(no subject)
In Australia, it was still dark and cool.
But this was a different desert, and it was bright out, such that Chelsea had drawn the shutters and the drapes and curled herself in the great Victorian chair in the corner of the bedroom, where she could watch her husband sleep. She had adjusted herself to the time change without much thought, the movement of time as familiar as her own pulse. The hem of her simple silk nightgown waved in the current from the fan, as softly as a heat shimmer on a distant road. She liked silk. It was the closest thing to being nude when you didn't want to be.
She turned the coin over in her hand; crescent moon and Horus eye, spider web sigil. It was old, and heavy. Like fate. Time she knew well, but fate was Nico's realm of thought.
It was hard to tell what hurt worse. She had always known she had been raped, that clear autumn day, of which all she had ever been able to recall was stumbling up the porch steps, bloody and shaken, into her father's arms. Tristan had taken the memory when he died, she supposed. Had it kept her from being ashamed, then? Losing that first memory, the first touch of pain so great that the notion of pain could not hold it, pain that overflowed the bounds of pain and became a sort of heated, soaring pleasure? Would she never have understood the transcendence of it, the real meaning of never being afraid of anything, if she had not experienced it then? When fear and revulsion and shock and pain became.......enjoyable.....there was no impediment left, no reason to acknowledge limitations.
It was all about time, when it came down to it. Time, and fate, and the way knowledge and wisdom distributed themselves throughout, filtering down to those who would only open their eyes and See.
Most of the things one was part of in a lifetime weren't very big. They were bedtime stories. What had happened last night was a novel, an epic, a legend. A compulsion of so much time and so many fates into such a small space, such a thick knot in the weave of it all. She had done well, for her part. And Nico.......was at once far weaker and far bolder than she could ever be. If her mind, analytical as it had become, dared to count his sins, the numbers were effectively drowned by the rush in her ears from a devotion she did not know herself capable of.
A few feet from her, in the big iron canopy bed and the nest of soft black bedding, still tangled from sex that had become near-frantic with relief, there came a muttering. She looked up, on edge and listening; it subsided as Nico rolled over and settled again in his sleep. She took a breathe, out of her reverie now, coin in one hand and glass of amaretto in the other. The low light in the room caught the cut crystal and the golden brown liquor at odd angles. It burned sweetly on her tongue and down her throat as she took her time swallowing, watching the play of the light. She had hoped it would make her sleepy, but it hadn't yet.
Hers was to watch; this much she knew. And Nico's, to act. Her faith in this had been rewarded the night before, when they both came home alive and untainted. And in continued faith, she reached across the Railroad, tucking the coin into Paint's pocket. Hers to watch; others, to act. Shiva had given her Sight, and it was her duty to make use of it. Others had other gifts, hers were her own concern.
The coin flickered as her shadows became Allen's rainbows, and was gone.
She drained the glass slowly, thought ebbing and flowing over the night before like the tides or the pull of fate. When it was empty, she sat it on the bedside table and lay down, watching her Nicodemus rest and heal, a dark guardian angel in the guise of a fair young woman. Sleep and death were too similar for her to be at ease with either, when it came to him. In the doorway, she had seen her past, and within the past lay the future, the present merely a vantage point from which all were visible. She knew her path now. And she was not afraid.
In his sleep, Nicodemus reached for her. She was pleased to go.