RP:I Won't Chase You
Part of the The God of Undeath Arc
Summary: Lanlan stays in House D’Artes after Gevurah quarantines her shrine and almost loses her life to Caluss. Because he is wanted by House D’Artes after Daath D’Artes destroyed his house and put a hit on his head, Lanlan must be under disguise when moving about House D’Artes. The charade is fun for one day, but by the second day wears thin. He and Gevurah have yet another big fight that threatens to end their relationship, but this time they are discovered by Izzerin who was spying at Gevurah’s door. Lanlan and Gevurha punish Izzerin, then Gevurah, in a gesture of good faith and love for Lanlan, determines to lift the hit from Lanlan’s head despite the weak political position that doing so would put her in. It works! The drow couple makes up. Gevurah goes about her day, when she is visited by Kasyr...
House D’Artes
Lanlan :: After waking up the morning after Caluss almost changed Gevurah, Lanlan felt needed by her. It was a feeling he yearned for without even realizing it, and he was ready to indulge her forever. He accompanied her throughout the day, hobbling awkwardly, enthusiastically wearing his disguise. Because he loved her! And besides, what else was he going to do here? He could play along as her nameless, worthless minion. And he appreciated how she toned down the insults for his sake. Izzerin must've been extremely jealous, just like all her other servants. Lanlan should've felt so proud. By the end of the day, he was happy to return to her bedroom. He instantly discarded the disguise and embraced her, shedding all of his worldly concerns with his clothes. They paled in comparison to the closeness he felt when they were intertwined. When he woke up again the next day, however, he felt cheated. They spent all day tending to her affairs, and a few hours at night tending to each other. When her servants came in the morning to dress her, he didn't disguise himself this time. He sighed in exasperation, threw a blanket over his face, and waited for them to leave. "I want to go somewhere," he says when they're gone. His voice is a little muffled by the blanket, but he's loud enough.
Gevurah laughingly tells Lanlan he doesn’t have to hobble around, but he insists and she rolls her eyes playfully at his antics. He’s not like the other drow, no. She’s relieved when they’re alone, though she wonders how long this arrangement could last - and if she even wants it to last in this form. He answers her question the following morning when her staff leave. “Go where?” She flips through a journal on her desk, her back to him. She’s listening but already beginning the next day. Her life is full where his is not.
Lanlan tosses the blanket off and starts to get dressed. He steps lazily over to her to try to arouse some interest in what she's doing, but truth be told he's wrapped up in the dread of starting the day here again. "Somewhere I don't have to pretend to be someone else." Maybe he isn't fully aware of why this even bothers him, he accepted it as the reality of the circumstances too quickly. He leans his back against her desk and one of his hands 'happens' to slide over her journal while he stares at the ceiling.
Gevurah steels herself against the drama of Lanlan’s statement. “You don’t have to follow me around pretending to be my servant, Lanlan,” she says. “That was something you wanted to do.” She sighs exasperatedly as Lanlan slides a hand over her journal like a cat demanding attention by parking itself between its owners face and a book. “Lan...” She slides her hands up his pecs, over his shoulders, around the back of his neck. “Where do you want to go?” She steps in close to him and scans his face. He’s more handsome now than he used to be.
Lanlan stares back with a perplexed grin. "I don't? I admit I was amusing myself for a while. But if I don't have to disguise myself..." He feels his way down her sides and around her back and slowly eases his body against hers. "...If I don't have to disguise myself I can stay here for as long as you want." He could've felt fine leaving it at that, but felt like pursuing a lead. "Especially since you divorced Daath. Or so I'm told?"
Gevurah smirks at Lanlan’s game. “You know what I meant,” she murmurs as Lanlan presses himself against her. “Disguise yourself when you come and go. ...But you can stay here as long as you want.” Her smirk vanishes when Lanlan brings up Daath. “How long were you going to sit on that?” She pulls away slowly and picks up her journal. “I have to go.”
Lanlan feels his grin waiver. He doesn't want it to but it does. "Only until I believed it," he says. They both know his sources can't be as reliable as they once were. He purses his lips a little realizing he annoyed her. Which was what he thought he wanted! But not if it means she would leave. "Wait, wait, wait," he says as he scurries between her and the door and holds her hands. "Let's go somewhere! Do you really want to stay here after all that's happened? We should go...to...Zaneer! Home away from home. And we might be able to find something else to use against Caluss. Vakmatharas seems a little neutered by his offspring doesn't he?"
Gevurah ‘s jaw clenches when Lanlan describes Vakmatharas as neutered. She forces a thin smile that fails to brighten her eyes. “You may be right, though what do you hope to find in Zaneer? I’m also expecting Kasyr soon.” Had she mentioned her ally to Lanlan? “I wrote to him yesterday and asked him to come precisely to help with the Caluss situation.” Presumably behind Lanlan’s back, in a brief moment when they were apart, she reached out to an ally she presumed could be useful.
Lanlan can see that she's lost some of her patience with him now, which meant he was succeeding. "I didn't know you knew Kasyr," he says, ignoring her question about Zaneer since he didn't actually have an answer. Then the other part of her statement hit him. "You wrote to him yesterday? Haha, when?" His smile was withering fast. Not only did she feel the need to enlist another man's help, proving that he wasn't enough, but she did it in secret? "No doubt he'll be wearing some kind of disguise as well, eh," he says, knowing it isn't true. "Because he isn't even an elf. I don't know what he is."
Gevurah can feel Lanlan’s ego prick and she shakes her head as he yet again measures himself up against beings he has no business measuring himself up against. A bit cruelly she lays out how things are and will continue to be. “Yes, I wrote to him. He is an ally, and no he doesn’t have to wear a disguise, because he has a permanent room in this very estate for when he visits the Underdark. He’s a vampire revenant.” (Well…) “He was here the day we exterminated the Razurath in Trist’oth.” Lan wasn’t! “And he secured a dragon for the battle in Venturil to destroy the saurian civilization.” Where was Lan? “Why wouldn’t I write to him?” she asks a little sharply. “We’re facing one of the greatest existential threats to our planet, and you’re worried about how you measure up against Kasyr?”
Lanlan weathers the entire thing soberly. Or tries to. "In a matter of days, you changed your mind back and forth so many times I can't tell if you even have one. It could be just a single coin flipping in there making all your decisions." He makes a show of trying to listen, and there is indeed the far off sound of a metallic tink, and a subtle drawn out twang that suddenly stops as the penny apparently lands! Magic noise. "No! I wasn't. I was...!" Somewhere he doesn't want to talk about, and isn't even certain of. "I supplied you with the -living- razurath you needed for that spell. It wasn't easy, with Quintessa ignoring that important little fact, and killing almost all of them. And! He secured the dragon?" Lanlan scoffs and takes a step back. "He led me to the dragon. -I- negotiated with it, and -I- grounded it when it was persuaded so effectively that it wanted to kill them that very day." Suddenly Lanlan realizes this all came back to their fundamental problem. "Write to him! Write to anyone you think could help, it's important. But I don't factor into any of your plans. I'm a non-asset to you." Once these were questions, now they were statements as obvious in truth as the color of her eyes, an annoying mean shade of red.
Gevurah scowls at Lanlan’s outburst and glares more pointedly when he insults her mind. “Careful, Lan, lest I change my mind about you.” But he hardly hears her and presses on with his rant. “I’ve never said you were useless! You said you were useless! You’re the one who is obsessed with being the most powerful person I know! I’ve not given you that goal.” She did not know about his role in taming the dragon, but says nothing about it. He may be telling the whole truth or a fabricated exaggeration. He’s prone to hyperbole, and the facts don’t matter. This argument isn’t about the dragon. “You factor into all of my plans, Lanlan, but I can’t share them with you without risking this very argument! You’re threatened by anyone I call an ally who is more powerful than you in any way.” She pauses but before he can speak bites back, “What exactly have I changed my mind about?” Outside, in the hall, Izzerin presses an ear to the door. Lanlan’s cover is already blown.
Lanlan hears her, takes a step back incredulously, and shakes his head. Just then, he realized he had a lot more agency than he realized and he didn't need Gevurah's permission for anything. "I don't think you know what you said, actually. But I think I'm the only one who can change your mind. This is exactly why-" He bites his tongue and shakes his head, realizing he was about to out himself as a hypocrite. This is why he can't include her in -his- plans. Instead of saying that, he brushes past her and moves to the door. "You changed your mind about me. Obviously. You want me in your life, and then you don't. I'm too weak. Then I'm fine." In this moment, the things holding him back seem tiny, the consequences of outing himself, manageable. She would agree after the fact. He shoves the door open sans disguise. "What the-" Some resistance bounces the door back, so he shoves again, and this time the door slams into Izzerin's head and swings open. He's recoiling on the floor. Lanlan looks back at Gevurah with wildness in his eyes, but no words. A black aura seeps out of his pores, wavering angrily like a stubborn flame against a breeze. Lanlan descends on Izzerin while the aura stretches and forms six solid insectoid limbs, tapered at the end with jagged ridges. As Lanlan grabs a leg and heaves him toward Gevurah's bedroom, the serrated exoskeletons of his false limbs are buried into Izzerin's torso. Now what he was going to do? He lifts an illusionary leg out of Izzerin and lets it hover above his head coiled to strike, then looks at Gevurah expectantly.
Gevurah shakes her head vehemently as Lanlan continues to get it all wrong. “I’ve never not wanted you in my life. You didn’t want me in your life!” she hisses the reminder of their biggest argument to date in Zaneerh, the one that almost ended them. “I reached out to you! Because I wanted you in my life. How dare you.” Is he even listening? He’s leaving again, as he always does when his back is pressed against the wall and he’s forced to recognize his destructive impulses. Gevurah growls at Izzerin, her loyal servant who grew too fond of Daath and spies at her door to see who has replaced her ex-husband. As Lanlan holds Izzerin up by the leg, Gevurah blasts her servant with a quick spell that sends waves of pain racking through his nerves, wave after wave for a minute. “Don’t kill him,” she says to Lanlan over Izzerin’s screams. “Release him.” Assuming Lanlan does, Gevurah force blasts Izzerin out of the room, then slams the door closed and stands between Lanlan and the door. Whatever fallout comes from this, she’ll deal with it later. The Razurath destroyed much of her city, including some of her strongest enemies. A weakened city has only become all the easier for Gevurah to squeeze in her fist. But before she can deal with any fallout from this, she must deal with that which is dearest to her heart and most apt to undo her. “Are you leaving again?” she says irritably. “So that I’ll chase you? Is that what you need to feel that your d*** is big? That I chase you? Don’t test me. If you keep leaving, then one day I’ll take you at your word and stop chasing you.”
Lanlan doesn't release him immediately, taking time to observe him writhing in pain. He didn't expect her to do that. His illusion fails in an instant, decaying into a swirl of dust and then nothing. He looks at her dumbly after her words echo in his head for a minute and abruptly releases his grip on Izzerin's leg. Gevurah blasts him out of the room and slams the door and he continues to look at her in full surprise, and something else. As Gevurah talks he moves in slowly, creeping step by step. He winces, blinks, trying to remember what he was thinking before she attacked her servant. Then before she can finish her sentence he moves quicker and plants a kiss on her lips, and then another one and before he even realizes what he's doing he has his hands around her waist pulling her against him. Then he just stares unblinking with his eyes darting to hers, then her lips, her hands, and back to her eyes.
Gevurah is surprised by his kiss, but can’t resist his lust, nor does she want to resist. She kisses him back, then again, until she’s breathless and pinned beneath his ravenous look. Suddenly she tugs on his shirt and yanks on her corset’s lacing to wriggle out of the clothes her staff spent so much time tying her into. Wherever she had to be, it can wait a little bit longer. Piece by piece their clothing falls to the floor. They return to that which they fully understand about each other: their bodies. Again she represses whatever resentments and disappointments and apprehensions she has about Lanlan. Whenever he grabs her, kisses her, repositions her, it all suddenly makes so much sense in an utterly senseless, intoxicating way. But she really does have somewhere to be. Their coupling is energetic, heated, and cathartic. The sheets remain undisturbed throughout, but the maid will discover that the bookshelf needs to be tidied (some books and trinkets must be picked up off the floor) and the reading chair must be slid back into its proper place. When they’re spent, she kisses Lanlan lazily and whispers against his lips, “I need to go.” She kisses him again. “Don’t leave. Don’t summon a disguise. I’ll fix it.” Another kiss. “I need to go.” She foregoes the corset and opts for a long robelike gown. She’s the matron. Whatever she wears is good enough.