Trash can overflowing with paper || Worldie's shit

[Mihai Chimet]

yeah this is where i put my crappy artsu and ficsu.

[Mihai Chimet]

Here, congrats to Misso and Icy for making me like this pairing enough to ruin it.

SPOILER: Click to show

You love that man for who he is. You love his smile, his eyes, the deep velvet of his voice when you recline against his shoulder and he whispers tales of gods and mortals into your hair. You love the smell of his cologne, the honesty in his gestures, the way he doesn't treat you like a thief or a throw-away lay—a criminal. Sometimes, after sex, you step into the shower and wash the sweat off of you as though you can scrub away your sins and become someone worthy. Of him.

It's sad, really. What are you but a lost little girl? You love him because he knows himself, and he likes to think that he knows you too (and most of the time, you also like to think that). But how long before all of your delusions and wishful thinking and resurrected childhood dreams crumble?

Count the minutes

(until your demise).

When you're alone at night, you hear ticking. It's a clock, counting down, trapped inside your head. There are no numbers. Just a destination that the little hand will someday reach—the end. The closing chapter.

You like to imagine that it'll go like this.

He weans you of your self-destructive behavior. He wraps you in his arms and kisses your lips and he shows you a way out. You leave your chains behind, you leave the dark, musty realm of underground life and you join him someplace brighter, where there's sunlight and a breeze to carry you away.

You like to think that you get married, like any other couple, and you don't even need him to buy a diamond. It's just you and him, and the two of you grow old together, just as helplessly, mindlessly in love as you were on the first day you laid eyes on one another.

But that's a beautiful myth, like the golden apple or cursed pomegranate seeds.

More likely, it will go like this.

You're waiting for him. He calls you and says the trams are running late—he'll be there a bit later than planned. 'Okay,' you say, with a smile on your lips. 'I'll see you soon.'

But you don't.

The past catches up to you. It always does. This time, it comes in the form of handgun, a few aggressive questions and just as many evasive answers.

You turn. You try to run. Maybe you would've held out some other time, but this time, you know he's going to be here soon and you don't want him to see you in such a mess. You don't want him to pay the price of your mistakes.

It's quick. The ghosts of your past have good aim. You barely have the time to feel the pain from the steel of the bullet burying itself into your back, through your ribs, deep into your heart. Like a sharp and stone-cold accusation. This is your penance.

Once upon a time, you weren't afraid of death. As long as it was flashy enough. But in that moment, you regret. You regret being too young and too weak to take care of your brother. You regret bringing your first sweetheart home at fifteen and sucking him off beneath the sheets. You regret never having thanked your mother. You regret having met him. You regret regretting that. You regret the past and the hard-headed pride that kept you two on the brink, never able to lean back towards safety or forward towards an adrenaline-rushing fall. You regret your hesitation, your addictions. You regret winding the clock and letting it crawl its way to zero.

Your last thought before everything turns to dust is—

(Well, who can say?)

But maybe that isn't what happens. Maybe it's this.

(Rewind.)

He sees you being accosted. He doesn't understand what is going on, but he knows he has to step in. He approaches you just as you turn, your short brown hair whipping back, the silver shine of a dangling earring as it catches the light.

He sees the gun, too. He sees it pulled out, aimed. He still doesn't understand what is going on, but he knows that bullet has your name written across its shell.

So he does what he understands.

He steps in. In the line of fire.

The gun goes off.

You see red, like the rose he gave you on Valentine's day two years ago. It blooms beautifully, fueled by your scream.

You don't try to run anymore. You leap on his killer and draw your knife and aim chaotically. The sound of metal on flesh sounds like a clock counting to zero.

You don't stop until someone pulls you off. Your hands are slippery with blood and you taste copper in your mouth, and you're almost certain that you're crying red, because all you can see is his body on the pavement and the rose he gave you two years ago.

You're scared, and lying alone in your hostile bed, you close your eyes.

(Rewind.)

(Tick tock.)

Somewhere, the clocks strike twelve.

[Joselle]

upon my death that night, i was saturated in fifty shades of feels

[Deleted]

I cried a little omg ;; A;; gdjhsgjdsghd

[Mihai Chimet]

contributing to the arthur dies!au

SPOILER: Click to show

Where did it go wrong?

He stands still, watches through a camera lens slowed down to five. It flickers before his eyes like a disjointed film—the moment of impact, the recoil, the red that screams. A burning, searing scream that etches itself into the backs of his eyes, the corners of his mind he'd rather forget.

He is at a loss. He doesn't know where to turn, where to look. People scramble past him and onto the stage, a confused mess of limbs and voices and laments. It's a strange creature, a monster of blinded panic and heady nausea.

Someone runs roughly into his shoulder, and it snaps him into motion (but not out of his half-awake reverie). Time lags like a cracked mirror as he pushes through the stampeding crowds, and the sounds of a few more bullets bursting into the thickening air. Even the oxygen in his throat clogs, falls into his lungs and suffocates him like feathers.

He gives out orders along the way, communicating through broken phone lines. The electricity ripples and comes through in static—he doesn't know what he demands and he doesn't know how they answer, but his eyes lock on the balcony from where the gunshots had come. There's still a flutter of fabric (red), like the shadow of death as it attempts to vanish amongst the fear and dreams and chaos.

But they do catch him (the shooter), somehow. They have him forced down on his knees, a piece of shit kneeling in submission on the marble floor of Westminster, with the Prime Minister's blood on his hands. His arms, stained up to the elbow in petals of roses, are locked behind him, and he looks at the crowd and the nerve-stricken security with a dead sort of resignation.

(How disgusting.)

Mihai stops two paces in front of him, draws his gun, and shoots the man with steel and vengeance. Wrath buries itself deep into the man's leg, and he doubles over and screams a penitent scream. It's not satisfactory, but Mihai makes do.

In silence, he scans the shocked and smeared faces of those who stand around him, and the corner of his lips twitch into a smile. 'Self-defense,' he says, and no one dares counter him because he still has five bullets left and plenty of insanity to spare.

He turns and strides back down the hall.

...

And then he is back in his house with a bottle of he-isn't-sure-what in his hands, and the TV is on but all he hears is the jabber of pigs and the chirping of snails. He stares up at the ceiling and the lights dance before his vision, and he sees something like retribution staring him back in the eyes.

So he closes them.

...

And he no longer wants to do this, because it has come out so, so wrong. He can't make sense of it, the feeling of a coiling venom in his gut, of worry and grief and unbearable guilt.

This had been the man he had ambitions to kill ten years ago—a gun to the head, an explosion of sparks, even arsenic in the drink if necessary—but now that he is lying somewhere between comatose and dying, he suddenly regrets having had such ambitions at all. (But wasn't he in control? Hadn't he always said that he would handle everything? Where did it go wrong?)

But control had slipped his fingers long ago, and now it all falls apart at the seams.

(Such arrogance.)

It frays his nerves and chips away at the willpower he'd built up over the course of more than ten years of smiling and lying and subduedly destroying, and isn't it ironic? The man he was meant to kill (now that he lay dying) would be the one to unravel his heartstrings and thread them around his neck—suspend it all above a precipice in an awe-inspiring fall.

The be all and end all had, indeed, ended it all.

(Ended it all with blooming blood on the marble floors, and one day there will be roses planted there.)

His hands are just as dirty as the ones that pulled the trigger.

...

He knows what the press says about his failure, and it only drives him mad. His fault, yes. Hadn't foreseen it; hadn't secured the entrances. Arthur was shot under what had partially been his watch, under his eye, and even if it weren't his responsibility in the first place, he would have taken it all onto himself. Somehow, over coffee and tea, Lovecraft and Shakespeare, dogs and roses, Arthur himself had become a responsibility, his responsibility (and so much more). The guilt was his own to bear, and he would gladly bear it over someone who tried to wash off the charges with evasive words and careful lies.

...

The day before he resigns, he appears for the last time in CI's holding cells. No one could get the killer to talk, they'd told him—no information whatsoever about who sent him, about who his accomplices are, and Mihai supposes he might as well do one last useful act before he vanishes into the depths of urban decay and ghost cities once more. After all, why not? He hates the shooter, and penitence was always a word that sounded like grace. (But in truth he hates himself more, and he has a policy against hating himself so he takes it out on the closest possible fit.)

'Close the door and turn off the cameras,' he says, and nobody protests him because they've never seen his eyes flash like coal before.

They close the door and turn off the cameras.

(It takes five hours, twenty-three minutes and fifty-two seconds. Afterwards, Mihai borrows the facility showers to wash off the blood and smell of burning.)

...

He never visited Arthur. Couldn't stand the idea of seeing his friend kept alive by some mechanical beast, someplace where even prayer couldn't reach.

(But he still prays anyway, to a God that doesn't listen.)

...

The day of the burial he leaves town. He sends flowers to the cemetery—twelve of them, to light a candle for the dead. He doesn't attend in person—feels no desire to be in front of cameras and buzzards now that he is no longer an entity of the city. And all for the better.

He walks under the midday sun, and he mingles into the commuters and pedestrians and trudging ghosts, and strolls through the streets of filthy, deceased London with nothing more than a lingering nostalgia and a desire to forget. Suddenly, it's so easy to disappear, and in ten or twenty years his name won't even ring a bell. He strolls easily across the zebra stripes of the main streets, doesn't even wait for red to turn green, and he hears the honk of horns and monkeys screaming obscenities. He doesn't mind. This city is no longer worth anything—full of rot and decay, and half-alive corpses—and he wonders what Arthur had even seen in this ugly, transient place that was ever worth dying for.

He stops at a crossroads, one that leads out of London and one that leads deeper into its bowels, another that leads somewhere he can never go. He hesitates there, with his feet on the curb, amidst the life and coming and going and ebbing and flowing that bends and curves and melds all around him. And he wonders what he owes.

He owes this city, if only for Arthur. Owes it for its tumult and problems and unsatisfactory solutions; owes it for the coffee that Arthur always hated; owes it for the hospitals and life-support and shooters and thieves. Only for Arthur, and he stares down at the street that will carry him back to the centre of town. An avenue of spirits and memories not worth keeping, so much more valuable than the blood that runs through his own veins.

And that's what he owes it: memories. Ten years' worth of memories.

'I'm not very good at paying my debts,' he says, but London doesn't seem to mind.

He returns to his home when the sun starts going down, and he throws his packed items into the back of his car. The house a few paces down from his is vacant, and its emptiness echoes through the streets like a wild howling of wind.

He departs that night, and doesn't leave a word for anyone. The ones who need to find him already know he has a contact in Belgrade, and the ones who want to find him will perhaps be determined enough to do so. The car starts almost silently, and large swathes of light cut into the fading twilight.

It takes him thirty minutes to reach the outskirts of town, and as he passes by churches and apartments, everything flashes by like fragments of a long-shattered dream, perfectly uniform and vastly distinct and ever-changing. The light of the street-lamps glint and fade, and trail out dust behind him. Vibrantly, like festivities celebrated beyond their prime, the buildings and silhouettes wave merrily in his rear-view mirror, in a macabre dance of its own destruction.

He turns his eyes from London and never looks back.

[Mihai Chimet]

SPOILER: Click to show

Six little Kirklands going about their lives
One got shot and then there were five

Five little Kirklands shaken to the core
They found him in a wreck and then there were four

Four little Kirklands trying not to grieve
One took six little pills and then there were three

Three little Kirklands feeling very blue
One lost her head and then there were two

Two little Kirklands and we're still not done
One lost his mind and then there was one

Being the last little Kirkland wasn't very fun
She whispered 'no more' and then there were none

[Mihai Chimet]

SPOILER: Click to show

[Joselle]

ogoogakdj;aj i literally flipped out holy she's so cute a;sdjjdaf

THOSE BOOTS TOO

[Mihai Chimet]

i'm glad you like it in spite of the shitty ipod picture! ;w;/

[Deleted]

SPOILER: Click to show

You said you had an offer for me?

[Joselle]

this is going to be my official reaction picture to everything here

[Mihai Chimet]

SPOILER: Click to show

Of all the places he could have gone first, he went to Paris. He couldn't deny that there was a certain charm to it, with its worldwide revered architecture and the tongue of romance (the sounds of which, he must admit, he had missed somewhat). And wasn't Paris where everyone went to drown their romantic sorrows anyhow? As much love as there was on the Parisian streets, there were just as many miserable fools, provided with the luxuries of too much fine wine and too many willing lovers.

(Mihai took advantage of both.)





But the thing is, he hadn't even been in love in the first place. Not exactly.

He'd loved the teasing, the snide retorts, the answering bouts of laughter. He'd loved afternoons spent over tea or coffee, supposedly discussing security detail only to be sidetracked by books or poetry. He'd loved the voice that became thin too easily when its owner was angry or upset or overworked, which seemed to be always. He'd loved sleepless nights over paperwork and negotiations, keeping one another awake with frivolous jokes and gifts of caffeine. He'd loved the skin that was too pale and the self-righteousness that reared its head at precisely the wrong moments. He'd loved the simple flow of conversation, the occasional brushed hands and traded glances. He'd loved all those things (and more), but he hadn't loved Arthur Kirkland.

But he could have.





He loved Paris in very much the same way. He loved its life and its sluggish passage like hot summer air. He loved the romance and abject squalor. He loved the wine that was sometimes too sweet and the women who laughed too loudly and the men who flirted too shamelessly. He wrapped himself in the substance of Paris, with all its trash and dirt and the eyes that passed over those things without seeing them at all.

He had enough time and enough drinks to become acquainted with the types that lived there. He discovered the French in a place that echoed their essence, with their French laughter and their French affectations and their French dissatisfaction from which nothing seemed to be spared. Once, he met a young lady who was a book critic, and she gave him the impression that she spent much of her time being dissatisfied with Victor Hugo.

"He never could capture l'espirit of the revolution, you see," she said on their one and only night together, gesturing vaguely with a lighted cigarette. Her free hand traced little circles on Mihai's bare thigh, an action that he found the slightest bit irritating and which he put a stop to by grasping her hand and sliding it onto the sheets.

He nodded, and agreed with her that l'espirit of the people was largely uncapturable.





One time, as he was prowling the streets of Paris now that he no longer had people to serve or a country to save, he came upon l'Arc de Triomphe. It stood erect at the end of the Champs-Élysées, tall and grand and surrounded by tourists. Mihai approached the structure merely because it rested at the end of the avenue, and it was only once he stood at the edge of the road that he decided he might as well take a look. He had never been a great patron of architecture, but he could always admire some skilled artwork, and l'Arc de Triomphe was one of France's greatest pride and glories. And wasn't it custom to pass under it in celebration of victories hard fought and won?

He fell to loitering around the grand arch with the rest of the tourists, inspecting the statues and the great detail that had no doubt been painstakingly engraved. Perhaps it was fitting that he had come here—he'd heard once, that there had been a sculpture perched on top of the arch that named itself "le triomphe de la Révolution." He couldn't quite recall what the rest of it was supposed to signify, but he did recall his book critic and her talk of l'éspirit, and he imagined that she would have said that the monument was only the next grand farce in a history of grand farces.

He remained thoughtful a moment, standing beneath the shadow of the monument. He had never been the type to boast to have some great connection with art, and he certainly wouldn't say that he felt any great force of time channeled through the structure, but for posterity's sake he laid a hand fleetingly over its rough surface and wished himself luck.

And as he left the plaza, he was stopped by an eager vendor. The little man, sporting a cap to keep the sun from his eyes, asked him in accented English whether he would like to purchase a souvenir. Mihai expressed his refusal with disinterest—it wasn't as though he had anyone to please, and he took no personal interest in keeping around merchandise whose value would soon be forgotten. But as he walked away, he was struck by a sudden and impulsive change of mind. He retraced his steps, and told the vendor he might buy something after all, for his girlfriend. (His lies had grown increasingly inconsequential ever since he'd begun to have nothing of worth to lie about.)

He picked up a postcard with a decent shot of the arch, dropped a Euro, and disinterestedly continued on his way. For the next month, the card sat on the night-table of his hotel room, untouched and utterly blank.





Of all the places one could lose themselves, Paris was hardly a bad place to do it. It was no less deplorable than the next big city, but it certainly had nicer cafés and better wine than any place one could care to go to in the Western hemisphere. Suffice to say that it was pleasant in the same way molasses is pleasant on a hot summer's day.

In a place like Paris, time did not exist. Or perhaps that applied to any city where one did not belong, where one could meld into the existing crowd who looked at their watches every minute and expected their trains to be five minutes late. Among all the timepieces and waning sunlight, he lived just as he pleased, the unpredictability of his day dissolving into routine and monotony. But he didn't mind. He needed it, the mornings spent in cafés and the nights in blurs of alcohol and lips, because it made things easier, and anything he might have thought in the morning would be swept away in a surge of ecstasy and lust by nightfall. Like this, it was easy.





He was struck with a sudden moment of clarity one night. At least, a moment as clear as it could be, with one of his legs hooked around the knees of a theater major and his head swimming in some ten glasses of champagne. He didn't think he'd gotten this drunk since his freshman year in college.

He sat up and pushed the other man off of him by the shoulder. He was driven by a strange sense of urgency, perhaps the knowledge that this alcohol-induced enlightenment would only last so long, and to put it off would be death to the words that echoed in his mind like bells. He scrambled in the dark to the quiet sounds of French confusion until he found the switch for the bedside lamp, and he flicked it on, bathing the room in a placid yellow glow.

"Need to write something," he murmured, and kicked the sheets from around his legs as he searched for a pen. Finding none on the nightstand, he pulled open the drawers and felt around almost frantically for something to write with, finally emerging with one of the cheap capped pens that every hotel offered. He uncapped it and flipped over the postcard he'd gotten of l'Arc de Triomphe—the one he'd kept on the bedside table in hopes of finding the right words to say one day. Funny, that they should come to him when he was kilometers away and in the middle of fucking a stranger.

"Are you a writer, mon cher?" the man asked, his lips brushing against the back of Mihai's neck. His voice was gentle and understanding, unclouded by the taint of too much alcohol. He sounded like someone who knew exactly what Mihai was doing, and pitied him for it. The French made such irritating lovers.

"I dated one once," the man said. "They're always so full of inspiration."

Mihai tilted his head, closing his eyes and leaning backwards, not in pursuit of romance but in trying to offer himself to a surrender that had come too late. He dropped the pen and flipped the postcard over. "No," he answered. "But I knew one," and before his partner could ask any more questions (questions he didn't necessarily want to answer), Mihai turned to kiss him and they fell entangled onto the bed.





And the problem was that he had too much time to think. No one was drunk before dark but for the heartbroken and destitute, and he didn't like to consider himself to be either of those. So in the mornings, as the bars lay silent and empty, he took to sitting in the outdoors tables of cafés with a book for accompaniment, although more commonly it lay untouched if he found the people passing him by to be more interesting instead.

And occasionally, they were. Many of them melded in and out of one another in complete and utter mundanity, but occasionally there would be a rarity or two. He'd watched a plainclothes cop try to appear inconspicuous as he mouthed into an invisible microphone; he'd looked on as a young woman took her place on the other side of the street, and painted a single sentence onto the limestone wall. 'You wouldn't know these words existed if you hadn't looked up,' it read, and indeed, if he closed his eyes all he would see would be darkness, but knowledge wasn't so easily decimated as sight. And it was knowledge that he resented.





He woke up the next morning with a terrible headache and a mouth as dry as sand. The thing in question that had caused him the bitter grief of coming to consciousness was the cell phone that was ringing rather obnoxiously from the ground, where it had been deposited along with his pants the previous night. It was a fortunate thing that the garment was within reach, otherwise he might have simply turned over and allowed the device to ring its share. Instead, he found himself obliged to pick the phone out of his pants' pocket, pressing it to his ear on the last ring.

"Salut," he said, voice slurred from sleep. His parched throat made any talking rather painful, and the dull throb in his head acted as a wedge between any possibility of a coherent thought process. He reached for the glass of champagne that had been left on the nightstand, taking a sip and making a face when the bitter alcohol met his tongue. The carbonation had all gone out of the drink, but it made his throat feel somewhat better. "What is it?"

The voice of his Ecuadorian contact crackled through, urgent and undeniably frustrated. "What are you doing?" she asked, strident enough that Mihai raised the phone a few good centimeters from his ear. "Your flight leaves in less than an hour and you still haven't shown up at the airport! I swear to god, if you're still in bed—"

"Book me something later," he said, cutting her off. He rolled over to lay on his stomach, shutting his eyes against the light that filtered through the curtains. He silently thanked whoever had bothered to close them as he half-listened to the rapid rebukes and angry curses that came through his phone.

"Listen," he said, cutting her off again. "I know it causes you trouble, but I feel like shit right now so if you'd be a dear and get me a later flight, I'll really owe you, okay? Thanks." And having learned that the best way to ensure a favor was to end the negotiations, he hung up and deposited the phone onto the bed.

He remained in bed awhile, face-down, fully giving himself into the languor that pervaded his limbs, encouraged by the silence of the room save the hum of the air conditioning and the occasional commotion in the hallway. Some time later, his cell phone buzzed to alert him of a new message. The glowing display screen informed him that the message had come from his contact, telling him that his new flight was at 20:15, and that he had better be there or he could deal with the consequences himself. 15:52 already glowed in a contained red on the digital clock, and he took it as an indication that he should get going.

Pushing himself up with a groan, he maneuvered into a sitting position. As he reached for the glass of champagne again, intending to dump out its contents in exchange for water, he caught sight of a slip of paper that had been resting on the nightstand, undoubtedly left by his most recent guest. Rubbing his eyes, he squinted at the overly-elaborate lettering of an actor: 'Thank you for a very pleasant night. It isn't usually my custom to leave so abruptly, but I have a class early this morning so it couldn't be helped. I don't suppose we'll see each other again, but I wish you the best of luck.'

He ran a hand through his hair, unable to keep the sigh from making it past his lips. The French made such irritating lovers. He wondered if his postcard had been read, and whether it was from there that such a great amount of graciousness was contained in the note left behind, but it lay just as innocuously overturned as he had recalled having left it the night before. He flipped it over himself, inspecting the drunken scrawl that cascaded across the white surface.

He thought, as his eyes focused on the disorganized lettering, that it had been foolish from the start. He wondered what he could possibly say at all, to fit between the lines drawn across the backside of all postcards. Certainly not enough. It wasn't as though honesty was one of his virtues anyhow, and in the rare moments it got through without an ounce of spite or sarcasm, he felt the overwhelming need to forget about it (and to make others forget).

So he uncapped the pen again, and drew three straight lines across his words.





That was how the housekeeper found the postcard in the evening, with everything in the room cleared out spotlessly but for one color photograph of l'Arc de Triomphe that lay on the nightstand, under an unfinished glass of champagne with ice that had melted a long time ago. She removed the glass and saw the writing that had been scrawled on the back of the card, crossed out by second thoughts and blurred from the glass of champagne that had been left upon it overnight. She read the few words on its surface and breathed a French sigh of sympathy—after all, they knew that the moments of true honesty of a damaged éspirit could be counted on one hand. In this case, it went like this:

I could have loved you. God, I could have loved you.

[Deleted]

For Missy and Cap. I'm sorry that a) I can't do Iain's accent, and b) I can't do Iain period.

SPOILER: Click to show

They'd actually met before, even though he doesn't remember. It started on a bridge, outside a masquerade party, with a splash, when he turned to look and saw the figure of a woman leaning against the balustrade with her chin on her hand. The next thing he knew, he was up there with her, and the next thing they would never know was that at that moment, they became irredeemable.

He leaned over next to her, peering into the waters, and felt as though he were looking into the stars.

"What was that?" he asked.

She looked at him, her mask glinting silver, and he felt the intensity of her gaze as she scrutinized him.

"Leave it alone," she said, after a pause. "You never know what's underneath those waters."

His gaze shifted to her, studied her, but he couldn't make out anything except a pair of light brown eyes that looked as bitter as honey.

"Someone could've fallen in," he insisted.

She turned, slowly, as though bored by the scene, and rested her back against the balustrade. Now, he could see her features (or at least, what could be seen with the mask that encircled her eyes), and the moon poured over her with a such whitish haze that she could have been called an angel if she didn't have such a cynical manner about her.

"They didn't fall," she said.

"Then what was it?" he asked, then added half-jokingly, "Did you push him?"

He eyed her blonde curls and the same way they fell against her neck as she tilted her head back to laugh. It was a light laugh, like the way she carried herself, and like the way he was certain her kisses would taste against his mouth.

"No." She shook her head, painted lips still curved in a smile. "He jumped."

He paused, taken aback by her casual demeanor. "What do you mean?"

"Said he couldn't take it anymore and jumped," she answered, shrugging. "Joined all the other miserable souls who couldn't take it and ended up at the bottom of a river."

"And I'm supposed to believe that?" He straightened, frowning, wary of the lethally disarming woman before him, but she continued staring at the sky in the same disinterested way. Finally, she turned her head and met his gaze.

"Yeah," she said simply. "Because it's the truth."

He kept his eyes on her, even as she looked back towards the sky. He opened his mouth to say something, but nothing came out. He didn't know how to respond, didn't know how to read her, and it may have just been the mask, but she seemed just as inscrutable as the river below them. He didn't know if he could trust her.

"I should call someone over," he said finally, diverting his gaze and feeling a bit peeved that he didn't know whether she was lying. He was usually good at telling, but this woman wore her emotions the way she wore her mask.

She sighed in a way that suggested she had expected his answer, then elegantly pushed herself off the balustrade. "You do that, mon cher," she said, turning in the other direction, and her voice held the same breathy, condescending quality as her laughter. "I'll take my leave now."

He watched her languid steps as she walked away, the shawl she wore over her dress drifting lightly behind her. All of a sudden, as he stared at her curls and her unreasonably high heels, he felt an unexpected, impulsive urge to keep her there for longer, to ask her where she was from and if she liked to read and if she had any lovers that she planned to keep. But she almost made him feel like a boy again, and he couldn't muster the courage to take her hand and lead her back to the masquerade as he would have liked.

Instead, he sucked in a breath. "Do I at least get to see what is underneath that mask?"

She stopped, slanting her head so that he could see her profile and the amused tug on her lips. "Unfortunately not," she replied. "That's a secret."

"Then tell me your name," he said.

He saw her smile disappear, and with it, any talk between them. There was a long silence. Time wore on in the form of wind through the trees and the music from the masquerade, her uncertain breaths and his placid certainty. Finally, she opened her mouth, and said it quietly, in a word so soft he had to strain to hear.

"Estelle."

And then she was gone, picking her way across the bridge and the footpath leading away from it, through the lies she scattered in her wake, and through her relentless and ruined life. And he wouldn't know any of that until five years later, when he meets a woman on a bridge above the river Thames, and he wonders why her soft laughter and her bitter eyes are so unbearably familiar.

[Deleted]

SPOILER: Click to show

[Deleted]

Written for my typetrigger.

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He'd never liked his medicine.

When he was young, there was a routine built around bottles with safety caps: three red pills in the morning, one white pill at school, two green pills after dinner, and five small blue ones before bed. He'd hated them as he climbed the stairs to the nurses' office, how they regimented his life and dictated at what time he must be where. He'd tried to show, time and again, that his illnesses couldn't best him, but that was a hard thing to prove when he took eleven pills a day.

The only thing that took the edge off the bitter pills and the discomfort of swallowing them was his mother. The times she could sit by him while he drank his water, she'd pat down his unruly hair and offer encouraging words and soothing melodies. That was a medicine all on its own.

And when he outgrew his childhood clothes and his brothers' headlocks (that's a lie—he would never outgrow those, not even with the passing years), he also outgrew the safety-capped bottles. Small blessing that was, that he was able to wean himself of red and white and green and blue pills, but he was never quite able to wean himself of medicine.

Now, his medicine came in the form of BBC series, of fantasy novels, and the moleskin notebook he kept for writing. It came in mocking eyes that were almost red, slicked blonde hair, flower shops, and hands that were more talented in the kitchen than his would ever be. It came in family, in a flurry of hair like fire, which both annoyed him and caused him inexplicable joy and elation. It came in the form of all he loved, and those were sweeter than pills would ever be.