#in bed lights out candle lit tea in a cat mug. current book is the bell jar .

[transsexualprophet]

the issue with the books i read is that 90% of the time its not a fun pre-sleeping book. the other 10% its discworld

[burberrycanary]

The Probable Stars (Matthew x Diana, ADOW Ep. 107)

Summary: That’s the way of the world, he remembers. You break the things you are fondest of.

Nocturns

Next to him, Diana’s breathing slows. He tracks the way her body relaxes into sleep and the beat of her heart. The dying firelight turns her hair a darker shade of gold.

The air, the sheets and his skin all smell of her, easing for now the need he will not satisfy.

But beneath that, the other scent lingers, bright with copper and headier even than desire. How her body felt under his mouth blurs together with the memory of blood in pools and splatters.

I won’t let you harm me, she’d said, lying in his arms, brilliant like a shooting star or a shower of sparks. Matthew has sworn too many vows not to hear the weight behind her words. He’s sworn and kept some, sworn and broken—

—blood on his hands, the arterial gushes from her emptying heart—

He sees Diana again in his mind’s eye, lit with moonlight, slipping from his grasp into the night sky and more cruel than she could understand.

If her little game had not worked, what would he have taken from her? What would have been enough to slake so ravenous a—

Matthew leans over to kiss the top of her head, breathing her in. Mine, he thinks, with the old confusion of hungers.

He leaves the warmth of her—their—bed.

He will not sleep tonight.

Lauds

The house continues to settle with creaks and murmurs.

He retrieves their scattered clothes from the floor. Each piece conjures up overlapping flashes—her hands rushing to open his shirt, the way she’d smiled against the backs of her fingers when he’d tugged her closer on the bed with his palms cupped behind her spread knees.

He sets her folded clothing on the chest at the foot of the bed, finds a clean undershirt in his bag and redresses.

Her heartbeat is the loudest sound in the nighttime hush. How far could they be separated and still he would be able to pick out the cadence of her heart from all the tumult of the world?

Matthew turns out the remaining lamps, content with the glow from the fire as he considers the room that has been hers since childhood—the sloping angles of the gabled ceiling, the gray and black feathers suspended over the bed on long white threads, the moonlight slanting in through small windows.

Little has changed from what he saw in the dreamlike vision of the night her vast wild magic was hobbled by those she loved and trusted most. The temporary rooms in Oxford he had searched for the book of life had revealed much more.

But, in the far corner, a pair of low bookcases overflow with worn paperbacks scattered with the bright yellow secondhand stickers of a university bookstore—Ptolemy, Grosseteste, Bacon, Robert of Chester translating Jabir ibn Hayyan. He flips through Sidereus Nuncius with its printed many-pointed stars from an age that had not yet divided science from art. On the Nature of Things is turned sideways to fit into a too full shelf next to a Latin dictionary with a broken spine.

His fingers skim over the titles to map the history of her quick and hungry mind. Had she been happy, he wonders, as he pictures her at library study tables, losing her turn in lines unaware of anything outside her reading, curled up in oversized chairs with her bare feet pulled up.

What first drew her imagination so far into the past?

He recalls the black-and-white photo on the back of her first book more as an impression than an image: she’d been pretty, of course, smiling. But her startlingly young eyes were what he had noticed, how they clashed with the way she wrote of those long dead.

Even then, she was making him remember things he thought forgotten.

In honor of old friends—monks and humanists in service of God’s Rome and lost Romes equally—who searched for manuscripts with an obsession that matched his own, he reads Lucretius’s opening invocation of life-giving Venus soaring beneath the spinning constellations of heaven again. Then, more dimly, another line returns to him, ni muer ni viu ni no guaris. I do not die nor live nor heal—a poet had sung of love in a language that no longer exists only to die with his guts spilling out into the chaos of gore on the road outside Damascus eight-and-half centuries ago.

The furious speed of Diana’s life is already rushing through his fingers.

The loss of her should kill him but it won’t.

Well, then. A road outside some Damascus awaits him, too, some charnel house of violence he will throw himself at as many times as he must until at last—

Her heartbeat quickens in his ears, drawing him back towards her with that magnetic pull to sit on the edge of the bed. Her eyes dart behind her closed lids. REM sleep prompts the unlovely language of this current life. Dreams. What once had been known to be the workings of planetary influence on a troubled mind, or so the astrologers had taught off and on for a thousand years, transformed now into shifting waves of neuronal activity shown on modern star maps of the mind, lit up with celestial complexity.

Diana flinches with a moan, turning her face into the pillow. He can still count the hours since he woke to find her missing, taken, somewhere alone and hurt and—

She survived those lost hours. She’ll survive their memory, he knows, for all he wishes he could spare her this and take the recollection from her.

Matthew draws back the hair that has fallen over her face, careful not to touch her.

He had not expected this strength in so fragile a creature.

Let me not break her—this—us, he prays in fragments to God, always God, despite everything.

Her trust, so carelessly granted, unearned, had settled over him from the first with a staggering lightness, as exacting a burden as grace.

Perhaps He is as careless with what He gives as what He takes away.

Her fingers twitch, curling inward as loose fists.

God, what would I have done tonight?

Matthew crosses himself and watches as her face tightens with the memory of pain and fear he failed to shield her from.

Outside, a gray dawn slips past the windows.

Prime

Just after six, the quiet is interrupted by the tread of feet down the stairs with a softness that must be Em rather than Sarah.

Matthew remembers their discarded clothes near the front door, Diana’s kicked off shoes. He hadn’t cared, not when her hands kept touching his face and cupping the back of his neck, not when she smelled of blood and lust and the night air.

He listens, idly, to Em in the kitchen, running water and then the click of a gas stove. Her aunts know where he sleeps and what he is to her. He can at least spare Diana this small awkwardness.

He pulls on a sweater against the vulnerable informality of short sleeves and leaves Diana, half-hidden under the faded patchwork quilt, with one last look.

Gossamer-pale light fills the lower floor, broken into occasional patches of red and green by panels of stained glass.

Em calls out good morning and then pushes their folded clothes against his chest.

“It's a good thing the house likes you.”

He doesn’t ask what exactly she means because his father had taught him better than to begin conversations he does not wish to have. He sets the clothing down on the kitchen work table and, with a glance for permission, picks up the small wooden tray of casting artifacts she has gathered—feathers and a bundle of sage, a candle and spool of red thread—so Em can carry her tea and the bowl of water out to the porch.

He will never forget whose magic found Diana for him.

But outside she doesn’t seem in a hurry to cast. Steam rises from her cup of tea and her breath is visible in the morning air. Birds call to each other. The family cat clicks its teeth in response. Its yellow eyes trace arcs and swoops.

Em watches him from over the rim of her cup, thoughtful. Her gaze sharpens.

He waits for the warning or judgment that he will listen to with patience for Diana’s sake. Em sets down her mug, keeping her hands cupped around the warm sides.

“The house used to play hide and seek with Diana when she was little.”

Matthew tilts his head and tries to decipher her, this witch that seems so welcoming and holds so much back.

“If Diana hadn't had any gift at all that would’ve been fine. Every family of witches around here has someone like that. But her magic, it just wasn't right and kids can sense difference like hounds. She would hide in some cupboard or closet and the house would slam doors or rattle windows, room to room, to show it was looking for her.”

Em smiles, quick and broad, though her eyes remain serious.

“The house would play with her for hours. It’d shift furniture nearby, something like that, to let her know she'd been found. How she used to laugh, sweet and carefree as though her heart wasn't still cracked in two with missing her mom and dad. And she never lost that, the way she can light up with joy brighter than anything. Grief didn’t take that from her. She remained herself, happy and kind and stubborn enough to drive Sarah half to distraction and back more days than not. She remained herself,” she repeats.

Em picks up one of the black feathers off the table, twirling it back and forth between her fingers. She gives him another steady look that contains none of Sarah’s anger or distaste. But something protective, ancient and terrible, moves behind her eyes that makes the hairs at the nape of his neck stand on end.

Matthew has seen what a mother’s love is capable of more than once.

He forces himself not to tense, to stay leaning against the porch railing.

Em closes her eyes and presses a kiss into the feather. She spreads open her hand. The wind grabs the feather. With a shimmering curl of air, it’s gone.

What did you pray for? He wants to ask. But that is between her and her pagan gods.

Em plays with the tea bag string. Finally, she says, “I'm going to start breakfast. Come inside if the smell of biscuits won't bother you.”

She holds the door open for the cat to follow them but it stares back with blank indifference. Another bird chirps, closer, and the cat’s teeth give a series of rattling clicks.

She shrugs, “All right, then, suit yourself.”

Em hums while she measures out flour and dices cold butter. Other than asking if he drinks tea, she seems content to let him simply be here in her space. He watches as she uses a mug to cut the dough into rounds. She slides a sheet into the oven with smooth automatic motions as though the calm and ordinary turns of life could be drawn like a paper screen over this maelstrom of change.

Above him, Diana’s heart beats, speeding and then slowing in familiar circuits as she sleeps. The light in the room warms to stronger slants that set the stained glass pieces aflame.

With a sudden immediacy, he hears Diana give an indrawn gasp and then, after a pause, a yawn that sounds like she was in the room rather than two floors away.

Em laughs and pulls the biscuits from the oven.

“You see now what I mean? Sometimes you can hear a sigh from the attic. Other times, well, let’s say the house understands the value of a little privacy. But it always let us know when she was awake as a child and I suppose it’s never lost the habit.”

Em cuts a biscuit and drizzles it with honey that still carries the scent of wildflowers—a trace of anise from end-of-summer goldenrod and the sage-like smell of aster. She adds a cup of tea to the tray that she slides towards him for Diana.

“The house likes you well enough. Ask her about the boy she tried to sneak in once if you want to hear what happens when the house thinks otherwise.”

Matthew traps the sound deep in his chest that’s triggered by the thought of other hands touching her and retreats back upstairs. He drops their clothes on the chest at the foot of the bed and leaves the tray on a side table for her.

Diana’s past is her own and she’ll tell him in time or she won’t as she chooses.

But as he crawls back into her bed in this gabled room where the air is still tinged with the desire he drew from her open, quivering body, he kisses her wrists, one after the other.

He leans in to kiss her throat while her fingers card through his hair with a sleepy and contented slowness.

All the while, her heartbeat sounds in his ears like the toiling of a clear and solemn church bell.

Terce

(Later, dying, he’ll hear Diana’s prayer as from a terrible distance. The air will shimmer with gold. She’ll press her torn open skin against his mouth—don’t—forcing her blood onto his tongue until the clamorous speed of her heart is the only sound left on earth. She’ll curl her small light body forward, around him.

Death marriage birth he’ll think in a confused rush as his teeth sink into the skin of her neck, so fragile, so yielding.

I won’t let you—

Blood on his hands, splattered everywhere, the arterial gushes of her emptying heart—

God—save me from doing this.

But the only answer he gets from God is more blood, always blood, despite everything.)