Name: Formality
Fandom: Brideshead Revisited
Pairing: Charles/Julia, but not really. It's Charles/Sebastian.
Rating: T+
Word Count: 436
Summary: (It was) a formality to be observed, nothing more. - Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited p243. Of course, I'm with the half that believes feelings between Charles and Sebastian are canon... I don't think they ever actually got together, but I think they would have if life hadn't gotten in the way. I think they liked each other. I could rant but I'm not going to let myself. Wheee.
He carries her tightly to the bed as though she’ll escape halfway there. Julia Flyte – Mottram; Mottram – is a butterfly after years of spidery Celia, and he intends to pin her down. It’s not that he’s particularly excited to collect her, but it’s been years since he’s added to his corkboard. He needs to be distracted from the one that got away, and anybody would think it was fair to say she is a fine substitute – even if she doesn't inspire any particular interest in Charles as a person.
Neither of them seem much inclined to take their time, so they swing straight into the act itself; her dress up, his belt and trousers round his knees. He holds her like he holds himself – familiar, unloving, firm and slightly rough. This has everything to do with lust, and nothing to do with the other word; she seems to think that is what he wants, but feelings like those are dead to Charles. They died along with Sebastian’s sobriety, he thinks, and with the leaves that summer at Brideshead. He goes through all the necessary procedures and wishes he wasn’t thinking Sebastian as he looks into Julia’s crumbling yet beautiful face. He wants to peel away the excess femininity in her and find Sebastian beneath it all; he wants to hear her voice deepen and feel her limbs harden and her voice break. He wants him, and after ten years he can’t forget anymore. He’s fucking Julia, but he isn’t. Not really. He’s screwing Sebastian for all the years he’s been screwed over himself, lonely.
I could have been your addiction, he thinks, and he hears Sebastian sigh.
Julia and Rex deserve each other, he decides. Her legs tighten around him, her manicured hands digging into his back; all she wants is more than Charles can give to her, and when he closes his eyes and bathes Sebastian’s image in that glowing heat, he can sense he hasn’t satisfied her. He doesn’t care. It isn’t about her. It never has been.
All the same, he kisses her gently on the lips. They’re very much like Sebastian’s. He wonders if they feel the same. Sebastian’s would have tasted of something more distinctive than this, of course. In an hour he might have succeeded in convincing himself that she was just as distinctive; that he hadn’t rocked into his imagination instead of child-bearing hips; Rex’s road less travelled. Then again, he might not have. He wants to sketch something, so he sketches the moon from the window and lets it fly to sea. Somewhere, somehow, Sebastian might catch it.
