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Lago di Como. Italy

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https://www.instagram.com/p/BT_eFnGjk7W/

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Unknown artist - Vanitas

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Fede Ring

Rings such as this one, with a clasped hand design, are known as fede rings - from the Italian ‘mani in fede’. It is a betrothal or faith ring. The design has been in use on love rings throughout Europe since Roman times. This particular example has three rings attached together by a small pin, and when they separate they reveal the two hearts on the middle ring.

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Tetsuo II: The Body Hammer (Shinya Tsukamoto, 1992)

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u stole my face

Remus had waited until the safety of the door latch fastening before slipping the mask from his face, divesting himself of it with a long and tattered sigh. A talking-to from Cullen, his direct supervisor, which of entailed a strongly-worded censure about his increasing dispreference for working within a team, now that he’d acquired this pet case of his. Romulus had made promises to better (promises he had no intention of keeping) and bowed out gracefully from the audience.

He was, therefore, in a state of distraction, and the sight of the letter on his desk spiked an irritated exasperation from him. Scrawled in a neater hand, on proper parchment, he left a note of his own.

He left the note unfolded on his desk, anchored in place by his inkwell and his quill stand, before stalking out the door.

It was almost midnight when he stumbled through his door, half drunk from his excursions at the bar with his boss’s boss— the Iron Bull was a notorious lush who demanded his subordinates’ company at the public houses from time to time, and tonight had been one of certain celebration. Someone had whispered to him that his pretty belle de nuit had  come into some fortune, but it mattered little to Romulus. What mattered was that he came home in high spirits. Enough to unlatch his window before he headed to bed.

He had foregone the trademark vapor mask, leaving it back at the room he shared with his too-curious roommate. He pulled a cap low over his eyes, wearing the simple, unmemorable street clothes of  a dockworker as he trailed his copy through the market. At some parts, he could have reached out as touched the sleeve of his coat through the crush of the crowd. And all the while, his target scanned the rooftops and windows, looking for the very man that stood within arm's reach of him.

Remus couldn't help but find that ironic and a little hilarious.

Rom stopped in front of a vendor selling steaming cakes with a frosted X slathered across it—which happened to be Remus' favorite, too. Remus took advantage of the pause, weaving through the crowd until he crashed lightly into the warm weight of the Overseer.

"Sorry," he mumbled, laying a hand on his copy's chest. The other hand slid a folded note into the breast pocket of his fine coat (which smelled of cedar and the sweet citrus of fine tea.)  "Sorry, clumsy of me."

He slipped away from the vendor, sliding one of the sweet buns into his pocket for later as he vanished into the crowds again without a glance back.

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copy

Rom had shuffled into his kitchen with the resolve of a revenant, ambling towards the salvation of coffee with his dry, bleary eyes half-opened and half-blind. His hips struck the counter before his foot, and only after a too-long pause did the realization dawn on him that he was where he’d intended himself to be.

Without thinking, he snatched the paper resting atop his coffee press, nearly crumpling it in his hand before he’d realized there was something smudged there. Smoothing it out with one hand as he put the kettle on, he read and reread the note until the words had sliced through his confusion, and he nearly threw his kettle.

He cleared the counter with a sweep of his arm, every crevice and container emptied of their contents, but there were no more notes, no more clues. Only an unlatched window and the note as evidence. 

There was no way to be sure, and no reason why he should assume so, but Romulus was sure it was from him. Ambling over to catch the light, he held the note to the kitchen lamp, the translucence making it almost etheral, and it might have been, for all the curious care it had shown him.

It was almost instant, the way his initial anger had softened into confusion, and now something that felt akin to affection. Was he so used to solitude, that he’d gleaned a note of care from the question? Was he that hopeless, to be that hopeful? Romulus had known no family but the overseers, which was a loose brotherhood of half-shared beliefs, and a necessity for shelter and occupation. He was grateful for it. But it was no family. And affection was a concept more foreign to him than women.

It stuck to him, more than the invasion, more than the violation of his privacy. Of course he’d found him. Romulus had found him, hunted him down, goaded him into a fight. And with those infernal powers of his, anything was possible, wasn’t it?

Romulus sniffed as he picked up the fountain pen he’d lifted off some beheaded wretch on one of his recent missions, and scribbled a note of his own.

It sounded almost like a love note, the way he’d worded it, and he pulled a face, even as he folded it up and carefully inserted it between the panes of the window he’d snuck into, then locked it.

He'd kept watching, even after the note in return, enraptured by the surrealism of watching oneself in motion. He had a daily routine that Remus learned quickly. Up early, small breakfast, go to the Abbey, do... Abbey things, and then a stop at the bar before home. He would read each night before bed, and Remus found he longed to know what words in what books those long, slim fingers were caressing.

The other whalers said he was mad for his fixation, and that if he had any sense he'd stay away from Overseers, no matter how much they looked like him. He had no sense, it seemed, because he watched his copy even at work, peering in from the window of his office in the Abbey. He hated the look of that mask over his face, not least of all because it obscured his features, those maddeningly puzzling features.

Rom stopped in his work, and Remus could hear him being called down the hall. The room was empty, which it hadn't been since a week ago, when Remus began following him. He crept in through the window, footfalls as silent as snow on glass, and left a second note atop Rom's desk.

He had just moved out of sight of the window, ducking against the ledge, when the door to the office opened again.

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DUPLICATE

His vision had only just begun to settle, still jostled by the concussion of his head to the uneven rocks, but he saw it: those same brown eyes that shifted green in certain angles of the moonlight, those same brows creased in the same pother of confusion, the same hard set of lips that mirrored his own. 

In his chest, he felt a surge of something indeterminate and sure. Like the certainty of seeing the first girl who ever set your heart in a panic, some indistinct longing, and a repletion that had no name, all at once. 

Neither of their questions would be answered tonight, it would seem. As Romulus opened his mouth to spout out another line of inquest, he could hear the calls of his brother overseers in the distance, their footsteps nearing. And just like that, his twin was gone in the blink of an eye. Disintegrated into a cloud of particles that drew into an invisible vacuum and vanished. Like a shadow. 

Romulus slept fitfully, and without dreams. But that night, it was his own face that lingered behind his eyes, like a phantom breath just behind his shoulder, and every time he turned to look, he was gone. The man with no name, who shared his face.  

A twin. Or just a boy with a providentially similar face. He couldn’t be sure. He’d heard stories of doppelgängers being harbingers of ill-luck. But since he’d seen that face, all he could imagine is that everything, every question, every dot and fleck of question of enigmatic burden would make sense, fall into place— if only he could see him again.

But his thoughts wrestled through the early morning fog of confusion, desperate for even a sliver of lucidity, and Romulus dragged himself to the little kitchenette for some coffee and more contemplation. 

It had been easy enough to find out where the Overseer lived. Remus lurked at a distance, just out of reach, and watched his entire path from the meeting spot, to an outpost, to a bar, to a simple apartment on a top story that he had no trouble reaching. And all the while, the Overseer never discarded his face.

His copy left his window unlatched, making it even easier to get inside the flat than it was to find it in the first place. Remus sifted through his effects with careful fingers; clothes, books, drawers and chests, gleaning whatever he could find. A name—Rom, said a small label on a desk. But little else, no letters or gifts or notes.

Well, he could remedy that.

He lifted a paper from the desk, along with a stalk of pencil, and scribbled a quick note, charcoal scratching in the silence, punctuated by the breath of the sleeping inhabitant. He laid the note on the percolator, which, for some reason, he expected would be the first place this Rom would look. And then he closed the window behind him and crossed to the opposite roof without any other evidence of his visit.

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His mask had gone cockeyed in the struggle, rending him blind as the two of them grappled on the floor like unseasoned calves still learning the basics of combat. (But what else was one to do when so evenly matched?) Remus fumbled with the vapor mask as he reached for the folding knife in his sleeve, attempting to align the lenses with his eyes before he delivered a killing slice to the Overseer's throat. But between his clumsy hands and the jostling of their combat, it wouldn't straighten fast or well enough. So he did the first thing Master Daud had drilled into him not to do: he shoved the mask up to his brow, baring his face.

He raised the knife—what would it matter if the Overseer saw him, when he would be dead before the end of that breath?—as his hand grasped viciously at the man's chin to expose his throat, but Remus stopped as his eyes snagged on the smooth face beneath his fingers. Remus knew what his own reflection looked like. He and the other whalers were expected to shave daily, crowded around shared mirrors or polished metal. He knew his own eyes, hazel and a little hooded, and his own cheekbones and the point of his own chin and the curve of his own mouth. He knew his own hair, brown and loosely curled,  needing a trim every week to keep it out of his eyes.

How was it, then, that this Overseer had stolen his features and wore them now? What manner of sanctified, empty devilry was that?

His hand, still held aloft, wavered in its path, and the knife never descended for its killing blow. Instead his hand grew more savage in its hold of the Overseer's face, giving him a hard shake by the chin to rattle his teeth. "How?" he demanded, brandishing the knife again in a threat. "How are you wearing my face?"

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He knew the whaler’s gait. He knew his pace, the sound of his footfalls. They struck like a terrifying echo, a meter that mirrored his heart’s own frantic pace. Romulus drew in a breath, drew his sword, and struck out with the broad side of his blade to the thick of his chest.

It wasn’t enough to hurt him. Only enough to surprise him, to stop him in his tracks for a semiquaver’s rest and allow the overseer to launch himself headlong into his masked opponent. It was hardly any offensive of militaristic triumph. But this excursion wasn’t exactly a sanctioned endeavor. A single whalers was nothing of consequence, but he’d fixated on one, a certain one, hunting him night after wretched night.

And it was for this single whaler that he’d discarded all his training, his proficiency, and any chance at a solid victory. They were equally matched. Nearly the same height, though perhaps Romulus was a little broader. Too similar in strength, but it was their hand-to-hand method that had caught his attention. Something in the way he managed to mirror his every move, and sometimes anticipate his movements. Like prescience. 

They’d landed hard on the cobblestone, Romulus’ hands scrambling for purchase on the whaler’s coat, and finding his balance upset by a knee jerked to the soft of his inner thigh. And then he was on his back, his head knocking hard against the uneven stone.

The fist came down in a devastating arc, smashing against his mask with a reckless impudence he was sure wrecked the whaler’s fist as surely as it did the peaks of his cheekbones, the point of his nose. Another strike, a trenchant right hook aimed at his chin, dislodged his mask, easily ripped from his face. The city air felt thick against his fragmented skin, the soot stinging where the mask had torn brutally at his cheek.

 “Go on, then,” he hissed, spitting out the mouthful of blood onto the whaler’s mark. “Finish it. But tell me your name first. Who you are. And you can end me however way you want.”

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Verse Info: Dishonored 

Name: Remus Lobo Age: 23 Occupation: Whaler

Bio: Born one half of a set of twins, Remus’ mother was the sister of a high-ranking Overseer who became with child after a torrid affair with a foreign noble. She abandoned the twins in an alley, where a working girl named Lupa found them and raised the pair as her own. 

Overseers directed Lupa to surrender one twin to the Abbey upon their fifth birthday, and Remus’ brother Romulus was selected from their childhood home and brought for the Trials of Aptitude while both were too young to recall it (or each other.) Remus fell into the life that often befalls young street boys, leaving him scrounging for jobs and money in the slums until he was picked up by a man named Daud and inducted into his gang of assassins, called the Whalers.

Remus is one of the younger full-fledged members, and has a reputation among the other men for being competitive for attention and contracts, and also for being a bit of a bookworm. He sends back a little money every week for Lupa, ensuring she no longer has to work.

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don't like that :(

“He’s like...... my boss’ boss. I gotta suck up.”