The game is still the game, though they work for themselves now. They dance through the strands, outrunning Garden and Agency both, tweaking things where they can (an interrupted kiss, peaches instead of plums, an encouragement here and a discouragement there; a myriad of little touches that ripple and reverberate through the strands) towards the goal of a future where they can exist.
It’s long decades into the play before they finally find themselves in the same place at the same time (they’re often in the same place at different times, leaving notes that span centuries or seconds; a plethora of words disguised as seeds and sparrows and sun-dappled sidewalks), and Blue’s been here for years—they might both excel, but Blue’s got the Garden’s patience grown into her more deeply than Red, and this assignment (which she gave herself; the thrill never gets old, pleasure bleeding into every cell as she denies herself what she craves in service of the deeper dream they share) requires that long game.
Blue’s a lady’s maid, not for the sake of a noblewoman but for the need to lay long lines of gossip and greed among the servants, and let that take its time filtering into the upper crust. (She wonders, sometimes, what the crust is made of. It’s not bread, shaped by luck and pressure and hardened by steam; it might be salt, encrusting itself on anything and everything and sparkling in the sun, making itself look more important despite being no different from its crystalline or dissolved brethren.) The role is simple, despite the precautions she’d needed to take when implanting herself in this role to begin with; the danger has passed now that Strand 843 has integrated her into its whole.
When she feels Red’s footsteps dance across the thread, her heart beats faster, remembering the last note Red had sent (in the smallest imperfections of a rug’s weave, which Blue had undone as she’d read it).
My dear Periwinkle-in-time,
I long for you. I play your notes back, melodies singing across my skin in glissandos of electric impulses soaring through my brain, but it is not the same.
Do you dream a (not-so) little dream of me, Blue? Because I dream of you.
I dream of feeling your clever fingers, patient and sure upon my skin. (Once! Unknowing, it is not the same, my love; a test is a test is a tease, and while you must have felt as scorched as I, it is not enough.) I dream of swallowing not your missives but your moans. If you do not make such sounds, you are welcome to take mine; I know and cherish them as I touch myself, thinking of you, wanting to know what you would choose to do to me, with me.
Is this too forward? We have confessed our love, cried it to the scattered stars and the deepest ocean cores, swallowed each other wholly and in part, transformed ourselves together and transform the world in our image, and yet I pause in speaking of this final intimacy which we have yet to breach: That of physical, personal, touch.
I do not think it is for lack of desire; it is, most ironically, for lack of time.
The rest of the words I hold in my heart I wish to whisper into your ears with my own voice, mark into your skin with my fingers, let you read in the staccato of my breath.
I’m tired of waiting. So be prepared, my kingfisher; I’ve found a time and place to cross our paths.
Yours,
Red
Blue can’t respond to it—no Garden agents providing cover, no way of ensuring that Red will be the only one to see the message—but she’s been thinking about it ever since. (She’d been thinking about it since Red had mentioned enjoying sex alongside eating in one of their early letters, if she’s being honest.)
She doesn’t think about sex much, usually. It’s part of life, to be sure, and she’s borne and raised children for the Garden’s goals, but that doesn’t mean she thinks about sex much. But in the past months (nearly a year!) since Red conjured vivid visions with her words, Blue’s been thinking about it more nights than not, and sometimes even allowing wandering fingers to explore her body, wondering how Red thought of consuming her. Whether she would be vicious or soft or both by turn, and where they would start in the long mapping of their shifting shapes.
This night, she’s trying to keep herself in her role, pinning up hair and helping wrap layer upon layer of cloth around a noblewoman’s curves. She’s trying to make sure her hands are gentle and sure and her eyes properly downcast, because she needs to come to the ball and have her idle chatter with the other servants. But it’s hard, Blue finds, to pretend she’s naught but a well-trained maid when there’s an electric hum in the air: Not a storm gathering, but the perfect harmonics of her love’s body moving through the strand, almost close enough to touch.
It’s not a surprise to help her lady out of her carriage and turn to see a map in the ripples of wind across a curtain. There and gone in an instant, and Blue’s heart bloomed. She almost missed her cue, missed being sent off as her lady joined the slow trickle into the hall. Blue murmured her courtesies and ducked out, making her way to the servants’ waiting area, as she must. The flowers set as decorations at each doorway were full-bloomed red roses sweet enough to catch her nose, with a bright array of variously-colored flowers and foliage complementing them.
Blue followed the purple-bloomed irises hidden amongst the riot of color, eschewing all plans she had previously made. This was a long game. She could keep the rumors up later. She couldn’t miss Red, not after—
Her skin buzzed, truly buzzed, when she opened the final door (framed with small vases of rosehips and periwinkles and purple clover) and saw Red for the first time (it wasn’t the first, but it was the first when they were both aware of the other’s presence, which was close enough). Earth-rich skin, silver-flecked hair shining in the lamplight, a smile blinding as the moon, and confident hands already reaching towards her.
Blue falls towards Red with an inevitable gravity, sure as a flower turning towards the sun. Red catches her, a phosphor-bright laugh already blooming in her eyes and turning them the changeable blue-green of the ocean waves. “I love you,” she says, and each word strikes Blue’s ears with the glorious certainty of the moon’s cycle; repeating, year after year and changing slightly over the fullness of millennia but still beautiful and perfect in each iteration. “I love you,” Red repeats, and her fingers fasten in Blue’s clothes and pull her close to a softness and warmth Blue has felt echoes of in other bodies across the years, but none which hum against her skin and root into her heart like mycelium awoken by a new rain.
“I love you,” Red says a third time, but it’s not with her voice anymore. It’s in the way their lips meet and press against each other, the tangle of Red’s fingers in Blue’s hair (she had spent long minutes making sure it was bound up, yet Red moved beneath all the careful weaves in a second; she always knew where the holes in Blue’s defences would be), in the unvoiced breaths escaping their throats. Blue lets the kiss stay soft for as long as she can stand, holding herself back and enjoying the budding pleasure flooding her. But she was not built for softness alone, and neither was Red.
Blue breaks the kiss but keeps her hand firmly on the nape of Red’s neck. The bones are not wholly bone, and she does not worry about breaking them. Red smiles, and Blue kicks the door she had entered through; she does not want witnesses to the wholeness of what they can be when unleashed. There is a pause, the most minimal held breath, and then Blue moves, pushing this all-too-human body to its limit as she forces Red towards the far wall, bodies shifting and moving together. Blue knows Red’s letting this happen, because she’s dancing back with fluid grace, hips grinding against Blue’s as she advances.
When Red’s back presses into the wall, Blue inhales the oxidizing smell that lingers near her skin and savours the hint of lightning for a moment before biting into the soft curve where her neck turns into her shoulder. Her teeth are a code, musical notes disambiguated with the strokes of her fingers across Red’s side and the curve of her stomach. “I love you,” she says with every fiber of her body, and Red sighs, gasps, moans as Blue nuzzles her way up Red’s throat and fastens herself into the thin skin beneath her ear. “I want you,” she whispers in the brush of her fingers across Red’s clothes.
“I am here,” Red’s heart says in response, and her legs open as an invitation Blue is happy to take. Red’s fingers dig into her scalp, tug at her hair, and the delicious pain pulsing down Blue’s spine is another message, about where Red wants her mouth and what she wants it to be doing.
Blue laughs and kisses her way down Red’s front, lingering over her nipples while her hands are busy finding the hem of Red’s dress and lifting it. Her fingers find the gift Red had left her: No undergarments, nothing else between Blue’s body and Red’s. Blue looks up and tries to let Red see the flush of desire in her face, wants her to hear the beating of her heart and smell the bursting arousal she feels at how clear Red was making it that she had come here for her and her alone.
Selfishness was not permitted to those who served the Garden and the Agency. Their lives were entangled wholly with their faction’s, their actions chosen to craft the greatest effect for the whole. But between them, Red and Blue had carved out space for selfishness one letter at a time, and here was the result. They might be on the run, they might have the whole of time fighting against them, but for this one small slice of time—infinitesimal on a galactic scale, yet it felt like it could last forever in this moment—they can have the most selfish of all desires: To care only about each other, and the way they meet and compel and complete each other.
Red strokes her hair softly, and then presses Blue’s face further down, against the warmth and wet of her genitals. Blue loses herself in their taste and feel, and in the moaning exhalations Red had promised and delivered upon. Her own arousal pulses in time with her heartbeat and Red’s, building despite a lack of contact or even the promise thereof. Blue barely thinks of it, with the way every press of her tongue reveals another subtle shift in Red that holds paragraphs of meaning about how long Red has been preparing for this encounter.
She tastes tart blueberries and sharp blue-of-the-heaven and cleansing juniper, smells toxic false-indigo and feels its burn in the tingling of her tongue. A heady collection of blues, collected from a hundred or more places, and distilled by Red’s body into a tonic meant for Blue alone. Its meaning is clear as Blue presses closer, nuzzles against Red’s sex-sticky pubic hair to take the message even deeper into herself: Red has consumed her, has chosen her, has taken Blue into her body in every way she can when they are apart.
Red shudders into her pleasure’s peak and Blue’s drunk on it, on the taste of her and the ripple of her muscles against Blue’s face, surrounding her and engulfing her until there’s nothing left of the world: There’s just Red; the inside of her eyelids and the blood in her body, the fire roaring through her with want and need, the vermillion shades of tongues and bruises and the deepest most intimate orifices, the overused truth of the heart.
Blue’s been Red for almost as long as she’s been alive, and as Red shoves her onto the ground and crawls on top of her with a fierce kiss that tastes blood-Red, Blue’s dizzy with her. She opens herself, lets Red touch her unresisting, presses herself into Red’s demanding hands. Red’s fingers are on her nipples, pulling at them and making them into sharp peaks as her teeth tear into ribs, worrying at the meat there. Blue’s happy to be Red’s meal, to feed her and become her even more surely than they already had in saving each other—and themselves; what’s the difference, anymore?
The first touch of Red’s thigh between her legs, finally giving her something to press against, is almost more than Blue can bear. She holds back after the first instinctual jerk towards Red, wanting to make Red work for her pleasure. It’s painful, forcing herself to stay against the hard wooden floor instead of reaching out to take Red into her arms, but the growl in Red’s throat is worth it. The way Red tears at her (more carefully that the word deserves; her clothing is everywhere but it is not ripped, just shoved aside in the search for skin) is worth it.
Red’s fingers are clever, when they reach down to take her in hand. Blue’s always known that, but Red plays her, fingers butterfly-light in contrast to the weight of her body and the sharpness of her teeth drawing purple bruise-blooms upon her breasts. Blue keens. She hadn’t known she could make that sound, didn’t know anyone could make her beg, but Red’s doing it. Blue’s fingers must be marking Red’s back in turn as she scrabbles to gain a hold, to bring Red closer, but Red’s patient right up until she isn’t anymore.
When Red finally surges close, a wave crashing down upon her, mouth taking hers as her fingers finally press and hold, Blue melts.
There’s no room for anything but the tense and release of her muscles, the endorphins and hormones flooding her brain. She’s covered in sweat and sticky with sweat and she simply presses closer to Red, mingling their fluids and their bodies and their breaths because there’s nowhere she’s ever wanted to be as much as right with Red, sharing this moment in any way she can. It’s the pleasure of a river flowing across her, of the sunshine on new leaves, of the first wingbeat of flight; heady and familiar but brought to new heights by the perfection of circumstance.
Blue holds Red close and says I love you with each pulse of her body around Red’s, and Red murmurs it back in the twist of her fingers and the edge of her teeth.
Finally, when their bodies come to rest, Blue kisses Red again. It’s soft, and it’s a question. Red smiles against her and says, in binary tapped against her heart, “As long as you can spare.”
It is not very long.
It is long enough.