bakerstreet | Baby, I just can't sleep.

Baby, I just can't sleep.

the i n s o m n i a meme

It happens to everyone - sometimes, you have nights where you just can't fall asleep, no matter what you do. It could be for a number of reasons, or no reason at all. And this is what's happened now: you've been laying in bed for what feels like hours, just tossing and turning, and nothing seems to help. So what's left to do? Get out of bed and go wake someone else up, of course. If you're not getting any sleep, then why should they?

i n s t r u c t i o n s

• Post with your character (note the name and fandom in the subject).
• Other people reply to you by generating a number from 1 to 10.
• Have fun!

o p t i o n s

01 • FEAR. Maybe you're hearing strange, indeterminable noises; maybe there's a severe storm happening outside; maybe you watched a scary movie before bed? Whatever the reason, you're terrified and it's keeping you awake. You just want to wake someone else up so they can protect you from the monster in your closet.
02 • HUNGER. Your stomach is growling and it just won't stop. Or perhaps your throat is so dry you could cough up a tumbleweed? Well, you've gone to the kitchen to remedy this and hey, that was a pan that just dropped on the floor. It was loud enough to wake the dead! Oops.
03 • PAIN. Your body is completely worn out, be it from exercise, battle, sickness, or what have you. Either way you're in enough pain to keep you from sleeping, so maybe someone else has a home remedy or something, or can at least help you take your mind off of it.
04 • SOLITUDE. For some reason, your bed just feels so empty at the moment. You're feeling terribly lonely and really just want someone to keep you company for a while. Maybe it'd be easier to fall asleep if you're with them...
05 • DISCOMFORT. Your room is an oven. Either that or a freezer. Or maybe this bed is just really uncomfortable? Who knows why you can't get to sleep, it feels like it could be anything. Why even bother trying? Maybe someone else can preoccupy you until you feel tired enough to ignore your discomfort.
06 • PENSIVE. Something's on your mind, and no matter how hard you try to focus elsewhere, it's just not going to work. Your body may be tired, but your mind is incredibly busy and it's virtually impossible to get to sleep. Surely, talking it out with someone else will help?
07 • SADNESS. Something terrible has happened that day, perhaps; or you could just be severely depressed. Either way you're trying your hardest not to cry yourself to sleep, and it's not working at all. Better find a way to get it out of your system somehow; you need a shoulder to cry on.
08 • ANGER. You are just... fuming. Who knows why - that annoying dog is barking again, or maybe the people next door are getting busy and keeping you awake. Whatever the reason for your ire is, you'd better put an end to it so you can get some damn rest already! Go wake up a friend so you can complain to them.
09 • RESTLESS. You're far too energetic to sleep right now. Maybe you're just trying to do so out of necessity - you have to be up early tomorrow! But you just don't think you'll be able to fall asleep for a while now, so why waste the time trying to sleep when you could be doing something else? Namely bothering someone else - you're totally jealous because they're getting more sleep than you.
10 • WILDCARD. Choose one of the options above, or make up your own scenario.

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It's like a game in itself, but as she sits down (obeys), she isn't sure if she's playing it with Irene or with herself. This isn't something she needs - this is the opposite, this is a complication that she already knows she won't always be able to control if she lets it get out of hand. Irene doesn't do 'in hand', and that's what had attracted her in the first place. So direct as she can be, she's always done better with people who know what they want and get what they want.

Irene is less dramatic about it than some of her former lovers, but the principle - at least so far as it concerns Benevenuta - remains the same. The difference is how, and why, and that it's always going to be on her terms. Benevenuta doesn't do 'in hand', either, not unless the hand is her own. On her terms.

(She sits down just like Irene tells her to; the weight of the holstered gun tethers this dream girl to reality. When she says the blood isn't mine, because it seems increasingly likely she's going to have to, it will be true, for once.)

“I had a meeting, this evening,” she says, after a few moments; she still speaks so carefully (four hundred and fifty years and she's never spent any significant part of that time in an English-speaking area), choosing her words, but as ever it seems deliberate more than hesitant. The words she chooses, she's sure of. “A...research thing, a nothing thing. The arrangements are all very last minute. I was not in a hurry to be in bed...I think that he followed me.”

Not here, though. She's edgy, but not the sort of edgy that suggests she thinks she was followed here.

Irene is self-centered, but far from heartless. She considers it a strength; empathy is an excellent weapon to have in one's arsenal.

Maybe that's not how empathy is meant to be viewed, though.

Irrelevant. The facts of the matter are that Irene has spent quite a lot of time being followed, hunted, threatened by men- for things she's done, things she didn't do, no matter. Who chooses The Woman as a name to convey power unless they've got a point to make, a standard to subvert, inside the bedroom and out? And so she can't help but feel very...human about things like, oh, for instance, a former lover, a clever, implacable girl-slash-woman forever on the cusp of something, managing to make distinctly learned English sound like modernist poetry (a nothing thing- Irene thinks distantly that she'd very much like to kiss her again), getting followed.

She puts the brakes on that thought in the privacy of her own mind, reminding herself again- the damsel in distress, oldest trick in the book, one of your own favourites, too good to be real.

She's frowning slightly- not an expression many people get to see. "For how long, where to? I assume you aren't hurt." Her voice is soft, and she has mastered the art of sounding concerned without exactly seeming worried- worry, after all, implies a lack of control over the situation, and Irene sounds very much in charge. It's subtle, but there.

“Long enough.” An epic in two words; long enough to find out what she was doing in London, who she was meeting with, where she'd be, what her name is this week.

(And after this perhaps there won't be any Mélisande any more, she'll get pulled back into whatever dream she came from and this will have only been a goodbye she shouldn't have needed, not with three years and no promises between them. She must be careful not to give Irene anything that can be traced to her later, when she's someone else.)

Then she says, “I only wounded him.”

This is and is not true. She makes it sound-- like it should sound, like she's almost shocky with it. Like she'd been afraid and she'd reacted and she shot somebody when she'd thought it was just a precaution that she'd never have to make use of.

She's never been good at goodbyes.

Her eyebrows move upwards, but only very slightly.

She's surprised because she isn't surprised; because had the suggestion that Mélisande could only wound somebody arisen in hypothesis she'd have thought it slightly absurd, but now that it's happened it seems perfectly sensible. The dream girl, slightly off-kilter, threatened and reacting- yes. It makes sense. And Irene knows for a fact that there's no more potent motivator than fear- the desire to lash out and run and never stop.

"Alright," she murmurs- it might be it's alright or you're alright now or just I understand. She's speaking with the voice of experience, slipping into a familiar role- older, experienced, in control in a way which is more reassuring than domineering, let me deal with it.

Funny, really, considering what she doesn't know.

"Any witnesses?" she asks. Practicalities.

“No. And I think--” a gesture with one hand, “I think he will not go to the hospital.” He certainly won't be going to the police, that careful tone implies; what trouble have you gotten yourself into, Mélisande?

(He's probably woken up by now, with a splitting headache that won't last long.)

This isn't poetry-- this is a love letter, a last hurrah, putting the dream to bed before she has to wake up. In a short while Mélisande-and-Irene will only be that dream that Benevenuta had once, and it's not the way she planned (when she looked up the address she'd thought let's get coffee and she practised saying it, not in the mirror because she was going to call her, going to listen to that voice and close her eyes and--), but it's nighttime, still, so she can have this. She writes her own history, just the way she wants to remember it, just the way she wants them to remember her.

Dear Irene, I was a fantasy you had in a dream I wanted to be...

When she stands to open her coat, though, the blood splatter tells a story that isn't damsel; upward from a low angle. One shot.

(Ruined that beautiful sheer blouse. At least the leather underneath - and she always did like her overwrought lingerie, but that's why I like it, under the sweater, it's incongruous; don't you love that word, Irene? - was mostly protected.)

Edited 2012-03-15 15:42 (UTC)

"Good," Irene says, and she's about to reach for Mélisande's hand when the other woman stands up and-

"My God."

The blood spatter shocks her into an artless, raw response. My God. She's standing up now, before she even thinks about it, half worried- worried, this time, events slipping from beyond her grasping fingers (that's an illusion, of course, everything was always beyond her control really)- and half astonished, for want of a better word. Admiring? Proud? Maybe. And she's angry. Oh dear. She just can't get the image of Mélisande firing off that one shot out of her head, for a moment can't see anything but the scene playing in her mind's eye, juxtaposed with vague background memories of a few months in Paris when Mélisande had been blonde.

Must this sort of thing happen to everyone she touches? Must it happen to girls- women- like Mélisande?

If there are other women like Mélisande. If even Mélisande is like Mélisande.

That's a lot of blood to be only wounded. Irene's taking her coat, putting it over the back of a chair, hand finding Benevenuta's upper arm, moving suddenly on an instinct, either not acting or so deep in her role that it's second nature- "Who was he?"

What she wants to say, incomprehensibly, is tell me the truth, because for once in her life she is yearning for it- and she hates the fact that she cannot simply trust that she already has it.

Most of the time, he's just a damned good reason to stay out of Britain. Immortals hold such grudges-- the last time it was the forties, it was Scotland, and she's still so sorry and maybe she just shouldn't use this name any more, Mélisande Girard then Sinclair and now Bellerose. It was simpler, last time; she knows if it's complicated now, that's her doing and Irene's hand on her arm.

Dear Irene, if I wrote to you a confession it would be one never repented--

Dear Irene, you are too dangerous for my world.

Her hands comes up to Irene's - there's the gun, now she's not wearing her coat, easily visible in that translucent blouse and those close-fitting pants - and she leans forward into her and the instinctive sway of it is as honest as the way her arm is being clasped right now. Shooting him didn't matter, she shot him because she doesn't want him dead, she wants the two of them far apart again; it matters because it's the end of this life and there's not going to be any coffee. There won't be any hopeful phonecall. A hand on her shoulder, her foot on his throat, a gunshot-- and everything Mélisande Bellerose loved is...something that she loved, once.

“It's family,” she says, and for a heartbeat she is so much older. It's always been there in her distance, but she's good, and she's always been good, and this lifetime she'd let herself be less tethered, and it was like camouflage. (The Belleroses are dead, the adoption records for her sealed; her birth father owns a security firm in Germany, nothing of her mother to find.) “I have to-- I have to go home.”

But not yet.

I have to go home- oh, of course she does, that much was obvious, she'd said as much, implied that she was leaving soon- and so why it makes Irene feel like someone has just stamped on her heart, she has no idea.

But not now, she wants to gabble, artless and unrehearsed, you don't have to go home right this second, so let's not think--

That sentence actually gets halfway to her mouth before her common sense shuts it down. It's a bit too absurd and desperate, and they haven't seen each other in three years, and while she's thought about her she hasn't thought about seeing her again, she's just picked up blondes and enjoyed fond memories and there is absolutely no reason to feel so very much about this.

But--

"I understand," she says, and she does.

She herself is always on the run, always second guessing the people who come to her door, always ready to jump on a plane and reinvent herself should trouble arise, and all of a sudden her focus has shifted and she can half see that reflected in Mélisande. So perhaps that explains how hard it is to pin her down, the sensation that she might be gone any minute. Because she might have to be.

Irene's fine. They never made any promises. Whatever she's feeling, it's just the novelty of seeing her again, the shock of the blood, how suddenly tired she seems. And then it's the sudden realisation she has that Mélisande is doing something Irene has often wanted to do and never actually tried- saying goodbye before she vanishes.

Oh.

"Oh, darling, you shouldn't even be here, should you?"

Her other hand comes to Benevenuta's face, cupping her cheek, remembering Paris. Perhaps she won't ask more questions. Perhaps it would be unnecessarily cruel. The hand on her arm moves to take Benevenuta's and Irene tangles their fingers together.

Benevenuta - Mélisande, a little while longer - smiles like she should be breaking someone's heart, curling her fingers against Irene's and not seriously thinking of stealing anything for a keepsake. She lets herself relent, a little, lets some of her tension ease out of her as Irene understands, because of course Irene understands, and she isn't sure if she would've been able to knock so thank god she opened the door.

“I couldn't sleep,” she murmurs; I needed to see you before I left. Then, sweetly and incongruously apologetic in just that note-perfect way of hers, the afterthought of respectable interaction, the way she used to almost fluster when she realized she'd shown more of her fascination than she intended (and she could be so intense, sometimes, so watchful and there and it was like being wanted by someone who'd peel away layers at leisure)-- “I'm sorry I woke you.”

As she relaxes, so does Irene, so does the entire atmosphere. She notes it a second after she actually does it, and is forced to wonder how Mélisande does it; makes Irene fall into step with her without Irene even noticing.

"You didn't," she tells her quietly, a slight smile on her lips as if to say of course you didn't, her hand on Benevenuta-Mélisande's cheek moving to brush a strand of newly-dark (new to her, at least) hair away from her face. "I couldn't sleep either."

She remembers and likes the half-flustered apologetic afterthoughts, the was I acting not-quite-properly again embarrassment. It's wonderful- pretty and sweet- but what Irene likes most about it is that it suggests she just saw something so real it has to be apologised for.

"At least my night's been more interesting than expected," she murmurs, something dry in her voice covering up something still distinctly shaken- and oh, when did quickly pushing a lock of hair from Mélisande's face become letting her fingers linger and stroke briefly over her cheek?

And why's she using the past tense, anyway? It's not over. Benevenuta is still here.

All the best disguises are somehow truthful, it's been said. It's with a kind of beautiful ruthlessness that Benevenuta uses the parts of herself still finding her feet to heighten the appearance of a woman so much younger than she truly is; she has never lived a mortal life as many of her fellows did before that first death, has never been able to understand this world from the inside because she's never been inside it. She wants to understand, to inhabit, and so she's spent her whole life trying to learn, trying so hard to find the melody and sing along--

It isn't that she wants to be something she isn't; it's that she wants to love something in its own whole truth. A world, a place-- a person.

When she kisses Irene, it doesn't break the spell because it is the spell, the inevitability laid out by her arrival, because this is the only part of a goodbye that she ever quite mastered and it's some sweet not-farewell, the way it feels like it could mean maybe or until or hello, again. And it doesn't, but-- oh, it could. It could. It would be lovely.

“I would hate nothing more,” she murmurs, close and intimate, “than to ever bore you.”

The kiss doesn't come as a surprise; it's what the whole night, horrible and magical, has been building up to, and Irene forgets to care about bloodstains on her clothes or three whole years or I have to go home for the space of a whole few seconds while Mélisande presses her lips against hers.

It feels like longer.

"Oh, don't worry," Irene breathes, voice low and private like she's talking in a church, whispering for Benevenuta's ears only when they shouldn't be talking at all. She's got that same soft, sceptical amusement, as if, in her voice. "You won't. I trust you not to."

And what else?

She starts the second kiss, eyes closed so that for a moment she can almost pretend she's in Paris and no one's covered in blood- but that's not real, that's not them anymore, that's not them really, if either of them are ever them, really. Whoever they are, this is here and now- and in the here and now they're in London at three in the morning, barely touching because of the blood and the years between them and kissing in defiance of it, and tomorrow will not be the same, the next minute may not be the same, so Irene refuses to waste time remembering when she could be spending it feeling.

Because that's what this is, isn't it? The making of a memory. Perhaps Benevenuta isn't planning on stealing a keepsake- but she's doing it anyway, writing out the perfect, poignant ending.

It's an anecdote read years later in the letters of someone you never knew as well as you thought you did, the lingering scent of perfume in a room that hasn't been opened for so long, an old photograph tucked into the side of a mirror; it's this, right now, the two of them living a moment that anyone else would know as something that happens to other people.

They are, they always have been, somebody else's other people. It doesn't matter-- there isn't anyone else here. (No witnesses.) There's only this warm regret; there's only how she'd wanted to spend years falling in love with Irene Adler and how it was never a good idea but she's so angry to have the option taken away.

(My name is-- but no, it's still a terrible idea, but if she'd been different then maybe Benevenuta would have held the knife for her like Ayse wielded it centuries before and maybe it wouldn't have come apart the way she's always known such a relationship must have to, and maybe it wouldn't have been a mistake, but the years will keep playing out in Irene's face and not hers and it is a fucking fantasy.)

She presses her cheek to Irene's, then to the side of her throat, then rests her head at her shoulder and closes her eyes, breathes her in. “I should-- I should clean up.” Maybe take off the blood-stained clothes. Stare into the bathroom mirror and wonder what she's doing to herself.

She wants to help, she realises, numb with shock for a split second. Whatever it is, whatever Mélisande has done, she wants to wipe it from the face of the Earth and steal, beg, borrow to make things alright- no. No, not alright. Just better.

It's not that she's in love or anything like that, just that she could have been. Just that Mélisande is so watchful and quiet and clever, sweet and soft, uncatchable and indefinable, and capable of shooting a man because of family. Just that she's warm and close and is holding onto her like she needs her and Irene needs to be needed. Just that Irene hates to be alone no matter what. Just that brunette suits her, really, she'll have to tell her, though it does make her look older.

And it's just that suddenly she'd quite like to go back to the nonsense of Paris, the coffee shops and the silly text messages and Irene's dreadful French and all the inconsequential things far away from the inevitable end.

One more safe place ransacked. Bloody typical, she thinks, some sudden surge of anger rising in her. She almost wishes Mélisande hadn't come at all- I barely thought about you I'll have you know, I only said your name once with a blonde and I was exceedingly drunk when I did it, so there- but that isn't fair, isn't it?

Neither of their lives is predictable, and they both strive and struggle to take charge of it- or she does, at least, and she assumes everyone else must do the same. You try and you try and take your respite where you can and then you cut ties- and it always ends up with trying not to get blood everywhere, doesn't it? Wonderful. Typical. Well, not this time. Irene holds on tight to Benevenuta. Her robe can go to hell for all she cares.

She rests her cheek against Mélisande's hair, closes her eyes, one hand at the back of her neck now, keeping her close, supporting her, we're both still here, think about now. "Would you like help?"

With anything, Irene pointedly doesn't say, letting the huge, absurd offer hang in the air even as she realises that she's probably only making things worse by showing Mélisande what she can't have, not if she's practical- and Irene thinks she is. Irene thinks they're both very, very practical, which is sometimes an absolute curse.

The thing is that Irene was supposed to have been a choice she made. A good memory that had to be only a memory, the worst cliché in the book: we'll always have Paris. So that in a hundred years this dream they had together could be a story she tells herself, the woman she could've loved, the life she caught a glimpse of having, how close she'd felt to something that she could really understand. She'd see her in other women, the way they hold their heads, a hand gesture, a walk, and there's not supposed to be any bitterness in the nostalgia.

No one else was supposed to touch the moment in time that contained the two of them. She has to rewrite it into something else, something better, something-- that still comes down to something final, because her pragmatism is sometimes brutal, and her idealism is never overwhelming. Even if she remembers working on the notes for her next novel (romances, under a penname) in bed next to Irene in that tiny little flat she used to have, and how wonderfully silly it had felt, the romance novelist and the dominatrix. Peddlers of fantasy. Different kinds. Here they are with the truth, finally, and maybe that's the poignancy of their ending; this artlessness that still isn't, quite.

“I'll take a shower,” she says, in a tone that means if that's all right, “and-- can I stay? Tonight?”

"No. I'm turning you out on your ear the moment your hair's dry," Irene says archly, but it's not the sort of sarcasm that seeks to sneer at Benevenuta- it's just underlining you know very well that I can't say no.

She wonders why she isn't frightened of that. She feels like she should be. She walks a fine line between a hatred of solitude and a fear of cages. Not that defining romance in terms of fear and hate is a terribly positive habit, admittedly.

She kisses her hair very gently, as if trying to wake her up without startling her, and steps back but keeps their hands clasped. "The bathroom's this way. Well, one of them is. Come on. You can admire my decor on the way- suffocatingly pretty, isn't it?" Gentle, real amusement, a refusal to be sad just yet. She squeezes her hand, and leads on.

The decor is lovely and Benevenuta does admire it, but the relief with which she finally steps into Irene's shower is one of those interestingly genuine parts of the evening; she leaves a trail of clothes across the bathroom floor (it hadn't been deliberate, but then, maybe it hadn't not been deliberate that she showed up on Irene's doorstep with leather and lace underneath everything else), and at least she's got the kind of coat she can get away with wearing on its own, later. Boots and coat and she'll put her hair up and perhaps someone will think she's walked out of Irene's house having accidentally become her, which wouldn't be the worst thing.

A body that heals isn't a body without tension, and hot water rinses away more than just blood. She came here for a goodbye but it's refuge, too, and she lets herself be nothing but the steam around her. She doesn't think, for a while.

Which is where all this artlessness gets you; careless. Her coat is still in the sitting room, with her clutch-purse.

Edited 2012-03-16 09:00 (UTC)

In fairness to Irene, the idea doesn't occur to her immediately. She first considers picking up the clothes on the floor and dismisses it, and then she considers removing all the books which she knows Mélisande wrote from her shelves, as if trying to deny that she kept any kind of keepsake at all, but that's silly and teenage and why feel embarrassed about remembering?

But when the idea does hit her, she doesn't even consider doing otherwise. She's just mulling over whether she could give her a keepsake, what she could carry in those pockets of hers- and then almost before she thinks, she's padding downstairs in her bare feet once more.

Knowledge is power; information is what the world runs on. And she's picking up her coat, slipping her hands into the pockets, opening the clutch, dismantling Benevenuta's disguise as best she can.

She doesn't feel guilty or nervous. This is second nature to her by now. She can hear the water running; she's safe, she'll have enough time to reorganise things before her guest ever comes down, if indeed she ever comes down. She may prefer to go straight to bed.

And wouldn't that suit Irene?

But she's not doing this for money or power this time. She's doing it- to grab hold of a situation slipping ever more precariously out of her grasp. She's doing it because she hates to be underinformed.

A picture. Mélisande- well, no, someone who looks like Mélisande- blonde, with pin curls, standing beside a dreadfully dashing young soldier. WW2. A note with an address in Scotland for K Greene. A man's wallet- Irene checks the cards and decides she must be staring at the man who followed Mélisande. It's the only thing that makes the next few items make sense (as if any of it makes sense) because they're duplicates. (Breath evenly, don't let your hands shake, keep an ear on the sound of the water, you've done this before). Two phones; one has her number in it, and William's; naughty boy. No, really. She doesn't like the idea of him bragging about her. Is he useful enough to justify it? She'll consider it later; right now, she can have no distractions. Another gun. No ammunition.

So he came for her with a gun, she thinks numbly.

She snaps pictures on her phone with a practical briskness, brows drawn, as far away from the dramatic, smirking, lady-of-leisure persona she's crafted for herself as she could possible be.

It's not until everything is put back in its proper place and she's flicking through the photos on her phone with that same ferociously thoughtful expression, wondering why it is that the photo unnerves her more than the cards and the weapon and coming to the conclusion that it's because she can't explain it, that she suffers a brief perspective shift and wonders what she's doing.

Snapping photos of the private belongings of a woman she hasn't seen in three years? It's not that she feels guilty, just stupid, desperate and as if she's jumping at shadows, making links where there are none.

Another glance at the phone and she ignores her doubts. Trusts her intuition.

She'll research later. When Mélisande is gone.

And then she's in the bedroom while Mélisande is in the en suite as if everything is totally normal, like they're playing house in Paris again. She puts the phone on the bedside table after a brief moment of panic- where was it, where do I normally put it, do I normally hide it, what's going to make her suspicious, will she even remember it, oh of course she will, I was permanently attached to it- and takes off her robe before situating herself elegantly on the side of her bed. (A few touches of blood, nothing drastic).

"Do you want anything to sleep in?" she calls, like they're on an unplanned sleepover and planning to spend the rest of the night braiding each other's hair and giggling--

--which doesn't actually sound bad, no, but nevermind.

That picture. A relative, surely. Obviously. It's because of family...

Next week there's going to be a car accident. It's going to be a footnote in the news - a short article about the short life of an author, a couple of blog posts, an update on the official website. Mélisande Bellerose (and Amerie James, pseudonym of a pseudonym) will just be some photographs, some books, some fading memories. Katherine will never find anything to explain what happened to her grandmother; Irene, she hopes, will never start looking.

(There are always flaws - unanswered questions. Irene has never struck her as somebody willing to accept something she can't know, and so much of that, that tenacity and that seemingly effortless skill, the way that she is so many steps ahead that she's already stopped playing chess and found some other, better game-- Benevenuta half expects that if she starts to look, then one day it'll be Irene on her doorstep at the German house that no one knows about, except she'd probably come in the window.)

It's a blind spot, that she doesn't think to worry about those phone numbers or that address or the photograph; instead, she leans in the doorway between the en suite and the bathroom, in laser-cut leather and mesh Gaultier for La Perla, turning the underbust corset that matches it over in her hands, studying the bloodstains with the slightly mournful expression of someone who is going to spend dedicated time to getting them out again, later. Damned if she's parting with this, too.

“I'd like that,” she says, looking up from it.

For a moment, all thoughts of chess and plans and photos are gone. Well, she's an artist, and Mélisande is unspeakably lovely- not just in her looks, but it how she holds herself, mourning over a corset, silhouetted in her underwear and framed in Irene's bathroom door like she was born to be there.

For a moment, then, Irene's mouth goes dry. Beautiful women don't make her nervous or jealous- but she's glad that the years and her numerous conquests haven't robbed her of her capacity for speechlessness. She's not that jaded.

"Marvellous," she says after an undisguised moment of admiration, getting up to her walk-in wardrobe and sorting through silk, lace, sheer mesh...

She likes the idea of getting to dress Mélisande up; as a little girl, yes, she had an enormous collection of Barbies (for her street, at least- she'd been so popular for that, had enjoyed all the other girls having to come up and promise to be her friend if they got to play with the one with the princess dress). And a lot of things Irene does are edited versions of her childish hobbies and dreams: when I'm rich and grown up, I'm going to wear party dresses every day...

"Here, darling," Irene says, drawing close to Benevenuta with her hands full of cream silk, a negligee; for a moment she wonders if it will be too big on her, before she remembers that, for all her seeming (deceptive, she thinks- no one who panics remembers to take the gun and ID of the aggressor she's just shot) fragility, Mélisande is actually slightly taller than Irene. Hm.

"Brunette suits you," she says, remembering her earlier resolution. "I'd have said earlier, but there wasn't exactly an appropriate moment. For the sake of scientific inquiry, you having more or less fun?"

...perhaps, the thinks, considering the fact that Mélisande never turned up on her doorstep blood-stained at three AM when she was blonde, maybe they do have more fun.

Close is good; she likes close, likes the effect she knows she's just had, likes the way it makes her feel less like she's come here grasping at smoke. Setting the corset down on Irene's dresser, she's unsnapping her bra (dreamy, delicate, distant-- but never shy) with the other hand before she has that cream silk sliding down over her skin, smiling, rueful as much as anything alluring-- “I think I get into more trouble now.”

(The cream makes her feel slightly sacrificial. About to be reborn, maybe; she remembers the white dress she wore the last day before the first day, the way the knife in her chest felt like the first exhalation all week. Would she trust Irene to plunge a knife into her? She thinks I don't know instead of no and it's the ache of possibility.)

“I was going to call, you know. For coffee.”

The two statements aren't really separate thoughts.

Edited 2012-03-16 13:11 (UTC)

Yes; a lot more trouble.

And either with a new hairdo you've figured out what to do with an unconscious and wounded opponent, or you always knew.

The first time anyone died because of Irene, she cried- not out of guilt so much as not having any other reaction to this chain of events, the shock of how did things end up this way? The second time, she spent a long sleepless night fretting. And the third time, she was fine. Cold. Distant. These things take practice.

Not that Mélisande has killed anyone.

She thinks about that blood spatter.

Not that Mélisande says she has killed anyone.

But she says she was going to call. Is that true? Irene has no idea, but it's such a nice thought. "You were?" She watches the silk slide over Benevenuta's skin, struck by how beautiful she is, and how dishonest, and how both those facts play into each other. "I wish you had." Yes, well, that's not a lot of use. "I'd have said yes, of course. I suppose we can have coffee tomorrow."

No; that sounds stupid, over-optimistic, as if she thinks they can pick up again after tonight.

"...If we get up early," she amends dryly; I was joking.

She hadn't been, really, but it's a decent disguise.

Lies beget lies and here they are, beautiful and dishonest both, wanting but not trusting; it's mourning the end of an affair that never happened. It's standing at an edge and looking across at someone who could bear your truth and stepping back, and walking away, and Benevenuta says, “I wish I had, too,” instead of something witty or clever or false.

It feels like the way they began, three years ago, when she'd said in distinctly learned English that you're beautiful, and I want to kiss you; I hope that is all right. Irene was the deep end and Benevenuta had jumped in both feet first and...then they hadn't made any promises, and they'd fallen out of touch, and she'd gone back to dating men who demand things of her because she forgets to be needed if she isn't told.

“I missed you,” she says, and it sounds like I'm going to miss you.

"Oh, now," she murmurs, sounding mildly reprimanding, being arch for the sake of covering up things which feel too real and close to the bone. It doesn't quite work; her voice is too gentle, too aching, too low, too reminiscent of the voice she used (and still uses, with other women) to murmur things between the sheets, lips against Benevenuta-Mélisande's ear. "Keep that up and you'll wring a confession from me."

She drags herself away, to the bed, sitting down and holding out a hand. Come here. She thinks about how they must look; her in black, Mélisande in cream, and it would be better, from a purely aesthetic point of view, if Mélisande's hair were still blonde so that they could be dark and light- but then again, that particular bit of symbolism isn't so clear cut anymore, is it? Mélisande's more like Irene than she's been letting on. So perhaps it works.

It takes a special kind of person to think about their own life in terms of dramatic devices and staging. It's easiest that way, though. It makes it seem more romantic and less real.

"I missed you too."

Maybe she'll stumble on this scene in a book, years from now, written under an unfamiliar name, echoing her own her past with uncanny attention to detail. (Benevenuta's first drafts always veer dangerously into writing for an audience that's been dead for generations; her prose, in historicals, is marked by a degree of overcompensation, moments and culture meticulously dissected. What parts of them would she inadvertently bare? Would it be inadvertent at all? Or another love letter, one Irene is never meant to get.)

“Is that the confession, Irene?” She stops at the side of the bed, lacing their fingers together and stepping between her knees, just close enough. “It's a good thing, I think, absolution is not your style or mine.”

Baby, I just can't sleep.

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