Deals and Drinks and Slightly Depraved Desires (Closed RP for Richard and Camilla)

[chameleonfaust.livejournal.com]

((Backdated to 7/17ish.))



Demon deals were, in the crudest of terms, a shit idea. Literature was strewn with examples; the mortal very rarely got the good end of the stick. And yet...

When the jovial guy with yellow eyes had offered Richard anything, he hadn't hesitated. One word, spoken with a fevered reverence, as if he was summoning some ancient goddess to rise from the incense and dust of her alter and walk among them. One word and it was done. The price was some favor to be done later, but Richard barely heard the terms. He walked out of the Great Hall - he had simply come down for a cup of coffee and maybe some breakfast, never knowing that he'd chosen a seat next to destiny in the form of a very average man - with a spring in his step and a sense of very clear purpose. This was his right. He would have what he wanted. Finally.

The day was spent in a walk around the grounds. Richard saw the world in a new light. He would have her. Finally, she would be his. Not Henry's. Not Charles'. He deserved this every bit as much as anyone else. After everything, she would see. She would realize.

Camilla would come to him. The demon had promised her to him. The terms were not important, the wording was a detail he didn't need to bother with. He'd said 'Camilla' and the demon had smiled - something cold and chilling that made him think of worms on a corpse or the winter's breeze across dead grass - and nodded and that was enough.

Finally making his way back to his room, Richard sat in the chair by the fire with a glass of scotch and a cigarette. Waiting.

Comments

[c-macaulay.livejournal.com]

More than once in the past, there had been moments when Camilla almost acceded to what she knew Richard wanted. They had always ended inconclusively, Camilla ever elusive; but there was always a moment of hesitation, a moment when it seemed as though she might acquiesce, willful and susceptible to whim. It had taken the demon's intervention to push her past that point tonight, tilting the scales finally in Richard's favor. And the demon's influence might be perceptible in the degree to which Camilla responded. She had never wanted Richard this way before. Before, she might have allowed him to kiss her because it was convenient, or because she was bored, or because she enjoyed the attention, or because he was after all rather good at kissing. Tonight, she had felt somehow drawn to him. To that extent she was swayed by a force not her own.

Now that they had come this far, though, she needed no prompting. Had things gone differently in the past -- had she gone home with Richard the night Bunny's murder was planned, for example -- she would have enjoyed it fully as much as she enjoyed their coupling now; and she would have participated as enthusiastically as she did now. She was given over to sensation. The experience was an essentially selfish one. She basked in his gaze. He told her she was perfect, a thing she had heard before; his eyes were a heat that could consume her, a focus also not unfamiliar. Charles looked at her just the same way, wanting her to melt. There was nothing here to frighten her or to hint for one second that anything was amiss.

So she welcomed him unstintingly, unsuspectingly, and with a complete disregard for anything but her own pleasure. She questioned nothing. She accepted everything. She wanted this, these long languorous kisses, this curious mingling of gentleness and force, the delicious solid heat of him inside her.

And in the end, maybe the demon did give him one uncompromised triumph after all: when Camilla at last was utterly undone, given over to that last shudder of ecstasy, even though she had been driven beyond thought let alone tact, it was not for Henry or her twin that she called out.

[chameleonfaust.livejournal.com]

His name. Richard accepted that cry as his due, pushing onward with a shout of her name as he collapsed, spent and undone. The last shivers of ecstasy made him groan and he rolled off of Camilla, eyes tightly shut, basking in the afterglow.

One arm reached out to gently pull Camilla towards him, playing with the golden strands of her hair. He pressed a light kiss to her temple. "You are so gorgeous," he murmured, breathing still ragged from the exertion.

And she was. Perfectly formed, exquisitely beautiful, like art come to life. Now, of course, completely his. He'd claimed her; the faintly darkening marks on her skin proved it. His other arm lay across her belly, fingers stroking the skin just where her hips flared out. Over the years, Richard knew he'd come to know every inch of Camilla's body. Every dip and curve would be like second nature. Now, though, it was still all fresh and new.

Burying his face in her neck, he trailed kisses down the slope to her shoulder, breathing in her fresh, womanly scent. His and her sweat mingled, the smell of their sex still in the air, all signs of their joining; not just physically, but on some deeper level. Forever. Never die, as Julian used to tell them. Richard understood what the old man had meant, now. Not the body, but the spirit; not this flesh and blood, but love. Their love, his and Camilla's, was eternal.

She was a solid, comforting weight in his arms. Like a star come to nest in his bed, like an angel touching the earth. At once distant and now known. His own, Camilla.

It was perfect.

Just like he'd known it would be.

[c-macaulay.livejournal.com]

Every knot in her body unstrung, Camilla stretched out beside Richard, passively allowing him to pull her closer. "Mmm." She wouldn't argue with his assertion of her beauty. It took no egotism to suppose his observation truthful. With a sort of diffuse affection, she ran idle fingers through his hair. He smelled nice: the scent of their bodies mingling, and some cologne or aftershave or something he must have worn, not at all like the linden water Charles used, not strong at all, but something that made Camilla think of a clear running stream, something clean and fresh and vibrant. It struck an incongruous bright note against the musk of their bodies' heat and the smoke of the fire still burning. Dimly curious, she brought her face close to his neck to catch what scent it might be, and left a soft impulsive kiss there.

She was sated now, at least for the moment. That odd drive she'd felt earlier had quieted. Still, she wanted something, she wasn't sure what. "Do you think I could have a cigarette?" She couldn't remember whether he smoked now or not. "There's a pack in the pocket of my robe. Wherever that ended up." The absence of the robe apparently presented no concern to her.

She waited for him to find her a cigarette and light it for her. "You know, it's really getting late," she observed as she waited. "Would you mind terribly if I stayed the night?" She didn't want to summon Silas to walk her back to Gryffindor safely, and really she didn't feel much like moving. She hadn't felt this relaxed in days.

[chameleonfaust.livejournal.com]

Camilla fit, so beautifully, next to him. It was like magic, something purer and more true that the base flicking of wands and broken Latin they taught at the school. Her kiss left Richard with a soft, silly grin.

"Of course, my dear." He would not, of course, under any circumstances, give her the pack from her robes. They were bound to be Luck Strikes, and Richard wanted no reminder of him in their bed. Instead he flailed out an arm and grabbed his pack from the nightstand, along with a lighter. Handing her a cigarette, he lit it carefully, before settling back down beside her.

<"My bed is yours,"> he murmured, placing a kiss to Camilla's shoulder. How could she not know that, now? What was his was now hers, all of him, all of what he was and would be. As he lay beside her, their bodies tangled together, Richard let his thoughts drift to weddings and houses and the family they would make. The future they had together.

"I've been thinking about buying a house by a lake," he told her, fingers idly playing with her hair. "Something with a huge kitchen and lots of trees. And a library. Not too far from the university, of course, but a little retreat." For them. For their children. "So I could write. Maybe get a dog," a grin, happy and completely at ease, broke across Richard's face. "Do you like dogs, Camilla?"

[c-macaulay.livejournal.com]

She took the cigarette and inhaled one blissful puff before it hit her: Richard didn't smoke back in college, but now that he did, he smoked menthols. They were not what Camilla would have preferred. "I quit smoking for a while, did you know? For Nana when she was so sick. Only I started back up again when I'd been at Hogwarts a while. Silly of me." She handed the cigarette back to Richard, still lit, as though to share it with him. Actually she didn't want it any more. (Menthols, ick.) "I ought to quit again. Soon," that last a hedge against the next time he would see her blithely sucking down smoke from a Lucky Strike. The light residue of ash on her fingertips smudged his shoulder as she settled against him.

He was talking, quietly, and playing with her hair, which felt nice, whispered touches to her scalp. She smiled a little and half-listened. A university, not here, right, he was teaching somewhere before he came here, she remembered she'd sent him a congratulatory card, getting a tenure-track job in academia was quite a coup. "A sizeable kitchen is always nice. God, the one Charles and I had was so tiny. Oh, I do like dogs, yes ... do you remember the greyhound we had? Frost. Charles brought her back from that racetrack. She wasn't with us very long, the poor thing. I do miss her now and again."

[chameleonfaust.livejournal.com]

Of course, she would have to quit. For the pregnancies. Which wouldn't be immediately - they would have a few years together, just the two of them. Perhaps travel. Richard took the cigarette and pulled in an absent drag before placing it in the ashtray on the nightstand. But it was so like Camilla to be thinking ahead, already.

"You should have a big kitchen," he told her with a smile. "With lots of room to work. And windows; a whole wall of windows. So you can see the sun." He pressed a kiss to her forehead. "And a dog." This was said with a little laugh. "What kind would you like?"

No need to even wait until they went back home to get her one, really. Perhaps as a present; Richard was sure he could swing that. There had to be someplace to purchase dogs around here. And it'd be a little promise for Camilla, just a hint of all the ways Richard would spend his life, fulfilling her every desire.

[c-macaulay.livejournal.com]

Hazily Camilla got the sense that Richard was now talking about some kind of shared habitation. The group had contemplated such a thing many times before. The plan once upon a time had been for all of them to live in Francis's country house after graduation. Then there had been the plan to run off to Uruguay, where, according to Camilla, they would have a little house with chickens, and sleep in hammocks. And very recently, she and Henry had discussed buying a vineyard or farm or villa somewhere in the Mediterranean, where their friends would share their sunsoaked days.

"I'm sure Francis would love the kind of kitchen you're describing," she said drowsily. "I can't say I've ever given thought to which sorts of dogs are preferable to which other sorts. A woman I know here at Hogwarts has a pet meerkat. She spends so much time on it. I wouldn't like to spend so much time. The nice thing about Frost was that really she took care of herself." None of these assertions carried any real force or conviction. Camilla spoke lazily, no real urgency to it. She was so relaxed. She'd been tense beyond bearing for days. In a way she felt grateful to Richard for doing what he'd done. He'd relieved her tension. Maybe without thinking, he'd known what she needed. He really was quite a good friend after all, wasn't he? Sighing with contentment, she snuggled against him.

"I hope you're not going back to your university so soon, though. We'd all be quite sad to lose you."

[chameleonfaust.livejournal.com]

Mmmm... Richard was feeling now contentedly sleepy; everything he'd ever wanted had just been handed to him, and now he just wanted to bask in it. "Francis has good taste," he chuckled, fingers still stroking through Camilla's hair as he let his eyes fall shut.

A grown dog, then, not a puppy. He could do that. "No, my dear," he cracked one eye to look over at her fondly. "I think I rather like it here, for now. And think of all the things I'll have to tell my students when I get back. Did you know there's an actual puck here? I met him in the common room the other night. Fascinating creature."

Richard's eyes had closed again, and he bit back a yawn. "No, I'm not going anywhere. Not for a while." His voice was slurred with sleep and he pulled Camilla closer to himself, reveling in the warmth of her body next to his.

[c-macaulay.livejournal.com]

"Mmm. I don't think they'll let you tell your students about wizarding things. It's standard to obliviate 'Muggles' who see things they shouldn't," Camilla countered just as sleepily. "Besides, I don't think they'd believe you. Not even about the puck -- who's very nice, yes, I had him over to dinner once." Hogwarts, such a strange place. "No, it's better to think of Hogwarts as ... secret. Something only a few people are allowed ever to see." She knew she wasn't communicating very clearly, but it didn't seem important. Surely he understood what she meant.

Where the room had felt stiflingly hot before, now it seemed to Camilla suffused with sweet lulling warmth, not overpowering; and staying close to Richard still seemed to help her breathe, enhanced by that breezy blue scent of his. In the wake of Henry's disappearance, Camilla's sleep had been irregular and fitful. Now, when the conversation faded, she lapsed easily into a light sleep at Richard's side. Maybe she'd only missed having someone next to her.

She only woke once in the night. Half-awake, forgetting where she was and who was here with her, she reached for the man sleeping beside her, murmuring drowsy endearments, one or two of which were in Greek and would only have been heard from her before by Henry. At some point in the ensuing proceedings she did register that she was with Richard, and that was all right, too, she supposed. He was her friend. She could let him take care of her. And he did, well enough that she slept again far into the morning.

[chameleonfaust.livejournal.com]

The night was bliss, pure and simple. The single greatest night of Richard's miserable existence. All that he was had lead up to this moment; everything he was going to be had started here. She was insatiable and tender and perfect in every sense of the word, his queen. His goddess. His divine Camilla.

When he finally awoke, it was from a dream into a day brimming with promise. For once, the dream was outweighed by reality. There was a golden head resting on his shoulder, beautiful silken skin beneath his fingers, and the scent of her filling every sense. It was, in short, heaven, such as poets and philosophers could not dare to dream.

Watching her sleep, Richard didn't dare stir, didn't even breathe for fear of wakening her. He wanted this moment - this bliss - to go on forever. And he had the singular joy of knowing that it would. There would be countless more mornings like this, following countless nights like the one before. This was Richard's nirvana. His lifelong pursuit of happiness had just come to glorious fruition.

[c-macaulay.livejournal.com]

The movement of the sun awakened Camilla at last, a pure molten bar of sunlight falling across her face. Blinking, she raised a hand palm-out in sleepy protest, shielding her eyes. "Morning?" Half-greeting, half-question. God only knew what time it was. She wasn't in her own bed, the light didn't fall this way across her room and every night they drew the shades so Henry wouldn't have to contend with sunlight -- that was before Henry left -- god, Henry was gone, she had to remember that all over again every morning; and she reached out her other hand to find beside her someone else entirely. Not Charles.

"Hi, you," she said, sleepily, sweetly -- the same sweetness Francis would have recognised as so characteristic of Camilla's twin. "Did I miss anything?"

[chameleonfaust.livejournal.com]

Like a peach kissed by the sun or a rose just unfurling its leaves before the glory of morning, so his Camilla awoke. "Hi," he grinned down at her, rubbing one thumb along the inside of her wrist. "No, didn't miss a thing. Good morning."

He leaned down to brush a tender kiss on her forehead. "Can I get you something? Coffee? Breakfast? Are you hungry? I can get us some breakfast." With all the eagerness of a puppy, Richard sat up, trying to remember how one summoned a house-elf. "Do you want some toast? Or pancakes, maybe?" He just wanted this morning to be as perfect as the evening before. Perhaps he was a little overenthusiastic. But nothing was too much for Camilla.

[c-macaulay.livejournal.com]

Overenthusiastic was a word for it. Camilla did not scorn such attention, but accepted it as appropriate for the occasion. It could grow tiresome if allowed to go on very long, of course -- which wouldn't happen.

"Pancakes?" She blinked. "No, toast will be fine. Toast and fruit, I think. Grapefruit? Or pears. Something. I guess I should get up. It wouldn't be very nice to get crumbs all in your bed." God, she'd really slept here, hadn't she? No, she'd done rather more than sleep here. Memories of the preceding night began to coalesce fuzzily in her head. How very odd. After all these years, to have succumbed -- well, she couldn't be blamed, could she? So much strain on her nerves. Stretching, she sighed and bestowed a faint smile upon her doting suitor. No, was that quite right? Suitor? He'd gotten what he wanted, so then he wasn't a suitor any more, wasn't that how it worked? She wasn't sure, in English. Anyhow she didn't regret any of it, as long as it didn't make him very tiresome. She felt good, aching in all the right places.

"That was nice," she said graciously.

[chameleonfaust.livejournal.com]

The house-elf had finally appeared, thank God, and Richard sent it scurrying off with orders of fresh toast and fruit and some coffee. Then he settled back down beside Camilla, a very doting expression on his face. "It was amazing," he said, brushing back a lock of her hair, twisting it gently between two fingers. "You were amazing."

Then he laughed, propping himself up on one elbow, resting on his side so he might look down at her. "Why should I care about crumbs?" Why would he care about anything like that, ever again? "Stay. Relax. Don't go."

The elf chose that moment to return with their tray, which Richard took, pulling it towards them, and immediately pouring Camilla a cup of coffee and offering it to her before fixing his own.

[c-macaulay.livejournal.com]

"Was I?" Camilla asked innocently. "Oh, good, the elf found pears." And had cut them into nice convenient slices, no less. She bit cleanly into one. "Mmm."

That same little hum of pleasure, unsettlingly like the sound she'd made the night before, for him -- Camilla totally unconscious of this.

[chameleonfaust.livejournal.com]

That sound had a very distinct relation to the direction of blood flow in Richard's body. God, she was so sexy. Chuckling softly at her delight, Richard reached for a piece of pear, offering it to her with a crooked smile.

Never in his life had he been so just out and out happy. Not in his childhood, not even at Hampden, certainly not in the years that followed. Oh, he'd had brief flashes of contentment - usually helped by pills or alcohol or both - but nothing this deep. This permanent. He couldn't think of a single thing in the world that could break this. "You were. You are. You're a goddess, Camilla. Surely you know that."

[c-macaulay.livejournal.com]

She knew more restraint than to nip at his fingers the way she would had he been her brother. She allowed Richard to feed her the small chunk of fruit, by hand, as though she were some shy animal too innocent to know fear; and as she did, she looked up at him, face lowered, gray eyes soft and trusting. Without so much as blinking she accepted, too, his wondering praise. She'd heard it too many times to be surprised. But most of all she'd heard it from Henry, and the inadvertent reminder saddened her.

She swallowed her bit of pear and pulled her hair away from her face, twisting it into a golden rope. "I can't say I do know that," she said quietly. "But it's nice to hear."

[chameleonfaust.livejournal.com]

Shock registered on his face, some tender form of the expression, and Richard shook his head in wonder. That she hadn't been told that every day, that it wasn't some inescapable truth for her to revel in... Well, it just went to show how boorish Henry could be. And her twin. The perversity of that union was only magnified by the fact that Charles didn't even lavish Camilla with the adoration she deserved. But none of that mattered anymore. Richard could spend the rest of their lives worshiping Camilla as she should be.

"You are," he repeated, fervently. "And you should know it."

Grinning again, he offered her more pear, watching the way the sunlight caught her hair, making it into a glorious crown of golden light. "I'm thinking a fall wedding," he told her lightly, too filled with giddy good cheer to even take this too seriously at the moment. There was a bit of nervous trepidation in his tone, however - even though he knew this was fate, knowing something and having it confirmed are two completely different things. "You'd look like heaven, all in white, with the countryside turned to flames around you."

[c-macaulay.livejournal.com]

Camilla took the remark as a joke, a sort of whimsical fancy. Richard had proposed to her once before, very seriously (I'll get down on my knees if you want me to. Really, I will), and it had been nothing like this. So it did not occur to Camilla for one moment that he could mean in earnest what he said now. In truth, she thought it all an extended figure of speech. Poetic, certainly, and lovely: a vague image of Kore or Persephone came to mind; something about her being a goddess and wearing white and the autumn leaves around her. "You haven't seen a Scottish autumn yet. Terribly gray, and damp. Even a goddess would rather be indoors, I'd think. Nothing like it used to be at Hampden -- there is something to be said for fall in Vermont, however overdone the postcards make it sound, isn't there?"

She laughed and ate the fruit he offered her, daintily. "But it's not pears associated with Persephone, you know," she reminded him, taking up the cup of coffee he'd poured for her. He'd remembered she didn't take sugar. How thoughtful. "It's pomegranate. Which aligns rather nicely with your autumn imagery, doesn't it? Vivid, deep red." She was really still a little sleepy yet.

[chameleonfaust.livejournal.com]

Laughing - a deep, rumbling chuckle that seemed to originate somewhere in his toes (who knew that toes could be happy? It must be Camilla's own special brand of magic) - Richard leaned back, musing. "Vermont in the fall is the king's own land. Perfectly fitting that a queen should be married there, yes." But not the winter. Vermont in the winter was hell.

He smiled down at his Camilla, his bride, and kissed the top of her head. "And pomegranate suits you, my dear. It would make you shine." Pomegranate it was. Wedding colors picked, and the location of the ceremony, all in one fell swoop. The date would have to wait until Richard found out how transportation could be arranged, but he didn't anticipate that would be difficult. Besides, not everything had to be decided right at the moment. Now was a time to bask in the happiness. "Perhaps pears at the reception?" he teased fondly, popping a slice of the fruit into his own mouth. "And cream cheese and marmalade sandwiches served as hors devours."

[c-macaulay.livejournal.com]

Camilla at this point had no idea what Richard was talking about. Did Vermont ever have status as some kind of royal colony back in pre-Revolutionary times? Her own family was from Virginia. Maybe Richard was being metaphorical again. The English department must have done something to him. She laughed a little and drank more coffee and let him ramble on.

"I'm sure cream cheese and marmalade would make wonderful hors d'oeuvres," she said. "Everyone loves them." This without a hint of irony. Actually, had Camilla been planning a real wedding, she would have opted for an extremely traditional menu. Traditional everything. The wedding would be in a cathedral. There would be the usual canapes -- bacon-wrapped water chestnuts, pate, whatever. It would have been the wedding Nana would have planned had Nana been alive to see it. That Richard did not know this only underscored how little Richard truly knew Camilla; and that Camilla did not say any of this in turn underscored Camilla's utter cluelessness as to how serious Richard was.

She finished her coffee and set the cup aside on the nightstand. No doilies or coasters or anything -- he must not mind leaving scars on the dorm furniture. It was a comfortable little room, and she was comfortable in it; she let herself relax against him, let herself pretend just for a moment she wasn't going back to a room alarmingly devoid of Henry's things.

[chameleonfaust.livejournal.com]

For Richard, of course, the image of a 'traditional wedding' was something completely different that what it would be for Camilla. It invoked pictures of a church, still smelling of crayons from the daycare that used it during the week and candles lit from last night's alter call, decorated in the same ribbons every bride that year had used and flowers from a neighbor's garden. The bridesmaids in matching gowns of some unflattering color and all with hair sprayed out to some flammable height. The music cranked out by the same organist who stumbled through hymns on Sunday morning, the pictures taken by a friend of a cousin. Nothing quite new except the wedding dress - white, of course, whether or not the bride deserved it - and the squeaky, painful pinch of shoes.

The reception would be held at a hall or an auxiliary club, kitchen reeking of a decade of sloppy joe dinners and friday night fish fries. Drinking and dollar dances would preclude the cutting of the cake, wherein the happy couple would smash frosting into each other's faces for the enjoyment of the half-wasted crowd.

And all of this leading up the the new bride tossing the bouquet to some lucky girl, so that she might continue the loop of middle-class plastic cookie-cutter boredom. Then the honeymoon at a hotel just slightly above three stars but somewhere deeply down the line from five; just a brief breath before the husband went back to a soulless job and the wife began her duties as incubator for the next generation of the apathetically predictable.

So, to Richard, the startlingly bright idea of Camilla, so fair and ethereal, standing in graceful white on the cool backdrop of a thousand autumn colors, was something of the divine. It was a million miles away from the hot, sticky, drab world he'd known. Higher than he'd ever dreamed he could touch, a star pulsing under his quivering fingertips.

Was it any wonder, then, that he couldn't grasp the utter disconnect between his fantasies and Camilla's? He was a Plano boy who had lost his way and somehow stumbled onto heaven. Nose pressed to the glass, he imagined himself on Mount Olympus when his feet were still firmly planted on dusty shag carpet.

Arm tightening slightly around Camilla, hand stroking up and down her arm with the tentative brush of an archaeologist discovering man's greatest treasure, Richard only knew he was content. He rested his cheek on her head and smiled, brilliant and pure. "Of course they do."

[c-macaulay.livejournal.com]

"But you didn't eat yours," Camilla pointed out. "I brought you one last night and you never ate it. It's still sitting over there and now it's no good any more." She had forgotten until this very moment that Richard had neglected the sandwich, her ostensible reason for being here. About to deliver a jesting reproach, she stopped herself -- of course, it was her fault, wasn't it? "But then I distracted you from it. We can't let that happen again," she said lightly.

Now that she'd remembered it, the cream cheese and marmalade sandwich sitting untouched in its napkin wrapping seemed to reproach her. It reminded her of other such sandwiches, in other rooms. Charles somewhere in Ravenclaw, in this very same dorm, her brother whom she was neglecting even now; nights they'd gone without dinner because one of them had distracted the other. When she was with Henry she didn't think nearly so much about her twin. With Richard, though, she found her thoughts circling back inexorably to Charles, locked in an orbit both painful and doomed. She'd resisted, for Henry's sake, though she had not the slightest idea where Henry could have gone; and now what had she done? She'd gone and slept with Richard of all people, someone whom she owed nothing, an action that no argument however tenuous or daring could ever justify as necessary.

Camilla had never needed to diet. It was a concept with which she was familiar from magazines read in waiting rooms. And it seemed to her now that what she'd done was rather like the sort of thing she read about dieters doing. Passing up Charles and sleeping with Richard -- it was as though she'd resisted the creme brulee at a nice restaurant, only to fall from grace with a Twinkie in the wee hours of the morning.

And now she was almost tempted to go find Charles, out of sheer contrariness. She'd done worse now; why not?

It was her natural laziness that saved her from that sudden destructive impulse. Richard was holding onto her and she didn't particularly feel like moving just yet. Also, she needed a bath; she couldn't very well go to Charles like this.

"I must be a mess," she said absently, thinking aloud.

[chameleonfaust.livejournal.com]

Laughing a little, Richard brushed the backs of his fingers across Camilla's cheek. "I liked the distraction," he murmured. "And we can always get more sandwiches."

He had no idea what was going through Camilla's mind. If he did... Well, he'd suffered her rejection once, but with hopes much less high than they were now. To know that she thought of her twin while in bed with him might break him. Camilla had that power; she very literally held him in her delicate hands, and he willingly gave himself over to her.

A mistake he could not realize the depth of.

"No," he told her with a smile. "You're never a mess." Not even after Bunny, even those half-remembered glimpses he'd gotten of her after the bacchanal attempts, not even after Henry. Disheveled, yes. But Camilla couldn't be a mess if she tried. She transcended beyond that.

[c-macaulay.livejournal.com]

In actuality, not only was Camilla a mess, she didn't even realise the extent of it. She just happened to look good while being a mess: tousled hair, kiss-swollen lips, the faint shadows under her eyes giving her a look of diffuse melancholy rather than the worn-out washed-out look they should have conferred. It was a gift Charles shared, the odd way in which fatigue and strain refined the twins' charm, made of their ordinary good looks something unearthly.

Francis or even Julian might have called it divine. Judy Poovey, on the other hand, might have termed it heroin chic.

Be that as it may, there was just no way of casting a favorable light on the red and purple blotches spreading across the fair expanse of Camilla's neck (and trending southward, though the line of the sheet she'd pulled up around her torso mercifully interrupted them). Little starbursts of burst blood vessels fanning out into broken nebulae, no more romantic than anything else an animal might do to mark its territory. Lacking a mirror, Camilla had no idea how truly bad the marks were. She'd wince when she saw them later, out of sheer embarrassment, and thank God (and Stephen) for the pot of bruise balm she still had stashed away.

All she knew for now was that her night of passionate abandon with Richard had left her smelling of alcohol and woodsmoke and sex, and she fancied she detected the tickle of toast crumbs in her cleavage from breakfast. Oh, it had been nice toast, and nice debauchery, she wouldn't deny that. And it was nice not to need to worry about the elaborate contraceptive precautions other people had to use, ugly rubber contraptions; long ago Camilla had chosen an IUD as protection against the production of unwanted twincestuous offspring. But now she was left with what one might term that not-so-fresh feeling.

"It's sweet of you to say so," she murmured back, gently disentangling herself from his arms, "but I can't think of anything I'd like so much as a bath right now, really. Thanks ever so much for breakfast."

[chameleonfaust.livejournal.com]

The marks were his, and so beautiful. Physical reminders of what had passed between them, much like the pleasant ache between his legs or the mingled scent of them that lingered in the air. He could find no fault with Camilla; and in that, there was no change between the first moment he'd seen her and now, years later.

Richard wanted to protest, to pull her back into his embrace. But he recognized both the fact that he had much to do to pull together a wedding on only a few months notice and that this was by no means a one-time thing. Not a brief tumble between the sheets. It was a lifetime, and there would be countless mornings like this. So, settling for a light kiss pressed to her shoulder, he nodded. Running one hand through his hair, Richard chuckled. "Yeah, I think a good, hot shower is in order. But...I'll see you later?"

Hopeful and bright, his eyes tracked Camilla with worship and adoration that would not have been out of place on a priest of some ancient religion watching his goddess. Or a puppy hoping for walkies.

[c-macaulay.livejournal.com]

Long accustomed to gazes of doglike adoration, Camilla merely nodded. "Don't we always?" To her, the previous night had indeed been nothing more than a brief tumble between the sheets. If Henry's absence proved permanent, and if Camilla yielded to anyone for longer than a night, it would be to her twin that she returned, naturally. Surely no other course was imaginable. It would be Charles or no one. Richard had to know that. When he'd proposed to her back in Boston, she'd been estranged from Charles, after all. He'd waited until the field was completely clear, and even then she'd refused him in the end.

So she thought he simply meant they'd see one another again in the same old way, as their circle of friends always found one another. Random visits to one another's rooms. Gravitating toward one another at Sortings or at meals. They lived in one another's pockets.

Modest, she half wanted to drag the sheet with her when she rose from the bed to reassemble her discarded clothing and to dress for what she hoped would not be too conspicuous a walk back to her own dorm. It was fortunate she made herself leave the sheet where it belonged. Its dragging tail would have hidden the broken glass she'd dropped the night before, and Camilla would have ended up with a shard in her foot. "I've made a mess of your room too," she said ruefully as she dressed. "Do you want me to send some house-elves by?"