Ivan Press

Ivan

Eventually they tire of Corsica, which is to say: eventually Ivan tires of Corsica. Though they sailed here, he can't be bothered to sail back, and so it is Dmitri is saddled with the task of arranging transport for L'Impératrice de la Lune back to Nice. That, of course, is in addition to all the other minutiae he must see to: closing out the house, settling the account, arranging for whatever accoutrements his masters have collected to be transported back to Nice, bringing over the jet, filing flight plans, obtaining permits and passes, etcetera, etcetera.

The parts move behind the scenes. Ivan, as ever, neither knows nor cares. He drives his small family to the small airport in a vintage MG and gates magically unlock; paths magically open. His jet is magically waiting, engines idling and boarding ramp lowered. He carries his son in one hand, holds his lover's hand in the other. She precedes him up the stairs. He hands the boy to Miron as he steps into the cabin.

The flight back is scarcely an hour. They rise up over the Mediterranean, blue as a jewel. As they descend into Nice, they can see their city spread along the shoreline -- low buildings the color of sun and sand and flowering plants; winding cobblestone streets. If they pay attention they can pick out their villa along the sea, though not Hilary's hidden retreat.

It is late afternoon when they return to the villa. There is a humidity in the air, a warm wind off the ocean. A storm is gathering on the horizon -- a summer squall, brief but torrential. All the second-story windows and most the first are open, that warm wet wind passing unhurried and unimpeded through the halls. The architecture of the house keeps its interior cool. No one's bothered with the climate control.

They part ways for a while. Anton is taken to his rooms, and likely fed and bathed and possibly put down for a nap. Ivan takes a shower, washing travel and the scent of unfamiliar places from his skin. He reemerges casual, chino shorts and a linen shirt so light his skin is an undertone to the pale sea-green of the shirt itself. It's begun to rain outside, a grey curtain sweeping up the shore to drench the villa, to turn the ocean the soft silver of a mirror's back.

He finds Hilary wherever he finds her. By then he has a drink in hand. Two, in fact: one for her. Something iced and tartly sweet, vodka-based, served in a collins glass that's already sweating. He hands her her drink and kisses her shoulder.

"I think we should put in a pool," he says.

This time, however subtly, Ivan notices that Hilary is tiring of Corsica, too. It's such a mild undercurrent of irritation that even he has trouble noting it, separating it from the more general irritation she usually feels towards life itself. But it's there, and it's different, and after a few days it reveals itself to him as what it is: she is tired of Corsica. She misses their villa, and her cabin. She misses her routine, her quiet little corner of the world, what has become her Real Life -- the first she's ever really had. She does not have words for what she feels, does not quite realize herself that she misses her home, but perhaps Ivan understands.

Has it confirmed, then, when he says they should go back to Nice, and there's a flash in her eyes that isn't quite pleasure, is close to excitement, but seems most like... relief.

--

After that, it does not matter to her if they sail or fly. Things are packed for them. The house they've been staying in is cleaned for them. They go to a meal together while everything is being sorted for them, and then they go to the airfield. Ivan carries Anton, who is almost three and can walk and run and climb and even swim, all of it almost entirely on his own. But Ivan carries him from the car to the jet, and Anton likes this very much. He babbles. He points at the plane. He says 'plane', first poorly in English. Then poorly in Russian. And Hilary says avion to him, and he repeats it, and it is perfect.

But then, it has no L sound in French. And he doesn't quite have L down yet.

Miron is the one who supplies this last piece of information: after all, no one wants Ivan thinking his son is developmentally delayed. In any of his three languages.

Hilary seems pleased with Anton, though. Pleased with Ivan for carrying him. So when they board, she takes Anton instead of Miron, holding him until the stairs are tucked away and the doors are shut, then letting him walk around until Miron takes him to buckle in for takeoff. Anton has no apparent fear of flying. He is curious. He asks many questions, but directs them to Miron. His beautiful, distant parents have drifted away from him again, sitting together, Ivan's hand over Hilary's, Hilary's eyes on the window.

--

The flight is short, and Hilary reads a book she got in Corsica instead of trying to make conversation. That's not unusual: the book is new. The lack of conversation isn't.

As they approach Nice, she hears Miron pointing out their villa to Anton. She looks, too, casually, her eyes scanning the shoreline. She sees the dock. She sees the ruddy tiles of their roof. She looks for her refuge, her safe place, and she cannot see it. She cannot see the path that leads to it. She can only barely make out the edge of another building, a hint of her little dance studio, and that is the only way she knows where to look. It makes her quietly pleased. A small smile tightens her lips.

She looks at Ivan. She smiles a bit more. She does not say why.

--

Anton is complaining about hunger on the drive to the villa, and it's annoying, but he seems to forget about it when they get home. He takes off, tearing through his house, rapidly climbing up towards overtired and overhungry and he is going to be a nightmare in roughly fifteen minutes, but that is Miron's problem. That is Elodie's problem.

His beautiful, gold-and-silver parents move more slowly. Hilary drifts from Ivan. She can hear Anton squealing as he's scooped up somewhere on the second level. She goes to the courtyard, where the fountain gurgles along, and sits there for a while. Ivan goes to her suite of rooms, which are nominally his as well, and showers. Somewhere else in the villa, Anton devours a quickly prepared little lunch. He has his face and his hands washed. He is laid down for a nap in his bed, in his room, in his house, in his home.

Hilary rises up as things get more quiet. She walks from the courtyard out to the path. It's not yet raining. She can feel it in the air and realizes she's never noticed that before: the sense of rain coming. She pauses on the path to look at the ocean, at the heavy sky, and inhales deeply. Smells it. Wonders at it, in her distant and blank sort of way. Then she keeps walking.

--

Her refuge is not open to the air like the villa was. The air inside is staler. She opens the windows. The door that leads to the dock. She leaves the main door, the one off the path to the house, closed. It's symbolic, though she doesn't quite realize it. Or maybe she does realize it: in the primitive way that encouraged humankind to create walls and doors in the first place. It begins to drizzle, and she goes around her refuge, touching things. She puts the book from Corsica on her little shelf with other books she's gotten here in Nice. She sits on her bed. She goes to her bathroom and turns the water on. Then off. She goes to the little living room area and stands in the doorway, looking down the path to the dock as the drizzle turns to rain and pours from the sky. She is amazed at the smell of it. She wonders how she never paid attention to the smell of rain before.

A knock on the door, then. The flash of her mate through one of the open windows. She calls for him to come in. She smiles at his wet shoulders, his damp head, his sweating drinks. Her eyes are hooded and her smile is something dark and almost sly as he kisses her bare shoulder, hands her the drink.

She must be in a good mood, because when he makes his disgusting and absurd suggestion, she doesn't pitch a fit. She just smirks and looks back at the rain, the horizon, the ocean as the rain falls onto it, into it. "No," she says, almost playfully.

The days are long, but the storm has prematurely darkened the sky. The sound of the rain is different here in Hilary's little cabin. In the villa, mostly, one hears the flat splashes of raindrops on the terra-cotta of the atrium and walkways. Here it is closer, a million tiny drumbeats overhead, resonant on the roof, softer on the foliage. It is a backdrop to their conversation; masks the clink of ice cubes in the glasses.

The air smells of rain. Smells of salt sea and wet earth, of that peculiar acrid scent of rain in civilized places. That, too, is a backdrop: when Ivan comes close, he smells of the lemongrass in his shower gel.

Something in her eyes makes him kiss her mouth, too, soon after his lips touch her shoulder. He leans in for that one, his shirtfront a cool layer between his chest, her arm.

Then they share that view of the horizon through the trees. He sips his drink. Smirks at her. "I thought you liked swimming now."

Her eyes close when he kisses her. She has a way of letting him kiss her: she has many ways of letting him kiss her, without quite kissing him back. The ones that make him stop and ask her if everything is all right. The ones that are simple in their receptivity, thier acceptance. The ones that feel like she is receiving a tribute. The ones that seem to indicate that she is going to make him work for it if he wants her to kiss him back.

This is that last one. Withholding, daring, mischevious.

Well: as mischevious as Hilary is wont to get.

--

"I am learning to swim," she corrects him. She hasn't quite started enjoying it yet. At least not as she measures enjoyment.

"And:" she adds, but doesn't go on. She simply gestures at the sea.

He makes a little sound, a hm, but amused. He tastes his drink. He tastes her mouth. He has a pathetic thought she would be disgusted by: something about which of the two was more intoxicating. He keeps it to himself, a secret that makes him smile.

"Really. The ocean? I thought you would be averse."

That gives her a moment's pause. It was a deflection, in a way: look at this giant body of water, why would we need a pool? But what he says makes her imagine actually swimming in it. The idea of a scream, more than a scream itself, bubbles up inside of her, tickling her throat. She sips her drink.

"But it's so nice here, the way it is," she says, half sigh, half petulant complaint. "I don't want it to be like the house in Corsica."

Oddly, he does understand that. They were both tired of Corsica and the house there. They are home now, and it seems right, somehow, that they make their home unlike Corsica.

"No pool, then," he says. "Just the ocean, when you're ready for it."

He turns away, slips back into the little house. Returns a moment later with a folding chair, which he sets outside, just under the overhang where he can stay dry. Unchivalrous creature that he is, he takes the seat for himself, crossing an ankle over his knee. His feet are bare beneath his sandals.

"I like it," he adds after a moment, a soft non sequitur, "when you're coy."

[HE NOT MOOB CHAIR DER CHAIR PREPAERD FOR :D]

This doesn't satisfy her, and he can sense it under the surface: she doesn't know if she'll ever be ready to swim in the ocean, but at the same time, she's done so many things she never thought she would do. She's becoming someone else. Maybe this person she's turning into will learn how to swim in the ocean and not want to scream, and scream, and scream, and scream.

She also does not want a pool. All concrete and tile and hard edges. The villa is somehow softened, even at its sharpest corner. The roof tiles are rounded. The fountain in the courtyard is round. Everything, courtyard and rooms and the surrounding landscape, is green and lush and shadowed. She doesn't want all that exposure, even to the sun.

But Hilary just sips her drink. Perhaps they will talk of it later. Find a compromise.

--

Ivan sits, dragging a chair under the overhang. She stays in the threshold of her little house, observing his dampened shoulders, how the linen clings to his shoulders. She drinks, the liquor warming her belly and setting a gentle flame licking the inside of her skin, watching him. She hates his sandals and his laziness and his sometimes gauche sense of style, but at the same time:

his fair hair, his lean body, his golden skin, his style -- when it is more classical, more refined -- and his deft, long-fingered hands. These things she loves.

Of course she doesn't think to say so. Not even when he tells her that he likes it when she's coy.

"I am not being coy," she argues, perhaps simply to argue, or because she doesn't think of herself as coy. She thinks coy is for girls, and she was perhaps never really just a girl.

But then: "What do you mean?"

On a slow blink he drags his eyes from that hypnotic rain, that ocean. He looks back and up at her, rare lines on his brow as he raises his gaze. He smiles.

"I love it when you make me work for it," he clarifies. It's perhaps too detailed, too gauche a description for her, but then -- she did ask. "I can never take you for granted."

A slight lift of one brow, barely perceptible. A turn of her chin. The subtlest change in her expression, which seems to say oh? is that so? even as she processes what he's said.

What he is saying. That he can't take her for granted. She thinks to herself that on occasion, he has. Has seemed to, at least. Which makes her think of something else. Less coy. Less playful.

She steps closer to his chair, but doesn't reach out for him. "Do you know that I love you?"

This, suddenly, is quite earnest.

He does, however, reach out for her. Nothing conventional; not her hand or her wrist or even her arm. His hand turns over on the arm of the chair; his fingers trail and snag at the hem of her top, graze the outside of her leg before wrapping around the back of her thigh.

"I know," he says softly. There isn't a shred of dismissiveness to it. "I do know that, Hilary."

A strange embrace. A strange, intimate, primal embrace. He seems to lay claim to her like this: her body, every artery, every pound of flesh. She does not fight him. Her eyes do flash, though. Something in her, rather than wanting to fight, is comforted by the way he touches her. Like he owns her. Has mastery over her.

Isn't that why she calls him vladelets?

"I do not mean to leave you," she says to him then, quietly, with the air of a vow. She does not intend it. She does not plan for it. She does not want that.

There's a softening in his eyes, but a darkening as well. He tips his head back. Rests against the chair, looking at her. Beautiful, eldritch creature that she is.

"I know," he says again, softer still. "And I will not leave you."

[perception + empathy! we can do this, hilary!]

Dice: 2 d10 TN7 (8, 9) ( success x 2 )

[he feels tenderly toward her, but also ... sort of possessive? not in like. NOT LET HER DO ANYTHING ON HER OWN-way. but just in a ... SHE IS MINE-way.]

A flicker of concern, deep down, that she said it wrong. That she's bored him. That she misread things. Her brow furrows slightly, her eyes intent on him, and then:

it clears. She exhales. She does not worry about making him work for it right now.

She sets her drink down on the planks of her patio, turning to face him where he sits, placing herself on his lap. She straddles him, puts her hands on his face,

kisses him. Does not simply permit him to kiss her.

Kisses him. Hard enough to push his head back.

He has an inkling of what she wants when she sets her drink down. It becomes a suspicion by the time she faces him. It is a certainty when she straddles him, and yet -- this time -- he doesn't immediately rise to meet her.

He stays where he is. It's so rare that Hilary initiates anything. He wants to see where she goes. And where she goes is right here: putting her hands on his face like she, too, has a claim to him. Kissing him hard enough to push him against that wood-slatted chair.

He takes the kiss. He returns it, all silent intensity. Rain is pouring from the skies, falling like a sheet at the edge of the patio, but here they are sheltered. The air is electric. Humidity has her hair setting into its natural waves, and that's where his hands go first: fingers running through, grasping at the roots, gripping her as firmly as she grips him.

He feels it, against his lap and in his arms: that shudder that goes through her when he grips her hair, holds it like he has a right now, tightens that hold like he's unafraid of hurting her. He isn't going to hurt her. Has he ever hurt her beyond what she could bear, beyond what she wanted from him? Has he ever treated her like that delicate flower in a walled garden that so many before him have made her out to be?

Hilary's hands move to his shoulders. She kisses him deeply, not slowly: hungrily.

"Stay," she tells him, a breath in between kisses, her mouth and her body lush against his now. "Stay with me here tonight."

Somehow, he thinks, it sounds less like entreaty, more like permission. This cabin is her domain. The house is her domain too -- but it is also Anton's, and it is his even if he does not always sleep here. The cabin, though, is all hers. He requires permission to stay here. He requires invitation, now given.

His hands loosen in her hair. He follows her back down. Flexible spine, slender body. He thinks she must have been quite something, dancing. He knows she is quite something, dancing, and otherwise.

"I'd love to," he murmurs. He finds the hem of her shirt. He rucks it up, caring little of where they are.

Up the path at the villa, their son sleeps. He's a small child, less a baby now, and he has strong opinions and likes and dislikes and a large volcabulary, even if his mouth cannot quite master certain phonemes yet. This is his house. The house in Novgorod: that is his, too. One day he'll be given papers to sign, things to review, and he will learn just how much he owns, just how much he will inherit, what all he is entitled to with the name his father gave him. He will see how much that father gives him, as the only heir, even if in the most traditional circles he will never be considered legitimate.

One day. Years in the future. A decade, a decade and a half: the boy will see just how much he owns, how much money he has.

How much power.

And even then, if they are all very lucky, he will know: one does not barge in on his mother. One does not come without invitation. One does not assume their welcome. He will be entitled to much, as his father before him was, but there are certain boundaries, certain laws of the heart, that transcend the laws of nature and the laws of man.

There are territories one has to earn passage into.

--

In this little house, with its secret luxuries mingled with rustic charm, the back of Hilary's shirt rucks up against Ivan's warm hands. Cold rain hits the patio, splashes off the wet wood onto his shins, onto her lumbar. She kisses him with soft, gasping eagerness. He hears her words as invitation, as permission, and not as entreaty. He is not wrong. Even Hilary, who has never felt that what she has is hers, has that now: this place is hers. Nothing is to be done to it that she doesn't approve of. No one is to enter that she does not welcome. It is her territory, her den, the way no other place ever has been. And Ivan -- even Ivan, even her vladelets -- must be invited here before they know they can stay.

She parts from the kiss, her eyes heavy on his. Hers are so dark; his so fair. Her hand is still on his jaw. The touch is not possessive; it is almost worshipful, despite how she came to him, kissed him this time.

"I am glad we came home," she whispers. It is at odds with the heat of her body against his, the hunger of his hand on her body, but it is somehow tied to these things, all the same.

onoz!!!

HALP

It is not a hesitation, but it is a pause nonetheless. A moment to consider. His hand is motionless on her skin. His eyes sweep between hers, down to her mouth. Back.

"Me too," he murmurs. It is a realization even as he speaks it. His hands guide her closer. He kisses her again, slower than before: as though that was hungering, and this is feasting: "Me, too."