magic_fratboy | Never an honest word... (rp for dealing

He was learning, very quickly, to find some means of drawing when the darkness descended.

Tonight, thankfully, he was at home with oils and canvas, painting freehand with no charcoal or pencil to guide him. Through the haze over his vision, a vivid storm of reds, blacks, and oranges was coming to life. Piece by piece, he was assembling fragments of a larger picture he couldn't describe or even quite make out, but it was right there at the edges of his awareness.

Without knowing what was to come, he could already tell there was a storm brewing.

When the fog lifted and he could clearly see the monstrosity on the canvas, he worked on adding his own touches in hopes that he could do something with the piece. Sell it, give it away, excise the cancer he'd just put down in oils and hope it didn't come to pass. He rarely understood his visions, and this was no exception.

This vision, this malestrom of fire and brimstone...he didn't want to understand it.

He was just thinking of altering the picture, knowing he never would, when her voice reached him. As he toyed with tubes of green and gray to soften the edges of the smoke in the painting, he heard shouting in the other room and frowned. Glancing up, he stared at the image...

...the dark, slender shadow at the center of a firestorm that seemed to coalesce into two hellish points of red...

Shrugging it off, he dropped the paint and headed for the guest room/home office. "Selene? Baby, everything okay?"

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In a gesture that was purely Tommy, he leaned forward, resting his elbows on the edge of the sink as he let her wash the paint from his hands, and in another gesture that was unfamiliar, but not malicious, he tipped his head to rest it against her arm as she did.

"You are wrong. Catherine...oh, he would want to kill her a great deal more if she were not a woman." he mused. "And if she were not rooted so deeply in your mind..."

He trailed off, lifting his head from her arm and watching as she gently cleaned his hands, wiping the suds away from his wedding band. It was a long moment before he answered.

"He did not choose you. He had no choice. Avatars love easily, if he did not love you it would be another. You are a killer, Selene. You are a monster...yet once you were human, and in six hundred years you have made many choices. The one you made, the one that made you his, was the choice to keep your human heart. Dead things cannot smile, evil things cannot love. You do this and more, not because it is your nature as it is with humans. You do this because you choose to. Everything you feel, you have fought for, and that is why he is here. He loves you for many reasons...but the choice? It was never his. It was yours the first time you resisted the call of Darkness."

There was a muted chuckle as she shook her head. "Catherine is no threat to me. He does not see that. What Tristan has done...." Long before he decided to be a trickster and removed that word from her head, was far, far worse. Did he see that? Did he know? "I can handle them." Until he said that....

"Rooted in my mind?" Between her dark eyes her brows pinched tightly together. Was that why she felt like she and Catherine were such great friends? Had she made her feel like that?

With a soft towel in her hands she took her time drying his. "I....see." Setting the cloth aside she leaned against the counter.

He ignored her remark about Catherine, and made no comment on the name she had offered up, only filed it away for later.

Instead, he watched her with those dispassionate red eyes, curious and disconnected at the same time.

"You do not. And it is better that you do not." he replied. "You only think you face great wars every day, that you dance with devils and yearn to fly with angels...this war we fight transcends good and evil. We are where both began, we are beyond it. Good and evil do not exist without my children and the shadows they hunt. In this game, you are all players...we are the field you play on."

He paused, sighing as he moved to kiss the top of her head, another gesture that was Tommy's, yet not at the same time. "We pray you never truly get to see."

When his lips brushed her hair she let him but she did not linger. She ducked her head away from the touch, closing her eyes she pinched the bridge of her nose.

"Then fight your war and I will fight mine." She muttered, sounding a little more hurt then she wanted. Even if it was pointless to do so, Selene knew nothing else.

At least his anger had settled and they were speaking about something else. She was not afraid to truly see what he spoke of. If he wanted to keep it from her fine. Lifting her head she opened her eyes and just looked at him. Then with a sigh she walked out of the kitchen.

He laughed, then, and it wasn't a pleasant sound.

"You really are a fool if you think that is possible." he bit off, following her out of the kitchen. "Another war is going on, this one for your soul. Catherine, Tristan, your coven...even your own mother. You have taken great strides in accepting our love, but you have a long way to go."

Catching her arm, he spun her to face him, pulling her flush against his body. The part of him that was still Tommy Karras warmed, thrilling at the feel of her as he always did. It colored his expression as he sneered down at her.

"You are so ready to fight the world alone, to believe you are unworthy...you, who could destroy the entire human race simply by dying. You may not want to be royalty, you may want to be left to your battles, Selene, but you must realize that any who lay hands on you lay hands on your husband as well. Consider that when you are struck, when you are manipulated...and if you do not want to see what we are capable of, you will strike down your enemies with the same fury you will reserve for those who would harm your husband."

She felt a rush of heat as her body was pulled in against his. It was uncontrollable. Angry or not she could not stop the instant reaction she had to being so close to him. Color pooled in her eyes and cheeks as her lips parted to breath out headily against his skin.

"No one has killed me yet." Selene snapped in an almost snotty tone. "It is not so simple. You make it sound so easy." She growled at him her dark eyes beginning to churn with her frustration. "Striking them down would mean fighting a fight I have no hope of winning. I use them, they use me. It is just the way things are."

And she had no idea how to break that cycle. Selene could physically kill each and every one of them. With ease. What she could not defend herself against was the mental intrusion. Hostility against any of them could mean she was turned into a lap dog for her enemies.

"Choose your words carefully." he shot back peevishly, hands moving to cradle her head with Tommy's gentle touch and an alien anger burning in hellish red eyes. "For hope is the one thing you have for always. Mark my words, if they are not shown the price of trifling with my children...I will show them. They play power games with you, but that stops now. Now, Selene, you will play the games because you have the power. You use them, they use you? Use someone else for a change. Use your husband."

Never an honest word... (rp for dealing_death)

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