transgressings | inbox for duplicity;

He imagines she's speaking of Cy, which means she suffered another loss at the same time Crais did. The chair is big enough for him to guide her around and pull her down to him, a gathering in his arms. He pushes a few whisps of hair from her face with light fingers. "I'm sorry," he says. Turning them he traces the backs down the slope of her cheek.

Any further words refuse to come. He's not sure they'd make sense to most, not even to her, and there's a long-held barrier against airing his weaknesses that's nearly impossible to cross. It's enough to hold her. Nearly enough. He traces her jaw and the side of her neck. Kisses her once.

"Just sit with me?" It's good to have company while he sifts through his feelings to find the order, such as it is. Some of the people he has met here have come bearing gifts, disconnected parts of himself returned like prodigal children, each reunion pain but welcome. It's more pain to retain the part without the bearer, strangely incomplete, a story unfinished that now never can be.

Drawing her closer, he rests his cheek against her hair. Eyes shut or open make little difference. Eventually he settles on shut.

The loss of Cyram had been nigh-simultaneous with Morgana, almost so close together that she often wonders if she'd given herself ample time to mourn them both, but there have been other disappearances before them that wounded her as deeply, made it as difficult for her to want to rise from bed in the morning back when the days were still her waking hours. She recalls their names easily now, all and each of them, recounts them in her memory and prays that she won't have to add to their number any time soon.

She permits herself to be gathered into his arms, into his lap, and she feels instantly small in his embrace, drawing her knees up and curling in; his words almost elicit a quiet laugh from her, a spark of bewildered confusion, because the entire purpose of her being in this room, to begin with, is to express her condolences for him, and now he's offering apology to her instead.

She merely hums, though, in response to his request, tucking her head against his shoulder and settling inward. A part of her feels as though she might need the comfort of it too, the reassurance of at least one presence still here in the wake of another gone, and she'll never reject his caresses in the meantime, the run of his fingers, the press of his lips. Her existence is his to find solace in for as long as he requires.

He doesn't track how long he holds her in complete stillness, unbroken by breath or heartbeat. There's odd comfort in it, knowing no march of mortality will ever come for her again save by mishap or murder. Eventually, he opens his eyes to find the unchanging street lighting of the Down still bathing the otherwise dark room in a lurid yellow-ish glow, creating harsh shadows.

"At some point I stopped seeing the trees for the forest," he says softly, speaking into her hair against his nose, lips, and chin. "I told myself my concern for humanity kept me human enough, that the great work to which I'd devoted my nights was all I needed. To try to save us all, as our world was potentially falling into disaster."

His hand takes up stroking again, a caress of thumb back and forth over her shoulder, the other arm lower and wrapped around her folded in legs and hip. "I thought my hardness was strength. But hard things are brittle things. They crack easily with the right sort of blow."

It has been a bitter pill to swallow, one he's still trying to come to terms with. "Nothing in my world prepared me for this one. For all of you. The weight of your humanity. The strength of raw need in this place, hooking into me and tearing a jagged hole. All it took was one person with a foot in the door, and I..." He sighs an unneeded breath.

"I can't close the door anymore. I can't find that detachment and cold logic that kept everything ordered. Neat. Clean. I don't know how to feel about that. Or even what, if anything, it has to do with Crais. It's where my thoughts are now, chasing one another stupidly like an animal its tail."

It's the longest he's ever held her since the change, save for at the end of the night when they fall into torpor together and often reach for each other there right before going unerringly still. She isn't about to take it for granted, either, knowing that neither of them will be likely to get tired or need to change positions out of a sudden discomfort the way a human body might after a time. Neither of them generates any natural warmth, but there is something that permeates from him and into her, only to be circulated back into him again, deeper than skin's heat could ever penetrate.

By the time he begins to speak again, she doesn't move, doesn't attempt to respond while he's feeling through his response; only after he concludes does she finally let her head tip backward, shifting across his shoulder until she can regard him more directly. One of her arms is pinned in between her side and his frame, but the other hand she keeps resting against his chest, fingertips lingering weights rather than fiddling out of unconscious habit or a need to satisfy tactile urges.

"Hardness and strength can be independent of one another," she murmurs. "Not possessing the former doesn't mean you have lost the latter, by any means. It simply means you're going to derive said strength from different places than you might have reached for in the past."

She sits up then, just enough to be able to look at him straight-on, a quiet insistence in her words when she lets herself continue.

"The door is open now, and look at what's become of it. Look at us." The hand at his chest rises to his face, thumb sweeping the line of his jaw. "And yes, the emotion of it can be complicated, and disorderly, and very, very human," and a small chuckle escapes her then, soft and brief, "but it does not mean you are weakened. It means that this piece of you has been awakened. Think of it as a limb long-deadened that has since rediscovered feeling. Is not the whole of you stronger with it, rather than cut off from being able to possess it at all? There is power in full awareness of one's self, and I swear to you that I can see it in you now, even as you may struggle to parse through your feelings."

It shouldn't be possible, unless everything he knows of the ritual is wrong, or there's more to it than others have discovered, because who goes back once that path is set?

Look at what's become of it indeed. He leans into her touch, listening as intently as she did. More importantly, hearing her.

"I feel like a child sulking that I must eat my dinner to have my dessert," he murmurs, gaze flicking to the side but returning soon enough.

"But I know it's so with emotions. We don't get to pick and choose what we feel and what we don't. Repress one, you dull them all sooner or later. I'm existing proof of that." He extends his caress along her upper arm.

"I wouldn't trade what we have for complete control or perfect unflappability. But I miss the certainty at times, and I hate revisiting a familiar ache I dulled for a good reason. It just lives there, a hot ember in dried flesh with no answer, and it will happen again, and again as it has before. It's hard to view going back as moving forward, even when someone so enticing and beloved beckons me there." He shifts to press forehead to forehead.

"I'll do it, because I know you're right. Sometimes it feels a little like impaling myself, though, and to what end I can't see. I'm glad one of us sees."

She can't help but chuckle, at least somewhat, at that remark, more of an exhaled laugh that's only slightly audible as her hand lingers at his cheek.

"No, we don't, else I would have been much less likely to have succumbed to you so quickly," she confesses — but the truth is that she wouldn't change one moment of everything that has progressed between them, not even the order in which it all occurred. Her feelings for him had been too great to be ignored, and the fact remains that she had let herself pursue them rather than sequestering them away and pretending as though they never existed in the first place.

"You know he'd likely hate being the center of such attention, anyway." She'd never known Crais to be an overly sentimental person, with his own unique way of expressing feeling, so she has the strong sense that he would have either been horrified by Grayson divulging any level of sorrow over this or perhaps inwardly delighted.

"The only trick now is not to consider it a regression," she adds, once he's drawn himself into her, speaking softly from behind closed eyes while their foreheads are nestled together. "Nor a decline. You are evolving, changing as anyone else might. There are pains that come with that — excruciating at times, but necessary. The difference here now is that you will not have to endure it alone, not if I have any say in the matter. And I feel most confident in asserting that I do, Mr. Frost."

"You succumbed to me?" Despite his overall somber mood, there's a touch of humor in the question. Mutual succumbing then, twisting into one another's orbits until it's difficult to imagine it was ever any other way or that it ever will be again. Despite his pursuit of her over the past several months, he'd always had the feeling of being the one pulled in her wake, falling into her gravity.

"He'd hate it, but he'd get it. He understood grief and loss." Crais' response was rage. He can't find it in himself to be angry, not about this. It's a heavier emotion weighing him down for now.

"You have a strong say, Miss Ives." Strange that being told he's not alone is its own kind of pain, a sweeter ache than loss. It will take time to adjust to this new reality, thought and deliberation on weighing the balance between accepting support without burdening. At times it's hard to remember how young she is when her soul feels so much older. He has no desire to saddle her with the weight of his years.

"I won't shut you out." It would be nigh impossible with their bond, but he believes he would not even without it. He didn't choose her to share his eternity on the periphery. They're in it together, messiness and all.

"You were there too, as I recall. Present enough to bear witness to the effect you had on me, and I in turn was helpless to resist you." Even in the wake of her somewhat dramatic retelling of events, there is a sincerity to her answer, an honesty that only he can sense the truth of. As much as he might have been drawn to her, nothing between them would have transpired as it did without the sentiment being an entirely mutual one, especially when he'd left so many choices up to her about how exactly to proceed.

"He had a different way of coping with his own," she agrees, and while she herself hadn't shared Crais' penchant for leading with anger in response to her own losses, she'd also accepted the fact that his processing ability was simply different from her own.

Regardless, she won't press on the issue of this emotion; it seems as though the vampire against her is already wrestling with its significance, but beyond reassurance and reminding him that it is not a sign of personal shortcoming, she doesn't suspect her presence is needed for anything other than its existence.

"Good, else we'd be having a very different conversation at the moment," she counters, lifting her chin so that her lips brush over his forehead with her words before she urges a more purposeful kiss there. "Do you want to stay in tonight?"

"It did feel a bit like magnet and lodestone," although he'd never call them polar opposites. They run along same veins. He has known that from almost the first, too.

He nods. Crais was fire to his cooler temperament, yet for some reason they never triggered one another over it or clashed. It was one of the least acrimonious friendships he has ever experienced with such profound differences. He believes he could think on it a hundred years and still not fully understand the strange alchemy that allowed it.

"Oh, I don't doubt we would." The left corner of his mouth curves. It doesn't last long.

He gives it some thought before nodding. He could bury himself in work easily. It's his go-to whenever his equilibrium is upended. As he's started to learn, the go-to isn't necessarily the best coping mechanism. It's only the most familiar.

Closing his eyes, he slides his temple against her cheek in a soft nuzzle before stilling. He can let himself be held, and the world won't end, no matter how much habit tells him he's wrong. "I'm glad you're here," he murmurs. Doubtless she can feel it. He doesn't want to fall into the habit of allowing things that should be spoken to remain internal simply because of the bond.

There had been a pull, strong and unignorable, and she hasn't confessed this since but she had been appreciative of the fact that he'd taken it upon himself to seek her out after the fact, even knowing what it might bring to light as far as the possibility of attachment is concerned. From moment one, though, she'd been drawn.

It's her turn, then, to dwell, to recall back on some of her own conversations with Crais — as intermittent as they'd been. She'd always had the vaguest impression that he was somewhat intimidated by her, or, at the very least, didn't quite know how to behave around her, and she in turn had strived not to make any interaction between them more awkward than it already had the potential to be.

Meanwhile, Grayson's response is the one she'd been anticipating — not simply because she can feel his distinct lack of interest in anything having to do with socialization or alternate distractions, but because he's hardly struck her as the type of man who wants to occupy himself with empty diversions.

"I'll always be here," she vows, whispering the words in his ear as their heads tuck against one another. She may not need to say it, but she will regardless, and it feels even more important to reassert it now in the wake of them both sustaining these recent disappearances.

Always isn't possible for vampires. They do have a larger taste of it than most. He has lived long enough to understand the press of years and how heavily they weigh when one is isolated from all but bonds of obligation rather than those taken in love. His hold tightens, as though he could physically prevent the march of attrition or disaster just by willing it to stay away.

"I'll do everything in my power to ensure it." Against the city he has little power. If those who rule it choose to eject her from this plane, or him, then they will experience loss. Against almost any other force, he has a better chance of keeping her intact and at his side.

"You're part of me now." Empty space full to bursting. A feeling he hadn't known how badly he missed until he had it, not that any bond is interchangeable with another. She feels very different from Meerlinda or Mary, different from Mornay or the rest of the Council of Seven.

But he feels like Kindred, not just a vampire, and he once more has a sense of clan. This will outweigh any grief or longing for lost friends. It's already a balm to his spirits. There's more calm in holding her than most other things he could do.

It may be a worthless promise to assert when neither of them can snap their fingers and issue a reversal of any disappearance; if it occurs, she can only hope that it will happen when they are together, and that they will depart in the same manner. She'd been a risk to her own world while she was still living, and in her mind, the best thing she can do now for its future is to never return, the lack of her thereby circumventing the prophecy of her destiny to undo it.

"We have our own power," she promises, even if it doesn't extend as far as having control over these particular circumstances, and while she doesn't know what future days will hold for them she does know how much stronger she feels with him by her side.

She presses her lips to his temple again, nudging her cheek there, her fingers sliding against the front of his body, mapping the already familiar shape of him beneath their descent. She hadn't quite understood the extent of how it would accentuate the feelings she possessed before dying; now, there are moments when she fights to separate his emotions from her own, strong enough to leave her breathless if she still had the need for it.

"That we do," he murmurs, finally feeling as though he could smile, if he were to reach for it now. He doesn't, content to be in such a space with her.

He shifts his hold, working an arm beneath her bent legs at the knees and wrapping higher up her back to lift her when he stands. "Let's go lie together."

It will mean they don't have to stir when it's time to go into torpor. They can transition from awake to not without having to think about the passage of time or anything to do. He carries her from the sitting room to the bedroom before setting her down so he can draw back the covers for both of them.

Stripping from his clothing down to his boxer briefs and singlet, he uncharacteristically leaves them where they fall then gestures for her to climb in ahead of him. He'll hold her through to his next awakening.

Her first instinct is to insist that she can walk on her own power, but before she can even think to voice such a thing she finds herself swept up into his embrace, carried in his arms with the same ease he's always borne her. Inwardly, she finds that she does enjoy this, being plucked off her feet and carefully taken from one room to the next, her arms reflexively resting atop his shoulders even though she knows there's no chance of him dropping her or his hold weakening.

She hadn't worn anything intended to be seen elsewhere, and the simple day dress she's in, paired with stockings and slippers, is an indication of that; the buttons down the front enable her to remove the outer layer swiftly, followed by the latter, and she finally climbs in between the covers in only her slip, settling in a recline along her side as she beckons outward with an arm for him to join her.

Once they're both tucked in, she arranges herself in a position well-known to both of them at this point, her head tucked into the cradle of his shoulder, her arm draped across his midsection, one leg slightly hitched up at the knee to rest over his thigh.

If anyone had told him he'd ever find joy again in heading into torpor with another vampire, any vampire, after his loss in Paris, he'd have thought them sorely mistaken and entirely too optimistic. This is something he'd choose every dawn if he didn't know both of them still had separate lives and a good reason at times not to awaken together at the next sunset.

With dawn a couple of hours away, it's just as good. He's done talking for now, appreciative that she isn't the sort who insists on filling every waking moment talking, especially when he's in a melancholy or somber state of mind.

It's enough just to have her weight against him, have her where he can touch her with slow strokes and finally let his hands still. His mind. Everything. He instructs the phone app to kill the lights so that they're lying in relative darkness with only the ambient street light spilling through the sitting room windows beyond the open double doors of the bedroom.

Deciding that's too much for him for now, he closes them with a telepathic nudge. As he turns his cheek against the top of her hair, he has one final thing to say. "Thank you." It's less a matter of feeling that he has to and more of wanting to.

There had been nights before this she had not spent alone — evenings when she had drawn Morgana into her bed and taken full advantage of their contract to allow herself the simple pleasure of not sleeping alone, even though she and the other sorceress had long favored more vigorous pursuits. There was something about the mere notion of simply holding someone else, of permitting herself to be held, and when her lover and dominant had departed, a piece of her had considered the possibility of when or if she would have it again.

She can safely reach the conclusion that, for all that occurred between herself and the one who holds her now, she had never imagined it would culminate in something like this.

She sighs quietly, a wordless agreement to his sentiment; it may not be entirely altruistic, her reasons for lying here with him, not when it brings her just as much comfort to have him this near, but she also doesn't suspect he'll have any complaint to voice about it. Instead, she simply nestles against him further, closing her eyes and letting herself fall into the stillness that night brings.

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