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fauxregard:

Perhaps she should be surprised, should react in some way as evidence to disbelief that this really is her cousin, the Beauregard she should be so used to. Wouldn’t that be disingenuous, particularly with just the two of them there to witness, both more than aware that nothing should be surprising? More than that, they are not required, currently, to parade before others and pretend to be something they are not, deceive with a bond so encompassing as family. Such a cruel word for the ropes they are burned on. She could like him better this way, as pretense is scraped thinner at least. Though there’s something harrowing in the way he tells her she can not. For once neither a criticism nor a challenge thrown in her direction, and for once such familiar words earn a reaction. “Vous ne le souhaitez pas.” Statement or question is a question in itself. Conclusion then also. 

A strange place indeed. Strange encounter. More comfortable than anything before, which makes it even stranger. An outsider’s perspective would deem her the strangest for even thinking it as right. Interesting, then, might be a more appropriate word. A leaning post in the wings for something pure and unrehearsed, “As pretending goes, so easy to be strangers.” she bows her head, determination subdued with the uncertainty of it all. gaze drawn to her feet as they tread such unfamiliar roads. She does not truly stand anywhere when she does not belong, blood meaning less than the allure of a magpie’s treasure cove. Dmitri, Hale, Xanthe, even Silas, scarce a glance to reach an appraisal of nil for Isabel Beauregard. She’s even scared to ask what he needs instead, if she can not heal him. “Could a stranger offer more reasonable than healing?”

“No.” It’s a simple answer, but he is glad that she is not angry at it. And in that moment, as Isabel Beauregard stands before him with a mind more open than any of her predecessors, he seems to see her in a new light. That seed of disdain that he has always held for his golden-haired cousins loosens. It will never fully dislodge, he doesn’t believe he will ever allow it to - but tonight he has been pleasantly surprised. 

“We are not in France,” he says in response, and the way he says France - with the long, heavy sound that only the French use, ties them together. “We were never meant to meet like this.” Dmitri raises one eyebrow, eyes lifting to meet hers, his a green grey colour that is both harrowing and strange. 

Oddly, in some lights, it is beautiful too. But not like Isabel or the others. They have a different kind of beauty, one that he will never be included in. He looks at her again, and as if for the first time, notices that she is not dressed like he usually sees her. There is something different. She almost seems to be sharp. But he doesn’t remark on it. Instead, he says, “Allons-y,” and steps away from the wall. Cautiously, gently. He still stays in the shadows, reluctant to show her his face without the shroud of darkness. “Where are you going? Ce n’est pas sans danger.” It isn’t without danger. What he also doesn’t tell her that he is the danger. 

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Dudley O’Shaughnessy photographed by Alexandra Leese and styled by Zoe Costello, for Flaunt magazine.

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Dudley O'Shaughnessy shot by Michael Mayren for i-D Magazine (2016)

[tatrisalol-blog]

So take me. Her insinuation is clear, made clearer still by the arch of her back, the way she poses herself with such twisted grace, such furious beauty. A woman designed to strike. And indeed, he is struck then, by the suspicion that all her camaraderie and insistence was a ruse; that she’s simply here to destroy him, that perhaps she will. 

But god, he’s endured temptations and trials a thousand times worse than this. If he falls, it won’t be to something so trivial, so demeaning. 

So Dmitri grits his teeth, turns his face away from her like people have turned their faces from him. Those who are denied, shunned, hurt; they learn to play the part of their deniers. No matter what happens, no matter how lonely he is or how sorely he hurts, he will never give in to this sin she offers him. “Don’t make me regret meeting you,” he says, voice low. He looks straight ahead, back to the bed, at the paintings on the walls. He never understood the allure of brushstrokes and age-old paint until he met a girl who adored them, and with her he touched the gilt frames of the world’s most beloved masterpieces and felt alive. 

He doesn’t feel alive anymore. He’s tired. The portraits and landscapes above him are an executioner’s squadron, and he is chastised beneath their judgement, and the worst thing is that he knows how wrong this is, how wrong he is. 

“Cover yourself up.” Dmitri doesn’t glance at her again, the serpent of temptation; but he remembers all too clearly what she wears, what she is doing. “It’s cold outside.” His English is blunt, short; so unlike his flowing, immaculate French - but in this situation, it suits him just fine. “I’ll be waiting at the door.” He’s already moving towards the hall, when he pauses. 

And then he does look back, a peculiar expression flashing across his face. For a boy so unholy, he finds himself made most aware beneath these ceilings, between these walls. “Don’t touch her shirts.” He inhales, exhales. “Take one of mine.” That’s it. Before she can answer, he slips into the dark, moving towards the living room, a knot of self-bitterness and contrition forming in the folds of his stomach.

She watched him rise and then, just as quickly, she watches his discomposure. Estela is not used to holiness, she is not used to wholeness – she is used to things that are shown in the dark, where she was left, things that are done in the dark, for everyone is afraid of their true selves under the blazing light; she learned how to treasure those moments, those of crude sincerity, so raw it was ugly, and so, Estela learned hot to love everything ugly. What people usually diverge their eyes from, she is one prying eye, devoted, adoring it. How twisted one needs to be to expect only the worst from everyone? She could not be made whole, so she could only watch as his consecrate ritual unfold, she can only absorb such righteousness to have herself choke on it late – body rejecting what her matter was not made of.

Th boy who burns with such ferocity under the lamplight, was, moments ago, the boy who was put together under his holy roof – the boys with cut knuckles carefully wrapped in pure, white bandages, the boy with scorched heart balmed and cared, the boy with dying flames in his eyes now emerging, like a phoenix, like something finally coming home; and like everything under her touch, she has made it rotten to him. She watches as desperation washes him over, as frantic misery strike him and he is suddenly the boy she found on the streets, something ferocious clawing it’s way out.

She would die to watch the havoc such choleric fists could cause.

A soft laugh escapes her lips, “Don’t French me, boy.” – his silhouette cut against the clarity of the bathroom, he is just a shadow with twisted features. Surely, she is not in a place she belongs – her hair falls in ringlets around her head as she peers up at the strange boy, from a stranger’s bed – his stranger –, her sharp edges don’t match with the smooth surfaces, the discreet elegance that coils in every corner of that place. That is a place of worship to him, and as though her back arches like ceilings of a chapel a she sits on the edge of the bed, there’s nothing of divine about her. 

“So take me.” It’s almost a dare – she fights the need to urge him for more, to press his soft spots, rub salt and vinegar on his cuts. She is taken aback for a moment, and then the realization spreads through her, crimson lips in a smirk. She wants everything he can offer. 

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I’m so in love with you. 

It’s what he wants to say. It’s always what he wants to say. But he can’t stop looking at her, staring; gaze transfixed until the rest of the world blurs. It’s been so long - and his breath hitches - it’s been so long. And maybe it hasn’t been so long after all, but from the way he aches, it may have well been a thousand lifetimes. She asks if she’s late, if her absence is the reason for the bruises on his jaw, the cuts on his hands. And in some ways she is late, in some ways it is she that haunts him and spurs him to recklessness, all those sleepless nights and prowling evenings.

But of course, he doesn’t let his burden touch her. 

“I kept myself occupied,” he says with a crooked smile, and though the voice and the words are light, they both know that his idea of an occupation is another’s death sentence. Dmitri exhales, and it is like a weight the size of the moon is lifted from him. Her fingers upon his skin are a comfort that he’s dreamed often of; the touch of a thief, the touch of a faraway lover.  

As Evie looks back at him and he can see how he saddens her, he lifts his hand to cup hers, fingers entangling, wrists pressed together. They stand there for a moment, just two young people in a crowded street, and there is such bliss to the semblance they almost slip into. Cars honk, doors open. The sky deepens into an impenetrable, charcoal gray. He presses the back of her hand to his lips, brushing a kiss upon the part of her that keeps him most innocent. But his eyes stills graze her face, still light upon her mouth: and he knows that this is the beginning of another round of loving her. She will capture him, and he will allow her to; because he’s ashamed and hungry, and she is all the light he cannot see. 

“Je vous ai manqué,” Dmitri tells her softly. They are close, but never close enough. He doesn’t want to think about how ugly he must look in this light; with his fight wounds and dirty stains. Besides her in all her radiance, he is nothing but a footsoldier, worshiping the queen when she returns from war. It is that thought that sobers him. He finally lowers their hands, but his words are still so full of hope, trembling gladness. There is a hesitance, and then he asks: “Will you stay?” 

That’s the best part of coming back; and also the hardest.

Most people have the keen sense that leaving is the hardest part  — departure takes its toll on the good willed and softhearted. Leaving, for most people, also takes a part of them, left behind — a mistake, that is often committed when you are too deeply intertwined; not that Evie has stones for a heart, no, she simply tries to avoid idle promises and craft impossible expectations, she was born, too, with an uncommon detachment — crude and hurtful, but necessary i a world she was born into.

For her, there lies the hardest part. London is her home, undoubtedly. She doesn’t seek for it everywhere she goes, she doesn’t try to find common ground in between places  —  London is her nest, her holy ground, that welcomes her with its rolling gray clouds and humid curbs, the pleasures hidden in the drapes of the polished and the poised. It is hard to come back, it is hard to breath the cold air again, to make the usual path once again, it is simply hard; but for all that it is, it’s hers to feel alone, and every time.

But it was even harder to be that to a single person.

She looks up at him, and it’s like every single reason that made her stop the car beside a burning boy under the rain pops into her mind. She is washed by the feeling, the sacred,  the precious feeling that is being loved so wholly, so consummately. She looks up at him and finds all the reasons that makes her love him back, and all the opposed reasons that makes it hurt so bad.

How hard was to be home to person and not be able to explain that you’re not truly whole. 

She doesn’t speak, at first. Her words never sound serious, not when so often doused in sarcasm and tangled with the flute-like sound of her voice – so childish, so innocent. She touches his bruised jaw with the tips of her fingers, and that says a lot – I am here, and you are here. You survived, and I came back. “Did I take that long?” Her smiles matches his own, tinged with a slight sadness – I’m sorry, I am so sorry. 

[tatrisalol-blog]

Dudley O’Shaughnessy photographed by Alexandra Leese and styled by Zoe Costello, for Flaunt magazine.

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When he emerges from the backlit bathroom, it is as if he has been born again. Water baptizes him; marking him holy, cleansing him of his sins. Dmitri pauses in the doorway. His is a face gingerly wiped of blood and rust, cuts swabbed and left to dry, knuckles bandaged with expert abandon - this isn’t the first time that he’s come here to lick his wounds, and it won’t be the last. The gauze wrapped about his hands makes him feel safe, protected. The whiteness of them is comforting somehow; just like the pristine shirts that have been left for him to slip into. Clean. Different. Standing there, the bright, porcelain light streaming from behind him, framing him in a halo of gold; he is almost made vulnerable, soft. There is a gratification that dashes itself upon his features, smoothing the edges and blurring the sharp vigilance that is always weaving about him. He almost allows himself to pretend that he is not alone.

And he is not. 

But then his eyes adjust to the dark, and he sees his company on Evie’s - no, his and Evie’s - bed, and suddenly he is struck by a desperate, terrifying wave of anxiousness. She can’t be there. She can’t be there. She isn’t allowed - no, he won’t allow her to touch this sacred space. It seems so wrong to see another woman in Evie’s place that he feels sick. A tightness grips his stomach, twisting it into knots. “Get off,” he breathes, softly at first. Then, “Get off.” There is nothing polite or kind about it. He doesn’t care. Stepping forward, he looks down at the woman perched on the silk covers with such dizzying confidence, and his fists curl of their own accord; his breath hitches. Force enters his voice, hardening its boyish lilts, because he’s suddenly afraid, nervous, overtaken by an emotion he cannot name. 

“It isn’t mine,” he continues harshly when she doesn’t budge, answering her question. “You can’t be on this bed. Leve toi.” He stares intently at her, waiting, expectant. Drums beat within him, and it takes all his willpower not to respond to their call. With such a simple motion, she has pushed him backwards; back into the warzone. He isn’t ready. He isn’t prepared to fight, not in these clothes, on these floors. He stares at her, and feels himself tensing, turning back into the creature that he has tried so hard to bar from these rooms, keep from these thresholds. My god, if Evie knew - if she knew what he was doing right now - and he closes his eyes, angry at the stranger for not listening, but more angry at himself for ever bringing her here. What a stupid fucking idiot he is. 

“We need to go.” And this time it isn’t a request, or even a statement, but a command. “Now.” But despite his words, he himself doesn’t move a millimetre. His gaze, storm-filled, is still fixed upon her, sprawled out upon the sheets like Madonna on a bed of roses. That feeling rises again within him, and again his throat tightens. 

She could see that there he is made whole.

She quietly follows him, an aspect not often attributed to her own boisterous and violent persona; but she silently follows him as he leaps up the stairs, as he places before the door with the golden numbers glistening in the dim light of the corridor; and there, she sees him being made whole again. It would be a good story to be told, one day, over chipped glasses and dirty hands of stained cards, over unbalanced tables in Palermo’s unholy corners — a boy she found shattered under a lamp post in London was put together right before her eyes.

Unlocking the door is like communion, is like watching him unlock the secrets of his heart — personal, intimate, something she should not look yet, still, with no notions of boundaries or respect, she looms over to understand the quirks of this sacred ritual. In the moment that follows, she places a hand over her heart — if she doesn’t have any, why does she feel it beating? Why does she suddenly understand the reason behind tremendous devotion, without even knowing him? She feels unholy in such a place, for she doesn’t want to think of her own, now profane, temple.

It’s clearly not his place, but he belongs there — he shaped himself in a way that he would belong there, and she is certain of it. She had seen willingness, she had seen the same constructed desired handcrafted to simply be that Only for someone. The same way that boy with jagged edges fits in a place of sleek, smooth surfaces, she, with her corrupted heart, had tried to find salvation under the roof of the incorruptible. Her feelings towards Luca taints her vision, and she doesn’t bite back when the boy orders her to stay, like a misbehaved dog. She’s taken aback, suddenly, she understands.

She knows how’s to worship someone who’s your salvation; but in her case, she was swept aside to make way to the righteous goddess of her golden warrior.

Anger snaps her back to reality. A sudden flush of crimson and the beast that coils in her guts is made awake, clawing her insides, wanting out. She breathes, considering her surroundings — the pressing warning registered on the back of her head, don’t touch anything. Her legs move beneath her, making acquaintance her surroundings — the disconnected, yet harmonic, gathering of different cultures, different places. It’s much like the museums and private collections they hit every months, with the only difference that those pieces, assembled together, told a story. 

Estela passes a painting on the wall in her way to the room, it’s sight nudging a memory in the back of her head, impossible to grasp — something familiar to it, like a deja vú. She doesn’t connect the dots, she doesn’t think of it as she enters the room, following the rushed sound of water coming out of a faucet. From the ajar door pours amber light, a slash of warmth in a, otherwise, dark room. It’s shadows dancing, its forms anonymous to her  — she was not a curious cat, exploring the territory was beyond her, she doesn’t mind, she doesn’t care. Belonging where ephemeral, quickly extinguished under the right pressure, she knows well of this.

So, she opts to prop herself on the king sized bed before her  — dark hair sprawled around her head like a deranged halo, crimson lips plucked. “This your place, mon cher?” She picked up bits and parts of French from Ciro in his impossible pursuits, when he whispered against the crook of her neck only to make her dig sharp nails deeper in his flesh  — it doesn’t roll off of her tongue nicely, a foreigner, much like herself. 

She is not sure he can hear her, the faucet was still rushing and from her spot on the bed, she could clearly see his figure staring at his reflection  — even there, contrasting in such a place, he was undeniably a fighter. Knuckles raw, his guard never down; it’s not the boy he glimpsed moments ago, whole, cleansed — but it is something she could hold, something palpable and that she knows how to deal with. She watches him, curious, for once, unsure of the outcome. 

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villiersevie:

It is a night that favors thieves.

Shadows dancing on dirty curbs, the moon shining behind dark clouds – rolling, lethargy clinging to its moves. The wind barely rustles, and there are no leaves on the ground to be swept by it. It’s not too cold, so it was impossible to be outside without the companion of clattering teeth, nor hot enough to invite people out – the night holds that promise of the uncertain. 

Among the shadows of the streets, only lit by occasional bar windows, she walks with hood pulled over her face, quiet steps impossible to follow. As she makes her path, ears are invaded by the occasional noise coming from a sudden open door – in which the man, after bumping into a petite girl of delicate features, would apologize and soon forget of her face in his inebriated state. He would, too, wonder where was his watch, as he tried to check the hours, or his wallet, as he tried to buy a coffee to fight the settling headache.

Evie got what she wanted, and discarded the rest. No traces, no way to get to her. She continues her aimless path, waiting for the stream of easy, drunk, targets to simply come to her and let her do her job – she is back in this city; and she doesn’t know who she can run into. Once again, she starts her ritual – runs into them, sticky fingers easily finding its way to the precious belongings; until she meets familiar eyes. 

“Hello there.”

At first, he doesn’t trust his own eyes.

It’s an uneventful evening, one that might be for others a day of work, a day in which they return home to their jovial families and jovial hearths - a day where they shop and dine and simply stroll the streets of London, uncaring of what calamity surrounds them. The sky is dark and flat, but then again, he’s stopped expecting the stars to shine a long time ago. This city of fog and rain leaves no room for those distant galaxies and their lonely soliloquies. Instead, it is characterized by a muffled roar. Automobiles rush through puddles, men call to each other as they exit storefronts and buildings, briefcases in hand...a pale, dark-skinned boy walks alone amongst the crowd, lost in a metaphorical daze, stepping on cracks and centuries of destruction. 

He’s almost offended that it is on such an ordinary night that he sees her. 

His hands are scraped and his jaw bruised, and he’s riding on too little sleep and too much adrenaline from a wild night out with a stranger he never learned the name of - but my god. How many times has he imagined this moment? How many times has he wanted, wished for, just a glimpse of her in a window, a mirror, a razor? Drug-induced, fever-induced --- he would gladly die if only it meant seeing her face flash before his eyes one last time. 

And now that she’s before him, barely five metres away, her smile illuminated like a star fallen from the heights; all else fades, becoming as grey and negligible as concrete and the taste of his words in his mouth. Dmitri stops in his tracks, and his eyes widen - they widen, and he thinks that he’s hallucinating, that this is all just another cruel trick of the light, or of fate. He’s filthy, smelling of another woman’s cologne and another’s man’s blood, and she’s beautiful; beyond anything he could ever dream up, lucid or not. 

She’s before him, and he stands smitten. He falls in love all over again.

“Evie,” he breathes, afraid of not her, but himself. He’s afraid that he’ll say something wrong, do something wrong; and the illusion will shatter. He’s so happy that he thinks he might burst. A laugh, incredulous, escapes him. And he knows that a better man would say something clever, practiced - but he only says what’s on his mind. His gaze lights, a fire sparked back to life, and he laughs again, staring at her and nothing else. “You’re back.” 

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He shakes his head, laughs. “No, no.” The very thought of what she proposes makes him smile, a devilish, sharp slash. “You never want to come to this place again.”

But he does, and though the hall itself is strange to him, the feeling of entering the building instills a calm in his bones, his demeanor. These are the places that Evie has walked - with her cat feet and her pixie lips, turnt up at his antics, turnt down at his depravities. She’s his moral compass. But more so, she is his goddess - and maybe it’s wrong to worship her (the very notion of her) as vehemently as he does…but he’s never cared for right and wrong. His goddess is the only thing that holds him together some days. 

Ascending up three flights of stairs - which he positively leaps up, in great bounding steps - he finally makes it to her front door. Even this makes him giddy, fills him with a lightness he hasn’t known for weeks. Echoes, snatches of her voice come to him. The number on this door is 333 - the holy trinity of a church he used to believe in, the number of tries it takes to kiss a girl, the precise time at which Evie Villiers first met Dmitri Beauregard and saved his life. 

Again, he employs the same trick with the turned back and the quiet paperclip, half-expecting the door not to open. Evie’s so smart. She would never allow another thief to rob her - much less in her own home. But it’s because she’s smart that the knob gives way beneath his scarred hands. Dmitri breathes a sigh of relief and admiration, because as always, she’s one step ahead of him. This is ours, she’d said to him several years ago. Come here anytime. And he hadn’t truly believed her until he saw the things she stocked for him, the aspects of the place that had been modified to save him from his stupide, foolish decisions. 

And then they’re inside.

Now he glances at his companion, and an entirely serious note enters his tone. His eyes shine, but when he says, “Don’t touch anything, ouai?” he means it like he means very few things in his life. “I’ll be quick.” 

He has to keep himself from studying this space, analyzing whether she’s been back - breathing in the clean, fresh smell of then apartment. It’s freezing. Yet as he fumbles his way to a lightswitch, turning on the soft radiance of the wall lamps; it is clear that this place is far from neglected. A casual, modern wealth characterizes the place: white throw rugs, crisp blacks and defiant edges - just like the girl who designed it all. None of Chescote’s stuffy excess is found here. This isn’t Francis’ palace, or even Zephora’s…this isn’t a tower. It’s a nest. 

“Stay,” he says again for emphasis, pressing his gaze into the stranger’s to drive the point home. As soon as he believes it’s been established, he’s off, rushing down the hallway and into the bedroom. The shirts are in the closet, besides her jumpsuits and that impeccable black she likes so much. Spare pants and jackets tucked in the drawers beneath the king-size bed - and now he shivers, feeling the cold brush against his spine. He remembers her on that bed. He remembers touching her, his mouth against hers, his hands on her hips - and being reborn. 

He almost murmurs her name.

But he doesn’t. Because that would make her absence a reality, this silence a death toll. Here, now, he can pretend for the briefest of moments that it isn’t a foreign woman waiting in the living room, but a dark-haired English girl. Clutching his clothes in his hands, he with great difficulty tears himself away from the memories, moving instead into the bathroom with its marble tiles and lion-headed faucets. The door swings softly to a stop behind him, but doesn’t fully shut. 

There’s rubbing alcohol in the cabinet, bandages too. The water runs icy, but he turns on the left faucet to make it warm. Dmitri inhales, and with both hands braced on the edges of the sink, the sound of rushing water drowning out his thoughts; he looks into the mirror and feels all at once damned and saved, ugly but forgiven. 

She is a mere strange in those streets, following a stranger boy and his promise of a time she won’t forget as long as she proves him what she is truly made of. She is not afraid, as she falls into a quick pace behind slumped shoulders and no turning back, never. She wanted to hint him, so unfamiliar to not have people recoil at the mere sight of her, Estela spreads her possibilities before her; should she warn she is made of something rotten, housing in its middle a gaping void, swallowing every and any beam of light that dares to peers into the darkness within? Or surprise would take the best of them?

There was no time for talking or thinking. Beside her, the boy walks in sacred ground – his gaze sweeps the streets looking for something, or, Estela marvels, someone to soothe the hunger that curls and uncurls inside his irises, that lingers in the slow roll of his shoulders. That’s what they are, strangers to each other, strangers to those streets – or maybe that singularity applies only for her, for he seemed familiar to the twists and turns of the humid curbs of London. She came here to escape impossible expectations and infinite disappointments, she didn’t want anything with it, but if asked, she wouldn’t mind giving voice to her distaste – Estela was always one to have barbs for a tongue; his reasons are hidden in the shadows, well tucked inside his coat. 

Her lungs ache and her minds blurs in soft shades of red as the piling memories nibble her frayed nerves. Shush, she tells them, There will be plenty of time and space. Would she dare share something so deep with a boy she didn’t even know the name? Would she show her most vulnerable face, her most hollowed side to a complete stranger who she would not even see again? What would her anger be worth of, if not to be there to watch the aftermath of her destruction? But then, it happens. She first senses the shift in him, lighter, familiar – then she sees it, on the way he holds himself, on the way he looks at the building towering in front of him, his hesitation – holy ground was found by the boy looking for salvation. Her voice sounds rusty, even for her, dubious – “Just a stop.”

She could easily decline to follow him – could easily be polite and wait for him outside, enjoying the cold air embracing her venomous thoughts; but she promised to show him what she was capable of. “So, is this the wretched place I’ve been promised?” Estela glances at the facade of the building, she measures the boy wrestling with the door, the same way you’d punch a puzzle piece in its wrong space – it’s part of a bigger picture, just not right there. “I wouldn’t miss this, not really.”

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He knows these streets like he knows the scars on the back of his hands; and if they have burned him before, then he gives no notion of it now. 

They make a strange sight. Foreigners - but maybe you can’t tell in this peculiar shade of light, half-indigo, half-grey, and entirely swept across the concrete and tar. Maybe you can’t tell that he stays here, loiters these streets, because he hopes that she - the girl he lives for - will return to her home - that she’ll return and see him. Twilight is the time of night where all the worst things that a city can hide come out to play. And he runs among them, silent and unnerving, but filled with the same undying fire. Part of him wonders why the woman besides him is here, this stranger, with her designer clothes and dark-lined eyes. He can tell from her accent and the fiery pride in her steps, the very toss of her head; that she is not accustomed to the humid cold or the dreary skies of this place. London, you see - it drains you. On the best of days, it doesn’t rain. On the worst, it rains blood. 

For a long time, they move in silence. Dmitri doesn’t slow down for her, his steps sure; his turns sudden. There’s blood drying on his lips and the cold stings the cuts on his cheeks, but he couldn’t be less aware. Streetlights, lone cars, the solitary cat yowling in a trash can - are they thieves and kings, or are they merely rascals dressing up for a part that is not their own? But still he leads on, not stopping, not even to take the much needed breaths that beg against his lungs to be fed.

And when they emerge from the far east of Hyde park, and cross two streets - he feels his heartbeat freeze, stunned by nostalgia. If London has a centre, then this is his. The apartment is one among many, but it almost glows, made extraordinary, ever different. He closes his eyes, and he can see her, hear her, taste her - so much of her haunts this street. It is so different from where he had been earlier - and, he thinks bitterly, Maybe that is the point. 

“Just a stop,” he explains bluntly to his companion, but from the way he awns his head back, you can tell that it is much more than a simple stop. If adoration can be seen in one’s gaze, then it must be tinting his now. The pure white facade glows silver with the moonlight, and with an anxious, eager trepedition, Dmitri makes his way towards the front steps of number eight - It’s a lucky number in Chinese, Evie once told him. Ba - it sounds like fa. And from then on, eight became his favourite digit. 

He almost does what he’s done hundred times before: leap over the gate, find handholds in the niches of the outside wall, hoist himself up onto a windowsill. He’s halfway there in his mind’s eye before he remembers that he isn’t alone. Not this time. He turns his face to the woman besides him, someone who is undoubtedly oblivious to the discourse which occurs between him and his own heart. 

“Ah.” For a moment his brows furrow and he is a child again, very French and very torn by decision. He doesn’t know what to say to her...he doesn’t know how he could justify bringing her into the sacred space in which all his dreams come awake. But if anything, he should do this much, if only to save them both from the cold. Another long moment passes in which he tries not to think about how Evie would react. God forbid she ever knows.

At long last, he says, “Come up if you want.” And with an unfamiliarity, he steps forward as if to unlock the door. Instead, though he does well to hide it with his back, he jams a paperclip into the keyhole, twisting and wiggling it to gain them entry. The right way. The way normal people do. 

People never call her funny – she is not one who usually humors people, not one of telling jokes. Estela and her sharp edges have their ways of cutting through people’s skin, of rubbing their wounds with salt, of making them flinch at the bare sight of her. Funny, was never an adjective that was attributed to her; the latter, as it comes out from his mouth with the faint shade of disbelief, is way more fitting for her. 

Out of your fucking mind.

She heard this many times, she hears this every morning when her brother gazes at her bruised knuckles, at the bloody half-moons on her palms, she hears this every time she has to buy new furniture of the previous one couldn’t handle the destruction that comes by her hands. She hears this every time her mother meets her grandfather, and yet another bar was shut down because she couldn’t control herself. She hears this as she throws vases against Ciro’s head and rips his sheets to pieces. Estela lives in a constant state of out of her fucking mind. But albeit everything, she smiles at his remark, at his laugh.

She barks a laugh, the doubt on his look prickling her skin. Why is she so keen on prove herself to a boy that she met not even an hour ago? Why does she feel so compelled to show his the extension of what she can cause, alone – what she can cause when matched with someone that is not afraid of the wretched, just like herself? She doesn’t want to find if he has a weakness, for the first time, maybe in her entire life, she doesn’t want to press him – afraid he will be too ripe and bruise under her touch. That wouldn’t be fun. She needs it to be fun in her own way.

“You might be right.” She wants it to happen, she wants to be swallowed hole and be consumed by the secret wasteland that London could hide in its streets – she wanted to know if corruptions ran deep here, just like Italy, and if so, why they are so prone to hide it. She feels the excitement running in her veins, the promise of something she wont forget – and she will make sure no one there forgets her; a promise she doesn’t make lightly. “But they will choke on me, still, bambino.”

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Surely she’s joking. A laugh escapes him, harsh and demanding; the  sort of strange, rare laugh that could be very ugly or very beautiful, sometime, somehow. It’s a sound of disbelief, but his doubts are not momentary: they have had a lifetime to fester, and now they press against him from all sides like knives and shadows. 

“You’re funny,” he coughs, arching one eyebrow as he looks her over with clear criticism. “Funny, or out of your fucking mind.” There is a satisfaction to the word fuck - he thinks that it’s his favourite word in the English language. The sharp explosiveness of it cuts the roof of his mouth while his tongue wraps about the fluidity of what it means. I want to fuck you. And entirely different is, I want to fuck you up. His mind is racing with a thousand ways that this night could go if he says yes, a single way if he says no. He thinks, as he always does, of Evie. What would she tell him to do? More importantly, what would she want him to do? 

It hurts to imagine. But Dmitri does - and in that moment, unbidden; a terrible, scorching idea burns its way onto his mind. And he could resist it, maybe, at another time. But wounded, with a crown of malignancies on his head and a scepter of longing grasped in his fingers; he is all too happy to give in to its allure. He thinks, as he always does, of Evie. Then he thinks of the woman before him; and the way that the night will go begins to forms, a sleek panther of a thing, purring against his reason and batting aside his judgement - what little he has. 

“You talk big.“ And he cuts his gaze to her almost mockingly. “You’ll see. These streets will swallow you whole.” And though it’s a rough remark, it’s also clear what his answer is. He pushes off the wall, still staring her down. He’s made his choice, chosen his poison, and now he must only swallow it to feel it echo down his throat. Perhaps this stranger of his will share in the ecstasy.

Estela cant grasp the concept of unity. 

As a child, she was fed on neglect – she was gave nothing, and she multiplied that inside of her, resulting into a gaping nothingness, a hungry void. She was gave nothing and could give nothing in return. As a teenager, she found out the filling ugliness of being deranged; she found out that seizing power was better than being granted with – Machiavelli said himself, better be feared than loved, and the latter, she never was.

Now, as an adult, the only thing that filled her was the rage, scorching her inside, at every deep breath that she takes at every new dawn. She considers him for a moment, considering that maybe she had never felt whole – maybe, she never would. “That’s interesting.” She always wonders, how some people could be so wholesome, how they didn’t have monsters gnawing their bones and scratching their skins? “To feel whole is such an impossible task to accomplish those days.” 

She didn’t care to know if it was true or not, for all she knows, he might as well be lying – she nods and falls in a brief silence, thinking of the boy in front of her, with cut knuckles, matching her own cut ones, and wonders simply how minds rule bodies so prone to destruction like theirs.

But under that night sky, they are nothing more than strangers with no access to the demons in their closets. The positive side of ignorance is that it was gentle, and you could get drunk on it before the crushing hangover came hunting you down. “London is not my home, no.” Her smile dabs sincerity into her tone, thinking of Italy makes her realized that what people say of home not being the place, but the people, is completely bullshit. “Well, I could tell you,” She rises an eyebrows, easy smile quickly falling to a conspiratory grin – the world was the Olympus, and Estela was Eris with her golden apple. “But if you show me the way, I can show you my ways, and make you believe in that.”

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Well then you do like it, don’t you?

‘I never had a choice’ he wants to say. Or, ‘I was taught to like it.’ Maybe even a play on words, what the English called a pun: ‘It was beaten into me.’ But he doesn’t let any of those variations escape him, because those are the thoughts that he has when he’s most alone; and the stranger’s presence, no matter how irksome, is better than the solitary confinement of those depths. 

He’s just risen from them, head breaking through the water; sea-spray and salt-sweat. The blood on his hands is still fresh - he still has some time before the ocean devours him again. 

So instead, he gives her something that is merely a tint of the truth, a sliver of the boy who Dmitri Beauregard was, the man he is now. “Peut-etre. It’s a thing that makes me feel whole.” A thing - but he means one of the only two things. There is a flippancy to his words that discount the meaning of the statement, the terrible weight that falls upon him just to say it out loud. He doesn’t like to pity himself. Loathing is so much more solid, more tangible. And perhaps he should loathe that so few things complete him, but instead he is glad. He has latched his entire heart onto a fleeting girl, and if he were to divide his affections any further, he would surely die. 

And no matter how he destroys himself, submerging himself in ruination; he doesn’t want to die. Not now. Not this year. 

“Oh?” He raises his voice in a curious, amused inquiry. He’s tired and his cuts sting, but now that they’re here, he might as well humor her. “You don’t know this city.” A snort of derision. “Tell me, petite fille -” and he breathes out, reverting back to his native tongue. “What terrible things could you have to show?” He flashes his teeth in a wolf smile, too far from warm or kind to ever compare. 

The boy in front of her is more sharp ends than soft spots, despite how purple and black he looks, shadowed under the precarious lamp light. He is the result of something that breaks and is not put back into place, something that was not born to be like that, but still, the world was unforgiving on him. There is something undoubtedly pleasing in the way his posture defies her, the way his words, not gentle – not completely rude, either, fill the space between them.

Estela is unaware, though, of how his words are dipped in sarcasm, how his eyes, never restless, always ready for a next fight, always with his guard up, pierced into hers, as if daring her to come closer at her own risk. Estela found herself curious about the boy in front of her, something familiar, something completely strange.

“Well then you do like it, don’t you?” She laughs softly, head resting against the painted pole, looking at the dark night sky. “Now, mio caro, just because I wear lipstick the way you wear bruises doesn’t mean alleyways haven’t seen the worst of me.” She reminds she is not in Italy, she is a foreigner in a foreign country, and those streets don’t know the vicious thing Estela Alvarez is in her best days. She cocks her head, beckoning to her thoughts, a smirk stretching crimson lips. “Well, at least those alleyway haven’t. Or bars. Yet.”

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“Tu n’es pas mal,” is his quicksilver response, soft voice matching hers. He is torn between shame and pride; to have his youngest cousin see him like this, in this state of pure disarray. The two Beauregard branches, who once had been separated so distantly; has in recent years collided - and he can’t recall Isabel ever meeting him in anything but his best - suits and ties, false sophistication for a mongrel born into the wrong name, the wrong family. He meets her bright, still gaze and all those occasions seem to flash between them. 

But he will not stand down. He wears his coat of blood and scars with a strange arrogance. It isn’t the pompous pretension that Hale or Silas don so well. It’s dark and rough, best viewed in the dead of night when his only witnesses are the street kings and city rats, the unruly mixes of people and places who know the price of such battle wounds, and how they mark him a champion in ways that society never would.

“What a strange place for a family reunion,” Dmitri says, half-meeting her gaze, half-skirting the horizon behind her. They speak English, and it feels unnatural for both of them - but it is Evie’s language, and so he treasures it, no matter how he stumbles. He can feel Isabel’s judgement as she evaluates him, and he knows with certainty that of all his golden-haired kin, he’s lucky to have chosen her from the crowd. If anyone must see his dirty edges and ripped realities, then let it be the silent one, the one who is oppressed by her siblings’ precedent, pushed into secrecy. Let her carry this one too. 

Do you want me to heal you?

At this, his attention snaps fully to her. A rigidness breaks itself into his back. He laughs, harshly, turning his face away as if overtaken by a joke. Heal him. He laughs again, because it’s so ludicrous, the very concept of healing - weren’t wounds inflicted to be opened again? “No,” and he’s smirking in the dim glow of the streetlight, white teeth flashing a knife’s edge. “No, Isabel. Tu ne peux pas.” 

“Fils de pute!” it’s not even loud as she says it, her tone hushed but words sharp. It’s definitely in reaction to the unexpected voice more so than the accusation, when she scarcely notices the meaning at first. If he had been louder or rougher or required more attention, she might not have jolted to a stop to look at him. Might have simply walked on by and assumed the words directed at someone else. Instead she has to round on him, and though it’s dangerous to do so on such a night in such a place, she pulls her shoulders back and walks square to meet him, feet planting right in front of him. Only then can she see well enough to note the blood, the blood first and then her cousin. ‘I look like shit?’ it’s what she wants to say but doesn’t. Hands tucked into fists at her side, both from the situation and to prevent her from reaching out to touch his face. She doesn’t often get to see it, the blood, the result of their upbringing, their legacy, their strange lives. Doesn’t often get to see it and certainly never gets to be touched by it herself. So how is it that Dmitri is standing her on this night, as though waiting for her to come by, some spectacle for her eyes, some reminder of punishment? 

“About to be.” Maybe she’s deserving of it, maybe it’s supposed to stop her from all she is about to do. Except now she has moved from planning to do, to about to do, and this seems more of an opportunity than a punishment. Or she’s going to take it as such, even if it means she’s already been warned, she’s the one who will end the night with blood outside her body. It should be an alarm bell, but just as she’d run back into a fire to get Cecily out, she’ll create a fire of her own just the same.  “Do you want me to heal you?” her hands are still pinned to her sides, so she gestures by tracing her eyes over his face. If he’s not there as a message, as a preventative, then maybe she can be his salve and he her instigation. 

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Dmitri pauses mid-smoke as the stranger speaks, cigarette suspended in the air, smoke drifting into the crisp night. Within the span of a moment, a hostility inches into his gaze, and there it remains. It’s the tired, half-bristled glare of an animal who has been fed, only to be commanded to perform a trick for the bone already held between his starving teeth, and it is a glare that he has carried one time too often. 

“Enfoiré,” he swears, soft in a not-soft way. It’s terribly ironic, that the fighter with many bruises still has the voice of a choir angel, velvet-blue, luxurious green. It’s yet another aspect of him that is a contradiction; and he hates it, just as he hates the rest. “I’m not a - “ he searches for the phrase he wants, lost in his anger, verdant eyes narrowing. What would Evie say? When he’s lost, he always tries to hear the words in her voice, that clipped, quick tone of hers - so different from his patched-up street talk. Tonight, he can’t. She’s been away for too long.

I’m not a fucking storyteller.

Finally, he huffs another inhale with an aggressiveness radiating from him. You can see something very French in his expression, the disdainful cold that has taken over him. “You want a fight?” One dark brow arches sarcastically, and Dmitri scoffs. “Yeah?” His eyes flick up. “Go look in another dirty fucking corner, and you’ll find one, pas probleme.”

There were some things Xavier would never understand. Violence was not one of them. Hatred was not one of them either. He hated so deeply that it filled him with fire. But he never stopped to consider how much of that hatred was inward. Oh, a psychiatrist would have had a field day with this angry boy, stopping a bruised and bloodsoaked stranger in the street to ask them about their night.

He has little sense of humor, but something about the brutish nature of this young man makes him want to snicker. He lights the cigarette, the two of them sharing in yet another unhealthy habit. What’s one more to the pile of bitter self-destructive tendencies?

“That’s a pity,” he says, breathing out smoke that mixes with the night air in a chill of frost. “I’m always on the lookout for a good fight, or the story of one.” And it certainly seems as though this boy has a hell of a story.

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He warily stares at the cigarette held out towards him. Half of him wants nothing to do with it, but the greater half is terribly hungry in more ways than one, and needs something to curb the pain. From the look of it, the man who has stopped to share his plunder isn’t so dissimilar. Like calls to like, and it seems that all the rapscallions are out tonight with their faces streaked red and their clothes torn off their backs. “Funny how that works, innit?” Dmitri mutters, and he almost smiles, because it is funny - in a twisted, despicable way.

He hates his last name, because it’s so laughable. To imagine that he's the son of Arnaud Beauregard is to imagine that a war mongrel is the son of a purebred. He’s a mess of blood and cracked sinew, knuckles split open: and his father is pedigree and admiration, an impossible precedent. On these streets, his skin the colour of caramel and his name nothing but a secret hanging about his neck, he can finally be himself. Perhaps all he is this. And perhaps he likes it to be that way. 

“Not particularly, no,” he says as he takes it at last, holding the cig like a lost friend between his pointer and middle finger. Leaning forward with a hand cupped near his mouth, he waits for the stranger to light. 

He had circled around The Victorian for what felt like hours, a bird of prey on the rooftops, the people below him looking like voles or rats, things that deserved to be struck and carried away into the night. That went for both the clientele and those who worked there. Those who bought bodies were no better than those who sold them, and vice versa.

But the Victorian had what felt like a protective shield over it. It was Villiers territory. He’d battled sourly with the temptation to merely follow one of the customers home and dispose of him, but depriving the Victorian of its customer base was likely to cause the ire of The Villiers as much as taking their workers.

And Francis Villiers was a man Xavier wasn’t eager to cross. At least in some ways. In others, he felt like he would have reveled in the fact of watching blood bubble between the man’s teeth. But if that day ever came, it wouldn’t be for a while.

And so his expedition took him elsewhere, to a dirty street corner where he’d overheard two men talk about the poisonous materials they cut some of their cocaine with. Idiots. Their laughter would be the last sound they made. And it was.

But what he hadn’t expected was to run into this sharp-boned boy who smelled of blood, sweat and violence. People who had it in them recognised each other. The aggressive and tormented soul of the boy seemed to call out to him. And his words, oh, they stank of irony.

“Could say the same for you,” he answered. He hadn’t looked in a mirror lately, but his body was bruised, for he could feel them beginning to well. And his clothes had been torn in the scuffle. “They’re all rough around here.” He lit a cigarette. Some smoked after sex. Xavier smoked after a fight. He offered one to the stranger. “Care to tell me about yours?”

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He doesn’t like how she looks at him, how she appraises him. With her mouth painted red and her lashes painted black, the woman before him is undoubtedly beautiful - but he pointedly refuses to acknowledge it, instead focusing on how her words rub him the wrong way. Dmitri pushes himself off the wall, lurching slightly on his feet - but he still stands, and he still gazes out with such concentrated defiance - and maybe, in another place, no one would’ve known how hard he’d been beaten tonight. 

To be beaten is to lose. A war, a fistfight, a scrimmage in the dark. Yet in the shadows of himself, Dmitri knows with an unwavering certainty that to be beaten is so much more. The decade-old scar slashing across his forearm and the hungriness of his eyes is testament enough. And he doesn’t want her, with her sharp, polished edges, to turn his dirty pride into something shameful again.

“Actually, I had the time of my life.” and it’s almost hostile, if not for the strange softness of his voice. “You hop bars, sweetheart -” He skips his h’s. You ‘op bars, sweet’eart. “I hop alleyways.” In the harsh, not-quite-worldly light of the night streets, he keeps debating with himself on whether he knows her or he doesn’t. There is something vaguely familiar to her: something reminiscent of Italian leather and the Sicilian mob. 

Her shoulders purposely bump into the passersby, an endless stream of people that even at that hour would still come and go and never sleep. Streets were always crowded, and it was good to be just another stranger in a sea of strangers – but also, it didn’t feel usual. “Merda.”  Even cussing aloud didn’t feel usual – not without heads turning in despair and fear alike, not with the heads turning to see where those words came from and the flash of recognition crossing their eyes.

Here is like just another con she had learned how to pull, years ago. Just another life she was living, in a sea of strangers. Estela wanted to stay away from her home, she wanted to stay away from the place she had made her wretched playground, and then, made to her a prison, once again poisoned by the vile hands of her mother. London, on the other hand, was not on her reach – it was good miles and some salty water away from all that shit that she is forced, now, to call “home”.

She almost doesn’t see him, almost doesn’t listen to him. The odds of finding a familiar face among too many unfamiliar ones. Estela almost laughs at his words, if she didn’t know the jagged boy in front of her. “You are one to fucking talk, bebé.” She crosses her arms, leans against the light pole, hands tucked deep in her pockets. “Your night was worse, I bet that.”

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For a moment, he almost sees her. Evangeline, Evie - queen of magpies and carrier of his soul - he almost sees her in the girl that approaches him,  And for that brief millisecond, it is as if his heart jumps from the cavity of his chest and into his throat; so eager to spill itself out from between his teeth for the girl who he loves, so eager to show her his scars, if only to silently plead for her to stay with him, even if just for the night. 

But it isn’t Evie, and maybe he’s desperate; or maybe he’s empty anyways, but he deflates when the realization hits. A deep exhale, his shoulders slumping against the brick, eyes flicking towards first the ground, then the sky, then finally the figure paused before him. And so Dmitri Beauregard regards Cecily Villiers with a flat sort of silence, the silence that is uncomfortable and dangerous, laying dormant like a beast in the dark. The man who he actually was speaking to has long since slipped away into the crevices of the city that would swallow someone like the youngest Villiers whole. 

“Little girls shouldn’t talk to strangers,” he says at last - not because he cares, but because she’s Evie’s little sister, and somehow that makes her worth protecting. He’s tired enough that his English is sloppy: quick and lilting, half Cockney slang, half Parisian streets. He isn’t a stranger, if the definition of the word was adhered to. But in the dead-night, with his hackles raised and his wounds still bloody, he might as well be. “Go home.” 

The myriad of streetlamps and occasion passing taxi set beams flashing across her sight, head spinning from the consumption of alcohol she’d drowned with her less than suitable friends. They’d, in a very classic English underage drinking teen fashion, had devoured a bottle of vodka, or two, in the tunnel beneath the slide in the children’s park. 

Cecily had drunkenly taken to sliding down the god damn thing, only to scare herself with her drunken clumsiness when she’d tripped over the end and almost banged her head on the side of the metal. It was in those moments, fleeting as they were, that Cecily felt the most normal. She could be like any other seventeen year old, hanging around with boys and choking on her first cigarette. She had one caught between her lips, ignoring the burning in her chest as she left her friends, who ought not know where she truly comes from, and took off to find her home. 

It was an hour later, and Cecily had forgone the idea of going home straight away in favour of following the cracks in the road, likening the tarmac to herself…not fit for purpose. She didn’t enjoy being so self-deprecating, but the world love to push her down, and then she too had found that the sting was lessened when she didn’t expect too much from herself. 

The drunkenness is gone, and she’s found a level of numbness which suits her just fine. Her head turns at the sound of a comment in the dark, and the only thing she can make out is the dishevelled appearance of a man. “Are you being funny?”