multiversallogs | ( let me kiss you hard in the pouring rain you like your girls insane )

Entry tags:

( let me kiss you hard in the pouring rain you like your girls insane )

Who: Ilde Decima & Ivan
What: Ilde and Ivan try something new; it goes horribly, horribly awry.
Where: Ivan's flat.
When: Sukkardi night.
Notes: Hasi and Ilde previously discussed (it hasn't happened yet in the log but it will) the concept of subspace and how that works; while Hasi was by no means suggesting that she try it, Ilde has a lot of curiosity and a marked lack of common sense about what is and is not healthy for her.
Warnings: This log features sexual situations, references to past abuse (non-sexual), a severe trigger reaction in character, violence, and suicidal ideation. If I have missed anything, please poke me and I will correct that.

feet, don't fail me now take me to the finish line, oh, my heart it breaks every step that I take, but I'm hoping at the gates, they'll tell me that you're mine

It's not that it doesn't work.

That would be better; if it were just awkward, if it just didn't fit, if she couldn't sink so deep. Sexual experimentation doesn't always work, and maybe it could have just been something that they laughed off later, a chance they took that didn't pan out. It would be disappointing, but it would be fine.

It would be fine.

Ilde doesn't have words for fine or not fine right now; her body is warm and her vision is dark and it isn't that she can't focus, it's that there is nothing to focus on. Just him and the control she wanted to give him, reaching for that blank canvas that she isn't and can't be. Pain doesn't feel like pain right now, his hands on her skin, slick with her blood, the burn of torn skin pulling when he moves and she could come like this if she weren't spinning out of herself, this would work perfectly if it just wasn't what it is. It's only she's nothing and he's right there and she can't stand it, someone else in this empty space she's put herself. Someone else in control when she comes apart, no, that's too much; she doesn't remember her name and she doesn't know why that's so fucking important because if it were important then he would've given it to her already and she wants-- something. Not this.

This is clean smells and mouths making words that aren't for her because people have conversations and she isn't people, they were always very clear on that but not to her because there was never any need to dignify her with explanations. This is that quiet place she went in her own mind where no one could touch her; this is where she goes every time she smiles out at the world with human eyes and human mouth like a light coming on in a dark room, pretty and wrong and not hiding but controlling. This is too close to something that has never been, can never be pleasurable, something that Ivan is not allowed to see or to touch or to know.

He isn't really what she's seeing when her hand closes around his throat.

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Despite what she says, he gets up so that she can use him to lean on as she walks to the bathroom. She may or may not need him, but he's really only good in so far as he can be useful, for now. As long as he has concrete things to do, he'll be fine.

The dressing gets discarded on the floor in front of the tub and she only wobbles slightly when she rises up on her toes and steps in, sinking down and -- all the way down, closing her eyes under the water for an unpleasantly long moment that'd be a hell of a lot more worrying if she were physically capable of drowning.

Sometimes she pretends; imagines that the water closes over her head and she doesn't have to open her eyes again.

He's left her alone for a moment to go put on some trousers and to fetch his cigarettes - smoking when his lungs hurt is clearly a great idea - and when he comes back, he comes to sit on the edge of the tub with a worried frown.

He's not worried that she'll kill herself, not this way. But he's worried about why she'd want to flirt with it.

Like this, there's a safety net, this is the safety net; this isn't real. This can't hurt her, she can't accidentally go too far, there is no danger to her in sinking into the water. She is what she is and this is where she's safe-- even before she knew, she couldn't have hurt herself no matter how long she lay under the unbroken surface.

She remembers what it was like to not know that, though. How it seemed like it could be a solution, sometimes. How it seemed like it would be so easy and it is, it is easy, all she does is lie down and it doesn't hurt her so it's even easier without any instinctive struggle.

Ilde opens her eyes under the water and watches him.

He watches her back, dragging on his cigarette. This went south abruptly and he's still not sure why. But he can give her time. He has no where else to be, particularly. That she needs something he doesn't doubt. He's just unsure what it could be.

Eventually, he lightly skims his fingers over the water's surface, as if testing the temperature.

The ripples distort her face underneath increasingly pink water, blood soaking off her skin and staining the bath. He looks far away and unreal through that, smoke rising strange and jagged, and it feels like something best left unexamined that he's allowed to be here, still, now. Everything more complex than yes or no is something Ilde considers best left unexamined and that, as well, is something she doesn't think too hard about.

Maybe this would make more sense if she did.

After a moment, he lets his hand sink down in to the water, up to his wrist. He doesn't touch her, for now - that still feels like too far, without permission. But he is available if she wants to touch him.

They do better with tactile than verbal communication. But he can still see how safe she doesn't feel.

Her fingertips edge his, disturbing the water with motion that looks almost lazy from above and-- isn't. It's barely contact, an almost calculated measurement thereof, this much is okay.

He leaves his hand there, letting her control their contact. Just because things are calmer doesn't make them right.

They stay like that, for a while.

Their fingers tangle together, and they stay like that, too. For a while.

It's a measurement of time that means Ilde doesn't really know, and it can just be like that, stillness and something that isn't warmth and almost something that makes sense, as opposed to everything else so far. 'You trust me too much', he says, well, that's true. Funny now, though, watching him frown down at her, smoking his cigarette, acting like somebody who gives a fuck. Who else is she supposed to trust?

And she doesn't, anyway.

Ivan isn't sure when this became something more than a casual affair, but it hasn't been one for some time now. He doesn't know when she became someone he took care of - someone whose well-being mattered beyond its consequence to him - but she had all the same. It has been a long time since anyone needed him for anything more than making travel arrangements. He doesn't know how to help her, but the incident has made him realize he wants to, and his world has been upended by that.

For now, though, he just holds her hand as long as she needs.

A subtle change of tension in her hand; her mouth twitches, thins, her lip rolls under her teeth. Then she moves, with or without whatever warning that managed to be, grip tightening as she sits up with an odd silence where someone else's sharp inhalation would've been. She's breathing just fine, no pause.

Eventually, "I don't want to do that again."

"No," he agrees, quietly. He hasn't released her hand. "We won't." It probably goes without saying, really, but it can't hurt to say it.

In the space here where an explanation might go, Ilde has nothing, just the anxious, reflexive grasping of her fingers and the reminder in the back of her head of how insane this is. Plenty of people would be happy to point out to her that Ivan isn't safe, a few of them already have - Ivan himself included - and she's stuck thinking but he's still here. Running a bath and getting a bandage and not pushing, and it doesn't leave her under the impression he's a good person (she's addled, not delusional), but she wonders absently how it is she defines good. If she defines it at all. Maybe it's a you had to be there kind of a thing--

Christ, maybe she'd like to think about anything that isn't what's still turning circles in her head. A few hideous moments and he'd been those dead human monsters still haunting her, and it's an equivalence she wants to stop thinking about, and she doesn't consider that she might need further explanations for why she feels abruptly compelled to wash off the medical-clean-first-aid smell lingering on his hands (in her head-- it's mostly in her head), reaching for a body-wash on the side of the tub that belongs to her.

He lets her, though his frown doesn't disperse. Whatever has happened to her, it went deep. He was no stranger to tucking your pain away in a place it couldn't be touched, and he didn't like to think about what state he'd be in if someone opened that place in him without warning. (If that place could still be found anymore.)

He watches her scrub his fingers, and bites back the mad urge to offer her the only sort of strength he knew how to give someone else. If he offered, now shouldn't be the time.

Now is approximately the worst time for that conversation, yes.

She lets go of his hands after rinsing them, grimacing faintly as she registers the sting of the soap in the bath against the bitemark on her thigh. "I really hated that smell," vaguely.

It's fine, usually, but now is not what she'd call usual.

"Is there anything else I shouldn't do again?" Subspace, clearly, but he isn't sure if he'd done anything else to trigger this reaction in her. It would be a lie to say he doesn't want to know what happened to her, but he'd rather not know than push her away by digging.

"No, it's-- I just-- no, I was-- I just didn't like that." Resting against the side of the bath, against Ivan's side, she picks at her hands, tangling and pulling at her fingers, restless and digging in her nails.

"I noticed." He sighs, and takes a long drag on his cigarette. "Are you feeling any better?" Since she was already 'fine.'

"I don't think I'm going to be sick." A concern she hadn't actually shared with him, though it's not as though he'd have missed it if she were.

"Well, that's something." He will hold off on offering food, though, for a little. He's able to sit with her, just quiet for awhile, despite his instinct for doing.

Eventually, he offers her a drag on the cigarette.

Nicotine can only help; she exhales smoke and hands it back to him, resting her head against the side of his thigh where he's sitting on the edge of the bath. Exhaustion is properly setting in, heavy in her limbs with an ache in her head and her neck that she knows is just tension, and the idea of having to move again at all makes her want to slide back under the water.

"I thought you were someone else," she says, eventually, and it's audibly and visibly difficult to give that much.

He nods. "Because of the position I was in?" Not physically.

"It just...felt. Like something else." A fucked up overlap of impressions; there's nothing sexual about what was done to her in Prometheus' custody, and it's nothing she wants conflated together. Him and them and this and this still doesn't make sense, she's still not quite sure of it, if there's something else that she should be doing to make it what she wants it to be-- and now is no time for picking apart every way in which she's failed, is it, but the spiral of thoughts tips downward in a slick inevitability.

Carefully, he reaches out to touch her jaw, very light. "It's just me." He wouldn't pretend his apartment was any kind of fortress, or even anything he was terribly attached to, but no one was in it but them.

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