Quite some time goes by from the time Eileen drops Dane off in front of his building and the time she hears from him again. Something like two, three weeks without a phone call, without an email, without a mission assignment together, without so much as a peep.
And then one day there's an SMS on her phone. It originates from his cell phone, if she bothered to put his number in after getting it from the Chantry. Otherwise, it simply originates from a Boston area code. It reads simply:
Do you like fishing?
eileenActually, two or three weeks do not go by before Eileen ever hears from him. After about the third day -- really, some time on the fourth -- she texts him.
text 'yes' for 'my phone chimed and the sound turned into a butterfly'
This supposedly means 'yes, I'm still dealing with Paradox'. Regardless of the answer, she at least knows he's okay. She doesn't ask a lot of questions. She takes the hint when his answers aren't... all that conversational. Or informative. She knows he's okay and he isn't asking for his car back, so the truth is: Eileen simply leaves him alone after that.
And his answer to that text, and the one he sends her later, do hit her phone with a recognized number. Her screen says thomas dane! :D and since she doesn't have a picture of him, there's an icon. It is a very chubby red devil-looking imp with a grumpy, pursed-lip expression and a flame over its head.
When she gets it, which is about two hours after he sends it, he gets an answer:
not really. i'll go with you, though.
DaneThe only replies she got were short, verging on brusque, and a little bizarre: In Portland - in the middle of something - talk later?
only he never called or texted back, not until a few days later:
Getting on a plane to Boston. Back in town in a week or so. Sry for not getting back to you earlier. We'll talk soon.
And then, this. Fishing trip, of all things. She replies; he's not terribly surprised by the answer. His answer is longer than it has been for the past two weeks:
Have a cottage up in Minnesota. View's nice even if fishing bores you. PS we can throw them back.
eileenPortland. Boston. And possibly Minnesota.
Where he has a cabin. For some reason.
Eileen is not happy with Dane right now. She's not above feeling hurt or confused or upset, however well she deals with these -- and other -- emotions. She is not above the sorts of thoughts that lead lesser people to being petty, not above the temptation. It isn't that she's been bored or lonely since dropping him off at his place, and it isn't that they parted on anything but amicable terms. It's that she is...well.
A little hurt. A little confused.
Of course, he can't tell that any more than he can tell that she's wearing heart-covered boxer shorts and a t-shirt with some guy's face on it, thoughtful and black and white and some friend of hers who is really into screen-printing made it for her. He can't tell that she's troubled, or what's troubling her, only that she's not into fishing but she'll go with him.
Then, a little while later:
okay. let's do it.
DaneOkay. Come pick me up tomorrow? :)
The emoticon is a little out of place. Dane's so serious. It looks tacked on, a little awkward. Maybe he does know she's not entirely happy with him right now. Maybe he can sense it even through text, if only because -- well. She's not being nearly as wordy as she usually is.
Any time works for me.
So, tomorrow rolls around. And it's a weekend, and likely they don't get up at 2am like hardcore fishermen. She's still driving his car. He's waiting for her at the curb, a duffel bag in hand. He's no longer sunburned. He's a good deal more tanned than he was before he got the burn, though. He's wearing sunglasses in the clear, bright sunlight, but he takes them off as she pulls up.
The bag sails into the tiny backseats of the coupe. Dane gets into the passenger's seat, buckling in. "Hey," he says, and reaches over to punch an address into the navigation. "It's a pretty long drive. We can make it in a day, but if we get too tired we'll get a motel."
A small pause. Then: "I'm sorry I've been incommunicado for a while."
eileenMaybe she's not as wordy in texts. Maybe she's busy, distracted, maybe she's not entirely happy with him right now. She at least tells him she'll come get him in the morning, which could be 'dawn' and could be '11:59am', but given that she's a time mage among other things, it could also mean three days from now. Cultists are alternately known for their perfect timing as well as for never being on time. Eileen, however, is not typical and not known for much at all.
She pulls up to the curb and his car is pristine. Shiny, washed not too long ago, gorgeous. She's in the driver's seat, obviously, wearing a pair of oversized sunglasses with amber rims and gray lenses. Her hair is in two braids, both loosely and stylishly wound down to their near-invisible bands that hold them together. She's wearing a plain white tee and a leather skirt with studs artfully arranged here and there, the cut angular and uneven. He can't see her shoes through the window, but she doesn't get out of his car.
Dane gets in. His duffel bag joins a well-worn plaid backpack already occupying the back seat, and though she wants to smack him, the second he sits in the car she wants him so badly she, well
wants to smack him.
So she stares at him while he puts his cabin's address in the GPS, and he says it's a long drive, they can make it in a day, but they can get a motel, and in the small pause after that,
Eileen starts smacking him.
Ineffectually, to be sure, and without even enough sting in it to do more than wrinkle his shirt, but she starts repeatedly smacking her open palm on his upper arm, actually bouncing slightly in her seat to get enough leverage to do so. She manages quite a bit of speed, here, getting in seven good swats before apparently her arm gets tired.
She exhales, huffs, settles into the driver's seat again, and pulls away from the curb.
DaneAll right; so what actually comes out of Dane's mouth is more like:
"...but if we're too tired we'll get a motel -- hey. What? Ow. Ow. What!"
She gets tired. He's staring amazed at her, left arm half-raised to fend off the flurry. She starts driving. He lowers his hand cautiously -- surely she won't smack him again while navigating Lincoln Park traffic?
"What did I say?"
eileenHe's seen the way Eileen drives -- or can drive. Her magic isn't powerful by any means, but there is something potent about it all the same. He can sense it when she's using. She isn't right now. if she were, she might keep smacking him while navigating Lincoln Park. She isn't though. Should be safe to lower his guard a bit. Should be.
Eileen keeps her eyes on the road and doesn't say anything. For three full seconds. Then:
"I'm not talking to you. I'm in Portland."
Dane"Oh." He understands. He slumps a little in his seat, squinting through the windshield, his hands toying restlessly with the sunglasses he's half-forgotten about. "I wasn't avoiding you. I was following up on the Wentworth situation, trying to get a bead on who this man was. I suppose I was a little caught up in the investigation. It wasn't my intention to leave you in the dark.
"I'm sorry."
eileenShe looks at him. The look says it all. And she says nothing. She's frowning, but she exhales again, audibly, as she looks forward.
"Apparently he's still in town. Still in his house. The chantry's council hasn't asked anyone else to go out there since we got back. There have been a lot of meetings. Roman isn't supposed to tell me much but he totally tells me some of it."
Roman. That would be the Cult of Ecstasy councilman. The master of Time. The only master of Time on the eastern half of the United States -- at least, the only one who hasn't vanished. For a tradition of hippies, he is remarkably well-groomed and composed, at least the few times Dane has seen him. He isn't known to be a lech or a drunkard, though he does love ...well. Anything sensory, really, or sense-altering.
Eileen shrugs. "Everyone's trying to get a bead on this guy."
There's a longer pause. She looks at him again. "I'm going to forgive you. I just haven't yet."
DaneDane gives a little laugh. "Well, that's encouraging," he says. "A nine-hour drive with an angry person who might attack you at any moment hardly makes for a relaxing fishing trip."
Speaking of which - he doesn't seem to have brought a tackle box. He's not wearing a fishing vest either. He's wearing what he typically seems to: blue jeans and a button-down shirt, unobtrusive and unspectacular. Beside her interesting skirt, he looks rather plain.
"I thought maybe we could talk a little more about ... personal matters, too. Between us. There are some things I'd like you to see and know."
eileen"I'm not angry anymore," Eileen says, though she doesn't explain that. Maybe hitting him seven times got it out of her system. She doesn't say everything is okay. He already knows she hasn't forgiven him. But she isn't angry. Which leaves other things.
The only fishing equipment she's brought with her is a faded orange bucket hat with a slightly frayed brim, but that's shoved into her backpack with a change of clothes and a few other essentials. She hasn't noticed that Dane doesn't have a pole with him, or else she's assuming he has them at the cabin. Besides, if he got into the car wearing waders, ready to go into the lake nine hours from now, she'd think he was a weirdo. Or just... really, really into fishing.
BUT IT WAS ALL A RUSE.
He wants to talk. Or thought maybe they could. About 'matters' between them, because he's not the sort to say 'stuff', just like he isn't the sort to say 'well, yeah'. Eileen just gives him a small nod, watching the road, watching traffic. "Okay," she says. Quietly. Glances at him. "Do you want to wait til we get there, or..."
DaneWell; it's not entirely a ruse. Fishing is still on the agenda. It's simply not the purpose of this trip, or at least not the purpose of inviting Eileen on this trip. Eileen, who is no longer angry at him. Eileen, who has not yet forgiven him, either.
"Yes," Dane replies, "I think perhaps that would be best." He glances at her, "Sorry. I know it's a long time to wait. But I think it might be easier there."
eileen"Well, yeah," Eileen says back, because she's not at all opposed to well-yeahs, "kinda hard to have a heart to heart when one or the other of us is going to be driving the whole time."
This time when she glances at him, she smiles. It's a small, soft thing, and maybe she's thinking she missed him or she's glad he's back or she's glad they're going up to his cabin in Minnesota or she's worried about him or she wants to lie out in the sunshine with him and do nothing again, but
she doesn't feel the need to explain why she's smiling just then. She just smiles, and says: "I don't mind being patient," and turns on the radio. Just the radio. No station in particular. She explains: "I like listening to how the radio stations change on a road trip, depending on where you are. Speaking of change, I wouldn't have pegged you for a trancey-housey-music type of person but you totally are, aren't you?"
And so it goes.
DaneNaturally, Dane is forced to defend himself against such wild accusations. The conversation, which he had briefly feared would be stilted and uncomfortable after that two-week near-silence, after that procrastination-until-the-cabin, veers into an endless tangent on music.
Dane claims not to listen to very much at all. He likes Bach. He likes cool jazz. He dislikes hot jazz quite a bit; it's too busy and uncoordinated for him. He claims not to like classic rock, but then she pulls out her iPhone or her iPod or her iPad or her iStone and he knows all the words to American Pie. He argues that you can't live in the United States and not know the lyrics. It's the only song on her i-something that he sings along to, though, his voice an untrained and pleasant baritone. Later on she plays other songs for him, perhaps as eclectic as her clothing choices, and he nods along to some, tells her to fast-forward others.
They stop for a late lunch at a roadside diner, some trucker joint where some teamsters are getting drunk at 2 in the afternoon before stumbling into the backs of their cabs to sleep it off while their partner drives. They get a few curious stares, but they're largely ignored. He orders eggs over steak. It's horribly unhealthy.
After lunch he drives, and he asks about her job. He doesn't seem to have a regular job, himself. He has a graduate degree in chemistry, but he's been Awake for a long time, and there are always Other Ways for talented magi, particularly ones who don't mind getting a little hands-on with the world around them, to live reasonably well without steady income. They go on a tangent on whether or not some Master of Entropy somewhere caused the latest stock market collapse.
And as he drives he grows more quiet. A subtle tension seems to mount in him; never directed at her, but present and building. They streak northwest across the upper midwest, the land flat and flat and flat around them, the sky bright, the sun turning. It's nearly summer, and the farther north and west they go the longer it takes for the day to get dark. The sun is finally beginning to slide into the west, glinting off the many lakes and ponds that dot the countryside, when they wind off the freeway. They take a smaller country highway into the Minnesotan backcountry, and as evening falls Dane turns on the headlights, blue-white and high-intensity against the falling night.
The last of dusk is lingering in the sky when they turn from a smaller road to a dirt trail, and bump down a mile or so of dirt trail to a lake. There are so many here, scattered and linked across a tree-strewn, gently rolling landscape, that the name hardly seems to matter. It may not even be named at all. It's small, a body of water that at some point in its prehistory became severed from the larger lakes nearby - perhaps a mile long at most, and only fifteen hundred feet or so across.
There is a tiny, rustic log cabin at its edge. It's newer than its style suggests, but older than Dane himself; built perhaps in the sixties by adventurous hippies and nature-gurus, worn by weather and cold Minnesota winters in the fifty or so years since. Everything around it is green or brown or grey or blue, and its own hues blend into the landscape. There's no pier, but there's a simple canoe hauled up and lashed at the shore, sunbaked.
It is perhaps not what one would expect from Dane's vacation home, Audi-driving, collared-shirt-wearing, world-bending Hermetic that he is. It is small, humble, tucked away, primitive. Then again, it also looks a little abandoned. That canoe may or may not still hold water. One or two roof shingles look on the verge of sliding off.
Parking the Audi, Dane kills the engine and lets the silence settle. The birds have fallen silent for the night. At first there's only the sound of water on the shore, wind through the trees. Then the rising chorus of crickets, frightened by their approach, emboldened by their silence. Dane steps out of the car and, quiet, lets Eileen take in the tableau.
When she turns back to him, or gives him some sign that she's experienced, she's processed, he comes up beside her. The smile he gives her is a little sad, a little strange.
"My wife insisted on buying this place," he says. "She was always more of a nature-lover than I was. We both went to grad school at Mayo, but we met through the local Chantry. This was before the shit really hit the fan during First Ascension War, and the Chantry was more like a social club than a war headquarters. It wasn't expensive, but we spent a semester's worth of stipends on the downpayment. By the time I graduated we'd finally managed to pay it off.
"Ironically, I ended up coming here a lot more than she did. She grew bored of it after the first month or so and wanted to sell it. I liked it, though. It was a retreat. I'd come here alone. Sometimes I'd fish. Mostly I just rowed out on the lake and relaxed. Maybe read a book. After our daughter was born, I didn't come here as often, but I still made the trip when we could."
He looks away from her then. He looks a the house, its fraying edges, its sun-cracked wood. His lips press together for a moment.
"After our daughter died, and after my wife ... left, I stopped coming here altogether." His eyes find hers again in the gathering gloom. "That was five, six years ago."
A pause.
"I'm sorry. I know it's bizarre behavior for me to bring you here and tell you this. I didn't know how else to do it. Or to show you why I'm so ... the way I am, about us. I'd understand if you want to leave and find a motel. Or maybe rent a cabin somewhere." Another pause. "Or drive back to Chicago."
eileenPerhaps unsurprisingly, Eileen likes a little of everything. Even the things she doesn't obviously, instantly get into she seems to enjoy, though in a different way. They play with the radio as long as they're in towns, but for endless stretches of road that come up between their location and their destination, they end up listening to Dane's flash drive some more and Eileen's iPod. She is not surprised to find that he likes Bach; she agrees that 'hot' jazz can be disorganized but this isn't inherently a bad thing for her. He sings, and she smiles.
There is Prodigy on her rotation, something called Eagles of Death Metal, Lady Gaga, Backstreet Boys, and a hundred others. It's a long trip. She tells Dane just to click through anything he doesn't like, and he does, and she's unbothered. After awhile they let the conversation die down and drive in companionable silence. Eileen drive with the windows down and the A/C off for long stretches, keeping the music loud, moving to the music in her seat. She's been driving this car ever since she met him, essentially. She's comfortable there.
Eileen eats salad with a side of french fries. She tastes his steak -- or at least asks. She asks for a bowl of fruit for dessert. She's kind of wanting a drink, so she buys a mini bottle of Southern Comfort from a nearby liquor store. Well: she goes in for a tiny tiny bottle of Southern Comfort and comes out with a much larger brown paper bag. So then Dane drives, and Eileen has that tiny bottle but leaves the rest in the bag. She takes off her shoes -- flip flops -- and drapes her legs out the window, so every time he looks at the side mirror he sees what's behind him, and a flash of her ankle.
The first time Eileen sings, it's to Turn the Page. Her voice doesn't quite blend with Seger's; it's too high, too light, but there's some range there, there's some depth and resonance. Mostly, though, there's feeling. More than raw talent, more than training, that's what makes Eileen captivating to listen to.
Later on they talk about work. He asks what she does, and learns that she's an Assistant Coordinator of the Architecture and Design Society at the Art Institute of Chicago. This means, Eileen explains, that she helps coordinate board meetings and relations, develops and maintains lecture schedules, openings of exhibits, and special events for this particular society. She deals a lot with their members. It turns out that she got her bachelor's in art history at Georgetown. She came to Chicago thinking about grad school at Northwestern and... sounds like she's still thinking about it.
Her ankles and her shoulders dance in rhythm to Tighten Up when it comes on.
She doesn't ask a lot of questions: why he didn't get a job, how long he's really been Awake. What he tells her comes freely, as do answers when he asks her questions, but she is mostly just... content. Gentle. Somewhere in there, she mentions that she's forgiven him, and that's all that is really said about it again. Dane comes up with the idea that a Master of Entropy caused the stock market crash. Eileen just chuckles, low in her throat, and says: "Nah. A Master would know better. Probably a Disciple. Or we can always blame the Syndicate."
There's more quiet. Stretches of it, unfurling like the road ahead of them. They stop for breaks, to stretch and to piss and because Eileen saw a funny sign she wants him to take a picture of her in front of. She lets her hair down from their braids. She pulls her feet into the car again, but leaves the window down. After awhile they roll up the windows so they can turn the music down and enjoy a little quiet. Not silence. Just quiet. She dozes off around five or six, just snoozing idly and lightly in the passenger seat, curled up with her hand under her cheek against the door.
When she wakes, the sun is starting to burn bright and gold. She smiles softly at it, murmurs that it looks like Dane, which is when he realizes she's woken up.
Though she feels the tension in Dane, Eileen doesn't press him to explain it. To her, he always feels a little tense. To her, the time isn't yet right. That's what this trip is about. Something has been building since the moment she picked him up, so she accepts the tension. It washes over her and through her, and she moves with it. She seems almost... excited, though, when they bump down the dirt road to the small lake where Dane's cabin is. She glees audibly, bouncing a bit, and bolts from the car as soon as he pulls it to park. She's out the door before the engine has even cut, her flip flops still on the floorboards, her two hairties from those braids she unraveled wrapped around his gear shift as though that's where they belong.
So she dashes across the grass and the gravel and the sand both, as though simply glad to be here, and outside, and at dusk. It's close enough to night, stars visible but so is a dim remaining sunlight. She smells the grass and the water and the cabin itself and suddenly flops down on the ground. Crickets have bounded away from her approach, and when she flops down to earth, it's a little while before they start their singing up again.
After a little while, Eileen sits up, her legs tucked to her side, her back to Dane and the car, her eyes toward the water. For a moment she imagines what it will look like in the sunshine, and then she decides no: it is as it is now. She takes it in. Breathes. And stays right there. But Dane never comes, so she turns her head over her shoulder and looks at him, smiling like an invitation.
He comes up beside her, and lowers himself to sit by her. This time they're on grass instead of sand, and this time it's night instead of day, and this time he's not sunburnt, and this time they aren't traumatized. Eileen is quiet; she knows something is coming, and she waits for it. What happens is words. What happens is history. Is Time.
My wife, he says, is the first thing he says, and though Eileen does breathe in then, it isn't a shocked gasp or a sigh: I knew it. Dammit. She just breathes. Nature-lover. They met before the disintegration of the last war, before it really got horrible, so this was perhaps ten years ago. Or more. Time is iffy: the war was different depending on where you were, who you were. When it hit the fan, when it ended, when they gave up, when the masters and mentors and loved ones vanished or died or both or something else altogether.
Our daughter, he says, and she begins to understand a little more. Eileen is aching. There's so much pain in him. It's like his resonance. His resonance hurts her to feel; she wouldn't tell him that though. There's so much grief there. My wife. Our daughter. Eileen doesn't touch him, though. She doesn't speak. Or sigh.
Died.
Left.
He hasn't been here for five or six years, but Eileen is willing to put money down that Dane knows how long it's been to the day. He doesn't say anything for a moment, but it isn't silent. The water moves, though barely, against the land, because the wind moves against the water. The crickets keep their perfect pattern, constant as anything in nature.
At first she wants to tell him that he shouldn't apologize, and that she doesn't think this is bizarre, and that she still doesn't understand why he is the way he is about ...her. Them. But then he says he'll understand if she wants to leave, and Eileen reaches over and slips her hand gently, softly, into his.
"Why would I leave you right now?" she aks him quietly. It isn't really a question.
DaneDane's hand moves a little, startled, as she touches it. Then her fingers slip between his thumb and his palm, and almost by reflex his close. He takes her hand as she gives it to him, his dark eyes falling to their shared grasp. It's that smile again, faint and a little pained.
He doesn't think she really means for him to answer her question. He does anyway in his mind. He thinks to himself that so many people would leave now. There are any number of reasons. He didn't call for two weeks. He flew around the country. He was in Portland. He came back and invited her on a nine hour drive with almost no advance warning. He drove her out here, out in the middle of nowhere, and fed her a muted horror story. It's dark now. She's alone with him. He might be a madman.
Any number of reasons for any number of people to hightail it out of here. But then, she's not asking why would anyone leave you. She's asking: why would I.
He squeezes her hand a little. "Thank you," he says quietly.
And a little later, as the last red glow of dusk fades to purple, he takes a breath. The air is fresh here. It smells like grass, and pine, and that dry earthy scent of water reeds. The crickets pause a moment as he speaks,
"I've always liked it here."
eileenSomeimes Eileen touches him the way one might touch a wounded animal. So slow, so careful. He tenses and she hesitates, waits for him to calm, shows him she'll recede if he's too afraid, if it hurts too much. Shows him, too, that she isn't going to leave him if he's bloody or broken or wasted. Maybe he wants her to ask more: what happened to his daughter, what happened to his wife, why does that all mean he can't deal with being with her -- one way or the other. But Eileen doesn't think Dane wants her to ask. She thinks that if he wants to tell her, when he's ready to tell her, he will.
She closes her eyes and doesn't tip her head to lean against his arm. Too close. It would feel like a betrayal. It would be one, in her eyes. She promised him she'd back off, leave him alone, and she wouldn't push. So she doesn't. All she does is hold his hand there, listening to the crickets and the water, her bare feet in the cool grass.
"I like it, too," she whispers, when he speaks. There's a small pause, then: "Thank you for bringing me up here."
DaneSay what you will about Eileen's knowledge of the higher Spheres or lack thereof, but her intuitive understanding of others - or at least of Dane - is close to perfect. She reads him right: there's nothing about him right now that suggests he wants to be asked, that he wants to be coaxed into some sort of great, cathartic divulging.
He gave her a little. Perhaps that's all he can bear to give right now. She gives him her hand in return, and he takes it gratefully. He does need this right now: some sort of human contact, some sort of reassurance that despite his bizarre behavior and his two week silence, despite the scars in his history and the destruction he's all but descended into,
someone still sees him as a little bit human. Tangible, touchable; not so wounded and dangerous that he can't even be approached.
"I wanted you to come," he replies quietly. "I wanted you to ... I wanted to be here with you when I came here again."
eileenHe knows where she comes from now: Georgetown, at least. Nothing about her parents, her family, her Awakening, her past. She's only in her early twenties, after all -- how much 'past' can she really have yet? But enough to know a few things about humanity. About scars. She holds his hand and she wants to hold him but he's so raw right now, the words out of his mouth leaving him a little flayed, or at least sore, and she doesn't want to press on a bruise.
But he tells her he wanted her to come, wanted to be here with her when he came again, and she looks at him then. She tips her head, looking at him for a little while before asking -- because now she can't help but ask: "Why?"
DaneDane hesitates - pauses, grimaces a little. "It'll sound selfish if I say," he says quietly.
And a pause. And then he goes on anyway:
"Because you're hopeful. Because when I'm with you, I feel hopeful. I didn't want to come back here alone and be weighed down by everything that happened, everything I remember. I wanted to be able to come here and feel the way I used to.
"Peaceful," he adds. "Safe. Content. I thought if there was anyone I could come here with and feel that way, it would be you."
eileenHer brows tug together a little, but she doesn't argue, only waits. Dane, though it sounds selfish to him, tells her why. Her head tips somewhere in there; she can see why he thought it selfish. Using her, somehow. Like a drug. Some are for running-away. Some are for running-toward. Neither are bad; both only are.
"You don't want to use me to make yourself feel better."
Eileen understands that. She's still holding his hand in her smaller, softer one. No callouses. She went to Georgetown and studied art history. She carries no weapons but a bit of pepper spray. She plays no instruments that he saw at her apartment or can feel in her hands, not regularly enough to roughen her fingertips.
But she understands this, too, underneath what she says: right now, it's entirely possible that if he had sex with her, that's what it would be for him. A running-away drug. A usage. Not necessarily a wrong thing or a bad thing, but something would be off, for him. It wouldn't be liberation. It wouldn't be ecstasy.
Eileen gives him a small shake of her head. "I don't think anything you said just now was very selfish, Thomas," she whispers to him. The crickets don't fear her voice. "You want to heal this place in your mind, and you can't do it by yourself. That isn't selfish."
DaneThat makes him smile a little. His hand opens a bit, then closes again. It's a warm, familiar sort of motion, a firming of his grip.
She's never been inside his apartment. She doesn't know if he plays instruments, if he has any hobbies or crafts, if he works out there. In truth, they know so little about each other. She took him to her place. He saw how tiny it was, how bright, how everything had its place. He's taken her to his retreat now,
which in a way is far more private than his home.
"You have a way with words," he says, wry. "But thank you for saying that, too."
And he's quiet a while. The lake, driven by the wind, laps at the shore. That same wind sifts through the trees. Pine needles spiral down around them. Dane looks out over the lake, watching the sky change colors behind the hills. He holds her hand.
Eventually, he turns to her again. He smiles a little, and it's a little truer than those sad, lopsided expressions of his. "Do you want to see the inside?" he asks.
eileenHis hand flexes and she smiles. She aches, too. She thinks of what he said last time, getting out of his car at his building: maybe next time she could come up after a 'mission'. Have coffee or something. See where he lives. But no, they skip that: he asks her to come to his cabin by a lake in Minnesota during one summer weekend, this woman he's met all of... three times now. This woman he wants. This woman who wants him. And she'd be lying if she said that didn't make her ache, too. Didn't make her a little confused and a little sad.
Maybe he is selfish. She squeezes his hand back, though, and she keeps her promise. They watch the sky grow darker and darker, watch more stars come out to reflect against the water. Eileen sighs softly, at some point, and lets herself fall back, lying down on the ground and looking up at the moon, the sky, the way it wheels overhead if she lets her eyes lose focus. Her hand still holds Dane's, though.
She thinks of ancient witches and their flying. Not adepts or masters of forces. She knows. They were Verbena and Cultists, mostly, the ones who knew other ways of flight. Metaphors. Dreamspeakers and other spirit mages and their projections. Magi who could enter each other's dreams. Dane's warm hand in hers is an anchor point, like those the masters of time use to bring themselves back when they fling themselves forward, backward, into other timestreams.
Later on, he smiles down at her, back at her, and his voice draws her back a little. She looks at him, the stars reflected in her grey eyes just as they are in the water, and there is a haze in them that seems almost drugged, though he knows she hasn't been on anything detectable these past ten hours. She gives a slow nod.
"We should play with magic," she murmurs, too. "Light as a feather, stiff as a board." A lopsided smile of her own, lazy and amused.
DaneIt's as though she can grow intoxicated off of simple sensation, Dane thinks. As though nothing more than the experience of being here, being under this sky, on this falling night, is enough to transport her. Briefly and searingly, he thinks of that almost-erotic sigh she gave the first time she took the wheel in his Audi. He thinks - oh, forbidden - of how far she could go, how deep her pleasure could take her, if they were to
spend the night together, the way they both, quite honestly, rather want to.
But she's right in this, too: the time is not right. Not for him, not here. It would be a form of escape. He wouldn't be going with her so much as he would be going away from everything else: this place and its memories, all the open wounds here that he wants to at least start to heal over. And then he really would be selfish, really would be using her, and
he doesn't want to do that.
So: she recites words he barely remembers from childhood. His grin is sudden and quirky. Instead of pulling her to her feet, he flops back in the grass with her instead. With their hands still linked he reaches toward the sky. She can feel the magic under his skin, like electricity, before it ever takes shape.
Points of light coalesce against the deepening twilight sky. Like so many motes of starfire, tiny orbiting specks of brilliance pull together from the air. Dane's hand - and Eileen's - comes to rest on his stomach. He too watches, as though he's not even directing this consciously anymore. Fiercely, luminously blue as the heart of a fusion reactor, Dane's tiny creations form patterns and whorls, jags, spirals. They dance. They spin. They cast their light down over Dane and Eileen, illuminating them in shifting, diaphanous hues.
When at last Dane gives an exhale different from the rest,
they spill out of the air, burn against fabric and grass with no heat, only light; wink out, one by one. Left in the stillness and the darkness, Dane breathes quietly, saying nothing now.
eileenShe can. She does. He looks at her and she looks like she's crossed some boundary. Her state is altered without a touch of alcohol -- the Southern Comfort, all two mouthfuls of it, burned off hours ago -- or drugs of some kind. It's the long time between the last time she saw him and now. It's the endless drive. It's wind on her ankles as he drove. It's the music they listened to. It's this cabin, and its history in him, and it's the lake and the grass, the crickets, the stars. Most of all, though, it's everything in her that awakens when she's with him. She doesn't go looking for it. And she knows that truths forseen are not always truths but truths felt, truths happening now, are pure in a way no blood, no coin, no god is pure.
Dane does not want to use her. Oh, that purity and that hopefulness and that indulgence tempts him, and in a way he needs it, craves it, but he doesn't want to use her. But here's the twist: she withholds, she promises, she does not press, because if he crossed that line he's drawn for himself it would degrade him. Right or wrong or sane or not, she can't judge. But it would degrade him, make him brittle, and if she cannot heal anything, cannot stop him from further or greater regret, she can at least try to keep her thumbprint off of his pain. She knows that grief can be as great a passion as anything else. If she took that from him, changed it, bent it to her will somehow,
may she be as one torn by wild dogs. Cast out into shadow and weeping alone. So may it be.
That lopsided, lazy smile, though: slumber party magic. Though with them it isn't levitation or ouija boards. It's real magic. It's something true, something wilder. Dane says nothing. He flops back into the grass with her, beside her, and draws her hand with his as he begins to gather something in himself. Energy cannot be created or destroyed, only translated. Only grown, or diminished, or changed. But there is energy everywhere: every breath they take, every beat of their hearts. It's in the wind and it's in the core of the earth. It's in the breathtaking speed of the earth's spin and orbit. It's in the sun that has not gone anywhere but merely moved above and around them.
She feels all that. The raw force and power of creation, translated by Dane's obliterating, wrathful, inconsolable touch. She wonders if there was ever anything else to his magic. If maybe, once upon a time, the taste of his working was different in the mouth, under the skin. She feels fire burning up from below, the core of the earth starting to unfurl, overheat, take everything, eat stone, carve through soil, burst hungrily through the crust, but it becomes this. All that anger, all that grief, all that ecstasy of pain, moves through Dane's body and through his fingertips and becomes
starlight.
Eileen makes a soft sound that is almost pained, aching with joy or pleasure or one thing that is both of those. She feels the longing to weep, her hand still held in his, as he translates the energy he senses into a new form. Something gentle. Something lovely. Something almost tender. She thinks of his daughter, of his wife, and she grieves for them, oh
she feels it as deep as anything she's ever felt,
twining together with her own longing, her own lust, her own protection, her own wonder at the sight of this. The tears do come, rolling down the sides of her face and leaving shining trails of wet silver on her cheeks. Her hand is limp against his stomach, though still tangled with his hand, fingers laced together. She watches the stars, the bits of blue fire, birthed from ...everything that is already there and Dane's own will. Her free hand floats upward and she moves her fingertips with them, never touching, never intersecting, but
dancing with them.
Her hand slowly lowers as they begin to fade out, fall toward the two of them, dying their natural deaths, returning to whence they came. Energy dissipates back into other forms. Eileen rests her left hand on her stomach, her right hand still held in Dane's against his body. There are still tears on her face, in her ears now, and she sniffs. It's the first indication he has, watching above them, that she's been crying.
DaneTo be truthful, Dane had intended only something not too far from a parlor trick. A pretty little diversion, is all. But when he pulls that magic from his mind, casts it all aglitter into the air, he finds it transformed. By this place, its history, his grief -- and, most astonishingly, by a gentleness and a tenderness he wasn't even sure still existed inside himself.
They both watch the tiny motes of light dance. He watches her fingers move with them, sometimes silhouetted against their effervescence, sometimes lit. And when it's over, when those points of borrowed brilliance dissipate back into the night, Dane feels...
lighter somehow. Calmer.
He turns his head, grass tickling his ear, as he hears Eileen sniff. He doesn't ask her why. He doesn't beg her to stop. He looks at her for a moment, and then he reaches gently over with his right hand. His thumb grazes moisture from her cheek. He leans over her,
and this is as natural, as gentle, as light born out of darkness, light fading back to the night:
he kisses her, softly, without insistence or escalation.
eileenWhen he sees that she's been crying, Dane doesn't ask Eileen to stop. And this time, when he kisses her, she doesn't beg him not to.
There are many reasons for the tears themselves, and perhaps he understands that some of them are merely for beauty. For sheer joy. There is grief there, and not all of it is grief shared, absorbed, reflected. She is more than a mirror. She is warmer, softer than that, she bleeds like anyone.
Her eyes close as his thumb moves on her cheek, sniffing again and keeping her eyes closed for a moment. She can still feel light against her eyelids, til a shadow crosses between her and them. A warm shadow. She can feel where Dane is moving as though she were watching him, senses him so intimately she may as well be touching him, but
only their hands are laced.
He kisses her, as soft and light as the only other time. There's no hesitation to him, nor any in her. Her lips move, but only in welcome. There is nothing further to it, no press, no invitation. It is like the way they hold hands, a stillness and closeness. Eileen's eyes open again while they're still touching, reflecting the starlight that needs no magic.
DaneDane's eyes stay closed longer than Eileen's. But then, that shouldn't surprise anyone. Of the two of them, she's far more in tune with her senses. She's far more attuned to the world at large. Sometimes he feels the world shift under his feet as she opens those senses to their fullest limits - perceives in ways he can't even understand. The flow of time. The warp and weft of dreams, thoughts. The pulse of decay. The symphonies of true creation.
Eventually the kiss ends. Their lips are still touching. And then he draws a breath, and he opens his eyes, settling back a few inches. His hand comes to her face, touches her hair. He smiles a little bit, wistful, warmed.
The grass cushions him as he lays in it. True stars are coming out now. The night won't be long, though. Not this far north. Not this close to summer. He knows sunrise is breathtaking over this lake. He knows this tiny lake is breathtaking no matter the day, the hour, the weather. He's glad she's here. He wants her to see it; share in it. He wants to share in her appreciation of these things.
A very long time later, whispering: "We should go inside. We'll get bitten by mosquitos out here."
Fishing.
She'd be lying if she said that she didn't want to be here right now, doing exactly this. Lying on her back on cool grass over earth that's still sun-warmed, with this man in particular leaning over her, shadowing her, kissing her just like he did. She's a little far gone from it: the starfire he made, the lake itself, the things he shared and the way he let her hold his hand when she told him that no, she wasn't going to leave.
And she does want it, so much, that it's hard not to reach for him. Stroke her fingers between his own digits so lightly that he shudders. Massage his scalp, watch his eyes close and roll back a little from some animal pleasure in the contact. Find out, finally, which spot on his neck is the spot, and how he reacts when she kisses it. Eileen exhales slowly when he draws back, their eyes watching each other.
Hers falter closed for a moment as he touches her hair, open again slowly.
As he lays back, she shifts a little closer to him on the ground, still holding his hand, looking upward. She shivers as the air, losing sunlight, grows rapidly cooler, but she doesn't ask to go inside and she doesn't tempt him or herself or fate by curling closer to his side and seeing how much of his body heat he'll let her take if she makes it rise. She says quietly, during that span of time,
"The only thing, right now, that makes me wish I were more powerful is... so that I could share what I see. With you."
But there's nothing to say to that, really. So they lie together, watching stars come out, every one of them on fire, burning, consuming. Centers of creation. Givers of light. Every one of them with the potential to wipe out all life for light years upon light years. And then, the night growing colder and the sky growing darker until night-flying birds of prey zip across the treeline in search of food scrambling below, Dane tells her they should go in.
She smiles. He can see her a bit in the moon- and star-light, see how her eyes close with pleasure as she smiles. She looks over him then, head turned on the grass, smiling, smiling. "Are you hungry?"
A beat. "Did we bring any food?"
DaneDane says nothing to that wish-upon-a-star, but he smiles. And she's smiling, too. Smiling, smiling as she turns to him, their heads and bodies cushioned in the wildgrass, and then she says
what she says
and his smile falters. There's a flickering in his eyes. He sits up. "Shit."
eileenEileen, perhaps true to form, bursts out laughing. It breaks something that is ready to be broken, though, and even if she's still holding her hand, the weight of what is and is not between them is lessened a little by the sound. She thinks this is hilarious. They forgot to bring food. She brought a bikini, she made sure to buy booze, but neither she nor Dane -- who one would think would be the planner, the thinker, the practical one -- remembered that they might want to eat something other than fish. Plain fish, no salt or pepper or lemon or the like.
She sits up after him, using his arm as leverage if need be, and though it flashes into her mind to climb onto him, straddle him, take his face in both her hands and kiss him fully, drenchingly, perhaps that would be too far. She gives him a hug, instead, wrapping her arms around him from the side and squeezing him, then climbing to her feet, bare as they were before, taking his hand to drag him upward.
"It's fine. There was a general store way back. Maybe twenty, thirty minutes, but if we go fast it'll still be open. Oh, I'm never letting you live this down. I'm so not."
DaneIt's hard to stay dismayed when Eileen bursts into peals of laughter at that, when she wraps those thin warm arms of hers around him and squeezes him. Dane rocks with the gentle impact, bringing a hand up to cup over her forearm. He laughs, too - at himself, mostly, but also for the joy of it.
That's a rare thing, for him. Joy. Simplicity.
"Let's go," he says, taking her hand again. There's grass stuck to the back of his shirt, when he dusts off the best he can. "You wanna drive this time?"
eileen"Yes, because I want to drive quickly and not hit any deer," she says, already heading back to the car, leaving the grass on the back of her shirt, leaving it in her hair. And he can feel it building. She said they should play with magic but it turned, with one breath of his lungs, into something else that is,
that isn't,
playing. But now Eileen is playing. She can't share it with him. She can't touch his mind or his dreams and open his eyes to the way she sees the world when she uses her magic, even if it's beyond his own ability to understand or learn. There are other things she would do, if she could touch minds like that, but there are dangers to that kind of power. Punishment wheels. Pleasure loops. It isn't just time magic that makes Cultists lose hold of themselves.
The car is unlocked. There really was no reason to lock it when they got out. Eileen has no idea where the nearest other-cabin is, where the nearest people are. It's warm enough now that people are going to their lakeside houses and vacation homes on weekends, but it's still cold enough after dark that if anyone is in a ten-mile radius, they're indoors now.
Eileen hops in the driver's seat and starts the Audi up. She leans over while the engine is starting to purr, grabbing her flipflops from the passenger side and wiggling into them even though driving in flip flops is hardly better than driving barefoot. She's taking her time with the magic. Dane, unlike most Hermetics, uses subtle foci if he uses them at all. No waving of a wand, no chanting in Enochian. Eileen is still very tied to hers. She needs boosts, kicks, help to make sense of things.
The thing is, though, she's a Cultist. Most of her foci involve emotion. Raw passion. It can't be manufactured and so she uses what is already there. What's there now is joy and grief and absolutely life-destroying lust. What's there now are a hundred other small emotions, and a couple more vibrant ones, and she doesn't have to go looking for them. She can't think of a way to tell Dane that he inspires so many of them. Magic is easy when she's around him.
There are traces of vertigo in Eileen's magic, true enough, but that isn't the strongest sensation. The smell of grass assaults Dane til it feels like it's growing right inside of his nostrils. There is, suddenly, a lingering sense of touch in his hand where it was linked so long with Eileen's, phantom fingers laced with his. His skin is hypersensitive to his clothing, to the leather seats, his eyes blurring with the light and darkness and their conflict. The music, though very soft now, throbs in his mind. Eileen's magic is a wild, overpowering thing, though truth be told it's only a novice mage who would be distracted enough by it to falter. Dane is an adept.
Eileen, when she works, does not feel like an apprentice. Or an initiate. And maybe it's just now, without a mission on the way or a mansion looming ahead, and maybe it's because it's the third time and it's finally becoming clear, but Eileen is not a novice. Maybe her avatar is stronger than anyone of her level, and that's why they let her run around with disciples and adepts doing missions for the chantry, but this much is true:
the magic she does may be delicate and sensorial, but the wallop behind it is like Thor's hammer.
The Audi whips around, guns forward, and takes off, all but sailing across the road. Eileen whoops aloud, alternately slowing and speeding up again. They often miss animals within seconds, bright eyes shining in the darkness in the rearview. When they turn, she takes it on rails. And Eileen is jabbering, asking questions:
"Do you have electricity? I never asked any of this. Running water? Oh, we have to get toilet paper. If there's a fridge or icebox we can get ice cream, Thomas. Are you writing any of this down? We need salt and pepper and a lemon and -- oh, maybe a knife and a cutting board if you don't have them there, we should have gone inside to make a list but then we wouldn't have been stargazing all that time. Oh, you should get my phone out of my bag back there and see your icon on my contact list, but I'm going to change it now. You're not a grumpy fire imp."
DaneWhat is resonance, anyhow? That undefinable personal touch on magic; that unique signature of every mage on his or her own will-working. All that, yes, but perhaps also - a reflection of the mage's personality and outlook; a mage's way of seeing the world. A small slice of her paradigm made tangible.
Every time Eileen casts, Dane wonders if this is how she feels all the time. So aware, so attuned. He wonders how it's possible to exist like this. To feel so much, and not simply... rupture.
He hangs on to the grab-bar as they take off. He is relatively relaxed. He trusts her. There's a strange thought, but true: he trusts her. Dane has not trusted anyone, either, for quite some time.
And they whip down those backcountry roads, scattering night-creatures, hugging the curves. Eileen chatters. Dane listens; he picks and chooses as he always does, because he suspects if he answered every one of her comments she'd only throw another dozen out for every answer he gave. It would be multiplicative. It wouldn't ever end! He laughs --
"Grumpy fire imp?"
But he doesn't look just now. Maybe he thinks he'll get motion sickness. Not impossible, that: the way she drives, the way her magic feels. So wild, so rampant, so lush. It's getting hard for him not to think of her erotically; he rubs his face for a moment.
"There's no electricity. There are kerosene lamps and a wood stove. It's all very old-fashioned. There's running water, but you have to pump it yourself. It's rather fun, actually. And -- there's no refrigerator, obviously, but I think there's a big cooler in there. We can buy some bags of ice. There should be utensils, though."
eileenDane can barely grasp that Prime is a sphere that exists, much less one he could learn to grasp. It's an esoteric art, really, and some say the core of magic itself. Eileen is a student of Prime. She's a student of all magics, but she would say that in many ways, one's resonance is the fingerprint of their soul. It's a piece of who you are. And what does it mean when you meet a mage whose magic feels like a hurricane, or one like Wentworth who is reminscent of the deep pressure of unfathomable oceans? What does it mean that Eileen's magic is sensory overload, or if the working of another makes you feel like you're falling endlessly off a cliff,
what does it say about Dane's soul that when he works, it feels like a raw howling of agony? What does it mean when a mage's resonance shifts, altering over time?
She knows magi who can perform a spell to infuse an object with a taste of their own resonance. These things are priceless, are dangerous. Held in hand or broken apart or used somehow in a rite, they can stab right at the pattern of the magi they are linked to. Eileen knows this because she has seen it happen. She has been a part of those rites. She has felt the backlash screaming through her skull as a very pattern was altered. Or ravaged.
That isn't what's going on right now, though. She whoops. She drives like a demon, hand on the gear shift, both of them buckled in and it's a good thing because she knows where the nearest general store is but not where the nearest hospital is and neither of them are life mages though she's pretty sure Dane could stop both of them flying through a windshield if he moved quick enough even if the Paradox to come after would be nearly as brutal as the car wreck itself but hey, priorities.
She knows, without asking him, without it being a topic of conversation ever, that if they were to get in a wreck like that, he'd still stop them. Both of them. Because the backlash might wreak just as much havoc on his body and mind, but
not hers.
So there's trust, for you.
"Grumpy fire imp," she confirms, "but I'm going to change it to a star. Not like a five-pointed or six-pointed or eight-pointed or a pictogram or anything, I mean like a star." She smiles. "Maybe Sirius. It has a little white dwarf star for a buddy."
She means her.
They go on making their list, and Dane tells her a bit more about the 'amenities' of the cabin, while she drives. Eileen reaches the general store that is twenty-thirty minutes away in exactly seventeen. It isn't much, but it caters to the people who pass through here going camping or going to cabins. There is firewood for sale, so they buy a couple of bundles. There is kerosene. Toilet paper. Basic foodstuffs and picnic supplies. Eileen has grass in her hair and dirt on her feet -- which are bare again -- and Dane definitely looks a little old for her, but the woman behind the counter with the blue smock doesn't seem to mind. Eileen's smile. The fact that, mercifully, Eileen dropped her magic before going inside. They don't have to rush on the drive back.
She is not a good grocery shopping companion. "Ooh!" she exclaims, opening a cooler door. "Ice cream!" She has three flavors -- thankfully all pints -- picked out before Dane reminds her that they aren't going to be at the cabin that long, so she reluctantly puts back the vanilla and keeps the rainbow sherbet and mint chocolate chip. She gets a little disposable camera even though she has a camera on her phone. She gets marshmallows and chocolate and graham crackers and skewers. She buys a book of puzzles and a pen that has a clear plastic top with 'water' and 'turtles' floating inside, with a completely out of place Greetings from Minnesota! on the side. They get batteries for the flashlight that Dane insists he has at the cabin.
Dane buys food. And practical items. And a pair of bananas, when Eileen plucks it from a basket at the counter and plops it on top of the rest. She beams at him. "Bananas are good," she tells him.
Doreen, behind the counter, agrees with Eileen on that one.
They make it back out to the car with a few bags of groceries and necessities at this point. There's ice and wood and kerosene in the trunk, salt and pepper and a rather puny lemon and some eggs and bacon and coffee and instant rice and butter and so on and so forth in bags in the back seat along with his duffel, her backpack. She says he should drive this time.
Because now he sees why she bought a box of plastic spoons even though he said there are utensils in the cabin: she pops open the sherbet and goes at it right there in the passenger seat, looking quite pleased with life. They don't need to drive as fast to get back to the cabin. Eileen seems content to have ice cream for dinner tonight, since they won't be having fish. She hums.
It's full night when they get back to the cabin. For city dwellers, it's still early. If this were a Friday night in Chicago, Eileen would not be anywhere resembling a 'home', most likely. She is, though. She keeps walking around barefoot, easily sidestepping things that could hurt her, which is a brilliant metaphor for the way she seems to go through life.
The word here is 'seems'.
But they carry things inside, and Dane gets one of the lamps lit and working, hung from its hook on a rafter. Ice rattles as it's poured into the icechest, ice cream containers wedged carefully inside, wrapped in plastic bags so the paper containers don't fall apart. Things that need to be refrigerated are settled in and the icebox closed to keep the chill inside. Then, the practical bit done, Eileen looks around.
DaneOften, Dane smiles like he's smiling in spite of himself. In spite of the Very Serious, Grumpy, Brooding Hermetic that he is. It's another one of those smiles when Eileen muses on fire imps, on stars,
on Sirius and its little dwarf star buddy.
"Or you could just take a picture of me," he says, all reasonable. "You could even orbit me if you really want to."
At the general store, Eileen seems to busy herself getting everything except what they need. At least that's what he says to her, gently teasing, as they get to the register. He has a can of kerosene in his hand. He has two bundles of firewood at his feet. He has toilet paper, and paper towels, and bug spray, and a variety-pack of Campbell's soup. Two frozen pizzas. A head of lettuce from the tiny grocery section in the back. Eggs and bacon for breakfast. A loaf of bread.
She has ice cream, s'mores ingredients, puzzles, and memorabilia. He smirks at her selections. They get up to the counter and Doreen wonders a little at their association, thinks he's a little old for her and she's a little young for him, but that chemistry between them certainly isn't just-friends. She doesn't judge. She's seen way worse. She rings them up, Eileen grabs bananas at the last minute, they have so much stuff that it's hard to carry it out to the car. Doreen tells them to wait and runs into the back to get them a big empty shipping box.
On the way back, Dane drives. Eileen starts eating her ice cream immediately. "Save some room for pizza and soup," Dane cautions. She hums.
It's quite dark when they get back to the cabin. Dane has a tiny penlight on his keychain, which Eileen directs at the door. The cabin is a genuine log cabin, and the door is similarly rough-hewn wood. The lock, however, is incongruously modern, indistinguishable from any front-door lock. When the bolt slides back, Dane puts his shoulder to the door, ramming it once or twice before it abruptly unsticks.
The inside of the cabin smells -- well, not musty or unpleasant, but certainly unused. The scent of wood, rained on, snowed on, sunbaked, windblown. The scent of the earth beneath. There are no light switches to fumble for, so the little penlight is all they have for a while. In the darkness, Eileen can tell they're walking on wood planks; a low, hollow foundation that levers the little cabin a tiny ways above the damp lakeside soil.
Dane finds a pair of kerosene lamps. He fills them from the can and lights them, the match flaring bright between his hands, dancing shadows over his face. The wick is too long -- it sputters and smokes until Dane adjusts it down. Then it burns with a bright, clear light. Next to a modern ceiling light, its luminescence is nothing. However, here in the wilderness, with their eyes adjusted to the dark, it seems surprisingly bright.
In its light Eileen can finally see the rest of the cabin. It is as humble as its exterior suggests. The walls are bare logs; the floor is, as she felt earlier, wood plank. It's a little wider than it is deep, but not by much. The front door faces south, flanked by a window. The glass is double-paned, weatherproof - little nods to the progress of civilization since the 1800s, and all. The east side, which faces the lake, bears three large windows side by side. The south, which faces what must surely be an outhouse, has two wide-spaced windows; and the west, facing the long lonely road that brought them here, just one.
There's a woodstove in the northeast corner, one that would have been considered a luxury on the frontier, but is merely quaint in modern times: wide, dark, squat, and roughly rectangular, with a large door in the front that swings open to turn the stove into a fireplace. Its chimney exits out through the wall behind it. There's a tall-legged table against the back wall, which apparently serves as both kitchen counter and - when pulled away from the wall - a dining table. Two proportionately tall chairs flank it, plus a third, painful one: smaller than the other two, the seat higher, made for a child.
There's a sturdy shelf built into the wall above the kitchen table, which provides some storage space for a knife block, utensils, salt and pepper; some hanging room for a few small pans, a cutting board, and a towel. Beneath the table are the larger pots and pans, heavy-duty and cast iron, as well as an enormous kettle. Between the table and the stove is what passes for a sink. It's a single faucet rising up from the ground, which spills directly back onto a stone-paved, stone-ledged area of the floor. The handle is a pump. Dane wasn't kidding: there's running water, but they'll have to make it run themselves.
There's a big ice chest, which is where the ice and the perishables go. There is - ridiculously - an enormous wooden tub kitty-corner to the sink area. It has its own drain, but apparently is meant to be filled kettle by kettle from the stove. Dane says, smiling, that he can count the number of times anyone's used that on one hand. Next to the tub is a wardrobe, narrow and tall. And then there's the bed, set against the west wall. As sturdy and wooden as the rest of the furniture, it's large enough for two adults, but only barely. There's storage built in underneath. There's also an airbed rolled up in a Coleman bag beside it.
The last time Dane was here, he must have expected to be back relatively soon. The bed is still made. The sheets have not be stripped. There's a bag of flour under the table, surely unusable now.
Dane finds a third lantern and lights them all. He hangs one from the exposed rafters overhead. He puts another on a bedpost, and the third he leaves on the table, which he hauls away from the wall. They don't have much to cook. He empties a can of chicken noodle soup into a pot, sets it on top of the stove. It takes a little while to kindle the fire, but once it's snapping he puts a rack over it and slides a pizza in. Then, while their dinner cooks, he slides one of the drawers under the bed open and hauls out a sheepskin rug. He goes out on the porch to shake it out, then comes back, tosses it on the floor, and drops down.
With the windows and door closed, with the stove burning, it begins to warm up rapidly. Dane yawns, rubbing his face a little.
eileen"I could take a picture of you," Eileen says in the car, shaking her head as she weaves down the road, dirt to asphalt, "but then I couldn't have your icon be a star." Obviously.
"There is no need, only different kinds of desire," is her equally enigmatic and yet equally true statement when he teases her purchases. Ice cream, a special pen, a book of puzzles. He's the one that gets the food. She's the one who marvels at the fact that a wood stove can handle a pizza, as though wood-fired pizza restaurants aren't currently the rage.
He tells her to save room for pizza and soup, and she beams at him. "Save room for ice cream," she counters. Feeds him a bite, if he'll take it.
The lights come on inside the cabin. Well: Dane lights them. They flare and then balance out, and she explores. She doesn't stand and turn in a circle; instantly she's moving, experiencing. Touching. She plays with the water pump as soon as she sees it, laughing aloud as a gush of it splashes out onto the concrete. She climbs into the empty tub and then shrieks, suddenly, launching out of it and all but climbing onto Dane's head because she thinks she felt a spider. Or possibly a snake. She didn't stick around long enough to find out.
Mercifully, she doesn't mention or ask about or touch the chair, the third chair, the child's chair. His daughter's chair. She does not know what to make of it; she knows that an almost universal symbol for loss is an empty chair at the table. She wonders what it will be like, eating at that table across from him, that empty chair sitting there, lonesome and mournful, a howling memory.
But she bounds over the bed, setting one foot on the mattress and ducking her head as she leaps over it, flops her belly on it, peers under it. She sneezes repeatedly -- seven times in a row -- when she disturbs enough dust to strike the reaction off. She looks out of every. Single. Window. She stops at one windowsill and looks back at him, smiling softly, and the other thing she's not mentioning is the bed, and the airbed, and the fact that the bed is made. She shakes out the linens, the bedcover, the sheets, the pillowcases, getting rid of who knows how much dust, while he starts a fire in the woodstove. It adds to the light, to the warmth.
Eileen washes her feet and her hands at the water pump, shivering at how cold it is on her feet. She sits not in a chair but atop the table, legs dangling down, while he opens a can of soup and puts a pizza on a stone to put above the fire. All the while she watches him, smiling, swinging her legs, and watches him with head tilted as he goes to find the rug. "Ooh," she says, as it's shaken out and laid down. He flops down. The soup simmers. He yawns.
She just watches him. Takes the wooden spoon and stirs the soup a little, moves the pan a bit off the heat so it won't boil and stick.
A little while later, her feet touch bare and silent to the plank floors. She crosses over to him, skin and leather and white cotton and dark hair, and kneels next to him on the rug. Sitting on her heels, Eileen reaches over and touches his hair. Just lightly, fingertips to his scalp, stroking it though it's shorn short, watching him.
Two, three times. And again. And again. Slowly, while the warmth and darkness and faint buzz of the kerosene lamps makes him drowsy, she strokes his head.
"Is it helping?" she whispers, after awhile, not meaning the touch of her hand.
DaneIt's a little like the night he went up to her place, really. She comes closer and he looks straight ahead, suddenly and absurdly wary. He isn't sure what she's going to do. He knows she won't push, she won't come on to him, she said so, but
he's not sure what he's going to do.
Then she kneels beside him. She reaches out to him, and he closes his eyes. He keeps his hair short. It wasn't always, but that's how he wears it now. The individual strands deflect under her fingers, creating a rippling gleam of light. His eyes open again when she speaks, and he turns to look at her.
"Yes," he murmurs. "I think so. What happened outside helped me come in here. And being in here helps me ... remember what I liked about this place."
Wood pops and cracks in the stove. He's left the door open. It'll take longer to cook their pizza, but he likes the light, and he likes the heat. He likes the sound of the fire, which reminds him of camping. This is a little like camping, he thinks.
"I really do like this place," he adds a moment later, sighing.
eileenIt's not like when he leaned over her and kissed her. He tenses, like he did when she stripped naked or when she dropped her towel to go get dressed. Like he did when she said she was horny in his car on their way to Wentworth's mansion. She did promise him that she wouldn't touch him, push him again, til he showed her he wanted something else than what he'd said.
So: he's not sure what he's going to do. He can't, really, be sure of her, either. As tender as she is, she's still an object of chaos in some respects. She is her own little universe of liberation, of freedom, of desire and pleasure and joy and pain. He can't be sure how he'll respond to that, even if he trusts her to control herself.
Trust. There it is again.
Eileen strokes him. She caresses him as gently as one would a pet, or a lover, or a child. She watches the light against the hairs. He's so much fairer than she is. His skin is more tan; hers is still rather light. When she tans it will be more olive than gold. She imagines she can see rainbows in the almost-metallic light flung back at her every time his hairs rebound from her passing fingertips. She doesn't lie down beside him, at least not yet. The sheepskin tickles his ears, softer than the grass. Cushions her knees.
"Tell me," she murmurs. "What you like about this place."
She bends her head and kisses his brow, and for a moment her long hair swings down and covers him, cocoons him, smelling distantly of her (coconut) shampoo and more recently of the grass outside, then drawing back.
DaneAgain his eyes fall closed. She leans over him, and this time instead of worrying, instead of wondering what she'll do or what he'll do or what he might want to do, Dane simply lets himself ... enjoy it. Her hair falls over him. Its ends are cool on his cheek, cool on his neck. Her lips are warm on his forehead. He's eight or ten years older than her, but in this moment he feels younger; she feels ageless. There is such wisdom in her, he thinks, such wild and unbounded magic.
In another age, before the Traditions were forced to unite, before they had to band together against the crushing encroachment of a cold, suffocating reality, they might have been enemies. His people were warlocks: symbols and black tomes, magic wrought out of raw power, reality forced to their will. Hers were -- well. The Catholic church would have called them witches. Temptresses, shockingly indecent in their sheer indulgence of all things carnal and otherwise. But sages, also. Wise and patient even in their impatience. Attuned to the ebb and flow of the eons. They would not have gotten along. They didn't, when they first met. Their Traditions still don't.
But they do. Dane lets her kiss his brow, and as she draws back his eyes open and he smiles at her.
"I like that you're here with me," he says. It's such naked honesty that he surprises himself. This is the third time they've ever met. It feels like it's been longer. His eyes move about the room, then - the rafters, the darker spaces of the ceiling, the dancing shadows on the walls. "I like the quiet. I like the peace. I like the simplicity of it. I like pretending I live in the 19th century," he laughs a little, and then grows serious: "I like that it reminds me of better times."
A pause. Then:
"I like that ... I feel like things could be good again, when I'm here. With you."
eileenWhat she might do, what he might do, what he'll want to do so badly it stings,
melt. There's only this, and this is her mouth coming to rest softly for a moment on his forehead, fingertips stroking his hair and skin, like she is taking care of him after a fever. During a fever. Eileen can't read his mind. She thinks only of the way the firelight hits his hair, the starfire he created earlier, his breathing, the feel of his skin to her lips. Now is now. Now is all there really is, in the end.
He likes it here and he likes that she is with him here. Eileen smiles back at him, smiles at that vulnerable truth. He looks at all the differences in light in the room, then back to her, as bright as any kerosene lamp and just as dark as a shadow.
"There's no time any better or worse than now," she murmurs to him, more reassuring than corrective. There's a pause, there.
"But now seems like a very nice now," she adds, thoughtful.
DaneDane's smile falters a little at that. "It's harder to believe that," he says softly, "when I've seen some very bad Nows."
He reaches up, then. He tucks a strand of her hair behind her ear - a meaningless, gentle gesture. It occurs to him that that strange familiarity extends even to the way he acts around her. His wordless language toward her.
"How do keep believing that?" he asks. "Even in the face of all the pain and horror? Surely you must have seen your share."
eileenHis smile falters and hers does too, because she thought he might say that, might believe that. Except it isn't a denial: it's just hard to believe. The weight of too much passion can be crushing; she knows that. And it isn't just the horrific ones that can turn into stone coffins. She knows Cultists locked into one now, forever, by lust or joy, and they may as well have died. Given up.
The gesture -- meaningless, as if that's possible now -- makes her ache a little, sweetly though. She closes her eyes a moment, tips her cheek into his palm, but she doesn't open her mouth to catch his finger as it retreats, she doesn't make the gentleness something else. She just accepts it, welcomes it, warms to it. Her eyes open down to him.
Pain. Horror. Her share. As though everyone gets a slice.
Eileen gives a small nod: one, two. She has seen. No --
she's felt.
But that isn't what he's asking. He asks her how she keeps believing that -- that all these Nows are no better or worse than the other. And it would be easy to tell him, with all the pain that can come with living their sort of life, that she keeps believing it because she has to. Except that isn't real belief. That isn't real joy. That isn't real peace.
Eileen is whispering now: "How do we make magic?" she asks him, and it's a rhetorical question, only meant to get him thinking, turn his mind in the direction she's looking, as though he's standing at a telescope. "Think of what we're actually doing. We think of the world we want to see, the thing we want to do, and achieve the impossible through sheer force of will. You make miniature stars in the palm of your hand. I drive ninety miles an hour without so much as hitting a pothole.
"Why?" she whispers, smoothing his hair under her palm now, and they are not kissing, not caressing each other but this is so intimate, so close, that they look like the lovers they aren't.
"We want something badly enough to prove that the laws of physics and nature are barely more than suggestions. We want. We choose: fire from our fingertips. Eyes that can see more clearly and more deeply than an MRI. Non-linear time. Lead into gold." Eileen gives a small shake of her head. "Choosing peace, or joy, or acceptance of the moment, is no more complicated than any of that. If you have the will."
There's an iron glint in her eyes, on those last words. Strength, there.
Dane"You believe it because you choose to believe it." Dane's smile comes; then it goes. "I don't think I could do that. I can't ... bring myself to believe something I can't see, or feel, or taste. Especially when I see and feel and taste so much to the contrary."
He folds his hands over his stomach. He looks out the window beyond his feet for a moment. Then to the oven, where the cheese on their pizza is melting. He can smell food: their soup and their pizza. He thinks he has a filter pitcher somewhere. They should boil some water too, he thinks, so they can at least wash their faces and their hands. He looks back at Eileen.
"It's all right, though. We don't really believe the same things anyway. It doesn't get in the way of what's between us. Does it?"
eileenHer head tips. She shakes it gently. "No," she says simply, when he says she believes it because she chooses to. It isn't quite that. She doesn't stop stroking his hair or resting beside him, though she's moved from kneeling and sitting on her heels to sitting on her side, her hip closer to his shoulder, her thighs beside his head, so neither of them is twisting their neck to see each other.
It's all right. They don't believe the same things anyway. Her eyebrows flick; a faint smile twists at her mouth. It's putting it mildly to say that they see things differently. Eileen doesn't even argue with him when he doesn't quite grasp how she sees things, what she means -- maybe it simply isn't important that he understand. Maybe it isn't even possible for him right now. He says that often: what he can see, what he can't believe. She never really argues.
She does wish she could show him. Share it with him, at least. But it's a selfish thing to want, really.
Then he asks if it gets in the way. Well: asserts. Then asks. And Eileen lifts her eyebrows gently. "It does." She pauses. The movement of her hand doesn't. "It is."
DaneThat makes his brow furrow a bit. And on an inhale Dane is sitting up, his knees bending, his forearms resting over kneecaps.
"How so?"
eileenShe shifts back a little -- not much, only leaning back so that when he sits up he doesn't find himself an inch from her face -- and her brow is furrowed. Truthfully, the pizza should be taken out before it burns. The soup should be taken off the heat before it scorches.
Eileen is wary now, though for the most part it resides under the skin. She remembers their first meeting. Misunderstandings, brusqueness, apologies. It's been so different, since. She doesn't want that again. It already feels like it's deteriorating, and it isn't what she wants. She can believe all she likes that pain and awkwardness and anger and fear and loss and all the rest are no better or worse than lust and peace and affection, but the truth is:
part of what makes them so strong, so sacred, is their inevitability and
their uncertainty
their chaos
and their pain.
She exhales softly, gives a small shake of her head -- a denial, in a way. And a refusal. And a plea. "I don't want to be so different from you tonight, Thomas," she says. "I don't want to be far away from you."
Let me touch your hair.
Let's talk about starlight.
She leans to him, putting her brow on his shoulder, turning her head til her temple rests against it, her eyes facing the center of his chest. "Can we talk about belief systems and separations and withholding... back in Chicago, in daylight, when there's tea or something? And just... be still, tonight?"
DaneSomething in Dane relents, softens, as she simply leans into him. A part of him wonders who he thinks he's fooling, holding himself celibate as a monk when in all other ways they're as close as lovers already. Even Doreen, in those five or ten minutes they spent in her presence, could sense the chemistry between them.
"All right," he says quietly, his voice a vibration in his chest. "Let's be still tonight."
A little later, he disentangles himself from her gently. He goes over to the stove, using a large grilling spatula to slide the pizza out. It's a little overdone, the crust crisped and the cheese very melted, but more than edible. At its smell, Dane's stomach growls.
They have soup, too. One can to share between the two of them is really just a little more than a cup, each, but between the soup and the pizza and the ice cream they have a three-course meal. Dane points this out. Not bad, he says, for a last minute wilderness dinner.
He doesn't pull the table out tonight, after all. It stays against the wall. The chairs stay clustered around it. They eat on the floor, crosslegged on that big sheepskin pelt he probably got from Ikea or Bed Bath and Beyond. He's careful not to spill. And when they're done, only a small wedge of the pizza remains, and Dane is yawning again.
"We'll catch some fish tomorrow," he says. "Eat them seared over the fire with nothing but lemon and maybe a little salt and pepper. Maybe we can find out if that canoe still holds water."
eileenShe's backpedaling. Feeling selfish, wanting things, feeling even some sprinklings of resentment, Eileen rears back and says no, nevermind, no. She leans into him, rests her head to him, tells him without fear or hesitation or circumvention that she wants to be close to him. As if he didn't know. As if they weren't already. She doesn't really expect him to accept it. She thinks he'll push, he'll pry the fight out of her, but he doesn't. He softens to her, like he has ever since the moment he watched her lie down next to Charlie, as loving as if she'd known the man her whole life, and bring him back. Eileen closes her eyes a moment and just rests there against him.
They're still, for a moment.
They have to keep the food from burning, though, and so they separate. Eileen helps, finding spoons and bowls and plates. She pulls a couple of bottles of beer out of the icebox, using a nifty trick involving the edge of the counter and the heel of her hand to knock the caps off. It's a wheat beer, sweet and mellow and light on the tongue. It tastes like summer.
A three-course meal, he says, including the ice cream. She laughs. Neither of them even make a move toward the table, though, with its three forlorn chairs. They go to the rug again and eat there. Dane is careful not to spill. Eileen lays out on her side and eats from her plate and bowl, less careful but not less tidy in the end. She doesn't eat a whole lot, which isn't surprising since she already had ice cream and is petite to start out with. She watches Dane finish his last slice and smiles drowsily, her head propped up on her hand, elbow buried in the sheepskin.
"You can catch some fish tomorrow," she corrects. "I am going to get a tan."
DaneThat was the moment. That moment when she laid out beside Charlie, who was so broken and so far gone that the only magic he could bear to work was to simply will himself dead, and brought him back. Up until then Dane had treated her as little more than a tagalong; an inexperienced, over-talkative, largely useless mage that the Council had for whatever reason saddled him with. He told her how it would go. He was a little taken aback, and perhaps more than a little condescending, when she voiced her views. And then
this little Cultist, this girl whose magic feels so chaotic and disorganized it's a wonder it can even take effect
did what he could never in a million years do. She brought back the dead. She healed damage to the soul. She touched Charlie - and Dane - so deeply and unexpectedly that there was hope again in that squalid little room with its twisted, monstrous plants.
They drink beers with their pizza. The soup is an odd appetizer, but it works. The ice cream is a perfect dessert. They talk about fish and tans and
neither of them mention that she felt selfish and resentful for a moment. Neither of them mention that Dane is, in fact, being selfish himself. Bringing her here. Taking what he needs from ... being here, or being here with her, or simply her. Going no further because the way he sees the world, the way he understands himself, won't allow it.
She's patient with him. Dane thinks, with a twinge of guilt, that perhaps he doesn't deserve it.
"You should at least come out on the boat with me," he says, "if it still floats."
eileenThe moment came later for Eileen. Not some vague sense of attraction or that initial spark, which was just after she saw him and just before he spoke to her for the first time, but the sweet ache that keeps washing over her now: that came later. It wasn't even when she asked him if he wanted to stay at her place. The real tenderness, the feeling she keeps feeling that keeps making her feel so much that it frightens her and is thus even more intoxicating,
also had to do with Charlie. That sick, insane Verbena who is still recovering physically and may never quite recover mentally from what he's been through. Dane saw her compassion with him and it touched him. Later, so much later, he plucked a little plant that shouldn't exist from his very palm and told her -- out of nowhere, when she figured he would have just forgotten about the man -- they could give it to Charlie.
It isn't just that Eileen wants him, or that she feels drawn to him, or that she wants to make him feel good, or any of the things that have been cascading through her since she stepped into her hall and asked if he wanted to stay right where he was in her bright, tiny, warm, cheerful little apartment. It's this other, more powerful thing, which confuses and scares her as much as it exhilarates her.
It's what makes her forgive him because he is, in fact, using her a little by bringing her here, especially after so long with barely a word from him. It's why she decides to try and protect him a little, because he isn't sure yet, and ...whatever else it is, that makes him hold himself back.
Eileen's eyebrows perk at him. She smiles. "Oh, I fully intended to tan on the canoe. You'll just have to squish to one end so I can lay out."
Dane"I'll do that," Dane says, a wry promise.
He downs the last of his beer. He's done eating. The pizza is demolished. The soup is gone. The beers they had - one each - are empty or mostly-empty bottles. One of the pints of ice cream is empty, and the other has a good chunk taken out of it. The fire is starting to burn down in the stove, and with it goes a little of their light, a little of their warmth.
"We should sleep," he says quietly. "Do you want the bed?"
eileenThey should sleep. They'll wake early, she thinks, just by nature. She has it by habit, though she has no trouble sleeping in when she's tired. But it's still so early, for city-dwellers, and they're talking of going to bed. It's warm in here but gradually cooling, and in the cool air their bodies will crave rest and warmth and stillness. The sun will be impossible to keep out of this cabin when it rises, glittering off the lake. There will be birds making noise. The fish will be easiest to catch then.
Eileen is lying out on the rug still, rolling onto her back as they talk about the canoe and fishing and tanning, lazy and warm for now against the sheepskin. She has her hands on her belly, her head turning to the side to look at him. He asks if she wants the bed.
"I'll sleep in it if you will," she says, and he knows it isn't a seduction, it isn't her trying to press him to a corner, but
it's also the truth. She gives a little shake of her head. "I'll feel bad if you sleep on the air mattress," she admits.
Dane"I wasn't going to sleep on the air mattress," Dane admits. "It was my daughter's. It's rather small. I was just going to sleep on the rug."
eileenA pang goes through her. Now she doesn't want to sleep there, either. She would have. But it's like not eating at the table, where that lonely child's chair sits. Eileen wonders for a moment if being here with someone else is even worse than coming here alone -- for Eileen to sit in a chair that his wife sat in, or sleep in a bed that was his daughter's.
Her brow wrinkles gently. "Well, then that would make me feel even worse," she says, and draws herself up, sitting up. "Just come sleep in the bed with me," she says. "And if you're afraid of like, an erection digging into my back, we can sleep butt to butt or something."
She smiles.
DaneThat shocks a laugh out of Dane, short and startled. He's a little bit old-fashioned. He gets so stilted and formal when he's feeling awkward; he doesn't talk about things like that.
"You shouldn't feel bad," he says, choosing in the end to ignore that topic altogether. "They're not ... sacred things to me, the chair and the airbed. They're just things. They are reminders, it's true, but you wouldn't be desecrating a memory.
"I was actually thinking I would take them back with me. Perhaps donate them."
eileenEileen is smiling. He laughs, and he almost changes color, and she wants to jump on him and tickle him but that's a little bit Romantic Comedy About Best Friends Who One Day Realize THEY ARE IN LOVE so she doesn't. She means what she says, perfectly practical and perfectly willing to lay it out in the open that all slightly more gooshy feelings aside, the two of them just want to fuck, too.
But what he says after makes her brow wrinkle a little, this time more in confusion than ache or anything. She didn't say anything about the bed being his daughter's or the chair, didn't mention the chair at all. It says more, to her, that he saw her frown and heard her say she'd feel bad and
went there himself.
So she shakes her head. "That isn't it," she says, shrugging. "I mean... it does feel weird to me. They're reminders. I'm not worried about 'desecrating' anything, Thomas. I'd feel bad if you slept on the rug because the floor is hard, and you'd get cold, and because I want you to be comfortable and I know that any claims you might put that it's fiiiine are total bullshit, a sheepskin rug is not the same thing as a bed and what are you, a caveman?"
She shakes her head. "And I know they're just things, Thomas. Things have meaning. Things have spirits in them. Ghosts, even if they're not real spirits and they're just shades of what they mean to us. And even if the reminder does nothing to you, it... might, to me."
This last is quieter, the words come less easily. She looks uncomfortable. "I'm not worried about all that very much, Thomas," she adds, soft. "But maybe we could just cut through all the angst and awkwardness and just... go to sleep together."
Dane"I like it when you call me Thomas," he says quietly, and without preamble. "No one calls me Thomas."
Then, putting a hand on the rug, he pushes himself to his feet. "Okay," he says, decided. "We'll share the bed. Let me find a washbasin. I heated up some water so we don't have to freeze, washing up. If you want a bath, though, you'll have to wait until tomorrow. It takes an hour to heat enough water to fill the tub."
eileenEileen tips her head to the side. She looks at him as he says that, her long hair falling as wildly and haphazardly as it ever does. She just smiles at him. No one calls him that but he likes it when she does. No one calls him by his birth name anymore, either, but Wentworth did, and he didn't like that at all but Eileen was frozen in time... at the... time.
"Nah," she says to the bath, accepting: "but I totally do want to take a bath some time before we go back to Chicago. I mean it's an old-fashioned wooden tub. What if I become a master one day? I'll need to know how to take a bath in a wooden tub because I could just end up in the nineteeth century. In a sod house in Oklahoma or something. You never know."
She gets up, and helps him clean up the empty ice cream carton, the last wedge of pizza, the soup bowls. They can be washed tomorrow -- will have to be, since there are limited dishes here -- so for now they're stacked on the table. The fire in the stove is still embers, and they'll have to make sure it won't re-ignite while they sleep and burn down the whole cabin, but for now it provides a few last lingering motes of warmth.
Eileen digs her toothbrush -- it has ladybugs on it -- out of her backpack and a matching cup, nevermind that they have cups here, but this one has ladybugs on it as well. She brushes her teeth quickly and gives her face a quick washing with a washcloth (yes: green. ladybugs on it), since she already washed her feet earlier. There's a brush in her bag as well, though it doesn't have ladybugs on it. Boar bristles, rather. That, she tosses on the bed and gets into her pajamas.
This consists of: unzipping and dropping her skirt, reaching up under her t-shirt to unclasp and Houdini out of her bra, and then hopping onto the mattress. Sitting there in pink panties and a white tee, she pulls her hair to one side and begins brushing it. She doesn't count to one hundred, at least. She just brushes it all out, all the tangles, all the waves from where it was braided earlier. She looks sleepy by the end, tossing her brush on top of her backpack. Her toothbrush sits in its cup by the washbasin with her little washcloth hung over the side to dry; seeing this makes her happy. And drowsy.
The bed is clean enough, most of the dust shaken out of the covers and the like. Right now it doesn't seem to matter that things be perfect or pristine -- Eileen herself might say things never really are. She looks at the bed and looks at Thomas, a glance while he's getting ready for bed as well or tending to the kerosene lamps, then lays down, slipping her bare legs under the sheets and the quilts, keeping to one side of the bed so that he'll have room to lay out.
When he comes to bed with her.
She'd be lying if she said her heart wasn't thumping a little.
DaneHe's over by the stove, banking the fire, closing the door, when she chatters about being a master of time; ending up in the 19th century. He smiles over his shoulder at her, and again when he sees her ladybug toothbrush. And cup. And washcloth.
They stand together at the stone-paved sink. He brushes his teeth vigorously and mechanically, finishing long before she does. He finds a washbasin in the storage cubbies under the bed, and he washes off the dust before filling it with near-boiling water from the stove. Tops it off with cold, feels it to make sure it's all right.
While she washes her face, he gets his pajamas out of his duffle bag, which consists merely of a grey t-shirt and whatever underwear he's wearing under his pants. He pulls out a large jacket, though, and drags one of the chairs over, using it as a nightstand. His phone - turned off to conserve battery - goes on this 'nightstand'. The jacket goes over the back. When she's done washing up he empties the basin and pours out another for himself, scrubbing his face and his arms, the back of his neck.
His towel hangs beside hers. He shows her the outhouse in the back, working the pump until pipes long since run dry with disuse groan with water again. She'll have to fill the reservoir by hand, he says, before every flush. And the septic tank only gets emptied when he calls people to come empty it, which he does every time he leaves.
He changes the sheets, too, every time he leaves. He's like that, or at least he was: thoughtful, forward-planning. He likes the feeling of coming here and having everything more or less ready, too. While Eileen is in the outhouse Dane takes the covers out front again, giving it the same thorough shaking he gave the rug. When she comes back the sheets are smoothed and the comforters are fluffed. It looks cozy.
She slips under the covers. He trims the wicks on the kerosene lamps, extinguishing all but one. That one lamp he sets on a windowsill, close enough to reach easily, far enough not to light anything on fire or glimmer in their eyes too much. It and the last embers of the stove are the last light in the cabin.
He comes to bed in the darkness. The mattress dips as he slides under the covers. It's a nice bed. This cabin is rustic, is roughing it, but the bed most decidedly is not. If Eileen looks up, she can see sky outside the window behind the bed. This far from civilization, the stars are brilliant and innumerable; the milky way is clearly visible. The bowl of the sky itself seems to have its own luminosity -- a deep, deep blue just shy of black.
"Come back, okay?" Dane whispers. And a moment later, elaborating: "If you become a master and go to the nineteenth century, come back."
eileenAll of this delights Eileen. She normally brushes her teeth rapidly too, but Dane is going so quickly that she starts racing him. He wins. Barely. By a hair. A tooth. By mostly ignoring the fact that she's staring at him, wide-eyed, while they brush. The stone-paved sink makes her happy. Watching Dane pour water from a kettle into a basin, like they live in oldytimeytimes, makes her smile. She is laughing through most of the outhouse tutorial, and telling him to hurry, it's cold. It's when they're back inside that she strips down to her 'pajamas'.
And watches him change his shirt. She does this mostly covertly, while brushing her hair, staring at his back. Her phone is god knows where, and she hasn't checked it since they got to Minnesota. Tomorrow she will show him the solar-powered charger she got because it's just so neat.
The sheets are cool on her legs. It's softer than she expected: the linens, the mattress itself. For a moment she closes her eyes, then opens them again slowly as the lights start to go out. What light there is left in the end are faint glows in the pitch-black darkness. The silence is whole and full, in the sense that every noise, every breath, every rustle has meaning and a story behind it. Eileen shivers, partly from the cold air descending rapidly around them, partly from the sounds and lack of sounds and how they weave together.
At first she is lying on her side, her back to him, because she thinks if she faces him while he gets into bed it will seem too much like she's waiting for him, inviting him, and while that's true in every sense she doesn't want him to ...well. How she wants him to feel, and how she wants to not make him feel, has already been gone over.
But when the mattress dips, and Dane is settled, he whispers to her to come back. Her head starts to turn, and then he explains what he means. Eileen turns over. He can barely see her in the dark, a fair face and all that dark hair, really just inches away. The mattress isn't that wide. It's not possible to sleep in it with another person and maintain real distance. It's hard to see her smile, but he knows it's there.
"Oh, Thomas," she whispers, the name boundlessly affectionate. "Don't be dumb. I'd take you with me."
DaneThat makes him laugh, and he doesn't laugh loudly, but the sound seems loud anyway in the silence. It startles him a little, that quickness and ... happiness, he supposes, of that laugh. He grows quiet again.
"I just bet you would," he replies, whispering too. He's reminded of sleepovers as a boy. Camping out on his living room floor with his friends, and maybe as he entered early adolescence with his girl friends, which was a thrilling and not-really-but-still-sorta taboo experience. He remembers staying up too late, whispering to each other. Sneaking to the kitchen when they got hungry. Going to sleep, finally, when the sky outside began to lighten and they realized they could see each other in that uncertain grey light.
He turns his head. He can see her in the flickering firelight. He takes a breath, lets it out, and turns his head forward again.
"Goodnight, Eileen," he whispers.
eileenThey are, by necessity, rather close on this little bed. And she smiles when he laughs, the way she always smiles when she makes him laugh, her eyes lighting up a bit as though his humor simultaneously surprises and delights her. Like it's an unexpected gift, every time. That smile softens, gentling, as he whispers back. She thinks of sleepovers, too. Of lying in a small bed facing someone loved, whispering in the dark.
Sharing laughter. And pains. Secrets.
She would take him with her. Of course she would. He bought this cabin, he likes this place, he likes roughing it and he describes pumping water by hand 'fun'. And the truth is, if Eileen's current standing is any indicator, if she can achieve the warping of time, she'll probably be a master (or close enough) of several other spheres as well. She'd be able to bring him with her. Besides: it would be practical. If she went back to the 1800s she'd probably need someone with a penis around anyway.
Also, someone who can sling fireballs at his enemies is always useful.
Eileen does notice how he's lying there, flat on his back, his hands folded almost primly over his midsection. She sees the way he looks at her, breathes, looks away. And he says goodnight. She smiles a small smile to herself.
Scooting an inch or two closer, Eileen puts her arm lightly over him, her hand on top of his hands. She doesn't snuggle up close, doesn't make him feel her bare legs against his own or her body through that thin shirt of hers, nothing so torturous. She just rests her arm there, closing her eyes.
"Goodnight, Thomas."
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