Who: Sol and Evie What: A VERY SERIOUS CONVERSATION (VSC) Where: Solomon's apartment When: Wednesday around 2 PM Rating: Subject matter, nothing explicit. Evie and Sol talking about their horrible existences. Uber-Glossing over of rape/child abuse/torture/sexual slavery/The Sadist being the Sadist. Nothing explicit, and no terrible dialog. Their bios are way worse. Oh. And you know, warnings for their typical cuteness.
Evie knew that taking off without telling anyone wasn’t smart. But she hadn’t been thinking about smart the night she took off. She had closed herself off completely, and just head for the hills. Literally. She had every intention of going back, but after talking to Solomon on the phone she realized that not everyone could just assume these things about her. She knew exactly what she would do if the situation had been reversed and she didn’t blame him a bit for being upset with her.
She had talked to her father, and while the conversation itself was different than most they had she was feeling stronger, and more comfortable in her skin than she ever had. She contributed that battle with the part in her life that Solomon had filled. She felt complete, and she was certain that she filled a part of his life as well. She’d taken that away, and that hadn’t been fair, or right. She knew that it was likely time for him to know everything, and it seemed by his tone that he had a few things to discuss with her as well. In her heart she knew that he wouldn’t run away from her. But her heart was sometimes hard to trust. This was a heart that still loved her mother after all this time, it wasn’t always the smartest part of her. But it was what she followed most of the time. She had enough heart for the disheartened, and she hoped she had enough to remind Solomon that he could trust her.
She showed up at Solomon’s apartment at 1:55, and stood there outside the door for a moment and took a deep breath. She found herself nearly aching to be on the other side of the door, everything was going to be okay. For the first time in her life she wanted to have the hard conversations. She wanted to deal with the not so pretty, and downright ugly truths that she knew were there for the both of them. She was scared, but she wasn’t afraid. This hadn’t been the first time she’d disappeared on her birthday, but this had been the first time she’d been eager to come back and face a new year.
She knocked on the door then. She pulled on the hem of her tee shirt, and readjusted her hoodie and moved her hands over her jeans a bit, mostly just to fidget. Her hands were in the pockets of her light blue hoodie, and she shifted a bit on the ballls of her feet while she waited for the door to open.
Nervous energy had turned him into a wreck. Why had he suggested such a span of time between their conversation and their meeting? It had given him enough time to practice what he would say to her, and enough time to realize no amount of practicing would help. He hadn’t slept, so he’d laced his system with caffeine, hoping that would help. Late Tuesday, half conscious and ready to collapse, he’d drunk himself asleep and suffered nightmares for his troubles.
Mistral woke him early Wednesday morning by nearly suffocating him, and he lurched from his sleep, covered in sweat and breathing heavily. Sun poured through the window; he hadn’t shut the blinds when he’d passed out in his bed. A quick shower later, he found himself pacing the kitchen restlessly, wondering what to do. He debated watching television, but knowing that would do nothing for him, he left his apartment for a run. When he returned, shortly before noon, he needed to shower yet again. He took his time, lingering in the burning heat of the shower as thought it was his personal mission to use all the hot water in the building.
After dressing and brewing a strong pot of coffee, he settled at the table to do the crossword of all things. He was puzzling through 13-down when the knock came at his door. A rush of adrenaline paralyzed him, and for a moment he thought he might throw up. But the feeling passed, leaving a steely resolve in its wake. Come what may, he had to tell Evie. About him. Who he was. What he’d been through.
Opening the door, Solomon gave Evie a tense smile. “Hello,” he said, his voice gentle in spite of the strain, he stood aside to let her in and then shut the door behind her. He didn’t lock it, though he usually did - a locked door afforded him some measure of time should someone attempt to break in. Moving away from her, he unconsciously kept out of her path to the door, just in case she wanted to leave abruptly. Hesitating by one of the overstuffed arm chairs at the edge of the living room, he glanced at her. “Would you like to sit?” he asked, his voice a bit scratchy. He swallowed. “Or a cup of coffee?”
When she finally saw him she offered him a warm smile and a “Hi,” before she stepped inside easily enough. Once she turned around and was looking at him again she fought the urge to just wrap herself around him, forget all the talking and just be there with him. She had spent a long time not seeing him. At least a long time by their standards. Even if they went a bit without seeing each other there was always talking or texting or emailing or sending notes by a long suffering courier. She’d missed him so much it ached, it felt like a burn the whole time she’d been away from him. But she’d had to do it, she wanted to be good for him. She didn’t know if she’d made it that far yet, but she’d tried and succeeded at more than she’d ever hoped to accomplish in her short time away.
But the hugging and cuddling would have to come later. She was toying with the string on her jacket hood and nodded at him, “Yes please. Coffee and a sit,” she said heading for the kitchen, she could get her own cup of coffee she was a pretty easy guest as far as things like that went. She was standing within reach of him then and she touched his arm gently and gave it a small squeeze, half to remind her that he was real, and she hoped to remind him that she was real. She always looked at comforting Sol like she was comforting herself at the same time. So she took a lot of the same actions with him that made her feel better with people she trusted. Granted, she knew that maybe she’d lost a little of that trust over the past week or so. She wouldn’t have blamed him for that loss either. It stung, but she would work to earn it back if it had come to that.
Strangely enough, the touch on his arm went a long way to soothe his frayed nerves. It surprised him, because he hadn’t expected something so fleeting to have such an effect, and it was with a much better temper that he followed her to the kitchen. He helped himself to more coffee, pouring it straight into the mug without any frills or bells or whistles. Coffee, black. The best drink on the planet. Pausing to inhale the aroma of the brew, he let it wash over him, saturating his senses. For a brief moment, he was in another time, another place. A Parisian salon, filled with laughter. He was there because his Lady wanted him there, an indolent expression on his face, but he had loved those salons. They were filled with ideas, and ideas were quickly becoming the new currency of power.
Opening his eyes, he found himself in the apartment he shared with Cora once again, and he gave Evie another fleeting smile.
They settled in the living room, and he took care to sit on the opposite end of the couch. It wasn’t that he wanted to be far away from her, and his hesitance at choosing his position gave that away, but he wanted to give her the ability to run. To escape. Dread settled in the pit of his stomach, a hard and heavy rock. It gnawed at him, pinching his internal organs and making him ache. “So then,” he said quietly, not entirely sure where to begin. Perhaps... well. “As you know, we are both from that other world. Musings, they call it.” Though why, he didn’t know.
He was stiff as he talked; though he tried for relaxed, he failed. “I was alive there for... a very long time.” She knew that. Around Evangeline, it was easy for Solomon to mention the past. A comment here, an anecdote there. He spoke so freely around her that if she hadn’t realized he was older than he looked, she would have to think he was a historian. But given that they were both from Musings, she likely suspected the former.
Evie poured herself a cup of coffee as well, she drank it black too, and he made a good pot of it. She sat down on the couch and kicked her shoes off before tucking her feet under her so she could face him as he spoke. She didn’t like that he was sitting so far away from her, but she wouldn’t crowd him. Not yet.
She held the mug with both hands, fingernails lightly tapping on the ceramic, not impatiently, just idly as he spoke. She nodded, she didn’t think he was as old as her Papa, but she knew he was up there. “I understand,” she said softly. “My Papa too,” she knew that her Papa had a lot of wounds in his past, she imagined that Solomon wasn’t much different. As many as she had in her short time, she could only imagine the worst for someone who had been alive as long as Benedict and Solomon.
With a deep breath, he closed his eyes. It was much easier to talk when he pretended he was talking to an empty room, or maybe to Mistral. Evangeline’s presence danced electric over his skin, making her impossible to mistake for someone else, but he could pretend. He had a skill at pretending.
He spoke slowly at first, haltingly. The memories brought with them strangely formed vowels and oddly constructed consonants. The old-world accent thickened his voice as he painted a picture of Constantine’s empire, of a disaffected whore for a mother and an uncaring world. He told her how he picked pockets and begged for food, about the lean years and the plentiful years, the days when the temple acolytes noticed the plight of the starving children and the days when they didn’t. He didn’t speak of his time on the streets like some would. There was no glamor in poverty, and he didn’t brush it with the shine of boundless freedom pepper with times of less. He described it starkly, with brutal strokes of charcoal, black as pitch against the white of his canvas. How keenly he remembered those days, even though he had been so young.
Then came the lady who ruined his world, and he spoke of her as one might a lover long gone, who left nothing but bitterness in her wake. Time had dulled the rage and resentment, turning his sharp hatred into muted dislike, but the unconscious tension in his body and the disgust that lined his face told the story of her well enough. His hands shook when he mentioned her, a reaction he hadn’t purged. And while he wanted to pass over the first time she took him to bed, he couldn’t. He recounted the haze and the confusion, the drugs that dulled the body but not the senses.
He described the rise and fall of empires with dispassion. He spoke of kings with no regard for the station. An outsider, he watched them come and go as time surged onward. In its current, he was a rock, solid and immovable. The fall of the Roman Empire brought him peace, and he told her of Gaul with a gentle voice. He had loved those people well, which only made him colder when he was brought before Charlemagne’s court. With exacting detail, he recounted the five hundred years that followed. A change came over him as he spoke. His eyes opened, but they were the Sadist’s eyes, frozen and merciless. Lovingly, he painted the portraits of the men and women who had used him, and tenderly he described their deaths. Solomon wanted to spare Evangeline the pain of slavery, but the Sadist revelled in it, in how he had turned the edge of pleasure into a blade that brought ecstatic pain.
The Sadist peeled back Solomon’s skin, crawled out of it and sat on the couch beside Evangeline. His eyes were on hers, never moving, never lifting for a moment. The eye contact kept him grounded. And as he told her all the horrors visited upon Solomon that the Sadist revisited on the other women, he smiled. He delighted in the memory of their screams, describing their pitch and their cadence with tender words. He detailed his times of freedom with words soft and gentle and with violent words ripped the freedom to pieces with tales of pain and abuse. The journey from Musings to Humanity was disjointed and fractured, and he explained the five years in the asylum in strange turns and whorls, as if time was a tertiary thing.
At last he fell silent, and the Sadist crawled back into the suit he wore called Solomon, and Solomon looked at the mug of coffee in his hands and wondered when it had gone cold.
Evangeline wasn’t a stranger to bad stories, she had lived her own, she knew some of her father’s, three days a week she sat in a room with people and listened to their stories. She’d seen, heard, experienced and done things that would make most normal people cringe. She knew that the story she’d just been told would have a lot of people running for their lives.
She noticed the moment the change took over in him, she knew that change she had something similar there wasn’t a name for it. But she understood it better than anyone else might imagine, it didn’t frighten her away, she wasn’t scared and she didn’t think she ever would be. She knew he had to be, she didn’t rightly trust herself either. She’d endured torment that was more than most people could bear to hear, but that had been 12 years of her life. Solomon had endured that and worse for centuries. She knew from watching her Papa that long life was a blessing and a curse.
She listened, her eyes on him the whole time, she didn’t flinch, she didn’t cower away, she couldn’t stop her mind from racing, she couldn’t stop herself from putting herself right there with him every step of the way. It didn’t relate to her situation, but she could relate it to her life. She could relate it to the love she felt for the man sitting next to her on the couch. She wasn’t going to pretend like it didn’t have an effect on her, of course it did. She fought her own mind’s retreat several times throughout the explanation she didn’t always succeed, but she fought it harder than she’d ever bothered to fight it before. Not for any reason other than she had reservations about scaring Sol (as strange as that may seem), she didn’t want to scare him off any more than he wanted to scare her off.
She was quiet for a long moment as she watched him she didn’t know what to say, she knew from experience that there was nothing to say. She could say she was sorry for all he’d had to endure, but no one wanted to hear that. They were just words that people usually said to make themselves feel more comfortable about having heard something traumatic. She didn’t feel sorry, she felt angry. It was in her nature to protect, fiercely, those that she loved. She looked slight and maybe even a bit on the fragile side, she played silly games, and said silly things, but she was not a silly little girl. She had never been allowed to be a silly little girl. She has visions in her own mind, of ripping apart anyone who would hurt Solomon, just the same as she did the night she’d had to pick him up from the industrial part of town, broken and battered. She was ferocious on the inside, and the more she thought about it the more that rage started to bubble to the surface. She reigned it in.
She was half in one part of her mind and half in the other, she didn’t know which part of her was sitting on that couch right then, but she’d just spent the last week trying to reconcile two halves of a whole Evangeline, and she wondered if they were never meant to be reconciled at all.
Her eyes drifted from him finally and she stared at the wall just passed him as she chose her next words carefully. She had watched him the whole time he spoke, eyes carefully trained on him, not backing down from eye contact, despite how cold his eyes may have been at any given time. They weren’t cold for her. She knew that as plain fact. but when she finally spoke the edge was hard to hide, but it wasn’t stinging or biting at him. It was stinging and biting on his behalf. “It feels like you’re not in control of anything, like nothing belongs to you. Not even yourself, not even your body. It’s all just for someone else, learning to fight back takes a little bit of what you lost back,” she was starting in the middle of her story again, but she wasn’t going to start explaining herself, not yet. He needed the time to recover. She tilted her head a bit, she wanted to move across the couch, she wanted to touch him, to feel him touch her. She was safe, he was safe, they were going to be okay.
“Solomon?” she asked softly. “Can I come over there please?” she asked deciding it was definitely time to ask permission before touching. It wasn’t always the case, in fact it had never been the case as far as the man sitting next to her was concerned. But she knew herself well enough. And she knew him, it had taken every bit of energy and strength he had to relay a past like that. She knew, it was never easy admitting past Hurts. Ever. No one wanted to be felt sorry for, or pitied. No one wanted to be seen as a victim. No one wanted to show others how weak they were, even if their weaknesses involved a major show of physical strength. It was half the reason she’d needed a place to hide the night she’d stabbed those men. That wasn’t her being strong, that wasn’t her showing off, that was her vulnerable and scared and letting terrifying base instincts take over.
He looked at her, slowly lifting his face so their eyes could meet again. He set his coffee mug down and reached for her, because she was really the only thing in the world he needed, and physical touch from her was a salve for his soul. Nothing else mattered. Nothing else was important. His mind could conceive of nothing but her.
Evie leaned over and set her own mug down before she unwound her legs from under her and-ungracefully really- settled as close to him as she could get. She leaned her forehead against his and moved fingers through his hair and touched the side of his face gently. She’d been away from him for a long time, especially by their standards, and for the first time since she’d gotten back, she felt like she was home again. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you I was leaving town, love,” she whispered as she pressed a kiss on his forehead. She had said it on the phone, but the words had been stuck in her throat since she’d gotten here. She couldn’t apologize for leaving, but not telling him had been the wrongness here, she only hoped she would make it better in time. Her father had said it was a mistake, a one time mistake, she could recover from a one time mistake.
Slowly, he wrapped his arms around her, drawing her close and holding her. Her lips on his forehead grounded him, kept him from falling away. He didn’t tell her it was alright, because it wasn’t, but he knew he had to say something. Words floated through his mind, streaming through his brain as small as grains of sand as impossible to pick apart. He had to choose one or two, but he couldn’t separate them. “It’s forgotten,” he finally managed. “Don’t worry about it anymore.”
He’d told her not to worry about it anymore, that it was forgotten, she appreciated that. She did want to drop that, as much as she could. But she wanted to make sure he understood that she was taking it seriously, that she could put herself in his shoes. “I understand, I wasn’t thinking. I know that if the situation had been reversed I would have...” she paused. “I would have completely lost it.” He’d seen her post ‘completely losing it’ once already, he would understand that.
She settled a bit more comfortably, sitting in silence and wondering if she was brave enough to explain what had happened to her the night she decided to leave. She would never do it again, not to him, that much she knew. But if he was going to understand her, the way she understood him didn’t she owe it to him? He’d been brave enough to talk to her, he’d told her his story, he’d let her into the scary side of himself, she knew better than anyone how hard that was. It wasn’t fair of her to sit here and struggle further with it.
Her mind made up, she started simply really. She talked fondly about her father, about how much he’d loved her mother, and how wrong he’d been to do that. She talked about her strange childhood, being used as a bargaining chip and a way to torture Benedict. She spoke fondly, as always, about her father and the efforts he put into making sure she knew how important she was to him. She couldn’t remember a time ever NOT loving him. Even when they’d been separated by continents and years between visits. She explained the emptiness and the void that was filled simply by his existence. She’d endured so much, but being separated from that part of herself was a new form of torture for the both of them.
The story was easy enough, typical enough really of a lot of children in this day and age. Her mother mistreated her, and didn’t understand her. She explained her letters to Benedict, and the way she clung to her half sister, and the abuse she knew her sister was subject to and the abuse Evangeline had taken trying to protect her. To give her just a small break once in a while. The guilt of not being able to do more, even as young as she’d been, to protect her.
The story didn’t get better, it turned uglier, her hand that had been holding onto Sol’s gently was gripping it tightly now. She told him everything, she didn’t pull any punches, she didn’t sugar coat it as she had for others. She didn’t just talk about the actions, or the people, she talked about herself and her feelings and the way the little girl she’d been would escape back into her own mind. She talked about fear, and personal strength. Eventually she talked about when she’d first met Luc, how he’d been like a guardian angel, how once again she was noticing a void being filled. It hit the both of them over the head. At first she’d been a job, a paycheck, but within minutes of meeting they’d forged a bond that she knew was never going to break. He’d offered her the promise of getting her home, they’d take full day long adventures when she knew her mother and step father were otherwise occupied.
She talked about her 12th birthday and what she’d walked in on involving her sister, she talked about the aftermath, the words were tumbling out of her mouth, the fear was creeping up, she choked it back down. She told him how hurt she’d been, the scars that were still on her body, but more than that she opened up about the scars that were still on her heart, and still marred her soul. The next part of the story was being back with her father, and Luc continuing to be her guardian angel, he taught her to fight (and he taught her well). Parts of her healed, other parts she just closed off and refused to deal with. Every year eventually becoming harder than the last, consistently being stuck between the person she was becoming, the person she might have become, and the person she desperately wanted to be.
For the first time in her life she was finding herself trusting someone that wasn’t her father, and wasn’t Luc. She was finding herself having feelings that she never imagined having. She had Solomon, she had Hayley, she had people she genuinely loved, and she’d run off scared. She explained her time away, she wondered if she’d ever make it back, if her mind would ever calm down enough to allow her a moment of peace. She talked a lot about clarity, and attempting to reconcile all the parts of herself. She admitted to not being anywhere close to reconciled, but she knew that the ache and the emptiness she’d wound up feeling was the lack of him. It wouldn’t be the last time she tried to close herself off from the world, but it would be the last time she tried to close herself off from him. Luc had been her guardian angel, her brother, her faithful protector...It didn’t escape her attention that it was his brother that eventually completed her and she told him as much. She looked up at him then, her eyes were wet, but tears weren’t spilling over. She kissed his chin gently and sighed a bit, “So you see...I’ve been missing you my whole life. I’ve been waiting for you.”
Once again, he had no words to say. So he drew her closer, stroking her hair and brushing her skin with small kisses, more than content to sit with her, curled up around her, for the next hour or four. With a smile turning up the very corners of his lips, he touched his lips to her ear and whispered, “I love you too, moonbeam.”