begmetwice | Apartment Above Dite's

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Apartment Above Dite's | Tuesday Morning

Irene, despite what you might think, was not really all about Valentine's Day herself in a personal capacity. It was yet another holiday that tended to bring out her sentimental side, and as everyone knew, that was better squashed than embraced.

So, while she had sent flowers yesterday, she hadn't been upset to not receive any. That was just how things seemed to be going here in her new life, and that was okay. (Now, would she continue that opinion when she heard about the whole forge situation? Probably not.)

But what she had had show up at her door had been unexpected, utterly delightful, and was still asleep here in Irene's bed with her. There were a variety of scarves in a trail from the front door to the bedroom, having been removed from their strategic arrangement on Margo's body rather quickly after her arrival. (Irene was still a little impressed, honestly, with the scarf placement alone. No pins! Magic was, as always, the best.)

It had shaped up to be an all right Valentine's Day. And now, there was a little post-Valentine's cuddling. Irene would totally blame it on being asleep if anyone got prickly about it, though.

[for the lady who is mentioned in bed with her, and some SP because ugh Tuesday.]

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It was Irene’s similar views on sentimentality that had left Margo confident that she could do this at all. Valentine’s Day was a minefield if you were a nice girl just looking to get laid and not in the market for a relationship. Fuck that.

Or rather, fuck her, which Irene had. Followed by some great damn sleep. And now some not-too-bad waking up.

You had to say one thing about sleeping with women: they were nice and soft.

She made a pitiful little noise as consciousness started to settle in beyond that thought. "'S too early," she mumbled.

She had no idea what time it was. That wasn't a magician superpower, unlike the scarves.

"Shh," Irene soothed, not even opening her eyes as she lazily draped an arm around Margo. "It doesn't have to be."

She, at least, didn't have anywhere to be today. There was no 'too early' in that case.

"Oh right," Margo mumbled, snuggling into her arm with absolutely no shame whatsoever. "No crisises. Go us."

None that they knew of, anyway.

"We're the best," Irene decided drowsily, based on pretty much nothing other than the facts at hand: namely, the night prior. She snugged her arm a little tighter around Margo before pressing a sleepy kiss to the other woman's shoulder.

"Someone's feeling cuddly today," Margo teased, sleep rendering her voice even lower. "You're comfortable."

"You're easy to be comfortable with," Irene replied quietly, and it was true in more ways than one. "Don't go telling people I'm a secret cuddler, though. I've a reputation."

Not really.

And it helped that the cuddling had been precipitated by, you know. You-showed-up-at-my-door-in-scarves sex.

"I respect a woman's choice to shape her image into whatever deadly weapon she wants, don't worry," Margo said, patting Irene's hand, because it was closest. "I'm a good feminist."

"You are good at lots of things," Irene remarked with a content little sigh. "Feminism ranking amongst them, sure."

"Yeah, I am."

Margo's eyes were closed again. The world was easier to deal with that way. "Maybe we can just get delivery later," she sighed.

The thought of getting up was, obviously, torture.

"Oh, I fully endorse not having to get out of this bed all day, if you don't have other plans," Irene assured her, now stretching a leg languidly against Margo's. It was just comfortable here, and there was a beautiful, sexy woman in her bed. Life didn't get a lot better, honestly. "And even then, I bet I could change your mind."

A beautiful, sexy woman who was very glad she didn't manage to lose her naptime eye patch last night. Nothing sexy about an empty eye socket.

(A pirate queen would argue with her about that, some day.)

"Are you trying to convince me to try so I can see your worst?" Margo asked.

"And show off my whole bag of tricks already?" Irene teased. "Never. But I'm wholly prepared."

She stretched, contentedly burrowing into her pillows. "And so is my bed, I think. It's the one with the compelling arguments, really."

"It is pretty soft," Margo allowed. She took the excuse to roll over and faceplant in said pillows. "The fuck is this, Egyptian cotton?"

"Of course. Thousand count," Irene remarked, reaching a hand over to gently run it over Margo's hair. "You spend a third of your life asleep if you're doing it right; might as well make sure it's in the best fabrics possible."

Made sense, given that that was how Irene spent her waking hours, too.

"God I really need to bring you with me to Fillory in my purse to give a good talking to the staff," Margo muttered into the pillow.

The noise she was making over Irene's hand on her hair was absolutely not that of a happy cat, how dare you.

Of course not. The fact that Irene responded with a little more pressure, trailing her nails lightly though Margo's hair and down along her shoulder, was incidental, and not at all prompted by that noise.

"Sounds like they don't know how to treat their rulers right." Irene really could teach everyone there a thing or two, in that department.

"You don't know the half of it," Margo groaned for, uh. Decent reasons. "You really don't."

"It hasn't sounded like the nicest gig," Irene noted easily, as she trailed light, affectionate fingertips along Margo's back. "But I hadn't realized that Fillorian royal amenities were questionable along with the monsters and mind games."

"The pillows they fluff with magic are nice," Margo allowed. "But absolute fucking uncomfortable hell in the middle of a magic brownout."

She stretched out a lazy arm until the hand attached to it found something of Irene's to touch. Oh, hi, nice.

"Hello, there," Irene murmured, shifting just a bit closer into that touch. "Give me regular un-magicked goose down any day, in that case. Not that I've been in a magical brownout, but bed with decent pillows seems like a good place to wait one out."

She'd gone through at least one electrical blackout that way, anyway. A+, would recommend.

"It's nice when it's working," Margo sighed. "Not so much when a psycho has been drinking the magic supply."

It was too early to like, get into something with intent, or anything. But if Irene was willing to let her have a little bit of a grope, she was gonna take that opportunity.

Please. When the groping party was as appealing as Margo, opportunities were more than easy to give. And Irene was kind of into this lazy, fumbly morning thing.

"Your psychopath sounds worse than most," she offered, scooting so she could turn the fingertips on Margo's back to a whole, lightly-stroking hand.

"I could tell you just how bad, but you'd lose your appetite," Margo said, with a soft snort, and shifted so she could see what she was groping properly.

"I've a stronger stomach than you might think," Irene replied, idly trailing one foot lightly along Margo's leg. "But I'm also a marvelous distraction, if you'd rather not."

See how she was leaning in for a light, lazy kiss? Exactly.

Margo hummed something happy and lazy, her other hand sliding up to cover Irene's cheek. "Well, I wasn't there," she said, "But the first time any of us met the Beast, he paralyzed everyone in the classroom, choked the teacher to death by crushing his trachea with magic, and ripped the Dean's eyes out."

Well, she hadn't been kidding. "What an entrance," Irene remarked with a little lift of her brows and the slightest nuzzle into Margo's hand. "What did he want? Or is he more of an agent of chaos sort?"

It was sort of impossible not to draw conclusions, and Irene found herself wondering if the Beast was also responsible for Margo's missing eye.

"He wanted to own Fillory," Margo said. It was hard, she reflected, to really mentally go back there when she was in bed with a hot chick. That was good. "This children's author who turned out to be a fucked-up kiddy fiddler messed him up real bad when he was young, and Fillory rejected him because he wasn't 'fun' anymore, 'cause that's the kind of shit Fillory did. So the Beast decided that he was the only one who got to have Fillory, actually. Started cutting off all the ways in."

"Oh, he's a human?" Irene asked, actually a little surprised by that. She'd kind of thought he was a literal beast. "And he stole from this spring thing that funds all the magic so he got strong enough to fuck it all up?"

"Basically, yeah," Margo said. "Like a fucked up magical Shulkster. In a suit. Surrounded by moths."

"Like a real horror movie villain," Irene remarked softly, both intrigued and sympathetic. "But obviously he didn't succeed."

Given that, you know, Margo and her compatriots had, indeed, found a way in.

"Tell me something awful happened to him."

"We fuckin' fell on our asses trying to kill him," Margo snorted. She sighed, dropping her head back onto the pillow. "Fucking idiot stepped in and ran off with him. Eventually we got our second shot, but it--"

She shook her head.

"We had this spell, called the Rhinemann Ultra. It was supposed to be able to kill him, but it took a lot of magic. More than we had. The first time around, Alice had to down god-spooge from one of the Fillorian gods to get the power up we needed."

Irene's distaste was obvious, though she struggled to get past it. "I suppose if you need a charge, that's a rather direct way to get it."

But poor Alice, all the same. There was something more than distasteful to Irene about that, but considering she didn't know Alice, her sympathy there was still limited. "But what about the second time?"

"Well, Alice ran out of god-power, but Alice is... fucking psycho sometimes," Margo said. For lack of a better word.

(More than sometimes.)

"The Beast hurt Quentin, so she just... did the spell anyway. There's this thing that happens when magicians dig into their magic too far, when they let it overwhelm them. The spell didn't work, but it pushed her over the edge. Turned her into a Niffin, a thing that's just-- pure magic. Ripped the Beast open just to watch the light in his eyes dye out."

Margo made a few complicated faces up towards the ceiling.

There was a not-small part of Irene who thought she would have likely chosen the same approach, given the indignities Alice had suffered in the name of defeating this monster.

However. Those were some complicated faces, and Irene reached out to gently trace her fingertips along Margo's shoulder -- just a light reminder of where she was, who wasn't here.

"Good girl," she said softly, her voice low. "What happens to Niffins, once they're not...magicians anymore?"

It didn't sound like this had likely worked out for the other queen of Fillory.

"They stay creatures of pure magic," Margo said, her gaze drifting back towards Irene at the touch of her fingers. "That's all they care about. As far as I know, Niffin Alice spent her time fucking around with magic without giving a shit about who or what she hurt, but I don't actually know the details. Niffins are dangerous. And psycho."

"So she doesn't -- didn't? -- have the capacity to realize what she was doing?" Irene prompted, frowning. "What a terrible sacrifice to have forced upon you, though. And Fillory."

"Whatever morality she had as a human just got ripped right outta her by the magic," Margo agreed. She pressed her fingers against her eyepatch, rubbing the empty socket. "Sad, I guess. Mostly just fucking horrific."

"Seems like there's been a lot of that," Irene remarked, watching the movement and rolling onto her stomach to cross her arms under herself. "Sadness and loss and the whole thing's just wrapped in horror. Is the Beast responsible for that, too?"

She lightly gestured with her chin towards Margo's eyepatch, which she had wanted to ask about for months. She at least knew that it seemed to be a recent casualty, given the picture Eliot had shown her awhile back.

"Nah," Margo said, lifting her hand gingerly. She stared at her fingertips for a moment. "That one's on the fucking fairies. They don't let you leave their realm without giving up a body part. Psychopaths all around."

"What on earth are they going to do with someone else's eye?" There wasn't any real heat behind Irene's question; more just quiet, arm's-length concern. "Did you get anything good out of...visiting the fairy realm, at least?"

The things Fandom made her say.

Margo snorted. "Don't make fairy deals," she said. "They'll always find a way of biting you in the ass."

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Apartment Above Dite's | Tuesday Morning

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