for ellie

[daughterofawolf]

dated to whenever

It shouldn't, after all these months, but it still feels nerve-wrackingly exciting when, in the middle of several hours of intermittent texting about nothing at all, Ellie asks Eponine if she'd like to come over. (She agrees readily, of course. She was never not going to agree, and she thinks Ellie knows that, too: but the asking is part of the game, isn't it?)

Walking out to the countryside isn't taxing for her, but it does take a little bit, and it makes Eponine think about how much she'd enjoyed riding Lisbeth's motorcycle. For whatever reason, cars still unnerve her -- she even rather likes riding in Jamie's car and Ellie's truck well enough, and she likes looking at Sam's Impala, but she still feels as though she wouldn't like to be responsible for that much weight and size. But the motorcycle had felt powerful and lithe even though she knows it's also more dangerous.

If she gets tired of this walk one day, perhaps she'll save up for one. It does feel nice, though, the city fading into trees and fields that, raised in the smog of Paris and most of her friends living downtown in Darrow, she associates with these visits more than anything else.

She skips up the steps to knock on the door, and calls, with a smirk after a moment, "Open up, it's the police," with a laugh in her tone.

Comments

[and_survive]

She didn't do much. She had a good, peaceful home, and she made enough to get by, and that should be good enough. It was, right? It was what everyone wanted. The urge to run into a fire or whatever was probably the wrong one.

Still, every peaceful day that went by, she wondered a little. And then she distracted herself. Not that that's all Eponine was, that was ridiculous. But among other things she was a definite improvement on staring at the walls, strumming nonsense or drawing the same lake again.

"Oh, shit," she said, pitching to be heard at the door even as she headed over. "Let me just hide all my drugs." She opened the door just enough to frame her head. "You got a warrant?"

[daughterofawolf]

Eponine laughs as Ellie leans out the door. "Hmm, well, I've got this," she says and leans forward to give her a quick, almost surreptitious kiss. "I think that warrants some further investigation," she teases.

It's good. It feels good. It feels natural, even, in this moment, which in itself is a thing that Eponine doesn't quite understand. There's much about whatever-it-is-that-they-are that's completely foreign to her, that she feels like shouldn't be but is.

But there are a few assumptions she can lean on: that kisses are an excellent choice, that terrible wordplay of the kind she's quick with makes Ellie laugh, and she loves being able to make Ellie laugh, and something in her chest relaxes when they're with each other.

It's working so far.

[and_survive]

"Well, that'll get you in the door," Ellie said, smiling. And flushing, just a little. She thought maybe that was dumb, to still be doing that, but it was nice, too.

She swung the door open, moving with it so she could gesture Eponine inside. She'd... sort of cleaned. She'd done a pass. It wasn't as much of a disaster as it could be.

"Did you walk out? I swear, you're making me feel lazy."

[daughterofawolf]

"Good," Eponine says with a little grin, and decides -- not for the first time -- that she likes making Ellie flush even more than she likes making her laugh, though if they were to go head to head it'd be a close call.

"I walked," she admits, with a laugh. "And I don't think anyone could call you lazy," she adds, poking Ellie's ribs with a grin. "It did have me thinking about a motorcycle, about halfway, though. I only have about three cars I like, and I would be terrified to drive one, I think," she laughs, "but a motorcycle sounds like fun."

She smirks and leans on a chair back. Ellie's house doesn't strike her as disastrous at all. In Paris, they'd basically lived in squalor, or without a home at all, and the aristocrats her father liked to target seemed to value houses and possessions that looked like they'd never been touched. The only thing that this sort of messiness suggests to her is that the house and its items are actually used. It's nice.

"Can you imagine me on one of those things? Just skidding to a stop like in the movies." She grins.

[and_survive]

Ellie took a moment to imagine this.

Ellie took an additional moment to imagine this, with some elaboration involving motorcycle helmets and tumbles of hair.

"Yeah, I guess you'd look alr- wait wait wait," she said, holding up her hands. "You're terrified to drive a car but a motorcycle is safe? That makes no sense."

[daughterofawolf]

Eponine smirks at the slightly flustered blink Ellie gives her, coming around the chair with a very low-key attempt at the sort of saunter she imagines someone hopping off a motorcycle to say hello to the girl they're kissing might employ. She's not sure she's exactly good at flirting with someone she actually likes, but it hasn't gone poorly so far.

Her coy smile turns into a laugh when Ellie stops her. "I know, I know," she grants, "that's what everyone says, but just listen. You've ridden a horse before, yes? You have a sense of the length and the shape of it, you can feel how it's reacting, here and here." She gives her a small smile, reaching to run her hands up Ellie's forearms and, watching her reaction carefully, down along the outside of her thighs.

"And it's dangerous, it is. A horse can throw you or drag you, too, sometimes even if you've done nothing wrong, for it has its own mind. But it's lithe, and quick, and can get through things, it's not enormous and it won't trap you if it falls. And sure, you can't urge a motorcycle forward with your knees, or trust it to think," she admits, "but you make it go or stop depending on what you do with your hands, and your feet a bit, and when you lean it leans, like a part of you."

[and_survive]

She was pretty sure Eponine had presented a case for why motorcycles were less frightening than cars. She'd been with it through the horses part, she had ridden horses. She'd kind of lost the thread of it somewhere around her thighs, though.

"...right," she said, swallowing. "Hands and thighs. Gotcha."

[daughterofawolf]

That's just about the opposite of Ellie objecting to that touch, and Eponine laughs, delighted at the way her eyes go a little wide.

"How have you managed this long, going googly eyed over every girl who says thighs around you," she teases, and slides her hands back up more slowly to tuck her fingers into Ellie's front pockets and tug her closer.

[and_survive]

"Hey. Hey," Ellie protested, although it was tough to get any sort of appropriate offence into her voice when being tugged closer by the front of her jeans. "There was a whole- you know what you did."

[daughterofawolf]

"Mm, I suppose. I can be good," she offers, laughing and raising both hands away, though Ellie's close enough to her now that they're just sort of sandwiched between them, at either side of Ellie's ribs. She can feel the prickle of air between them. Eponine tips her head up to meet green eyes with hazel. "If you'd rather."

It's good, this teasing; it creeps into a warm, exciting push and pull that prickles and pools.

Behind it, she's enough experience to know that if Ellie did say she just wanted to talk, or if Eponine hadn't come here with this in mind, they would change tacks, either of them, and do something else. It's -- well, it's new, and she's still learning how to put her weight on it -- and trying not to overthink whether it might end -- but on days like today, it makes the whole thing so much easier.

[and_survive]

"I mean..." Ellie said, in tones of protest and scandal, both at the existence of this blatant teasing and the possibility of it stopping. She caught Eponine's raised, hovering hands with her own, although she stopped short of putting them back on her, which meant that now they were both just sort of hovering.

"What's 'being good,' here? Just so we're clear."

[daughterofawolf]

Eponine grins, flattening her hands out against Ellie's, more because it feels good, her hands in Ellie's, than to tease. A kind of caught she likes.

She has to blink for a moment to keep track of her own through line. "You said you know what you did," she says, as if this were completely common sense, "so I thought I could be less...distracting. Keep my hands to myself, and be a little more proper."

Eponine chews on the inside of her lip, smirking a little. "But we get to make things up, don't we? What do you think would be 'good'?"