Title: Overfire
Rating: PG-13
Author’s note: The beautiful song ‘Overfire’ belongs to THC. This fic is not directly associated with my episodes, but it could be. ;)
Acknowledgements: My lovely collaborators in our new project - Lauren and Mae.
I’ll take you up above the ground
Over filth, over fire
Newly emerged from damp rich earth
Every inch a new sensation
Stretches me out of my head
Out of my head, into his
To taste and smell myself…
Ryder.
Sometimes when we make love, he clasps his fingers around my left wrist so tightly that in the morning I find bruise marks there, circling my skin like a bracelet, black and blue.
But I don’t care. I never cared much about pain, not when he’s one causing it. It’s his mark, and he brands me - I belong to him. In my own twisted way, I love it.
I love waking up before him in the mornings, when the early sunlight seeps through the blinds and falls on the two of us in bed together, settling over our still forms like a fine mist. That’s when I’ll find him resting his forehead on my shoulder, lightly, as though he couldn’t really allow himself to be leaning on someone, anyone. Not even when he’s sleeping.
I love how he sometimes stares at me when he thinks I’m not looking, his brows furrowed in slow contemplation. He thinks I don’t notice the small smile that creep into his grey-blue eyes, but I do. I know when he is secretly drinking me in with fixed desire, tangible to nobody else. It’s my little secret. Only with me - his guards slip and for a moment he is no longer so nasty, so cold, so wary of the world.
In me, he is confused; in me, he is human.
Life is so strange sometimes. Like there isn’t enough weirdness in the world already that we have to be tossed, headfirst, into this crazy whirlpool of life to help make up the quota. Ryder and me. Me and Ryder. What were the gods thinking at the time? Let’s try to find the two most unlikely people in the vicinity of New Rawley, throw them together, and see what happens?
When did all this start? I don’t know. How did I let it start in the first place? I don’t know either. A subtle seduction lacing the air, neither of us understanding any of it until everything began skidding out of control. All I know for certain is that it was a kiss, an accidental kiss that finally changed everything. Days, months and years spun away from our astonished awareness, casting ghostly glimmers of thought upon memories that, we thought at the time, best forgotten. Our lives, of course, had since splintered into fragments and after a tumultuous length of time, painfully managed to reshape itself into something that resembles normal but isn’t, not really.
Then again, how could we ever be normal? Him and I, we were never supposed to happen.
Together, we’re more vulnerable than we ever were, being apart.
I guess it was lucky then that we are who we are. Two single entities melded into one. Bound by those inexplicable ties that we share, in our own strange little way. What other explanation can be given for us? Our high school years - those awkward, fumbling years watching other people ride on their adolescent delusions that we never really had - are long behind us, yet we remain.
Together, we’re complete.
Tonight, I lie awake in bed and stare up at the ceiling, feeling his arm thrown possessively around my waist and our warm, naked bodies entwined. His other hand is curled into a loose fist, and I close my hand over his, my fingers brushing lightly against his collarbone.
I’ll take you up above ground
Over filth, over fire
Beyond everyday more than life
Over filth, over fire
Sometimes the faint light catches his hair, weaves shimmering gold and silver across those soft, fair strands; and I can’t help but run my fingers through it, gently. In the mornings his hair will stick up all over the place like it always does, making him look incredibly endearing, like the boy that he never really was.
“ Stop that.” He mumbles sleepily. He doesn’t like people touching his hair, me included. So I stop.
But then he opens his eyes, lids heavy with sleep, and smiles languidly - almost apologetically - at me. It’s always as though he suddenly remembers, through the thick fog of sleep, that it is me he’s speaking to. I am different; I’m not on the receiving end of his animosity to the rest of this sorry world.
Well, any more.
He flexes his fingers so that they lace through mine, and words fall from his lips, hanging on a murmur.
“ I love you.”
He always looks so surprised when he says those three words, like he couldn’t believe that they’d come out of his mouth. Every time, there’s that element of shock settling in his brows, and he would look at me as though I would give him answers, an explanation as to why, he of all people, could love someone. Love me.
It’s a strange concept to him, of course. Before me, nothing really penetrated that cold veneer of his, that seething smirk and careless flick of a cigarette, watching white ash flake away from the glowing red tip of his only addiction. No fear, no passion. Nothing ever held, nothing ever lost.
I smile consolingly and kiss him lightly on the forehead. It’s my way of reminding him why exactly he said those words. Day after day, that’s how we do things. He asks the questions with a gleam of doubt in his eye, and I answer by kissing those doubts away, my breath warm against his warmer skin.
Before all this, I had always thought of him as some sort of reptile held in captivity, callous and calculating behind thick glass panes; his confines, his transparent, cold walls that isolate him from all the world. They saw Ryder - saw the man with a caustic curl of the lip that he called a smile - but they could never reach him.
But I have broken through those walls. I touch them, and they fall away.
More flesh wrapped around me
More weight on my limbs
More teeth, more hands, more heat, more breath
More teeth, more hands, more heat, more breath down my throat
He closes his eyes as my lips brush against his forehead, such an innocent gesture that somehow always manages to be the most intimate moment that we ever share together.
When he holds me, I feel like I have meandered into a dream; when he makes love to me, I drown. But in this instant, our roles reverse and it’s him, for once, who lets go completely. All his painstakingly constructed armour melts away in an instant, and he is weak, defenceless, here in my arms.
That’s when I know just how much I mean to him.
Now is the fleeting moment when he yields all of himself to me, an unconditional surrendering of power. And to be perfectly honest, it terrifies me in its all-consuming tenderness. Right now, he is so fragile that I fear I might break him with a kiss.
Ryder and fragility, what a contradiction of terms.
He feels something going through me, the slightest tremor, the aftershock from a perfect moment that balances on the razor-sharp dividing line between adoration and obsession. His eyes fly open, he pulls back slightly, and gazes at me with just a trace of concern tinting his eyes a deeper shade of blue. His hand spreads out into a comforting shape on the back of my waist, and our roles reverse yet again, the protector becoming the protected.
“ I love you.” I whisper back, trailing a finger across his cheekbone. He is so beautiful. Too beautiful for this world. Too beautiful for anyone to understand him, really.
Some may say it’s weird that I do.
Ryder Forrest, everybody’s nightmare, nobody’s friend. My lover, my saviour, my redemption from this life that sometimes blinds me with its cruel radiance.
He smiles. Slowly, dreamily, and his eyes flutter closed. His body shifts slightly against mine, and he reaches up to kiss me.
I’ll take you up above ground
Over filth, over fire
Out of my head into yours
To taste and smell myself
I win. Despite the countless tribulations that stood in our way, his resistance, my anguish, our heartbreaking interludes that defined us through months, even years of everlasting pain, I win in the end.
He thought he never loved. He denied himself that pleasure and agony, because Ryder Forrest did not love. He was never to love somebody. Especially not somebody who, incidentally, turned out to be me.
I taught him otherwise.
The past is fading before our eyes, and there are no regrets. Flipping past the pages in our minds, filled with Technicolor teenage angst set in a distant place called Rawley, we still find each other, here, now. He is in my arms, his lips slowly scorching their velvet imprints upon mine.
It’s all the affirmation I ever needed.
Over filth, over fire...
The end
[ f e e d b a c k ]