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

[rhinemaid]

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.

Comments

[rhinemaid]

"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.

[deservesadaisy]

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.

[rhinemaid]

"I know." Now, anyway, she knows now, all those important details come back; who she is, where she is, more to him than just touch and presence.

"I have some appointments," she said, after another of those long, not unawkward pauses. "Shundi and Newdi. Can you cancel them for me?"

She'll feel badly about this later - it's a kneejerk reaction, she doesn't want to be around anyone, she's not even sure she wants to be around Ivan, she just wants to build a fort and hide in it - but right now she can't imagine being up to it and she doesn't stop herself from reacting.

[deservesadaisy]

He nods, and drops his hand after a moment. "I'll take care of it in a moment." For now, he doesn't want to get too far from her.

[rhinemaid]

"Okay." It may be the opposite of progress, but it feels like something concrete and controlled and that's good, that's better. "Can I just stay here? For a while?"

[deservesadaisy]

"As long as you need," he says, simply. He isn't expecting other company, and her being there won't bother him. Either in the bathtub or the flat, whichever she meant.

[rhinemaid]

"Just for a while," she repeats, curling her fingers under her palms and thinking about getting out of the bath-- fluids and soap and lukewarm water, it's starting to be less comfortable than it was before. "I don't want to go anywhere." Or be asked anything, like 'are you all right', to which there is never a good answer.

[deservesadaisy]

"You don't have to." He is fully prepared to chase off anyone well-meaning, if need be. "Come, I'll change the sheets, then you can come back and get some sleep."

[rhinemaid]

A hesitation on this point; Ilde isn't certain sleep is such a great idea. Her head's a mess and she has nightmares on the good days-- but she can't teeter on this edge indefinitely, and sooner or later she will crash, hard, and maybe it would be easier if she just slept through it.

(The problem with the notion of 'sleeping through' is that it's not fixed when you wake up, you're just calmer.)

"Where's a towel?"

[deservesadaisy]

He gets up to get one for her. "Unless your stomach's settled enough you'd rather food." From the way she'd observed that she wasn't going to be sick a bit earlier, he won't assume.

[rhinemaid]

Stepping out of the bath and into the towel, the thought of food is not the most immediately appealing one and she wrinkles her nose, curling her toes under against the bathroom tile. "I don't think so." She feels wretched, if not nauseous, and almost everything seems like far more effort than it could possibly be worth.

[deservesadaisy]

"Alright." He considers her a moment, then goes back out to strip the bloody sheets off the bed. He doesn't like this, but assumes she likes it even less. At least she can have some clean sheets, if she's staying.

[rhinemaid]

Something about Ivan making the bed is so incongruously domestic, so out of place with the impression of him that Ilde would probably laugh under any other circumstances. As it is, she watches him from the doorway for with a peculiar what do I make of this expression for a few useless moments before it occurs to her that she should be toweling dry and maybe unplugging the bath or-- something more useful than wondering where Ivan learned to tuck a sheet.

[deservesadaisy]

He looks back at her after a moment. He doesn't know what it is about her that makes him want to take all this trouble, but he does, and he isn't questioning it too closely. While she has some superficial characteristics that Mitchell could, sometime, point out were not unlike Daisy, Ilde is so intensely not Daisy in every way it matters that it would honestly never occur to Ivan without prompting.

He offers a small smile. "You thought I had maids in to do this sort of thing?"

[rhinemaid]

"I didn't think about it," she says, truthfully, clutching the towel around her like an ineffective toga. "You look like you just fall into place." She's watched him get dressed, she knows that's not actually true, it's still just odd to see him puttering around a flat. She wonders if it's more or less odd than seeing her-- this.

[deservesadaisy]

"If a man can't make a bed properly when he's my age, he deserves whatever happens to him." He straightens, as he finishes. "I like to be self-sufficient. Though I did live in a lot of hotels before here."

[rhinemaid]

"You think people deserve whatever happens to them as long as it entertains you," she says, reflexively, but it lacks even the false bite that it'd usually have; good attempt, but shaky on the dismount and more like rote than banter.

Her thigh is bleeding again, sluggishly, when she comes back toward him and has a look under her towel-- "Where did you put the kit?"

[deservesadaisy]

"On the chair, in the corner." He points. Since she was trying for banter, not a conversation, he doesn't pick up the point about what he believes people deserve.

"Do you need it bandaged more tightly?"

[rhinemaid]

Kit in hand, after a beat long hesitation she offers it out to him, sitting down on the edge of the bed. "Yes." This is more consciously testing; how much does he care? What else will he do? Will he do it if she asks instead of if she just can't? Does she still matter when she's paying attention?

[deservesadaisy]

He nods and takes the kit. "I've bound a lot fewer wounds than made beds," he prefaces, before he kneels and begins the work of re-bandaging her leg.

[rhinemaid]

"Well, you put it there," she murmurs, reasonably, "it's the least you can do."

[deservesadaisy]

With a wry smile, though he doesn't look up, he comments, "Usually, I wouldn't care." Except, apparently, he does.

[rhinemaid]

"I know." She's less clear on why this isn't usual, but she's grasped at least that it is and in ways slightly more complicated than just 'good' or 'bad'. Life would be a lot more convenient if things would simplify more neatly for her, more often. "Hasi says I'm supposed to talk to you. That you have to do that. For people." The talking thing.

[deservesadaisy]

He smiles, and there's a small, inward and bitter edge to it. "I can get by without, if it's so unpleasant to you." Maybe it would be better if they talked, but it wouldn't be the first time he managed without it.

[rhinemaid]

"She says--" Hasi says, Hasi knows, Hasi is, there are lingering hints of adolescent idolization that are why even now it's more big-sister-little-sister and not so much a friendship of equals, but Ilde could use the former, "--that it's a necessary evil, and no one likes it. That I was myself a Chinese puzzle box."

(Hasi didn't say that, Anais Nin did.)

She doesn't start crying again, at least, but it's worryingly close when she says, "I'm trying." He's supposed to appreciate that; the thought is slightly more savage than plaintive.