THERE'S NO GLORY IN LOVE.

@unpossession said: did you have fun? - for minsu

“  yes,  i  did.  san  francisco  is  beautiful.  i  had  never  been  before.  ”

he  has  been  in  a  bit  of  a  melancholy  slump  since  he  got  back  —  parting  with  kangho  was  difficult.  a  romance  so  new  with  barely  any  separation  or  room  to  breathe  –  now  that  kangho  has  moved  on  —  out  of  state  to  his  next  stop  on  tour  —  minsu  has  to  get  back  to  his  life.  phone  calls  and  video  chats  were  all  they  had  now  —  nobody  to  come  home  to,  no  bright  smiles  to  wake  up  to  in  the  morning.

he  keeps  trying  to  tell  himself  the  separation  is  good,  but  his  house  feels  so  cold  without  his  sunshine  boy.  the  walls  start  closing  in  if  he  thinks  about  it  too  long.

“  i  took  many  pictures  —  i  plan  to  get  some  of  them  printed  and  framed.  i’m  sorry  that  i  had  to  cancel  so  many  of  our  book  club  days.  i  didn’t  expect  to  be  gone  so  long.  ”

If she really wanted to, she could quit—but the financial sacrifice would be immense, and she’d be fucking over Angelo, which is inconsiderate at best and suicidal at worst. There’s also the matter of Zero’s reaction: perceived abandonment is one of his triggers, and she could end up as one of the mutilated bodies in his freezer. And sure, she cares about him too, in the way you come to care about anyone you spend extended time with, regardless of whether or not you like them—which, to this day, Roxy has never been able to make up her mind about.

The people who don’t have financial incentive are the absurd ones. Like Willow, for instance. She is, in theory, smart. Yet here she is. She doesn’t even appear to gain anything from this arrangement half the time.

Roxy ties off the garbage bag and hauls it downstairs, out the door, to her car. She has to dispose of it all elsewhere, otherwise Z will dig through the trash to overdose again. She makes sure her doors are locked before she heads back inside.

Maybe it was a stupid question to ask. Maybe she deserved to be cut down a little. Willow had only wondered why this job, and not something a little less impossible than keeping an immortal everything-addict from overdosing on his seemingly infinite supply of vices. She slumps a bit, then returns to perfect posture. She wishes she had stayed in the library.

Does she bow back? She's bowing back. But then he stops bowing, so she's stopped, and -- Okay, how about she just hugs the book? She's hugging the book. And blushing.

          “Oh, don’t ask me why Lazarus does the things he does—I couldn’t tell you. Maybe he was reminded of something. We’ve led a long life,”          she says, waving her hand dismissively.         “We’re often on each other’s minds anyway. If you really want to know what he was thinking, you’ll have to ask him.” 

On the one hand, she should never want to see either of them again. On the other, she wants a great deal more from them than their absence. Answers, for one; she was in such distress that day that she doesn't even remember if the experiment was a success. She also wants to prove the both of them wrong.

Maybe, though, she is just a masochist.

A birthright, a blood-currency, a thing as natural as breathing and twice as necessary. That she does not know this— that she has lived this long without understanding that the body’s first and most delicate language is revulsion— strikes him as a kind of sacrilege.

Feyd looks at her face the way he looks at things he is deciding whether to break or to keep or to banish into the in-between. The bones close beneath the skin.

“You are allowed everything,” he says, “Not that you may take—” his knuckle is still warm from her jaw, “—but that you already own it. The hate. The fear. The-- everything else.”

His thumb traces the hollow beneath her ear, a valley he has mapped in the dark of his own skull long before he touched it. The cartilage there is thin, almost translucent, and he can feel the faint tremor of her pulse— quick, quick, quick— like a small animal held in a fist. She is so terribly alive. It makes him want to press down.

It festered, of course, the way hatred always does. But she masked it to the point of barely recognising it. With Feyd’s teeth bared, she understands it now. What she would have always denied out loud.

There are tears in her eyes. A face-splitting grin takes up the space of sorrow and leaves only relief. Thank you, she wants to say. So she leans her throat against his fingertips to satisfy the itch for a bruise there.

They move in a rhythm that feels preordained. Synchronised, yet not stiffened by the formality of rehearsal. He is alert to each dip of her finger, each press of her keys—the shifting of bones, tendons, muscles, the body joining in with this romantic orchestration. And that brush of cloth against cloth, though it feels close to scandalous how her arm touches and toys with his.

"You're impressive," She'll give him that much, but the wording of his question makes her stop her playing. Willow breaks the spell of the music between them and instead presses her fingertips against his cheek. "But I wish you wouldn't think so much about what I think of you."