title: toxicity
characters: jessamine kaldwin, corvo attano
notes: what dumb married ppl.

She has a million ideas, a million times a day. He appreciates that about her. Her mind has always seemed so infinite to him.

He doesn't know if this is a good one or not. He doesn't like anything that makes him unable to do his job. He doesn't like not being unable to think clearly, it makes him vulnerable. Which excusable in him, sometimes, if he must. It's inexcusable when it makes her vulnerable.

So what she's really asking him to do is trust her. If he'll let himself go a little, for her.

He'd do anything for her, of course. So in that case, it never really was a question at all. Fugue is the only time when they are not beset with people, when for one shirt night, they are themselves with no one else. Or that is the myth they indulge in. It is a pleasing pretence, and he finds himself weak to it more often than not.

Because it's hard not to be weak, when she leans back, smoke curling from a long elegant pipe that settles in her fingers with an expertise that says he might never have been interested in it outside of now, but she certainly has been. The air is sickly sweet with the smell of whatever it is. It's filtering through his head already. Or maybe that's her, because he needs to tell her that none of this is necessary to inthrall him, she does that enough already.

But he can't pretend his head is not muggy as is. Because she's stripped down, and insisted he not be so stiff in his coat. The windows are closed and they are not in any of the royal palaces that they had put around they would be, for Fugue. They are in a small estate that no one but she, he and the spymaster himself knew about. It was as close to forgetting as they ever got.

'Corvo,' her voice is rich as the smoke that curls from her mouth in a thick haze. It must be the smoke talking, such is the want to draw it down as it leaves from her mouth. 'Are you going to stand there all night?'

'I'd prefer not to.' He steps forward from where he had just been watching. Always watching her, how his duty might pain him if he did not love her. How it pained him in that he did. Granted, there was never any real choice but to love her. He expected no less of himself than utter fulfillment of his duty.

'Then come, I'd much rather you here.' She goes to draw another breath, and this time he catches her hand, stilling her and for a second, meeting her eyes, they're still. What foolish eternities they make, with just a glance. The rumours would never cease. She ends it first this time, tugging her fingers in his. 'Are you going to be my tired protector? Scared of some smoke?'

He doesn't answer. Rather he turns his head as he turns the curl of her fingers. Angling to catch the end of the pipe and drawing a deep breath for himself. One, just the one. Breathing it only in so far before he lets it go. Tilting his head up to exhale, and she -- sharp actions that begot ruling, has no interest in mercy. Spirits knows how she manages it, for how he feels when it hits him. His edges go dull. Old injuries that never forget him as much as he wished them to leave him be, fade. He feels for the first since he took up a blade, painless. But she - she knows too much of her head. Knows him too well, in that second where he's vulnerable ( because she willed him to be so, because she looked at him, and he was undone ) catches his throat in the scrape of her teeth, pushed up all sudden, dragging lips and mouth and the heated draw on rough skin.

More potent than the smoke, as toxic to blood as it as well.

He snatches at her then, and he hears her not recoil, but shudder with the giggles that she's too languid to even fully form. All to her plan as he gets a hand under her hair, pooling in the inky black mess of it. His head is swimming, her hair swirls around his fingers like the sea-women sailors spoke of. She turns up, all expectant, pupils gone wide and in the distorted numbness that takes hold, there's something to her warmth that is indescribable. He is no poet, never had the inclination, but oh he wants to be, right now.

'Jessamine. We're being foolish.' He cant help it, even as he says it, he grins. Wider than he ever remembers doing normally.

'Corvo.' says it again, it's still worse than the smoke, no, it is the smoke. The way his name trickles out of her mouth like it. 'Come to me.'

It's never a question between them, no matter what she asked, he always would.