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Susie doesn’t like the idea of living with regrets.
Even under the increasing weight of world ending responsibility there remain the simple wants of a young woman. Hobbies and friends and kissing and dates and feeling wanted. Ralsei was perhaps not the best subject to place all of that upon, but she couldn’t help herself. Admitting it was embarrassing, difficult to understand. It’s precious lightning in a bottle that now slips through her fingers like falling sand, affection meant to burn as bright as a shooting star and extinguish as quickly. If something made both of them, it was something uncaring, otherwise, how could it give her something so precious just to take it away?
She’d give anything at all for him to just be… Some guy. Just a transfer student, with a house in the neighbourhood and extracurriculars and a family life. But in her heart she knows that want isn’t completely honest. She doesn’t know if it would be possible for them to be them without the magic and the darkness and the nonsense. So she wishes moreso there was some miraculous way to transpose him to the “real world”— Though she would never call it that, because the lingering implication is his unreality, which she finds horrific. Her world.
But the possibility of it remains uncertain.
So, for now, she doesn’t like the idea of living with regrets.
And it is that that spurs her to his room. If she tries and she’s rejected, well, that was that. But at least she tried. She tries to act casual about it, about the walk there and the greeting him, hands behind her head while he looks at her politely, coyly asking to make her way inside, that there’s something that they need to talk about— There’s lots of things they’ve had to talk about. There is now an added complicity between them. Kris didn’t see the Last Prophecy and neither of them were the type to ruin their life with accursed knowledge. Susie, the one who hates people who dance around the truth, now eating her own words.
There was something special about Ralsei. Despite the circumstances of their being differing dramatically, he has the same exhaustion to his eyes that she knows in herself. Knowing too much, too early. He understands.
She tries to talk about it, to verbalize that she likes him a lot, perhaps an absurd amount for the time they have known each other. But she’s never been good at words. They trip over each other in an awkward dance of indirect statements. So she grits her teeth and does a leap of faith. Can’t possibly be worse than jumping into the maw of a Titan.
And for a moment when they kiss she expects resistance but Ralsei does not resist. Worry nips at the back of her mind that he is simply saying yes because it’s what he does, but the way he leans into her with hunger let loose and how she presses on him and feels him hard under the robe quells those fears and fills the remaining hole with fiery excitement. She fiddles with her belt and digs her fingers in the plum denim with the perfected practice of someone who’s been flicking the bean for a number of years. And when she does his eyes gleam with the same real boyish spark they did when playing videogames in the Green Room. He bites his lip and the tent on his robe twitches and Susie loses herself in the feel of him and her own touch and, in this weird fidgety state of nervousness and want and standing on the edge of the unknown, they somehow manage to undress each other.
At first there is the lingering threat of the circumstances at hand, the end of the world creeping in the darkest corners, but then he touches himself too and she kisses him hungrily and with her own slick and his she lubes him up— she is so very wet, wetter than most recent memory— and when they grind together and he moans, and she rests her weight on him a little, and the underside of it rubs her, and it barely crests in and suddenly the world stops existing. She sinks onto him, toeing the line between the pain of the new and the pleasure of excitement that they’re doing this, and then there is no Roaring and no Knight and no death over the horizon; in this cocoon of giddy excitement finally unhindered by the weight of youth stolen too early by loneliness and abuse there is no Prince and prophecy and a shitty mattress and a smashed piano and a mother that should never have had a daughter. None of that matters. All that matters is how good he feels inside her. Nothing exists except for her and Ralsei, enjoying each other.
The faces he makes are so beautiful. His noises are so beautiful. The way they move in clumsy rhythm and he looks like he’s doing his damnedest not to bust—he’s so beautiful. She flicks herself eagerly, feeling familiar fire coiling, through the anxiety and the inexperience and even the remaining pain she careens toward the peak, and she feels under her butt how his thighs tremble and raise as his toes curl and tense his legs, and he holds onto her waist and whimpers something unintelligible and that voice that sang lullabies and metal falsetto is just so sweet and so needy and despite herself she clenches around him hungrily, coming undone—maybe quicker than she would have liked, slowly sinking the rest of her body onto him, chest resting on his. She can feel the way he twitches inside her, pulls out, leaving vague lingering desire—and with two strokes of their hands combined he, too, cannot hold back anymore.
It happens exactly as in the light world. Knowing about the “specific darknesses”, she wonders if Ralsei comes like a lightner because her and Kris understand the logistics of it at least conceptually, then decides that idea is detestable. Ralsei comes like a real dude because he is one, and that’s that.
She rests by him, has him lean his head on her shoulder. She knows there’s bigger things to worry about. That maybe for her own sake she should not do what she then does. She drags him closer by the waist. He irradiates warmth and the fur around his temple is vaguely wet when she kisses it. Maybe, for the best, she should not go for his mouth again. His eyes are closed, gorgeous eyelashes framing delicate pink eyelids, and he breathes and his lips shine. His most unreal quality, Susie thinks, is just how gorgeous he is.
She does not know how pillow talk works. She does not know how any of this works.
“I’m gonna guess there was no prophecy like, the girl deflowers the prince or something.”
He chuckles, breathless. “No there was not. And yet.”
“Then the Old Man was right.”
“Possibly.”
She decides to nip this tangent immediately, but the gap of quiet puts her at unease.
“I think I like you, Ralsei.”
She should not say it. But she cannot help it either. And she hates people who dance around stuff, anyway.
It sounds so dumb said now when they just did all this. The conclusion of it is so self evident.
“I think I like you too, Susie.”
He looks at her with intense longing and she feels big feelings that she can’t explain. Adoration, and cuteness aggression, and deep sadness, and a slight morsel of want. She’s bitten the forbidden fruit and now she wants another taste. She wants to fuck him again. An uncertain, potentially impossible thing.
“But… there are bigger things at stake right now.”
“I know. But I didn’t want to be feeling like shit for once. And I like how you are when you’re not worried and you’re just… you.”
It’s terribly embarrassing to say, but he smiles a smile that could warm her under the rain.
“I like you when you are you, too.”
“Did you… was that good?”
“Very much so.” He nuzzles into her neck, hiding his face, one of those mannerisms she knows he does to hide his own embarrassment.
“You didn’t say yes just because… you know, serving the lightners…”
He tenses, shakes his head no. “No, I… I wanted it. Despite it all. I learned to say no to what I don’t want from a certain someone, so if I had not I would have said so…”
She colors, her face heating just a bit.
“I’d never thought that you… I mean, no one ever liked me like that.”
It is a lie now, and both of them know it. After all, love finds its way to the girl. Everything with Noelle went so smooth it was almost unnerving. She was rich and she had a pretty face. She was a top student. Her mom was the mayor. She’s a girl, and Susie knows she is a mannish brute who is too loud and eats too much and sits with her legs spread, by all accounts a complete failure at the art of femininity, and she’s hopped enough towns to understand the attached implications—all being here having freshly fucked a guy.
It was as if it was meant to be, set up by fate to be basically perfect.
She hates it. It makes her sick.
So she, too, nuzzles the fur above Ralsei’s head.
“Well, that’s done,” she says, awkward. “I… I guess I gotta dress up and let you rest some.”
“Stay,” he begs, something pitiful, scared and pained. “Please.”
His wimpy arms tighten around her frame.
And she stays, cuddles up to him naked—even does him a second time, just because she wants it and he does too. They have bigger worries. But all that is tomorrow. Tonight, they sleep together.