deercountry | in the ghoul-haunted woodland [catch-all]

Why would she have wanted to, is really the question.

So: if anyone has, she hasn't removed them.

"I see you've been popular," she gives a teasing nod toward—can he tell it's toward his neck? "And, uh. Unpopular as well? What happened to your face?"

Edited 2023-03-01 04:38 (UTC)

"Which time?" he asks, as dryly as he can possibly manage.

(With ten thousand-plus years' practice, it's possible that it was dry enough now she needs a drink.)

"The current state of your eye, Lustmolch."

Sarah's rolling her own eyes, while she says that, but at least neither of her eyes appear to have been hit by any objects or punched.

"But if you prefer to explain some other aspect of it, by all means, do go ahead."

"Both of my eyes are functioning perfectly, as it happens," which is more bland than dry — which is to say, shading into the slightest hint of puzzlement, actually.

(Okay, so, it is not in fact a cosmetic choice made by Augustine himself.)

"What did you just call me?"

"A nickname." Sarah's not lying, exactly. But if Lustmolch ends up sticking as a nickname for Augustine, she is going to both be surprised and absolutely not apologize. "You do—um—you're aware that one of your eyes is the kind of black where it looks like you've been punched or gotten a concussion somehow only on one side, yeah?"

Maybe he actually doesn't know.

Somehow.

"... do you mean my eye, or my cheek? Or, well, general ... ocular area, not inclusive of the orb itself?"

He doesn't think she has any reason to lie to him; none of these are the questions he was planning to ask her — which might be evidenced, at least in part, by the way he has in fact stopped lounging on his chair like an absolute louche, and instead is actually sitting on it like a Normal Person.

Sarah can't help but click her tongue and roll her eyes again. Augustine, being pedantic about bodily descriptors? Who knew.

"Okay, okay, yes, it's not actually the eyeball. And I can't tell if it's actually a bruise or just interesting makeup."

"I'm not w—"

Augustine stops, and runs his tongue over his teeth — in the somehow-prissy behind-his-closed-lips way — and then scoffs, a little.

"I did not put on any makeup," he corrects, with a stiff overformality. "Neither should I have been bruised, but given that someone apparently has no sense of humour at all regarding anatomical variance and sexual proclivities and possibilities..."

He shrugs, pops his neck once, and settles back in his chair — in a fashion more comfortable than slutty — and cocks an eyebrow at her. "I have to say, though, I'm quite fond of your makeup today. Clay-based, is it?"

How dare Augustine, of all people, actually amuse her in a way that is making her smile at him genuinely. How dare he not keep being her playful punching bag. Doesn't he know that's his role in this relationship now that she's got the upper hand and has helped him with a bunch of stuff she didn't actually want to do?

"Something like that," she agrees, since technically it's not much clay on her face so much as under her nails: what's on her face is higher level dirt. "You're right, I probably would've noticed if someone actually punched you." She's learned to tune out him having sex, but a punch would definitely have caught her interest.

Here, again, an expression of barely-and-badly-hidden surprise: does that mean she didn't notice him getting punched over his offer to be on either end of that blowjob? Damn. She only would have meant to ignore the actual blowjob! Outright horrible, really.

Anyway, now she's lost the current game, because she hasn't asked another question — twice! — which leaves him to come up with one instead.

(Wait, three times?)

"If you were supremely well-endowed, in a fashion that were — hmm — perhaps not universally recognized, or seen as desirable, and then someone made a genuine offer to express genuine and profound appreciation of said feature — what would you do?"

It's not that Sarah's eyebrows didn't quirk at Augustine's actual surprise (maybe her filters are too good) so much as that they quirked up more at the question.

"Is ... that a theoretical question brought to us by the speed dating exercise, or an actual experience related to what happened to your face?" Okay, so technically, that's a question, but she has to answer his. "I'd ask what that type of appreciation was before cheerfully accepting it."

"Well, profound, obviously," which is maybe a little bit testier than it would have been before someone had gone and decked him one, but — well, water under the burning bridge, and all of that, yes? "I didn't say anything about it taking place immediately, and yet!" He gestures up toward his face, with a truly irritable flick of his fingers.

"Is there a particular type of appreciation you feel is most appropriate, to your best-endowed feature?"

Ah, the duality of Augustine: a wise spiritualist-magician of thousands of years, and ... this. Confirming some of Sarah's theories about longer consciousnesses, anyway.

"Seeing as how it's my hair," was all she actually said, "a nice keratin treatment. What's yours?"

The speedy and prosaic nature of her response stops him dead like a one-two shot from a double-barrelled shotgun, albeit with a great deal less blood and buckshot, leaving him gaping at her for a solid two seconds before he closes his mouth with a click.

(This is not the sexually-salacious-or-at-least-flirtatious answer he was aiming for, to say the absolute least.)

He blinks, twice, a full breath in between, and then:

"A hand job," as blandly as he can manage, and holds one hand out to her, palm flat, for her consideration.

Expecting salacious from Sarah may have been a mistake. Doesn't he know her? Maybe he knows that she used to be an alcoholic who had casual sex with three strangers a week, but prosaic is a far better way to describe her.

"All right," she says, just as practically, and takes his hand in hers. She traces the lines on his palm, almost as if she were the charlatan type of psychic, or at least a real fortune teller (she is neither) before moving to massaging his knuckles instead of pretending she knows anything about palmistry. "You all right, there? Your thought process seems to have hiccuped a little bit."

She's grinning. Softly, but it's there.

He groans, then smirks — and sure, they're almost simultaneous, but they're not simultaneous; make of this order what you will, Sarah King — and makes absolutely no attempt whatsoever to retrieve his hand from her.

"Now, that's the sort of appreciation that certainly can be profound," lightly enough. "And are you trying to tell me you aren't trying to encourage exactly that?"

"Not really," Sarah says with a one-shouldered shrug—the other not being able to shrug because her dominant hand is doing the majority of the knuckle rubbing. It's not true massaging, because she doesn't have the knowledge, experience or hand muscle training to accomplish that ... but she does have good motor skills and, frequently, joint pain in her hands. She knows where it feels better. "I'm no massage therapist, so it's not like I'd expect to have the ability to intentionally distract with my profound skill."

He couldn't possibly have meant her word choice, or her lack of innuendo. That doesn't occur to her at any level except, possibly, the level that their bond is on.

Which at least isn't so circuitous and feedback-looped that she's feeling the effects of the knuckle rub on her own hands, but she is at least able to tell that it's soothing, or otherwise received positively.

The downside, of course, is that she isn't able to feel the effects of the knuckle rub on her own hands, in order that they in turn might feel better.

(It also, of course, raises the question: why hadn't she noticed the punch, earlier?)

"I didn't say expecting, I said trying," he chides gently, teasingly — see the smirk? the smirk says it's just teasing! — even as something that is far too soft to be a shoe, but possibly just soft enough to be a foot, bumps lightly into the inside of her ankle.

It could be a small dog or cat, but it's ... well, it's not an animal, it's a foot, sorry about that.

(The answer, presumably, is that Doorway is in charge of all the bonds and this event — and so at some level it must just make perfect sense that they're getting all swapped around confusingly. They're probably just lucky the bond's effects aren't getting swapped around, for that matter.)

It could similarly have been Sarah's own Omen, the fisher Skotos—he's small enough to dart around one's ankles. But, no; Sarah gets Augustine's foot instead of her Omen, who has been steering clear of this event. Fishers are not popular with anything indoors.

(She's not thinking too hard about the punch. That was weird. Blips happen, distraction happens, and she's usually trying to keep a clear line between what is Augustine and what is her. She keeps a shield up. She is not trying to fix him.)

While she isn't even sure how one would reciprocate such an action, Sarah doesn't pull her foot away, and she doesn't scowl at him, either. "Trying? No. I'm just doing what you asked." Profound appreciation of his hands, right?

They are, profoundly, worth appreciating, of course — absolutely everything a person could want, out of a pair of hands, so long as what they wanted included words like elegant and capable and attractive. Flexible, too, in the finger department at least. Loads of manual dexterity. Fantastic sensitivity, for that matter! Utterly perfect, 10/10 ~~fingers~~, would appreciate again.

"I didn't actually ask you to do anything," he points out, with the faintest tinge of regret just barely audible in his voice, to someone who's listened to him long enough to know him well.

(Confessing this does, after all, drastically raise the likelihood she's going to stop.)

She doesn't know him as well as she probably should.

What she knows best of him is that he has walls. He has an unfathomable number of walls, and only his age explains anything about them.

"You didn't?" Sarah frowns slightly. "No. You did. You didn't ask me verbally."

She doesn't stop, either.

"I was demonstrating, much as you were demonstrating how nice your hair is," he points out, and — still does not remotely try to take his hand away, because trained or not it does feel good; good enough for one of those walls to start dissolving, or —

Maybe that's just a stress-knot in the back of his ribcage relaxing. Whatever.

(Even odds as to whether or not he's even registered that that was technically a compliment he just paid her.)

"All I did was say my hair was my best feature, or whatever words we were using at the time," because she is honestly more absorbed in hand soothing than she is in remembering word choice, "I didn't really demonstrate anything. Though I suppose all you have to do is look at it."

And it's not that her hair's that fancy. It's just that it's not in any way unpleasant, and even she might call it pretty. The Mallen streak is unusual, but in Trench no one's called her a freak so far.

"Since it's hair. It's about looks. Or I guess you could touch it, but it's not as soft as it sometimes is."

(She's not pushing the wall: it might bite her.)

(It isn't that he isn't capable of putting teeth in his chest wall, but that doesn't mean he wants to, Sarah — that shit is uncomfortable!)

"Something to do, I assume, with the way you were presumably gardening or otherwise farming, just before getting dragged in here, rather than having purposefully softened it up in anticipation of it being caressed?"

"The only person I would soften it for is myself," Sarah challenges, since she's given up on the casual cuddles, thank you very much, "But yes, it's dirty. I mean in a literal there is dirt in it kind of way. I was planting shrubs."

This is when she finally stops the rubbing, because her hands are tired, which he can no doubt feel clearly enough she doesn't need to say it—and for once she's allowing that, allowing magic and psychic to be enough, no matter how much most of her hates it. But she doesn't pull away: that she can allow him to do at his leisure. Simply holding the hand of someone whose mind doesn't take that as an opportunity to dump eighteen emotions at once at her is nice, and yes, she is forgetting that she will get the dominant one at any time, with unmoving skin contact.

Edited 2023-04-01 02:54 (UTC)

in the ghoul-haunted woodland [catch-all]

oh it totally isn't she has other speed dating threads even

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cw: Augustine's sex life (referenced)

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i absolutely remember already writing this tag, did the internet swallow it

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