I don't want a lot for Christmas, there's just one thing I need

[austenianhorror.livejournal.com]

*Tall and undeniably elegant, the tree dominates the room. Live fairies playfully roving within the inner branches like schools of luminescent fish, giving the evergreen an almost alien, restless quality. A dozen floating candles bob around the festive centrepiece, some having even traversed waywardly into the further reaches of the parlour. In the warm, wavering light, Victoria Higgs sits primly, half engulfed by an enormous, fir-green gown. Wine has loosened her posture and as a consequence her hands rest easily at her sides, brushing Regulus's legs. Tellingly, the adults have long left the newly-engaged couple to themselves, only their distant chatter emanating in from another room.

There's an expectant half-smile on Victoria's lips - it speaks of obligations, seasonal cheer and desire.*

Comments

[spindleform.livejournal.com]

*Regulus, though he has been sipping wine all evening as well, displays no such relaxed expectancy as the young woman beside him. In fact, he looks as though he expects to be hexed or slapped more so than anything else, sitting stiffly with his knees and ankles tight together and his back as straight as if his mother is breathing down his neck. It isn't, he has assured himself on numerous occasions with varying degrees of conviction, that he dislikes Victoria. Hardly.

It is simply that to be alone with her makes him want to stab himself once for as many years he has been alive and then lay in the gutter so that curious homeless men might poke about his wounds with grubby fingers and piqueristic misconduct.

Such a vivid scenario may be the work of the wine, but he endorses it's accuracy all the same. From an objective point of view she is acceptably lovely, with an undoubted sense of propriety and very strong, captivating and even sensible views for a woman. Her reputation is ladylike and her family decent enough and though he feels it in her stare sometimes she hasn't yet mocked him outright for anything. But he had known months ago when she had begun sitting nearer to him that he could never escape without employing the homeless men strategy, and, glancing down with wide grey eyes at the seemingly careless placement of her hand tonight, he sees just how right he was. Being near her fills him with all the wrong sorts of tension - merely judging by the tales of his peers, and he is distinctly aware even in public of horribly intimate things such as her faintly floral smell and the fact that she never stops breathing, not even for a moment out of curtsey.

He knows having a wife is just as important to him as she must feel having a husband is, and if he must take one he is glad she is decent and pleasantly fair and not filled with uneducated politics. But though he is not threatened by her mind or her status, he admits he is very much by her tongue and the strange looks she sometimes gives him that make him feel as though he has missed something entirely and instils a dread of finding out what she's hiding. So though she has done nothing he can understand enough to be wrong, he still listens to the faint sounds of talk from across the house and wishes for the first time in his life that doors would open and a crowd come in, if only their gazes would alleviate the intensity of his fiancée's.*

[austenianhorror.livejournal.com]

*Victoria, as always, appears phlegmatic to Regulus' obvious apprehension.*

I feel as though I have been depriving you of late, Regulus.

[spindleform.livejournal.com]

I...

*He tries to clear his throat before speaking but gets embarrassed by it's loudness and looks her way almost to see if she'd noticed.*

I don't see how so.

[austenianhorror.livejournal.com]

We have been engaged for more than two months and have not yet had an intimate moment.

[spindleform.livejournal.com]

*Regulus' definition of intimacy is not particularly normal or often exercised. To him, being alone together is personal enough to show he cares, and only with those quite close to him does it involve contact, non of it sexual. He knows she must mean something different than this, he is hardly stupid, but part of him is genuinely confused. They are all alone in the dimly lit room sitting so close she's still touching him a bit, and he isn't sure just how much more closeness is she expecting.*

We've been alone before.

[austenianhorror.livejournal.com]

Never quite like this.

[spindleform.livejournal.com]

*His eyes scan the room looking for some reason why this is special. It may be Christmas, but a spade is a spade to Regulus, and he's just as uncomfortable now as he has been before, holiday décor or not.*

I take it you like the holidays.

[austenianhorror.livejournal.com]

I should think most do.

[spindleform.livejournal.com]

You don't find the expectation a little high?

[austenianhorror.livejournal.com]

Social expectation is never anything less than reasonable, even during the holiday season. Only those truly deficient in character would have difficulty fulfilling basic interpersonal obligation.

[spindleform.livejournal.com]

Perhaps it depends on... whom one has in their lives to be personable with.

[austenianhorror.livejournal.com]

I should hope this is a purely hypothetical implication on your part.

[spindleform.livejournal.com]

Do you believe I have any reason to mean otherwise?

[austenianhorror.livejournal.com]

Do you?

[spindleform.livejournal.com]

*It feels like a trick question, but it's better than previous topics of conversation so he gives her a false but accidentally earnest gaze as he concocts a weak lie.*

No...

I meant it's good. That you and your family could be here this year.

[austenianhorror.livejournal.com]

It's much better that you are here with me.

*Victoria's hand now firmly, purposefully, touches his leg. Her face seems rather closer than before.*

[spindleform.livejournal.com]

Yes, well.

*He can't help by fidget slightly, though it is more likely a stifled recoil. He looks upwards toward the top of the Christmas tree instead of at her.*

Our holiday celebrations have been larger in the past. This is rather close.

[austenianhorror.livejournal.com]

This would be about when our attempts at conversation taper off to passion, Regulus.

[spindleform.livejournal.com]

Is it? -Well then perhaps you'd like a coffee, I can ask Kreacher to... if you want.

[austenianhorror.livejournal.com]

*Victoria doesn't want, she doesn't answer, instead she gets closer. Five fingertips lightly holding Reg's head in place as her lips approach.*

[spindleform.livejournal.com]

*He is sure he must have been kissed somewhere as an infant and close relatives have cornered him for a brief kiss on the cheek now and again, but the closest he has come to being kissed anything like this had been on a dusty kitchen floor with his soul at stake. Needless to say, the idea of another go at it isn't very enticing to him.

He isn't sure what to do or if lips are supposed to be wetted before this exchange or if this could possibly give him a disease, and that line of thinking does nothing but bring sores to mind. Nose crinkled in horror at his imagination, his lips are still as they meet Victoria's, and he simply watches her eyelashes in a suspended moment of awkwardly innocent union.*

[austenianhorror.livejournal.com]

*Suddenly, there's something alien in Regulus' own mouth - it isn't immediately clear what exactly it is, but unless Victoria's oral anatomy is intrinsically inhuman, it is her tongue.*

[spindleform.livejournal.com]

*He usually expects the worst, but this is entirely without precedence as far as he's concerned and is about as shocking as if Victoria had spontaneously dissolved or turned into bugs. Of course he has seen this happening, nearly impossible as it is to live through ones teenage years without bearing witness to some public displays of affection, but he had not thought it would be someone's tongue in his mouth or that it would feel as strange as that. The moment their tongues touch he snatches both her hands into his - not at all violently, but with no attempt to hide his haste - and leans back to look at her with the widest eyes.*

[austenianhorror.livejournal.com]

*Victoria smirks, looking far too pleased with herself.*

Is there a problem?

[spindleform.livejournal.com]

Ah...

[austenianhorror.livejournal.com]

I enjoyed that very much, Regulus.

[spindleform.livejournal.com]

Did you.

[austenianhorror.livejournal.com]

*Her face is suddenly deathly serious.*

I should hope you felt the same.

[spindleform.livejournal.com]

Why... wouldn't I.

[austenianhorror.livejournal.com]

Precisely. There should be no reason whatsoever that you would be unwilling to repeat the experience on command.

[spindleform.livejournal.com]

So not just on holidays.

[austenianhorror.livejournal.com]

We are engaged now. This is the sort of activity we must engage in at all opportune moments.

[spindleform.livejournal.com]

Of course.

Well then, I will... tell you, when I come across them.

[austenianhorror.livejournal.com]

As will I - and you can trust a woman's eye is far more discerning in these matters.

[spindleform.livejournal.com]

My mother never mentioned that.