Fic | Bound To Linger On | DeWitt/Dominic
Title: Bound To Linger On
Characters: DeWitt/Dominic
Genre: Angst
Rating: M
Disclaimer: Not mine, Whedon’s mind frak.
Word Count: 3239
Summary: ”Adelle DeWitt did not do accidents, although apparently she did mistakes.” Spoilers through 1x11 Briar Rose.
Notes: Many thanks to
ladyvivien for betaing, it’s much better now, and the tense is consistent, which er probably wouldn’t have happened otherwise.
Bound To Linger On
The first time it happened it could almost be called accidental, except of course Adelle DeWitt does not do anything accidentally. At least this is the myth that must be perpetuated, so her heels clicked and clacked with assurance as she made her way downwards. The Attic: its name is inappropriate. It lay deep within the bowels on the sprawling underground complex. She had only seen it twice. Once, when she first got the position, a cursory examination, because this was her house and she would know all of its dirty little secrets, and again when one of their dirty little secrets broke down. So she made her way down, the elevator going quickly enough to make her ears pop, for the third time, to examine another secret: one she had missed, one she had not known or predicted.
Before the surprise and the fear could settle, she ordered for the cameras to be turned off in Subject 1-88’s cell, the guards' warnings and curiosity silenced with a single glance before they were voiced. The man who accompanied her to the small room offered her a chair to bring in with her and her thank you was said in a quiet, thoughtless manner. She watched as he placed it facing the single bunk that occupied the white cell. The guard left the room telling her he'd be outside. She did not respond, already too occupied with the creature curled into a corner of bed and wall.
The door closed behind the guard with a slam that she wouldn’t have thought possible in such an unnaturally quiet place. The form on the bed shifted its eyes with a fear and timidity that unnerved her. The eyes came to rest on her and for a horrid, glorious moment she thought there would be recognition, but there was only the tiniest hint of curiosity at the break in the monotonous white in the room before that was sucked into the vacuum, which was now inside his head. "Oh, Laurence." She murmured. The words escaping without permission as his eyes passed over her form and looked at the wall behind her, any memory that she had never been there before gone.
The room seemed to suck the syllables away until there was nothing but a smothering silence, one of those thick unnatural silences that only exist in hospitals and funeral homes. She only stayed a few minutes that day, not even sitting in the chair. As she passed the guard outside she had told him to leave the piece of furniture in place. No, Adelle DeWitt did not do accidents, although apparently she did mistakes. She would have no one confuse the two.
(The first time it happened it wasn't an accident. It wasn't a thing of lust or passion, it was a calculated decision that boiled down to the fact that she wanted it. They were wrapping up the day’s business and she kissed him. It was an action she had decided upon after several weeks of judging the likely outcomes. Of course it was inappropriate, and unprofessional, but she did want it. She wanted it with the fervor that she usually reserved for her career and her own self-interest. Adelle got the things that she wanted like that, and in the end that was all that mattered, so she kissed him. She had expected him to be unresponsive at first, shocked, and she had prepared herself to work past that. She was unprepared for the speed and the passion with which he responded to her. His tongue in her mouth long before she had planned it, and she found herself pulling back to evaluate what was happening, because she hadn't quite expected him to want this too. Except he opened his eyes and they were dark, and his hand was clenching at her hip promising, claiming, and doing a million things she had never been quite comfortable with. She leaned in and kissed him again.)
The following two weeks are busy. Among other things she had to deal with Margaret. She's losing too many friends is the thought that brushed up from her heart, but she squashed it and told herself she's only lost one. She knew when she pictured that one, she should be thinking of late nights with bottles of white wines and horror stories about exes instead of late afternoons with the sun heating her back and him between her thighs. She puts off seeing him as long she can, though she knew the trip was inevitable. Finally, after Margaret was most certainly dead, and Echo had already gone through two other imprints she made her excuses to Langdon and disappeared.
The guards on duty were different, but their response was the same and it took barely a glance for them to say nothing. They opened the door to his cell and she noted that his position was hardly different, of course why should it be, she thought, he can't remember enough to want any variety. She sat this time, less shocked, knowing what to expect. She looked around the room trying to find something to catch her interest in a space that was designed to have no such details. She sat and looked, still trying to put off the outpouring of information that would come.
Finally the starkness of the room drove her to look at him again, and the time dwindled closer to when her mouth would open. In the moments before she pondered if perhaps reactivating Roger would be better, he wouldn’t remember either, and it would be saner than this. But even though the usually sharp blue was dulled and vacant, there were still some vestiges of him, and as much as she hated to admit it, she would’ve told him this had he still been with them. She was direct, as the story of Margaret unfolded. She meant for it to be bare-boned and factual, and maybe if he was still in that body it would’ve been, but the fact is she did lose a friend and that winds into the murder-mystery because he was unable to judge her. So she let things that she never knew existed escape. And at the end the silence still felt like it has sucked her words into oblivion, but some irrational, primal part of her couldn't help but recognize his form and think that since she had told it, it was done, and that made it all okay.
(The following time was a shock to her. They hadn’t talked about what had happened, about the way she had pushed him against the door trying to regain control of a situation that slipped out of anyone's control the moment her lips met his, or about the way he groaned as he pushed into her for the first time, or about the way they had dressed in silence and without a hint of shame or regret at the end of their encounter. They still didn't talk as he pushed her against her desk in the middle of the day. They continued not talking as they unbuttoned each other's shirts with their normal efficiency, and they remained silent until he put his head to her breast and the quietness was broken with a sound halfway between a moan and a sigh. She pulled his head up then and kissed him her hand working on his trousers as the blood began pulsing between her legs. His hand was rough and agile as he removed her knickers. Their legs and hips wriggled and rose and lowered as his trousers were pushed down and her tight skirt was pushed up, then suddenly the room was filled with their quiet moans as they moved together. They moved together, and they gripped each other to tightly. His hand found its place under her skirt manipulating her clit, and her mouth found it’s way to his neck where she sucked at his pulse. Their sounds are quiet and inarticulate, except when she comes with a few gasped out “fuck”s and “Christ”s, and him with a guttural sound that reverberated off the walls. It was only after they were both fully dressed that a sentence was uttered, and Adelle quietly said: "Would you like to join me for lunch tomorrow Mr. Dominic?"
His smirk seemed a little less obnoxious when he responded: "Of course, Ms. DeWitt.")
It became a pattern. Every time Echo went off the imprint. Every time she felt just a little too alone. Every time Langdon wasn't him, she went to him. It is her house and no one questions her decisions, at least visibly, but she is too intelligent to not have realized the rumors that circled around her visits. There was a visit that is preceded by Echo needing to be patched up by Claire; a bullet had grazed her left thigh. No permanent damage, and Claire, in an irony that only real life could hold, was an excellent surgeon, the scarring would be small, and would not detract from Echo's attractiveness as an Active. Of course, the client was still paying an extra two million. The guards did not even pretend to go through the formalities of waiting for her to tell them what she was there for. She knew that was a bad sign, a sharp reminder that this was an ill-advised weakness, lacking logic and overflowing with sentiment. She smiled emptily at the guard as he left her alone in Mr. Dominic's cell.
The body glanced at her for a second merely trying to attempt some facsimile of primal survival, or curiosity, but then he was staring through her, past her it didn't matter, and then suddenly she hated him, but it wasn’t him, she hated it. She wanted to hit it, yell at it until it's eyes would flash, and he would smirk and tell her that she was doing something stupid. The worst part, the thing that turned disgust to hatred, was she knew it would never respond to her. Knew she could yell, scream, and kick it until doomsday and he would remain passive, he would not even react in fear like a doll would, he would just do nothing.
She exited the cell after only a few moments. Her blood was boiling, her head was pounding, and her chest was aching with an acute pain that made it hard to focus, and there was no way to fix it.
(It became a pattern; lunches, desks cleared of paperwork, carpet burn, and clothes that need to be dry cleaned more often. She enjoyed it, more than she should have. Her feet became accustomed to digging into his back, and his hands became accustomed to gripping her hips. They didn’t define it, not to themselves, and certainly not to each other. It was just, that sometimes, there was a need building in each of them and so she'd place a hand on his sleeve, the closest she'd ever get for asking for anything, and he'd stop her from leaving a room, and sometimes they’d end up fucking. ‘It’s that simple’, they told themselves. The fact that it was good, great, fucking fantastic, was only a product of working together. They worked together well, so they fucked each other well. If sometimes she liked that they eat lunch together while they talk about new security precautions, and if he liked that he could let his hand hover over that place on the small of her back without her ordering him to cut it off, well then, they never mentioned it. It worked.
It worked until it didn't, and it didn’t about a year after it started. He never stopped her but he never encouraged her either, and so she stopped initiating their encounters once she realized. Adelle refused to want something that did not want her back. And if at the end of the day she still clenched around her own fingers with his image imprinted on the back of her eyelids - well, she was angry, and lonely, and she needed some form of escape, so she caved. It was a whim, one of the few ones she couldn't hold onto, one of the few ones that ran free. Roger was born from his absence.)
She would never grow used to Langdon, she decided as she turned back to her desk. He had thought she was joking. Some joke, she thought. She knew that Langdon was somewhere in the building giving Toper the order. She knew that within the hour she would be talking to Mr. Dominic again. The idea made her whole body still for a second, before she shook her head sharply and returned to work. Work, that was all he was, merely a solution to a problem.
She wasn’t surprised that it was Laurence looking at her from the brown eyes. Echo had been Margaret quite completely. It thrilled her to see him act with all of his normal nonchalance at first, he was still strong, but then he realized and everything began to break down. The feelings within her changed as he pleaded with her (“Adelle, please, come on”) mixed, and became muddied. There was an urge to fix him, and an urge to glory in his destruction. And she watched as Saunders gave him the shot, and she calmed Topher, and she did her job.
The drug made him weak, and his head lolled. His smirk, his sarcasm, and the way he stared her in the eye were the same despite the body and the drugs. He was looking at her like he could see right through her and it scared her bloody senseless. So she spoke calmly, softly, and she implored him, and she kept his attention, and then she left, her job was done.
(She wouldn't believe it. How could she? How could he? He stood by her every day, she would've seen it, and he wouldn't have- except she knew he did. She knew Echo wouldn't be wrong. Roger watched her dress as she prepared to meet the traitor and Echo. She told him quietly that he had to stay there, she had work, it should be over quickly. She didn't say that it had to be over quickly, that she couldn't handle this for any longer than strictly necessary. She made her way out of the bedroom where he had never been.
“I never lied to you."
The words ran around in her head as Roger held her. She wanted to believe him, she wanted to trust him, except it wasn’t born of desire her want, it was born of need. She needed to believe, and she needed to trust him, and she couldn't.
"It's embarrassing how naive you are."
She remembered it later as the bullet meant for his own head moved through her skin. She wondered idly as the pain corrupted her mind for a moment, if he thought that as he was moving in her. She wondered if that's the reason he stopped.
"Just like you believed in me, and look how that turned out."
As she walked away from the Dollhouse that night she promised to remember that. She thought she hadn't trusted, but she had, she’ll know better next time. She realized later she should've specified to herself that she meant remembering the sentiment, not the voice it was said in, not the gentle warning that felt like there was an angel at her shoulder reminding her to be careful and the harsh reminder that he had betrayed her making her chest tighten every time she did remember.)
"We need him again." Langdon said, his tone resigned and guilty. God, she was so tired of people with overactive consciences.
Adelle did not turn to face him. "Yes, I know."
"Should I give the order?"
She waited for a second before looking at him over her shoulder and nodding once, sharply. Langdon was at the door when she spoke, "Give him his body this time."
A flicker of surprise crossed the man's face, a weakness Mr. Dominic never would've allowed. He nods in understanding and closes the door behind him.
She was, as usual, one of the first things he sees when he awoke. "Adelle, change your mind again?"
Her face darkened. She ignored him, "Alpha and Echo have killed five of our clients. We need to know how they're getting their information."
He frowned slightly, it is not the first time he has been called out of the Attic to help on the Alpha/Echo fiasco, and though at first he was pleased at being proven right, his pleasure quickly dissipated as he realized the horror that had been released upon the world. He looked at Adelle; she showed no signs of breaking. He kept expecting, no he kept hoping, that one of these times he was called back he'd see something in her, even hate. Apparently however all he was to her was a transaction. He looked pointedly down at his wrists bound in leather, as Langdon crossed over to unbind him with a nod from DeWitt he noticed something. He looked up quickly; he stared at her in almost wonderment. "It's me." He said softly. She began to leave, breaking eye contact.
She turned and looked at him. "Remember, I can change my mind back, Mr. Dominic."
Despite the destruction he knew may've been reigning down outside, he smirked. Not that much of a transaction, then.
(He leant against her desk in Victor's body. He was in the red sweats Victor usually wore and his bare feet seemed so bizarre in her office that she stared at them for a second before she arched an eyebrow at Topher, and after a moment, he seemed to understand, and with minimal babbling he disappeared. "Mr. Dominic." She said evenly.
"Adelle."
She bristled. He had only called her that since they had started bringing him back in Victor's body. It disturbed her. It took years of discipline not to snap at him every time he did it, but she knew that was what he wanted, so she aimed for walking around him and taking her chair. Her progress was halted by his hand grabbing her wrist. She looked him in Victor's eyes, looked down at his grasp, and looked him in the eye again.
He ignored the warning. "Do you know why I stopped sleeping with you?"
She had not expected that. She expected frogs falling from the heavens, the four horsemen of the apocalypse arriving on her doorstep, and Topher being concise before she expected him saying that. And so in an unusual moment she was forced, by her own inability to think properly, into silence.
He took her silence as a no. He leaned in towards her, and if she was thinking properly she would've probably had Langdon in here taking him back to be wiped again, but she had never quite thought clearly in Laurence's case. He said it quietly, it wasn't his voice, but it was his intonations, his convictions, his words he left her with before he walked away: "I didn't want the betrayal to be any worse than it had to be."
It was personal, and intimate, and for them downright fucking romantic.
Especially because as she stood looking at the sun bouncing of the endless city, she heard what he really meant,
I didn't want to hurt you.)
Comments will be loved & they wont be put in the Attic, promise. ☺
Characters: DeWitt/Dominic
Genre: Angst
Rating: M
Disclaimer: Not mine, Whedon’s mind frak.
Word Count: 3239
Summary: ”Adelle DeWitt did not do accidents, although apparently she did mistakes.” Spoilers through 1x11 Briar Rose.
Notes: Many thanks to
ladyvivien for betaing, it’s much better now, and the tense is consistent, which er probably wouldn’t have happened otherwise.
Bound To Linger On
The first time it happened it could almost be called accidental, except of course Adelle DeWitt does not do anything accidentally. At least this is the myth that must be perpetuated, so her heels clicked and clacked with assurance as she made her way downwards. The Attic: its name is inappropriate. It lay deep within the bowels on the sprawling underground complex. She had only seen it twice. Once, when she first got the position, a cursory examination, because this was her house and she would know all of its dirty little secrets, and again when one of their dirty little secrets broke down. So she made her way down, the elevator going quickly enough to make her ears pop, for the third time, to examine another secret: one she had missed, one she had not known or predicted.
Before the surprise and the fear could settle, she ordered for the cameras to be turned off in Subject 1-88’s cell, the guards' warnings and curiosity silenced with a single glance before they were voiced. The man who accompanied her to the small room offered her a chair to bring in with her and her thank you was said in a quiet, thoughtless manner. She watched as he placed it facing the single bunk that occupied the white cell. The guard left the room telling her he'd be outside. She did not respond, already too occupied with the creature curled into a corner of bed and wall.
The door closed behind the guard with a slam that she wouldn’t have thought possible in such an unnaturally quiet place. The form on the bed shifted its eyes with a fear and timidity that unnerved her. The eyes came to rest on her and for a horrid, glorious moment she thought there would be recognition, but there was only the tiniest hint of curiosity at the break in the monotonous white in the room before that was sucked into the vacuum, which was now inside his head. "Oh, Laurence." She murmured. The words escaping without permission as his eyes passed over her form and looked at the wall behind her, any memory that she had never been there before gone.
The room seemed to suck the syllables away until there was nothing but a smothering silence, one of those thick unnatural silences that only exist in hospitals and funeral homes. She only stayed a few minutes that day, not even sitting in the chair. As she passed the guard outside she had told him to leave the piece of furniture in place. No, Adelle DeWitt did not do accidents, although apparently she did mistakes. She would have no one confuse the two.
(The first time it happened it wasn't an accident. It wasn't a thing of lust or passion, it was a calculated decision that boiled down to the fact that she wanted it. They were wrapping up the day’s business and she kissed him. It was an action she had decided upon after several weeks of judging the likely outcomes. Of course it was inappropriate, and unprofessional, but she did want it. She wanted it with the fervor that she usually reserved for her career and her own self-interest. Adelle got the things that she wanted like that, and in the end that was all that mattered, so she kissed him. She had expected him to be unresponsive at first, shocked, and she had prepared herself to work past that. She was unprepared for the speed and the passion with which he responded to her. His tongue in her mouth long before she had planned it, and she found herself pulling back to evaluate what was happening, because she hadn't quite expected him to want this too. Except he opened his eyes and they were dark, and his hand was clenching at her hip promising, claiming, and doing a million things she had never been quite comfortable with. She leaned in and kissed him again.)
The following two weeks are busy. Among other things she had to deal with Margaret. She's losing too many friends is the thought that brushed up from her heart, but she squashed it and told herself she's only lost one. She knew when she pictured that one, she should be thinking of late nights with bottles of white wines and horror stories about exes instead of late afternoons with the sun heating her back and him between her thighs. She puts off seeing him as long she can, though she knew the trip was inevitable. Finally, after Margaret was most certainly dead, and Echo had already gone through two other imprints she made her excuses to Langdon and disappeared.
The guards on duty were different, but their response was the same and it took barely a glance for them to say nothing. They opened the door to his cell and she noted that his position was hardly different, of course why should it be, she thought, he can't remember enough to want any variety. She sat this time, less shocked, knowing what to expect. She looked around the room trying to find something to catch her interest in a space that was designed to have no such details. She sat and looked, still trying to put off the outpouring of information that would come.
Finally the starkness of the room drove her to look at him again, and the time dwindled closer to when her mouth would open. In the moments before she pondered if perhaps reactivating Roger would be better, he wouldn’t remember either, and it would be saner than this. But even though the usually sharp blue was dulled and vacant, there were still some vestiges of him, and as much as she hated to admit it, she would’ve told him this had he still been with them. She was direct, as the story of Margaret unfolded. She meant for it to be bare-boned and factual, and maybe if he was still in that body it would’ve been, but the fact is she did lose a friend and that winds into the murder-mystery because he was unable to judge her. So she let things that she never knew existed escape. And at the end the silence still felt like it has sucked her words into oblivion, but some irrational, primal part of her couldn't help but recognize his form and think that since she had told it, it was done, and that made it all okay.
(The following time was a shock to her. They hadn’t talked about what had happened, about the way she had pushed him against the door trying to regain control of a situation that slipped out of anyone's control the moment her lips met his, or about the way he groaned as he pushed into her for the first time, or about the way they had dressed in silence and without a hint of shame or regret at the end of their encounter. They still didn't talk as he pushed her against her desk in the middle of the day. They continued not talking as they unbuttoned each other's shirts with their normal efficiency, and they remained silent until he put his head to her breast and the quietness was broken with a sound halfway between a moan and a sigh. She pulled his head up then and kissed him her hand working on his trousers as the blood began pulsing between her legs. His hand was rough and agile as he removed her knickers. Their legs and hips wriggled and rose and lowered as his trousers were pushed down and her tight skirt was pushed up, then suddenly the room was filled with their quiet moans as they moved together. They moved together, and they gripped each other to tightly. His hand found its place under her skirt manipulating her clit, and her mouth found it’s way to his neck where she sucked at his pulse. Their sounds are quiet and inarticulate, except when she comes with a few gasped out “fuck”s and “Christ”s, and him with a guttural sound that reverberated off the walls. It was only after they were both fully dressed that a sentence was uttered, and Adelle quietly said: "Would you like to join me for lunch tomorrow Mr. Dominic?"
His smirk seemed a little less obnoxious when he responded: "Of course, Ms. DeWitt.")
It became a pattern. Every time Echo went off the imprint. Every time she felt just a little too alone. Every time Langdon wasn't him, she went to him. It is her house and no one questions her decisions, at least visibly, but she is too intelligent to not have realized the rumors that circled around her visits. There was a visit that is preceded by Echo needing to be patched up by Claire; a bullet had grazed her left thigh. No permanent damage, and Claire, in an irony that only real life could hold, was an excellent surgeon, the scarring would be small, and would not detract from Echo's attractiveness as an Active. Of course, the client was still paying an extra two million. The guards did not even pretend to go through the formalities of waiting for her to tell them what she was there for. She knew that was a bad sign, a sharp reminder that this was an ill-advised weakness, lacking logic and overflowing with sentiment. She smiled emptily at the guard as he left her alone in Mr. Dominic's cell.
The body glanced at her for a second merely trying to attempt some facsimile of primal survival, or curiosity, but then he was staring through her, past her it didn't matter, and then suddenly she hated him, but it wasn’t him, she hated it. She wanted to hit it, yell at it until it's eyes would flash, and he would smirk and tell her that she was doing something stupid. The worst part, the thing that turned disgust to hatred, was she knew it would never respond to her. Knew she could yell, scream, and kick it until doomsday and he would remain passive, he would not even react in fear like a doll would, he would just do nothing.
She exited the cell after only a few moments. Her blood was boiling, her head was pounding, and her chest was aching with an acute pain that made it hard to focus, and there was no way to fix it.
(It became a pattern; lunches, desks cleared of paperwork, carpet burn, and clothes that need to be dry cleaned more often. She enjoyed it, more than she should have. Her feet became accustomed to digging into his back, and his hands became accustomed to gripping her hips. They didn’t define it, not to themselves, and certainly not to each other. It was just, that sometimes, there was a need building in each of them and so she'd place a hand on his sleeve, the closest she'd ever get for asking for anything, and he'd stop her from leaving a room, and sometimes they’d end up fucking. ‘It’s that simple’, they told themselves. The fact that it was good, great, fucking fantastic, was only a product of working together. They worked together well, so they fucked each other well. If sometimes she liked that they eat lunch together while they talk about new security precautions, and if he liked that he could let his hand hover over that place on the small of her back without her ordering him to cut it off, well then, they never mentioned it. It worked.
It worked until it didn't, and it didn’t about a year after it started. He never stopped her but he never encouraged her either, and so she stopped initiating their encounters once she realized. Adelle refused to want something that did not want her back. And if at the end of the day she still clenched around her own fingers with his image imprinted on the back of her eyelids - well, she was angry, and lonely, and she needed some form of escape, so she caved. It was a whim, one of the few ones she couldn't hold onto, one of the few ones that ran free. Roger was born from his absence.)
She would never grow used to Langdon, she decided as she turned back to her desk. He had thought she was joking. Some joke, she thought. She knew that Langdon was somewhere in the building giving Toper the order. She knew that within the hour she would be talking to Mr. Dominic again. The idea made her whole body still for a second, before she shook her head sharply and returned to work. Work, that was all he was, merely a solution to a problem.
She wasn’t surprised that it was Laurence looking at her from the brown eyes. Echo had been Margaret quite completely. It thrilled her to see him act with all of his normal nonchalance at first, he was still strong, but then he realized and everything began to break down. The feelings within her changed as he pleaded with her (“Adelle, please, come on”) mixed, and became muddied. There was an urge to fix him, and an urge to glory in his destruction. And she watched as Saunders gave him the shot, and she calmed Topher, and she did her job.
The drug made him weak, and his head lolled. His smirk, his sarcasm, and the way he stared her in the eye were the same despite the body and the drugs. He was looking at her like he could see right through her and it scared her bloody senseless. So she spoke calmly, softly, and she implored him, and she kept his attention, and then she left, her job was done.
(She wouldn't believe it. How could she? How could he? He stood by her every day, she would've seen it, and he wouldn't have- except she knew he did. She knew Echo wouldn't be wrong. Roger watched her dress as she prepared to meet the traitor and Echo. She told him quietly that he had to stay there, she had work, it should be over quickly. She didn't say that it had to be over quickly, that she couldn't handle this for any longer than strictly necessary. She made her way out of the bedroom where he had never been.
“I never lied to you."
The words ran around in her head as Roger held her. She wanted to believe him, she wanted to trust him, except it wasn’t born of desire her want, it was born of need. She needed to believe, and she needed to trust him, and she couldn't.
"It's embarrassing how naive you are."
She remembered it later as the bullet meant for his own head moved through her skin. She wondered idly as the pain corrupted her mind for a moment, if he thought that as he was moving in her. She wondered if that's the reason he stopped.
"Just like you believed in me, and look how that turned out."
As she walked away from the Dollhouse that night she promised to remember that. She thought she hadn't trusted, but she had, she’ll know better next time. She realized later she should've specified to herself that she meant remembering the sentiment, not the voice it was said in, not the gentle warning that felt like there was an angel at her shoulder reminding her to be careful and the harsh reminder that he had betrayed her making her chest tighten every time she did remember.)
"We need him again." Langdon said, his tone resigned and guilty. God, she was so tired of people with overactive consciences.
Adelle did not turn to face him. "Yes, I know."
"Should I give the order?"
She waited for a second before looking at him over her shoulder and nodding once, sharply. Langdon was at the door when she spoke, "Give him his body this time."
A flicker of surprise crossed the man's face, a weakness Mr. Dominic never would've allowed. He nods in understanding and closes the door behind him.
She was, as usual, one of the first things he sees when he awoke. "Adelle, change your mind again?"
Her face darkened. She ignored him, "Alpha and Echo have killed five of our clients. We need to know how they're getting their information."
He frowned slightly, it is not the first time he has been called out of the Attic to help on the Alpha/Echo fiasco, and though at first he was pleased at being proven right, his pleasure quickly dissipated as he realized the horror that had been released upon the world. He looked at Adelle; she showed no signs of breaking. He kept expecting, no he kept hoping, that one of these times he was called back he'd see something in her, even hate. Apparently however all he was to her was a transaction. He looked pointedly down at his wrists bound in leather, as Langdon crossed over to unbind him with a nod from DeWitt he noticed something. He looked up quickly; he stared at her in almost wonderment. "It's me." He said softly. She began to leave, breaking eye contact.
She turned and looked at him. "Remember, I can change my mind back, Mr. Dominic."
Despite the destruction he knew may've been reigning down outside, he smirked. Not that much of a transaction, then.
(He leant against her desk in Victor's body. He was in the red sweats Victor usually wore and his bare feet seemed so bizarre in her office that she stared at them for a second before she arched an eyebrow at Topher, and after a moment, he seemed to understand, and with minimal babbling he disappeared. "Mr. Dominic." She said evenly.
"Adelle."
She bristled. He had only called her that since they had started bringing him back in Victor's body. It disturbed her. It took years of discipline not to snap at him every time he did it, but she knew that was what he wanted, so she aimed for walking around him and taking her chair. Her progress was halted by his hand grabbing her wrist. She looked him in Victor's eyes, looked down at his grasp, and looked him in the eye again.
He ignored the warning. "Do you know why I stopped sleeping with you?"
She had not expected that. She expected frogs falling from the heavens, the four horsemen of the apocalypse arriving on her doorstep, and Topher being concise before she expected him saying that. And so in an unusual moment she was forced, by her own inability to think properly, into silence.
He took her silence as a no. He leaned in towards her, and if she was thinking properly she would've probably had Langdon in here taking him back to be wiped again, but she had never quite thought clearly in Laurence's case. He said it quietly, it wasn't his voice, but it was his intonations, his convictions, his words he left her with before he walked away: "I didn't want the betrayal to be any worse than it had to be."
It was personal, and intimate, and for them downright fucking romantic.
Especially because as she stood looking at the sun bouncing of the endless city, she heard what he really meant,
I didn't want to hurt you.)
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