to want him to burn up with jealousy at the thought of anyone else touching her. She knows it's sad and a little pathetic and maybe even a bit sick to want him to crave her enough that it drives him a few miles out of his mind, just because that's how she feels. She also knows that there are a lot of people who would be overjoyed to hear this speech, to feel so understood, so trusted, to be talking so honestly about where the lines really are and how everyone feels about those lines. She would have thought, asked a month ago, that this is what she might hope for, if she ever found herself falling for someone.

But even if it's not something she wants to be feeling, she is feeling all of that. And it doesn't feel good.

Eileen takes a slow breath and lets it out. Slowly. She is quiet for awhile, processing. Thinking. Watching him. She tries to find a way to explain herself to herself, so that she can then explain it to him. Eventually something surfaces. The waitress has come by and refilled Eileen's coffee; she tells the woman thank you quietly, and that's the only point she glances away from Dane, smiling up at her for a moment.

Her eyes come back to him, though. "Sometimes how I feel about someone when I'm having sex with them is different than anything else I feel for them. And sometimes that depends a lot on what they bring to it... how open they are. If they're willing to let their guard down. Sometimes even with a complete stranger it becomes something... real. And deep, and aching, and... I love them, entirely." She gives a small shrug. "Not always. But a lot of times I don't know what it's going to be until I'm in the middle of it. I always have a sort of... fondness for them, even if it's not that great."

Eileen looks down at her mostly-eaten salad. "I think sex is... very powerful. It's not puritanism or essentialism or anything like that, it's just... what it is for me. I am pretty careful about who I choose, because... they'll be inside me, or I'll be inside them, and... " she's stumbling over the words, surprisingly shy to talk about it like this, talk about others like this, to him. She shakes her head. "It's just an instinct. With almost everything else I might be open and eager and just wanting to try new things even if they're risky, but sex is so ...potent. It's more powerful than any drug or pain or music... at least for me. And it does take something special for me to be willing to go there with someone... even if it's just for comfort, or if it's just low and raw and dirty, all the way up to truly high ritual."

She looks at him again finally, and her face is slightly pink, mostly in her cheeks, high and bright. She looked similarly when she came, only then she was sweating, gasping, clinging to him, as though she would float off into the stars if she didn't hold on tightly to something grounded.

"I've never felt like this before even when I'm not making love to someone," she tells him softly. "And I don't really know what I ultimately want or what I'm even ready for or what any of it might mean. But... I think if I feel like this sitting in a diner with you, then I don't want to feel this with someone else while I'm in bed with them. And... I think the very idea of you being with someone else makes me feel... burnt."

She settles on that word. It's a good one. In shock from pure pain. Skin shredded away by heat, everything left raw. Angry. On fire. Burnt. Burnt right up like kindling, crackling into quick ashes.

Dane

Neither of them are eating now. Dane's fork is still in his hand, forgotten. They met over a meal, too. He ordered a sandwich to go. That was before she knew him; he seemed so hardened, so superior, so cold. A bit of an asshole, really.

He does not seem so very hardened or superior now. Certainly not cold. He listens to her, hearing her. When she's finished he laughs a little, without much mirth. "I don't think you need to worry about my going to bed with anyone else," he says. It's wry; and then it's not, the last of the humor slipping away. "I won't. I don't want to. You don't need to worry about that."

A few moments pass. He hesitates a little. Notices the fork; sets it down. Looks at her again. "I only meant to tell you that you didn't have to ... be faithful to me for my sake," he adds quietly. "I don't need that, and I'd feel bad if that was the only reason."

eileen

He seemed hardened, superior, cold until he had her drive so he could eat his sandwich. It was haughty, but she found it oddly endearing. Maybe she misread him then. It doesn't seem to matter now; she doesn't care if she saw right through him or if she just willed his warmth into being by pretending it was there. That's Eileen's own sort of magic, without any warping of reality at all. People drop their guard, drop their weapons, drop their eyes and their voices even, because of some spell she works on them. It's a very kind magic.

He laughs without mirth. Eileen blushes faintly and smiles with tenderness, shyness. A little sadness. A little bit of pleasure that she feels rather guilty for feeling. Because, perhaps, Dane isn't the only one who might feel wary that they aren't... special. That they're just like everyone else to someone who seems like no one else.

"I didn't really know anything about you until this weekend. I thought..." She shakes her head and smiles at him again, gently. "It was never the only reason. It wasn't even a main one." She hesitates for a moment, then adds: "If... um." Uncomfortable, she hesitates again, then rushes headlong: "If you do met someone you want to be with, will you talk to me about it? It doesn't have to be before. It can be after."

Dane

There's a sort of subtle wince in Dane's eyes at that. A pause; then he reaches carefully across the table, takes Eileen's hand.

"I will if it happens," he promises gently, "but I don't think it'll happen. Like I said: I don't want to be with anyone else. Right now, I can't even really be with you ... but I don't want to be with anyone else, either."

eileen

He takes her hand; no. She takes his, wraps both of her smaller, defter ones around it. She draws it to his mouth and kisses those fingertips, rough as they might be, or soft -- she just remembers them drawing stars down, creating them out of nothing. She remembers heatless flame glowing blue and white around them, marrying things both magical and intensely, carnally physical. Her lips are very light, like the landing of a ladybug just before it takes off again, and then she is looking at him again.

"You're really with me now," she tells him, even though it isn't the same, not really-really, as what he's talking about. S-E-X. As in penis in vagina. As in opening up to her as much as she opened up for him. As in falling apart from sheer undeniable closeness, as in a shattering of the tenuous but vital boundary between one body and another, one soul and another. She knows what he means. She knows why he recoils from it like ancient man recoiled from fire,

so bright, so warm,

so painful, so dangerous.

"Do you want to get pie?" she asks him, her eyes brightening. "We're at a diner."

Dane

As though a little startled, Dane looks at her: those dark eyes, that core of flame. This time when he laughs there's a quick-flickering joy in it.

"Yes," he says, "I suppose I am."

He has a few more bites of his incredibly unhealthy dinner. He leaves some gravy on the plate; a bite of biscuit. Some mashed potatoes. Ate all of that fried steak, though, and is working on his cream soda when she brings pie up. He snags the dessert list over. It's literally that: a typewritten list, no pictures. Apparently cherry pie, apple pie, ice cream and chocolate cake are all self-explanatory.

"I'm getting apple pie with a scoop of vanilla ice cream on top," he decides, and turns the list around for her.

eileen

Yes. He is here with her. Right here, right now, sitting in a diner and his hand is in her hands and her smile is toward his eyes. She is never one to linger long over the difficult, the painful, the dark, the upsetting; she comes back from it quickly. In the end, what matters is that they are here. He's here with her. They are going to get pie. There isn't anything she can foresee or forestall other than that, and when you get down to it, this is pretty good.

Dane and her in a diner, getting some pie.

"We!" she proclaims. "We are going to get apple pie -- warmed up a little -- with a scoop of vanilla ice cream on top. And I'll have some coffee with it and then I'll drive for awhile. 'Kay?"

Dane

"We should get a double helping, then," Dane says, straightfaced. "Because I don't know about you, but I intend on eating a lot of pie and ice cream."

So that's what they do. They get two slices of apple pie, and they get two scoops of ice cream, but they pile it all onto one plate and maybe their waitress is having a good day and she thinks it's cute, or maybe she's having a bad day and she wishes they'd just quit advertising their status to the world. What does this diner look like, anyway - facebook?

But the truth is, their relationship isn't really at the level of cutesy shared dinners yet. They sort of want it to be -- they're both making efforts in that direction -- but the work is hard, there's so much past and grief and uncertainty to dig through, and in the end it's quite something that they can sit in a diner and share a slice of pie. It's quite a lot.

When they're finished, it's well and truly dark outside. Eileen drives, so Dane slides the passenger's seat back to accommodate his longer legs. He leans back and he watches the long, lonely road slide by. It's quieter now, something about nighttime and motion facilitating silence. After a while he reaches over and takes her hand, their elbows on the center divide, their fingers loosely linked. He's lost track of whose music is on the stereo, but it's a nice song, mellow.

Chicago gets closer, the miles counting down on the freeway signs. When they're out in the northwestern suburbs he switches back behind the wheel, and they watch together as the city and its skyscrapers rise out of the plains. The northwest approach is the one of the loveliest; the city with all its layers and complexities laid out, the skyline anchored at either end by massive, dark monoliths. It feels like a return to civilization. It feels like Rome, all roads leading there.

"You'll have to give me directions to your place again," he confesses as they get closer. "I wasn't really paying attention to that, last time we were there."

eileen

The sad truth is, it's harder for Dane right now. All of this is. For Eileen there's something fresh and new and exhilirating about it all. She fantasizes. She charms. She crushes. For all the wisdom in her -- and it would be foolish to ignore that she is wise, and that it is real -- she is still so very young. She is still so very unsure of what she wants or even who she is going to be. There is surprising power behind her piddling little sensory spells, even Dane can feel it when she works. If she doesn't find some outlet for all that strength, some way to truly use it, she may one day split from a small tear like a waterballoon, and there will be nothing left of her but a puddle and some tatters. It's the same with her heart. It's so very great, so very broad, so very inviting, and

there is a crack in it now, opening.

But she isn't afraid. Maybe a little, but not greatly. She doesn't want to recoil. She runs toward it, laughing. She knows the cost of loving is one's life and thinks, what a bargain! let's buy it! because she hasn't been burnt like he's been burnt. She has suffered losses, but not losses like Dane's. She can't possibly know how much pain lies down that road, only that along the way there are roses with such beauty, with such aroma, that one thinks one must have died.

It's easy for her to sit in a diner booth and eat pie and ice cream, smiling at the one she is so fond of, imagining that she can make it easy enough for both of them.

She drinks coffee, too, and is quite perked when they go back out to the car. She drives. They laze on the long stretches of highway between here and there, single spot of silvery light in darkness that becomes velvet, thick, and overpowering. She starts slightly when Dane reaches over to hold her hand, because she wasn't expecting that, and her hand flutters and then stills, becomes quite strong, squeezes his once before relaxing again. For awhile her fingers stroke gently between his, intoxicatingly, soft and slow and rhythmic, and she doesn't even seem to realize she's doing it, or the effect it might have. It doesn't go on forever, though. She drives, and she drives so very fast, and she isn't even using magic.

But after awhile they pull over, use a rest stop, stretch, and then get back in and Dane is driving the last leg into Chicago. Eileen rolls down the window and half-hangs outside of it, her hair streaming, her eyes closed, her arms outstretched, just for a few moments. She comes back in windblown, dazed, smelling like the night air. The city looms ahead of them, and they are drawn into it, woven into it, as the roads get more full, as people come back to life out of the darkness, as they are pulled inexorably into civilization once again. It simultaneously pleases and saddens Eileen; it means this is over. Whatever it was, or is. It's winding to a close, like the ending of a casting. Bittersweet.

Dane mentions needing directions and not paying attention and she glances over at him. "No," she says, smiling vaguely, "I don't imagine you were." She gives him her address, reminding him where her little box of white and yellow and books and rainbows and warmth and sunshine is located. The closer the get the more she guides him, turn here and then there and it's probably not the fastest or most efficient way but it also has some of the neatest nightlife and scenery along the way. She hasn't asked yet. She doesn't ask, until they pull to the curb, which is where she invited him to come up for coffee last time:

"What were you paying attention to, last time?"

Dane

It feels oddly like a throwback in time. They park here at the curb. He is looking straight through the windshield again, very subtly tense, as though he isn't sure what will happen next or what direction it will happen from. She asks him a question. He doesn't quite startle, but there's still a hint of it in the way his eyes blink.

Then he looks at her, and things change. Time advances. It's not x weeks ago when they first met. It's tonight; he's been inside her, if only a little, in a way both carnal and metaphorical. He smiles a little.

"You. Or rather, my thoughts, trying to figure you out. I was trying to figure out if you were really just asking me up for coffee, or if you were going to try to seduce me, and if you were going to try to seduce me, whether or not I should resist. And all that while trying to carry on a conversation about the relative merits of black coffee vs. cream-and-sugar coffee.

"It didn't," he finishes, quite wry now, "leave much room for mentally mapping your neighborhood."

eileen

Some of that tension bleeds into the air like a fuzzy corona around him, soft violent and pale orange mottled together, shifting, like fear and excitement both and uncertainty in either. She smiles at him and he smils at her and it's today. Time warps and shifts. She's no longer aching for a shower because she was snuggled up to a half-dead Verbena earlier this evening. Earlier this evening she was holding Dane's hand, that's all. Last night his hand was inside of her, working her, on fire in the aftermath. But that is the past, too. Right now it is now and now is the time when Dane is smiling, wry, telling her that last time they were right here he was thinking exactly what she thought he was thinking at the time.

She wrinkles up her nose, grinning, looking a bit like a wild but very cute animal for a moment there. "That's what I thought," she tells him, leaning over and popping a kiss on the end of his nose, then his brow. "I was asking you up for coffee, and trying to get to know you better to see if I should go out doing errands and missions for the chantry with you again, annnd I wasn't thinking of seducing you at all but when you wanted to leave I could tell it was partly because you wanted me and the thought of you wanting me made me so, so, so unbelievably turned on that I wanted you to stay and be near me even if we just talked and drank coffee all night and when you left anyway I made myself come so very hard, but in that low down dirty filthy wonderful way that's different from last night."

She pauses, tipping her head against the headrest of the passenger seat. "You should put my address in your GPS and save it under a code name. Flax. That's what my code name was when I was with the Euthanatoi." She smiles. "Or the name of a pizza joint."

Dane

Eileen does that thing she does, where her words seem to almost get away from her. Or, no. Like she lets her thoughts, which are so very unbounded, get into her words for a moment. Lets them run rampant, lets them go off and get into whatever interesting designs they can manage to get themselves into, and all the while Dane is looking at her with this look of bemusement, if not amazement, and when she's done,

when she's done he closes his eyes a moment, laughing, letting his head fall back against the headrest. "Really," he says, "why do you have to tell me all that?"

And: "Flax?" He raises his head again. "That's an odd name to go by." He starts to put it into his navigation, regardless.

eileen

"Because it's true," she says, and her smile is so bright and happy and unbounded. He's not angry at her like he was at the lake, cutting her off and shutting her up and yelling at her for talking about things like sex and her desire and all that. He's laughing, thumping his head back, and she can almost see him later on, hardening, head back just like that, eyes closed --

"And because I like turning you on," she finishes, which is also the truth. Her smile softens, quiets, as he puts her address into his GPS. "Because my last name is cotton. Like... two plants that make cloth or something. Part of what made it a decent code name was that hearing it, you wouldn't automatically think of me. Like...calling a Hermetic who likes to call fire 'Hothead' is just asking for someone to figure it out. I like it," she mentions. "They think flax was the first domesticated species in human history. The flowers are this pretty violet-blue with gold centers. You can make it into all kinds of different things. Paper, cloth, food..." There's a pause. "Cynthia said that it's sprinkled on altars in healing spells. People used to believe it was a gift from the gods to take care of almost all their mortal needs."

She smiles. "I don't think the deathmages were thinking about all that though. But they might have been. They're surprisingly flexible, at least as far as their magic is concerned."

She doesn't want to get out of the car.

"I should come up with a code name for you," she says happily, brightening. "It'll have something to do with stars."

Dane

"People believed that of olives too," Dane remarks. She doesn't want to get out of the car. He's not rushing her out either. They sit there, the two of them, parked at the curb on the loading line. If this were daytime, he'd have a ticket in no time flat. But it's not daytime. It's night. The Loop is quiet and still, strangely barren. "But there's already an Olive Oyl.

"I picked Thomas because of Thomas Hobbes. He was a morose fellow, but not as bad as most people think. Everyone knows the 'nasty, brutish and short' line; what they forget is that his point is that that's the state of man if man doesn't do anything about it. But the whole point of living is to do something about it, and by doing so, transcend it. Become something better than what you were born.

"Dane is a little more boring. My great-grandmother was Danish." He shrugs. "I'm not sure if she was any good at butter cookies," he adds, and laughs.

eileen

The grin that spreads over her face at the Olive Oyl line is slow and broad and gleaming -- a little bit goofy, too. She laughs softly. Eileen has turned to sit sideways in the passenger seat, her head against the rest, watching him, smiling, just... talking. He tells her about his actual 'code name', the Hermetic one, and her smile fades and dies its natural, gentle death -- except, it never really goes away. It lingers like a spirit in her eyes and at the corners of her mouth, still a little alive.

He talks about the philosopher, and what she knows is that Thomas Hobbes was also the namesake of the tiger, just like Calvin was a reference to John Calvin, only the blond-headed kid in the striped shirt was the one who was nasty, brutish, and short -- only literally. He mentions butter cookies and she doesn't get the joke because she doesn't know much about Danish baking, but the fact that he laughs about it makes her smile, and then

it's quiet for a little bit, because she doesn't have anything to say. Why does she tell him things that torment him to hear? Because they're the truth. Why does she go silent, watching him in the dark, when it's so very late and she has to be up and getting ready for work in fewer than eight hours? Because she has nothing to say, because she wants to look at him, because work is just work and this part is life.

A little while goes by. The silence is companionable and taut, the air gentle but thick. And after awhile -- and rather sleepily -- she asks him softly,

again:

"Do you want to stay?"

And like before, she doesn't disclaim or promise. No assurances of what will or won't happen. Just a question. It isn't even a request, though he knows it is also an invitation.

Dane

There's something gentle and intimate about this moment. This quiet space in the front seat of Dane's Audi, with the engine off and the air still warm from their long, long drive. Their words on the air. Their names floating between. Code names. Names they gave themselves, or were given by those who knew them. Truer names, perhaps, than the ones their own parents gave them -- long before they became who they are.

He thinks that she is, in fact, versatile and holy. He thinks she just might be a gift from the gods.

After a while they are both quiet, and he looks through the windshield again. She sees his profile, the strong nose and the firm mouth, the dark eyes that move now and then, following lights that blink, images that stray. Wind comes and goes down these skyscraping corridors. She lives above an independent grocers, or a tiny theater, or any number of little things that exist and live in the Loop, half-forgotten.

His head turns, his hair scritching softly, when she asks what she does. He blinks once, slowly. Then he nods.

eileen

Last time she had to ask him twice. He never said no, but he didn't stay. This time she asks him once and all he does is nod slowly, watching her. She knows he wants to stay. He wanted to stay last time, too, she could feel it. But there was all that tension -- was she trying to seduce him? Did he want to resist? Should he resist, regardless of what he wanted? She adored him that night, that very first strange night. She knows that even for her, that's a little odd. That's a little frightening, if she stops and thinks about it. It's a little bit scary that she feels the way she does about him even while sitting at a diner or sitting in his car, that she feels this way about him even when she has no intention, tonight, of making love to him.

A lot of things Eileen does would scare her more if she stopped and thought too much about them. That only inhibits freedom. That only limits transcendance. So she decides not to think too much about this, either. It's Thomas's way of staving off his own fear: just stop thinking so much, stop questioning, stop worrying, stop obsessing over it. Just be. Just let go.

Eileen lets go. She smiles softly to him and nods over the way. "You can park there," she tells him, and he shifts in his seat and he does turn the car back on, taking it to the appointed spot and parking, locking up. They get their things out of the trunk, meager as the luggage is, and he helps her juggle it all while she gets out her keys, letting them in that skinny door at the bottom of the narrow stairs. They're quiet -- it's the middle of the night and they are both tired, but it's more than that. It's as though they know that too much talking will break something here. Not because it's fragile, not because it's brittle, but because it calls for some element of respect and reverence. It calls, more than anything, for simple silence. Just be. Just let go.

At the door he's been to twice now, she unlocks again and lets them in. She's only been gone a couple of days but she seems like she missed the place, sweeping into it and hugging the first thing she sees, which is the corner of her bed, the bedspread fluffy and rumpled. She made it before she left. It looks clean in here, feels bright and cheerful even with the lights off. It feels so safe. There's been change, though: there's a wooden mobile over her couch that wasn't there last time, hanging delicately from the ceiling and moving only when the air conditioner kicks on.

Eileen never turns on the lights, but there are some ambient from the street outside. There's some white string lights above the couch that she turns on so they can see a little bit better, but not much. It's dim and it's comfortable and they are wedging themselves together in the closet-sized bathroom when they brush their teeth, leaning against each other's sides. Eileen laughs around her toothbrush, which has ladybugs on the handle, but luckily she doesn't spew any flecks of foamed-up toothpaste. She is just happy.

They undress. They wash up. They get ready to go to bed together. This is the third time they've done this. It's different now. He isn't averting his eyes -- at least not as much -- and she isn't as uncertain inside, aching, worrying, wanting so badly she isn't sure she can ever get to sleep. Her bed is larger and softer and holds no memory, not even one, of a life that's gone now -- except the part where he has not slept alongside a woman other than Eileen for so, so long. It is all right. If memories come, they come. They come for Eileen, too, and she compares, she contrasts, she thinks about others she's slept with and the ones she's Slept With and this is still

different.

But: no obsessing. No questioning. Just be. Just let go.

When they go to bed, when the white lights are off, Eileen draws the thin white curtain between the bed and the rest of the teeny-tiny apartment. It blocks out more of the light from the window, the fire escape, the city. She plugs in her phone and sets her alarm and groans softly at how quickly she'll need to be waking up. She's wearing to bed what she wore at the cabin: panties. T-shirt. Her hair is brushed out but loose, and she sleeps on the other side of the bed than she did at the cabin, curling up under the covers next to Dane. She seems heavy and warm, sleepiness overtaking her quicker than any drug.

She kisses him before curling up finally, though. Her head turns and she looks past her shoulder at him, smiling lazily in the darkness. Doesn't tell him she's glad he's here, though she is. Doesn't tell him she totally expects him to drive her to work tomorrow morning, because she doesn't. Doesn't tell him that tomorrow she doesn't mind if he wants to hang out here, that she trusts him, that he can sleep as long as he likes before he goes home, even though all of that is true. She just smiles at him, her pleasure at his presence in that bed so evident she doesn't need to voice it.

And that's when she kisses him. It does not escalate. It does not spiral dizzingly away from her. It does not end with her groaning, turning around completely, pressing to him, begging him with her body to topple head-first over a cliff and lose himself in her. But: it is warm. So warm. It isn't even entirely chaste. She kisses him with the comfort of a long-time lover, the way you know and feel

I love you and just the way you are,

though without the troublesome part of sounding like a Hallmark card.

And, breathing deeply and sighing it out, she turns back around when it's over, closing her eyes and dropping -- almost instantly -- into sleep.