shiegra (shiegra) wrote in het_challenge, @ 2008-05-14 22:48:00 |
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Entry tags: | a: shiegra, f: baccano!, r: reversathon, recipient: mahokiwi |
Baccano!, Firo/Ennis
Title: filling in the blank
Author/Artist: shiegra
Fandom: Baccano!
Pairing: Ennis/Firo
Rating: R
Warnings: Mild suggestions, etc
Request: Baccano! - Firo/Ennis -- Something that explores Ennis's struggles to be fully human, and to understand what it's like to be independent, with a lot of cute firo-and-ennis adventures in every day things that ennis might not have had to think about before. Smut is secondary to adorable domestic antics, but if you wanted to put some in there, something about how Ennis's instinct is to read firo's advances as orders, and firo wanting to approach their relationship from common ground would be super plus awesome. Basically I'm hoping for something where Firo and his adorable smile cancels out any potential angst that Ennis might be trying to experience :)
A/N: Pinch hitting. It's a bit late, and I hope the requester isn't too unhappy with it.
She woke up very morning and thought, yes, I am alive. I am here, and I am not afraid.
Sometimes it felt less like a lie than others.
Life, now, is an empty canvas. It stretches ahead of her in black white, eerie and hard to touch; hard to consider her own.
Her world is no longer confined to Szilard's presence and will, no longer guided by the steel rails and bars of his whim, no long dependant on his desires. She is vaguely aware of human romanticisms, and the blackness they presume to label loss with.
You are human now, too. She reminds herself. Or must become so, at least.
The words are hollow; she is blinded by the mute gray and paper white of an unfamiliar life, and the disinterest she possesses in living it at times. Perhaps a homunculi is like a wind up doll, to tick down the moments after its master is gone until it settles into dust and stillness and eternity's disuse.
But, she remembers, her master is not gone.
Only consumed.
He smiles when he sees her, a delighted, crooked grin, and his eyes light up. His hair is mussed and his jacket is gone and he reaches for her hand, fingers curling, and she pauses.
She has no words for her purpose here, and maybe he sees that. Maybe he can read it in her eyes, because Firo Prochainezo can read the thoughts beneath her skin with an ease not even Szilard Quates achieved, he who shaped her blood and bone.
"Come in," he invites, and pulls the gate open for her.
For a minute she cannot breathe as she steps close; he is smiling, his hair falls over one eye, his hands have a little dirt on them, and for a second he fills her canvas with a rout of color. Szilard's presence has felt physical to her before, but not like this; if she licks her lips, she thinks she could taste him.
"Come inside." He repeats, and she bites her lip and obeys, aching with confusion and more.
Ennis doesn't need anyone but herself, to survive. Surviving is simple, and sometimes ugly, and she is entirely capable of it.
Living, she is learning in tiny stilted steps along a way she suspects is paved by Isaac and Miria, is harder.
The first time he tells her to do something--tosses out a request, casual and thoughtless--she can't help but stiffen a little as she turns, reaching for the bottle. "Yes," she murmurs, soft and mechanical.
He's sitting up and frowning at her, and when she comes across the room he shakes his head at the bottle, takes her wrist. "Ennis." He says, low in his throat. "You can say no."
She couldn't quite bring herself to do anything but accept the touch without protest or reciprocation. There is the only the quiet of the room, and his breathing, and the absolute dark intensity of his eyes.
Liberty is a concept like dry sweet air, spread before her like the untarnished canvas. He grounds her in the white, smears color over her world with his reckless grin. He lives in her, and she in him, and Ennis--
Ennis is not focusing. He is still staring at her. "Yes," she says, and cannot help but be slightly impatient as she offers him the bottle. She does not desire to refuse him, and it will suffice. Firo makes everything complicated.
He sighed, and rummages beside him to pull out a clean glass, slosh nearly translucent liquid into it, and offer it to her. Their fingers brush when she accepts it, bemused, and he pours some into his own, grins as he tips their glasses together for a toast.
She would smile but she isn't sure she knows how to do it the way she wants; what he pulls from her--what he makes her want--is alien to anything she's ever desired before.
She goes shopping one day and returns with her arms full of bags. Firo meets her at the door--he is normally too polite to come into her house without her invitation, so he must have been worried--with a bemused expression. "Are you having a party?" He asks, nods to the bags.
"A party?" The words are unfamiliar on her tongue. She leaves the bags on the table, the counter, looks at him over her shoulder. "I thought I would buy food."
At the offer in her eyes, he pokes through the bags with all the sly curiosity of a cat, grinning whenever he finds something particularly appealing. There is a bag of apples, far from windfall fare, crisp and firm with pale streaks riding the juicy red of their surface. "This is more than one person needs." He points out, and his eyes flicker to her, dark and curious. "Or two."
"Oh." She says, baffled. When Szilard thought to loosen his control on her and allow her to sate the human functions of life, she remembers hunger as a consuming thing, weakening her and gnawing in her belly. Hunger so great to be pain. "Perhaps I--"
She sees the memories move behind his eyes, and there is no reaction in him at all for a long movement. "Of course." He says, and smiles, brief and filled with a razor edge of anger. She has told him before--briefly daring--that there is no use in hating a dead man. "Well, we'll put it away and maybe have a party after all, yeah?"
She had learned enough of herself and him both that she does not simply murmur an assent, but picks up the bag of sugar, looks down at it, and says, halting, "maybe tomorrow."
The last time she told him his time was wasted in anger against Szilard, he laughed and said she was right, there were better things he could be doing. The words had stalled on the air, as though waiting for a familiar response, and Ennis could not give him one, could only pause with his eyes on the back of her neck and feel the weight of the air.
It was one of the few times she did mind, so much, her lack of experience within the ordained rhythms of his world. She would not have cared to sacrifice that strange sweet pressure with a practiced remark. For all that she cannot help but wonder what the meaning of his stillness is.
When he carries the apples to her, his hand brushes her waist and for a moment she forgets to breathe.
One day they are attacked on their way home.
Ennis knows little as well as she does battle, even obedience taking a second place to the propensity for violence. When the third man's arms snap against the brick and he sags, gurgling a muffled scream, she toes aside his body and turns to see Firo.
He is finishing the last, palm driving into the man's wrist to shove the knife away from his face. He slips out of reach, his other hand snapping forward to bury itself with extraordinary force in the man's torso. His opponent gags, crumples over his hand, and hits the ground. His hair is a little dissheveled but he has not lost his hat, and he turns instantly to seek her, finds her, and smiles like a delighted schoolboy to see her waiting patiently. His eyes are still glittering.
Beautiful, she thinks, in a dizzy animal instinct, and cannot then find the reason she feels the concept nor the will to deny it.
She is surprised that he kisses her first, mostly because on the day they first kiss it is hot, and he wandered downstairs in a loose pair of pajama pants, surprised to see her in the kitchen. He's lean, and has a knife fighter's scars on his pale torso, and her fingers tighten around the knife she's using the cut an orange.
She is surprised because she is sure her control or her resolve or simply her calm would snap and she would be reaching for him, assuaging the ache she is not even sure she fully understands. Then he kisses her, and the knife is pressed against his ribs, thankfully the blunt edge against the skin, and he touches her like--
The knife clatters to their feet and he kicks it aside as her hands spread against his stomach, slide around his sides, press against the arch and ridge of muscle running beneath his shoulderblades. She cannot breathe but for him, and when she kisses him back he shudders, body tautening against hers, and makes a throaty sound against her collarbone.
And then he goes to his knees in front of her--wicked, wicked smile--and his hands are on her thighs, the front of her pants, his mouth on her hips--her skin is already damp with sweat--and then he sighs and hums against her, a low controlled almost-moan, and moves up--
Her head falls up, and colors burst against the black of her eyelids.
She woke up every morning curled into the lean weight of his body, her face pressed into his shoulder, and did not think at all.
Her world is vivid with him.