Edyta

Tue 06:03AM EST
Silence reigns...

.the. .masks. .they. .slide. .to. .reveal. .a. .new. .disguise.

Steam distorted her reflection as a small insignificant bubble of water slid in a lazy, trembling pattern over the slick steam stained surface. A quick shake of her head, the water from her sleek skin and hair splattering wetness across the mirror, the tiles and the wall alike.

(mirror mirror on the wall. . .)

She reached out palm against the sickly cool mirror with fingers splayed and moved it idly from side to side, leaving a collective string of droplets trailing behind.

(touch me - touch you)

Inch by staggering inch her reflection solidified: hollow yet unhaunted eyes stared back at her. . .

. . . conscience long dead

The predator's blood watching a predatory reflection. The visage in the mirror sported a long thin neck that spilled into prominent collarbones that stretched their bone hard wings towards either shoulder.

(that soft touch of silk)

The reflections skin was both softly smooth and roughly callused in patches, delicately mortal, invariably pale and scarred. . .

(my body weeps/my blood seeps)

Breasts and the ribs beneath cast a ripple of shadow, expanding and contracting with each solemn, shallow breath. A tender solar plexus and a taut belly rising and falling as the breaths fall deeper and push out against muscles for more room in craven, smoke-torn lungs.

Speaking of cigarettes. . . (cravings arise)

.my. .love. .with. .a. .knife.

She lifts the burning cigarette from the ashtray balanced on the edge of the sink and taps the clinging ashes, lifting the cancer-stick to her mouth and wrapping her lips around the filter. Fumes in haled, toxicity spreads, nitcotine sliding through the system, weeping into the brain and. . .

Ahh. . . better.

.she's. .a. .portrait. .of. .a. .poison. / .for. .you. .to. .quench. .your. .thirst.


Konrad Vrdoljiak

Tue 06:11AM EST
"You know you're beautiful, don't you?"

She would not have heard him enter. Svelte and muscular, he's made his appearance (and we do mean appearance as in, simply appears.) at the edge of her bathtub. All in black against the stark white of porcelain, he's swarthy east european skin and tawny eyes watching her with a keen awareness of form and feature; he's dark against the light.

Watching her watch herself.

And his words were not spoken in romance. They were not spoken, even, in their conventional sense. He does not mean she is beautiful in shape, that she pleases his eye (though she does. though she pleases him well, physically). He means something else, and that's there, too, in his tone.

Which is low, caressingly so. But which is serious, too, startlingly without its usual payload of cruel humor.


Edyta

Tue 06:21AM EST
He was there, the way he normally came.

Appeared.

And she must be getting used to it, given that she didn't flinch. She didn't reach for the cold hard metal of the gun that balanced just as precariously as the ashtray on the edge of the white porecelain of the bathroom sink.

She didn't look like she was losing her touch.

She was merely accepting that sometimes there were people(things) that would arrive without prior warning. People(beasts) that needed no invitation to enter her territory.

Men like her mate (in, perhaps, the loosest sense of the term).

She turned a half circle without replying, a glance back over one shoulder into the mirror to stare at the trail of her spine set among muscles too toned for such a lazy society. A water droplet falls from the tip of her water darkened hair to one shoulder and slides down over a long thin blade scar then further; to the bow of the lower back where it quivers on the edge of a circular, puckered scar from a grevious injury from long ago.

Same life. Different place.

(Flash molten/burning metal)

.gazing. .at. .you. .with. .scorpion. .eyes.

Her eyes, dropped into dark pools of the shadow and light play around the steam encapsuled room, slide along the mirror, past her own form and she watches him via the reflective surface as it slowly begins to cloud again with the moisture in the air of the tiny, confined space.

"Hello."

The first time she had actually really greeted him during one of his little appearences.

. . . locked doors, hidden secrets.


Konrad Vrdoljiak

Tue 06:31AM EST
His mouth curves: a small smile, one that barely - barely - touches his eyes. And such intense eyes he had, a stare that could pierce steel but could not quite pierce her armor. "Hello," he says softly in response.

He doesn't even look at the gun. Not yet.

A rustle of fabric as he rises to his bare feet. Must have come in the wolf-form, then, racing beneath the huge umbral moon, a shadowbeast slinking under steel and concrete webs, leaping glass and fiberglass constructs, scrabbling up crystal ladders and down high-grade polymer chutes, dodging patternspiders and outrunning the Onesong to his materialize so casually in mate's abode.

He comes to stand before her, facing her, fully clothed to her nudity. He looks at her image in the mirror over her bare shoulder, reaching behind her to touch the knife scar, then the puckered one. Gunshot wound, arrowshot wound, or simply a knife pushed straight in: a maneuver that requires a great deal of speed, strength, skill and - most importantly - callousness. Cruelty.

He would know.

His touch is gentle, though, tracing the edge of ruined and imperfectly reknit flesh. In the mirror she is pale against the darkness of his clothing: some sort of reverse eclipse, the light before the dark. Even her olive skin is a shade or three lighter than his own, tanned by sun and weather and heritage.

"Where did you get this?"


Edyta

Tue 06:44AM EST
. . . Grim reapers and skeletons and a missionary bell.

It wasn't the time for him to ask his question, so dark and low and personal, or seek answers about the woman that he had taken for his own. It wasn't time, but she would give him what he wanted. Once. Maybe twice.

"A traitor," she replies smoothly, cooly, her voice as caressing as the wind of Death's imperishable wing.

She half-turns her torso, her skin sliding under his inquisitive fingers' exploration, and taps the ashes from the cigarette held between two long (iron)fingers. She watches the small pile of black-white-gray ash, a tained parody of movie snow, collect in the bottom of the ashtray and then slowly turns back, lifting her chin and her eyes to look up at his face.

The room, thick with steam, smelled as wet as a jungle and, perhaps, strangely feminine. There was the spice of oils that mingled with the mists that floated in hynotic swirls around each of them as they had respectively moved, the smell of soap. Shampoo. The hint of metal and oil from the gun that remained untouched on the basin edge.

I am the Dark Cavalier; I am the Last Lover:
My arms shall welcome you when other arms are tired.

She was a woman.

She was a loner.

She was so much more than all scents and sights and sounds combined.

Complex and dangerous and intoxicating and as cold as a glacier.

She finally stubbed the cigarette out, crushing the last of the embers as the filter curled and puckered under the pressure and her hand wrapped around the (familiar, how achingly so) grip of the gun and lifted it. She turned back, her head tilting to the side, such a lupine gesture and he could feel the press of the barrel against his clothed flesh.

Do you trust your own mate...?


Konrad Vrdoljiak

Tue 06:57AM EST
In the reverse-image he watched her turn. Watched her ash her cigarette, the motion of her body so close to his an eerie echo of the world he saw in the mirror.

Watched her lift her gun.
Watched her press the gun to his body.

He'd plenty of time to stop her, if he so wished. That he doesn't could mean more than one thing, and that he trusted her wasn't necessarily among them.

With the cold kiss of steel seeping through the thin, heavy, close weave of fabric, with her showing such an unexpected (or was it really? or can it really be unexpected, when he's smelled gunoil so many times before, seen her photographs taken from what can only be a sniper's angle?) turn: with things as they are, he takes the time to reach around her with his free hand, take her cigarette with its hint of her lips' moisture at its filter. Deliberately, and quite firmly, he grinds it out completely.

The ash of the smoke rises and dissipates from the crushed cigarette.

Put out the light: and put out the light.
Othello to Desdemona.

"Now why," that vibration of laughter in his throat as he brings his tawny attention from the image to the reality, from the mirror to her unreadable face, "would you want to do that, Sona?"

The way he speaks her name: you would almost believe him her lover.
You could almost believe he loved her.

Almost.


Edyta

Tue 07:13AM EST
Droplets of water slithering down over her skin, both the silken smooth and the scar tainted, and gathered into a smallest of pools around her feet against the cool press of tiles against her the bottom of their feet. There was a blank nuetrality to her face that still could not outmatch the blank whisper through the pale blue of her eyes:

. . . the sole indication of being elsewhere; being in that white voice of static that caressed, that surrounded, that took over. The place where nothing touched and where conscience was no longer a virtue that remained. The place in which a person could commit the more heinous of crimes and never blink, never loose sleep, never once wonder how they could have done something like that. She was there.

Killer Eyes

(there is more death in women than you know)

She bears in her hand war and death. The feel of the grip caught tightly in the wrap of her fingers, the press of metal against flesh, the pinch of coolness of an inanimate objects against the warmth of animate muscle. I stalk you... you stalk me...

She lowers her eyes slowly to the gun in her hand, the angle that it was pressed as it slid down his stomach and paused so close to his groin, the pinch against the family jewels. What's wrong? You can regenerate... She leans closer, trapping the gun between the pressing line of their bodies, nudity to clothing. She rises on her tip-toes, feeling the rasping line of the metal of the hammer scratching against the taunt flesh of her stomach and she pressed her lips (vulpine bite) against the corner of his mouth, without kissing, more to one side. More to the cheek. But so very close.

C-c-lii-ii-ii-ck...
She rolled her eyes up, looking at the tawny depths that were the mark of the predator.

Click.

. . . and the trigger was pulled.
the chamber?
Empty.


Konrad Vrdoljiak

Tue 07:38AM EST
click-click
(.boom.)

The logical conclusion doesn't come. And she, pressed so close that the slightest turn of his face would bring their lips together, can no doubt feel it: the arc of his mouth, the grin, so fucking arrogant.

"Just this once, Sona." Murmured. Almost whispered. "Just this once, I'll allow you your games."

And she can no doubt feel it, too, standing as close as she is, pressed naked to him as she is. Arousal. A stark physical response to her nearness, her scent, the feel of her skin beneath his fingers, that the prospect of a fairly sizeable new hole (what is that, a 9mm? could be worse...) in his body failed to overcome.

He inhales.
Something gathers in the air like an invisible thunderhead.

Swift as lightning, and so very smoothly, carelessly, he strikes the back of her wrist with stiffened fingers - an action propelled entirely by a snap of his wrist. Pressure points. Fingers spasm involuntarily, flying open: the gun falls and he, barely stooping, pulls it from its gravity trajectory.

Brings it up. Turns his head now, turns his head past her lips carefully, does not kiss her. Looks at the gun held in his hand with the grip of one unused to such a weapon, who had rarely, if ever, held one before.

I should really learn to use one of these...

He lets it drop, thudding to the bathroom floor, heavier than anything of that size had a right to be. The hand on her back tightens, crushing her closer against the hard lines of his body, digging into her flesh. And it's his turn to murmur in her ear as she had him so many times:

"Next time I will kill you for it."


Edyta

Tue 07:55AM EST
. . . if you even see it coming next time, beloved.

She inhales deeply through the bare parting of her lips, filling her lungs with the cloying press of steam and the unmistakable scent of her enemy, her lover, her mate, her nemisis, her pain, her reality. Slowly (excuriatingly, achingly expelled) she exhales through her nose the rush of warm air against the side of his neck as she leans her torso back in his grip and turns her face to look at him.

Never ask for a glimpse into the mind of a killer, even if you, yourself, are a predator, for even the predator can become the ultimate prey. The ultimate kill for those inclined, those so far removed from the reality of morals of the world. In my dreams I hunt you. . .

Desire, connected intangibly to the idea of lust and want, but at the same time so far space. Desire to kill. To hunt. To leave bloody goblets splattered against a pristine finish of white-washed walls. How many bullets would it take to bring you down?

She runs the tip of her tongue between her lips, staring at her mate in an agonizing silence. Not Glacial Cool now. Replaced with Predatory Burning. She shakes out the hand that he struck, flexing her fingers slowly before curling them into a loose fist and then releasing the coiled tension.

She uses both hands against his hips, lacing her fingers into the belt and tugging harshly against his hips, placing them both offbalance for that moment as the press of their bodies together - melded and as one as they could be in this state - is brought even tighter.

"So this time," she spoke, cruel and harsh and intoxicated on the peel of adrenaline through blood and body, "Why don't you just fuck me for it?"


Konrad Vrdoljiak

Tue 08:15AM EST
How many bullets?

Many. Six. Twelve. Eighteen. Dozens. He's big and tough. He's fast and cunning. She'll have to be careful. Conceal herself. Move faster and quieter than him. Think quicker. Fight harder. She'll have to weaken him first. Slow him down so when she steps out from behind cover she'll have the time to put three bullets through his head and three through his heart. Kill. him. dead.

If she's lucky.
If she's up to the task.

Adrenaline rush? Oh, you bet. He knows she knows what a hunt he'd make. He knows there are times the breeding and the conditioning fail: times when she wants to kill him as bad as she wants to fuck him right now.

Doesn't matter. Because he knows she'll never find another like him.

(Just like he'll never find another like her if[when] she finally oversteps and he tears. her. to. shreds.)

She drags him closer. Somehow. And he twists his hand in her pale blonde waterstreaked hair and yanks her head back, baring her throat. Forcing submission.

Hunt me?
Only in your dreams.

"Yeah." And he has the audacity to laugh, even here, even now, even with his pulse surging down the axis of his body. "Why not."

Fuck you?
Only when I'm angry.