pleasuretoburn (pleasuretoburn) wrote in birthrightrpg, @ 2021-10-10 14:51:00 |
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Entry tags: | noah restic, rhiannon lee |
Razor Sharp Purpose
Who: Rhiannon/Noah
Where: Las Vegas, Noah's Apartment
When: Present
Content Warnings: Descriptions of Exothermic Chemical Processes
The front door pushed open and Noah was inside the relative security of his apartment. He leaned against it for a moment, closing his eyes and trying to center his thoughts. He looked down at his dirty clothing. There was blood and alley debris and a spot where he had accidentally burned his own shirt. He went into his bedroom, peeling off his shirt and opening his dresser drawer. The pyrokinetic stood for a moment as if he had forgotten what to do next. He took out his phone and began firing off a text to Rhiannon, asking her if she could come over. Once that was accomplished, he went into the bathroom and turned on the shower water.
Noah held up his wrist, which was wrapped in a thin layer of gauze. He peeled it off slowly, parts of it sticking more stubbornly to his wrist than others. He dropped the gauze into the wastebasket and examined the twin bite marks curiously. His phone lit up on the bathroom counter, and he swiped it up anxiously, but it wasn’t from Rhi.
Enjoy your gift.
Rhiannon’s key turned in the deadbolt of the gym on Sammy Davis, Jr. Drive. The interior of the building was dark, the skinny parking lot lit by a chain of meager streetlamps. Across the road, a mall squatted on a parcel of desirable real estate. The mall’s best feature was being the thing that separated Southside Boxing from the relentless expansion of gondola rides and all-you-can-eat buffets on the strip.
It was rare that she clocked in for a late shift or closed the gym; Rhiannon reserved her nights for hunting and used the hours from lunchtime through early evening for her day job of teaching people how to lift weights and take punches without going on disability. Unfortunately, the scheduling didn’t always work out, so she prioritized paying her bills and buying groceries because it was nice to eat with a roof over her head. The income from her latest hunting contract gave her the cash she needed to reserve a moving truck and afford her security deposit and first month’s rent in a new apartment, but it had dwindled in short order.
A night out with Katherine didn’t help.
As she bent to retrieve her bag, the exterior pocket rumbled and glowed. Her fingers plucked her phone free and the brunette read Noah’s text as she walked to the car. Although she was curious about the way he asked her point-blank to come over, the relationship was too new for her to think automatically that anything was a problem. She didn’t type a response, just tossed her things in the passenger seat, started the ignition, and rolled down the window. The Dodge grumbled as she angled the nose over the dip between the parking lot and the road and took off.
A while later, she pushed the button for Noah’s floor and watched the doors glide shut. The muted reflection reminded her that she was wearing black joggers, a sports bra, a long-sleeve crop top, and a ponytail for an effect that was more cat burglar than someone who had been summoned for a visit. “Fuuuuck,” she mumbled. Rhiannon used her sleeve cuffs to wipe under her eyes as she exited the lift and went to knock on his door.
Noah heard a noise and turned off the shower, glancing at his fogged reflection for a moment before exiting the bathroom. A quick look into the peephole revealed Rhiannon standing there, a surge of relief coursing through him as he opened the door. He stood back so she could enter the apartment. Once the door was closed and locked, he turned to her. “Thanks for coming,” he half-mumbled.
He moved to embrace her and winced. “Hey, remember when we talked about me getting a hobby?”
“Yeah?” Rhiannon frowned. He smelled different to her, like his ordinary scent but sweatier with a rusty tinge, and when her fingers ran through his hair, they encountered something sticking the pieces together. She took a sharp breath and lifted his hair. There was dried blood in it. She searched for a cut to see if he needed stitches. “Noah, what the hell?”
The hug had been too quick and the room too dark to get a good look at him when she entered. Worried now, she peeled herself back from the stiff enclosure of his arms. It was natural for a hunter to start an examination for injuries once they suspected a fight, and the signs of a physical confrontation were all over him. Rhiannon gently turned his face left and right, then she ran her fingers over his chest and down his sides, searching for broken bones or internal injuries. He had pinkish-purple bruising rising on his ribs.
From there, she picked up his arms. He was bruised there, too, but all she could see was teeth marks.
Rhiannon took a slow breath and held it.
Noah felt an inexplicable sense of guilt as Rhiannon looked him over. It wasn’t his first time getting hurt, but it was the first time someone cared, and that set off a strange chain of emotions within him. “I was walking when I heard a woman scream,” he explained, following the path her eyes took. They landed, once more, on his wrist. “Two vampires were fighting over her. I’ve dealt with vampires before.” The pyrokinetic leaned against the back of the sofa as he watched her face.
“Turns out it wasn’t just two. I miscalculated.” That was an understatement.
Rhiannon held onto his wrist. The fingers of her other hand hovered over the puncture wounds. It was hard to get a breath, so she curled her nails into her palm and flicked them outward, a repetitive, self-soothing motion. A non-fatal bite mark on his wrist told her that Noah walked into what could have been a feeding frenzy. Many fangs, lots of places to latch on.
She closed her eyes.
God she hated vampires. It was easy to forget that sense of razor sharp purpose, like when she was with Katherine and they were nowhere near anybody’s spurting neck wound. Even on hunts, it wasn’t that often that she caught a vampire with its mouth open, sucking somebody’s life away. If she could get her hands on the creature walking around with a stomach full of Noah’s blood, she’d split it open on the sidewalk and she didn’t care who saw. ‘This is not about me... Not about me.’
“Are you okay?” Rhiannon looked up. “Do we need to go somewhere?”
Noah shook his head slowly. “Not yet. I need to tell you something, first.” He put his hand over Rhiannon’s, the one that held his wrist. “I hit my head when one threw me into the wall, I got dazed. It was hard to concentrate, to set anything on fire, but I managed to take out the first two,” he explained. He let out a breath that he hadn’t realized he’d been holding. “My younger brother is here in Vegas. I think he had been following me. He has, um...people working for him. They showed up and the vampire that bit me got staked. I don’t know if she’s actually dead, though.” The pyrokinetic didn’t have a chance to ask Ivan about that, or what happened to the woman he had been trying to save in the first place. Part of him didn’t want to ask.
“Your brother?” Rhiannon’s eyes flickered to his chest as she worked the puzzle of this new piece of information. She remembered all about Ivan, the replacement, a baby his parents made before they donated Noah to science like spare parts and not a young boy who needed them. Ivan, the one Noah hadn’t killed when he came back to show his parents that they could reap what they had sown. She squeezed his fingers. “Why now? What does he want?”
She had more to ask. Did he save Noah? How was he monitoring closely enough to be there at just the right time? Was he like Noah? She kept the firing squad of questions to herself but her eyes moved with the turning of each one in her mind, a dark tumult of thoughts. Not yet, he said. They didn’t need to go anywhere yet.
He nodded and let his eyes close for the first time since being unconscious. Noah tilted forward to press his head against her shoulder, as if drawing strength from being next to her physical form. After a moment, he sat up straight and opened his eyes. “I think there’s a game being played, but I don’t know what it is yet,” he admitted, and there was something bitter in his tone. “He was amused.” With his free hand, he guided her hand up his arm, stopping just at the crook of his elbow.
“They injected me with something there. Ivan keeps calling it a gift.” The pyrokinetic hesitated, his jaw tightening.
“Here?” She pressed lightly at the spot and watched him for a reaction. “Something like a substance or an object?” It was too dim to see a damn thing and she shook her head. “C’mere.” Rhiannon took his hand and guided him toward the bathroom. The top two-thirds of the mirror had a layer of steam and the air still felt warm and wet, but it was bright enough to see him. “Are you okay to sit?” she asked. She knew from experience that even when you were exhausted, sometimes sitting or lying down hurt worse. But if Noah could manage it, she could kneel in front of him and get a better look at his arm and the rest of him if he let her.
“Rhiannon.” He said her name out loud like it was a mantra, something that would help focus what was raging inside his head. He followed her lead to the bathroom, where the shower was still wet and humidity hung in the air. Noah put down the toilet lid and sat atop it. “Yeah, I’m fine,” the pyrokinetic told her belatedly. He still felt dazed, yet surges of adrenaline kept going through his limbs. “It was a substance. I think it did something to me.” His phone was still on the edge of the sink and he picked it up, trying to Google any news stories about a fire outside the Palms.
“It feels like it was new again,” Noah told her. “Hard to control.” In all honesty, it felt like he was tweaking.
She watched him fiddle with his phone, not saying much, but the molar cutting into her inner cheek was matched by a gnawing pain in her gut that she recognized as stress. No, fear. Rhiannon got up and looked for a few clean washcloths, which she soaked and wrung out in the sink. She also searched briefly for anything she could use for antiseptic and found an over the counter bottle that hadn’t expired.
Rhiannon got onto her knees and turned his arm. She began to delicately wipe any dirt from his open wounds, beginning with the bite. It was inflamed. Hollywood always made the punctures look so neat, as if vampires had any qualms about tearing whole chunks out of people. “It’s okay,” she said, then shook her head and exhaled. “I know it’s not okay, but I’m not going anywhere. Do you remember what happened? Why are you saying it’s hard to control?” She spilled liquid antiseptic onto a cloth and dabbed him with it. Under any other circumstances she would recommend flooding it, but maybe not when he was describing himself as out of control.
The sting of the antiseptic was, for once, welcome. Noah focused on that, instead, and it helped him find the words he was looking for. “He took me to a suite at the Palms. We were on one of the top floors, and he asked me if I could set something on fire way down on the ground.” He reached up and brushed a piece of brown hair out of his eyes. He fixed his gaze on the wounds. Now was not the time to think about the vampires as they descended upon him, or the way he felt now, wishing he could find them and finish what they had started. A memory came to him then, half colored-in, and it was Ivan’s voice wending its way into his ear. ’Are you going to let them get away with that?…’ When had he said that?
“I knew I couldn’t. Not then, at least, after everything that had happened.” Noah looked up at Rhiannon. “So I tried. To humor him. And it worked, and...it wasn’t small.” He swallowed, using his thumb to wipe away a streak of antiseptic that had crawled up his arm. “And now all I can think about is doing it again.”
“I won’t let you. Okay?” Rhiannon put the cloth over the tiny incision near his elbow. “Say the word and I’ll knock you on your ass because it’s not really you.” No, it was whatever Ivan shot into him.
If it was possible to radiate hate, she knew she was in danger of doing it when she looked at the tiny dot and the discoloration around it. She imagined herself staring hard enough to rewind time and make it drip back out of him. She tamed her angry appetite with the methodical folding of another towel, then leaning over Noah and carefully peeling locks of his hair apart until she found the gash in his scalp and could tend to it. Slow, steady tasks. Careful movements.
The phone: that was why Noah had it, because of the Palms. “Do you want me to look it up for you?” Rhiannon imagined a different fire, beautiful and dark green, one that formed at the end of her weapon and begged to be used.
“No, not yet,” he answered, and he lifted one hand up to rest on her cheek. It was hot under his skin, and he swept his thumb over her jaw. “I want to exist in a bubble with you, where it didn’t happen. Just for a little bit.” Noah tried to keep his head still, though he wanted nothing more than to bury it against her and drown everything out. He noticed what she was wearing for the first time that evening. “You were busy?” His eyes fell to the bare skin that could be glimpsed between her pants and cropped top.
Rhiannon covered his hand and turned her mouth to kiss it. “Just work,” she said. In case her cell began to buzz with dozens of notifications, as had been its habit lately, she reached into the pocket of her joggers and emptied the contents onto the bathroom counter. Phone and keys landed in a jumbled clatter. There. No distractions, no world beyond the one in front of her.
She tossed the washcloth on the floor and widened her stance around Noah’s legs. The fingers that tipped his face up went easy. “I was thinking about you the whole time but I didn’t have a clue. That kills me. I should’ve known.” Rhiannon swallowed. “Sometimes we get a feeling that something’s off, and I was…” Her eyebrows lifted. “Feeling invincible.” Then she frowned. “I’m sorry, that’s not helping. I can do a bubble.”
She touched his bottom lip. “Are you sore here?”
Something swept through Noah then and he leaned forward, steadying himself with his free hand on the sink’s counter. There was something about the way Rhiannon tended to him that was more intimate and unfamiliar than he had expected it would be. “No. It’s not your fault,” he told her quietly. His lip tingled where she touched it. “No, it doesn’t hurt there.” The pyrokinetic kissed her deeply. Needfully. He needed to hold on to this feeling and remember what he chose.
She tilted her head to gain more access to the inside of Noah’s mouth. Keeping contact, Rhiannon lowered herself onto first one knee, then the other. Her arms went around him to make a safe place where he could get lost for a little while. She tried not to think of the bleeding, the hungry latch of a vampire’s fangs after Noah stopped to help a woman. She tried to ignore the brother who had dragged Noah backwards to a state where all he wanted was to burn things, and where in a deranged way he might be safer.
Most of all, she tried not to think of his head hitting the wall.
She broke off the kiss and breathed at his cheek. “Noah?” Rhiannon’s fingers traced his shoulder and along his spine, giving him light touches, things to contrast with the pain he felt elsewhere. “Do you know? I don’t have to say it if you don’t want me to. I just want you to know.”
The kiss provided him with exactly what he needed, and Noah sank into it with an oblivion of thought. He reached his hand up to bury his fingers in her hair, following the trail of her ponytail down to the ends. When she broke off the kiss, he opened his eyes. He could see the words materialize in his head, and the only fear he felt now was not saying it before something else like this happened. Noah knew he could have been taken away from her. “I love you.”
Rhiannon exhaled. A warm wave of feeling crashed through her, almost painful in how deeply it affected her, like the first woozy moment that something unnatural reached her veins. “Oh you had to get there first, you ass.” The tip of her nose brushed his. She held onto his knees because she knew they wouldn’t hurt him. Rhiannon stretched up to kiss her way around Noah’s face, beginning with his cheekbone and going up to his forehead and down the other side. Love left her thrilled and elated and aching because as soon as she had it, she feared the lack of it, and because it was another of those out-of-her-depth emotions she couldn’t seem to take the edge off.
She took her time coming back and looked at him. “I love you.”
“I didn’t mean to steal the spotlight,” he told her, mouth turning up in a half-smile as he tilted his head to follow the path her mouth was making. He had been about to say something else when she spoke again, and Noah stopped breathing for just a moment. Hearing it was different from hoping. He pulled her closer, and he was so disconnected from his injuries that he didn’t care. “One of those things Old Me didn’t think I’d ever hear,” Noah murmured.
Rhiannon fit her lips to Noah’s. It was a quick, there-and-gone kiss, one that reminded her of the shape of him, those little details that got lost when they kissed each other harder. “If you like it, you’re in luck. I’m gonna say it a lot. Annnd if you don’t like it…” Rhiannon cut her eyes to the side. “I’ll whisper it when you’re asleep, or really distracted.” She tucked his hair back and traced the intricate structure of his earlobe. Rhiannon leaned around and held his hair away. She kissed underneath and behind his ear. There wasn’t anything overtly sexual about what she did when she used her mouth, fingertips, and breath in those places; it was affectionate and exploratory. She wanted to make him feel something good and safe. “I love you,” she repeated.
Had she been fortunate, standing in the right place at the right time, knowing and spending time with Noah, and being attracted to him, when he decided to open himself up like this? Or would she have wanted him and fallen in love with him anyway? That line of thinking made her stare at the sky some nights, a cigarette in her hand and the hood of her car under her back.
“There are two things that I’m confident I’ll never get sick of hearing,” Noah told her, tilting his head contentedly when her mouth found the spot beneath his ear. “Your name, and that sentence.” He looked around them then, the bright lights of the bathroom, the blood-spotted gauze in the wastebasket and the makeshift first aid supplies on the sink. “We can probably go somewhere more comfortable,” he suggested lightly. “And I’m not being suggestive, sitting on this toilet is not comfortable.”
Rhiannon smiled into his hair. For the sake of his eardrum, she suppressed the laugh that came with it. “But antiseptic is such a sexy smell.” The hunter rocked backward on her heels to give Noah some space and got up. Between Noah’s state of disarray and her gym clothes, they were a hot mess, but she was accustomed to being any combination of sweaty, grimy, and bleeding with other people. She washed and dried her hands at the sink. “What’s going to be comfortable? Maybe we should get you checked out. How bad does your head hurt? Are you dizzy, are your ears ringing? You haven’t thrown up, right?”
“I’m okay,” he assured her, standing up and moving behind her. He met her eye in the mirror and slid his arms around her waist, resting his chin against her shoulder. “It didn’t knock me out, it just made it harder to use my power.” Noah looked down at the phone and sighed resignedly. Maybe it was time to check. He disengaged from Rhiannon and picked up the device, typing in a quick Google search for ’Palms hotel fire’. The first image that came up was obviously taken from someone’s cell phone. It looked like a war zone, but he couldn’t find anything about anyone being hurt. The pyrokinetic sighed and held it up for Rhiannon to see.
She frowned and studied it closer, expanding the photo with her fingers. Rhiannon’s gaze flickered to Noah and back at his screen. How did one say, ‘holy shit,’ in a dulcet tone? She lowered her hand and busied herself straightening up the mess on his counter. “You said that it takes more energy to start a fire from far away. Is that something you could do before… cause that kind of damage from the top of the Palms? It’s got to be what, forty floors?”
She noticed the stiff movements of her hands in the mirror and made them soften.
“I don’t know if I’ve gone that far before, and definitely not like that,” Noah told her, leading the way out of the bathroom and into his bedroom. He sat on the edge of his bed and looked up at her. “And it would have knocked me out of commission before. Now, I feel like I can do anything. Destroy anything.” He glanced at his window, the back at her. “It feels like I’ve lived my whole life with a switch, and it was set on low, and someone just put it at max. At first, I thought of Elfleda and what she offered me, but this doesn’t seem like her MO.”
“No, you’re right. She’d want you to accept it, and there would have been…” She trailed off and puzzled through the way to word it. “I guess maybe an exchange?” Rhiannon took off her gym shoes and sat cross-legged in the middle of the bed. “When I made my deal with her, we held hands. Maybe it wouldn’t be like that, but someone old like her might place a value on old things, like ritual and respect. Plus I get the feeling she’d watch.” The brunette reached up and loosened the elastic band of her ponytail. She mussed the thick, straight length of her hair until it lost its prior shape. “Why would your brother want you to be stronger than before?”
Noah let himself flop backward onto the bed, his head resting near her leg. He watched the blades of the ceiling fan above spin lazily. “The only reason Ivan does anything is if it benefits himself somehow,” he told Rhiannon, one hand touching the discoloration that painted the side of his ribs. “And maybe it’s not entirely his fault. I was the same way once.” His eyes ticked up to look at her. “What does he get out of me being stronger? I don’t know yet, but I need to find out.” The pyrokinetic was so tired. Doing anything at that moment felt as appealing as climbing Mt. Everest. And then something occurred to him, and he turned onto his non-tender side and moved closer to her.
“I forgot to ask you what you’ve been doing. How you are.”
“I’m okay.” Rhiannon stretched and lifted her sweatshirt overhead. She tossed it, the fabric coming to a soft rest in a corner of his room, and she laid down alongside Noah, facing him, in a position that had become comfortable and intimate for them; it was their own closed-off world where they told each other private things and swept reassuring fingers over each other. At times, Rhiannon thought that putting her hands on Noah was as reassuring to her as it might be to him.
She placed her fingertips on his chin and the tender skin underneath. “I got involved in a kind of strange situation. A group of us started getting texts from an anonymous sender, and they would share these things, dark secrets about us. Impossible things to know. It’s been about as unpleasant as you might guess.”
He lifted his head slightly, any hint of fatigue pushed from his head. “What?” he asked, though he had heard Rhiannon perfectly. “Someone is messing with you?” A dozen different thoughts spilled from various corners of his mind and half were born of anger. Noah wrapped an arm around her hip, possessive or protective or maybe a little bit of both. “What did they say about you?”
“That I work for Elfleda.” Her blank expression faltered. “It’s funny. I was afraid of it getting out. I didn’t want it to hurt my reputation as a hunter or a person who could be trusted. But it turns out I don’t have one. Not anymore. Almost everyone in Nevada who knew me and what I do and what matters to me is gone. Or not close to me now. The big, terrible secret doesn’t matter.”
She took a breath. “I don’t know how you do this. I don’t know how you ever did. How do I stay on a path when I don’t have my family or allegiances to a group of people, just some nebulous concept of good or evil? I’ve always wanted to think for myself but I’m not designed to think of myself, which makes it hard to operate alone. Most days it seems like it’s the easiest thing in the world to wake up and make the right choices, but other days I worry it might become hard because I don’t have to live up to expectations. And I don’t just mean someone else’s. I mean mine.”
Noah wasn’t entirely sure how to answer that. He took her hand in his and threaded their fingers. What had driven him before? He could have chosen the path of least resistance, been what someone else had wanted him to be. “At first I thought there was freedom in being alone,” he told her. “But that was just because I didn’t have the right people. I didn’t fit and so I started to see loneliness as doing whatever I wanted. Because who would stop me? I had no idea what I really wanted, though.”
He squeezed her hand. “Maybe no one ever gave you space to figure out what your expectations are.”
“Mm.” Rhiannon watched the match-up of their palms, the sliding together of one another’s fingers. Noah wasn’t wrong. Freedom of thought hadn’t been the order of the day in any hunting circle she knew. “It’s like floating. The weight is gone and there’s this second of...” Her sentence drifted. Her understanding of the experience was too tenuous to describe it, or to comprehend whether it was even a negative thing. “I guess it’s unsettling to get what I wanted. Except us.”
She repositioned her cheek on the bed to see him better. “I always thought you were beautiful, even when you were cold.” She turned their interwoven hands. “I think… No, I know that after a while, I would have wanted you either way, and I wouldn’t have cared if it made sense. But it would’ve been terrible if you hadn’t wanted me back.” She studied the pale skin of her hand, naked without its rings. “You said earlier you just want to burn things. Will you try not to let go of this, no matter what?”
He took in a deep breath, still not used to being called beautiful, especially the way that word sounded coming from her mouth. She had perfectly articulated the way he felt, sliding in between weightlessness and grounding. And after seeing that black room of nothing that had seemingly hatched from the deepest recesses of his mind, Noah now knew exactly what he wanted. “There was this quote I read once that stuck with me, that I gripped onto and wouldn’t let go of.” The pyrokinetic looked up into her eyes, the ones he noticed turned warm when they fell on him. “‘The question isn’t who is going to let me, it’s who is going to stop me.’”
His weight shifted on the bed as his eyes scanned her face. “It used to apply to other things, but now…” Noah lifted their hands up so he could press a kiss against her fingers. “To me it means that no one is ever going to stop me from loving you, or being with you, for as long as you want me.”
Noah always knew the right words and gestures to make fear leave her, and she didn’t care if that was from years of reading people or something that happened naturally as a characteristic of their match. She let the shadow on his cheek tickle the backs of her fingers and examined the face that had become all she could think about in her quiet moments.
“Well. I don’t know how to love anything a little, or for a little while.” Rhiannon smiled. She leaned forward to kiss him on the mouth. It stayed soft but she felt free to be more possessive of him, and her hands ached to do the same. If it was a different night, she would have wanted this confirmation that they belonged to one another to play out in its entirety. Instead she resettled. “I’m here. Whatever you need or when, it doesn’t matter, okay? I’d do anything to help you. Right now it looks like you need to sleep, so how do I help with that?”
“Just be here?” Noah reached up and ran his fingers through the hair that was still slightly crimped from the elastic band, down to the thinner strands on the nape of her neck. “That seems to do the trick.” He let go of her hand to grab a pillow and place it under his head. There was a part of him that was scared to close his eyes. What if he lost control? He had to trust that Rhiannon knew the choice she was making to stay near him. “Earlier, what happened at the Palms. I barely had to think about doing it. It was like going into a trance, and the fire took a hold of me. Literally.”
Here, he glanced at his arm that was untouched, at least, by flame. “It happened when I closed my eyes and I don’t want to go back there.”
Rhiannon emulated his move with a second pillow and got comfortable next to him. “You can’t stay awake forever.” Fortunately, it wasn’t late yet for her and she wasn’t carrying the amount of exhaustion that Noah was. If she put her mind to it, she could be up for hours yet. “I’ll stay up for a while. If you’re afraid of torching me, I’ll move away just to be on the safe side. But you should know, every day you wake up and I didn’t elbow you in the nose during a fight dream is a victory.”
She smiled at him and kissed the place where his eyebrow met his temple. “I got this part. Relax and close your eyes.”
That made Noah smile. “No, I know you,” he told her, smoothing down her hair before letting his hand rest on her hip. “You would instinctively avoid my face. You like it too much.” He gave her a satisfied look even through heavy-lidded eyes. “Anyway, I trust your decision.” His head settled fully on the pillow, and with one last lingering look at her face, he let his eyes slip closed. It was the unconsciousness he feared, the lack of control, which was a different side of the vulnerability he once felt when he feared being inert would get him harmed.
“I love you,” he told Rhiannon again, sleepily.
He was right, of course. It was a nice face, and she had a particular fondness for his profile. “I love you, too.” Rhiannon put her fingers into a part of his hair where the scalp wouldn’t hurt and combed it methodically, until the rhythm of it began to hypnotize her. When his breathing deepened, she went loose beside him and focused on a point on the ceiling, no longer smiling but thinking of what could be to come.