Excerpt: Eye for an Eye
Silco and Vi have a chat in Stillwater.
From 'heron blue,' an AU where Vi and Jinx reconnect under different terms. Slow, rocky relationship rebuilding, found family messiness, and political schemings.
Full story on AO3
She sees fire. She sees red. Red on his clothes, on his hands; in his mangled, inhuman iris; on the silvered edge of his poisoned tongue.
"Vander's prodigy." She hasn't heard the sickly gravel of that voice in six years. It ripples beneath her skin, and sits there. Etches the drawling cadence of every vowel into her bones. "I regret that we've yet had the ability to speak."
A tilt of his head. Through the bars, doused in shadow, his mismatched stare sharpens. "I'd have made the journey sooner," he rumbles on, "but, you see—the time would be a waste, for a dead girl." His good eye narrows, a scathing flash of blue radium. "And yet."
Vi breathes in quick, harsh. She swallows it down.
He looks like a creature the Pilt chewed off and spit back out: a sinewed blot of shadow, bones and flesh, wrapped in leather and silk-weaved linen. There's an animal under his skin—a tidewater predator watching from the shallows, silent and still. Waiting.
She scuffs the sweat from her temple. Feigns indifference. "Who the hell are you?"
His brow perks. "Don't you remember?" His hands shift behind his back, held laxly there, as though folded around a knife. "Surely the walls haven't rotted your head that easily."
"I remember," Vi snarls, baring her teeth. "Like hell I'd forget." And she'd tried. Kindreds above and below, she'd tried to wipe her mind of that night, a lifetime over. Spite coils under her tongue. "But, y'know—don't really care about the name of some rat in the street. Might have to remind me, there."
She can't tell under the dim light whether the crook of his mouth is a sneer or a smile. It passes too quickly for her to care.
"Well. You've Vander's tongue as much as his damned fists, don't you?"
Her nails carve into her palms, hard enough to draw blood. She paces across the back of the cell, glaring.
Don't you dare say his name. Don't you dare—
Silco stands still as stone, two steps from the red line that chips over the cement floor. Silver glints in his hand. He's slipped a gilded cigarette case from the breast pocket of his coat. His thin, willowed fingers pluck one roll out, snap the case shut, and flick open the hinge of its lighter. The crackling hush of the drag he takes rattles over the stones: fills the air with a dry, ambered spice.
It's not like Vander's pipe: cheap, heady, citrus and cinnamon. It reeks of expense. It's the same peppery smoke that sits on his clothes, bittersweet and earthen, laced with juniper berry and cedar. It hisses out from his lungs, a blue thread unspooled, clouding about him in a thin haze. His dead eye leers through it.
"Come here, girl," he says, and takes a step forward. Under the ripple of the light, he's taller than she took him for; taller than she remembers, cowered on those rickety grates behind a wall of other bodies. His right eye—a frigid, dirtied blue, like the underside of a glacier—cuts to her tattered boots, and climbs. "Let me look at you."
The words gut into her, vilely. She wheels on him. Her fist slams into the bars, hard enough to make an ugly, chorusing echo through the steel. "Bastard."
"Charmed."
He stands on that thin red line, puffing away on his cigarette, and stares at her, as though trying to make sense of a riddle in a paper, or picking through the nuances of an artist's strokes. Her fingers snare hard on the bars, hard enough to stain her bloodied knuckles white. She glares right back at him. Pristine coat, lithe hands; scratched up, grayed out face; swept-back hair, flecked with silver; steel-tipped boots. There's a knife handle under his belt. A knife handle nearly in arm's reach.
"You couldn't have been more than fourteen, then," he mutters. The words carry a taint of wonder, in their remembrance. It plunges, swiftly, to distaste. "Tearing through my men, like a tank through the trenches." He scoffs. Now, he is sneering: the scarred line of his lip baring crooked teeth, his cigarette pinched between his fingers. "What good are you, left to waste away under these Piltie scum?"
"I didn't ask to be here—"
"Oh, no. You asked for revolution." His eyes spear into hers, an unwavering burn. "You were denied."
Blood ticks between her fingers, scalding on the cell bars. Those words itch into her; find the festering resentment she's left abandoned, over months and years shackled within these walls, and gnaw at it.
"You sold Vander out," she says, heat broiling just beneath the words. "You stabbed him. I saw it. You killed him—"
"Vander sold himself out, girl," and he is walking, with the slow, prowling lope of a wolf; the fluid circling of a shark in the deep. "Laid his throat under the enforcers' boots, like a mutt on a leash. I paid my dues—nine years of it—while he sat back and cowered." He strides over the red line, and stops, inches from her battered fists. "He owed me a debt," he says, plainly. His cigarette skims the grayed blot of dead flesh that stretches over his cheek. "Eye for an eye; tooth for a tooth."
Her hands shake. She sees the flames, eating up the cannery with the roar of a living thing. Hears the bellows of their arguing, split apart in fritzing static and neon-blue. "What did you do with my sister?"
He ticks the ash from his cigarette. It falls to a swirl of embers at his feet. "You, however," Silco prattles on, blithely ignoring her. His fingers wave through the air, with the nonchalance of a royal: a razor-edged flit of smoke and cinder. "Now—what I wouldn't have given to see you storm this wretched city, yourself. You still could, if you only had the gall." His heels sweep over the concrete: th-thump, th-thumping: fall still at one end of the cell. His eyes flit curiously across its hinges. "These bars, girl—tell me: have they strengthened you? Or leashed you, as well?"
She doesn't have time for this. You talk too much.
"What did you do with my sister—?"
"Jinx?"
A cold pit plunges through her stomach, and twists.
Because you're a jinx! Mylo was right!
"She's alive," he says slowly, the rasp of his low, scratched-out throat worlds away. The look on his face is unreadable: deceptively blank: scathing. "Safe," he adds, with a lilt of his head. "Though—as I'd been led to believe—you're good as dead, to her."
Vi pulls in a tight, heavy breath. "Her name is Powder."
"Her name is her own. She chose it." The dagger of his teal eye thins: hunts for something under her shaking bones, something she can't see. "From what I gather," he mulls, "it was your parting gift."
Slices in.
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Lazy (Oneshot)
Needed something short, sweet, and cute as we maneuver into crunch-time weeks at work 👌
Warnings: Suggestive, drabble, pre-established relationship, fluff, cuddles, non-explicit nudity, let's just have some nice-times, dammit
Though it's truly loathsome to admit it, Silco is far from youth, and it's moreso growing-exhaustion that makes his arms shake, rather than pleasure.
Still, with the unexpected added years on his lifespan, the spite and drive has only grown, and as he watches your face twist and grow slack with pure pleasure beneath him, he manages to keep himself hoisted above you. If only to have the satisfaction of watching your features reach euphoria, before crumbling into the blissful exhaustion he-himself feels.
Then, and only then, does he allow the arms that keep him above you and upright, to lower. Elbows resting on the bed as he tips his chin down, catching his breath while limp, wild strands of hair brush against your chin.
Silco hums when he feels trembling fingers reach up to catch them. "You seem weak, darling."
"And you... seem tired." Your panting rebuttal is cut by an indeed-weak meal escaping your dry lips when such snark is replied with a further-dip of his head, and a nip at your collarbone. It fades into a purring hum as the teeth release their pinching-of skin, thin lips roaming over the new purplish-mark left behind as Silco lowers himself fully onto you. "But... y-you still got it. Even if you are getting a bit old, Sil."
Green-and-red flick up to you, unimpressed, but perhaps age has changed him. For it only takes a single look at the softened edges of your face, indeed in-bliss and still showing evidence of his actions, that lead him to once more press lips once more to your skin.
Again.
And again.
Again, and though you are not sighing with the toe-curling pleasure he has kept you on for some time now, it's a comforting sound that has Silco growing equally accustomed to the comfort of such a moment. A moment where little else - nothing, really - matters outside of the peace between him and you, and the warming comfort of your skin against his.
You share the sentiment. But still laugh when the feel of lips tracing and trailing everywhere he could reach stops, and a new, heavier pressure rests along your chest instead. "Tired and lazy? Wow, Jinx should start calling you Pops instead of Dad..."
Such a jab earns nothing but a faint huff of warm air against your skin. It grows warmer as the space grows slimmer, and there's a shared deep inhale when Silco rests his chin between your breasts, and you sigh at the feeling. It's quiet satisfaction to feel your chest rising beneath his touch, a faint, rhythmic thump below that already has his remaining eye faltering.
Again, he hates admitting it.
But Silco is not as young anymore, no longer a man of youth with boundless energy... and there are far worse sounds to slip into a doze to, than the sound of a lover's heartbeat.
With that, ignoring your soft snort as you raise your head to watch the sight, Silco turns until his ear rests in the valley between, arms smoothing down the rumpled sheets beneath your body to curl under, and around your waist.
Effectively keeping your (largely already made-useless) form against him, with his head truly being the weight to trap you as he rests against your chest. Trapped by his arms, and from the way his hair tickles along your neck as he shifts to get comfortable, you're to be trapped for a long-while to come.
"Lazy," You murmur, hand still carting through limp and tangled hairs on his head, your own tipping back onto the pillow with eyes fluttering shut at the feel of lips, pressing faintly against the soft-mound of your tit. "What a lazy, lazy old man."
"You call it lazy, and yet I still make you sigh in pleasure, at the simplest of things," Silco murmurs with no small-amount of smugness in his quiet tone. Knuckles strum your ribs as the sound of your denying eye-roll could be heard from miles away, but Silco pays it little mind.
The sound of your heartbeat is a far louder sound beneath his ear, and one he focuses the entire scope of his attention on, as he begins to drift into the comfort of quiet, and yes, lazy bliss.
-
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