Thread: Paradise Isle  (Fades & Good Girls)

Fuck, fuck fuck, it's real. The hissing whisper turned excitable in a way that was impossible even for that small gathering to decide whether it was the result of sudden terror, overwhelming excitement, absolute fascination, abrupt cold feet, or most likely, an ever shimmering combination of all four wrapped up in one panicking burst of wonder that was accompanied by a clutching of the curtains so tight that fingers had to be gently grabbed by other slim digits to keep one of their number from spoiling anything by causing the stage drapes to come crashing down. Did you think that of all things was an exaggeration? a hush asked with fair incredulity. Some things just aren't real until they're ..... real . the third quiet ethereally considered, and then, almost as one, three lower lips found themselves pinched by teeth in terrified, wondering anticipation. And La Touche Finale had only just announced itself with its glowing presence on the stage, the only glow that could have hoped to have overshadowed the eyes and the smile of the actress who had decided to dedicate her life to the dedication of her living in service of another. But this was not the clear-eyed shine of submission realized on a grand stage. This was the angry glow of possession given wrought-iron existence. Emilia did not so much as try to look up in his direction when the hush fell quite literally over the crowd, only to give way to their murmuring, questioning, indignant awe-dacity in the fact of what was so clearly about to happen. The heat of the moment was entirely mythological in her head. It was impossible to feel five hundred degrees from across the stage, from so small a source. It was impossible to measure months of time required to truly heal, when it was the heat that was going to renew in the first place. She remained beatific in her regard of the gathered journalists, pundits, and presshounds who were close enough to see the first prickle of a nervous glow making its way across the regal pale of Emilia's brow. Her smile quivered, but did not falter while they prattled on about their realizations of what the piece de resistance of the contract signing was to be. She had had time to come to grips with this, even if now in the moment, she might as well have had no time at all. The tap, tap, tap of his shoes seemed to be happening in slow motion compared to her heartbeat. Rather than the captive hummingbird in her rib cage, this was the steady promise of the true signing of their accord, and each thrum of his well-to-do footwear across the floorboards may as well have lanced straight up from where her knees kissed the same. Throb, throb, throb went her cunt, in proper time. Flip, flip, flip went her stomach in confounding concert with the same. And then like that, she was his in his hand, and in his lips, absolutely. There was something about the entire display of it, the entire display of her being entirely on display beneath and against him before the crowd, he impeccably dressed and carefully controlled in the winding of his fingers through her hair, that only reinforced the correctness of her decision. She showed all that she had had for him, and he would show as much as he liked in return, and she had no expectation or desire for those two things to be in league with one another. She wasn't his equal she didn't desire to be. She was simply his . And maybe there was no need for that to be more properly sealed than in the feeling of that first real kiss, her lips soft, pliant, and warm to his own. She could tell him as much without a single word, the possession he had over his new possession. But what she couldn't share was the deep truth of what she was giving up and what it meant to her to the rest of the world He would know, and he was the only one who needed to know. Except of course, that the entire world knowing was kind of part of the bloody point, wasn't it? She exhaled sharp and shuddering when he broke from the kiss and whispered the last things she would ever hear as a free woman the last thing she needed to hear. He was already proud of her . For someone who, in slow self-realization and reckless desires built up over years and months and the prior weeks that had all lead to Emilia realizing what it was she truly needed, imagined that nothing more than his desires and his needs and his decisions would ever again matter in her life, that promise was the sort of thing that could shut the mind down in euphoric bliss that made it so much easier to endure any cruelty that could have come after. I mean, it could . Maybe not so much when one was having her tit cooked. She tried, oh good god she tried, to put on the stiff upper lip that Britain was so good for. It didn't even last for as long as it took for the iron to get close to her skin, the heat of it feeling like she'd already gotten far too close to the broiler when reaching in to recover some bubbling dish from inside the oven. A flit of utter panic danced against her eyelashes and then her vision went entirely white. Her throat clenched up with such severity that when her lips snapped open of their own accord, no sound came out but for a squeak of tightly controlled air, and her hands slammed down so quickly that the only purchase she could find with them was somewhere that might have been his ankle? The pain was so immediately intense, so white-hot incredulously blinding, that she didn't transcend it with a kiss and warm feelings. She transcended it because her body almost went into shock. And that transcendent sensation nearly threw her into whatever distant light awaited her, only for the literally searing agony of her skin to snap her back into her body thanks to the residual curve of her chest squeezing back up against the iron to sweetly kiss the side of it, while the flesh around the point of contact gamely broiled itself pink in the siphoning heat of her blackening brand. And it was that yank back into her own body which snapped Emilia's tear-filled eyes open to a proper vision all over again, and somehow, she realized that sound in the air was in fact her own scream. She stopped it as quickly as she could, which was to say, with monumental effort and a wailing, sobbing exhalation that she could scarcely calm or conduct with any sort of grace. She was still largely only thanks to the luck of her momentary shock and the knowledge that anything else could have been so much worse if she wiggled or jiggled too much, and left herself not only in smoldering pain, but with a misshapen promise forever staring back up at her when she looked down. Trying to control her breathing was impossible. She kicked the stage with her bare heels hard enough to worry about damage to her feet accompanying the damage to her sizzling skin. And she didn't even realize it was over when the iron kissed the stage and considered leaving a smoldering streak in its wake, even if it would have needed to be much hotter to blacken the boards the same way it had blackened the broad. It kept burning. It didn't stop burning just because he had taken it off, and that was a brand new fear to erupt through her guileless, wet breaths and wide eyes. What if it just never did? What if she not only bore the brand for the rest of her life, but felt it searing into her for all that time too? It was just that the nerve endings that hadn't died in the process remained all too aware of the fact that they were nonetheless suffering a variety of degrees of burns radiating out from his initials, and reminding her of how much that was going to be screaming for days at least. She clutched his shirt and buried herself against him, never more small than when the brunette attempted to curl herself into the deadened center of her new marking so as to make it as painless to the rest of her body, to be burned away and promised like so much phoenix-ash that she would rise stronger and healthier than ever before. She rocked, she sobbed, and she tried desperately to feel her fingers and toes even while her nerves attempted to go on holiday in solidarity to their fallen brethren. An out of body experience would have been easier, but she was all too much in her body. In his body. I think my pussy just turned inside out, came the first panicked squeak from the peanut gallery, who seemed to be collectively wondering if the woman who had seemed the calmest and most assured of them reacted like that to the finishing touch, what was it going to mean for their own performance? -- kyou. Thankyou. Thankyou. She sobbed the words against his chest for several seconds, running them together, practically kissed into his chest rather than spoken aloud. Her spine shook like it was stuck in a run away massage chair, and her limbs refused to work save to keep her in the fetal position against his warm embrace. And so, it might have seemed somewhat alarming for her to .. tip. That she was about to collapse entirely, that it was going to be for the best that he hold her tighter and keep her upright. But Emilia tipped enough to put her hand flat on the stage, to bend her knees a tiny bit, and to suck in a deep, shuddering sob of a sound. Her other hand pushed him like the petulant child who wanted no comfort, forceful against his chest without being commanding or really, enough to even budge him if he didn't wish to be budged until she could nearly fall away from him to land on that same palm against the stage in a half-turn that left her hair spilling forward against her tear-streaked cheeks. She breathed in and out rapidly, and then looked at him through her swimming sea of tears. Thank you, she said with something approaching clarity. She shifted her hips, and tucked her knees, keeping them closely together. She put her hands at the side of them, lowering her shoulders to leave her palms flat on the stage. And then Emilia arched her spine and pushed with her neck, lifting her chin and her head as high as she possibly could leaving her arms down on the stage necessitated the long curve in her back, leaving her very nearly catlike in the pose that pushed her shoulders and chin forward to the mostly shrouded crowd who had come here to watch this spectacle in the first place. Moreso than any moment before, she all but thrust herself upon their gaze, pushing her arms tenderly inward until her biceps all but perfectly framed the pert attentiveness of her girls and more importantly the horror she had invited upon her chest. Only at a distance, there was only a slight pinkish red visible around the edges of the pitch black stamp over her heart. It wasn't horror it was a signature. A stamp. A statement. One matched entirely by the way Emilia beamed from ear to ear, her teeth shining in the stage lights every bit as much as off of the sloppy rivulets of her tears down her cheeks.