saviolum-sanguineus - Tumblr blog

[saviolum-sanguineus]

handmade heaven

Enoch pays the Facetailor another visit. Esme underestimates the toll. Taran collects. (caverna au; pounding shores, mild but plot-relevant e-squared)

tw: blood, graphic corporal punishment, physical abuse, references to sexual abuse. the dove is dead.

Dread clings to Esme's feet and makes her shuffle through the motions of closing up the shop. Taran has shut himself away in his study, which would be some comfort if not for the promise he'd made her just before doing so: Don't fret. You'll have my full attention tonight.

The clock ticks down, ornate face staring mercilessly down at her from the wall as she locks the display cases, sweeps up pencil shavings and discarded sketches, and checks them all over again. The quiet lulls her anxiety into a brindled stupor, but only for so long. 

Then it is dark out, there is nothing more to be minded at the shop, and the Facetailor calls her name.

Esme keeps her head up but her eyes down when she walks into Taran's study. She's learnt better after all these years at his hands, knows that he likes her best when he knows there’s breaking left to do and that that desire is very, very dangerous for her, but something still keeps her bold. Maybe it's the same thing that got her mother killed, like Taran says. Bitterness swells in her clenched throat.

In any case, it means that she feels but does not see Taran's eyes raking over her, his features kept serenely in unreadable contemplation.

“There you are. If you were late again, I would have had to call in a temporary putty girl for a tenday, and you know how I loathe training them.”

He stands and walks closer to inspect her. As he lifts her hair and dismisses it over her shoulder to reveal the purple handprint streaking across her throat, Taran asks casually, “And do you have anything to say to me, sweetheart?”

He fits his palm to the bruise on her neck and smiles gently at the flex of her throat against his hand.

“No.”

“Hm. Are you sure?” The thumb just below her jawbone crooks into its purple print, fingers on the opposite side holding her stationary against the deep gush of pain.

“Yes, my lord.”

He snorts and squeezes harder for a second before letting up on the pressure—though Taran's hand stays where it is. “Very cute, kitten.”

He sighs then, grip tightening again until Esme has to angle her head up to look his cool disappointment directly in the eyes.

“You know what I have to do now, don't you? All because you had to make a scene.”

When she doesn't answer, lips tightened into one hard line, Taran squeezes. “Manners, Esme.”

She wheezes, hands rising fruitlessly towards the clenched fist at her throat. Taran's grip lightens before she touches him, just enough that her lips stay at the deep border of red instead of purple. 

“I didn’t mean to. My lord.”

His features slide into serene benevolence as his free hand blurs. The impact slams Esme's head to one side, though there isn't much room for her to travel with Taran's fist anchored around her neck to keep her steady.

One of the rings on his open hand slices a sanguine line from cheek to brow. As it begins to drip, Taran releases her and looks in distaste at the blood staining his hand. He pulls out a handkerchief and wipes himself clean, voice smudged with displeasure. “Drink the Wine and dress the cat.”

Wordlessly, Esme staggers to the side table, blinking past blood and the echo of blunt force to peer at the bottle of Wine set beside a leather whip whose tails branch into a thick handful of knotted cords. There is no glass set out, just a shallow dish placed beside the tin of leather dressing.

Esme's hand shakes as she pours out some of the Wine into the dish and lifts it to her mouth, only for Taran to clear his throat pointedly.

“You know the rules.”

Slowly, she sinks to her knees and places the dish back on the table, then her hands behind her back. The porcelain clinks against her teeth and Taran clicks his tongue in admonishment, but makes no other comment as he relaxes into the plush, darkly glossy embrace of a leather armchair.

The sound of Esme awkwardly drinking from the dish rivals the soft ticking of the clock; her final gulp is interrupted by a sharp, pained hiss as the Wine sets her split skin to knitting back together. Her movement stiffens for a second before smoothing, but the Wine’s cruel mercy is meted out exactly: the handprint on Esme’s neck remains, as does everything else below her chin.

Taran swills a lowball glass and takes a sip. Rich notes of amber and orange bloom in the air against the acrid smell of leather conditioner as Taran watches Esme rub polish into the leather tails.

“No need to breathe so shallow,” he comments drily. His drink leaves clear legs down the side of his glass; they distort his smile like the warping of the false moon’s reflection on disturbed water. “You know this is for your own good, kitten. I don’t enjoy having to punish you. But we do have to set good examples, don’t we?”

Esme stiffens, but Taran doesn’t seem to be looking for an answer. He considers his glass for a second before looking again at her bent over the table—and curiously, the clock.

“I saw the way you looked at him today. Do you even know his name, kitten?”

Esme’s arm pauses for a near imperceptible fraction of a second before she says quietly, “Lord Daddano? Yes, my lord. He’s quite an enthusiastic client of yours.”

Taran scoffs. “You might have been a drudge before, but you weren’t that thick.” Another sip glosses his lips. “Enoch and I know each other, you know. If you’re fantasising about him swooping in and saving you from the one who’s given you everything you have—and likely ever will have, I might add, based on the status of your debt—feel free, kitten.”

The smile he wears then to look at Esme is the first she’d ever modelled for him: Regarding the First Bloom of Lavender on a Dewy Morning.

“He might be thinking of doing the same. Might even feel badly for you, the man’s very generous with his pity even if he doesn’t know it. But Enoch doesn’t care about you. He just knows that you belong to me. He despises me and thinks it kin to self-righteousness. Your face is well-made enough to confuse a man's baser interests. That’s all.”

Esme rises and walks back to Taran’s chair to shove the now-gleaming cat o’ nine tails at him. He smiles gently at her and takes the intricately-wound handle, thumb running over the texture of braided leather wrapped flush around its fellows. The other hand lifts his glass for a final sip before clinking back onto the table.

Taran combs his fingers through the leather tails, toying tenderly with one of the knots between thumb and forefinger. “Clothes, kitten.” 

Esme’s hands move automatically a few scattered inches towards the buttons at her back, but stop and wring at her waist. “My lord, I’m sorry—”

“You've picked an interesting night to test my patience.”

Her teeth clamp back into her lower lip and the first button comes undone. The rest of her dress crumples over itself and falls to the floor, followed by the rest of her garments: silk, but tattered at the seams and painstakingly hand-mended. Esme’s back is a pale, gnarled landscape of rose thorns and freckled flesh, old scars subsumed into a mad weaver’s living magnum opus. Tendrils of previous penance reach out past her hips to grip at the skin below like the ghostly, greedy fingers.

She swallows, teeth clenching around the lips of Pleasured Coquette Oversees Butterfly Garden as though it might serve the same purpose as a wadded rag or leather bit, and curls her fingers around the upper edge of the wooden frame placed by the side wall.

Taran exhales with the same lusty satisfaction one might expect after a decadent meal and stands. The cat is softly lustrous in his hands; he flicks it once in the air, as if testing Esme’s preparations. When she flinches at the sharp crack, Taran trails its tails down Esme’s bare back and murmurs, “Fifty for your tardiness today. Two hundred more for humiliating yourself on my name. Another ten for each minute you wasted with excuses. And one kiss, my dear, for apologising for making me have to do this. You know I can’t help but spoil you.”

The first lash sings before it strikes. Taran raises no welts and takes no prisoners with any of his tongues: “Are you thinking of him now? Imagining him raising a hand to stop you from getting exactly what you’ve earned? Go on, then. I know you hate letting me hear you. Cry out for him. Pretend it’s him inside you after this, if you like. Though I never did think you were one for useless fantasies—but you do surprise me sometimes, dear. Your father’s daughter, aren’t you?”

The clock ticks on, its count split unevenly into units of leather slashing skin open, choked back sobs, and after Taran switches hands, a quiet but steady drip.

He takes a break to pour himself another drink once his crosshatching loses its cleanliness. Taran’s eyebrows rise as he surveys her weeping back and bowed head, the bloodless grip on the red-flecked ridge above her head. “Tears already? Perhaps you’ve learned your lesson, then.”

Esme sniffs. It takes two tries to successfully speak: the first cracks under a bitten-to-blood tongue. The second is flat, emotion tamped down like cinders turned to ash in flattened grass.

“If you keep going, you won’t be able to use me after.”

Taran rolls his eyes and shoves his knee between hers, ignoring her cry and sudden, surprised second of agonised limpness, then checks the shape and size of the creeping bloodstain left on his trousers.

“Not without cleaning you up, I suppose,” he acquiesces. He takes another sip of his drink, then tosses what remains over the flayed mess of Esme’s back and tuts disapprovingly when she screams and writhes, back arching forward violently.

“Hush, kitten. It’s for your own good, you don’t want an infection. Hands on your ankles now. You still owe me lashes and it’s not worth wasting the Wine for how many weeks you’d be worthless with them on your back.”

Enoch’s next visit to the Facetailor takes them all by surprise. Esme blanches when he walks in with Andrey, clinging to Extending Invitation While Adorned With Butterflies by the very skin of her teeth as she records the arrival. Her hands shake when she slides the pen over to Andrey to sign in for his appointment, her eyes kept firmly on the paper.

Taran hovers unusually close, to every outward eye the picture of a protective if slightly exasperated artisan supervising a protégé. He lays a hand firmly over her shoulder after Andrey signs and whispers something in her ear that has Esme hurrying off into the backrooms, her stride stiff.

Taran's features display lightness, his chosen expression one of softly upturned brow and easy pleasantry: Cheerful Repose By Swift-Flowing Stream had been ever so popular upon its release and remains so now, particularly with the signature Etoni twist of cold mischief near the mouth.

“A pleasure to see you both again,” Taran says with a quick smile directed at both Andrey and Enoch. He glances down over the registry, one hand smoothing the paper flat with the girth of his pen until it rests taut beneath his fingers.

“Nicky will be seeing to you today,” he tells Andrey, smile creaseless and gleaming as he nods towards the velvet-draped corridor leading to the Facetraining rooms. “Room five—and you, dear heart, are with me today.”

Enoch blinks. His face remains curiously blank, free of the disdain that his voice stings of as he looks down the plane of his nose at Taran.

“I am here strictly to accompany Andrey,” he says. “I require no additional faces from you.”

The way his lips shape the words “additional faces” has them dripping with poison, immunity granted by Enoch’s own sheen of disgust. The touch of flat-edged cold at Taran’s mouth gleams brighter, sweet like the song of a shrike, and he shakes his head as if lightly admonishing a small child.

“Perhaps not,” Taran says as he shifts his smile from Enoch to the paper at hand and jots in an additional appointment entry for a Lord Enoch Ward, “but I’d be a poor host if I had nothing to offer to make up for a, shall we say, less than stellar previous visit.”

He glances at Andrey, who’s already slipping into the corridor and halfway into the private room with a gilt plaque number five over the doorframe, and adds, “It may take a bit longer than you’re accustomed to, Andrey, I’ve added a few special treats onto your slate. On the house, of course.”

The tip of his pen finishes etching out a tiny flourish at the end of Enoch’s name and Taran smiles back at the lord. “As will be the services rendered unto you today. There’s been considerable effort put into creating an expression just for you—I’m glad we had it done in time to catch you today.”

Taran’s mouth quirks up at the corner. “From one noble scion to another, I hope you forgive the forwardness of going to such lengths. It’s simply the least I could do to repay your…generosity.”

Enoch’s hand clenches over the pommel of his sword, but he says nothing, just offers Taran a gritted, curt nod. The gleaming smile sweetens and Taran beckons Enoch through the corridor.

The private room he leads Enoch into is furnished with the atelier’s usual layout: elegant, dark wallpaper and hand-carved furniture that gleams in the soft light of the sconces lining the walls. Taran gestures to the armchair invitingly, then swoops his arm back towards himself suddenly as if having forgotten something.

“Pardon me a moment,” he says, clasping Enoch’s hand before turning to go. “I’ll be back with you shortly—just need to retrieve the final face sheet for you.”

With him gone, the room’s quiet becomes somnolent, a constant invitation to bask in its lush drapery. Even with his obvious unease, Enoch finds himself sinking into the chair’s embrace. 

When Esme slips in through the dark-panelled door, Enoch’s head has tipped back against the surprisingly plush leather of the chair. She stops in her tracks, hands flat against the inside of the door, eyes wide.

Enoch’s eyes flash open at the sound of her steps approaching; his hand clenches automatically around the hilt of his sword and Esme flinches back, her shoulder blades thudding against the door.

“I-I’m sorry, I’m just tidying—I’m supposed to—” Esme stammers, her features snapping into the same beseeching, lilac-streaked innocent smile she’d worn in an attempt to placate Taran. Enoch blinks at her before slowly raising both his hands, eyes fixed on Esme. 

“That’s quite alright.” His voice is soft, his shoulders kept deliberately low and centred as though soothing a startled animal. 

Esme’s eyes flicker away, darting over the room and Enoch’s hands before returning to his face. Slowly, she nods and steps hesitantly away from the door, closer to him. 

Enoch’s ghost-pale eyes assess the door before landing back on Esme. Slowly, the severity of his features lightens under a sweet, tender smile: the same he’d bestowed upon her the last time they’d seen each other. It renders his face anew, blooming over his wide jaw and hard eyes with all the softness of spring blossoms emerging from under melted snow.

“It seems to me the room is sufficiently well-kept,” Enoch says then. 

Esme’s expression wavers, uncertainty curling her fingers into her skirt. The high, frilled collar of the blouse beneath her dress seems to swallow her face, leaching tension into her features.

“...yes?” she answers, voice no more than a hesitant whisper.

“So it would stand to reason that you could ensure that it is up to the atelier’s standards of comfort,” Enoch continues, now avoiding Esme’s gaze. The smile drops from his face, returning his features to their usual austerity, but his voice is warmer than the ice his expression suggests. “Perhaps you could start with that chair.”

Esme looks at the stool directly across from Enoch’s seat. Her face is flushed, though the sweetness of it is a tad blotchy to be purely coy, her pupils tight pinpricks. “I…yes, I believe so.”

She sits gingerly, smile straining around a sudden, poorly-disguised wince as her weight settles. “I didn't know you were taking new faces today, my lord.”

Enoch exhales—it's not quite a scoff, but obviously intended as one. 

“Taran can be very insistent.” Enoch's eyes scan over Esme's face again, lingering on her high collar and the long cuffed sleeves of her dress. His voice floats bloodless as a starved leech. “As I'm sure you're familiar with.”

Esme looks down. “He is very thorough,” she says, voice pale and carefully laid over the words. It drapes like a shroud. She blinks a few times, rapidly, and adds politely, “He has exquisite taste in Faces. I'm sure what he has selected for you will be very becoming. Your features are well-suited to any Face, of course.”

Her voice trails off near the end, falling into a haze as she looks at Enoch. It doesn't bleed through her pristinely-set Face, but longing curls off her tongue, pricked back into place by the spiny fear beneath.

He leans back slightly in his chair, eyes leaving hers. “I don't particularly care to hear Taran's preferences. Surely you must have your own—I'd rather hear those.”

Esme blinks twice. The fear on her features shrinks, lightened but still there like a waterstain on wood years after the spill, and very deliberately she lets her face shift into a warm, grateful smile. It’s the sort of expression that brings to mind cosy evenings and watching snow fall from inside a sturdy home, kept warm by the company kept and a crackle in the hearth. 

“I don’t know that you’d know them by name—not that anyone would.” Shyness and a reluctance to let it show shade her voice pink, the same colour of the hydrangeas that crop up near the dining room windows of the Ward estate in spring. “But I can show you some of my favourites. They aren’t released yet, I haven’t shown them to Taran for approval.”

The winterlit hearth contentment on Esme’s face melts smoothly into a different smile: this one brighter, more drawn from the silvery sparkle of starlight in a quiet night. The Face is visibly imperfect, clearly a work in progress: each distinct feature is a little blurry around the edges, not quite cohesive yet in how it sits with its fellows, but the emotion encapsulated in it as a whole is resplendent. 

Its beauty is frightening in how fluid but eerily disjointed its constituents are, how uncannily close it comes to the inconstant, unpredictable nature of Aurora’s face—but Esme narrows her eyes slightly and the pieces freeze into place. Still rough-edged, but static enough to be comforting. 

“Those are the two I’m hoping will debut in the coming season,” she says, speaking around the stillness of the Face. Esme releases it after a moment, reverting back to the polite option of Reflection Upon Chastely Enjoyed Time. 

Enoch’s face is stoic as always, neutrality bordering on disinterest, but his nod seems genuine enough acknowledgement.

“Perhaps I will see them then,” he says.

“See what?”

Taran’s smile gleams as he enters the room, brushing aside the velvet privacy curtain behind the door with one casual hand. He glances at Esme a moment, eyes lingering on the subtle straightening of her posture even as she takes half a step back, before Taran’s full attention falls on Enoch. 

“Has Esme been taking good care of you?” he asks pleasantly as he taps Enoch’s shoulder and presses him back against his seat. Taran’s fingertips glide over Enoch’s jaw, tipping his face up slightly and sliding back into his hair in a smooth massaging motion.

Esme glances nervously up at Enoch, eyes flitting between him and Taran. Enoch’s jaw ticks—his hand comes up to grip Taran’s wrist, fine sleeve crushed in a vise-like grip. Taran’s smile turns slowly into a smirk and his fingers flatten against Enoch’s cheek, thumb pressing into the hollow below the arch of his cheek a tad harder than necessary.

“No? A shame to hear. I’ll be sure to discipline her more thoroughly.”

“You know you’ve done more than enough. This is an embarrassment.”

Taran’s smile returns. “I take it you’re well-pleased with her services.”

Enoch’s expression, as always, remains fixed, but his voice mangles itself. “I do not patronise your species of establishment often enough to distinguish its quality. As you must be well-aware.”

Taran shakes his hand free of Enoch’s grip only to place both his hands over Enoch’s face, bracketing it with his grip.

“Good. I taught her everything she knows. You have no idea, Enoch, how gratifying it is to be so appreciated.”

His fingertips glide over the outline of Enoch’s lower lashline, then his eyebrows, cheeks, the tapered corners of his mouth. When Enoch’s features have taken on the malleable, neutral state a Facetailor’s work requires, Taran snaps his fingers at Esme. 

“Book. On the table.”

She rises and moves to bring him the leather-bound volume, but freezes in her tracks before getting close enough to reach, one hand extended but trembling. 

Taran’s touch is gentle on Enoch’s skin, his breath warm as he leans in to perfect the blank angle of one eyebrow. His voice is a spear thrown from on high. “The book, Esme.”

Her fingers graze the binding, motion slow with all the horror her face does not allow to show. “Taran—my lord.”

“Page thirty-three.”

There is no sound but the rustle of paper as she obeys. Light glints off the faded, patchy gilding on the monogrammed E embossed on the cover.

“I crafted this with you in mind,” Taran murmurs as he begins his work, eyes focused on tilting a crease just so below Enoch’s eyes. “Only you, mind. I won’t be teaching it to anyone else. It took quite some time for me to decide on the perfect finishing touches—quite the rough first draft, if you can believe it. Messy, messy…but now I’ve cleaned it all up. Just as it was meant to be.”

His thumb curves down Enoch’s cheek and around his mouth, pulling his lips from slack into the gentle slope of a warm smile. Taran’s eyes meet Enoch’s, glimmering and unreadable, before he glances back to the skin beneath his hands.

“I’ve thought often of you wearing this Face. A little indulgence, to get me through the tedious days. This is how I see you. What I see in you. Every little detail. Look at me.”

Taran purses his lips. His thumb flicks an angle of malice into Enoch’s tenderly-lit smile.

“Perfect.”

He angles Enoch’s face to the side, one hand holding his jaw gently in place while he tweaks the play of muscles around his eyes; Enoch’s gaze pierces Esme, a refined reflection of the unfinished Face she’d shown him earlier.

“You should know, Enoch, that this is something quite special. It’s rare that I see fit to give a client my full attention. Ah, shh, shh—not yet. Your lips aren’t set yet, you’ll ruin this mouth I’m so proud of.”

Taran gently turns Enoch’s face the other way, surveying his work and stroking down the contours of Enoch’s new expression. “Shall I fetch you a mirror?”

“If necessary.” Enoch’s voice is frigid, his gaze burning from where Taran has moulded it tender.

Taran cups Enoch’s jaw and turns his face from side to side, thumb tapping lightly at the cleft of his chin. “I insist,” he whispers, voice tender as raw flesh. “Esme! Bring the handmirror—mine, from the estate, not from the shop. Only the best for our dear Enoch.”

[saviolum-sanguineus]

moodboard for writing a transition sentence or paragraph

[saviolum-sanguineus]

colour-inspired prompts

pink - leaning closer to listen intently - "oh yeah?" - "let me get that for you" - "here, I've got it" - working to finish something without having to speak; quiet harmony - head-tilted back, mouth-open kind of laughs

red - getting a little teary when you're about to scream - fists clenched in your lap - "that's what you think? really?" - muttered insults - lipstick stains on the side of the mouth - interlocked fingers, being pressed against the wall, eyes narrowed - "god, you just don't know when to stop, do you?"

orange - sun-kissed skin - flowers braided into hair, a worn book on a bus - a child's hand wrapped around your finger - sunset on the beach - a shattered stain glass window - medicine bottles lined up on a shelf

yellow - visiting a childhood friend after too many years gone - a frayed string bracelet - "how did you remember? I only mentioned it briefly." - a half dozen friends showing up at your doorstep when you're sick - "you didn't have to come." "I promised." - days marked off on a calendar - patches of sunlight spotting a lazy afternoon

green - taking the train into the countryside - school trips - running out into the fields, shoes wet with dew - leatherbound books and sketchapds - a willow tree in the local cemetary - "tell me. promise me."

blue - an empty chocolate box at the foot of a bed - flickers of light from the television over a sleeping figure - the same sheets from the past week - a grey sky over harsh waves - "keep it. it was always yours." - growing old and one friend staying forever young

purple - "I didn't think you'd notice." - a kiss, a lamppost, Levi's - all of your firsts - a hand on the steering wheel - quiet conversations outside an empty diner - being the last ones out of a restaurant - running through the rain to the subway

[saviolum-sanguineus]

[saviolum-sanguineus]

smoke rings and sugar

he meets her in winter and decides to keep her for the warmth. or: how taran teaches his new plaything to smoke. ost: strawberries and cigarettes (troye sivan)

tw: etoni.

He's decently sure that she'd jump off a cliff if he promised to buy her sweets after, but Taran has to admit that he's more impressed with his unanticipated Aixoisi find than he'd anticipated.

She's a fast learner, eager to please in return for a few easy promises and praise, and she fits stunningly under Taran's arm once polished. He glances at her sleeping form sprawled out over the inn bed and indulges himself in the memory of how sweetly she'd sucked at his fingers for praise that morning, how pliant she'd been to his little game of showing her a new kind of dance to entertain themselves with in the warm theatre of laundered sheets.

She'd danced on her feet for him before falling asleep too, eyes alight and earnest as she demonstrated some new step or another, before he'd coaxed her into a more mutually interactive method of tiring herself out. Taran runs a hand lightly over the mess of red curls spilling over the pillows, his fingertips trailing onto Ember's back. Her skin is soft, warm and slightly damp from washing up; she smells of faintly of flowers beneath the soap, and Taran vaguely recalls the quaint little sachets of dried wildflower petals he'd found under the pillow the first time she'd shared a bed with him.

She stirs slightly, skin pulling into gooseflesh at being exposed to the chill of the room; Taran lays a palm flat over her arm to keep her from getting too cold while he watches a wave of tautness ripple over her from shoulder to stomach like pebbles washing up in shallow tide. The sight pleases him, even more so with the intoxicating tang of salt-citrus smoke from his cigarette to accompany it. Smoke billows from his plush exhale and glitters silvery in the air as her eyes flutter open and she squints blearily at him.

“Taran? ‘S cold, come under the covers,” she says. Her accent rolls the words like grain in wind; it's endearing in its provinciality, the same kind of charm that her neatly pinned braids and coy pleasure at playacting glamour hold.

He gently moves her arm when she goes to cover herself, placing it comfortably over his own stomach instead as he slips into the bed. She nuzzles up to him without hesitation and he smiles around the glowing ember he takes a drag from. She isn't entirely guileless, but what innocence she does have is refreshing.

“Thought you were asleep, Ember,” he says around another glittering puff of silver.

She pouts, nudging at him with a calloused finger. “Esme now, remember?”

“Yes, right, Esme. Slip of the tongue—you do inspire so many of those, kitten.”

Her cheeks flush and her ears twitch, silky against his hand when he pets her. Taran grins around his cigarette and lets his hand travel lower, pausing in its journey at her shoulders to pull her closer so he can feel the ripe fruit sweetness of her warmth pressed along his side.

“Why do you always smoke, after?” she asks after a moment, voice muffled slightly from where her face is pressed into his side. Her magic thrums under his fingertips. His mouth waters at the thought of sinking into her and siphoning that ginger-spiced gold into himself, soothing the curious emptiness at the base of his mind.

He shrugs. “It feels nice. Relaxing.”

“Oh.” She's oddly tense under his hand, but he can feel her relaxing slightly when he tips her face up to look at him, one cheek cupped in his palm.

“Here, try. I'll teach you how.”

Hesitation sprawls over her face, but she doesn't protest as he helps her sit up. Taran thumbs her lower lip and Esme's mouth opens automatically, though he has to correct her freshly-formed habit of letting her tongue curl out as well.

“Good girl—but this time you don't need to use your tongue,” he tells her as he plucks the cigarette deftly from between his lips and slides it into place at Esme's mouth. “Hold it between your lips, not your teeth. And then inhale through your mouth. Just a little breath at first, that's it. Now hold it for a second. You feel how it fills your lungs up, gets you that nice tingly buzz feeling?”

She does beautifully, eyes half-lidded and lips lax, for all of two seconds before Esme pulls away coughing, delicate chest rattling with how hard she's hacking up broken puffs of smoke.

Taran laughs and rubs her back, replacing the cigarette in his own mouth.

“It feels like choking,” she complains, wiping her mouth with the back of one hand and pulling a face. “I don't think I like it.”

Taran smiles indulgently and purses his lips to blow out a ring of smoke. Gold eyes track its movement, following it from the precise curl of his tongue through the air until it dissipates against the inn’s rafters. “It'll feel better the more you practice,” he says. “Just like everything else.”

She doesn't look convinced, but she nods with a little grumble. His eyes drift down to the soft curve of her waist, framed ever so temptingly by the drape of the blanket and the blurry-edged shadow of her hips below.

“Let's get some more practice in now,” Taran purrs, his voice dropping low like the kisses he brushes along his new favorite's cheek. “We'll be in the capital soon and I want to make sure you know how to feel your best before we are.”

She's silent for a moment but pliant as ever before his lips coax a whine from her throat, his hands a tremble from her thigh. Her face colours, blooming streaky red like the cherries and cream she'd devoured for dessert earlier, before he'd had her for his.

Taran smiles as he sinks two fingers into her, thumb massaging her into slickness just above. “So pretty, kitten. You’re doing so well for me.”

Her magic melts like sugar on his tongue when she comes.

[saviolum-sanguineus]

encore

A woman meets another for lunch; the latter's hair is the same color as the coat of the first. Something crystallises between them.

(1930s/pre-war AU)

Taran never sorted out his own mail, but whoever had been working at it was good enough at it to read the invisible currents of the city. They slid the envelope between a postcard from a friend somewhere in Spain and the riveting gossip hiding between the lines of this month’s issue from his Club.

—Something for you.

The vaguely bemused interest in his voice—I was still his little secret, traced out in the shape of winks and coy allusions to whatever domesticated animal he was feeling most metaphorically allured by that day, and not at all in the position of being written to by anyone with casual access to the expense clothing this missive—faded at the more immediately tantalizing letterhead from his Club. He handed the letter over without looking up, his other hand moving to slit open the Club envelope with the silver opener at his side.

It was addressed to Miss Esme Odile. Starting at ‘O’, the slant of the letters became slightly more capital, as if to highlight the awkwardness of it against the easy richness of twenty-dollar paper. I could have taken it as the slight it was meant to be, but this city made certain things cheap, like closing my eyes to the generosity of Taran’s mouth, and other things free, like rearranging your name until it fit like a second skin under bright lights.

Taran took a sip of his martini and I opened the letter.

The mother of Taran’s son took me out to lunch at Veselka. It had occurred to me on the walk over that she could derive no small amount of pleasure from watching me flounder at ordering—Taran’s habits and dictation were painfully obvious to the both of us, even in his absence—but two platters of varenyky were already on the table when I arrived, neat piles of golden-brown onions nestled beside dollops of sour cream along the cerulean pattern edging the plates.

Her son was noticeably absent, and for a moment I wasn’t sure if it was relief or dread that panged through me at the realization. Dahlia and I shared a vital commonality: our individual relationships to a very specific man were very well-defined, but to each other? I thought suddenly of Andrey, as if a tenuous alliance might bolster my spirits, but just as suddenly I remembered our first meeting. The uptick in morale was therefore short-lived.

—So good to see you again! Esther, isn’t it? Charming name, it suits you.

—You wrote it correctly. Lovely handwriting. Just like the primers.

Dahlia smiled thinly. In the restaurant’s clear light, the coldness of it turned her hazel eyes into something like the Hudson. It made sense why she’d be wearing a fur coat in October then: the thing lay over the back of a third chair at the table in a quiet, glorious rustle of tawny fox fur and soft ostentation.

She watched me sit, still smiling, and offered: Cassius is off with his father today—and isn’t it nice that we could chat?

Of course, she waited until I had taken a sip of water (brunch’s mimosas were too generous a mercy for Dahlia, apparently) to speak, so I kept her waiting with another, crossing my legs beneath the table and relishing the tiny flicker of annoyance in her eyes.

—Lovely of Taran to take him out to a show. It must be a treat for Cassius to spend time with him, I said with a smile.

Those came cheap in the city too.

—Mm. I heard he keeps you entertained the same way.

The barbed irritation in Dahlia’s voice went well with my forkful of varenyky; almost too rich. She watched me eat in silence for another breath, the corners of her mouth taut. Just as I began to swallow, Dahlia took a minuscule, impossibly dainty bite of her own, swallowed like a smug cat, and dabbed feathers of sour cream off her lower lip.

—You must feel like you’ve accustomed yourself to the city very well.

I looked at her and felt my fingers start to curl hard into the swell of my palms, leftover defenses that didn’t care about French tips or keeping up appearances. Dahlia smiled at me, hazel eyes sparkling. My patience shriveled, all dry husk and jagged edge against the soft rustle of her fur coat.

—Well, once you start receiving mail at a place, it really does become home, I said. I find the city suits me well.

—Is that what he told you? Very sweet.

Neither of us were smiling anymore, but somehow I preferred it that way. This felt realer than all the performances Taran and his circle demanded of me: more tangible and genuinely enticing. As much as I embraced the ease of leaning into the image of a willowy enigma ricocheting as desired between ingenue and seductress, there was meat here to sink my teeth into, an itch that could stand to be scratched instead of aching.

Dahlia took another bite, then laced her bare fingers together in front of her. She paused, ostensibly to give me the chance to pluck low-hanging fruit off the bough she’d offered.

My smirk pulled unexpectedly dry. The weight of it grated my tongue against teeth like cogs in a machine finally realizing how far the rust had crept. All the bright crystalline light surrounding us suddenly smelt of a circus. For the first time in my life, the thought of dancing under a spotlight was not an exciting one.

—You ought to know better than me that he doesn’t say anything for other people’s sake. What do you think I’m here for, Dahlia?

Her lips twitched and for a very serious second I thought she might slap me. Part of me wished she would. That would be familiar. That would be known.

—You don’t belong here, Esme.

And there it was, the elephant slain and skinned on the table between us and our naked hands.

Dahlia took a deep breath and pressed one slim palm flat against her temple. It was the sort of pose Mary took in the windows of St. Patrick’s, immaculate sufferance on display for the world to see.

—It’s not just you, Dahlia said in a voice that suggested she was angling for the patience of a saint. There are plenty of girls like you—you know, they come here from some plains town in Iowa or Georgia or wherever, and they think the dream is coming true. You wanted to be a star, didn’t you? Make it big, land the albatross.

She studied my face for a while. Whatever Dahlia found, it introduced a soft, squirming streak of dismay to her expression.

—I’m trying to save you some heartbreak. Yours, whatever family you’ve got hoping to hear from you back home, whoever you care about enough to lie to yourself about. Certainly not his, don’t mistake me. This isn’t the life for you.

—And what makes us so different?

I had played into her hands without realizing it, but Dahlia didn’t take the easy, immediate kill. She lifted her hand from her head and set it over mine.

—I think you know.

I could not move her. I could not move myself. For all the things seething under my skin, the only thing I could do was unclench my jaw and release my bite to bark.

—I wish he’d mentioned you. I’d have known to ask for advice. That coat brings out your eyes so well.

Dahlia matched my desperate spite, which made my own less desperate. An accidental kindness on her part, no doubt, but one all the same.

—Nothing stopping you in the future! He always did like my eyes, loved the lashes especially. And Portia has such beautiful hair. She keeps it long, you know, like the milkmaid girls in those God-awful European pictures. But it suits her.

Dahlia’s eyes flicked over me: up, down, and back up again. We smiled at the same time and in the same way, and she released my hand.

—Seems like he’s trying out a new flavor. On a diet, maybe.

She laughed: high, clear, glassy. I tasted it in the back of my own throat, the same phantom ache. The waiter came over from the wings of the circus tent and refilled our glasses without a word.

Another one of the city’s whimsies: watering the animals became a thankless task.

[saviolum-sanguineus]

go find what a fic of ur life would be tagged as on ao3

[saviolum-sanguineus]

cineri gloria sera venit

blurb

They come at night, and quietly. Any reasonable person would have been fast asleep and caught unawares, but Esme has not slept deeply or easily since Parlan’s heart stuttered to a stop beneath her hands. The war, stretching on as it has, has only scraped away at her sleep like a knife at soft carving wood until her nights are thin enough that the light of mornings is welcome when it shines through her eyelids if only because it signifies the coming of an end to fruitless attempts at rest.

Dear Joel My Your My Holiness, Forgive me my absences, my sins, and my forwardness. I fear I have little right to the confessional, but I have news that time will not act graciously upon.

The mob does not know the name sigil that unlocks the window nearest Esme’s bedroom, so they knock on the door first. The sound is feeble, inquisitive and hopeful in nature, and it reminds Esme so bizarrely of Cassius that she is mid-laugh when a pre-traced sigil explodes the glass of the doors leading to the balcony, where her wards are weakest.

She has time to slam wards up around Ember, who wakes with a yowl of alarm, before the first of them are upon her. The chain of Enoch’s gift is icy in her palm when she scrabbles for it, facets cutting into her flesh as wintergreen burns faintly in the air. The warding enchantment is strong but unmaintained since her return from the front, and a crude sigil burns on the club that eventually breaks it.

I have not maintained residence at my lands in the Crimson Corentine for some time. With the war straining resources and morale, I have reallocated the staff there as follows:

Esme is fast and stronger than she looks, but Pheles has demanded of her a dancer, not a fighter, and even the ghost of a farmgirl cannot do much against the frenzy that has come to Shatterlily Square. The moon is new, leaving a blankness in the sky like an eye scooped free of the socket, so it is by the light of a torch that layers of violet-ginger-scented wards shatter and tear.

The first to fall is a woman whose fear stinks of ignorance. Her skull splits on the wooden floor and Esme and her attackers are strangers enough to such things to be frozen in horror for a heartbeat. Esme has the dubious advantage of having borne witness to Nicholas lathering Peteuil blood over the wood of the breaking wheel, but it wanes quickly under assault augmented by adrenaline and freshly-frothed rage.

- I. Corrail; Aplesnay (TMS) - L. Stravinsky; Aplesnay (TMS) - Y. Metrois; Aplesnay (TMS)

- A. Restag; Aixois (AAC) - N. Guerrol; Aixois (AAC) - G. Possor; Aixois (AAC)

They are good people, and go with letters of recommendation. Many of them will be returning to homes once left in pursuit of service.

Ember howls in fear and ire that would set scallops trembling in their shells. If only her foes had been so spineless, perhaps they would have been cowed. Instead, the kitten is shoved out onto the balcony; a child too young to be there but old enough to feel a burning need to be scoops her up with a cry of delight, holding Ember up in the night like a prize. Years later, her clawing protests would be changed over many retellings to the ferocity of a beast from hell, animal anguish distilled with the knowledge that her wicked mistress would soon face comeuppance.

Esme spins and spits sigils until her hands shake too violently to cast, and then she claws and bites until every hand laid upon her bears the mark of her teeth; but eventually she tires and a knife filched from her own kitchen finds the tender skin of a recently-healed wound. The blade fillets flesh that still sizzles with healing magic—the scent of cloves, so unlike the sun-warm florals she cannot allow herself to crave as she does—and Esme lurches away with a scream, fire searing through her veins and gushing out from the wound opened anew.

I understand our obligations. If anyone must pay the price of my selfishness, I would not have it be you. Enclosed are copies of the papers I received confirming the legitimacy of the Trinity Memoriam Service and Aixois Artemancy Conservatory, respectively. TMS is newly-established in the memory of a late mother of an upstanding citizen of Aplesnay. It is my hope that their mission to honour her memory and keep the town’s walls well-shored does good for years to come.

There is no leader of this group that has come to turn her home into a crucible, but a man, masked like the rest of them, steps forward to speak for the senseless rage that reflects up from the blood and shattered glass on the floor. He wears a crucifix of heavy gold around his neck and the kick he aims into Esme’s stomach lands like his boots are soled with it too.

“Redeem yourself. Repent. Accept what forgiveness you can.”

He punctuates the commands with another kick, then motions at the mob. It mills for a moment before arms extend from the mass to seize her, another tight in her hair to hold her head up. Someone’s weight is on her tail, pinning her into a cramped, crooked kneel—another corruption of the faith shining up from the bloodied glass underfoot.

“Repent,” the man says again. On the balcony, the child holding Ember watches with wide eyes; they are too far to hear exactly what’s being said, but invented glory will fill in the gaps for years to come. The distraction proves enough opportunity for Ember to wriggle free, snarling, and escape into a hollow of debris. The Malrics will piece together the news the day after, when Ember scratches, bedraggled, at their door.

Esme struggles against the grip of her captors and manages to break free long enough to swipe a clawed hand over the man’s face. It tears skin, painting over his surprise with blood, and earns her several feet stomping on her tail. Her scream, at least, drowns out the crunch of bone.

“Will you cast the first stone?” Esme coughs while the fire under her skin is still hers. The man throws instead a fist and one golden eye shutters, blood vessels bursting dark and furious.

There comes no third call to empty salvation. Esme’s arms are tied fast behind her back, broken tail dangling limply while the legs she’d made her life lash out. Eventually those too are tied fast at the joints; there comes a terrible splintering crack from the front room as the mob breaks away a crooked slab of wood from the furniture and lashes Esme to it to carry her to the site of execution, apparently brilliantly unaware of the irony muddling through their motions like thick fog.

Across the square, all is dark.

Someone told me once that love is a service with pleasure in its rendering. I have come to find that being loved is not the same as being of service. Perhaps there is truth to both.

Sunlight is just gripping the horizon when they reach the stake. Esme’s vision is blotted with alarming clusters of darkness, but she musters enough strength to bite savagely at every attempt to untie her until it’s decided that the same effect can be achieved by simply tying the broken wood to the prepared stage.

The smell of gunpowder and thinned grain spirit is achingly familiar. She’s measured them out countless times over the past seven years, after all. Esme laughs as they pour the mixture out over the branches stacked at and over her feet, soaking through her nightgown when it splashes over unexpected pockets of wood. No one threatens her: she would like to think it’s out of intimidation, but even to her own ears, her laughter sounds more like sobbing.

She would like to taunt them, to throw it in their faces that the way they’ve tossed this kindling together will take longer to catch, but there’s real, uncontrollable terror writhing in Esme’s gut now, and no amount of icy eyes or a head held high can slay it.

Still, she refuses to break—refuses to allow herself to be broken, even as she feels something running down her wrists that is too warm and sticky to be sweat; even as a slap wrenches her head to the side and slams it against the pole; even as a shout for her to keep her heretical eyes open—muffled, as though coming from very far away and through deep water—crashes slowly through the air, Esme bites through her tongue to keep her silence.

I have learned many things in Pheles. Among them is that the goodness of man is surprising, a force that even the most cursed eyes cannot corrupt, and that love can be both selfish and selfless. Whichever mine is, I hope it is well-received.

Sunlight breaks over a white wall, bathing the nearest window of the papal residence in blindness, and Esme screams. Blood flies from her pierced tongue and the open cuts on her face; she doesn’t quite know what words her mouth shapes, only that No! is among them—and as the great cathedral bells begin to toll the first hour of daybreak, a torch is tossed onto the pyre.

She was right. It does take a few extra minutes for the wood to catch, even doused as it is with accelerants. Her accuracy is agony.

Inside the papal residence, in a marble cloister carved of stone so purely white it is blinding, Cassius kneels and says his morning prayers. His voice echoes off the walls, bouncing into a chorus of holy words and wishes. The heavy door behind him seals out all sound and keeps his voice filling the air.

The sweet smell of roasting meat chokes into something putrid as flesh chars, blackening into sickness.

A courier—an auburn-haired man wearing an unseasonably long coat—makes his way up the cobblestone path that leads to the side door of the papal residence, hidden from view of the pyre by the sloping grounds. The guard there recognises him, tips a friendly hat at him, and waves him through with a commiserating grimace at the smell carried over through the air.

“They’ve gotten started early today. Poor souls.”

Matteo drops the slim bundle of correspondence on Joel’s desk and turns to leave; he’d usually stick around for a quick chat and a few wan smiles, but having to stop by the Imperial registry to pick up whatever documents Esme had ordered copies of had eaten more time than he’d thought it would, and Sam would be even more of a terror if he thought he had something to hold over Mat’s head.

He comes across the pope on his way out; Joel is just exiting the kitchen, hands dusted with traces of flour from mixing pancake batter together, breath faintly scented with coffee. Matteo waves, slowing but not stopping, and calls, “On your desk—have to run!”

I send my love. With grace I intend it for Joseph and his kindly ward. Always, Esme

[saviolum-sanguineus]

agnus dei

the beauty of childhood is in its ignorance; later, it becomes the object of a wistful, willful desire.

tw: worsties toxicity (light, through cassius pov)

(part one) | part two

He looks as though he’d liked to have passed his hand closer to her throat, but Valentine curls up prohibitively there, silent and bright-eyed. “You wanted to. You wanted all of this, Esme.”

The next time Cassius sees Esme, her silks are as crimson as her hair and the lustre of her title burns radiant in the absence of his father’s arm. The porter announces her as a Lady and he claps politely, wondering if she remembers him or if she had shed the memory of that quiet, cold evening along with the man who had left her there.

She does not approach him, but when Lady Esme Odile is speaking to a woman whose serpent dæmon slithers luxuriantly up one arm and down the other during their conversation, Valentine the ermine dæmon pads lightly over the floor to Cassius, not more than a foot away. Esme’s back is to him, but as Valentine makes his form slink in an elegant circle around Annika’s mourning dove shape, she tosses her hair back over her shoulder and a wave of gentle, sweet ginger and spicy rose fragrance floats to him like a wave hello.

Valentine does not speak, but sets his furry head atop Annika’s breast for a second and blinks at Cassius before he returns to Esme, shuffling around her skirts. She finishes speaking to the woman with the serpent dæmon and moves away; Valentine waggles his ears subtly at Cassius from Esme’s shoulders and the boy smiles, one small hand going to pat Annika’s soft feathers.

His Lord father catches Esme by the arm and pulls her towards him as he closes the distance between them—shock plies her into that smooth dance of celestial wounds and welcoming for an instant, Valentine still as stone on her shoulder, before she twists her arm out of Lord Taran’s grasp, gold eyes guarded behind mirror-like, polite smiles.

“Doing very well for ourselves now, are we?” Taran’s voice is smooth as ever, as sleek as Helæna prowling by his side with as much of a smirk as could appear on a leopard’s muzzle. “

Esme’s face went very still for a moment—in that stillness Cassius saw once again the unnameable thing that had slowed Valentine’s curl so many years ago, but this time he was able to read it spooling across Esme’s features. He watched the burning in her eyes and the set of her mouth like blood, like wine, like the opals flashing at her throat, and he knew that this woman and his father had hurt and helped each other terribly, and perhaps wanted to be hurt at the beginning of it all, or at least taken the pain as a sign that something greater at play had been working—and Cassius knew that it was because of this hurt that echoed between them that they could never have loved each other the way the other craved to be loved, and why they now felt a kind of resentful, wicked need of each other despite it all.

The hurting was the proof and the cause and the result, and it was why Lord Taran, who did not care for much at all beyond finding new vices, tapped out a little cigarette from the silver case he carried, put it between his own lips to light it, and nestled the glowing thing between the resistance of Esme’s fingers.

“Your hands are shaking,” he said, and it was as much a reprimand and judgement as it was a warning.

“The air is fresh,” Esme responded, “and I never liked smoking.”

Lord Taran raises an eyebrow and uses his hand to turn one goosefleshed shoulder to look over the gathered guests. He looks as though he’d liked to have passed his hand closer to her throat, but Valentine curls up prohibitively there, silent and bright-eyed.

“You wanted to. You wanted all of this, Esme.” As he releases her and leaves into the crowd, Taran adds in a murmur whose cruelty is in its sweetness, “Even if you didn’t know what game you were learning to play. You learned all the same. And so you know that there is no one else to blame.”

Cassius cradles Annika closer to him and watches Esme blink, breathing shallow; just as he plucks his courage up to go and speak to her, perhaps to offer a bit of verse that he has tucked away in his pocket for times of need such as this, someone calls her name—or rather, her new title first, followed by a surname that exists nowhere outside her own entry in the city’s registry.

The shallow, wavering thing disappears from Esme’s face and leaves her breathtakingly beautiful; more so than even Cassius’s mother, who had never been able to empty her face quite so quickly of the things keeping it from doll-like perfection. She turns, smile dazzling, and Cassius feels himself fading into the safety of being a quiet, well-behaved child of little import in a treacherous city.

Valentine, from his perch on Esme’s shoulder, sees Annika; their eyes meet for a moment, but the ermine’s ears do not waggle, and then Esme is walking farther away, laughing prettily at something while the opals at her wrist flash like lightning.

That night, long after they should be asleep, Annika whispers to Cassius, “We must be good. If we are to help anyone, we must be good.” She says nothing more, but Cassius knows. He turns over in his bed and tries to think only of how soft chinchilla-formed Annika is against his neck and chest, and recites verse until he falls asleep.

[saviolum-sanguineus]

miserere nobis

Lord Taran Etoni keeps his bastard son cloistered for somebody's protection. Cassius keeps his hands clasped in prayer, never to question. Ignorance, after all, is an easy bliss. tw: implied sexual coercion (blink and you'll miss it, it's so light for worsties in particular), sad sad little pursedog of a boy

part one | (part two)

The war within him resolved into a strange deserted battlefield of feeling, and Annika had to rustle her feathers by his ear a few times before he said slowly, “I am Cassius Etoni. This is my Annika.”

The first time Cassius Etoni met Esme Odile, she had been wearing smoke-grey silk and his father’s arm around her waist like a delicate manacle.

Moonlight followed her into the foyer for a moment before his father shut the door behind them both, and Cassius made two startling observations without much in the way of being startled at all: first, this woman was young and beautiful like his mother had been (was still, depending on who you asked), before Cassius was born and her daemon was a velvety length of sleek, snowy white fur and bright-eyed agility caught between the great paws of Helæna, his father’s leopard dæmon.

Neither of the dæmons, nor his father or this unfamiliar beautiful woman had yet noticed Cassius, as still and carefully postured as he was in the cool crepuscular stillness of the rarely-used entrance hall, and so Cassius was free to make further silent observations as though witnessing some strange projection of the tomes he adored occupying himself with most of the day. His dæmon Annika, in the shimmering, blue-brushed shape of a butterfly, fluttered softly near his head and kept the chill of the stone beneath his feet from seeping into him to the bone with the comfort of it.

The white ermine dæmon twined up and around Helaena’s thick-furred neck, motion limber and nothing like the limpness of prey, though there was a strange reluctance—a regret? Resignation? Cassius struggled to name the thing that dragged at the dæmon’s elegant motion but knew easily and immediately that it was there—to be glimpsed in the artful coil of his fur against the leopard’s.

His father’s hand drew the woman closer, a heavy jewelled expectancy at the small of her back, and she turned at his touch to allow her side to slot more neatly into his; they moved in a tandem of old, fluid habit, in the way accelerated projections of planetary orbits and fingers picking at the ache of scabs do: teasing out sudden, sharp bursts like the light of being struck behind the skull from a melting rhythm of dull, constant aching and eclipses. A streak of white lightning flashed over Helæna’s tawny, dark-spotted head and then she was rolling on the floor, paws batting lightly at the ermine as they tangled.

Cassius’s father was Lord Taran Etoni, whose strong, unscarred hands had commanded the salvation and demise of more men than years walked upon the earth by them all combined; the long fingers that plucked at the secrets in the city’s lifeblood like a prodigious violinist rested now along the fine bone of the woman’s jaw, lifting her chin for a thumb to brush and part her wine-stained mouth on its way to remove the dark-tinted pair of lenses hiding the woman’s eyes.

The smoked glass lifted away and even Annika’s nearness—for she alighted on his hair, rather abruptly, shifting into a form that Cassius recognised by the hollow weight on his head and the brief squeezing along the very edges of his being and in his heart as a mourning dove—could not stifle a gasp from piercing the silence Cassius maintained so devoutly during this vigil. The woman’s eyes were brilliant even without the dubious advantage of moonlight, gold like the crucifix that burned now against Cassius’s chest beneath his clothing.

Lord Taran paused, a faint shadow crossing his face, before he released the woman—who had very nearly released herself, if the creak of her leather glove rising to where Taran’s wrist had been was any clue—and turned to his son. The expression on his face was pleasant and smooth, and that made Cassius’s blood sluggish with dread.

“You said we were here for secrecy,” said the devil-eyed woman. Her voice was low and smooth, but with a sizzling kind of danger at its very beginning before it melted away into vapour like the furious hiss of cream martyring itself in molten sugar for caramel; it frightened Cassius terribly and yet it reminded him, also terribly, of his own mother, and his thoughts whirled as frantically as he knew Annika’s trembling wings longed to.

Lord Taran sighed—the sound was superficially disappointed, as though the woman’s anger had ruined some marvellous joke before he could deliver its punchline—and shook his ashen head. His mouth, Cassius realised with a stab of terror like ice, was stained faintly with the glowing red intoxication of the woman’s. With one hand Lord Taran lowered the woman’s and said in a voice carrying the traces of smug satisfaction, “I said this is where we should go for a secret.”

The woman’s devil-gold gaze burned into his father’s face for a moment before she turned it upon Cassius; in the few seconds it took for her fine jaw to turn on a neck as slender as her dæmon, that beautiful face purged itself of the irritation his father had borne the heat of. The danger remained, illuminating her features from within like a lighthouse’s beacon and setting the red pennant of her mouth aflame, but Cassius had long comforted himself with the knowledge that to recognise deception and the ills of temptation is to take one step towards defeating it, and so he simply remained rooted to the ground with a strange, nauseating blend of terror and feeble, desperate faith in his own rectitude.

She blinked, and in the instant that awful, intoxicating golden gaze was obscured, Cassius glimpsed the cold iron-like face of understanding click into place on her features like the cocking of a gun’s hammer before being shot. His fear for himself was quelled by faith, but suddenly Cassius was entirely overwhelmed by the agony of knowing that his father had already engraved his own lauded name on the bullet indubitably waiting to be launched from the flintlock strike of this devil-eyed woman’s tongue.

How much time did Lord Taran Etoni yet have to draw breath, to draw his hand languidly through the soft fur laying over Helæna’s spine, to live in possession of a whole and unfractured soul that rested at once within him and within the leopard at his side? A night? Minutes—mere seconds?

Cassius had always known, for his mother had told him this and he was still of the age where questioning her word was unthinkable, that for all the absence of warm embraces and gentle hands in Lord Taran’s fatherhood, he had held his son’s existence close to his chest these three years, guarded him ferociously from the eyes of London, protected him with this necessary loneliness—so what did this woman with devil eyes and infernal hair offer that could rival such a priceless secret?

The panic drawing Cassius’s small throat tight as a noose exploded into a whimper as the woman’s eyes opened—gold pinned him in place—and she paused again.

“Give me those,” she snapped, but somehow the naked, incredulous anger in her voice was less fearsome than the way she swallowed it back like bile and mellowed the swipe of her hand to a pat against Lord Taran’s chest before reaching for the dark pair of lenses in his grasp. He relinquished them with a chuckle and the deviless—for what else could she be?—veiled her eyes again before looking at Cassius.

She drew a long breath and Annika changed into an eagle—a fledgling, white patches betraying the fear buzzing along her and Cassius both, but with a sharp, curved beak and talons that echoed that metallic red-iron promise. The woman looked away then, and something in her slender neck and narrow frame became unbearably pained before she said to Lord Taran, “You never told me you had a son.”

He shrugged and petted Helæna as she abandoned the other daemon to rub along Lord Taran’s legs; the ermine, having leapt to the woman’s hand and scurried up to coil around her neck, bristled and hissed ferociously.

“You never asked. And he is a very precious secret—aren’t you? Come say hello, dear boy.”

These last words were directed, of course, at Cassius. Between the holy furore and fear keeping him frozen with their war and the deep-seated inclination to obey his father, the latter won after a skipped heartbeat and Cassius approached them slowly, hands pressed tightly to his sides. Annika clicked her beak softly and hopped down to his shoulder so that the warm rustle of her feathers echoed the all-too brief pass of his father’s hand over his hair.

“And how would you have made me earn it if I had?” the woman asked his father—she was too beautiful to sound bitter, and yet her words filled Cassius’s mouth with acrimony as though her tongue had replaced his own. “Do you value your son over sapphires? The Salons? Sharing what is not yours to share?”

Lord Taran clicked his tongue. Irritation was bleeding into the saturation of his amusement, and Helæna was no longer purring.

“I’m right to value him more than sharing things so apparently wasted on you. Etiquette lessons in particular,” he said, and though the insult seemed too light and juvenile to find any purchase in the flesh of someone so lustrous she could have been chipped out of some cathedral’s stained glass, the woman flinched.

There was a twitch in Lord Taran’s face as he turned back to the door he’d just entered through. It made the perpetual amusement of his features cold, like a new face of a glacier revealed by ice shearing off the old surface.

The ermine dæmon on the woman’s shoulder shifted slightly and her voice sounded, tempered ever so slightly, every word diluting the fire further. “Wait. My lord, I was wrong. Don’t go—we’ve barely seen each other these past weeks—“

“Of course,” Lord Taran cut her off, beckoning needlessly to Helæna to follow him without looking at the woman. “You wouldn’t let me forget that your auditions are coming soon, and your time is in such short supply. How could I begrudge you, Esme? I’m the one who brought you here, after all.”

He glanced at Cassius and smiled. The blue of his eyes is a shard of the sky. “Your mother’s left for our appointment, I presume?”

A sinking feeling in his chest, Cassius nodded his head. “Yes, Papa,” he murmured—too well-trained to mumble. “She took the second train this morning, and said I was to wait and greet you both upon your return here.”

He chanced a glance at the woman and decided not to add that no guests had been expected to accompany his father. Something in the set of her face whispered to Cassius that she already knew as much.

Lord Taran turned that cold, sky-shard smile onto the woman he’d arrived with and strode back out the door. Helæna’s tail flicked a bit sharply against the silk of the woman’s skirts and the ermine’s dark eyes glared at her, steady despite the subtle tremor that runs through the shoulder he’s perched on.

Lord Taran had left the door very slightly ajar, just enough to allow a bit of the evening chill through. The woman watched the door swinging against the wind for a long moment, then stepped forward and pressed her hand against the door to shut it with a firm click. In the silence of the hall, it was as loud as a gunshot.

Cassius swallowed and crossed himself as she turned. She paused—he could not tell if she was just staring or blinking again behind the dark tint of her glasses, and had to resign himself to simply praying that she did not remove them again.

The ermine uncoiled from around her neck, draping more loosely over her shoulders as she knelt so that he didn’t have to crane his neck up like he was regarding one of the stained glass panels she could have fallen from.

“My name is Esme and my dæmon is Valentine,” she told him, and the sizzle had gone completely from her voice, leaving it soft like a cornered thing that had seen its death and was saving its strength for one final, fruitless kick. “I am a dancer but not a devil, and that is the secret I’ll give you in return for yours. How shall I call you?”

With a start, Cassius realised that his father had not uttered his name, and that this devil-eyed dancer had said that he was his own secret rather than his father’s. The war within him resolved into a strange deserted battlefield of feeling, and Annika had to rustle her feathers by his ear a few times before he said slowly, “I am Cassius Etoni. This is my Annika.”

He looked into Esme’s face and forced himself to peer deeply into the dark-tinted lenses; there was a scraping of gold shining through, only enough to be mistaken for a reflection of streetlight or perhaps the fire in the adjoining room, but still it was enough to shoot a fear that quivers like an arrow in Cassius, deep beneath the shelter of his ribs.

It snapped, shaft severed from arrowhead, beneath the quiet observation of the other features on Esme’s face: there was something unreadable and taut in the press of her mouth, fighting against the smile she wore like his father’s father wore his military dress uniform, in the set of her fine-boned jaw and the nearly imperceptible tilt of her head against the soft fur of her dæmon. It stirred restlessly in him, a worrisome mystery that refused to untangle neatly and instead turned over itself endlessly in a corner of his brain, silent but pressing. It was a secret she had not intended to give him, and entirely human.

Cassius swallowed and told her, “I should like to pray for you and offer you refreshments, Esme, but I am afraid you must fetch them yourself if you would like something I cannot reach. Mama has taken the porter with her and the maids do not come today.”

She was silent for another very long moment, and Cassius began to fidget, before Esme smiled and nodded at him—and the glimpse he had been unable to name reared itself up in his vision again, stronger this time, before Valentine in his soft white coat slid nimbly down Esme’s arm and peered at Annika in an affable way. The sight relaxed the anxious knot boiling in Cassius’s gut—for however good a person was at lying, no dæmon could conceal the truth of something like that, and Annika was a dove now anyways and cooing rather than trembling in the face of something she could not read either—so he nodded and led Esme into the library with its sullen coals and carefully-tended cross in the corner that Cassius most liked to read in.

[part two]

[saviolum-sanguineus]

glory, glory, glory (of transience and unknowable memory)

Esme always wanted to belong with the stars. Perhaps, with all her brightness, she should have known it would come to burning. tw: death

Wind stirs the flowers again, along with their shadows; slivers of silver light and the darkness neighboring them whirl over the marble and draw Luna’s and Joel’s eyes.

Even if the glamour hadn’t withered away the moment its caster passed into death, the Malrics still wouldn’t have held an open viewing. Pheles had long since forced its fill of drinking in their daughter; she would have laughed at the idea that death would preserve her dignity, but Tobin and Yvette hold a private ceremony anyways.

They dress Esme in crimson, fine cloth woven furiously and dyed by her mother’s hands, and lay soft lavender and lilies by her head and feet, nestled around the cold stiffness of her body so the soil and stone will welcome her home. The blooms do not cover the scars—skin split by flame and flagellation, healed over waxy and gnarled—and Tobin cannot bring himself to look Val in the eye to ask for his help.

So they sit and speak to Esme one last time, before warm, trembling hands lay over a pair of cold ones and tuck a trio of mementos where they’re folded: a worry chain of tiny, interlocking wooden hearts, polished buttery smooth and varnished with a glossy dark cherry stain; a pair of ribbons spun from silk that gleams softly opalescent, embroidered with tiny, fine-stitched scenes of a dancer whirling in the stars, and coiled into the shape of two roses; a child-sized woodworking chisel, worn with age and marked near the lip of its handle with a tiny, crudely carved pair of cats sitting with their tails entwined.

Three pairs of hands lower the lid of the casket. A clock ticks over the sound of sobs. A charcoal portrait of Esme smiles brightly from its stand between carefully arranged flowers; in front of it is a plate of apple slices cut to look like rabbit ears, crisp flesh yellowing.

They lower the casket with all the care they’d saved up for her during her life and great absence from theirs. When the earth is smoothed over before a marble stone, three warm hands press their palms in turn to the triquetra carved below Esme’s name; the scent of mingled magic lingers in the air as the Malrics depart—solemn sorrow so unspeakable it silences even their steps.

Taran has either the consideration or carelessness not to visit until three days have passed. He drops a single poppy over the grave and looks silently at the headstone and its inscription for a long moment. A faint, vaguely sad smile and a shake of his head before the murmur: “Eight more, kitten. Maybe you’ll find me again in the next.”

He smokes wordlessly while Cassius kneels to perform something tearful that’s part prayer and part farewell, choking on the words he gulps to make way for sobbing. Taran steps forward only to place a hand on his son’s shoulder and urge him up to his feet when the message turns to apologies.

“We all made our choices,” Taran whispers as he hugs Cassius close, scooping him up. His face is unreadable, voice steady as he ferries his son away. “Even her. Even then.”

He slows but does not stop when he passes Zia on the path, one arm slung around Morael’s shoulder. She raises an eyebrow but says nothing. When the Marquesses Seraphine leave the cemetery, it’s without the elegant but impersonal bouquet they’d entered with—red ranunculus and sparkling white lilies—and having completed another task on their list of duties.

Luna visits at night, when the moon high above is the only witness. She stares at the headstone too, mouth pressing into a tight frown before she sighs.

“Hi. Um, I miss you,” she says, eyes dropping to the pile of flowers atop the grave. Briefly, she wonders if Esme would have wanted her to bring flowers too. In the moonlight, their petals seem colourless.

Luna hesitates. “I miss you,” she says again. The petals flutter in a breeze that curves so like the touch of a hand that Luna nearly expects the moonlight bending over the marble to slide aside in response. Quiet settles again like snow.

“I thought about talking to Ell,” Luna says suddenly. “I don’t know if you’d remember her. I think you met. And you knew so many people here. Ell has studied necromancy. She could bring you back. I’d convince her. But I don’t know if you’d want that. I never knew what you wanted. But I always wanted to do what you wanted. Even if I never was.”

She pauses. Esme’s grave does not respond.

“I’m going to miss you for a long time,” Luna says quietly. “I keep thinking about the night you spent at my place, back then. And if there was anything I could have to done to make this end differently.”

“Luna?”

Her instinctive shielding spell flickers and fades—somewhat reluctantly—as Joel emerges from the shadows along the path. He’s dressed darkly, signs of the papacy condensed to a Farfallan cross hanging from his neck, minimal enough to assure his being mistaken for a devout civilian from a distance.

Luna grimaces before nodding at Joel. “Pope Babyboy.”

He blinks—something twitches over his expression, fleeting as a cloud over the moon, before Joel motions towards the grave, still not quite able to look directly at it.

“I wanted to come pay my respects. If you’d prefer privacy, I can wait.” There’s a faint pause after the words.

Wind stirs the flowers again, along with their shadows; slivers of silver light and the darkness neighboring them whirl over the marble and draw Luna’s and Joel’s eyes.

Rain washes pollen from the marble, water gathering in the etched lettering above Esme’s name. Beloved. May she dance among the stars.

Far, far away, in the ashes of what used to be an Aixoisi lavender field, rainwater mixes with the silt and ash and soaks the grave of flowers that knew too early the grace of burning. Earthworms churn in the dirt and break through the surface, glistening raw and pink in the moonlight.

The first petal from the flowers left at Esme’s grave flutters gracefully to the earth, felled not by malice but by time.

[saviolum-sanguineus]

ode to joy

It isn't that Esme doesn't love dancing. It's simply that this is a new kind for her to burn into the memory of her body.

tw: canon-typical violence/blood/gore

The hand at her back drifts a touch lower before coming up to adjust one of the ribbons laid flat along Esme’s ribs, nudging it over the tiny constellation embroidered there.

The performance goes well, if joylessly: Esme’s calculations as to how much gunpowder to secret are perfect down to the milligram, rewarding her with an easy spectacle as she spins, bared spine blurring to the eyes of the company assembled. She’s barefoot, dust floating just above the ground before being sucked back down by the sigil she’d laid down beforehand, and clothed in a mockery of dress traditional to a town to the southwest of where she’d grown up—a special request from the colonel in charge of this brigade. Aixois was apparently a favourite summer destination of his in more officially peaceful times.

Esme’s mouth twists wryly in the half-heartbeat of shadow she can afford to, before she turns a blinding smile back to her audience and whips her arms out, followed by a wave of flame coloured the perfect, smooth blue of the imperial crest.

Things blur after that—it’s not comfortable but unnervingly familiar, the feeling of the colonel’s eyes lingering on her as she curtsies. Memory doesn’t make it any easier to look at him through soot-darkened lashes as she rises and catch him on the slim hook of a smile.

“A marvelous performance, Lady Odile. I was pleased to hear we were due one of your visits.” He’s standing close enough that Esme can feel the calculation in his gaze as it slides over her, heavy where it lingers on the signs of Enoch’s possession—protection, as futile as it may now be—on her body: jewels at her hand and deep blue silk sheathing her torso. “There was some question whether or not your schedule would allow for such an extensive tour out.”

“It’s always a pleasure to serve in what ways I can,” Esme says. Where her knife presses low into her stomach beneath the taut, reinforced lining of her bodice, the metal is warm with anxious promise—the colonel’s palm sears impatiently on the bare skin between her shoulder blades, contact lasting a prolonged handful of seconds before he smiles and glides his hand down to the small of Esme’s back, pleased with how easily he’s drawn her a step closer.

“And we are grateful for your service.” The hand at her back drifts a touch lower before coming up to adjust one of the ribbons laid flat along Esme’s ribs, nudging it over the tiny constellation embroidered there.

“Before this deployment, a beautiful specimen of Aixoisi handicraft came into my possession. Particularly fine tapestry work of red lavender—as I understand it, the model landscape is one you were raised by. It must be difficult, to be so far from familiar fields and faces. Perhaps it would be of some comfort to view, over a bit of light evening conversation.”

In the dim light of a far-off torch, the colonel’s eyes are colourless, easy to imagine clouding over in death. Esme tips her smile like a spilled wineglass and sets her golden eyes to drift towards his tent. “Lead the way.”

She draws from the amethyst reservoir at the back of her hand to cast a silencing ward as they walk in, polished purple facets glinting. The colonel watches her, mouth curved up as he pours out two glasses of wine—a ridiculous luxury, this near the border, but Esme isn’t sure why she expected anything less.

His eyebrows lift slightly when Esme double layers the ward, golden sigils shimmering over the beaten-down grass. “Such caution, my lady. Another gift from our illustrious Lord Ward? I’d heard how extravagantly he outfits your desires, but not how closely he guards his.”

“Lord Ward doesn’t know what I want,” Esme says lightly, turning to face the colonel and slowly undoing the clasp at her wrist, drawing the gold ring and chain off. It hits the ground with a quiet, metallic clink, echoing the swell of hunger in his smile as Esme closes the distance between them, one arm draping over the olive drab of the colonel’s fatigue coat to pull him closer before trailing down his side. “And what he doesn’t know won’t hurt him.”

She pulls the colonel’s hands to the lacing at her back, voice stinging sweet as she smiles up at him and murmurs, “I do love a man who takes instruction as well as he gives it.”

“So the rumours are true. What a delightful piece of enlightenment you are.”

The colonel laughs, Esme’s bodice loosens, and the balisong falls into her waiting hand, handles flipping together with a muffled click—it’s heavier than any prop she’s ever handled, insisting on a rigid tendon in her wrist when she drives the winking blade into the soft flesh at the crook of the colonel’s neck. The rip of flesh is wet and drags at the knife when she yanks it free to plunge down again, artery and muscle turned to slick, hot shreds.

His ruined dominant shoulder jerks, stilted motion instinctive before quick abortion and abandonment—the colonel is fast enough with his other hand to grab Esme’s arm and jerk her to the side, but not fast enough to anticipate that she’d pivot her armed side to slice along his forearm and follow the arc of the cut to find purchase once again in the mess of raw flesh and blood at his shoulder.

His body slumps over her, blue silk soaked through to black with blood. Esme grunts at the shift of dead weight, a grimace flickering over her features as blood smears salty and thick over her cheek.

She drags the corpse close enough to the low cot that he could have been sitting on it when stabbed, then shoves the weight off herself to thunk against the ground. One of the wineglasses donates half its contents to rinse the blade of its gore and the remaining half to Esme’s dry mouth; its twin follows the colonel directly to the ground, glass shattering, wine flooding over the bloodstained earth. Esme swallows, runs a hand over her side, and sits on the cot.

Vital organs here, and here, but most stab wounds are so dangerous because of blood loss or shock. The memory of Joel’s voice is warm, though Esme’s hands are cold when she traces two fingertips over her lower abdomen, tracing over a scar that hasn’t been left yet. The blade is just as cold and just as steady through the drag of soaked-through silk.

I hope you’ll never need to know this. I’m glad you’re safe here with me now.

Blade raised away twice its own length. One deep breath. Joel had taken her hand then, brought it to his mouth to kiss the knowledge into her fingertips. Esme brings the knife plunging down into her side.

The pain shatters her glamours and rips a scream from her throat that sets the silencing ward shimmering. Esme falls from the cot, knife falling from a trembling hand as she struggles to think past the searing gush—the colonel’s blood had spurted out hot, but this burns like every fear she’s ever had made flesh.

She’d meant to drag the body onto the cot, meant to make the scene look as perfectly convincing as all her performances on and offstage have always had to be, but the shake in her limbs is uncooperative, shallow rasps of breath and the pound of blood in her ears overwhelming everything else.

Enoch’s gift is still warm from the earlier heat of her hand when she wriggles it back on and cinches the clasp in place with her teeth. The ruby flashes—she’d never quite liked how wearing them at her throat made it look like it was slashed open, but what could she do when the court knew her as a woman of crimson and fire—and the balisong blade burns clean of blood, magic unscented. Under her feet, the earth had been relatively solid; it sways now, grit sticking to her palms, sticky-slick with a mixture of blood and sweat.

Esme’s fingers slip the latch of the knife back into place and she leans back against the cot, panting, to hike her skirt up and fasten the balisong against her inner thigh. She presses her hands to the gash in her side, pulls the magic from the silencing ward back into the gems at her hand, and screams until black, fuzzy-edged spots begin crowding her vision.

It’s almost like watching a curtain draw over a stage—the rapid footsteps approaching are a kind of applause too, a small voice in the back of her mind whispers, before the darkness shushes that too.

[saviolum-sanguineus]

[saviolum-sanguineus]

Totally agree - Enoch is an omega if I ever saw one. Also, Nicholas as an alpha is the boring option - Nicholas as an omega?

Cataclysm with omega!Nicholas and alpha!Esme is the truth, and we all know it babes. I'm not here for discourse, so I'll stop there, but yeah. Butterfly Court Omegaverse deserves better than the tired, expected tropes @sacredsanguine.

P.S. Joel is an omega through and though. His scent is so so so omega-coded.

Just what it says on the tin. 18+ interaction under the cut. <3

So I feel like most of the characters could have lots of different presentations, but Some of them are just. They're very strongly coded, alright.

Andrey is an omega. He likes sniffing his love interests, he's like perpetually comforting himself with Nikolai's scent (okay and the cinnamon roll thing??? guys. it's right there.) Also the blanket nests all the time, etc. etc. He's super super physically affectionate with his partners and wants to be held/snuggled all the time - can I make it more obvious?

Taran is a beta. AND instead of those magic siphons he has sucking off his artisans, he's got some kind of meds that make him smell/seem like an alpha. I was actually thinking of a whole backstory like how instead of going to Aixois with his friend to buy a horse he was actually going to get a refill or something. Also beta!Taran definitely still has special artisans on his patronage to make him colognes designed to mimic alpha scents by amplifying certain aspects of his own pheromones.

Ariel is a beta that everyone thinks is an alpha. They have a quietly commanding presence and a way of arranging pieces to fall into place that gives off Big Alpha Energy. It also helps that they're such an enigma - major mysterious alpha vibes.

Esme is an omega on heat suppressants. She's like the POSTER GIRL for them (it's a secret still, but like c'mon). She's such a girlboss and definitely covers up her presentation to make everyone in Pheles believe she's an alpha, just like she has her whole "My name is and always has been Esme and I'm a fire mage" thing in canon. She loves being wrapped up (look at her wardrobe. homegirl does not own anything that doesn't FLAUNT THE FIGURE, and it's because she craves touch), she's literally whimpered and clung to alpha-coded people on-screen and immediately performed panic responses to cover it up, she's got similar responses to Andrey to certain magical signatures....don't EVEN get me started on how her body language around love interests changes DRAMATICALLY in public vs private.

Enoch and Nicholas are both alphas. But this one fic I read had their ruts trigger each other's instead of being on a regular cycle or triggered by an omega's heat, and honestly it was kind of genius. I think they'd keep a running count of whose rut induced the other person's (and by they, I mean Nicholas) and it'd be a competitive thing for no reason.

So magical signatures are pretty much equivalent to what I think everyone's specific blend of pheromones would smell like, but I think blockers would come in two kinds:

Mufflers - more socially accepted/common, used as a courtesy when appearing in public during a heat/rut or when you know you'll be around a lot of people and don't want to accidentally flood anyone's brain who might be close to/in their own. Don't remove or replace a scent completely, just dampen it down. Negligible side effects, even if used long-term, applied topically (rich people have sigil patches instead of a cream). Over time, your body might develop a resistance to a particular formulation, which would make the muffler less effective.

Banners - very taboo and/or illegal when used outside specific "approved" ceremonial contexts (ex. religious figures who are mandatorily celibate, deep spy missions, etc.). Completely neutralize a person's scent; some kinds also replace the scent with a blend of pheromones from a different presentation, so you could use a banner to pose as a different presentation. Betas posing as alphas or omegas aren't usually made as big of a deal out of, but an alpha posing as an omega or vice versa definitely would be a big scandal.

"Scenting" as a form of greeting is only done within Pheles and the court - like the message bubble spell, it's a ridiculous custom rooted in the archaic "alpha superiority" posturing culture (and also because exposing your neck/scent glands to a stranger used to be equivalent to "you show me yours, I'll show you mine" since two alphas meeting would have to ease their instinctual threat response to each other).

I'm gonna talk about ruts too but the alliteration was really cute <3

Even outside of heats, Andrey just builds nests. Constantly. Lowkey his actual heat nests are massive fire hazards bc of how many flammable, fluffy blankets and pillows he piles together.

Whenever he has to deal with his ruts/heats himself (I flip-flop on his presentation lol), Joel recites Farfallan verses - if it's reallly hard to get through, he does them backwards.

Joel is also the type of person to always try getting himself through without help because he doesn't want to burden anyone with taking care of him.

Esme's been coasting because she has enough girlboss alpha energy to make people placebo believe her Alpha Command Voice, but she gets found out either by her "fake" Omega Suggestion Voice working a little too well OR suddenly developing an intolerance to her suppressants and well...the fandom doesn't call her soggy for nothing. <3 First heat in what, seven years? Bitey bruises are the least of the issue.

Taran has a huge and unexplored presentation-play kink. He'll likely never get into it with a partner for fear of exposing himself.

Nicholas once had to be put into a medically-induced coma during his rut because he kept wanting to draw blood off Enoch and then the smell of another alpha's blood sent him into a raging frenzy.

Enoch tends to hide away during his rut, emerging only for necessary business or to work out (usually very destructive). He also gets more omega-like symptoms during his rut (feverish, very flushed, damp).

Plot Headcanons

Esme never realized it until way too late, but the periods where her heat would have been happening were also the times she craved playing bitey the most.

Nicholas would have put it together if he hadn't been so disgusted/busy playing bitey with her. Taran does put the pieces together because he's never seen Esme brat out like that.

Nikolai also figures it out and tells Andrey. Andrey is too busy building a nest to care (for now). Depending on divorcee solidarity status later, Esme might get an unwanted and unasked-for safe mating talk. Nikolai does the hand puppetry.

At some point, Andrey's and Esme's heats sync up and their altered behavior prompts the tabloids to theorize that Aurora is their biokid again

Alt. headcanon for how Esme gets exposed: when she's sick after ice skating and Enoch goes to check on her at her apartment....that wasn't an alpha command voice, that was a really bossy omega suggestion. And it worked. We leave it to the fanfics to decide if Enoch realizes or not!

Taran's post-sex cigarettes are for pleasure and for enhancing the dominant alpha notes in his scent.

Nesting Habits

Andrey likes soft fleecy fabrics best for nesting, decorated with silk tassels or pillowcases. He likes more blankets or his partners' clothes to wrap up in than pillows and likes burying his face in them while being "rolled up"

Esme likes the feeling of silk, but her favorite nesting material is cotton because it's softer and more breathable with the fur of her ears/tail. She doesn't like being too warm, she would rather steal a partner's clothes to wear than wrap up with lots of blankets

Joel keeps multiple rosaries on hand to decorate nests, whether for himself or a partner

Taran once jokingly called Esme a pillow princess. The scratches on his back took a month to heal

[saviolum-sanguineus]

“ why are you looking at me like that? ” e-squared? but like with a captain crunch esme

with pleasure, nonnie! i changed up the wording of the prompt a bit, but this sure is some crunchy esme and some dense enoch. together, they're a delicious pudding.

tw: slightly suggestive? emotional repression. poor moral decisions. girlbossery.

War is unkind to them all—to some in different ways than others. The military order for her morale tour severs many of the strings of influence that Esme had kept tightly wound in her grasp, and Enoch’s noticeably cool non-responses to the few papers that manage to extricate a statement from him snap a good handful more.

She bears it in the best way she knows how, but Esme’s tolerance has never been her greatest virtue. It’s late evening, one of the few remaining to her in Pheles before an impending departure for new shores of humiliation to endure, and Enoch is in his study, poring over papers lashed with scrawls of deep, blood-blue ink, when Esme enters, nerves frayed enough to remind her of how they’d first met without including the fear she’s felt since the Seraphine murder trial.

“Esme.” It’s more fatigued than purposefully cold, a decent enough greeting for a man tasked with managing the arming and provision of the empire’s many military outposts amid the flurry of activity caused by official mobilization—but Esme’s empathy, already shrivelled, is curtailed further by the fact that Enoch’s eyes land first on her hair, not her face, and that the small smile that spreads over his features comes only after noting how she’s come bearing his colours, deep blue silk making her as much a Ward possession as the similarly shimmering pen he sets aside to look at her. “You look beautiful. Why are you up so late? It’s unhealthy, you should take better care of yourself.”

Esme’s restraint shivers, setting the chains of her careful calculation jangling—and the one at her hand as well, a delicate harbinger of rage built up over weeks. “I’ve been packing.”

Her eyes narrow slightly as Enoch looks down to avoid responding to the implication of her answer and Esme continues, voice sharpening against the brilliant white whetstone of aching teeth, “Blythe and I had a conversation earlier—unfortunate, that she never took me up on that offer to show her backstage during the performance season. I wish I could have given her a little tour. She made a few remarks on the profession that the insight would have helped better inform her on.”

Enoch sighs, the sound rough with impatient frustration. “Esme, not now—”

“Why are you speaking to me like this?”

Esme’s voice is all blade now, no silk to shield its edge from carving through the air as she stalks forward to plant her hands on Enoch’s desk and stare at him—it infuriates her that he’s tall enough, even sitting, that she’s just at eye-level, and it certainly shows.

“I asked you a question, Enoch. I already know the answer—I want to hear you say it.” Her eyes are searing, every word low and sparkling with the sibilant perfection of an accent that falls upon the syllables like a perfectly honed sword. “Tell me that you’re ashamed of being so publicly sullied. Tell me that you agree with your daughter, that she serves our glorious empire in superior ways and that you’d never let her do such unspeakable things like me. Tell me that you would rather cast me aside to debasement you have every ability to preclude than raise a finger that Nicholas would take offense to in his fragile state.”

Esme’s fingers are clenched over the gleaming rosewood of Enoch’s desk, voice sliding tight and hard through her teeth, but the room is devoid of her magic, ginger and gold kept restrained under her skin—a pointed sign of self-control perhaps lost on Enoch, whose silence is slipping into a hollow, vaguely reddening expression as Esme continues. His features cling to thin-lipped disapproval like barnacles to sea-shorn rock, though the tide, it seems, is turning.

“Tell me what we both know you are, darling.” Her fingers catch Enoch’s jaw, crimson-lacquered nails glossy against his pale skin, and tilt his head up, forcing a slanted line of sight as Esme leans over his desk, the conflagration in her eyes flaring ever higher.

His grip closes around her wrist—not tight enough to grind the tiny bones there against each other, but Enoch moving at all is enough for Esme to raise an eyebrow.

“I never said you could touch.”

She doesn’t entirely expect him to release her. Maybe he doesn’t either—but Enoch’s hand loosens and slips back down to his lap. The gems running along the back of Esme’s hand glitter as she tips Enoch’s head a little further, voice lowering into a purr cold enough to disguise the disdain at its core.

“Look at you. A pathetic, sorry man who hides behind a creed about as sturdy as melted ice because it’s the only conviction that will never realise how miserably clueless you are and demand better of you. You don’t have to hide that from me—you can’t.”

Her nails press in slightly harder, drawing red beneath the skin but not breaking it, before Esme releases Enoch, rather suddenly, and takes a step back. Something like a scoff twists over her face, unpainted lips glistening around a silent breath.

“You want someone to tell you what to do, don’t you? It would have been easy to have me reassigned or at least kept closer to court. But I didn’t ask. Because I loved you and I believed you when you told me you’d keep me safe. I should have known you needed direction.”

Esme doesn’t move. Every line of her body is taut, commanding in the way of a drawn-back crossbow as she breathes, eyes fixed on Enoch’s, “So I’m not asking now. I am telling you to finish that page and come to bed. You will hold me and you will listen, and we will sleep. Do you understand that, Enoch?”

Freedom from his silk is fleeting, a bare heartbeat before Esme lies down in Ward blue and arms. Enoch's bed is comfortable; Esme hates herself and him a little bit for how much the warmth of him pressed along her body quiets the storm in her stomach.

The absent tenderness of Enoch’s embrace cuts like a knife. His kiss does worse.

[saviolum-sanguineus]

instantly on my knees

[saviolum-sanguineus]

primadonna

what, really, is the difference between fall and flight?

tw: early worsties (so toxic intimacy)

She understands what she is and what she looks like, and if all of court only lowers to its knees for the thought of what lies up her skirts, they’re still bowing.

She burns her fingertips figuring out one of the tricks he describes for her, but that night Taran takes her hand and turns it palm-up to kiss the tender skin. His lips are soft but she still flinches—Taran kisses her palm instead, then pulls her arm forward to caress her into his lap where he sits at the foot of his bed.

Odile Malric is not naïve. She understands what the warm hand on her hip wants, why Taran slips her arm over his shoulder and eases his fingers to the edge of the collar on the dress he bought for her. She’s tried to prepare herself for this inevitability of this moment, chased away the last of her uncertainty with thoughts of dancing into fabulous dreams with a hand in her lord’s and gulps of amber liquid that burns on the swallow. One of those has been more effective than the other.

Taran smiles at her, thumb massaging a slow circle over her skin. He’s looking her in the eyes, lips curved up in the indolent smile she’s come to know so well. “You did so well tonight,” he croons, leaning his cheek against her and pulling her close. “Always so beautiful, Ember…you’re going to be the envy of everyone in Pheles.”

The name he chooses shouldn’t relax her as much as it does. Neither should the sweet softening of Taran’s smile as he lifts a hand from her hip to cup her face, thumb brushing over soft skin like a treasure—but it does, and she smiles back at him. She has not yet learnt to read his expressions in layers, to recognise superficiality in the way the court will teach her.

“So clever, kitten,” he murmurs. “Clever and beautiful…my pretty dancer.” He doesn’t kiss her, just draws his hand back so she follows and brings her own lips to his, gives her the idea of control. When she leans in with a soft sigh, Taran returns her hesitancy like stoking a fire with silvered tongue, feeding every unspoken want with affection that he leaves for her to decipher into what she wants it to be.

His thumb brushes her lips, coaxes them open so he can whisper, “So sweet,” into the dark, wet curl of her determined tongue while the dress he’d bought for her slips off her shoulders. “Such a good, sweet kitten for me, Ember—”

“Don’t call me that.” Her voice is desperate, hitting Taran’s lips with the kind of urgent heat he’s used to in a different kind of context that runs not quite parallel to this one. “I want you to use the one we picked out together. So I can get used to it.”

He pauses, eyes flickering over her face. “Alright. Lift your hips for me then, Esme.”

Silk rustles to the floor and Taran’s palms are hot along her bare skin when he kisses down her breastbone and murmurs, “Good girl. Is ‘kitten’ still fine, sweetheart?”

He’s never been anything but sweet and kind and giving to her, promising the moon and stars like he can see the dreams spilling from her brain. Esme nods and Taran presses a smiling kiss to the curve of her collarbone, then tips his head up—she doesn’t keep him waiting, tilts her head down so their lips meet, breath coming fast and muffled. In the years to come, she will regret her earnestness. Hope sours quickly under denial and quicker still under the heat of bitter revelation.

He calls her many things that night, groans a wealthy collection of syllables as they take each other apart over and over, but every one of them sounds like her new name, the one Esme will cling to as her only sword and shield in the dark nights, more so when they become lonely as well.

He tells her that she’s beautiful, that she’s taking everything so well, that she was made for this, and Esme tries to believe him. She lets his pretty words and pretty touches sink into her skin. Taran helps her rewrite her voice, her posture, everything but the face he’d taken her for in the first place. Or rather: he places the coin and knife in her hands and leaves it to her to use them as he watches, comforting her with praise and pleasure that fades in the harshness of morning light.

Odile Malric was not naïve and Esme Odile even farther from it. She hones her mind into something as ruthless and sharp as her tongue. She understands what she is and what she looks like, and if all of court only lowers to its knees for the thought of what lies up her skirts, they’re still bowing.

She knows Taran is not her friend the first time he kisses her. She knows they are not lovers the first time they share a bed, no matter what they both may say about it.

She reads her parents’ letters a thousand times and does not know how to respond.