Even though you've already stepped into it to make the pact, you still have to get Zero out out of it. She folds against, over, into your body, physicality becoming aether connected to yours, your body now her gate into the Source. You can feel her right there, a tickle at the base of your spine, a breath at the back of your neck.
You wonder how much of the sensation of your body she can feel. She's not technically possessing you, not yet, just waiting for your call.
You step out of the summoning circle, just enough more voidsent yourself than when you entered it to feel the difference as it passes over your skin, and then you do the responsible thing and scuff the hell out of it so that no one else can go summoning so much as an imp with it. Leaving a potential open crack to the void, even a tiny one, is significantly more problems than it would be worth. You set up a mop and bucket in the corner for precisely this purpose, in fact.
If it's practically an extended tease with yourself and her, going through the important steps of making sure nothing else follows her through even while your aether is hooked into her and vibrating with the desire to pull her back into this plane properly, well. You enjoy enduring it, feeling your clothes just a little too tightly, a little too intimately. The ache in your ear, just a little too intense to be called dull, is in the same category of hyperawareness.
So you drag out the process just a little, until you can really start to feel Zero building up beneath your skin, a unique sensation in its own right. It's confirmation that voidsent, or at least half-voidsent, can feel desire, because you've never had cause to think of the normally laid-back Zero as impatient for anything else before. Why would she be, with an endless age stretched out on either side of the present moment, in a world where no one dies or is born?
Eventually you call it good, in part because you're not entirely sure that Zero couldn't simply possess you if she wanted it badly enough. It's not a battle you've ever had to fight, not against both an external force and your own self, who trusts her enough that you would probably let her. Will almost certainly let her, at some point down the line.
Instead, you walk, measured pace and carefully stiff, back to your bedroom, and there shut and lock the door and close the windows against any potential disturbances. You take a seat on the side of your bed and undo just enough of your clothing to be interesting, kicking your shoes away from the bed.
Only then do you call her to you, a gentle beckon as you offer a hand for hers, which appears in a gentle swirl of shadows. You feel the change in her presence as she shifts planes.
She's still fully clothed, but the first thing she does is lift the hat from her head and hang it on one of the ornamental overhangs on your bedpost. It's a start, you think.
After a moment's hesitation, she starts on some of the buckles of the rest of her outfit. "I'm unused to wanting things," she says. "I'm beginning to wonder what kind of devil I've aligned myself with, that can tempt a voidsent."
You huff a laugh and reach out for her hand. She gives it to you with a curious look, and you start very carefully taking the glove off. The skin underneath is as pale and strangely un-time-worn as her face, except for a scar cutting deep into her wrist, which - in contrast to human scars - sits with the purple darkness of a bruise, or darker, on her skin.
"I didn't know you could scar," you say.
"A memory of the living," she replies. "I can't, anymore. But these remain."
"The body remembers what the mind forgets, I take it," you say.
Zero nods. You slide your thumb over her wrist - there isn't a pulse as you're familiar with it, and her skin is cooler than almost anyone else you've ever touched. You catch your thoughts wandering towards Shiva - the goddess, this time, not the real one. You still wonder sometimes if her skin was cold.
Zero slides her other glove off and tosses it to the side in a dismissive motion. You underhand the one you're still holding in the same direction. The two dissolve on impact into the black wisps that correspond with voidsent dispersing, and you raise your eyebrows.
"How do your clothes even work?" you ask.
"I've never investigated it too closely, honestly," Zero says. "It wasn't important. They're just clothes."
There's another scar on the back of her other hand, this one just the faintest line of darkened skin at an angle behind her knuckles.
"If you're so impatient, you could have saved time and appeared naked, then," you mutter, pulling at the bottom of your shirt, and to your surprise she chuckles.
"I hadn't thought of that," she says. "Could I? I don't know. I haven't seen my own skin in..."
She doesn't so much trail off as simply stop. You understand. Linear time is incomprehensible. You say, "Something to try in the future. We'll just have to do this properly, this first time."
That tiny smile is back. "Properly?" she repeats, tone just incredulous enough to be mocking, to say is there anything proper about this? and it makes you want her mouth.
So you push off your bed with just the smallest bounce and into her, catching one hand to tangle in the fabric of the cape that's still over her shoulder, and you kiss her.
no subject
You wonder how much of the sensation of your body she can feel. She's not technically possessing you, not yet, just waiting for your call.
You step out of the summoning circle, just enough more voidsent yourself than when you entered it to feel the difference as it passes over your skin, and then you do the responsible thing and scuff the hell out of it so that no one else can go summoning so much as an imp with it. Leaving a potential open crack to the void, even a tiny one, is significantly more problems than it would be worth. You set up a mop and bucket in the corner for precisely this purpose, in fact.
If it's practically an extended tease with yourself and her, going through the important steps of making sure nothing else follows her through even while your aether is hooked into her and vibrating with the desire to pull her back into this plane properly, well. You enjoy enduring it, feeling your clothes just a little too tightly, a little too intimately. The ache in your ear, just a little too intense to be called dull, is in the same category of hyperawareness.
So you drag out the process just a little, until you can really start to feel Zero building up beneath your skin, a unique sensation in its own right. It's confirmation that voidsent, or at least half-voidsent, can feel desire, because you've never had cause to think of the normally laid-back Zero as impatient for anything else before. Why would she be, with an endless age stretched out on either side of the present moment, in a world where no one dies or is born?
Eventually you call it good, in part because you're not entirely sure that Zero couldn't simply possess you if she wanted it badly enough. It's not a battle you've ever had to fight, not against both an external force and your own self, who trusts her enough that you would probably let her. Will almost certainly let her, at some point down the line.
Instead, you walk, measured pace and carefully stiff, back to your bedroom, and there shut and lock the door and close the windows against any potential disturbances. You take a seat on the side of your bed and undo just enough of your clothing to be interesting, kicking your shoes away from the bed.
Only then do you call her to you, a gentle beckon as you offer a hand for hers, which appears in a gentle swirl of shadows. You feel the change in her presence as she shifts planes.
She's still fully clothed, but the first thing she does is lift the hat from her head and hang it on one of the ornamental overhangs on your bedpost. It's a start, you think.
After a moment's hesitation, she starts on some of the buckles of the rest of her outfit. "I'm unused to wanting things," she says. "I'm beginning to wonder what kind of devil I've aligned myself with, that can tempt a voidsent."
You huff a laugh and reach out for her hand. She gives it to you with a curious look, and you start very carefully taking the glove off. The skin underneath is as pale and strangely un-time-worn as her face, except for a scar cutting deep into her wrist, which - in contrast to human scars - sits with the purple darkness of a bruise, or darker, on her skin.
"I didn't know you could scar," you say.
"A memory of the living," she replies. "I can't, anymore. But these remain."
"The body remembers what the mind forgets, I take it," you say.
Zero nods. You slide your thumb over her wrist - there isn't a pulse as you're familiar with it, and her skin is cooler than almost anyone else you've ever touched. You catch your thoughts wandering towards Shiva - the goddess, this time, not the real one. You still wonder sometimes if her skin was cold.
Zero slides her other glove off and tosses it to the side in a dismissive motion. You underhand the one you're still holding in the same direction. The two dissolve on impact into the black wisps that correspond with voidsent dispersing, and you raise your eyebrows.
"How do your clothes even work?" you ask.
"I've never investigated it too closely, honestly," Zero says. "It wasn't important. They're just clothes."
There's another scar on the back of her other hand, this one just the faintest line of darkened skin at an angle behind her knuckles.
"If you're so impatient, you could have saved time and appeared naked, then," you mutter, pulling at the bottom of your shirt, and to your surprise she chuckles.
"I hadn't thought of that," she says. "Could I? I don't know. I haven't seen my own skin in..."
She doesn't so much trail off as simply stop. You understand. Linear time is incomprehensible. You say, "Something to try in the future. We'll just have to do this properly, this first time."
That tiny smile is back. "Properly?" she repeats, tone just incredulous enough to be mocking, to say is there anything proper about this? and it makes you want her mouth.
So you push off your bed with just the smallest bounce and into her, catching one hand to tangle in the fabric of the cape that's still over her shoulder, and you kiss her.