Well, this ended up being about six times longer than it needed to be. >_< AS USUAL, AUGH. I need to start seriously doing 50sentences prompts, because my inability to say things succinctly is getting irritating. And shit, but I do suck at endings something awful.
Orrin is a spaz, but he also tends to be very logical and methodical in his thought processes, if not in his actions. (He lacks organizational skills something fierce.) And he suffers from the affliction of incurable curiosity, which will undoubtedly get him into terrible trouble at some point in the future.
He knows Silverlock as Rien, and has a hard time thinking of him by any other name.
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"What are you doing?" Orrin squinted blearily at Rien, and tried to figure out where the clock had landed the night before.
"Nothing, go back to sleep." The other man sat beside the bed with a cup of coffee balanced on one knee and a sketchpad on the other.
"That doesn't look like nothing." He rubbed his eyes until his vision cleared and leaned over the edge of the bed to get a better look at the sketchpad. "What're you drawing?"
Rien looked vaguely embarrassed, and tilted the sketchpad out of Orrin's view. "It's just a sketch," he said, taking a sip of his coffee. "I picked up the habit a few centuries ago, but art has never been my strong suit."
"Come on, let me see." Orrin put on his best pleading expression; the only person he'd met who was consistently immune to it was Eleth, but Eleth didn't count as a whole person, anyway.
Rien thwacked him upside the head with the sketchpad and tossed it on the bed. "Fine, brat. But I'm no artist, so don't complain if you look like a cow. I'm making more coffee."
"Bitch," Orrin said affectionately. He picked up the sketchpad and began flipping through it. "Put the kettle on for tea? And make some pancakes?"
"Does this look like a bed and breakfast to you? Make your own godsdamned pancakes," Rien shouted from the kitchen.
Orrin snorted. Rien was an excellent artist- not professional quality, perhaps, but Orrin recognized his own face easily among the dozens of sketches in the book. There were several other pictures of him, in various states of unconsciousness, including one of him asleep in the lab, drooling on his notes. "Charming," he muttered. There were sketches of other people, most of whom he didn't recognize.
Rien sauntered back into the bedroom with his coffee in one hand and Orrin's tea in the other. Orrin took the tea with a grateful smile.
"These are all pretty good, you know. Maybe you should try drawing people who are awake to appreciate it."
"People's faces are more honest in sleep." Rien settled back into his chair and propped his feet on the bed. "And the majority of the people I draw wouldn't appreciate it."
"Huh. Really?"
"Security risk. And some of my older sketches are of people who were very self conscious."
"Mm. So, who's this?" She was young- younger than him, definitely- but her face was twisted in weariness.
"Anna DeLavrey."
"You had sex with Anna DeLavrey?" He couldn't decide if he was surprised or horrified.
"No. I spent several years as her body guard, however." Rien looked thoughtful. "That was done the night her mother died."
"Oh." He looked at the picture again. Anna DeLavrey was responsible for his soul, in a way, and though she'd been dead for years, he still felt grateful to her. "And this?"
"Zizi Menelek. He's an old friend, and the artist who did the linework on my face."
"You sleep with him?"
"On occasion." Rien shrugged. "I don't keep a log of my bedroom conquests in my sketchbooks, Orrin. It's more a record of the people I care about than anything else."
"Isn't that dangerous?"
"When they're not in my hands, they're in a locked box in my workroom."
Orrin still had yet to see the inside of Rien's workroom; there were enough magical wards on the door to give him a headache if he thought about it for too long. "Fair enough." He tilted his head to the side. "You have other pictures, then?"
Rien smiled mysteriously. "You're going to be late for class, you know."
"What?" He caught sight of the clock, lying on its side by one of the windows. "Fuck! Why didn't you warn me?" He scrambled out of bed, gulping the rest of his tea in the process and only spilling some of it on his chest. "This is the third time this month- my students are going to riot. Crap, crap, crap- where are my pants?"
"Your clothes are in the bathroom, on the counter, as usual." Rien leaned back in his chair, a serene expression on his face. "There's toast on the kitchen table, and your briefcase is by the door."
Orrin hurried to get dressed, any further thoughts of sketchbooks banished from his mind.
---
A week later; he'd managed to be late to class only one day, which was possibly a new record. His students had taken to showing up even later than he did, and as a result, the entire class was about a chapter behind schedule. If they all failed the final, he would probably have a lynch mob on his hands, and his department might take away his fellowship grant.
Well, that was fairly unlikely. But if he pissed off his advisors too much, they might downgrade his housing options. And he liked his apartment, for all that he didn't see the inside of it very often these days. It was optimally located for him to steal food out of Faraz's fridge.
Of course, Rien had plenty of space if it came to that, but Orrin wasn't sure he wanted to move in with the other man. It would mean putting a formal name to their arrangement, and he wasn't quite willing to do that yet. (He could hear Jay in the back of his head, using his most condescending therapist voice. "How does it really make you feel, Orrin?")
He kicked open the door to Rien's apartment, feeling slightly irritable, and ignored the sound of Jay's voice in the back of his head.
"Bad day?"
"Not really. Class is behind, as usual; they all blame me and not their own unwillingness to read the fucking textbook, as usual. What the hells are you doing?" He dropped his briefcase by the door, kicked off his shoes, and stepped across the mess Rien had made across the carpet, heading towards the kitchen.
"Indulging in nostalgia. I hadn't realized I'd collected so many sketchbooks over the years."
"Seriously?" Orrin found some cheese in the fridge and wandered back into the living room, gnawing absently. "I thought a filing cabinet attacked you or something."
Rien was leaning against the couch, surrounded by notebooks and photo albums and hundreds of sheets of heavy drawing paper, napkins, bits of newsprint, parchment, and what might have been vellum. Each page glittered with aether: preservation and protection castings.
"I thought you might like to see some of them." Rien's smile was distant. "Since you were so fascinated last week."
"Sure." Orrin sat on the edge of the couch and picked up a piece of parchment. "How much energy does it take to maintain these castings?" He turned it over and rubbed at it with a greasy finger; the spell shimmered, and the stain crumbled away.
Rien snorted. "Engineer."
Orrin blinked owlishly. "What? Some of these are hundreds of years old, right? And they're all in really good condition, and I bet you could set them on fire and they wouldn't even get singed. And there's a lot of paper here- the energy expenditure has to be enormous. They don't use spells this thorough in the library except in the classified archives." He pulled out his glasses. "You must have some sort of aether-dampening field working, too, because there's no way a spell this powerful would be so quiet."
A crumpled up ball of paper hit him on the nose. "I'm almost tempted to make you figure it out for yourself, but you'd probably try to deconstruct it, and that wouldn't be healthy for you or my sketches." Rien pinched the bridge of his nose and sighed heavily. "Do you want me to spoil it for you?"
"No! That takes all of the fun out of it." Orrin lit the tip of his finger on fire and held the paper over the flame. The casting shimmered, and the flame went out. "That's so cool."
"I'm glad you're amused." Rien began sorting through the papers, arranging them in neat stacks. "The casting uses some magicrafting techniques. I'll introduce you to Bellicose and Prufrock at some point, and they can explain the basics of crafting to you. Who knows, you might even have some talent for it."
"That would be awesome." Curiosity temporarily sated, Orrin turned the sketch over and adjusted his glasses. "So, who is this?" The sketch was old, if the date in the corner was to be believed. It was done with an amateur's hand, but lovingly- the young woman slept with a smile on her face.
"Sarila An'astri. My sister." Rien was looking out the window, away from Orrin.
Orrin's eyes widened. The date in the corner wasn't lying, then- and the woman was young, which meant Rien had been young as well. "How old were you?"
"Twenty three. I gave that to her when it was finished; it was found among her possessions after her death. Her husband's children were kind enough to let me keep it."
"She's hot." Orrin grinned.
"The most beautiful woman in the world," Rien agreed, grinning back. "She was the only sister from my age group to survive her indenture. The others killed themselves when they left the House, along with two of my brothers."
He set the sketch down, carefully. "That's...kind of terrible."
"Emotional enslavement usually is."
Orrin had nothing to say to that; slavery had been abolished for centuries, and the dwindling half elf population no longer bothered with the old traditions. Their god was dead, swallowed by the tower, and none of the Kin alive now remembered what it meant to wear a collar- none of them, except Rien.
He picked up another sketch; it was easy to forget, sometimes, exactly how old Rien was. "Who's this?" It was another very old sketch, though not quite as old as the first. A scar cut across the woman's right eye, and she slept with tension carving lines into her forehead.
"Ayanna DeLavrey. She put an end to the Fourth Era Riftwar by killing her brother and the Guildmaster of the Assassins' Guild."
"I've read about her- Eleth has some sort of weird historical crush on her."
Rien laughed. "Eleth has too much free time, but he certainly does have good taste. She was an amazing woman, and I loved her dearly- more than I should have, really, but she was...kind enough to not hold that against me. It's because of her that I've kept so close to the DeLavreys over the years."
Her features were strong, and she was older, probably in her fifties, but she'd clearly been quite beautiful once. "She reminds me of someone." He couldn't quite say why- there was nothing about her face that was familiar, but she reminded him of someone nonetheless.
Rien laughed again, but without humor. "Does she, now?" Mocking, slightly bitter.
"Ass," Orrin muttered. He hated when Rien did that- that irritating, I-know-something-you-don't-know tone of voice and smile. He set the sketch of the Lady DeLavrey aside and picked up another. It was from around the same time as the other two, of a man with scars across his mouth and nose. Orrin stared at the picture. This was familiar, too, and he had no idea why.
"He never knew I drew him." Rien nudged a stack of sketches towards Orrin, all of the same man. He was older in many of them, though curiously lacking the scars in some. "Towards the end, I filled an entire book with him, and I never told him, never showed him any of them."
Orrin looked through the stack of pages- there were hundreds of drawings, and couldn't shake the feeling he knew this face. "Who was he?"
"Someone else I loved more than I should have. It's something of a recurring theme in my life." Rueful, then sly. "He reminds you of someone, too, doesn't he?"
"Yeah." Orrin set the sketches aside and looked at Rien searchingly. "You're never going to tell me, are you?"
He shook his head. "You don't need to know."
"That isn't your choice to make." It angered him. It fucking pissed him off, actually, because he hated it when people knew things he didn't know, hated when information was witheld.
"It is, actually- possession is nine tenths of ownership, and that applies to information as well as anything else. If I told you who you were, you would live every moment of your life wondering if your thoughts or actions were your own, or those of someone who died well before you were born." He reached up and pulled Orrin's glasses from his face. "You are yourself, Orrin. Not any of them." He gestured to the stacks of paper. "And you might be able to believe that now, if you let yourself. If I tell you which of these faces might have been yours once, you never will."
"That isn't fair- I have the right to know." It wasn't just morbid curiosity, and it wasn't just because of Rien- even though he knew- knew, no matter what Rien said- that if it weren't for his soul, he wouldn't be in this- relationship, or whatever it was. He needed to know, because he could remember the Time Before, and he still woke up at night gasping, afraid that it was gone, that the bleakness would return.
He owed someone's memory a debt that he might never be able to repay. And if he had learned one thing in his life, it was to pay his debts.
Rien shook his head. "Jaden agrees with me on this- knowing would do you more harm than good." He took Orrin's chin and pulled him down so their faces were close. "And I am being selfish, Orrin. If I tell you where your soul came from, you would leave. I'm rather fond of you, for any number of completely unrelated reasons."
The kiss was less of an attempt to manipulate him than he expected.
"Please, just trust me- and if not me, trust Jaden."
"If I promised to stay, and if I told you I would leave if you didn't tell me-"
"It wouldn't change anything," Rien said gravely. "I'm selfish, but I'm not that selfish. Knowing would do you more harm than good."
Orrin leaned closer, so their foreheads touched. He liked his life. He liked his job, he liked his friends- he even liked his therapist. And he liked this- arrangement. Relationship. Whatever it was. He liked raiding Rien's kitchen and he liked the fantastic sex and he liked pancakes at three in the morning and waking up next to someone who remembered where he'd put his things the night before.
He still wanted to know the truth about his soul. But he wasn't a fool. "I trust you."
"Thank you." Rien sounded relieved- and Orrin wondered if he could push hard enough, if the other man would cave eventually. It was something to think about.
He sat back on the couch and picked up another sketch, this one of a woman with scaly shadows on her face and some sort of headdress or jewelry with a large cabochon stone centered on her forehead. It was dated about a hundred years after the others. "Who's this?"
Rien crossed his arms over Orrin's knees and leaned to get a better look. "Ah, that lovely lady is Her Holiness Manikarnika, Avatar of Venani. Brilliant woman, one of the most well read scholars of her time. Also one of the most amazingly flexible people I've ever met, though I do attribute that to her being half snake."
"Ugh. Snake? Seriously?" Orrin shuddered. "Scales and slithering- that's disgusting. Seriously disgusting."
Rien stared at him for a moment, then burst into laughter.
"Oh, screw you." The next sketch was of two people, an almost completely nondescript man and a fae-looking woman. "Who are they?"
"That's Lady Foxbird Torkehaav, City Walker and Guildmaster of the Assassins' Guild, with a lieutenant of the City Watch. I never could remember his name- I don't think she could, half the time, either." He picked up another stack of papers. "I did draw her awake several times, at her insistance. She was always particularly skilled at getting what she wanted."
Orrin knew he was slow sometimes, but he usually figured things out eventually. The fact that Lady Torkehaav's face was familiar to him was irrelevant. "Tell me more about her?" He held out the sketch.
Rien smiled all the time; he said it was a good way to put people off guard and that he was, by nature, a cheerful person. Orrin thought this was bullshit, generally. He'd gotten to know Rien well enough to tell when his smiles were hollow and when they were true, or rather, not quite as empty. The hollow, untrustworthy sort far, far out numbered the others.
He was smiling at Orrin now- a smile that barely reached his mouth, but one that lingered in the corners of his eyes. It was, Orrin realized, probably the first truly honest expression he'd ever seen on the other man's face.
