Strange Expectations

*

It strikes Lucien as strange the day he realizes he's never wanted any woman more than he wants her. And at first—for weeks—he's convinced she's slipped some sort of poison in his food. He spends time better spent minding contracts on trying to discern her magic, even if he can't determine the source of the taint. And then one day she finally does slip an aphrodisiac into his wine. And Lucien finds it's not so very different from everything he's been feeling. Only now the lust is maddening, bound up in too many emotions he doesn't know the names of, eating him away from the inside out until he breaks and locks them away with all the other useless things he was and felt before he became the man he is today.

Lucien thought he'd finished with emotions like that a long time ago, but lust—lust he understands. So he drinks the wine just the same, eyes locked with hers as they discuss mundane things like death and sacrifice until he can't take it any longer. Somehow she ends up with her back against the wall, too-clever fingers stripping off his clothing, her mouth searing against his own, starving as though she suspects this opportunity will never come again.

It unnerves him how much he needs her because he isn't really certain he's ever needed anyone before. At least not like this—fire and passion and emotion he hopes to never understand.

The first few times are rough—against the wall, her legs like a vice on his hips—because this is what she wanted, what she asked for when she slipped her spell into his wine. But he takes her to bed eventually and it is slow and sweet and everything he isn't. And when she's calling his name, bearing that porcelain throat as her head rocks back against the pillows, Lucien can feel his carefully erected walls crumble down around him. Too many emotions careen through him, too many sullen, quiet things he would have sworn Vicente beat out of him as a boy tear him to shreds as he closes his eyes against the torrent, whispering her name as he comes. He feels lost even as she anchors him with crimson nails raking patterns on his back and when they part he is a changed man, and Lucien has never been very fond of change.

He sends her away the next morning. Sends her to dead drops to find notes that will not say I love you because he cannot—will not—allow himself that weakness.

It's when he leaves a contract in the Skingrad castle well for an aging sex addict of an Altmer and finds the mer alive a week later that Lucien begins to worry. He wonders if the traitor is closer than he thought, if he led the bastard to his Silencer… he wonders if his Silencer is dead.

And it shouldn't worry him, he tells himself. He's a Lachance. He forms no attachment. Cold as crypt stone. But weeks pass and he cannot find her. She has fallen from the face of the map without a trace, a ghost among the living as she slips by unseen.

Lucien does not mourn. He does not give her up for dead or spend his nights dreaming of the way she felt in his arms. He did not wish his notes to her said anything other than the words he'd written, nor does he miss the way she laughed as she danced through his home. He is so busy not watching the memory of her asking him to waltz that it takes him a moment to realize someone has sat down next to him at his corner table at the Tiber Septim.

Lucien looks up then and smiles. Smiles because he's taught her every trick he knows and even though a toothless hag grins back at him, he can see the beautiful woman laughing beneath the illusion.

"An orc, Luc?" she cackles, voice brittle with age and Lucien relaxes just a little.

"Aye," he grunts past jutting eyeteeth. "An' where've you been?"

The laughter melts from her eyes then and she pushes a book across the table.

"Present for you, dearie," she says but her voice has gone flat. "From the boy who switched your letter."

He feels cold staring down at the flaking brown ink, tendrils of slow and deadly hatred curling around his heart. But there is a heat rising at the edges of his being, emotions threatening at the gate and Lucien closes his eyes against them.

His dead drops have been compromised.

The have the traitor.

His lover is safe.

…his lover…

It's only when Bellamont is hanging from his ankles in the little farmhouse west of Bruma that the words finally settle in and make a nest of his black heart. And Lucien smiles as he watches his Silencer wield her rusty calipers with deft precision, clicking every so often in off-key accompaniment to Bellamont's screams, red to the elbows with blood. And when they finally tire of their game and Lucien tears the traitor's beating heart from his chest to tie with a bow to give to her, his beautiful Silencer laughs and sweeps him into a mangled sort of waltz, her mouth locked to his.

And it's strange to find he's never wanted anyone more than he wants her, but then, they're strange people in the end.