panchali: first half
posted this on ff.net but i'm super paranoid all the smut will actually get me in trouble eventually, so i figured i should put it up here too.
copy-pasted from ff.net.
STORY STUFF: Title of this one is taken from The Mahabharata - the Hindu epic, for those of you unfamiliar with it. Panchali (more commonly known as Draupadi) is one of the main female characters. She, among other things, is born from fire, and ends up married to five husbands at once. Let that and Wikipedia lead you to some interesting conclusions about where this Rei-centric story might veer off to :P Also, the song "Undisclosed Desires", which is quoted in the beginning, is by Muse. It's sort of the one-line theme of the whole story. Last little disclaimer - I don't know anything about Shinto rituals, but I had a friend who's more familiar with them check this for me, so hopefully they're okay.
So, more about the story - primarily about Rei and Jadeite. Set in Crystal Tokyo, couple hundred years after it's all unfrozen. Kind of a mishmash of anime and manga. I basically just picked and chose what I like best about both, so there is no consistency, and I definitely veer from canon in quite a few places. Sorry :P In terms of naming conventions, I tried to stick with their planetary or formal names when they're "on duty" (Mars, Serenity, Endymion, etc.) and have them call each other by their more familiar/intimate 21st century names (Rei, Usagi, Mamoru) in their thoughts and to each other. Just wanted to clarify that if it appears confusing…oh, and here, I really have to thank VO1 - I totally loved the idea of Jadeite acting as Endymion's body double, which I read in a couple of her amazing stories, and I had to steal it. Sooo thanks VO1 for being brilliant, but I think everyone knew that already :D
Will feature sex, possibly of the rougher variety (duh, I don't write anything unless it includes very naughty times) and bad words and a bit of violence. And, um, pseudo-adultery and mature themes?
Please read and review and make me squee.
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Panchali
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I want to satisfy the undisclosed desires in your heart.
-Muse, Undisclosed Desires
…
Rei does not know when, exactly, her dreams turned to discontent.
She supposes it’s the luxury of every woman in love a little too long, who rests her head on the same chest every night. To put another man’s face to her lover’s, to imagine a less familiar footfall at her doorstep.
And Rei has more justification than most, that her eye strays from time to time. She sees what everyone does, of course. Five men who walk like god-kings, stride spanning oceans, eyes encompassing Earth’s sky and turf in all their changing complexity. They command universal devotion. The Senshi who have stood between the blue planet and the end so many times are worshiped, as their Queen is worshiped, but the Shitennou and their King are loved as Earth’s own.
Indeed, she sees much to admire in these men. And privy as she is to their closest counsel, it’s natural that she grows as fond of them as her King. But as the years become decades become centuries, and she fights and swims and drinks beside them, gradually, Rei sees more than she should, and wishes sometimes that she’d stayed far, far away from Earth’s rightful guardians when she first met them thousands of years past.
…
Summer breathes her last as Rei observes the sparkling dusk with Nephrite, both quiet in its purple majesty. Papery oak leaves crunch under their feet, and above, Sagittarius draws back his starry bowstring and lets his brightest arrow fly.
“I wonder, sometimes, that she and I both are ruled by the great archer, and you by the martial god,” he comments, and Rei hears the piqued curiosity in his words, this man who’s always held in his callused fingers a savage spear, a scarred battleaxe.
Stepping closer, she nudges Nephrite’s left foot forward with her own and lifts his elbow. Her great, unbending bow flames into life in his hands, and he recoils a bit, startled but unburnt.
“Like this,” Mars tells him, briskly, and Nephrite’s face splits into a roguish grin.
…
Rei is a miko no longer, but the shrine is so beautiful at this time of year…it calls to her, to her old home. She tugs futilely at the highest, heaviest bough, before a quick, long-fingered hand closes over hers and helps to pull its weight down. Rei looks on, utterly fascinated, as the shy buds tremble at his touch, unfurling tentatively at first, then blooming rapidly into creamy, flushed splendor.
She thinks that they rival the shade of Ami’s cheek, but only just.
Rei holds the branch steady as the copper-curled general efficiently plucks its length clean, and shakes her head no when he deposits hundreds of cherry blossoms in the overburdened folds of her robes.
“At least take some for her!”
“They look better on their mistress,” he returns archly, tucking one blushing flower behind her ear. “And she…” Zoisite smiles, leaf-green irises faraway. “She needs no…decoration.”
…
“I want you to perform the ceremony for Small Lady.”
“Me?” Brisk footsteps echo down the long, crystalline hallway, then suddenly halt. “No…Helios has always been the priest of your house.” Endymion’s ageless eyes darken at her mention of the young cleric’s name, and Mars bites her lip on a smile. “It wouldn’t be right - “
“I want you,” her King interrupts her, sounding strained. “Helios is still just a boy. Sere - Usagi trusts you.” He takes her shoulders, midnight stare boring into twilight. “I…I trust you, Rei.”
“Then I will do it,” she answers him simply.
A beat, a stillness. Mars pulls his hands off her shoulders, and takes them in her own smaller ones.
“They’re only children, you know. It’ll be a long time yet before he steals her heart.”
“It had better be,” and then their footsteps resume.
…
It happens again. Venus flings out her molten chain, too bright and fast for them to clearly perceive, and somehow, Jadeite closes his hands around it. Yanks Venus close, and once she’s in grappling range, it’s over, his blond head bent over hers. Rei laughs, a little disloyally, at her leader’s scrunched-up expression. She laughs harder when Jadeite is delivered a kick that hurls him airborne, connects him solidly with concrete. “They are so very alike, “ she manages between uncharacteristic, husky giggles.
Kunzite smiles, but his eyes remain on the arena below them, on the glittering valkyrie. Rei’s gaze, too, helplessly follows the golden general as he winks in and out of existence, portals shimmering in the air. They’re powerless to look elsewhere.
“As are you and I,” the mightiest of the Shitennou finally answers her, and they watch as the twin suns before them eclipse the one above them.
…
Rei knows to expect him - but irritatingly, not precisely when. Wanting to appear terribly busy at his arrival, instead, she sits in her garden, contemplating nothing and everything, when sunshine gleams in a corner of her vision. “Always. Always you surprise me.”
“I should know better by now, than to dare and surprise the Oracle.” Jadeite speaks her first and most royal title, lost to ages past, before those of guardian and seer supplanted it.
“I didn’t expect you - “
“Then your Fire has failed you, miko,” and Rei remembers a demon who shadowed her a lifetime ago, laughed to know her human name, took it with him to his frozen slumber. Though she’s not a miko anymore, his warm tenor holds that same laughter, and she grows more agitated.
“I meant - I didn’t expect you - “ she curses her tied tongue, “ - you are early.”
Jadeite kneels before Rei and takes her face into his hands. “No,” he says, the Fire’s blue heart in his eyes, burning away the millennia between them. “I’m far too late.”
The general’s voice cracks. “But you will forgive me. You always have,” and his palms on her cheeks are suffused with hot tears.
…
Rei wonders if it is certainty itself that drives her to wild thoughts.
Her flames have always shared their auguries with her, and in all three of her lifetimes, she has known that Jadeite will come for her - either as friend or foe, but her soulmate nonetheless. There’d been no flirtation for her, no suitors, never a liaison, no one to rival the golden general she’d seen smiling in her Fire. In every incarnation, she’d forsworn all lovers, dismissed any troth - known it was silly to tease herself with distractions if she could not have him.
Her sisters have all wished (Usagi), waited (Makoto), worried (Ami), wanted (Minako)…but Rei has always waded the rivers of the future with implacable sureness. The Fire Senshi envies other women their wistful uncertainty, and wishes she could, even briefly, not know what was to be.
A little more patient in immortality (but not much), she has finally been granted him in this third life, and Rei knows she could love - really love - no other. She can’t imagine another man to understand her subtleties as he does, and she loves and guards his mercurial, open heart with equal ferocity. And yet, Mars still jealously keeps his priestess for his own. They do not marry; Rei can’t shake her diffidence toward the institution, and Jadeite never speaks of it. Her feeling for him is constant enough, a living and growing thing in her chest, and Jadeite’s return brings her fierce, astonishing joy that she had not thought to possess. But still, as the years of her long life loom before her, niggling doubts touch her from time to time, and make her wonder what it might be like to anticipate the unknown, to desire another, even for a day.
And her traitorous heart only wants the best, the kings and keepers of Earth, among whom her own lover walks. It’s infrequent, but sometimes she can’t brave her fellow Senshi, plagued by her dreams - Nephrite’s shadow, Zoisite’s knuckles touching her own. The deepening stare of her King, and a breeze playing in Kunzite’s pale hair. Rei loves them dearly - her beloved sisters’ chosen companions, and more than that, her own close friends. The idea of acting on her frivolous, wayward imaginings never even crosses her loyal mind. But she can’t help but ponder occasionally what it would be like, just to be free from fate, to choose one of them for her own.
…
It starts when Zoisite walks in on her bathing. Rei glances up disinterestedly and nearly shrieks when she sees the back of his reddish head where she expected cropped blond curls. As he works off his shirt, the lean muscles of his back twist and bulk under his skin, acquiring their familiar tan. Glistening dragonwings etch scales into his shoulders, the mark of the Far Eastern ruler, and Jadeite turns around. His customary quirk of the lip fades when he sees Rei so visibly shaken.
“Some warning would be nice,” she manages. “Uh, why…?”
“Zoi needed to get out of a conference, and I owed him one,” the Shitennou’s master illusionist answers her casually. “I’m sure he’d love to see you naked, but not so badly that he’d risk incineration.”
Rei scowls and turns her dark head away. “I know that.”
“Wishful thinking, maybe,” Jadeite teases, and she grabs a towel and stalks out of the bathroom, dripping as she goes. His watchful eyes follow Rei’s hasty exit.
…
He’s shifting more often than not these days. With the global summit in high gear, there are hundreds of state functions and forums to attend. Jadeite frequently serves as his King’s double for security purposes. As sovereign of the Far East, Crystal Tokyo technically falls under his dominion, so luckily, Jadeite shares enough common ground with Endymion to speak for him with convincing ease. Unexpectedly, though, he also steps in for Kunzite and Nephrite, while they quash drug-fuelled turf wars in Algiers - thirteen tons of Colombian cocaine seized so far, and counting. The public never questions Jadeite’s frequent absences from negotiations, as Mars ably represents his interests, and Phobos and Deimos manage hers.
In the past, Jadeite always unshifted before seeing her, but either his tight schedule or sheer laziness prevents him now. Between talks, she’s unnerved to feel Nephrite’s big hand cupping her ass, find herself alone in a hallway with Kunzite’s steely scrutiny molten-hot on her. Endymion corners her backstage after she leads a televised prayer for the lives lost in Algiers. His teeth are sharp on her earlobe, fingers trailing the velveted column of her throat.
“Stop it, Jade,” Mars hisses, even as her eyelids slide shut, unthinkingly.
“You know I can’t, I’m up next,” Jadeite murmurs against her hair, blunt nails raising goosebumps beneath her loose state robes, growing hardness evident against her stomach. He presses a quick, hard kiss to her temple before striding into the spotlight, cape subtly draped to cover his front.
Mars stands in the dark, Endymion’s wooded fragrance flaring her nostrils, stomach clenching unwillingly with desire. Is it so wrong to be curious?
…
By the end of the week, Rei knows Jadeite is doing it on purpose. He’s barely Jadeite at all, and neither laziness nor business explains his constant shifting. At the end of every day, a different man collapses in her bed, and before Rei has a chance to speak, a flaxen-curled, smiling-lipped angel takes his place. She wants to ask why, but is afraid that Jadeite might, in turn, ask why her look - as his disguise crosses their bedroom - is one of anticipation and not vociferous objection. So Rei says nothing, and merely turns over and lets sleep and disloyal dreams take her. Her reticence is her undoing, because Jadeite has never known his lover to be so silent. So he pushes her harder.
A few mornings later, Rei meditates, begs the Fire to tell her where the end to these hopeless fantasies lies. She loves him more than she thought possible, so why do others still intrigue her? Why can she not be satisfied with her happiness? As always, when she asks the Fire about him, it shows her nothing but his laughter. Rei can see nothing of her lover’s intentions, only his presence, as everlasting as the sun. It is here that Kunzite finds her, lifts her against the granite length of him, coaxes her mouth open with unfamiliar, unyielding lips. Half-entranced by the Fire still, Rei responds, pushing her tongue boldly past his teeth, crushing her body to his before her wits retake her.
…
She flings herself away and wipes her lips with the back of her hand.
“What the fuck do you think you’re doing?” she rages.
“I didn’t see you complaining,” Jadeite replies, folding his massive arms.
“Because I thought it was - I thought - “ Rei stops, unable to complete the lie. Had she known on some intellectual level that it was Jadeite, cloaked in his leader’s shape? Yes. Had she reacted viscerally to Kunzite’s kiss? Yes, and the wrongness of it brings tears to her eyes.
“Hey.” He strides forward, vestiges of the Middle Eastern king melting away. Jadeite tilts her jaw up. “Don’t ever turn away from me. Not in shame.”
“I am ashamed,” Rei wrenches herself away. “Jade, please, I…”
“I mean it. Look at me.” She does, reluctantly, and meets his clear-sky gaze, steady on hers. “It’s a fantasy. Nothing more.”
“It’s more than a fantasy when - when I act on it,” Rei whispers savagely.
“You knew it was me. You have a mind and a body, Rei. Sometimes they want different things.” She doesn’t say anything, and Jadeite continues.
“Everyone thinks about what could have been. We all want that excitement - you know, the unfamiliarity, the chase. Your sisters had a chance at that before we arrived, but you…you saw me coming.” He sees that he’s echoed Rei’s thoughts, re-echoed by her stricken expression. “I know you’ve never strayed, not even when all you had of me was a vision. It’s not wrong to…to wonder.”
“But.” Rei squeezes her eyes shut, trying to take in what he’s said. “But…I love you.”
“Don’t you think I know it?” Jadeite chuckles, but Zoisite’s sensitive fingertips brush the wetness from her eyelashes. “We have eternity. We have to keep things interesting somehow.”
“Interesting?” she asks thickly, and hears the odd note her lover strikes, coalescing into the younger European king’s.
“I can never deny you anything, Rei. And you know…I’m sure we all of us have...undisclosed desires.”
Rei feels Zoisite’s palm round her nape; they stand utterly still, seemingly hypnotized by their own precipitous silence. Only the loud beeps of their communicators stir them, and Jupiter demanding their presence forty minutes before the border control talks commence.
…
Later that night, Rei kicks off her painful shoes with gusto. She still has questions. “How does it not bother you? At all?”
“Explain how it’s so different from, say, me dressing you up as a schoolgirl and fucking the living daylights out of you? Hypothetically, I mean.”
She does not blush, and continues to strip in the privacy of her large closet. “This isn’t make-believe. The King…his generals…they’re your friends.”
“Does a Senshi have any other equal? Of course they’re my friends.”
A new, horrifying thought occurs to Rei. She steps outside, and meets with coffee-colored irises and curls in the mirror. “You haven’t - have you felt like this?”
“Jealous?”
Now she blushes, fully aware of her hypocrisy, and fiddles with her signet ring, the seal of Mars. “Yes.”
“I never wanted any of your sisters, no. But I was no choirboy before I met you. You know that. I got this out of my system a long time ago, Rei.” His glance flickers to her white fingers, bare but for her planetary sigil. “I’m all yours.”
There is a brief pause, and then he continues, a touch hurriedly. “You would be surprised what your fellow Senshi get up to in the privacy of their own bedrooms.” A grin. “I haven’t mastered teleportation for nothing. Those portals can land you in the most interesting of circumstances if you’re not careful.”
Rei opens her mouth again, and Nephrite’s callused fingers press to her lips. “Shhh. We have an early day tomorrow. Neph’s speaking all day, and you have a joint resolution with him - well, me - at noon. Let’s get some rest.”
…
They don’t speak of it the next day, or the next. Mars knows he’s thinking about it, though, because she thinks of nothing else. The challenge of it, the strangeness, the irresistibility. When she lifts her glass to her lips at the closing fête, she finds Jadeite watching her over its rim, his stare like Jupiter’s blue lightning. Mars drinks faster, refills unhesitantly, and sees him do the same with his brothers. Having successfully seized several Colombian cartel lords and their Algerian runners, the newly returned Nephrite and Kunzite - especially the former - swig their fair share of liquor. The King joins his Shitennou in celebrating the end of long, exhausting days spent in the spotlight.
But Mars has eyes for nobody but the golden general, which she finds ironic given the peculiar trajectory she knows this warm, capricious night will take.
“Someone’s hungry,” a familiar voice observes amusedly. Venus joins her, skirts parting fluidly above her lithe thighs as she moves. Mars blinks twice rapidly, the only indication that she’s caught off guard. “What?”
“I just rescued the last of the cake from Usagi, before she threw up on the Indian emissary,” the blonde’s blithe words hold no guile, but Mars still looks at her carefully. Seeing her second’s wariness, Venus gives it up.
“I don’t think you’ll let me rescue Jade from you, though,” she nearly sings, “so you’ll have to satisfy that…craving in private. Good night!”
She indulgently kisses the tip of Mars’s nose and breezes away, leaving an air of lushly white flowers and perhaps too much champagne. Mars briefly glimpses the Holy Blade - temporarily magicked into a dagger, riding Venus’s uppermost thigh - and smiles.
A tall, hard body pulls her into its length, into shadow, and Mars yelps at being startled twice in as many minutes before his mouth descends on hers. Jadeite braces his right hand on the pillar behind her and lifts her chin with his left; his weight crowds her into the cool marble and they feel unnatural heat spring between them. Mars fumbles vainly with his ceremonial armor, but her fingernails only scratch the flimsy silver plate, and she hisses irritably against his teeth.
Jadeite lifts his face from hers, and his thumb caresses her bruised lips. “Let’s go.”
…
An already dreamlike night is made moreso by far too much drink, but who knows if they would have found their courage without? Almost before Jadeite kicks the door shut, Rei slams him into the wall and accidentally hits the lights. It doesn’t matter; she runs her palms over a visage more finely carved than the one she knows, sees the armored glint of a fully pierced ear, silvered like the crescent moon outside. Zoisite’s exquisitely long fingers find purchase between the folds of her diaphanous gown. She pants harshly as her thighs grow slippery. The curls twined mercilessly in her grip, though, become long and dark. Rei has to tilt her head almost all the way back to receive Nephrite’s hungry kiss. He folds her close, and she enjoys the pliant give of her breasts, puckering nipples to raised scars crossing his chest and stomach.
Kunzite makes short work of her gown; its unwearable shreds are tossed in some corner. He buoys Rei up easily, wraps her bared legs around his powerful torso, carries her to their - their bed. A tendril of unease coils Rei’s belly tight, but she reaches for him anyway, smoothing the hard planes of his back and behind, skin and play of muscle beneath like sun-warmed stone. His lips feel a touch softer than she remembers from their first encounter; Rei leans back, black eyelashes fluttering against black. She sees Earth’s first, infant sky and final firmament in her King’s deathless sight.
Her hands fall limply from his shoulders, but Endymion does not appear to notice, positioning himself between her spread thighs. He traces her lightly from vee to knee, preparing himself, and Rei finally speaks.
“Come back,” she gasps.
He pauses, and the bleeding, shifting green-brown-gray-blue of his irises renders them utterly inscrutable.
“Just you,” Rei pleads. For a moment, she’s not sure he hears her, and then -
“As you wish,” Jadeite tells her, features blurring, forming a shape of familiar and infinite tenderness. Rei leans over to switch on the bedside lamp, wanting to see more of his face than moonlight can tell. Just as she twists onto her stomach, Jadeite abruptly grasps her hips and pulls up so her bottom is pressed against his arousal.
“Jade - “ she half-giggles throatily before he breaks it off with a demanding kiss, locking his forearm over her head to turn her to him. Rei feels him between her thighs, taunting her slick need, and pushes back forcefully, but Jadeite moves with her, elusive. Frustrated, she reaches behind her. Sinks her sharp nails into the tight muscles of his rear, feels their points break the surface as she snarls inside his mouth - and it’s inside his mouth where Rei shrieks when Jadeite rams himself into her with enough force to raise her knees cleanly off the bed.
He tosses her up and brings her down hard, filling her completely with him; perspiration waterfalls between the delineations of Jadeite’s abdomen, matting Rei’s loose strands until he finally loops them into a handful, levers her rise and fall with his grip. She doesn’t even register the pinpricks in her scalp.
“More,” Rei demands shakily, shoulderblades sliding wetly against his chest. She maintains her reversed embrace, hands behind her and grabbing at his ass, the backs of his thighs, anything to increase his speed, take him deeper. Her breath comes rattling between her teeth. “Ho - hold me down - and fuck me.”
Jadeite complies, now using his fistful of Rei’s hair to pinion her to him. The back of her skull presses insistently against his collarbone as he drives into her again and again. His other hand is everywhere, crushing greedy handfuls of her breasts, palming roughly between her legs, but she stays exactly where she is, bearing down to increase the angle of depth while he fucks her totally senseless.
Light stubble abrades the moist shell of her ear. “How does it feel?”
It’s a test. Rei is rarely capable of speech when she’s close. She thinks she’s going to fail this time too, but… “It - it feels - “
Jadeite pushes her forward, and her back separates from his front with a humid, thick sound. Now Rei feels it, that languorous, mad, golden honey that slows the rush in her veins, slows time, fills her mouth and eyes so she can’t speak or see. Jadeite takes her sudden, helpless muteness for what it is and slams into her so hard and fast, Rei has to put her hands on the wall so her forehead doesn’t crack into it first. And then she flies apart - so rapidly and violently that it actually hurts - screams something long and lewd up into their vaulted ceiling, and hears it reverberate back down.
“Good,” her lover finishes for her, ribcage expanding and contracting violently, as he buries himself in her for the last time, hot rush inside her making Rei jerk involuntarily against his hips. “It feels good,” Jadeite growls low into her hair, and then she’s free of his weight.
She wants to drag him to her, ease his sweaty halo onto her chest, but he’s already risen from their damp, fluid-marked blankets. Rei blinks blearily at his silhouette in the shower, puzzled, but wine and weariness lull her to sleep before Jadeite returns. The last itinerant musing before slumber takes her - even as he brought her to ecstasy, her lover never let her see what she craved most - his own face.
…
Someone had taken a hammer to her sleeping head. Rei unseals one soot-lashed eyelid, winces, and forces the other open as well. Alcohol never treats her very kindly in the morning, a hard fact easily forgotten many nights before. She moans and rolls over, encountering rumpled sheets instead of sleep-warm skin. The events of the night prior rush back into her throbbing skull, and Rei sits up straight.
She finds him in his office, two hologrammed lieutenants saluting Jadeite snappily as he issues a stream of orders. Rei hangs back by the door, but they see her and immediately nod in respectful unison. Jadeite glances at her, but does not pause in his instructions to the young officers.
“Get back to me when you have real news. I don’t want to hear about small-time smugglers crossing our borders. Find me the kingpin, gentlemen.”
“My lord,” they respond simultaneously, and then, “Lady.” Their holograms vanish, leaving a silence that neither Rei nor Jadeite have ever known to be awkward before.
He smiles at her, but no mirth reaches his veiled eyes. “Good morning.”
Rei knows he is mocking her; she always rises before he.
“I feel like shit,” she says plainly, as is her way.
Jadeite’s tone is neutral. “Do you?”
Before Rei can respond, he bends his lion’s head, busies himself with the reports spread before him. Too stung by his dismissal to retort sharply, she backs out of his office, mind whirling too fast for her to keep apace.
…
Things only grow worse. At first it’s petty, trivial - both of them irrationally upset and trying to conceal anger they know to be indefensible. They are both adults after all, and they have done something, something with consequences. But it’s easier to feign normalcy, and failing that, to jibe and eventually snipe at each other with a touch more venom than wonted - eyes flashing, teeth bared - when their pretense thins. When Rei loses her temper first, as she always does, Jadeite falls back victoriously and does not speak to her again. He knows how to push her hard, and pull away just when she falls and grasps at his anchor. Jadeite has always known, and she has always forgiven him, loved him perversely more for knowing how to best hurt her - her, fearsome, born of fire with no discernible weakness. Rei always forgives, but not now.
She wonders, somewhat viciously, if this is the beginning of the end. The slow, inevitable slide toward losing him in this lifetime as Rei has in every other. Once, it had come in an explosion like a great human pyre, light and dancing sparks falling away to reveal blood-clumped ashes and bones soft as charcoal. Once, it had come in the swiftest, coldest sleep, filled with nightmares unshakable in their crystalline grip. Rei thinks this protracted, painful end might be the worst of all, to have held him and loved him and ultimately lost him again. But perhaps they had both played their hands too well, and the game had grown beyond their reckoning. They flounder in its wake, unsure of what rules bind them now.
…
Trying to track down Ami - she’s just heard they’re abruptly being dispatched back to Algiers - Rei passes the arena and catches a familiar flash of yellow. She pauses to watch him wrestle with Nephrite, both bare-chested and slicked wet. Jadeite is angry, but there’s not another soul in the universe who would know it, save for her. Only a strange set to his chiseled jaw gives him away, an unnatural speed and savagery to his attack. Rei nearly cries out in warning as he aims a nasty kick to Nephrite’s jaw, but the taller man ducks it at the last second, and swipes a towel off the floor as he does. He throws another to Jadeite, and without words, they both automatically relax. They grunt something at each other - Rei can’t hear what - and Nephrite makes for the entrance. Seeing her, he grins broadly despite the perspiration undoubtedly blurring his vision.
“C’mon, get out those boxing gloves. I know you want a piece of this.”
“Not so much,” Rei smiles, and is surprised that it feels genuine. Friendly, and without the slightest twinge of fascination. She has not smiled in days. “You smell like warm piss, Neph. Another time.”
“Pussy,” Nephrite returns with equanimity. He ruffles her hair with a sweaty palm as he passes, and Rei can’t suppress a feminine shudder at its unmistakably moist weight. She descends the stairs to the floor. Jadeite steps into her immediate line of sight, and she swallows at his unreadable countenance. They are alone, but conversations leak audibly from the hallway above, and make them cautious with what they say.
Rei wastes no time. “Are we okay?”
The illusionist’s face is the furthest thing from expressive. “You have to ask?”
“I don’t want to play games,” she says sharply.
Something flickers in his eyes. “Have you tired of them, then?”
“Damn it, Jade!” Her shout bounces off the high crystal ceiling and eerily back down again. “Do you want to end this or not?!”
Jadeite says nothing, but what flickered in his eyes now leaps, and she feels a knife, silvertipped between her ribs.
She steps closer. “Please,” Rei says in a sound nobody else hears, and his shoulders sag.
“I gave you what you asked for, Rei,” he exhales wearily. “What more do you want from me?”
“What I asked for?” she whispers. “You were there too, Jade. You pushed us to this.”
“Because you wanted - “
“I wanted.” Rei holds his gaze, but just barely. “I did. But - but you told me not to be ashamed. That it wasn’t wrong - that it was just a fantasy.”
Jadeite’s eyelids fall shut for a brief, hurtful second, and she can no longer read their fire. “I…it doesn’t feel like just a fantasy anymore.”
Above the arena, officials and servants alike murmur as they pass by, go about their daily business. Below, that knife slides cleanly up her windpipe and forces speech out.
“You can’t say that,” Rei chokes out against its blade. “You can’t take it back - you told me - “
“I know what I fucking told you!” Jadeite explodes furiously. “I didn’t expect it to feel like this after!” He strides forward and grabs her arms. “I thought - I thought I’d share you with your dream. Just for one night. And now…”
“And now?” she breathes.
“Your dream follows me when I wake.” His tone is flat. “Will I ever be enough for you, now? Just me? Maybe there’s a reason fate kept us apart - maybe forever is too long for us.”
“No.” Rei can barely speak past the stabbing hurt in her chest. “No, don’t - “
He cuts her off, seemingly lost to his contemplation of a point above her head. “You’re all I’ve wanted for so long,” Jadeite muses. “I thought if I gave you everything you wished for, I would finally win you.”
“Win me? How can you think - you have me, Jade - “
“But in giving you everything…it feels as though I’ve lost you. To an illusion.” Jadeite looks down at Rei as if for the first time. “To myself.”
His hands skim up her neck, thumbs tracing circles around her high cheekbones. Rei leans into his touch, willing her tears to dry where they shiver fluidly against her wide, unblinking irises.
“You said something else,” and her own coherence surprises her. “You said we…all of us…have undisclosed desires. What…what is yours?”
Jadeite stares at her for a moment, as though he does not understand her question. And then, he brings her near, speaks against her furrowed brow.
“Just you.”
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on to second half