sixthiterationlogs | closed; just one look at you, my heart grows tipsy in me

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closed; just one look at you, my heart grows tipsy in me

WHO: Benedict Sorellin-Lancaster
WHERE: The Inn, Benedict and Kate's room
WHEN: December 8th-ish
OPEN TO: Kate Kelly
WARNINGS: Excessive schmoop 'n' stuff 💞
STATUS: Ongoing

When he had first realized that he'd somehow wound up on the Surface, Benedict had nearly had a panic attack. He'd been taught all his life that the Surface was synonymous with unspeakable danger, usually in the form of the horrendous creatures that lived there. And, sure, while there had been some alarming attacks — including the tragedy that had taken Karen from them — he's found that, for the most part, those dire warnings had been for naught.

The worst he's ever had to deal with is bad weather.

Weather is still something he's getting used to. Living in habbles his whole life, Benedict has never experienced even a mild rain, let alone seasons with things like snow. It had been exciting at first, interesting, strange, but now it's just cumbersome and irritating. It does, however, provide an excellent excuse to stay in bed to conserve heat instead of getting up in the morning, or going back to bed in the middle of the day to huddle beneath the covers because there isn't anything else to do. (The fact that huddling up in bed most often leads to kissing is neither here nor there. Really.)

This evening finds him lying flat on his back, Kate cuddled up to his side, her head pillowed on his shoulder and his arm wrapped around her so that she can entertain herself fiddling with his fingers as they lie in their cocoon of blankets, the darkness of their room broken by the dying embers in the little fireplace lending a dim, womb-like feel to the room that seems to discourage speaking in anything louder than a whisper.

Tipping his head a little more towards her, he noses into the hair at the crown of her head, his fingers curling briefly in hers.

"And that's how I wound up being sent to bed without supper for an entire fortnight," he finishes, swallowing a chuckle. "My aunt could never prove Gwen was the instigator, and I would never grass her up, so..."

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He'd braced himself, closing his eyes, for any reaction she might have in the face of his news, but Benedict certainly hadn't expected pure confusion.

Shock. Horror, perhaps. Disgust, even. Pity, if he was being hopeful. But confusion?

He opens his eyes slowly, having squeezed them shut after his pronouncement, and cranes his neck to look down at her. "...Yes. It's... I'm warriorborn." Doesn't she know what that means? "My sisters are not, and neither is Gwen, so they are not barred from entering whatever aspects of trade that they wish." But he is, obviously.

"I don't..."

Kate's voice trails off before she moves. She rolls over so she's more on his chest than not, able to brace herself enough to peer inti his dear face.

"I don't know what that means," she says, carefully. He is wary, upset and holding himself as if for a blow, but she doesn't even know if she should be moving for a slap or a reassuring kiss.

"Is. Is it related to the purring? And how, um. How you didn't like it?"

His senses have been muted in his time on the Surface, but even so, he's more than able to see her face in the darkness of their bedroom, and despite his worst fears, the only expression on Kate's face is something between confusion and sympathy.

He doesn't know what to do with that.

"Yes, I—" He breaks off to look away from her, lifting a hand to rub it over his face and through his hair.

God in Heaven, how is he supposed to explain this to someone who doesn't even know what he is? The warriorborn have been part of society since the time of the Builders, and he's never had to articulate any of this before, not to anyone. Certainly not to someone who's slowly grown to mean more to him than he knows how to properly say.

"It's...a genetic mutation," he begins, closing his eyes so he can keep going without letting his cowardice shut him up. "Relatively rare. It pops up randomly in families, there's no way to predict when it might manifest or in whom. I'm...faster, and stronger than normal, my senses are sharper, and...sometimes I purr, apparently." He doesn't mention his eyes or his teeth, because he can't figure out a way to say it without making himself sound like a monster. "It's been different since I've been here, but... That's probably something to do with the Surface, I don't know."

Cautiously, he looks back at her, his eyes searching her face to try and read her thoughts. "I'm sorry I didn't tell you," he adds, barely louder than a whisper.

Kate has never heard of a genetic mutation before, but she doesn't want to say so. She doesn't want to appear that uneducated and she doesn't want to distract him from something like this.

She can guess, though. A condition. Hereditary. He isn't telling her everything, for why would just that mean he and people like him were treated poorly?

And yet...

It isn't as if she is, or truly intends, on being openly honest either.

Kate lowers her eyes, chewing the inside of her lip for a moment.

"But you are still a man? Still one of God's creatures?"

All Benedict can do in the face of her question is nod slowly.

There's a murky grey area about whether or not the mutation that makes him who he is being created, some claim, by scientists seeking to create more efficient soldiers, but the monks at the Temple had always said that he was created by God in Heaven the same as anyone else, and he had clung to that assurance desperately, even then.

"You truly don't know about...us?"

"Truly. If there are any such as yourself about, no one is open about it."

To her, that is not the main point. The main point is Benedict, looking at her like that. As if he is still waiting for that blow, that rejection. That fatal pity.

"All right," Kate says, almost to herself. Then she pushes herself to to lean in and kiss him lightly. "But you're still a man, and you are still Benedict. That's all I need "

If there were any such as he, being open about it wouldn't be a problem, as it would be incredibly obvious what they were. Which means the warriorborn don't exist where Kate is from, which means he's been worrying himself sick over nothing.

When Kate pushes up to lean in and kiss him, Benedict has to close his eyes and hold his breath so he doesn't do something horribly pathetic like whimper or start to cry.

He's been lucky, in his life, to be mostly surrounded by people who don't treat him any differently for who he is. For what he is. But it's one thing when the difference is obvious, and something completely different when he's been able to pass for normal, for human, for the past four months and hasn't told anyone any differently. He would have understood if Kate had been angry with him, or if she no longer wanted him to warm her bed after lying to her like that, but instead she just accepts him the same way she always has.

"I—" have to get out of here before he has an embarrassing breakdown in front of her. "—think I'm going to get some tea, I'm parched. Do you want something?"

Extricating himself from her grasp is difficult, in that he doesn't want to leave the warmth and comfort of their bed and her embrace, but he does it nimbly and very quickly, and is standing at the edge of the bed in no time at all.

He's gone. He's going. Before she can say anything, share a confidence to repay his, be honest in the face of his honesty, there's somethin' I've been hiding too, he's up, he's untangling himself, he's standing there in her (their) dark room, at the foot their (her) bed so quickly she's left open-mouthed and lost.

"I-"

Come back. Don't run, why are you running away?

"Tea. Thank you. Tea would be fine. My, my usual?" The tea Miss Helen told her to take, to help her sleep.

Kate sits up, hugging her knees to her chest, eyes dark in the lack of light as she watches him.

"Don't be long though, yeah?"

"Yes, of course," he mutters before quickly darting out of the room and stopping somewhere on the landing, only realizing once he's out of the room that he's in bare feet and only wearing the long underwear bottoms.

The Inn is very cold.

However, he said he would make tea, and so down to the kitchen he goes, hissing and cursing under his breath at the cold, cold wood beneath his toes, calling himself a fool for not just gritting his teeth and staying in bed, no matter what embarrassing thing he might have done. Luckily, there are candles leftover from the feast that he can light to help him as he goes about filling the kettle. He's just about to grab it off the stand by the stove when he notices a rather large box sitting on the table; curiosity has him moving closer despite the frigid paving stones beneath his feet to discover what's written on the tag. He's heard people talking about these boxes; Miss Hoppity apparently came in such a box, but he's never seen one himself. Maybe someone in the Inn has been given a gift, through whatever magic it is that keeps them here.

Benedict, the tag reads.

His blood runs cold for a moment. What could possibly be in this box? Who would think to leave him something?

Forgetting entirely about the tea, he takes the box and the candle he lit and moves back towards the stairs, pushing his way through the door and closing it behind him with a press of his shoulder.

"I found a box," he says, looking at her still huddled in their bed. "It's for me."

He left in a state, and he returns in a state. Agitated, his normally calm demeanour dissolved into too-quick movements, and too-hasty a voice. She'd hoped that making tea would calm him down.

It's all right, after all. It's all right. He doesn't need to run from her.

"A box," Kate repeats, sitting up properly. Nothing living in it, he'd have mentioned sounds. Would have, she's sure, opened it downstairs before bringing it up here.

"Do you know what's in it?"

He holds it close to his middle for a moment, clutching at the box, almost, before he abruptly thrusts it out towards her.

"I don't know," he says, folding his lips between his teeth nervously. "You open it."

The box may be addressed to him, but he's not sure he wants to know what's in it. Kate, on the other hand, is far too practical to be rattled by such things, so she should logically be the one to open the box.

Kate takes the box, but beyond the mostly subconscious assessment of how to hold it so it doesn't drop, how to put it on the bed and shift around so she can easily open it, her attention is on Benedict. On all of this twisting uncertainty roiling under his skin, across his calm and destroying it. She wants... She wants, suddenly, to protect him. Protect him from whatever has him so upset.

"All right," she says, and opens it. No ceremony to draw out his nerves, turn it into more of a production than it already is.

What greats her is fabric.

Yellow, a bright, rich yellow that is almost harsh to her eyes after so long without seeing this colour outside of flowers. And flowing lengths of it, enough that it is easier to tip the box over and dump its content over her bed rather than just pull it out. Fabric, and a pair of large sandals.

He'd somehow managed to convince himself that him being here was some sort of strange fluke; that there wasn't someone who put him here, there wasn't someone watching him. After all, nobody had sent him any unexplained gifts, so logically that meant that nobody was observing him. He was just coincidentally here, and there was no ulterior motive for this strange captivity.

Cavendish would be far more likely to just kill him outright, wouldn't she? Probably leave his body somewhere for his family and friends to find? She would want to make a spectacle of his death, to send a message to those who care for him. She wouldn't trap him here, with nobody knowing where he might be.

Right?

He almost stops breathing when Kate opens the box, afraid of what she'll uncover. All kinds of morbid scenarios run through his head — it's a dead cat, a severed gauntlet arm, a silkweaver, someone's heart — but all that greets him when the box is opened is saffron cotton.

Long swathes of it.

"Oh," he breathes quietly, recognition lancing through him the moment she tips the box over and dumps everything out on the bed, a pair of sandals clattering out after all the fabric to land haphazardly on the pile. Abruptly, his hands ache, his palms singing with the kind of bubbling pain he'd almost forgotten since he crawled out of that fountain. He clutches them to his chest, biting his lip against a whimper, and nearly expects to see those thick, deep burns on his hands when he glances down to look at them; they're perfectly pristine, same as they have been for months, not a scratch on them.

The box and its contents are not forgotten, but she shoves them aside. They mean something, and he's mentioned things. Burns. A temple. He's mentioned those and he's reacting as if the contents of this box are inflicting the same damage. Maybe they are, in his mind.

She's grown familiar with wounds in the mind that are as deep as anything physical, that come back as raw as ever.

Kate crawls across the bed to her lover, folds her small, strong hands around his.

"Ben," she says, softly. "Hey."

"Oh," he breathes again, his voice trembling, and doesn't resist when she reaches for his hands to tug them away from his chest, holding his much larger palms between hers.

It's not just his voice that's trembling now, but he doesn't seem to realize, staring blankly down at the fabric on the bed with a glazed expression on his face that should make it clear he's not really seeing what's there.

"Kate, that's..." his voice trails off as he glances up at her, eyes wide and dark a face that's suddenly lost all its color. "It's my robes."

Kate doesn't hide her expression. Not the way her brows suddenly pull together in a frown, not the way her mouth flattens. It's dark, yes, except he has good eyesight so who knows what he sees. She doesn't hide it because the only way she has of hiding her emotions is to go blank, and that's what he doesn't need right now.

"Well," she says, hard and angry, "I'm sure God will forgive us for puttin' them all on the floor."

She lets go of Benedict and shoves everything back in the box, lets the box fall onto the wooden ground. She's angry because how dare they. They've killed, yes, been cruel with gifts, but they're messing with Benedict now.

Fucking with him, she corrects in a voice that sounds similar to Miss Jo.

She really hates their captors.

She's angry. He's had girls angry at him before, usually his cousin, but it feels different this time, and if Benedict were less shaken by the dubious gift he's been given, he might do something like shrink away from her. The last thing he wants is Kate to be angry with him.

She pulls away from him and moves to shove everything on to the floor, and Benedict has to fight against the urge to reach out and stop her, deeply-ingrained habits not wanting to let him get his robes dirty like that. He'd been taught to treat his things with respect in the Temple, because he'd been expected to have a hand in the cultivating of the cotton and the weaving of the fabric and the dyeing of it in the end. To just push it all to the ground makes him want to duck and gather it all up in his arms quickly, to shake off whatever dirt might have accumulated and to lay them out neatly somewhere where they won't get trodden on.

But Kate pushed the box off the other side of the bed, and rescuing it would mean traveling around the bottom to the other side, and he doesn't want to do that. So he stands still, flexing his hands carefully like they still pain him, his head ducked down low enough that his hair shadows his face.

Is this a sign? Is the habble going to be burned down the same way the Temple was?

His heart thunders jackrabbit-fast in his throat, choking him, and it's all he can do to continue to breathe steadily.

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closed; just one look at you, my heart grows tipsy in me

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