2020-09-12 - Come Clean

"This is entirely self-serving, you did smell like a trash fire." Lilith breathes out a quiet sigh after she's murmured with an attempt at play, though with how sober her big blue eyes are when she looks at him, she can't quite manage it for a change. Byron didn't just come home smelling like smoke and a fire, no. It had that dead burnt meat and fat oily smell to it that's wrong, she knows what it's like from-- well, catching people and things on fire, this is just the amplified concentrate of charred human. She probably shouldn't know this, but she does.

With the lemon juice bottle rising up in preparation, her other hand goes to hold at his forehead in initial shielding of the man's eyes, lifting on tiptoes, "Tip your head back. You don't want this in your eyes and I'm not mean enough to squirt into them." Despite what she believed a few hours ago... after the woman says it, she has to somewhat steel her general bearing to stay quiet and reserved with her calm, focusing on Byron.

"More nightmare fuel or relatively painless dead body experience?"

"Thanks. That's the sweetest thing that you said to me...all day." Byron jokes as they had pleasant conversations prior to this mess. "I was about to message and invite you to the bonfire festivities too, since we never had the chance to celebrate. A pleasant summer night ruined." By now, his hair and body is already drenched by the shower spray coming from all sides, but he takes a step out from beneath the overhead shower head so that the lemon juice doesn't automatically rinse out with the rush of water. He could tilt his head back, but that would be uncomfortable to a degree, so instead, he lowers himself down before Lilith, his gaze at navel level as that's what he's absently staring at, her flat midsection, one of his hands hold onto her hip while the opposite arm rests across his knee.

"It was... " He remembers it in his mind, his own imagination running wild at the moment, yet it's something that he's hesitant to say. But he does. "Looking down at the corpse in the fire, it's like I could see myself there for a moment. But everything's going strange now."

Lilith can't help but be oddly... relieved by what Byron details, because it's not how she imagined him dead. No... not imagined. That's not the way she believed she killed him. So if this problem they're having is happening the same way and to the same degrees with both of them, unbidden and ready to strike at any turn, at least their imagery isn't matching. It's certainly not pleasant to hear him talk about, she almost shudders just with the very idea of his smooth skin charring and peeling back with flame, all those tiny hairs and bristles and locks burnt away, the man he is, rendered all to bone and ash. It's visceral even though it wasn't her vision and the woman's guts twist some just imagining it.

The way she believed him to be killed, the way she truly believed him dead, it involved a broken spine, a kitchen knife, and blood all over the tile.

Grazing her bottom lip with her teeth, she cups her hand to catch any lemon juice run off in dribbling from his already soaked head of dark hair. Then once Lilith has a good saturation of citrus into those wet locks, she runs the hand on his forehead upward to start kneading and working the fragrant juice through, meeting up with her other hand. When she's finished, though, she reaches her hand into the spray to start directing and splashing some of it in rinse over his hair before leaning slightly to get the shampoo man-combo to work with next.

While the woman's body moves with the leaning and motion at standing hover, Byron might notice her own breath pulling her stomach somewhat concave and heaving her chest some while water runs down. She's taking a giant breath of composure, and after she's had that breath, she starts to lather Byron's hair while he's still easily accessible, voice exhaled in a quiet rush of wondering with concern, "... did you believe it? When things got strange, did you not just see it, but believe it?"

Down on one knee, Byron's chin lowered, he allows droplets of water to splash down from his bangs and to drip down his face as his mind goes back to that night. Was he really thinking that the body in the fire was his own? He could imagine it, though, feeling the searing burn at his flesh, being burned alive rather than cremated after death. Then he feels the coolness of the lemon juice spreading throughout his scalp and through his hair and he instinctively tilts his head back, giving him a full view of Lilith's breasts, but he looks beyond that, to view what he can of her features from this angle. Her fingers felt good through his hair.

He was concerned that this revelation would upset her in some way. Byron didn't say who he believed did it, the burning. His burning. But with everything that they are currently going through, the rumors and catching glimpses of images in his mind just upon waking up from that terrible Dream, it's not hard to figure out who the murderer may be. Even if he believes he knows who it is in his mind.

With the cascading water now flushing out shampoo and lemon juice, he lets his eyes close.

"It's... difficult to say. If that was my body on the pyre, or if my body was ever burned on a pyre, why am I alive to remember it happening? These thoughts, it's like I can feel it happening, I can smell the burned flesh and feel it on my skin. It's hard not to believe sometimes, you know. But no... that was a flash of something. I shook it off quickly enough."

"Good. Not... good that you saw it, but good that you were able to fight it off, the imagery." Lilith says quietly, playing her thumbs and fingertips through some of the sudsing in Byron's hair, features schooled to pretty neutral calm laced with natural concern, she can't quite control that in the sound of her voice either. With one hand still in his hair then, her other drops, soapy and sliding at his shoulderblade and upper back to draw him in against her stomach in tight hug and squeeze while his eyes are closed. It's an odd moment for a hug, mid-soap-hazard and hair wash, but she needs so badly to feel him solid right then, she doesn't much think about it.

After sniffling and swallowing down thickly, Lilith releases enough to start directing the spray and cupping some water collections to rinse over Byron's head again, watching as the soap runs down in streaks to mingle in his beard before eventually getting washed away too, "You got confused. I got confused too." There's a thick pause and Lilith doesn't want to elaborate, she really, really doesn't. But they probably should talk about this when it happens because they need to know what's real. But in the moment... as the woman herself learned tonight, sometimes that might not be possible until the terrible moment of dangerous deceit is passed.

"You were in the kitchen floor with your spine broken at an angle. There was a kitchen knife in your chest and lots of blood on the tile."

Clearly, it wasn't a true image that she's laying out for Byron, but for LILITH... for a good span of minutes and then some confusing time afterwards she was emotional, disoriented, and alone with no real concept of how to reconcile the sheer way she BELIEVED she killed Byron. If it had lasted much longer and she was alone, needing to punish herself for what she believed she did...

Thankfully, she broke other things, not herself.

After a shudder that's sudden, Lilith exhales a rush of shaky air and continues rinsing Byron's hair while the shower conceals unbidden tears that start rolling all over again.

"I believed it. I don't know how long. I thought I killed you. I thought you were gone because you were dead and that I did it. ...I didn't want to... be alive if I did that."

The pull of her arms forces Byron's other leg to drop, positioning himself into a full kneel when his face in drawn in close against her slick, wet flesh. Here, he wraps his arms around her hips, her thighs as he leans in rest. He didn't need this embrace as much as Lilith did. While having thoughts and memories of being burned alive is horrific, the fear and shock of it had long passed. At least, for now. He may not be looking up at her face, but Byron can hear it in her voice, the sounds of her sniffles being muffled, slightly, by the spray of the water. And he remembers the state she was in when they'd found her on the couch.

The imagery that she conjures up when she tells him of how she saw him, the way that his body was mangled and all the blood, hearing her explain this makes the grip that he has on her tighten, something which she may be able to sense. Did he remember those things too? It was all so familiar somehow, the more that he tries to search his mind for the answers to this, the more that he feels that he should just ignore that nagging feeling.

"Lilith..." He pulls back long enough to tilt his head in the hopes to gauge her emotions once more through her expression, that right now, is misted with water from the shower. Then he starts to move and slowly draws himself up to stand, his hands traveling the length of her body in the process until they lower to rest at the small of her back. Leaning in to nuzzle against her hair, then her cheek with the side of his own bristled face, he murmurs, "None of that happened, we know it. Or else I wouldn't be here now, right?" Though from what they learned from the Thorne House, strange things are afoot. Was the Byron that he saw, the burned one, was he buried in that backyard? Or the one with the broken spine and the knife through his chest?

Tilting his head to the side, one of his hands raises to lift her chin gently, "But you would never do that, would you? You're stronger than that." What he's touching upon is what she used to worry about as a teenager, losing control of her powers. He has no idea what played out between the two of them where she ended up murdering him. Before she even gets the chance to answer, his lips move to press against hers, "You're stronger than that." He quietly repeats.

"It was so real..." Lilith tells Byron in murmur that's so earnest it's close to cracking her voice off before she can get anything else out. She's trying real hard to control her expression, but her bottom lip is doing a pitiful little shiver and tremble with the effort. She can't work out much more in ways to explain how real it was, because real is just... real. She believed it, it didn't matter what was because in those horribly agonizing moments, that was her reality. And she can't get anything else out anyway, much to her relief, because there's no way to stress it in a way with words that makes it real while he's standing right here holding her in the shower spray.

With her face tipping upward, guided by that lifting bid of her chin, Lilith exhales in a shaking rush right into Byron's mouth. That tremble of her lips persists through the first second or two of the kiss before it turns tact entirely. He's real and alive and she's hungry for feeling how alive he is, how solid, she wants him to kiss away all her pain, all his own fear and the fear of days before, the fear she knows will be in the days that come. Her hands slip with water skimming slide over his sides and back on their way around to grip under the man's shoulderblades with near painful dig of fingertips and nails.

The cat. What if the cat hadn't been outside the door, yowling and shoving his paw under to distract her non-stop until... until...

"I couldn't kill you." The woman has to breath it out shallowly with promise to herself and Byron, right from her very bones, her air is stunted in lip mesh as they are, the woman suddenly unwilling to break as if he might disappear when she does. Her wet head tilts and she's kissing Byron more intensely, more livewire and deeply, "Help me believe we're safe. I don't care if it's a lie, just... tell me something to hold onto if it happens again. Please. My mind isn't as strong as yours."

"I know, Lilith. I know that it felt real." Byron wants her to believe that he fully understands. And in truth, he does. He sees flashes of his death in his own mind every so often since they returned from the pool. Though they may be minor inconveniences , something easy to put out of mind, there was something insistent about these thoughts. While they may not always grip at him, there are moments where he can feel the onset of... something; a something that usually doesn't manifest, but it's similar to that nagging feeling that something is odd.

He starts with a gentle kiss, then another, nuzzling his mouth against her own. In this closeness, despite the dampness on her cheeks due to the shower, he can see the redness of her eyes, remnants of her unwashed tears and this is what fires up his intensity, parting his lips take her mouth, feeling the spray of water dripping down onto his tongue amidst his own heat. This was their moment; a moment that reminds Byron that he's so very much alive and one to remind Lilith of the same in him. Feeling her nails digging into the flesh of his back helps to stir up more of this necessary passion and what he said earlier is something he meant. He wished that he could take all over Lilith's pain away.

"I'll always be there, Lilith." The hand that once tilted her chin upward now brushes against her wet locks at the side of her face as he looks with intensity into her eyes. "Whatever They try to do to us, we'll work to overcome it. For now, let's not waste this moment." This is followed by another kiss, softer than what the previous one had built up to. He knows that Bennie's showering and getting changed, so they didn't have the whole evening to themselves, but for right now, he didn't want to Lilith go.

For a moment, just a moment, Lilith gets the idea that she's kissing his ghost and she's simply gone mad-- it's vaguely surreal to believe he was murdered at her hand so solidly after kissing him goodbye that morning, even more surreal to be kissing him now even though they've kissed so many hundreds of times. And for a moment, just a moment, she wonders if this is how Byron felt kissing Lilith alive after the Valentine's Day Dream had her dead at his hands, the weird dreamlike state of everything feeling right again, a blinding contrast to the horrors in their life that dark forces construct.

"I'll always be there, Lilith."

Not a ghost, not a ghost at all. He's too warm, she feels too much of him, the details that make her stomach turn over and over with so many different kinds of butterflies, so many colors of memory and sentiment and sensation. As one of her hands trails back around onto his side, her fingers pressure with tipping over his ribs, once smashed, once repaired by her will. Her fingers dust to the subtly tangible and cut line of his flat stomach down low at one side, that place she likes to kiss that tickles him just right when she leans with intimate brushing skim of hair.

Her kiss stays hot and heavy before tapering off and turning into quick and shallow breath, some of the trauma bled out of her eyes to be replaced with that vaguely wild-eyed intense look she often has for his solid one. If he's an obsessive stalker, she's a sheer fanatic, especially when she looks like this... it's close to reverence. He's right. She would never kill him. She is stronger than that, there can be no wavering about it. (Can she keep this resolve, though? With his eyes on her like this, she thinks she can.)

Her hand splays out in wandering path, down low over his cut stomach, curling to squeeze at the top of the man's thigh, her other hand still at his shoulderblade with rub and pet where her nails dug in, "How long do we get to make this moment?"

The hand at her hair continues to stroke down her wet locks; after reaching a certain point, he pulls it up once more to start the motion all over again in a comforting manner. Byron makes no indication that he noticed her tears. There's not kissing at nor rubbing a thumb against her cheek to brush her tears away. What he does do is to compliment her by his gaze, which is held at length when staring deeply into her eyes. The way that her hands begin to explore his own body gives him some peace of mind.

How long did they have? Turning towards the door as if listening for any signs of movement coming from the hallway or living room, the dark-haired man returns his gaze to Lilith. "As long as we need." He knows that Bennie will understand, especially after the scene they both had walked in. Slowly, the hand stroking at her hair begins to drift down the length of her arm just as he leans in close to nuzzle his bearded chin against the side of her face near her temple, his thoughts on Alexander's words.

"He said that we had two memories. We need to remind ourselves of that, no matter how hard it might be. Or how convincing the false memory is." It's a thought that is easily put aside, feeling that touch to his thigh, something which stirs something hot within him. 'Mmmm', he breathes out heavily. Did she close the bedroom door? No matter, the master bath was closed shut. Despite the horrors that they'd both either seen (even if it was within their mind) or witnessed in some burning pyre, Byron lets a small smile creep across his lips, withdrawing briefly just so he can smile down on her. The hand at her arm is tugged to pull her firmly against him before releasing her entirely, moving to press against her hip.

As long as we need is what he told her.

His lips, brushing against her wet hair murmurs, "I know what I need right now."