(no subject)

[rhinemaid]

Who: Ivan and Ilde
What: Ivan discovers that trying to have a conversation with Ilde about ~their relationship~ is not unlike trying to pick up a cat that doesn’t want to be. Also, biothurgy is really neat, and Hasi is the least likely of Ilde's friends to offer to shove Ivan's balls somewhere unpleasant.
Where: Ivan’s new Mafaton apartment.
When: R...ecently.
Notes: Written on gdocs and formatted for livejournal.
Warnings: Discussion of violence, murder.

Mitchell’s arrival has made Baedal seem suddenly, intensely real. Before, Ivan had kept it somewhat separate from his old life. It had been easy to think of it as a very odd purgatory, in some ways. But Mitchell is a link back to what, and who, he’d been before. (It hasn’t escaped Ivan that Mitchell is, literally, the last person he’d seen before dying.)

He isn’t sure how he feels about that.

It isn’t the only thing Ivan’s uncertain about, in all honesty, and he doesn’t care for uncertainty. If he can iron one thing out, it’ll be one less thing to be unsure about.

Ilde might not cooperate, but he’ll at least give it a try.

It’s funny how often the traits ‘willful’ and ‘codependent’ don’t actually contradict each other-- most of the time, arguably, she’s the very definition of cooperative. For certain people in her life, it’s rarely all that difficult to persuade her to do something; so easy as to be worrying, a thought that had occurred to Sonja almost immediately when they first met.

On the other hand, everyone has their limits and Ilde isn’t any more rational about hers than she is about anything else in her life. None of them are actually on her mind, of course, when she traces the address and map on her CiD for Ivan’s new apartment, hard to miss on her approach with bright purple tights under black shorts and the sound of her heels on the pavement. She’s been busy, lately; she’s busy most of the time.

Maybe she just doesn’t want to find out how she’d feel if she were still for a while.

When Ivan lets her in, he smiles, though there’s an edge of wear to it he didn’t have before the debacle with the bad blood and its fallout. Or perhaps she just knows him better. “Good evening. I thought about having a housewarming, and then decided I’d rather just invite you.”

Presumably he knows her well enough to read ‘do you even have friends’ in the droll expression he gets in response, tipping her hat off her head into one hand and using the other to shake her hair out as she slips inside past him. “How long do you give this one?” she inquires, turning to keep him in view as she does, it being apparently no big deal to navigate an unfamiliar space backwards and in heels.

“I have some wards,” he says, amused. “A month or two?” He’s used to hotels anyway; he doesn’t tend to get attached to places.

“Not a bad estimate.” Given the seeming frequency of Baedal-brand chaos, and the fact skipping town is only an option if you really, really want to get eaten by a fog-monster. “Did Njoki get you into flannel after all?” Flannel and acid wash jeans, if she’s remembering right - speaking of residences.

“No,” he says, amused. “But I did help clean up, if that’s what you’re asking.”

“Only fair.” She drops her purse (also purple) on the sofa when she finds it, trailing aimlessly around the room with a typical restlessness. It tells her the same thing about him that the last one did - that he doesn’t give much to a space, stylishly impersonal.

“I thought so.” He sits, after a moment, when it’s clear she won’t be. “Have you gotten anywhere with your research?”

‘Which research’ wouldn’t be an unfair question - Ilde has to stop and think for a moment what he could be specifically referring to - but the answer for all of the above is broadly the same: “I haven’t hit a wall yet.” A beat later. “Which?”

“I meant the Candlelighters,” he says, “but I’ll take anything you’re willing to talk about.”

Sliding down into the corner of the sofa, she shrugs. “You read Quirin’s essays?”

“I did. I can’t say I had the background to completely follow them.”

“Neither do I. So I’ve been writing back and forth with him this week- he’s at the university.” And she’s just innocently interested in his research and not specifically trying to find out if they were using said research or using his knowledge specifically, certainly not trying to better ascertain whether or not it was biothurgic methods that tainted the blood. Of course. “Do you have anything to drink?”

“Not as much as I did, but I’ve a few bottles of wine, some gin and a bit of vodka.” He answers almost absently, thinking over Quirin’s papers as she’s mentioned them.

Wine sounds worth investigating - and easier for her to drink slowly, maybe a little watered down, even if she doesn’t plan on going anywhere else tonight - and Ilde pursues the possibility of glasses as well, stepping out of her shoes when she gets up from the sofa. Over her shoulder, she says, “He seems nice so far.”

“Second cabinet down on the left,” he said as she went toward the kitchenette. “How is he at explaining what he was talking about?”

Conversation pauses briefly while she rummages through his things - two glasses, a white wine that’s been sitting in his fridge since his last flat - since otherwise she’ll miss half his replies, and she only responds when she returns, “I’ve been keeping up.” In fairness, Ilde is a nerd.

“Can you explain it back to me?” Ivan is educated enough, but he’s always been more for languages and cultures. (Mainly because learning by immersion is better than a lot of studying, in his opinion.)

“Maybe.” She tucks one foot up by the other knee when she sits, this time, stretching her toes so the foot of her tights webs and pales there for a moment before she leans forward through her knees to pour the wine. Her glass is smaller, because ‘alcohol poisoning’. “I dug up one of his papers that seemed the most like something I could’ve stumbled across while researching my species, I can show you that.”

“Alright. I’d be interested.” He feels like he’s only scratching the surface of something and remembers why he hates politics.

“It’s not directly related to anything yet,” she cautions, absently, handing him a glass. “But it might be.” And either way she’ll get more out of the man than his papers.

“It can’t hurt to know,” he said, “and in the absence of anyone to blame, I can’t say there’s much to do but try to follow threads where you find them.”

“Well, we were talking about the ethical implications of theoretically combining different creatures because of whether or not souls exist and if they do exist can they be measured?” It’s possible Ivan will not actually find the details of their correspondence thus far that interesting.

“Very H.G. Wells,” he comments, sipping his wine. “I suppose if one wants to study the soul, this would be the place to do so.”

“And it’s almost necessary, isn’t it, when you’re dealing with the possibility of transforming living beings?” Magic is exciting, all right; the conversations she’s been having with Quirin are interesting for their own sake, especially since she has numerous opinions about the ethics of the above.

“I will take your word, on both magic and the soul.” He’d been open to but skeptical of both, pre-Baedal. “But it sounds as if he’s engaging enough, even if he is a dead end.”

Ilde points at him with her wine glass. “If you tell me you’re a dead person wandering around being sardonic at things who doesn’t believe in magic, I’m going to laugh at you.” A beat. “More.”

He laughed, then. “I believe magic exists, I’m just not going to pretend to know anything about it when I don’t.”

“That’s fair,” she concedes, after several silent moments of trying to find something wrong with it.

He nudged her with his foot. “You always seem so disappointed when I make a legitimate point.”

“It throws the pattern off,” she returns, glibly, nudging him back.

“What’s your Sonja up to,” he asks, because there’s really nothing to say to her response, “while you’re off talking theory at the university?”

“She’s been fog-hunting.” Among other things; instead of telling him about any of them, she’s going to sip her wine (a little) and put her feet in his lap. “And we’re training Orion, still. He keeps having stand-offs with Penelope’s cat.” It’s funny how domestic she makes their lives sound, and in places they are- just maybe not quite as much as Ilde’s lazy accounts imply.

“Mm. I’ve never been much of a pet person.” No one could have ever guessed that, Ivan.

“I noticed.” She’s still placidly inclined to allege she likes Orion more than Ivan. “How is your friend settling in?” Unrelated to pets. ...presumably.

“Mitchell? A bit shaken up. Managed to get here the same way I did, a short while after me. Well - not the precise same way, but close enough.” Via death, evidently. “He’s genuinely somewhere between bloody maniac and self-righteous prig, so I’ll be interested to see which way he turns out first. My bets are on the latter. First, at least.”

“Hasi’s taking him to Gutters,” Ilde says, leaving that neatly there in the conversation and having another tiny sip of wine.

“That should be interesting,” he says, with half a smile. “He and my wife killed a handful of people back home, he feels a bit torn up, I gather.” So... surrounded by temptation should be interesting.

The mention of Ivan’s yet-unnamed-in-Ilde’s-hearing wife gives her a moment’s pause; ‘til now Daisy has been that one mention when they first met, in past tense, and there’s just something about the way he says it that starts ringing ‘still married’ alarm bells in her head. Given that he’s the one who doesn’t want her fucking anybody else (she wouldn’t like him to, either, but that’s irrelevant to the fact that he said it first), she decides it’s not unreasonable of her to wonder at it, at least.

She can’t pin down anything to question yet, though, so instead she says, “He told me about his pure and true sexless relationship when I asked him if he can come without biting.” That was a weird conversation. “He says he can, though.”

“Good for him,” Ivan says, without missing a beat. “It’s nice to know he’s only giving himself one complex at a time.”

“Gutters will be interesting.” Almost a shame she’s not going to see that, if only for the sake of curiosity.

“You watch for Mitchell,” he says, a bit more seriously. “He’s one of the most brutal of our kind I’ve ever met. Oh, he’ll scourge himself afterwards, consumed with guilt, but when his fangs are out...” Ivan shrugs. “He was more than his maker bargained for, in the end, I suspect.”

Ilde seems mildly skeptical - her brief interactions with Mitchell so far don’t add up to ‘fearsome’ - but shrugs, taking him more or less at his word. “Well, I’m careful.” That is objectively untrue.

He laughs at that claim. “Are you?”

“Yes,” she says, sinking lower against the sofa and trying not to spill her wine - it never takes long. “I am.”

“So very careful that you’ve taken up with a vampire, in between trips into the fog or poking at secret societies,” he says, lightly.

“A vampire who harps on about how I’m not careful enough,” she retorts, “and I don’t see how the rest is relevant.”

“You trust me too much,” he informs her, which is, perhaps, a bit odd.

“I trust that you’ll be consistent and act in your own best interests,” she corrected him, with another gesture of her glass. “Essentially I just think you’re not stupid, I don’t know what you’re complaining about-”

“I’m not complaining,” he says, amused, “I was just informing you.”

“Well, I don’t trust you.” So there, her expression seems to say, in apparent contradiction of the fact she’s more than slightly tipsy and slowly becoming a part of his sofa.

“I find that terribly reassuring,” he informs her. “Do you even care what I do?”

“About what?”

“Is this anything to you other than small talk before we inevitably end up shagging?” Well.

Ilde’s expression briefly takes on a slightly hunted quality; she’s not fond of being cornered into conversations she doesn’t think she needs to have. On the other hand- “I think ‘are you still married’ is a better question.”

“They’re not unrelated.” He finishes his glass of wine. “No,” he says, “I’m not. But I was for a very long time.”

“All right.” Apparently she’s side-stepping the fact he asked her a question first, for now; it doesn’t need so much picking apart, she thinks, or at least she doesn’t like to have to do it.

“It would bother you, if I said yes.” It’s not quite a question, this time.

“I don’t think that’s unreasonable. Of me.” And she does devote a fair amount of her time to figuring out how she can rationalize her own reactions, so presumably she’d know. Besides, she can hear Cindy now if the answer had been yes; she’d probably be right.

“It’s not unreasonable, but it’s not a given.” Not all women would care, especially considering that there is no way for him to go to his wife, and no reason to think his wife will come to Baedal apart from Murphy’s Law. “We hadn’t even discussed exclusivity until recently.”

“I don’t see why it needs to be discussed. I already said yes.” What more really needs to be said? She’s happy to rearrange things that way, and as far as she can see that should be enough. (That or she just really doesn’t like talking about what she does and does not care for.)

“I’d like to know what you want,” he says, “so I don’t accidentally cross a line I didn’t know was there.”

“What kind of line?” It’s not unreasonable of Ivan to think a conversation like this is a good idea, even necessary - married for a long time, accustomed to being constantly cheated on, maybe the man’s got some priorities - but you’d never know that from the slightly suspicious way Ilde addresses him from the depths of the sofa-corner, gone boneless. Not so cooperative, then, after all.

“If you’d slept with someone else before I’d said I didn’t want to share you, I’d have had no grounds to be angry,” he says, “but I would have been, regardless. I’d rather not upset you that way by accident.”

“I’m not going to sleep with anyone else, I’ve said.” Not that she couldn’t, arguably, benefit from a bit more clarity in her personal life.

“It was an analogy,” he returns, “You’ve said you won’t and I trust you, but that wasn’t what I meant.”

“I don’t have psychic intuition,” she complains, putting her glass down on the coffee table in front of them. “I don’t know exactly what you mean, you’re going to have to actually tell me.”

“I am trying.” She’s not making it easy. “I was saying that now that it seems like this is more than purely casual, I would like to know what you do and don’t expect.”

“I didn’t have ‘relationships’ before, I don’t know. I hadn’t thought about it.” Sliding inadvertently into the aforementioned with Ivan is not a lot like, for instance, a minor tendency in her mid-teens to sleep with her father’s acquaintances. The experience she has to draw from isn’t exactly useful here, she’s found, so for the most part she’s just done the things she likes and not done the things she doesn’t and hoped for the best.

“Fine,” he says, after a moment. “I just thought it might be pleasant to not have to guess, but I’m not going to drag anything out of you.” Something in him retreats, a little. 70 years married to Daisy took its own toll.

“I don’t know how it’s supposed to work, so I’ve been making it up as I go along.” This is probably true of more than just how she’s handled Ivan, these past few months. “I’m not trying to be difficult-” because it’s naturally effortless to her, “-I just don’t know what I’m supposed to be expecting or not. I expect if you were still married then you could fuck off from expecting anything from me.”

Ilde has a compulsion to fill silences when she’s been drinking that rarely otherwise occurs, but it’s probable that that being the point she sticks with has more to do with the fact it’s the only one she’s completely clear on than anything else.

“Daisy would have had no patience for this sort of discussion either.” Though, arguably, for different reasons. “It just seemed like this snuck up on us both, that was all.”

“I wouldn’t like to have to get not used to you any more,” she informs him, with a semi-inebriated air of finality; she doesn’t want a drawn out conversation about how she feels about what they’re doing and exclusivity removes enough of the ambiguity from her perspective that she doesn’t feel much of a need to pick it apart further than that, but there is a fleeting sense of anxiousness that he not get the impression her willingness to bite him in the face rather than give him a straight answer means she doesn’t (in her own words) like to be used to him.

“I’m glad you find me convenient,” he says with a smile, retreating back into sardonic detachment, even if it’s not unkind.

“That’s not what I said,” she objects, frowning partly because she doesn’t like the way that interpretation sounds repeated back to her and partly because she objects to Ivan declaring himself to be in any way describable as ‘convenient’. “I think convenient would necessitate not having to bring a first aid kit to bed, and also being less irritating.” This is not the most skillful way anyone has ever argued someone else’s importance in their life. In her defense, he already knew about her alcohol tolerance.

“I wasn’t convenient at first,” he allows, “but you know what to expect, and you like fighting with me.”

“You don’t make enough sense to be convenient,” she says, critically, admittedly as inclined to argue with him as she ever is. “I don’t know what you think about anything. And ‘convenient’ wouldn’t dictate whether or not I sleep with anyone else. You can think of yourself that way, but it’s not how I find you at all.”

“I don’t know what else to make of you being ‘used to’ me,” he returns, just the same.

“It means I’m used to you.” It makes more sense in her head than it apparently does to anyone outside of that mess of faerie logic and bad judgement; irking her into clarifying herself can be added to ‘methods of getting information out of Ilde’. “I don’t know, there’s a space where you are and I don’t want you to not be in it. You made it sound like that’s what you wanted and now you’re being strange at me.”

“I’m not... I’m trying to figure out what I am to you, I don’t think that’s such a very odd thing to wonder about,” he says, not agitated but slightly bemused.

She is slightly agitated, in contrast; unsure where her explanation is falling apart and wary of too many untrustworthy words that might say more than she’s comfortable with. “I thought that was what I was telling you.”

“I don’t suppose I’ve much experience with anyone just being used to me,” he says, with a shrug. “I don’t know how to do this middle thing we’re doing, when we’re neither really together or apart.” Ilde isn’t the only one with a tendency to obsession.

“...I thought we were.” ‘Together’, since he’d specifically brought up exclusivity; that makes sense to her, that that’s what that means. What else would it mean, she’d reasoned; why else would it matter?

“You come over and we sleep together, and it’s very enjoyable, and sometimes we talk vaguely about politics, but it’s not.” He gestures, frustrated and vague. “If it’s what you want, I’m not unhappy, I just don’t know how much I’m allowed to care about you beyond that.”

There’s something inappropriately funny to Ilde about Ivan caring about being allowed things, but she doesn’t think he’ll find the humour in it right now, for some strange reason. After a thin pause where she’s trying not to start giggling or hiccuping, neither of which are very useful to her, she says, “It’s not what? I like this and I don’t know if I want anything else, I don’t know what anything else would be and you’re not actually saying.”

“I didn’t make a chart,” he replies, “I don’t know. I thought you might have some opinion, but evidently I’ve read to much into this, and I should just stop making an idiot of myself.”

“I thought,” carefully, since this is unfamiliar ground and mostly so far this conversation has been a clusterfuck of misunderstandings on both sides, “that you asked me not to be with anyone else because you wanted to be with me and not casually, so I said yes because I’d like that, and I thought that meant we’d already sorted out what we are.” Making his initial question sort of alarmingly unexpected, yes.

He smiles, a bit wearily, but says, “That is, I suppose, probably good enough for the time being.”

“I thought it was good,” she says, more quietly, picking at her nails and feeling more than slightly like a fool.

“If I didn’t care about losing you, I wouldn’t be worried about what you thought of this,” he replies, a bit more frankly.

“Okay.” The fact she and Sonja are actively intent on leaving Baedal seems...not irrelevant to that point, but it’s not something she feels inclined to bring up right this very moment; it’s not like he doesn’t already know about it. She’s visibly not entirely sure what else to say, off-balance and leery of another misstep, so after a pause she picks up her wine glass again, instead.

Clearly wine will help.

Ivan is silent, thinking for a few moments. This has turned into something other than he intended - he’s not sure now what he did intend, but not this. It seems, however, the conversation has run out of momentum, and he isn’t sure it’s worth giving it a push. Daisy had said she loved him at least daily, and in the end it hadn’t really mattered; perhaps it will be enough, being with Ilde the way they are at present.

“Pour me some more as well, would you?” he asks, after a moment.

Obliging him with a refill, she curls up into his side rather than stay tucked into the other end of the sofa; preferable generally, and seemingly apropos. “Did I tell you about Hasi?” she asks, suddenly; she’d mentioned her with Mitchell earlier, but she’s not sure if she’d ever told him about her before or if she’d just assumed he knows things.

“No, I don’t think so.” He accommodates her change of position, and for all they’ve confused each other, he still likes having her near.

“She’s from a different timeline of my world- she’s an actress, she was involved with my father for a while. I missed her.” And it’s strange, having her here; worlds that continued on after 2006 have bothered her quietly since she arrived in Baedal before she had to deal with any of them actually being alternate timelines of her own existence. It’s disconcerting when she thinks about it, so mostly she thinks about how glad she is to have Hasi and leave aside the parts that she can’t make sense of.

“And now she’s taking Mitchell to Gutters. It seems like she shares your flair for interesting decisions,” he says, and it’s something like a peace offering.

“She’s lovely.” Which is both an acceptance of said offering and, probably, a concession to his point. Hasi blows Ilde out of the water there, all things considered, but Princess Rationalization over here isn’t going to outright admit there’s anything wrong with hers in the first place - at least not most of the time. Now and then, maybe, like when Remy’s teaching her how to fistbump. “I used to want to be her when I grew up.” Maybe not so high-profile.

“It sounds like I should meet her, one day.” If nothing else, to get an eyewitness account of how Mitchell fares, but also because she sounds like she’d be worth meeting.

“There isn’t anyone else like Hasi.” Possibly because the alternative would cause aging Scotsmen to grab hold of reality’s engines, crying she cannae take any more, cap’n, but there’s nothing wrong with just the right brand of intensity. “She stayed with us for a while, when I was sixteen- you’ll like her.” And she’s placidly confident of that, in spite of the general trend among Ivan and her close friends being ‘wary tolerance’.

“It seems more likely that, with your friends, I’ll like them than they’ll like me,” he says, along those same lines. “But I would be glad to meet her, sometime.”

“She’s much less likely to offer to castrate you.”

Ivan laughs, quietly. “Well, that is a step in the right direction.”

“Oh-- you know, I did mention her, we just didn’t talk about it. She was the person I was talking to about whether or not you have some kind of vampiric sexual dysfunction.” The woman responsible for Ilde’s inquiries about the same; surely this is the best first impression of Ivan anyone has ever had.

“If you really wanted, we could try it without me biting you,” he says, lightly. “I honestly haven’t made the attempt before, but if it bothers you.”

“No, it doesn’t- I wouldn’t let you do it if I didn’t like it. It just came up in conversation.” How natural she makes this sound may be slightly disconcerting. Doesn’t everybody casually discuss things like this?

“I will say it resulted in more than I need to know about Mitchell’s sex life. He had a human lover for a bit, several decades ago,” Ivan adds, like he’s just remembered. “I never saw, I just heard. I imagine that had to have been taxing for him.”

“Is this taxing for you?” The notion hasn’t occurred to her before, really-- she’d figured if he couldn’t control himself, this wouldn’t happen at all.

He looks a little surprised. “Some. More than it would be if I couldn’t kill you.” If he didn’t enjoy it, he wouldn’t do it, but it had taken some adjusting.

It takes her a moment to parse ‘couldn’t kill you’ into ‘it’d be more convenient if you were dead already’ rather than ‘I can kill you later’, but not too long. “Daddy always said I was difficult,” she reflects, with odd satisfaction.

Ivan shakes his head, though smiling. “I can’t argue with that. But it would be harder still if I couldn’t bite you at all,” he adds, “which was more my point.” He’d assumed that Mitchell had been feeding on his human without killing her, much as he was doing with Ilde, when he’d heard about it at the time.

“It’d be boring, too.” It might not actually be boring, but she also wasn’t paying lip service when she said she liked it.

He shifts so he can press a kiss to her neck. “Well, you’ve a very low tolerance for boredom.”

“Faerie,” she reminds him, unnecessarily, the wine glass dangling precariously from her hand when they move. “Pop culture says I’m allowed.”