The Amell Legacy: Transgressions

[Marian Hawke]

"Yes, yes, I ate some poisoned stew, I'm clearly fine," she says, shaking her head. Clumsily done, to say that. "I don't know, this feels pretty fucking ruined. Before I could talk to you and now it's all, who's going to walk away first and why, like watching a shipwreck in slow motion."

[Haliel Lightsong]

"Well, I won't be the one to walk away so it's up to you. The only way you ruin this is to give up." Stepping closer, she pulls Marian into a hug. "Please have hope in us. Tell me what you need to be able to talk to me again."

[Marian Hawke]

She tenses, doesn't hug Lightsong back. "I don't know. This is the most humiliating and painful-- well, it's not really, but it's up there. Do you have any idea how it feels to put yourself out there, with something you know forty percent of people are going to hate you for, and be rejected?"

[Haliel Lightsong]

Haliel pulls back just enough so they can see each other easily. "Yes. Just a few days ago, when I asked to kiss a girl I care for and wasn't good enough for some standard I don't understand and now she can't stand to even look at me anymore!"

[Marian Hawke]

"Wasn't good enough?!" Marian opens her eyes to glare at Lightsong. "The hell you weren't! You didn't want me. You didn't and don't want anything to do with me that way and I will never understand why you persist in dragging me through this hell!"

[Haliel Lightsong]

"But I do want you!" She falters then. "I- I think. I don't- I don't understand what it is that I'm not doing or am doing or- I want to be near you. I want to spend time with, just hours talking and being close. I want to hold you and feel you against me. I want you in my life."

[Marian Hawke]

"But you don't want to fuck me, Haliel! You don't want to make out with me, you don't want to touch me, you don't want to, I don't know, cover me in chocolate syrup and feel me moaning and writing beneath you! You don't think of me that way -- only men, never little Sapphic Marian! I'm the one biology did dirty, I'm the one who won't ever have a child because my brain's wired like a man's and I want you."

[Haliel Lightsong]

Haliel blushes brightly at that list of suggestions. "I- I am... curious about... about that. Well, not the chocolate, I can't stand the taste of it but- I do want to... touch you. More than I have ever wanted to... do anything like this with anyone. I..." She hesitates, looking down at her hands. 

[Marian Hawke]

"Like you were curious about kissing me?" She makes it a curse, a sneer. 

[Haliel Lightsong]

Haliel shrinks a little. "...was it really that bad?" she asks in a small voice. "I- I can try and... learn better. Study or practice... somehow?"

[Marian Hawke]

"It's not about bad, Haliel! It's about -- I'm not going to force myself on you like--"

This time, she manages to stop short. Not that it really hides what she was going to say anyway.

[Haliel Lightsong]

Force yourself on me like a rapist. Like that scummy little man in the cave. "But you wouldn't be! I am not just asking but pleading for you to- to try with me. I don't understand what I am doing wrong or missing or- or whatever, but I want this!"

[Marian Hawke]

"You want to make me happy, that's not the same thing at all," she snaps. "Alydra only knows why. I'm nothing special. But you won't let it go."

[Haliel Lightsong]

That gets a bewildered look. "Wanting you to be happy is bad? And you are very special," she adds sharply. 

[Marian Hawke]

"You shouldn't fuck someone just because they want you to! That's, that's manipulative and evil, to make someone do that. To make them think they have to fuck you to keep you around." I learned that from books too -- just like everything else in my sex life, it's purely academic.