Taking Flight

Hey guys! So I came to the realization this weekend that this blog kind of a mess and I decided I wanted to start over. You can find me over at @tckingflight now! I have all of my drafts saved over there and I will hopefully be getting to them this week if I have any brain left. And as for this blog, this is now an archive. 

How did she want him? What a loaded question. There wasn’t a way that she didn’t want him, and she knew she always would.

So the real question was, how did she want him now?

Allegra looked around, her eyes landing on the kitchen table nearby. She walked over and turned one of the chairs around and sat down upon it, spreading her legs wide for him.

Dorian gripped the fabric with the tips of his fingers and almost immediately let go.

“What in God’s name… This is so thin, darling. Is this made of spun silk?”

He pulled it carefully over her head, bunched it into a ball and set it on the rickety table next to the bed. The fabric draped over the edge, the movement of his hip nearly yanking it off. Dorian nudged it back up.

Surprise overtook him once more when he turned back to Allegra.

“What are you… is that your…” He gestured at his own chest, miming rather inelegant cups. “Brassiere? It’s so… small. I mean! No, not small, you aren’t… You’re stunning, but how does it… how can it possibly… erm, support? Anything.”

If Allegra had any sort of energy left in her, she would have been extremely confused. Nothing about her clothing was odd; in fact, it was what most of the women were wearing as she was exploring Ireland.

But she was exhausted, and his talking only proved to grate at her tired nerves, no matter how handsome or kind he seemed. So she answered with two short words.

“It’s French.”

Having enough, Allegra reached behind her back with a small “Let me,” and she unclasped her bra and tossed it to the floor.

“You’re right. You’re too much of an ass to hold something like that back. If that’s the case, pass that basket. I’m eating like five pieces. I’ve been dying to do so since the waiter brought them out.” She takes a bite of food with a smirk, waiting to swallow before continue to tantalize him. “Oh please, like you haven’t been imagining it already once in a while. I’m at least one of the top three people you’ve fucked, if not the reigning champ.  And that’s the whole point. Torture you over dinner and still pass the bill your way. And when you react like that? Makes it so much better.” She nods. “It’s your right and I’m not arguing that. Just know the way these lawyers think. Babies all of them. I agree with you it’s stupid not to vaccinate your child if you have the ability. You’re putting others in danger, especially children and people with weaker immune systems.” There’s a flicker of pride in her gaze. “I respect you sticking up for what you believe in and saying fuck to the consequences.” 

His vision swam, all at once trembling and burning and falling, blocking his throat and stealing the weight from his head, limbs, the center of his chest. Allegra crashed into him and if she hadn’t been so slight he might have fallen like a man shot.

Dorian had expected to feel ecstatic. Years ago, sitting in a trench with dirt smeared over his face and the chipped butt of a gun digging into his shoulder, he had expected that the end of the war would bring him joy so extreme that he wouldn’t be able to stand it. He’d fall to his knees and weep.

And he was ecstatic. There was no doubt in his mind that half his light-headedness stemmed from glee.

It wasn’t his only feeling.

He was rattled. Taken by disbelief. Confused. The thing that nagged him the most was the last feeling: loss. Dorian could not pin its source, couldn’t so much as guess where in his heart it stemmed from. He felt as if he were hearing of a close friend moving away, a childhood buddy passing on, a grandparent diagnosed with something carved out of future tragedy.

He didn’t know why.

“Oh,” he said simply, breath caught in his throat. “What now?”

Allegra’s excitement over the war finally being won, and them being free from any terror or fear instantly faded when she saw Dorian’s expression. She thought that he would be happier about this. That he would cheer and take her in his arms and spin her around the room he was so excited.

Instead, he looked as if he saw a ghost.

“Dori…,” she began to say, pushing his hair out of his face and she sighed, not wanting to dampen the mood on this lovely day.

“We can do whatever we want now. I don’t have a job anymore now that the war is over, so we can go and do and be whatever we want. We can have a beautiful life together. One that we deserve.”

She leaned in and kissed his cheek before leaning her head on his chest and sighing.

Unsure how else to carry himself, Dorian followed Allegra stiffly. His brows furrowed and his lips drew into a frown. The place was cozy, small and lived-in, and he would have felt at home if it hadn’t been for a constant tug at the center of his chest.

“Okay,” he said. “Thank you. I, um…”

Maybe he should go home. Allegra had a routine and, more pertinently, he didn’t know her. He didn’t know her, her child, anything about either of them, and they didn’t know anything about him. Dorian was a needle pretending to be one straw of the haystack.

“We can drop Elodie off,” Dorian said softly, massaging the palm of his wrapped hand. “I need to run to the store before I go home, I… I don’t know if… I have my wallet, I mean, just if you would… drive me?”

He shifted awkwardly, eyes fixed on the floor.

“I can always hail a cab.”

Allegra felt for Dorian. She really did. It couldn’t be fun going to sleep in a stranger’s home and then waking up with said stranger clinging to you like a lonely barnacle. She didn’t want him to think that he was in her way. She wanted him to feel welcome here.

But she also understood his need to go home.

“Don’t worry about it. We can drop Elodie off at school and then go to the grocery store. I actually have to pick up a few things myself. I haven’t been there all week.”

Allegra felt a pair of small arms wrapping around her legs, and a small head leaning against her hip. She looked down at Elodie with a fond smile and she ruffled the sleepy little girl’s head.

“Hello, darling,” she said with a smile. “Why don’t you go get dressed while I make some breakfast?”

Elodie nodded and wiped the sleep from her eyes before going over to Dorian and hugging his leg too. She then pulled away from him and padded sleepily towards her room and disappeared into it.

That made two of them. Enn could have told them the secret to life and they wouldn’t have known one way or another. He felt bonded to Allegra; they were the last two morons on a sinking lifeboat.

“We’ll start with that, then,” he grunted, and gestured for her to follow.

His home was situated a little less than a mile outside of Whitehead, a small, colorful town of boxy little houses and golf, both of which Dorian pointed out.

“If you ever feel like swingin’ a club, this is probably the place to do it, you know? I’ve never been one to golf, always felt I’d bonk myself on the back of the head or somethin’,” he said with his back to the road, taking blind step by blind step backwards. He gestured at a man loading a bag of clubs into the trunk of his car. Convenient for tourism.

A little further down the shoreline were the houses, bright and colorful and neat as a mouthful of dyed teeth.

“Dunno who lives there,” Dorian said honestly. “But I always thought they were neat. Lovely little homes, they are, yeah. Cute. Oh, we’re almost there. Just a few blocks down.”

“I don’t think I’ll ever try golf,” she admitted with a small giggle. “I just know for a fact that if I try, the club will slip through my fingers and all of a sudden, I have a lawsuit on my hands.”

She wasn’t lying about that at all. She was hopelessly clumsy, and she knew that something like that would be bound to happen to her if she ever tried golfing. Pity, she thought as she looked at Dorian with a smile. That would’ve been an incredibly cute date idea.

She turned her head to look at the row of colorful houses and her smile grew wider.

“Those are adorable,” she cooed. “I almost want to knock on one of the doors and see who’s there. Maybe one day,” she said as she turned to look back up at Dorian.

It wasn’t long before they made their way into the grocery store and she looked around.

The smallest movement of Katya going closer to Kirk made something sweet bloom in his chest. She was probably using him to block the cold wind or get some residual body heat but it showed trust, however small, and it gave him hope for them. At her wink he froze for a moment and then answered her cheeky with a wicked grin of his own. It was a look that said, well aren’t you just a sweet little thing. I’m going to have fun fucking you. They were going to have fun together, that much was certain. “Yes, your ass is quite the marvel, I’m honored to gaze upon it.” He teased while being completely honest.

The look shouldn’t have unnerved Katya like it had. She knew that she was safe with Kirk, but she knew that look. And she knew what it meant. All of her alarm bells went off, and as much as she wanted to bolt across traffic and disappear, she knew that would be unfair to Kirk, who was actually a really wonderful guy. Still, that knowledge didn’t keep her from feeling incredibly anxious.

♢

The North bit through his furs as if they were made of parchment, and he knew that the queen, no matter how elegantly she might hide it, felt no better.

They had come here on business. In the months since meeting her employment, Percy had become a regular fixture within the council, something he had come to enjoy only when it irked the blue bloods that claimed loyalty to her rule.

He had become so regular a fixture, in fact, that he had been instructed to attend this meeting at her side. Some lady, he had been told, married to a snooty lord no doubt. Percy loathed the lord’s; always so selfish, always so cruel. The ladies were kinder, but only sometimes, and only slightly.

“This one must offer us more, Your Majesty,” he said lightly. “Or we’ll never be able to get this revolution off the ground. You understand that, no?”

“I know, Percy,” she said through her shudder. The closer they had gotten to the North, the colder it seemed to be. And Iris absolutely hated it. Not only was the journey much longer than it needed to be because they had to take backroads to remain unseen, but she was not used to the cold. She grew up in Essos, where it was always warm.

So without even thinking about it, she leaned against Percy for some semblence of body warmth.

“I hope she will listen and be receptive. We need her support more than anyone else’s,” she said thoughtfully.

When involving herself in the people’s lives, she had come to find that they weren’t wishing for her to come back and take over. They were hoping that someone else entirely would come down and rescue them.

Allegra Degray. Now Allegra Trase…former Lady of Highgarden and future Queen of the North. And despite the fact she was labelled as most likely murderer of the former King of Westeros, she had made an incredible impression on the people.

“Did you ever meet her? This Lady Degray? Well...I suppose she’s Lady Trase now. But I heard she spent a lot of time in Kings Landing and helping those in need, and that’s why the people love her so much.”

Cal wasn’t so bad, Enn decided. Questionable taste in music, but sound enough as a person.

“It ain’t too good, darling,” she retorted, mimicking his drawl with an arched brow and a quirk of the lip. She patted him on the shoulder then, and grinned.

“I’ll try not to talk your ear off,” Enn answered. “Much as I might want to, I don’t reckon I have half the words needed to accomplish something like that. Mind you, it isn’t for lack of trying.”

The key turned, the engine grumbled to life. Next stop, sandwich shop. Then London, for better or for worse.

“You’re staying with Allegra and Dori, then?”

All Cal could to was chuckle at her retort, and try to ignore the fact that his heart was beating faster and more erratically than a drummer on steroids. He loved it when women could hold their own and fight back in a conversation, and women who weren’t afraid to rag on him.

What a wonderful thing to find out that Enn was certainly that kind of girl.

“I am,” he said with a nod. “I don’t really have anywhere else to stay. I sure as hell can’t afford to stay in a hotel room for a week. And I don’t mind sleeping on the couch.”

He then turned to look at Enn with an arched brow.

Allegra looked down at him, her teeth sinking onto her lower lip as he settled in between her thighs. And when he winked at her, a grin burst across her face.

That was quickly overshadowed by a moan the second she felt him going down on her.

Allegra gasped lightly when he rolled her underneath him, and when he spoke she felt as if she might cry.

The fact that Dorian had felt like home to her in the past three weeks felt like an understatement. And she knew that her departure would leave a hole in her heart from the absence of his presence in her life. He would be gone as quickly as he came into her life, and she didn’t want that.

“You feel like home too,” she said softly. And to keep herself from crying, and to keep him from seeing any tears falling down her face, Allegra leaned up and she kissed him deeply. Her hand tangled in his hair and she whimpered softly against his lips.

Bluu sniffled and wiggled her toes to shake off the numbness. “I-I think so…”

If she couldn’t walk, she could crawl. If she couldn’t crawl, she would drag herself on her elbows. She would get upstairs. Trembling, Bluu drew her right leg beneath her, pushing herself up, and breathed a sigh of relief when it didn’t cramp. Her entire body was shaking violently, both from the cold and in reaction to the incessant shivering. She was unbelievably weak. How could shivering be so debilitating? Wasn’t it the body’s mean of producing heat?

She couldn’t stand. Even though her legs were no longer cramping at the moment, she simply didn’t have the energy to get to her feet.

After a few moments she rolled, blankets and all, like a large human sausage. If babies could use rolling as a means of locomotion, so could she.

“I can’t do it,” she whined and stared up at both her parents pleadingly. “It hurts to move. I can’t even feel my feet!” She reached up, little hands clutching onto Allegra as she tried taking in her mother’s body heat.”Mommy, am I gonna’ die?”

@allegradegray

Allegra almost felt helpless at this point. In the short couple of years she was lucky enough to be Bluu’s mother, she had never seen her this sick before, and neither had Cal. The new parents had no idea how to handle this situation.

But they did know that they needed to get her to the emergency room and quickly.

“You’re not gonna die, baby,” she said as she knelt down on the floor and pulled Bluu close to her body. “But you are very sick. And I don’t feel right just putting you straight to bed with you feelin' like this. We’re gonna have to go to the hospital, because it’s the only place that’s open this late that can help you get better.”

Cal came back into the living room with the keys to his truck in hand and he knelt down in front of his daughter.