@xxelloss
[[ continued from X ]]
Xellos tumbles into minutia, into excess and into terror the way that he so often inspires in others–a stumbling mess of uncertainty and speaking faster than he can think, she thinks, spinning scenarios and what-ifs and he’s scaring her, not for any fear for her own safety but because this is not the composed monster she knows and understands.
What did I say? What did I do?
She is afraid for him because something she said or did must have undone him and she doesn’t want that, can’t comprehend it because Xellos is everything she isn’t–sturdy and unwavering against all odds, despite everything he pretends; she knows his fickleness is dependable, and his disloyalty loyal.
Why, then?
His hands string through fine, fair hair and she jerks involuntarily, feels chills all down her spine and it calls forth everything she’s been working so hard to ignore, because he excites her and arouses her to things above and beyond the flesh.
Xellos makes Filia feel alive.
“Kiss me! How very dare you!” she cries, lips trembling, eyes wet. “How dare you; you’re exactly as you always are, taking everything about me and using it against me, Xellos; I hate you, I hate you, I hate you!”
Doubt is nestled piping hot, so hot it burns cold in her breast, stings like her words, and can she trust him can she trust those piercing eyes can she trust his desperation, his hunger, the absolute way he is begging her to let him understand?
In the silence that follows, broken only by haggard breathing, it is the eye of a storm, and slowly, as if underwater, Filia weaves her arms about Xellos’s neck and leans in–chest still heaving, teeth dug tight into her bottom lip and, then, gracing it with release and a soft sucking sound; her cheeks are hot and her ears hotter, but for the first time in their lives together, Xellos is beckoning, and she is entranced.
He has asked her what she would do, and it seems as if it matters.
She pauses just short of his mouth.
“What will I do?” she murmurs, lashes fluttering. “What will I do?”
There it is, there she is, so stinkingly obnoxiously alive; her temper and her flushes and her tears, they are all what he should fear and loathe and seek to demolish. But he’s standing over her throbbing in pleasant ways, feeding not only on her distress but also on all in her that is rich, nurturing and maternal.
How blind and stupid can she be, not to realize what draws him from miles away?
FUCK her!
And fuck him for not seeing that the things in her that he relishes? Those are the same things he himself elicits.
Xelloss’s eyes are wide, the pupils slim slits, the color of his irises pale and mad with the compulsion to kill. His smile is no different than it ever is, but it’s in his eyes that his true disposition is clear. His ragged breathing is audible; he does it for her, all those illusions of a true physical life force, and that disgusts him. Just a hatchling, little more than three hundred years old, the orphan of the race he happily bled to death. And here he is indulging her, here he is, soft. Here he is, actually, having breathed for her so often that it’s second-nature, instinct.
She asks the air, herself–him?–what to do.
Here he could say, “That’s a secret,” like he always does. But Xelloss gives Filia a gift instead:
“I don’t … know!”
The most terrifying, bald statement he could utter, as far as he’s concerned. That he has no schemes, no deceits, no plots for what comes after this heated moment. It’s the weird silence of the earth after lightning’s struck. It’s the green of the sky before a tornado. The death-throes blip on the seismograph after an earthquake.
“I don’t know,” he repeats, and steps back, and shrugs at her, angrily hapless.
And the moment, she thinks, is gone.
Filia’s arms come loose easy; she is not one to hold the unwilling, and Xelloss, frustrated and undone, is not one to be restrained.
But damn her, she almost wanted him to stay. And it’s those qualifiers that make their uneasy, liminal bed--almost, what-if, supposing and guessing and undermining her own conclusions because when has he ever been something to be understood? And if he remains a mystery, how is she to ever know what she wants from him?
There had been a time that wanting from him had been laughable. Dangerous. Repulsive. But she does not think that he would lay himself bare in this way only to fool her. Xelloss has his pride, after all. And it makes her wonder--what does he want from her?
For it is certainly something more than it had been before. More than the paltry, shallow outrage of an irritated blood feud. The earliest occasion she remembers knowing him, unexpectedly, as if he were not merely a masked pawn playing to the gullibility of mortals but something that could be moved--why, she’d annoyed him.
They had chased each others’ goats ever since, rumble-tumble into a veritable two-person war at once centuries old and young as two petulant children brawling in the mud.
A mutual fascination.
Impersonal as a grudge.
Intimate as asking her how it would all unfold if he were to change the careful dance of the two of them, irrevocably.
She huffs, shrinking against the cluttered desk where he’d pressed against her only moments before. She doesn’t know her own feelings any better for chasing them. But certainty is a luxury when it comes to Xelloss.
“This might be a first for you,” she mutters, voice uncharacteristically quiet, nails digging into her arms through the sleeves of her blouse. “But the rest of us are at a loss quite often. And do you know what we do, Xelloss?”
Wide blue eyes survey his frazzled fury through a crest of pale lashes. He is breathless, sweating, voice cracking with frustration. It is strangely, frighteningly beautiful.
“We learn.”
