I'd left him dreaming [closed]

[deservesadaisy]

Who: Ivan and Ilde
What: He's making a habit of turning up on doorsteps.
Where: Villa Roassieux
When: Shortly after receiving this text
Notes: It's just a one-night stand. That kept happening. Exclusively. And then he took care of her dog. ...you are no longer fooling anyone, guys.
Warnings: None yet, but give it time.

Ivan is not going to dignify that text with a reply. Instead he turns up, very shortly afterward, on her doorstep, expression closed.

At least he brought her purse with him.

Comments

[rhinemaid]

"I don't know if he and Huan would live together well," she sighs, letting Ivan arrange himself before she resettles against him like a vampiric arm-chair. It's nice, being in her own house with her own things and her own vampire, and she feels like a traitor for it. For being grateful for it. She wants their success in New York, but she doesn't really want to go back.

[deservesadaisy]

He presses a kiss to her shoulder. "It's moot now." He's sorry she had to come back this way, but he's too selfish to be sorry she's back.

[rhinemaid]

"I just...I don't know if Sonja's coming back." Maybe it's selfish to want her to; they'd spent so much of this past year focused on getting out of Baedal, she shouldn't be sitting here wishing for Sonja to get trapped again. She still has a life to live there, and responsibilities that are so much bigger than Ilde.

[deservesadaisy]

"She will or she won't," he says, quiet and simple. "If she'll come back for anyone, it will be you, I'm sure." Ivan doesn't know if that'd be good or bad, but it's something to deal with later. "I don't know if we'll figure out the whys any time soon, here."

[rhinemaid]

"Baedal keeps secrets." That's nothing new; she's been frustrated with it since she first arrived, ferreting out little pieces of information and hoarding them like something precious.

[deservesadaisy]

"So it does." He leaned back a bit, drawing her with him. "And people, as well, it seems."

[rhinemaid]

"Some people." Ilde, Sonja and Hilmi aren't the first to disappear; Ilde isn't the first to reappear. Many of those others, though, they were gone and they stayed gone.

Dean Winchester died.

[deservesadaisy]

He just holds her, at that. She's right, and he won't pretend she isn't.

Finally, though, he says, "I'm glad you came back." He says it like a secret.

[rhinemaid]

"So am I." It sounds more like something she's half-afraid of, the way she says it; something she might not have admitted if not for that timely opening. Is she allowed to be glad?

[deservesadaisy]

He kisses her neck, lightly. "That's nice to hear, under the circumstances."

[rhinemaid]

"I didn't want to never see you again." ...well, even death probably wasn't going to make her effusive in her sometimes-wary expressions of fondness in this accidental relationship. It's a step up from 'used to you', either way, and it's a little bit easier in the quiet room with steam rising and a hundred things that will still need her attention later but aren't quite anything she can think about now.

[deservesadaisy]

He presses his lips to her hair. "I wasn't ready to let you go." Which falsely suggests that he might ever be, except for the tone in which it's said.

[rhinemaid]

They really need to have that conversation, she thinks, vaguely; she doesn't have the energy right now to get into it, whether or not he's going to stay with her when she's ready to find a way to get pregnant. Not being ready to let go of her now maybe doesn't mean he's going to be interested in signing up for the life she wants to lead now her part in that siege is over--

A lot changed, the past few weeks. She needs to let herself catch up with it.

"If I could've warned you, I would have...I didn't know it was about to happen."

[deservesadaisy]

"I gathered. It wasn't your fault." Ivan knows better than most that people don't get a chance to warn you before they leave, more often than not.

[rhinemaid]

People keep saying that to her, since she got back. Sooner or later she's going to start believing them properly, she tells herself.

"I didn't know I would be coming back, either."

[deservesadaisy]

"No, I don't imagine." He shifts, a little, settling her against him once he stops. "I'd have managed, but I wouldn't have been pleased to."

[rhinemaid]

A little huff of air--

"Now does it qualify as a relationship by your completely arbitrary standards?"

[deservesadaisy]

He laughs, quietly, against her neck. "I don't know. I suppose. Would you like it to?"

[rhinemaid]

"...yes," she says, like she's deciding it on the spur of the moment and not entirely sure of what it might actually mean-- but everything is always complicated.

[deservesadaisy]

"I'm terrible at casual," he says, as if it's a confession even though she's likely gathered. "It's probably just as well."

[rhinemaid]

"I don't know what I am." Good at or bad at or suited to or...Ivan is the first relationship she's had that she'd be sure qualifies as something other than 'morally suspect sneaking around'; she has nothing much to compare it to, just this. Casual was the intention, at the beginning, so maybe she is terrible at that.

[deservesadaisy]

"I think people get very wrapped up in dissecting things. Naming them. You've got more important things to work through." Her death. Whatever led up to it. And the trauma before that - their mistake with subspace, and back.

[rhinemaid]

"I like things to have names," she mutters - definitions that can be written down, pinned down where they can't twist and squirm into something more complicated and confusing. Words make ideas make sense, it's soothing, and it's...not always easy, so he's right, it's just irritating when he has a point.

[deservesadaisy]

"I gathered." It was almost funny, given how much she hadn't wanted to discuss their relationship in contrast to how she wants to define it neatly. "What would you like to call it, then?"

[rhinemaid]

"I don't know. Mine." Nicely simplistic, easy to remember, covering a multitude of sins.