#gn.

you eventually convince him to let you wash him with a little (a lot) of nagging (he doesn’t wanna bother you with this, but you would do anything for him, as long as you’re near him), so you fill the bath with water and allow him to settle in, stripping his clothes off of him. you planned on just washing him from the side, shampooing and conditioning his stinky indigo hair, but then he asks you to join him! you’re a little reluctant, because no way is a situation where you and aiku are naked and together gonna end with you walking straight for the next week, but you comply as the water splashes on the walls of the tub and onto the tiled floor. you sit on his muscular thighs, massaging his scalp as his eyes slowly close and his head rolls back, sighing deeply. when he adjusts his position by shifting his ass though, the serenity of the situation seems to feel… hotter. you grunt, but continue to scrub his head, praying he hadn’t heard you.

who were you kidding, this is oliver aiku you’re talking about.

his expression remaining unchanged, but you could tell the air was already different, he continues fo slowly move his leg, making it harder for you to contain yourself. soft whimpers start escaping, and he peeks one eye open as he smiles teasingly at you. his sexy face being too much to handle in the situation, you drop your head to his shoulder, hiding your warm face in his neck. “what’s wrong, princess?” he breathes out, his big hand rubbing along your back as he molds it into an arch. “aiku… you know what you’re doing…” you chastise, but of course he plays oblivious! “oh, ‘m not sure about that… why don’t you tell me?” he ends his sentence with a little lift of his leg as he guides your hips backwards, causing you to moan out loud— exactly what he’s been waiting for. even when you’re trying to take care of him, he manages to be a little freak, always finding ways to dominate you. “shit, this is why i never do n-nice thin—ngh..s… f’r you…” you trailed off, giving up on washing him as your only focus was chasing your own high by riding his thigh. he chuckled, “that’s it baby, grind on me,” before bringing your head up by your jaw to kiss your lips deeply. you moaned into the kiss, yet he swallowed all of your delicious sounds up.

when you began whining, increasing in pitch, and moving yourself on his leg with more haste, he could tell you were almost there. “you close? huh?” he panted out, “come on, give it to me, ma.” you released himself on him with a yelp of his name, and he kisses you, whispering “i’m here, ‘m here, baby.” you both sit for a moment, catching your breaths. aiku’s massaging your ass as you run your hands along his sweaty neck, getting all stinky again from the sexing you two just diiid..! he kisses you deeply once more with a goofy smile on his face, “i love you so much.” giggling at his expression, you hold his face when he leans into your touch, whispering an “i love you too, aiku.

The Journalist, Miss Lamb, was unfazed. If anything, he thought as he side-eyed her, she seemed to regard him with... shit, was she onto him?

“My apologies, I didn’t mean to imply that I believed you were lying. You were a wonderful partner to explore the manor with and I..” Her voice trailed off, but he knew what she left unsaid. Maybe she didn’t fully believe it yet. She continued, “I just want to be certain. Later today, I want to see if the others don’t have a similar message. If they don’t…” Another thought seemed to cross her mind. She fell silent and began musing to herself, regarding the calendar once again.

Norton did have to give it to her; she must have some ridiculous guts if she was getting drugged repeatedly and insisted on continuing her investigation.

Maybe it was some kind of developed tolerance from overexposure which could have been possible given she had been administered a variety of doses at least..three times by now? (Four, possibly?)

Maybe she was just too stubborn and single-minded to let go of her questions about the strangeness of the manor, which was definitely plausible given her insistence at trying to beat him at Golden Cave (which she was terrible at).

Maybe it was a blindness to any kind of danger, like a bird repeatedly flying into a window, again and again and again.

Or it could just be all of the above.

The thought of it was honestly a bit funny: such a rich little lady with her nice skirt and blue bow running around headfirst into danger because she had a question. The drugging part was maybe a bit less funny, but really, watching her sneak around at night, he wouldn’t have expected someone like her to get her hands (or her gloves) dirty.

Norton made a poor attempt at suppressing a laugh, coughing into his hand.

“Are you alright?” Miss Lamb asked, turning back to him.

He could do with less of the questions though.

Dryly, he remarked, “Better than you probably are at least.”

“I appreciate your concern, Mr. Campbell,” she said without a hint of sarcasm. What an angel.

“Well,” he said, rising from the chair and brushing off some dust from his permanently dusty pants. “If you’ve got nothing else for me, I’m headed to bed.”

An almost disappointed look crossed the Journalist’s face. “But we haven’t determined what this message could mean.”

“We haven’t slept all night. And I don’t want this ‘game’ to start without me getting at least a little shuteye in.” Norton slipped his calling card back into his pocket, hand on the doorknob. “You’re smart enough, missy. You can figure this puzzle out yourself.”

“You tend to cough when you laugh.” He froze. The words fell suddenly from her lips– even she seemed surprised. They hung in the air, a pointed finger, an observation she had made of him in their short time knowing each other thrust into the light. The distance between them seemed impossibly close now. She continued: “It happens whenever you express any kind of extreme emotion, really. Is that why you’re so reticent and hostile at once, pushing people away so you don’t have to bother with those feelings?”

The Prospector scowled. “Wrong. I don’t like talking to people who don’t mind their own business.”

“Why did you accept my invitation then? We were investigating places we were told not to explore together.”

“Maybe I should rephrase it– I don’t like when people stick their nose into my business.” Sleep-deprived frustration was eating away at him now as his tone grew more and more angry. “You can dream up all the fantasies that you want of me, miss, all the imaginings of what might be the real reason behind who I am. But you don’t know me. And you don’t have to know me. The answer is clear as day. You can hear it in my voice– all that dust from a lifetime of work, stuck like glue to my lungs and throat. That’s why I’ve got that damn cough. And my personality just came with the job. You ever meet a happy miner? Doubt it. Life’s just miserable. I have more things to be pissed off about than to laugh about. There’s nothing more to it.”

The Journalist was silent through all of this, standing with her little calendar behind her and her notebook on her desk with the names from the files and probably all kinds of other notes and that look in her brown eyes with which she could just see right into him. Her head held high in the face of his relentless assault, her face still carried that horribly persistent expression as if she was searching for the truth in him, for some kind of hidden gold, even though he had practically laid it all bare for her.

“You said yesterday that you wouldn’t show me your card,” she said calmly. “That I couldn’t afford it yet. And then after investigating, you simply showed it to me. Why?”

His head thudded against the door. He groaned loudly, “You and your ‘whys’...”

“Mr. Campbell, do you trust me?”

This time, Norton really did laugh, loudly and unabashedly, before clearing his throat in a gloved fist. With a crooked grin, he cocked his head at her. “How about you answer that for me? Should I trust you?”

To his surprise, Miss Lamb actually hesitated. For a while, she seemed to consider this question, a slight frown on her face. Then:

“I should hope so.”

“Not the most reassuring of answers.”

“No,” she said, shaking her head to clarify. “You should trust me. You can.” Her voice was clear and firm. “You came to the manor for money, correct?”

“Hah. More or less.”

“I’m here for answers. Nothing more to it.”

He raised an eyebrow. “What kind of answers?”

“To a case I’ve been investigating all my life.”

“Sounds a bit dramatic.”

The Journalist moved to her bed. There was a doll next to it, Norton realized, there on the bedside, with a green sweater and cap and awkwardly stitched mouth and button eyes. She picked up the ragged thing tenderly and held it in her lap. There was something very sweet about the scene if it weren’t for the very pensive expression on her face.

“If you want to trust me, I can tell you a bit about my travels to find these answers.”

“Oh, so the Journalist really does have her own entire dramatic backstory now?” he drawled. Still, his hand had been long taken away from the door knob. Leaning against the door, the Prospector had forgotten his weariness. Instead, curiosity was keeping him awake. What kind of story was she going to spin for him?

The sky was getting lighter, though the storm didn’t seem ready to let up at all. The rain continued to patter against the window of the little room. Save for the rain and his slightly labored breathing, the room was silent as Miss Lamb thought long and hard about how to begin. She held the doll close on her lap, eyebrows knit together.

Norton had half a mind to just leave, but at last, she began.

“I was born here, in England. I grew up here for my early childhood. But due to circumstances outside of my control, I moved to another country when I was young and was kept from returning home.”

“Where’d you go?” he asked plainly.

The corner of her mouth twitched. “Australia.”

“Huh. That’s a long way to go.”

She nodded. Didn’t take a detective to figure out she didn’t want to speak more on it. Not his business, fair enough.

“But eventually, I was able to escape. Since then, I have traveled the world to determine what caused those circumstances in my youth that led me to Australia.”

“You must really hate Australia. What’d the emus ever do to you?”

A bright melody lit up the room, her laughter. “You know about the emus, Mr. Campbell?”

“Only a bit from a couple of transplant folks at the mines. Guys would shut up about emus being some kind of plague. They’re…” he gestured vaguely with his hands.

“Birds. Flightless birds that are large and rather fast. But I don’t think they’re much of a plague…” She began picking at her gloves. “There are worse things in Australia than birds.”

Shaking her head, the Journalist continued her narration. “After leaving, I conducted several of my own smaller independent investigations before eventually applying to become a journalist. The cases I have investigated have led me to travel all over – from France to Africa to the Americas– and to meet and learn about so many people and so much suffering.” Her mouth was suddenly set into a firm line. “There are so many people who have experienced so much hurt.”

“So you’ve felt bad for a couple of folks. What does that have to do with me trusting you?”

“As a result of my travels and maintaining correspondence with various sources, to date, I believe I have written thirty-five case files on different individuals– all in careful detail, omitting what is necessary to respect certain individuals’ respect and pride.”

“They published anywhere?”

“No. The only articles I end up sending to be published expose what I consider to be true corruption.”

Ah, there it was. Now she was all up there on her high horse. The Prospector scoffed, “What makes you think you can decide what is ‘true corruption’?”

Her eyes met his. “I cannot decide that myself. But if there are voices out there who have been silenced or have gone missing…then it’s my duty to uncover the truth and figure out what greater powers are covering up these secrets and this suffering. It’s not right to turn a blind eye to pain.

“And learning about these people has helped me better understand myself and my past. Piece by piece, I’m understanding that there is a network of pain that is tied to my own tragedy.” Her voice was becoming more emotional as she gripped the doll tightly. When had he ever heard her speak with anything beyond a polite matter-of-fact and analytical tone of voice? “Our experiences are so different and yet all of these people had some kind of wish, a hope for something to help them. And if I can learn the truth of my past, perhaps I can use that knowledge to help those who have been silenced.”

Norton stared at her. And she met his gaze. There were no tears in her eyes, only the will of life.

“And Mr. Campbell, I have to admit…” She hesitated again. A furious debate was toiling behind her eyes. But she didn’t look away. “I have investigated your situation as well.”

“Huh.”

“The first major case I investigated upon returning to England was actually on the Coal Mine Inspection Act. Your story stood out to me. I had almost forgotten about it until I began speaking with you and put two and two together. It’s why I requested that interview. I assure you, I had no–” 

“Alright.”

The doll fell over in her lap. “What?”

“Alright. You said you wrote about people with respect and dignity, or whatever. And I’m going to assume you didn’t publish shit about me. Honestly,” he murmured, combing through his memories of the people who had come poking around in his life, “You’d think I’d remember someone as chatty as you.”

“I wasn’t among the other reporters you must have encountered after the mining incident,” Miss Lamb clarified. “Since I had no idea where you were and your story wasn’t my main investigation, I primarily relied on other miners and that hospice you used to visit as my sources.” Luckily for him, she was so busy explaining herself that she didn’t notice him stiffening at the mention of this hospice. “But I wanted to tell you all of this so that you understand I’m not here to exploit or harm you, or anyone else here for the matter. I’m just looking for the truth.”

She stood up, setting her doll back on her bedside table and moving cautiously towards him. “I should hope you trust me at least a bit more now.”

“Yeah.” And to Norton’s surprise, that was the truth. This was probably the one journalist he could ever bear the thought of having a conversation with. She was…good. Stubborn and annoying sometimes as a result, but well-intentioned. She was honest, though naturally not without a few secrets of her own, as with whatever happened in Australia. And she just wanted to understand others. “A bit.” 

She smiled warmly at him, and for a moment, he felt as if they were the only people in existence. The way the corners of her lips turned and her eyes shined at once mirrored the frilly kinds of smiles you read about in books – the wonderful kinds of smiles that made you feel like you were being truly seen and recognized– and the sad and beautiful kinds of smiles that belonged to people who have suffered so much but continue to persist.

He couldn’t smile like that.

He offered a small nod instead, now keenly aware of his face and whatever his eyebrows and lips and mouth and cheeks might be doing at that moment. Miss Lamb’s smile turned a bit more playful. “Now, do you believe that I can trust you?”

She didn’t know yet. Of course she had his suspicions of him, and he still had some suspicions of her. He also had an entire mission to carry out keeping tabs on her. Could he really form any kind of relationship – alliance or even friendship – with a lie as large as the one he was keeping?

But then, he considered her earlier words. He had told her the truth. Or at least part of it. There wasn’t much to smile about in his life. He was hostile to her because that was simply the attitude he needed to have to survive here – even if he was playing it up just a bit. And he followed her because it was part of his job, but also because he had to know who she was. He had to see her in action and to what lengths she would go to uncover the truth. He had no reason to trust her before. And now, he maybe had a little bit more reason to.

And didn’t every relationship have at least a few secrets?

He chuckled a bit and opened the door, stepping out of the room. Over his shoulder, he threw her a smile. “I should hope so.”

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