#avabealil

“Ava, can you step a bit to the left of the statue so I can screenshot the detail on the back. You never know where some symbol or maker’s mark might be hiding, and understanding the provenance of-”

Her voice, so captiving when it’s Ava’s body and its particular habits of response doing the listening, falls flat against her ears. She is too used to the silly Italian-accented English that the animus feeds her through its filter. Beatrice’s accent, which ordinarily strikes her as charming, can only be jarring when it finds her in this broad-shouldered body.

Still, she steps obediently aside in Ezio’s body, cloak caught in one hand to stop it from brushing the stone. Almost speaks just to hear the low hum of his voice, its mechanism of sound in her throat. She has been reading a little about what makes this body different from her own and this particular thing is thicker vocal cords. It feels like speaking through honey, bright-dashed on her tongue.

Not that Ava dislikes her own voice, but there is something intoxicating about inhabiting this body. Its sweat and sweetness.

Beatrice asked how much of a filter she wanted on the language right in the beginning, when Lilith still glowered and Ava’s body felt strong in its own right. Abstergo’s strings unraveled fast. By the second day her steps across the room were shaky. By the end of the third she couldn’t walk. Beatrice and Lilith had finished arguing, the latter running Abstergo’s memory core through the strange red-upholstered animus, the HALO, as Lilith called it.

“Like the video game?”

A black look not at all offset by the clearly thrifted shirt that hung off Lilith’s frame and bared collarbone. Beatrice was out doing laundry and making tentative enquiries into how one might hack Abstergo’s subscription-based leg implants so Ava could walk again.

“Not remotely like the video game.”

Beatrice helped Ava into the animus and approached the issue of translation with an embarrassed frown.

“So, ah, have you read any Chaucer?”

“Is that the guy from A Knight’s Tale? the blonde one?”

Beatrice's expression of blank incomprehension and Lilith’s death-rattle of a laugh in the background. Lilith who is biting and unfriendly at every opportunity and also very gentle with Ava when she pulls her from the animus late at night while the others are sleeping. “Here, let me put some gauze on the insertion point. and this gel,” cool on the inside of her wrist which is raw and constantly bloody from the USB-like cable they use to keep her sedated and also hooked-up to the animus and, in turn, the memories in her blood.

“Why does ours work like this, and not the one in Abstergo?”

“The difference… is about 5 billion US dollars. give or take a nonetheless functionally inconceivable amount of money.” Lilith with her strange tempers, her eyes on Ava’s wrist and her legs spread in concentration, "I wasn't lying when I said Abstergo had deeper pockets than us.”

“just understating.” Ava, tired, didn’t try to keep the mingled pain and longing out of her voice. Not with Lilith to whom there seems no point in lying.

Ava doesn’t care if this particular girl judges her.

dark eyes flicking up, granted a strange flat effect by the monitors still gleaming like belligerent lighthouses in what Ava can only describe as a loft room turned… something else. “Beatrice described the bleeding effect to you.” It's a statement. It is also a question.

“Are you trying to ask if I'm hallucinating?”

“They're not hallucinations, really. More like echoes.”

It doesn't feel like a comforting distinction to Ava, but she looks around the dark space obediently.

just beatrice snoring lightly on her little floor-pallet made of blankets and cardboard and scattered books. No shadows, no play of light between real and not-real.

A slow shake of her head and Lilith’s blunt sound of acknowledgment. A long pause between them.

“Since you won’t ask, yes, I do hate it when you pull me out.”

“That doesn’t surprise me.” Lilith is calm about terrible things. Not so much as an intake of breath at the sight of the scars on Ava’s legs the first time she was the only one around when Ava needed to pee. A strange thing to do with someone she essentially dislikes and also wants to taste in a very vague way that feels distinct from the more honest crush she has on Beatrice.

Ava scoffs. “Does it disappoint you, at least?”

“Do you want it to?”

Lilith finishes applying the weird, ice-cold gel that discourages scar tissue but seals blood in the cut. lets Ava’s silence wash over them both before looking up, darkly serious in her coldly beautiful way. Ava braces for a lecture, but Lilith just takes her in for a long moment.

“What?”

“Nothing.” Lilith stands, offers her hands as she always does before she carries Ava anywhere. Like there’s a choice in the matter. She speaks only when Ava is pressed flush against her, the tensile strength of Lilith’s arms evident in every step they take together toward the double bed, “Just be careful.”

Ava thinks of how often she’s exploded into pain and pixels, slipping off rooftops in Ezio’s body. Of the guard who opened her up from neck to navel with a huge axe. Of leaps of faith slightly misjudged.

She tries as much as possible to keep her breathing level, to keep her body from responding. But it's difficult with the sounds that seem to be coming right next to her. She tries not to picture anything but the black behind her eyelids but it only helps to serve as a blank canvas. 

Despite herself, her mind tries to discern what's happening through sound alone. Beatrice gasping, on her back; on her knees. Ava hovering over her; behind her; taking as she pleases. 

The lounge chair next to where Lilith is lying creaks slightly, accompanied by a hitched moan that is suddenly muffled. 

Lilith whimpers. 

Everything stops. 

Oh fuck.

Before Lilith can contemplate throwing herself off of the roof, she hears Ava call out, "We know you're awake." 

Still, she doesn't move. Not until she hears Beatrice, her voice shaking in a way Lilith has never heard before. 

"Please, Lilith." 

Her eyes open of their own accord. The sight that greets her is both better and worse than what she'd imagined: Ava sitting in the next lounge chair over, Beatrice sitting back into her. Beatrice's bikini top is barely hanging on by her neck, her chest bare and flushed and heaving. Lilith catches sight of the matching bottom at the foot of the long chair, but her attention is between Beatrice's legs where Ava's hands have been moving idly, spreading around the wetness there. 

"Won't you play with us?" Ava asks, pressing her knowing grin to the side of Beatrice's neck. Beatrice arches into the touch, shudders when Ava adds her teeth. "I've only got two hands, you see." 

And Lilith does - watches Ava's fingers circle around Beatrice's clit while her other hand drags her nails up Beatrice's side. Palms the underside of her breast in offering. 

"Beatrice really needs something inside her," Ava continues, grin widening when Beatrice moans in agreement. "Something like your fingers." 

It takes a moment for Lilith to realize how much she's trembling, how short her own breaths have become.

How much she wants this. 

Wants them. 

Something in her breaks - a dam, all of her tightly wound restraint - and then she's on the chair in front of Beatrice, kissing her messily. It spreads a fire through her veins, a fire that she has no idea how to release.

"Come on, Lilith, don't make her wait," she hears next to her ear. "Or do - she likes that too -"

Lilith doesn't, can't wait. She pulls back just enough to watch her own hands grip Beatrice's thighs and slide up to her hips, almost disbelieving when they buck against her. Fingers that she knows are hers curve inward, thumbs reaching to pull Beatrice apart. 

Hears twin moans in response. She looks up to see both of them watching. Uses their eyes and the way Beatrice moans and the way Ava bites her own lip to guide her fingers, letting them slide against Beatrice, coating her fingers liberally. 

But she has to look down for the next, to see it for herself: Her own two fingers slowly sliding in. 

Somewhere in her mind, Lilith registers that the guttaral sound was from her, but further conscious thought is burned from her brain at the feel of Beatrice clenching around her. "Go faster, Lil," Ava growls, before tilting forward and kissing her briefly. "She's not going to last." 

Lilith complies without question, has no reason not to when Beatrice is holding on to her so tightly, with both her hands and her cunt. Lilith feels something brush against her hand and glances down to see Ava's fingers rubbing frantically at Beatrice's clit. 

And Beatrice - 

Beatrice is a sight to behold. 

Mouth open, eyes closed tight, head thrown back, glowing and moaning in the afternoon sun - she's pleasure incarnate, the wildest and freest Lilith has ever seen her. It makes Lilith grow more frenzied - wants to see more of this Beatrice, wants to see her break. 

And she does.

Ava covers Beatrice's mouth just as she screams and it takes both Lilith and Ava bracketing her to keep her from falling - sliding, rather - off the chair, now drenched from how Beatrice had gushed. Lilith slows her touch as Beatrice's shaking starts to subside. Feels also the rush start to fade. 

"Give me you hand, Lil." 

Ava's voice is wrecked, but she holds the now limp Beatrice with a tenderness that brings back that twinge in Lilith's chest. 

She mentally shakes the thought away, offers her hand. Ava, however, shakes her head. Nods downward. "The other one." 

Lilith blinks. Slowly, she pulls her fingers free, shushes softly at Beatrice when she jerks and whines. Ava takes Lilith's hand by the wrist and lifts it to her mouth. 

The rush returns with a vengeance when Ava's lips wrap around Lilith's fingers, so much so that it takes her a moment to register Beatrice's faint question. "Round two in the hotel room?" 

Realizes that the question is being directed at her. Realizes what they want. That they still want her.

this amused her.

she is conscious, in her kitchen, that already this story begs the question. why? why go home with something impossible?

because i wanted to

but why, Ava? why did you want to?

(some burnings)

she writes so carefully now, with a sweet ache in her skin and her hands, poor physicians, disturbing the scabs on her neck, her wrist, underneath the slant of her ribs.

(are beautiful)

god, shut up.

because i wanted to.

her, specifically. to fuck her or to know her. to irritate her pretty mouth with the taste of cheap cigarettes.