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nepthys-merenset · 9 days

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AHHHHH I LOVED THIS SO MUCHHHH. beautiful prose & you nailed both of their characters! well done!!!

your faith between my teeth — cainlane

a night, a dawn, and so a different night. ao3

🎧 julia shortreed - taste

The world doesn't die in Rotkov.

It lurches after them like a wounded beast, lugging the guts and gore of all that they've witnessed there. The pursuit is slow but ceaseless on a road laid in blood. It can’t let them go; it will not rest without gagging on their last cuts of sanity.

An abandoned railroad station mercifully swallows them first, housing them in its hushed ribcage, offering them a few swigs of safety, and a tattered blanket of quiet to settle over their shoulders.

Well, it was quiet, Lane thinks sourly, too exhausted to forbid herself this indulgence in petulance.

Night had been washed away like ink, fading without notice, leaving behind a blanched dawn stained by voices of every color. Even the most muted members of the squad argue their case along with the familiar, intense tones of Anna and Noah.

In the end, survival is an individual instinct, and each member had to ensure theirs. Lane's mouth lifts faintly. Does the General know it wouldn't take all that much for his leash to fray?

A tall, muscled woman speaks up, frustration further twisting the scar cleaving the deep brown of her face. ‘We have no way of powering the snowmobiles. Setting off with barely any charge left is suicide.’

A retaliation of ‘We have two injured people with us!’ flung, knocked away by Noah snapping ‘Do you think they give medals for dying ten miles closer to Adam?’

Anna looks up sharply, hand clenched by her side, and Lane sighs inaudibly, falling back into her mind as another bout of squabbling begins anew.

Roused minutes before dawn with a stiff neck and a dull, throbbing ache in her body, Lane has been quietly leaning against a table, haggling with her mind whenever the squad's deliberation went off course. To dissolve every touch stinging like salt on her skin, to send them rippling over her body when moonlight is the only voyeur, to not have them cresting over every moment, eroding the present.

But the material is precious, rarer than a memory untainted by its future, and just as unrelenting. It slithers between the muffled din of the squad, burning fingers tracing her collarbone, the cold of a cross sliding down her neck, so vivid and real she nervously glances at the corner of the room as if his intent eyes are watching her from the writhing shadows.

Her eyes snap back to the squad as Greg rises from where he's been crouched on the floor and squares his shoulders, adopting an unfaltering stance. Though it's a weak specter of the General's vulcanized presence, the squad quietens, their bickering dying to a whisper here and a jab there.

‘Getting stranded without shelter around is riskier. For the injured,’ he swallows, ‘and the rest. The safest option,’ for most, goes unsaid, ‘is sending the coordinates of this station and waiting for the base to get us.’

Calls of protest cut through a fog of relieved sighs, mollified when Greg turns an affable smile on them. ‘Why don't we check out the snowmobiles again if it'll satisfy you?’

The smile cracks when Anna stalks out of the room with a venomous look as goodbye. The tall woman who'd spoken earlier claps him lightly on the shoulder. ‘I'll come with you, let's go.’

Guilt adroitly plastered and painted over in hardly a few seconds, he meets her with a winning grin, draping an arm over her shoulder. ‘Why freeze out there? Imagine the kind of things you can find in these drawers.’

‘Of a station? Get out of here,’ she says, laughing as she pulls away.

Watching them, Lane recalls an old feeling; her first friend, the most loyal of them all, of being wrong. Born too cold, too aloof, too asleep to this world, she could do nothing but peer like a berated child from the back rooms as the rest of them tangoed through life, switching between partners, comfortable in the arms of pain, misery or happiness.

As she'd grown older, she'd managed to snatch a table for herself, watching with shark eyes as her peers stole away into the crowd, dancing and fighting and falling, and she convinced herself it need not matter to a person with ambition like hers.

But someone had come for her, come to her, graceless and inept that she is, holding out a hand with the promise of a turn around the sky itself as their ballroom. Who had seen her among a bevy of buoyant dancers, who had picked her out from a cast of white capes, who had sat by her side, looking ahead as their boots quietly kissed and kissed.

Lane sighs irritably as self-awareness oozes in like rancid oil, blistering under her skin. He can't allow her a single thought without tailing it like a comet.

She pushes herself off the table, intending to find a spot obscured to all but sunlight, when she pauses, eyes snapping up in unison with the squad, as an abrupt thud sounds from the floor above. Hands creep to their sides, relaxing as feathers sweep past rusty walls, an eerie shushing noise echoing with every step.

Wings large enough to brush the walls. Her heart misses a beat. Not Anhea.

She swallows, mortal eyes vainly trying to scatter the dark of the doorway as her heart skips impatiently, zero point eight seconds lavish when he’s not around. A new shadow bolsters the existing gloom. She inhales sharply, lungs taking in the last sips of air before his presence siphons them, only to deflate as the immortal steps inside.

Red is garishly bright in a room abandoned so carelessly.

Lane watches with distaste as Pileon saunters upto Greg, ignoring the squad who visibly shy away from his path. ‘Anhea and I are done with our shift. I hear you're choosing to stay?’

Greg nods. ‘We'll be sending the coordinates after checking on the snowmobiles. Tell Cain to take over patrolling.’

Pileon eyes him disdainfully. ‘Do I have any more duties after an entire night of flying?’

A short, obtrusively muscled man grumbles as he gets to his feet. ‘We spend half our time looking for that angel.’

Cain's deadened eyes, the labyrinth of his mind they invite her into locked and shut, and the exhausted set of his shoulders jostle their way to the front of her mind, and an odd sting of irritation shoots through her, shoving past reason or rationality.

She speaks before she could think. ‘I'll let him know.’

Greg turns to her with a confused smile, pleasantly surprised and vaguely suspicious of her volunteering for a cause that does not concern her. Pileon looks at her with mocking amusement, going as far as to gallantly sweep an arm out.

‘Go on. The prince needs his frog. Or is it the other way around?’

Ears burning in humiliation, Lane does something she wouldn't have dared to under the General's sovereignty, and dismisses herself, wrenching past them without a second look, chased into the shadowed passageway by the demon's knowing gaze.

The further she retreats, the more her shoulders slump, until she pauses, exhaling soundly as the squad's chatter dwindles to a faint buzzing. The relief doesn't last long; on her subsequent inhale, the dust motes from the air transmute into hundreds of moths inside her, fluttering in anxiety, scattering the words she had torn apart and thrown away.

Remember this. Look and don't forget.

She scoffs as she nudges a door open. She hadn't ever forgotten. How does one forget divinity, when it glints through gleaming white feathers and eyes laden with the weight of time? It had simply… faded into the background like the hushing of the sea to a coast dweller. What would be a staggering roaring to the others, terrifying in its unknowable depths, was a quotation hum to her.

But to get used to the sea is a fool's wisdom. His rage crested over them, and she was left blinking through the fear drenching her at the savage aftermath. But maybe the destruction wrought by three pairs of wings and incinerating eyes is not more than what he broke in her, for her to look at a seraph and see a metamorphosis instead: Beautiful. Petrifying. Beautiful.

She peers into yet another ransacked room, reliving last night. Gone. Here. Gone, she'd thought, still as a sacrifice, left at the altar of his hands. Humanity is scant in her, but his fingers were greedy on her skin, leaching what he wanted, and thoughtlessly, callously brimming her with need.

No, what she had forgotten is this: that for all his sins, he is still an angel, and for all of hers, she is only a mortal.

The last door in the hallway springs upon her as if in ambush, cracked open and leaking dark like the waiting maws of a wolf. She's allowed a fortifying breath before it swallows her, and spits her out onto a chessboard of shadows and struggling daylight, with archive boxes, overturned chairs, and her, she supposes, the pawns to the angel lucent and quiescent in the corner of the room.

She makes her move, cautiously stepping around office paraphernalia like a thief in the night, trying to think ahead, not to win, but to challenge, to put up a fight, only to slow and then stop entirely.

He's… sleeping.

A few ghostly steps and she's in front of him, close enough to coax out deception, close enough for her knee to brush his in a way that an excuse of ‘accidental’ would be met with pinched skepticism. She gets to work, casting her scrutiny on him.

The sun falls back in its rising, to linger and worship him in a pour of light like white wine. Unmoved by its adoration, he dreams in a bare office chair, legs crossed carelessly, wings arcing over the armrest and flowing to the floor like a heavy veil. Truly, assuredly asleep.

The verdict lays out the next course of action. Step back to a safe distance, rouse him, deliver the message, and leave. Clear, efficient, and rational, all of which would appeal to her in any situation, so why does she hesitate now?

She glances to the side, as if sharing a look of disbelief with a stranger over an act of public idiocy, except both the idiot and the onlooker in this scenario is her, before sighing softly, stirring the wisps of his hair as she leans down.

Just this once, she thinks in a heedless rush of curiosity-apprehension-longing, inflamed by an achingly familiar voice laughing in the back of her mind. I just need some ammunition, anything.

The first shot is fired at her, by her own useless observation that Cain is almost too beautiful to bear from this proximity, too beautiful to watch and not want.

Strands of silk-white hair fall over his eyes, fitting them with a frayed blindfold, shrouding the webbing of translucent blue veins on his eyelids. His temple rests on an uncurling fist, fingers skimming his cheek like slender branches. His lips part innocently for steady exhales, oblivious to the kind of thoughts they set off in her.

Despite his unearthly beauty, catching him in such a vulnerable position almost feels like evidence. For all his perilous power, he too requires rest, implicating him in the same weakness that plagues mortals. Almost human, she thinks blasphemously.

Her mouth twists wryly. What is she doing? Her hand rises of its own accord, fingertips hovering over the spill of moonlight over his ear. Trying to knit his veins to hers, to make them of the same blood? Her finger follows the orbit of a stray lock of hair, silk sliding against her skin. Trying to make him human? It slips and grazes the delicate shell of his ear, her touch so light she can only confirm its reality when her entire arm trembles.

So close, she thinks, suddenly hollow, empty. Close enough to feel you breathe, mind eons away.

His eyes slit open.

Her heart leaps and she almost follows its wake, too panicked to worry about tripping over his feet, before going boneless, meek as a rabbit sagging dead between the jaws of a fox, when Cain lifts his hand, lazily catching her wrist.

The seconds draw out as if slogging through honey, and it's twice as sweet when he leans his face into the palm of her hand, nuzzling into it like a sated stray cat with a soft sigh of reprieve.

She stays limp in his feather-light grip, mind and body in agreement for once, to be a mute witness to his tender spot, his soft underbelly, the way the faint heat of his skin leaches into her cold palm.

Miraculously, her mind tolerates the warmth budding through her veins and blossoming in her chest for all of five seconds, before hissing and clamoring over why, to stretch the moments of his weakness, or to memorize the feeling of his skin, her softness?

She can tell the exact moment his scheming mind catches up to his gentler body, and sweeps away the last vestiges of sleep, already spinning new webs. His lashes flutter like a baited bird, tickling the sensitive skin of her fingers, sweetening the parting as he draws his face away.

He releases her hand like an afterthought, so nonchalantly it could be nothing less than calculated. An insouciance mirrored in the slow routine of running a hand through his hair, and shaking off sleep, silver cross briefly catching fire in the sunrise.

‘What?’ He doesn't grace her with his gaze as he speaks, voice lower and rougher than usual, dredged from his throat where sleep was holding it in shackles.

‘The squad asked you to take over patrolling,’ she replies, mouth emptying words mechanically, even as her mind scrambles, grasping at the fire illuminating what she had assumed to be a shameful fantasy.

He sighs, dropping his head back. Distantly, she admires the strong, graceful line of his throat, a serene backdrop against her violently overspilling thoughts. When he straightens and his eyes finally catch hers, it's not by being garbed in one of his thousand disguises, but honestly, tiredly.

He lifts a brow when she stays rooted to the spot, still blindsided by her dream confessing to be a memory. ‘Planning to let me go?’

She shoves what would be a deeply satisfying retort into an armoire of other worse things she's held back around him, and wordlessly steps aside, her real gratification the brief, confused flit of his eyes as he rises, strolling to the center of the room.

His wings stretch out, curling and uncurling, a field of moonflowers blooming in front of her eyes with every motion, as their owner twists his shoulder with a hand, wrestling with the consequences of a night spent in discomfort.

Lane watches his back, the familiar loose, languid lines now distorted as in a nightmare, shoulder blades pressed high and tight together, tensed.

Did he realize that I remember? The mystery of why, or how, her flimsy, threadbare blanket had held her tightly till dawn, entrusted to her to solve with only the barest wisps of hints. A flash of white spiked through her lashes, a kiss of cold against her neck, a whisper of feathers in drift.

She'd thought it was a dream.

‘Better not linger.’ His voice steals into her memories. She looks up as his head turns slightly, offering her the slashes of his cheekbone and jaw blade first. ‘I might’ve heard squeaking.’

He doesn't look at her.

Lane has always felt curiosity like an itch, aggravating and intolerable until she could find an answer she deemed satisfactory. But this feels new. Different. Sharper, stronger, violent like the sea, more useless than the anger it cowers behind.

But no. She's only curious. Curious about why her mind follows him like he's North Star. Curious about why she needs to look for him in every room. Curious about why she's always the fool here, on her knees to a god deafened to all but his own solitude. And angry, angry that her heart won't beat for her own pain but twinges when he's discomforted, his unease echoing in her chest.

She just has to know–

Maybe that's what possesses her.

‘Cain-’

He swivels around in a sunburst of feathers and as her vision clears, her stomach plunges. Wings fanning out behind him like a crucifix, the sunrise lending a lethal blade of crimson to his eyes, his image is of deity, angel, and sinner in synchrony. If God still lived, he would’ve walked in his shadow. Her fingers snaked around his wrist almost feel like desecration, if only she had the power to touch him.

Reverence settles over her like the hush of first snow, smothering all her gasping worries, soothing all her lacerating feelings. Her insignificance isn't a burden, but a nave she walks to faith. Her fingers slacken, unable to bear the burning perfection of divinity, when he speaks.

‘Yes?’

His voice is low, wrong, disorienting as a note missed in a fervent oratorio. Her knee jerks and she takes an unconscious step back as he arches his hand, sending her fingers sliding over a swathe of bare skin evading his sleeve. His wrist bones strain to kiss her fingertips through ludicrously soft skin, and his eyes anchor to her face, twin wreaths of fire hardly quelled by the snow of his hair falling into them.

‘What is it?’

Her nail snags on a seam, and she watches with horrifying desire unfurling claws in her stomach as his sleeve inches back. A flash of tantalizingly smooth skin marbled with sculpted blue veins, hot to the touch. When it's swallowed by night-black fabric, it feels like punishment.

When her eyes rise back to his, she finds them still, still as the air before lightning. Dimly, she realizes she should be afraid. Killing her isn't the worst of what he can do to her. He could hone and hand over her own desire like a dagger, annihilation without a touch of blood on him.

‘You're not answering me.’

His tone remains carefully flat, a void coming up to meet her hands when she reaches for a clue to predict his next move. A drop of disquiet finally rolls down her spine and this time, she's overly conscious of the distance between them as she shuffles back, stretching like a fraying cord long past its limit, a sharper tug from either side enough to snap it irreparably.

He tests it.

Lane's eyes widen as he follows her lead, a slow, perfectly overestimated step barely grazing her knee with his, before drawing back to position, locking them in a strange dance. She doesn't know the steps, but she knows she's tithing her hand to a cunning partner. She knows her body will only glide to the melody his fingers play.

She jolts as he resumes their game, forearm gliding against the loop of her fingers, firm muscle and chiseled veins straining against the obscenely thin material. His rapt eyes track every twitch and exhale of hers, pulled by the allure of even a simulation of his skin and all of it just verges on the edge of too much.

Cain tilts his head in an uncanny imitation of genuine curiosity. ‘Should I take your silence as an invitation to guess?’

He doesn't wait for her reply, accurately assuming she would need far more than a few minutes, or the distance of more than a day, to pry out coherent words.

‘You want something from me.’ The hypothesis, spoken so plainly, spoken like the truth, is shockingly crude from the mouth that spins half-truths and full lies with the prosaic ease of a spider. He cocks his head, considering her without seeing her at all.

‘No, not want.’ He leans closer and she tenses, praying his teeth would be gentle on her neck, conned into faith by his intoxicating scent. ‘Something worse.’

The sun, now seething and glorious, bleeds all over him. Two memories twine in her head, backlit by flame; the two times he's alluded to his priesthood, but only now does she see. His eyes are enough to extricate your worst sins from the bars you trap yourself in, to lay them bare on your body and flay them with a single word.

He wouldn't need to do much, she thinks, lightheaded, flushed down to her throat. Anyone would willingly sink to their knees if condemnation sounded like this, voice dipping suggestively, almost rasping the words out. ‘Need, maybe?’

Hardly able to think past the dizzying fog of something both heady and subtly sweet emanating from his skin, she makes a miserable attempt at shaking her head, silenced by his hand arcing up to brush her cheek, fingertips sliding into her hair.

Silver ensnares her peripheral vision. Though her eyes flit back to him when he draws in a silent breath, uneven around his own abstinence, a thought won't let her go, provocatively dangling in her mind.

The crimson of his eyes deepens to sanguine. Lane swallows painfully, stomach folding it on itself, anticipating the climax, the crescendo, the cuts his cunningly bladed tongue would leave.

She'd expected words. She should've remembered his touch, its fatal softness.

She jerks minutely, stifling a gasp as his hand lightly trails over her hip. ‘Are you confused?’ Waist, ribs—her heart stops—the faintest brush over the side of her breast. ‘Hopelessly excited for nothing?’ Higher still, till his slender fingers collar the side of her neck. Eyelids slipping, he presses slowly, until her pulse is whimpering against his fingertips. ‘Is your godless body always starving?’

In dazed snatches, she wonders why. Why no blood wells up now. Why, if he meant it to hurt, it feels like a confession instead, given to be absolved by her own whispered sins.

The idea of Cain miscalculating a single word, look, or touch, much less a bacchanalia of all three is what gives her pause.

He wouldn't. He wasn't.

She slumps in his dreamlike hold, delirious and preening from the victory of finally, finally sneaking up to where he schemes, the second wave of intoxication sent by the thought of what he was insinuating exactly, submerging her inhibitions, suspending the consequences.

She twists in his grip. Lightly, just enough to turn her head and catch the drooping cross in her mouth, feeling it sink into her bottom lip and indent it.

He stills.

His wings shrink and flare, flare and shrink, but he remains frozen like a god amidst the myths that keep him alive. He exhales slowly, a sigh of soundless agony, rippling the air anticipating them.

Her teeth instinctively bite down on the metal clutched between her lips as his thumb brushes her jaw, turning her back to face him, interrupting her hazy fantasy of tasting the skin it kisses religiously.

Under half-lidded eyes, she watches as his eyes rove over her face, brow furrowing in a look of almost pain. She wonders if this is his one face that isn't painted on, naked as it can only be in a moment of undiluted agony or unrestrained ecstasy, and shivers.

His thumb slides over her bottom lip, hot against the warming metal, as his tongue snakes out to wet the corner of his mouth. Watching her eyes track the movement, lips parting unconsciously, he murmurs, gentle. ‘You might be.’

Tenderness was his mistake. She could reluctantly accept her body betraying her for the worship of an angel—understand it even, when she treats it like a tool at the best of times—but the quiet affection in his voice, real as blood, nothing like the cloying pity they'd glazed as love, sends something in her skittering.

Maybe it's fear. Scared of what lurks in his eyes, scared of what she would have to dredge up within herself and hold to light. Scared enough to stumble.

Lane flinches as a storage box home to obsolete equipment skids across the floor, clattering like her mind trying to process that it was her who was the catalyst for this turn of events. Even Cain starts, looking so much like a lover booted out mid argument that she lets out an entirely inappropriate breath of laughter. I’m definitely in shock, she thinks as his unblinking eyes fall on her.

He looks at her for a long moment over the rabid pounding of her heart, before stalking out of the room and taking the sun with him, wings shooting past her like neat rows of white-flamed arrows.

She moves to follow him, body and mind working on autopilot, but staggers, identifying, recognising his parting look.

Because he didn't look like the deity from last night filled with empty curiosity, or the angel from dawn reaching for her to rest, or even the priest from sunrise touching selfishly for once. The table catches her hip, steadying her. He looked like a common sinner, just as lost as her.

✟

The night is a courteous host to whoever knocks at its door. It welcomes her into an alcove of time where obligations cannot find her, taking her worry lined coat and hanging it onto the next sunrise's hooks. Lane sits on the edge of the roof, letting the wind titter and caper around her dangling legs, playful in her fragile, exquisite peace. Silence isn't the same as emptiness apparently.

So spellbound by the tranquility drifting through her like snow, she only notices her deification, the shadow-feathered wings resting on the ground, a second before he speaks. ‘What is it about this bleak view that inspires brooding?’

He sounds less far away than last night.

Her body straightens subtly, not moths, but fireflies flitting about her spine, tiny flash fires set where his fingers strayed.

‘I wasn't,’ she replies, eyes trained onto the star-pricked sky.

‘Already have your answers then?’ His voice is blank as glass, glued together from words like shards, warping the real meaning behind them.

She inhales slowly, siphoning courage from the unsuspecting stars, before raising her head, turning to look at him. Standing against the night, all of him in shadows. The god, the man. The angel, the sinner. She gives him the only truth she can afford.

‘I might.’

She does. She'd been so desperate to fill the singular blank in her mind, furiously circled and underlined in red, so as to shelve it and let it fade forgotten, that she overlooked what has always been right in front of her eyes: Cain exists in duality. Helping and hindering, savior and ruinous, the holiest thing her hands have held, and sometimes more human than she has ever been.

Not her perfect answer, not an answer that will allow itself to be shelved and forgotten, not an answer at all, but so right it could almost be called the truth.

Lane can't read his eyes through the veil of dark.

He's still for a heartbeat, two, before dropping down next to her, wings fanning out and sinking into the dirty snow, in a motion so smooth she wonders how she wound up in his distant embrace again. He leans back on his palms, tipping his head up to the sky, and heaves out a soft sigh, heavy as time. ‘Good for you.’

‘You sound bitter.’ She peers at what he offers of his face, a flash of an eyelid, the slope of his nose, soft pink lips, all caressed by moonlight's pearlescent sheen. ‘Are you still struggling?’

‘Not in the way you're thinking.’ His words float to the mirthfully twinkling stars, following the line of his stare. ‘More so with how I chose to be blind for such a long time. And of course, the consequences taste bitter now.’

She considers him thoughtfully, angling her body to his and tucking her knees to her chest. Rare that Cain pouring words like water into her hands is, she wants to savor it. Underneath that, a smaller, stupider reason. She just… liked listening to him.

‘Long, even to an immortal?’

‘Time doesn't always exist in a straight line.’ His head tilts, gaze sliding to her. Not empty, but haunted. He looks through her, at a past neither can touch anymore and when he speaks, she's not sure if it's to the her trapped in the present. ‘Some moments run in circles, for all of eternity.’

Lane thinks of her own life. She thinks of the glowing, heatless thing in her chest after an achievement that she named happiness. She thinks of the silence ringing in her childhood house, the gaze that seemed heavier when it was turned away. She thinks of the daze of awakening as something new and seeing him, not knowing a thread of blood and snow bound them. She thinks she understands.

‘I see,’ she says quietly.

His gaze sharpens, red splintering the opaque ice of his eyes, emotions finally whirling up in them. ‘Do you now?’ he bites out, almost accusatory, somehow brittle.

Her first contention is that she understands now, what he's really asking.

Her mind reminds her that one cannot understand someone without knowing them. And how can you know a person who disappears like a card trick between your fingers, there and then wholly new when you flip it?

But a smaller, startlingly insistent part of her tells her to wait, to look. And so she does, catching all that sloughs off of him like raindrops in her hands. When they flower open, in lies a mirror, reflecting what haunts her own nights.

Forsaken and forsaking their own kind, nowhere and never to call home, the humanity gouged out of her heaped onto him. Sometimes, in her weakest moments, she believes they'd fit like two halves of a pomegranate if they let each other.

Or perhaps—her eyes flick to him—it's only the strange logic Cain lives by, and therefore pulls her into.

Leaving her cold, and then burning. His fingers on her forehead, gently chilling the feverish skin, and the heat radiating off him in an inferno, hands reaching to crush her head. The closest anyone has come to the rotten thing inside her, and so far her hands would only brush air if she reached out.

So impossibly sweet and so inexorably dangerous.

She has him—her eyes flutter shut briefly—and she doesn't.

It's so quiet. It's only the two of them in the falling universe when she speaks. I want to. ‘I can.’ Better presumptuous than incriminating.

His eyes narrow. The only warning she's conceded before he's leaning in slowly, bracing a hand dangerously close to her thigh.

‘Anything?’ he asks, red eyes boring into hers, impenetrable to the moonlight hammering weakly against them. ‘Whatever it is?’

He's turning the same look on me, she realizes with a bolt of recognition. Rooting for the trick in her words. Absurdly, her next thought is I want to touch him.

Cowardice cannot be shed in a day. Lane only gazes back into his hollowed eyes steadily, hoping what she can give would be enough for now.

Adequately chastised, he sighs, lowering his head, and she counts his breathing silently. She blinks when the rhythm breaks, stopping with a faint shudder. Her eyes follow his line of vision and her own breath catches, an odd intermingling of shame and something hotter coiling in her stomach.

She'd needed to cut into something, cling onto someone, to draw out the restraint to hold still and not surrender a single gasp last night. The aftermath of which manifested on her palm, in a trail of half-moon red marks.

When he falls back, it's with the loot of her hand with him. Cradling it delicately in one hand, he traces the testament to his effect on her, written plainly on her skin. A barely there touch, half apology, half prayer.

He speaks when the motion has eased from stirring to soothing, still watching their hands.

‘Another promise? Besides my protection and kindness?’ Lane barely has the time for incredulity to rear its head before he continues, eyes shadowed when he glances at her. ‘Don't you know greed is a sin?’

Her eyes fall to the rosary guilelessly skimming her palm. Not my worst.

Cain smiles. While it's not his usual infernally soft one, there's a tremulous quality to its edges, a frailty in his eyes too light for her to recognize. ‘I'm joking.’ He squeezes her hand gently, yielding to her more than just his words. ‘You'll have to teach me this too.’

The idea of him entrusting her with teaching something she hasn't even crawled up the steps to makes her breathe out laughter, along with real honesty. ‘I'm not the right person for either.’

His reply comes soft as a breath held, swift as a hope dashed, both impossibly full of possibilities like raindrops suspended in time. ‘Then we'll learn together.’

Lane isn't quite as delusional to believe this isn't an aftereffect of needing her in his own esoteric pursuit; not his path, but only a detour. But leeched from that look he let slip like porcelain, shattering at her feet and dissipating the haze she was wandering in, she knows that if his words bloom like wisteria in her lungs, she'd at least be a thorn in his heel. He wouldn't be able to stagger away from this untouched either.

Even so. The thought that however briefly it, this, lasts, it wouldn't be Cain, or Lane, but CainandLane is tart and bright as biting into a berry, bursting sharp on the tip of her tongue.

Together.

She turns her hand in his wordlessly.

Not his perfect answer either, but his shoulders relax minutely, fingers tightening around hers, the rosary kept warm between their skin, and she wonders if summer will be sweet this year.

#romance club #rc hsr #rc cain #cain x lane #rc lane

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