poly_chromatic | (no subject)

[He reaches up, curling his hands around her forearms and sliding the loop of his fingers down to circle both wrists. He rests his forehead against hers rather than pull back to reply.]

I don't want you to worry.

[That she frets, in her own way, is still revelatory.]

[Her hands twist, her fingers catching around his wrists in reply]

I don't like the sensation. Of worry.

[The odd angles of her body, her movements, seem normal now.]

You're not supposed to. Discomfort is it's purpose.

[She sits, quiet for a moment, thinking]

I don't understand at all. You don't need to explain, but I don't.

[But he does try, as simply as he can.]

It's the self-preservation instinct expanded to something you care about outside yourself, over which you inevitably have less control.

But you are not my responsibility.

Socrates is my responsibility. We're siblings. He's my brother.

[Saya is still working this out. It takes her a long time to figure out the very few emotions she has.]

Responsibility isn't a biological trait. It's a... side effect.

Are you a side-effect, Robert?

I hope not. [He's leaning it, raising his arms to pull her closer by that one conjoined point.] I mean, there are endorphin rushes and bonding chemicals giving biology a head start, but love's a choice people make for themselves.

[She looks at him, her eyes lightening, going from their dark brown to a lighter amber.

She asked him once, if he loved her, and he couldn't answer.]

Are you asking if I love you?

[And he's still a coward.

Though he meets her gaze for a long moment before dropping his.]

No.

[It doesn't matter. It doesn't have to be. This is enough.

He can repeat that as long as he likes.]

[She moves, then, going to straddle him, to push him down on the bed, her hands on his shoulders. It's not fast, so he could stop her if he wanted. She moves slowly because he is not prey.]

Do you want to know?

[Any way this ends it confuses something.

But yes, of course. Of course.]

If you know.

[Which isn't a given. It's less of a given than him capitulating to her, laying back with his hands on her hips to hold, not restrain. He doesn't feel like prey when this is quick, or rough. Prey doesn't feel so fortunate.]

Then yes.

[She leans over him, her mouth close to his ear, her hair over his face.]

Yes.

[Her whisper is like breath, a secret. It's not said with trepidation or fear - she doesn't feel those things, she doesn't understand the pain of rejection. She doesn't fear it. When she's rejected she can move on smoothly, casually.

Love with a werespider is more complex than with a human. She will never be the girl who clings. She will never understand monogamy. She can compartmentalize everything.]

[Love with a human is, Chase has always found, painfully complex. So simple from his side; riven with problems in the communication of it between two people with different expectations. Here, he already knows his can't be met, not to the picturebook precedent he idealises. It's part of the reason - along with deference to her incapacity for it, along with acknowledgement of his own prior failure - that he'd warned himself off becoming involved at all.

It was her discomfort that prompted him to revoke that principle, too.

He's loved her (a less unspoken thing) for how uncomplicated she's made their time. So, whatever he says now, at the end of it it confuses something.]

I love you too.

[So why pretend.]

[It doesn't change anything else. Their time together will always be uncomplicated, in her view, their relationship unaffected by the rest of their world, by their relationships with other people.

She kisses him, then, on the mouth, and this time the sweetness in it isn't almost. It's actual, it's honest. There's truth, there.]

Stay here.

[Tonight. As if he were going anywhere else.]

[He's recently set on the idea of trying to involve himself elsewhere (in ways other than those one-night things which have started to leave him hollow) to keep him from getting to deep here.

It's going to take him a while to reconcile that lack of success, but for now the headache gets put aside as he pushes himself up to meet her, elbows digging against the mattress.]

As long as you let me.

[And he's smiling into that kiss.]