Rated R.

Usual disclaimers apply: I own nothing but the story.

ESCHER   by Jayne Leitch

C. 2003

The mattress on the cot in the panic room is old and thin and lumpy, but compared to other places Ric could be sleeping if Jason changes his mind about his potential usefulness, it's comfortable.  Ric lies on his back, his right arm crooked over his eyes to block out the wan light from the monitors above and behind him; his pounding head is sensitive to even that much light, even in this dim, flat, gray space hidden behind the wall.

He doesn't see Elizabeth on the screens, then, coming up the walk to the front door. He doesn't watch her fumble with her keys the way she always does--because she's never been able to tell this key from the one to her grandmother's house--open the door and enter their home before dragging her feet to a halt and staring at the wall-door to this room, wide-eyed and tight-lipped.  He doesn't see the shake of her head as she makes up her mind, or the determination in her stride as she goes to the bookshelf and pushes the release button.

He sees nothing on the monitors, but every detail is like a photograph under a magnifying glass in his mind.

When she comes to the edge of the opening in the wall, he's sitting up, waiting for her.  He knows how he looks: disheveled, unshaven, unfed.  He works to keep the hunger out of his voice, works to sound anything but entitled to her attention.  "Why'd you come back?"

She stands still, wholly contained in the stark outline of the door.  A silhouette in colour against the brighter light of the living room behind her, she looks like a painting in a too-severe frame.  "I had to," she says eventually, her tone chillingly neutral.  Her gaze stays fixed on his face, and Ric has to commend her willpower in not staring at the cell in which he's been imprisoned.

Or maybe she saw all she needed to the day she found Carly.  The day she almost died.  "I'm glad you did."

In the silence that follows, he wants her to step across the threshold, into his reach--the reach of the chain attached to his ankle.  He wants to touch her, knead the tension out of her back, soothe the hardness in her eyes.  Wondering how her scars from the surgery have healed, he clutches the cot's scratchy wool blanket to keep from reaching out, the tendons in his fingers cording painfully.  "Elizabeth, I--"

"Don't."  And it's a shock when she does it, when she steps inside, closer, until she stops with her knees brushing his.  Staring straight down, she doesn't give him any options on where to look.  "Don't apologize, Ric.  Don't even try.  If you do, I'll leave."

"Please--"  Desperate, pleading, it's out of his mouth before he can stop it, but he bites his tongue--hard, tasting blood--before anything else can follow.  Swallowing, he masters himself, then speaks evenly.  "Please don't leave.  I promise--I promise--"  He doesn't know how to finish.

Elizabeth smiles, satisfaction freezing her mouth.  "A promise is a promise," she lilts, and her eyes glitter in the dim, gray light.

Ric finds himself nodding, and doesn't know exactly what he's agreeing to.  It could be anything; anything to keep her here, close enough for the brush of her knee on his, the rasp of denim and cotton, close enough to touch--his hands falter on the blanket, and his palms burn with the memory of the fabric.

She sees it.  Her gaze twitches down--a brief disconnect as he can't meet her eyes--and when she looks back up, it's with too much understanding.  And before he can think of what to say, how to sound, how to explain himself...her smile disappears.  "Promise you're not sorry," she says, standing too still, staring too fixedly.  "If you're sorry now, you can find a reason to resent him for it later."

Another shock, like grabbing a live wire.  It sends tingles to the pit of his stomach, the base of his spine; when he opens his mouth to exhale, he finds them on his tongue.  "I'm not sorry," he says, feeling the snap and aluminum tang on his teeth.  "I'm not, Elizabeth, I promise, I--"

Elizabeth catches his words in her mouth, closing the circuit with a kiss, and Ric jolts at her afterimage glowing on the blackness behind his eyelids.  Watches its edges blur and reshape and blur again at the sensation of her weight on his lap, his chest, pushing him down onto an uneven place in the mattress.

He can't help himself--his arms go around her, pulling her tightly to him, and his hands slide into her hair, thick and silky after the coarse flatness of the blanket.  He hasn't let himself think about this for so long; now he can't stop the impulses firing through him with every stroke of her skin, every push of her body, and he thinks--he knows--he should be ashamed of himself.

As that thought becomes clear in his mind, she breaks the kiss, and Ric, gasping into the emptiness she left, opens his eyes to Carly's sneer.  "What happened to that promise not to be sorry?"

He has her off the bed and against the wall in the space of a heartbeat, gripping her bare shoulders with enough force to turn his fingers white.  When she squirms, the round of her belly rubs against his hip.  "I'm not sorry," he breathes, watching her pupils dilate at his closeness.  "I'm not sorry.  I said I wouldn't be, I *promised*, and I'm not."

Carly arches an eyebrow, curves her lip, and keeps moving as much as she can.

It's as if he needs to prove himself.  Tightening his hold on one shoulder, Ric releases the other, slides his hand down her arm to brush his knuckles over the side of her stomach, ignoring her attempts to twist away.  "This was almost mine," he murmurs, leaning in so his lips buzz under the hard line of her jaw.  "It could have been mine.  I could have made it mine."  He flattens his hand where he's been teasing, feels her stiffen, and presses a tender kiss to her throat, letting his tongue taste the flicker of her pulse under her skin.  "I could have made it, Carly.  Don't forget that."

"But it's not yours," Carly says immediately, breathlessly.  "And I'm not yours.  And *he's* not yours."  Ric can feel the stretch of her cheek against his temple, and knows she's smiling.  "He's not, Ric, no matter how much you wish he was.  No matter how much you wish he was here instead of me."

"That's not--I don't--" Ric shakes his head, and doesn't know exactly what he's disputing.  He feels out of breath without knowing why, and sucks in air humid and musky with the scent of close bodies.  Lowering his forehead to rest on her shoulder, he lets his hands drop to his sides and presses forward to trap her flush between him and the wall.

"No?"  His head is pounding again, ringing like he's just been hit, aching too much for him to concentrate; he can hardly make out the low words by his ear.  "Then you're lying to yourself."

And Ric raises his head but not his gaze, not yet--he's transfixed by the sight of muscles bunching and flexing in Jason's back, under skin slick with sweat, as he braces his hands on the wall and rocks against him.  Biting his lip, Ric brings his own hands up to wrap around Jason's straining wrists, and meets the rhythm with a push of his hips.  "I'm lying to myself?" he repeats, putting his mouth close to Jason's ear to watch him turn his head away.  "You consider him your brother!"

"Yeah.  That's what he is to me."  Flat and hateful as only Jason can make them, the words make Ric's fingers clench.  He imagines the little gasp that shakes Jason's ribcage is due to Ric's blunt fingernails digging into his veins--but the twist of satisfaction that brings only lasts until Jason continues, "But to you, he'll never be anything more than the person at the top of the stairs while you're on your way to the bottom."

Ric's eyes widen, and the next roll of Jason's body knocks him off-balance, and the noise he makes as he falls away onto the cot is wretched, animal.  He stares as Jason, still standing, tenses all over before shuddering, hard; and Ric squeezes his eyes shut but the afterimage is still there, blurring and melting and reshaping, becoming Carly, becoming Elizabeth, becoming all of them at once before--

before becoming--

--and Ric opens his eyes to the dim shadows of the empty panic room, his own harsh cry echoing in his ears, his own harsh breaths echoing off the walls.  He's shaking; his hands, when he scrubs them over his face, will barely cooperate, and his heart triphammers in his chest, and he's drenched in sweat.

He remembers, in rapidly-fading flashes at the back of his mind, other voices, other gasps, the sensation of other people trembling at his touch.  The tightening coil in his belly that comes with hard sex.  A roiling shock of desperation.  A bizarre staircase with right-angle turns and no top or bottom...

A sound from the monitors distracts him, and he loses the tenuous image. He turns his head, craning his neck to see the screen, and feels a shock like electricity in his bones at the sight of Elizabeth, coming up the walk to the front door.

As always, she fumbles with her keys.

End.

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