CONTAINS CONTENT:
Mild sensuality.
{{Unedited}}
Vincent spent most of his time in the lab with Klara, Sabine, Chamber, and Kirra.
A day passed, and another… and Austin and Marielle mostly avoided one another; or rather, Marielle avoided Austin as best she could. He seemed to be doing the same, but it was difficult to tell being right next to one another office wise.
Marielle often found her mind wandering back to the first few weeks that they’d met; that first smile that he’d given her and how she knew that she’d never forget it. The night that they’d gone to the movies together, which now seemed like a dream… so much of that first few weeks seemed like a blur. She had been mostly focused on wanting Vincent and his attention that when she went out with Austin, she often forgot about it a few days after. They’d gone to see a romantic comedy, which he’d chosen, and they threw candy at one another and laughed their heads off, and sang the entire way home.
-I remember that, too. His voice came through the other room and she cleared her throat and apologized. –Please come back to me?
-You know that I won’t.
-I have to keep trying, Marielle. You’re a part of me now, literally, and forever. The moment that I leave this country I am going to feel incomplete.
-I’m sorry, Austin. We had a deal.
-It was the worst deal I ever agreed to.
-Do you really think so?
-No, I mean that it was the best deal that I ever agreed to. The end result was the worst. They were silent for a moment as Marielle forced herself not to cry. -I miss you in my arms.
She said nothing, and continued to work on the dossier that she was re-doing for Kiritani, when she signed it, set it aside, and looked down at one that seemed different to her. A closer inspection caused her to realize that it was brand new.
She lifted it, opened it, and looked it over.
– Name: Rancor, Austin Michael.
– Code Name: N/A
– Agent Name: N/A / Tundra
She shuddered… Tundra. She knew that this was why it said not applicable, because he wasn’t Tundra.
She continued to look it over.
– Age: Thirty two.
– Birthdate: 11 / 04 / 38
– Height: Five foot Eleven.
– Hair: Black
– Eyes: Blue.
– Nationality: Italian.
– Born: Turin, Italy.
– Abilities:
– Frost Bite – Blows air that he can control the temperature of.
– Ice Patch – Lays down a layer of ice, slowing enemies, or causing them to slip.
– Glacier Strike – Forms icicles that he can throw with deadly precision.
– Ultimate: Squall – contained ice and snow storm that incapacitates anyone within a fifteen-foot radius.
She had to stop there, memories of Tundra turning her into a human popsicle were starting to crowd her mind.
His voice came through. -I see they gave you my folder.
-Yeah, I don’t understand why, though… you’re leaving.
-It doesn’t mean that I was getting out of here without having a folder… They handed me yours today. Write whatever you want about me in there, I guess.
She paused for a moment looking over his birthdate. -Speaking of which… what do you want for your birthday?
-You know what I want.
She took in a deep breath and sighed, -What else do you want?
He paused, knowing his limits. -A good hug… a kiss on the cheek… a card.
-A card? Like a birthday card?
-A playing card.
She swallowed hard understanding his meaning and her heart thudded with a secret knowledge that she had swirling around the tunnels of her mind. She had kept this secret for a few weeks now, wondering what to do with it. -There won’t be any promise attached to it.
-I know. I want it anyways. I’m going to keep it in my wallet again…in place of the other junk… to remind myself what I could have had if I hadn’t allowed my addictions to eat me alive.
-You didn’t.
-Oh, I did. Or you’d be in my arms right now, where you belong.
-If that’s what you really want…
-I can’t have what I really want, so I’ll take that.
She made a mental note of it, closed his folder, and set it aside to look at later.
***
When Austin went to his bed, he was already upset, irritated, and feeling all of the familiar itches creeping up his limbs.
He pulled the gun from his arm, and set it on the nightstand, wanting at least a few hours of peace without worrying about that annoyance.
“She thought that I looked good today,” he said aloud after he was lying face down on the bed for several minutes. “She wanted to nibble my ear and kiss my neck.” He squeezed a fistful of the blankets. “Why is she doing this…?”
-You know why. She loves you, but she finds you revolting, and sick.
He wrung the life out of the blankets. “I have to have you,” he breathed. He tucked the pillow in against his body, shaping it perfectly to the way her form rested against him. He even went as far as caressing the top as if it were her face and head, which he brought in against his collarbone, gently holding the back as if keeping her there.
It wasn’t satisfying enough, and as he tried to make it more so, the anxiety in him began to well, brim, and overtake him.
“I have to go find someone to quell this,” he whispered.
-No. Keep your promises.
He chuckled cruelly at himself, “For what? To who?”
-Promise to yourself, Austin. You know that she’s right, someday you might find someone else and if you do, and you’re what you are right now… you’re not going to be okay, and they’ll never want you.
“I’ll never want anyone the way I want her.”
-That may be so…but it still may be.
He shook his head, rubbing it into the pillow and going as far as to kiss it, hoping it would relieve some of the tension in his body and chest. It did, but only for a moment. Just long enough for his brain to get the message that it was fake, and that pretending was only going to go so far.
Breathing deeply, and purposefully, he lifted his hand and began to stroke across the top of the pillow, imagining her hair, and how each strand felt. He could remember it, but it was fading. “I will love you until the sun crashes into the earth,” he breathed against it as tears threatened to make an appearance.
He sat up, opened his drawer in his nightstand and pulled out a pad of paper and a pen that he kept there to jot down important things for the next day.
He began to write.
I don’t know too many things.
But I know this much is true,
my love for you is endless
like the sun, and like the moon.
I whisper gently in your ear
of desires and needs so pure
I feel your heart beat next to mine
So scared you are, unsure.
I’ll tuck you deep inside myself
I’ll keep you safe from all
I’ll breathe deeply, and suck you in
You are so very small.
I’ve fashioned a bed of roses
in the corner of my mind
I take you there quite often
my passion leaves me blind
But I would rather be blind, darling
than see a world without you.
Because until you came and loved me so
my whole world was askew. -A.R.
He looked it over… it didn’t say what he wanted it to in entirety, but once again, he felt astounded by what he’d done. He blinked at it a few times. He’d written something.
It hurt. It hurt so badly.
He put the pen to the paper again, something new.
This was more like a letter.
Marielle, Masin, Darling,
You are my love. You are my completion. You are the heat that tempers my cool. You are the beauty that tames my beast. You are the drink that quenches my thirst. You are the calm that steadies my storm. You are the storm that rages within me. How I want to make love to you. How I want you breathing my name. How I want to kiss your wrists and find my name indented in your flesh. How I want to own you, and how I want you to own me. You are my obsession. You are my addiction. You are my chaos. You are my calm. Shatter me, love. Put me back together so gently. Take me in your arms, never let me go. Never, ever, ever stop kissing me. Never stop stroking my hair and digging your fingers into it. I am ruined! I am sick! Let me taste you again. Let me roll you on my tongue. The cure is your lips. Say my name. Never stop saying my name! Say my name so I can repeat it. Say my name so I can taste it in my mouth, and yours. Let me speak to you in hushed tones and dark corners. Let me take control. Let me love you.
– Your Austin.
He smacked the back of his head against the headboard a few times, madness overwhelming him.
It was insanity. It was passion. It was perfect, and his rise in anxiety continued to climb.
He gave in. Going to the computer, he opened the search engines and began to play with his familiars; typing quickly, and finding page after page of his delicious, perfect surrogates. He gasped, that one… oh, gosh how she looked like her, they could have been sisters. She was just a toy, a play thing, a means to an end. He took several screen shots, and saved them to his computer. “What am I doing? What am I doing?”
–Satisfying your need. Now shut up and take your medicine. You know how good you’ll feel.
“Yeah, for like five minutes.” He snarled. “Then I know what I’ll feel… alone.”
-Don’t think about that part, just do it.
At first blood coursed through him, guiding him toward what he thought he wanted and needed right then, making him remember how good it had felt in the past, and how moments of levity had breathed new life in him, coating him with perfect excitement and desire.
However, by the time that he’d found what he thought that he’d been looking for… something had changed. His love for it wasn’t there. The actions had occurred, the visuals had stimulated his body, but nothing remained that made him feel satisfied. It was all…empty.
“Oh, no.” He breathed as if realizing it again for the first time. “I’m in love with her.” He put his face into his hands and cried. For how long? He didn’t know. “I’m ruined,” he said as he eventually crawled back into bed, and once again formed the pillow against his body. “I- I’m ruined, Marielle. I’m never going to be the same, I’m broken.”
-Of course, you are. You’ve never been in love. For the first time in your life, you want to care about someone more than yourself.
“I can fix this. I just need an actual person.” He was starting to drift even while arguing with himself.
-Keep your promises.
“Why, what’s the point?” He spat.
Then a different voice broke into his head-
“Keep your promises, kid, ya know?” Autin knew that he was falling asleep now. The image was blurry and the voice was distant, but the gray hair, and brown eyes were unmistakable as was the New York Italian accent. It was his adoptive father, Rick, and this was a memory. He nodded and looked down, “it’s important to keep your promises, kid. You don’t make a promise that you ain’t gonna keep, ya know?”
“Why?” Austin had only been sixteen at the time, but he already recognized his own voice, and he remembered this memory clearly. He’d lied to someone, he hardly remembered what about. But Rick had come and picked him up from school and taken him to dinner to talk about the whole matter.
“Because your promises – your good word – are all you have.” Rick had leaned back in the chair, one arm over the back. “You know, you ain’t got women… they leave or whatever. There ain’t no fancy houses or bars… you can’t take nothing with you… No, it’s who you are as a person, ya know? Your promises, the weight of you.”
“The weight of me?” Austin had learned English all through his twelfth and thirteenth year, but sometimes euphemisms, allusions, and other abstract English concepts were still going over his head.
“Yeah, yeah, it’s like who you are as a man, ya know?” Austin twirled the spaghetti in his plate and put some into his mouth. “You ain’t gonna do somethin’? Fine, ya’ know?” He pat Austin in the forearm. “But you better not promise that you’re gonna do it. If you promise? You’re bound. You do it. You make a name for yourself that way.” There was silence as he took Rick’s words in. Rick took a swig off the brown bottle of beer. “Keep your promises, Austin kid.”
“Okay, dad,” he whispered, half asleep.
***
When Marielle and Vincent came home, Vincent gave her an adoring smile as he leaned against the kitchen wall and watched her start to take pots out as she prepared to make dinner. He crossed his arms over his chest and took her in; her movements, how she stretched on her tip toes to search the upper shelves in the cabinet, how her figure was accentuated by the movements.
She turned and smiled at him, catching him staring. He gave her a bashful smile and glanced down, pushing his glasses back up his nose. “I was just thinking about how beautiful you are,” he whispered. He sauntered toward her and held her from behind for a moment, kissing her cheek tenderly. “What do you plan on for dinner?”
“Your favorite?” She purred, back.
“Potato pie?” he breathed excitedly.
“Oui, Vincent.”
He gently tugged at her earlobe with his lips before he whispered, “Is your plan to make me love you forever?”
“Maybe,” she replied, coyly.
He was gently rocking her, and his arms were enfolding her from behind. “Is there anything that I can do to help?” he asked.
She nodded, and looked up at him. He was so big next to her. “Peel potatoes?”
“Of course,” he whispered, kissing her several times before letting her go, going to the sink to wash his hands and the two proceeded to make dinner together; fish and potato pie.
She set up the table in the kitchen with a candle, and Vincent opened a bottle of wine for them both.
She sipped as sweet memories of her parents crossed her mind while she watched the firelight from the candle dance in the darkness and adored Vincent’s expression as he ate his favorite food.
“What are you thinking, love?” he asked.
“My parents,” she replied softly.
“Oui… I never knew them even in the other dimension. What do you remember most about them?”
“My mom was super stubborn, and very in love with my father, even though there was a pretty big age difference,” she said with a soft chuckle. “And my father was extremely supportive of almost everything that I ever did.”
“Really?”
“Mhmmm. He settled my anxieties when I first manifested powers.” She swirled the wine in her glass and watched the legs rise and fall for a moment thoughtfully. “I felt like a freak,” she explained flatly.
“So did I,” he reached across the table and took her hand. “We have something in common there.”
“I think that most people feel outside of themselves when it comes to their powers for a while. Inhuman, maybe?” she wondered.
“Oui. I think that’s a fair assessment.” He raked his hair back and took another bite. “This is divine, by the way,” he whispered. Then he sat back, wiped his mouth, and continued his thought, “I think some people want the powers, or… it’s hard, you know? Some personalities would see themselves as deserving of these powers.” She looked thoughtful, but like she understood and probably agreed. “Some personalities and types of people probably want to take over the world, lead… narcissists use these abilities to their own devices.”
“Yeah, people definitely just want to abuse their power from time to time. It’s one of the things that we look for when choosing who to allow into Valorant.”
“What about Austin?”
“We don’t need to talk about him,” she said dismissively as she took a sip from her glass, set it aside, leaned forward to take a piece of bread from the center of the table, and used it to sop up some of the sauce from the fish on her plate.
“I’m not trying to start something with you. I’m genuinely curious. Does he use his powers in ways that he shouldn’t?”
She thought for a moment as she cleaned the plate with her bread. He did… but only for those little pranks; the kind that made you cold enough to make the hairs all over your body stand up, but those were on her, and as far as she knew no one else, and that was about all that he’d done. “He has, but only for little pranks,” she explained.
Vincent looked off distantly. “Austin used to use his abilities to blow up waitresses and strippers skirts,” he said.
Marielle swallowed and looked down. Yeah, that sounded like something that he’d do if he were as unhinged and uncontrolled as Tundra. “He’s never done something like that to me, or anyone in the group that I know of,” she explained taking a drink again. She thought for a moment about what he had done, and for a moment she wondered if keeping this from Vincent was lying. It was; or it was at least keeping something from him… but she wasn’t going to come out about it anytime soon.
For a moment she pondered how interesting it was that she had hardly thought about Austin in hours, and now her mind was moving over him as she hoped and prayed that he was okay. She knew that these next few days were going to be extraordinarily difficult for him.
His metamorphosis could lead to a lot of actions that had the potential to be scary. Her stomach had twisted in fear for him after picking up on his thoughts regarding any actual attempts at creating a prison for her. He’d thought that if he actually started to plan for such a thing that he’d kill himself.
She closed her eyes and sighed as her skin went icy. She couldn’t help him. She couldn’t reach out. Whatever happened, she had to let it happen. The Marielle in Vincent’s dimension always rushed to his aid, and in doing so, she enabled him to a point of no return, and she’d already screwed a lot of his learning and growing up by things like the camera the other night.
She twisted her fingers together, nervously. “You’re worried about him,” Vincent perceived.
“I don’t know what he’ll do,” she explained.
He nodded. “It’s not on you.”
“I know that in my spirit and in my heart but my mind says that I could have done things so differently.”
Vincent swallowed and wiped his mouth again. “Let’s not stay stuck in the past. Austin will become whatever Austin is going to become and all that we can do is wait for it to happen and pray.”
“What if he becomes dangerous for me?”
Vincent paused with a slightly angered look crossing his expression. “I think that you know that right now? That is not going to happen. He loves you too much to truly hurt you. He either wants you to be his entirely or to keep you safe. He doesn’t want to hurt you.”
Marielle drummed her lip for a moment. “What if he does something like kidnap me and hide me away somewhere?”
Silence engulfed the room like someone had sucked the air out of it. “Has he expressed that he will do this?”
Yes? No? He thought about it? How did she explain this one? “He hasn’t threatened it,” she said flatly.
“But you’re concerned that he’s thinking about it.” She glanced away. “That’s a yes,” he answered for her. He finished his potato pie in one large bite, and dropped the cloth napkin into his lap. Then he folded his hands under his chin and watched her for a moment as she stared off in thought. His eyes darkened. “Masin, if he kidnaps you in an attempt to keep you forever? Let me be clear with you- I will kill him. I will search until I find you, and I will make him suffer for that.”
She closed her eyes, tilting her head forward. “I know,” she whispered.
“Good,” he replied with a long exhale. Then he reached his hand out to her and led her to standing, where he came around the table and held her in his arms for a moment. They wrapped themselves around one another in silence for a few minutes as Felix moved around their legs, asking for food. “I’ll feed Felix, you go get comfortable on the couch,” he whispered. Then he pulled back and looked down at her, “or would you prefer that I draw you a bath?”
She smiled excitedly at him and nodded quickly. “Yes, yes! Bath!” She said putting her fingertip to her mouth and looking off.
He smirked at her childlike demeanor, and after giving her a quick kiss on the forehead, he marched off.
After Marielle rinsed down dinner and washed the dishes, she went to the bathroom and discovered a glass of wine sitting next to a plate that had three chocolates on it, and a hot bubble bath in a dark, candlelit room.
He’s trying pretty hard.
She sunk into the tub where she spent a good twenty minutes relaxing, nibbling truffles and sipping wine.
Vincent came in toward the end and sat on the closed toilet to watch her for a moment. “Something I can help you with?” she asked coyly as she lifted her leg out of the water, pretending to wipe it down as she gave him a show.
“You can stay in here all night if you want. But I want you to know that I’ve started a roaring fire, and there’s some massage oil on the coffee table. I want to rub away your anxieties, and that I want to hold you against me tonight as we sleep,” he whispered tenderly as he caressed her bare, wet shoulder.
She felt her cheeks fill with color, desperately needing comfort and attention. She felt like he knew and understood this and it gave her peace.