Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

It was a simple moment, when he was eight. 

He wasn’t much of anything yet but simultaneously not allowed to be nothing, so he was scented floral when children were to smell of dirt and he was much too pale as he was buried in books and new ink across his fingers like the breaking out of an allergic reaction when he should have had freckles scattering across his cheeks and the ridge of his nose and down his neck. A simulacrum of his grandfather who was so of his, his mother told him as soon as he was old enough to stand, and there are standards every generation must live up to. He naturally already knew the definition, and the implications, of what it meant to be another’s portrait.

But children no matter their effigy are always precocious in the same way a fish cannot breathe above water regardless of if it calls a river or the ocean its home, and even one such as him wishes for the darkened hallways of his estate to be something he sees when drenched in the third bell nightfall. Too scared is he to go further than just these halls, because the garden he walks in when the sun is high is looking too much like the very scary forest of the faeries the valiant knight got lost forevermore in when it’s low, let alone the windings further downtown into that too-dark maw like the dragon that then ate him.

It was simple, so simple. He couldn’t sleep despite the moon’s beckoning. He thought of going for a walk in its shade, because if it wasn’t the day there was nothing to do but sleep. Sweetly, he knocked on his door as he still held his teddy bear and the maid standing outside peered in. The candle she was holding lit her face from below and he very almost shied away from her before she smiled and accepted his very small hand into hers to accompany him. She didn’t speak, so there was nothing to listen to but the rough pounding of his heart in his chest. He would grow accustomed to this noise and the silence married to it, hand in hand, bells ringing. 

The halls are the perfect roaming ground for lost souls, and Violet isn’t lost yet but they say places that hurt grow to be haunted, like how scars will ghost deep wounds. He has to waddle three steps for every wide stride of the maid, not even to her hips yet, and when he squeezes on her hand she squeezes back with a smile if not any words. He’s used to hearing words in actions, and from this he hears to follow quietly behind. He doesn’t know what it sounds like to be given affection - affirmation, positivity, compliments that would make even a poor man’s head grow to tumorous sizes he is dangerously familiar with - but not those simple three words. This is a failing that follows him for too long, but there is no way for him to know that yet when he has seen the pages of a textbook more than his father’s face.

He walks quietly, her even quieter, and the candle’s flame flickers to and fro with every bob of the bronze holder. Outside a wolf howls, its kin joining in song moments later, and Violet will look alarmed at the noise here even though he will come to know it as the most soothing noise the world can produce, second only to Pavel’s slow breathing as he rests curled up against the tree and a little too close to his leg. They ghost down the hallways, step down the staircase that winds like veins in the heart of this family, and then sweep briefly across the main hall.

And he knows what the main hall looks like, by the very fact that he’s lived here for his entire life, but - oh, it’s a coincidence , by definition, but fate has a way of looking so pedestrian in the moment until you trace it back like starlight veiling over that dark, peppered canvas overhead with your blotchy fingers, thirty-two and stuck in the honey pot of hearing ‘I love you’ but not knowing what that means. For they step into the hallway and briefly, the maid means well and the stars know this but little Violet does not and they sigh and cloud over as if to not see the freight train collision to his tiny carriage veering him off course. She takes him to the mantle place and holds the candle out and he has seen his mother of course of course but he has never seen her like this.

A portrait, you see. Hung by its neck, and the blaze of the candle dancing underneath like the burning of a stake.

The maid says, “you’ll be up there one day, too, young master.” There is a smile on her face, and she is only excited to see him there for she has served this family for years. Violet only hears a threat, or maybe something closer to a warning.

Well, the child’s mind is quick to be tormented by absurdism. He is 39 now. Still tormented, but that isn’t relevant at the present moment. Not as he sweeps through the streets, frost of the baby winter be damned. 

His cape is a stretch of the night behind him and if he’s frank, so too are the lines across his face. He’s older now - as people are wont to grow so, when time passes by them - but his eyes still glimmer brightly like stars in the darkness that shrouds his features, hood pulled over his head and a non-descript broach keeping it tight across his shoulders lest the wind tug it off him seductively, wishing for him to stay a little longer than his scurrying down Perland’s concrete leaves it behind. He isn’t in the business of being recognised but it appears Perland herself has missed him greatly. Bright with familiar scents in the air despite the blustering winds coaxing him here to a valiant stall that remains open even as the snow begins making its descent known via the bridges of red forming across their cheeks and noses; there to a tavern he recalls spending more than a few nights at back when the Raiders were more than just a memory he could catch himself thinking about when his eyes have spent more time looking at the ceiling than her next to him. Slush on the ground, and noise in the air.   

As it is, Perland is different ten years later in the same way a tree is different ten years later, which is to mean maybe it's grown a few more branches as its concrete roads wind deeper into its busy, ever-crowded centre and some more leaves with its blooming buildings that he doesn’t recognise but is still easily recognisable as what it is if only because you know the very shape of it. But every tree will be pruned, or will have a new set of leaves, and in this descriptor the leaves are the bricks that make up the city. The walls themselves are similar to what he remembers, astoundingly large grey that towers right up taller than the biggest peaks in the city. They grant the same sort of awe when you walk through that any good mountain lining the horizon of your glare would do. Yet when he walks in, there is the tell-tale scaffolding attached to buildings around the area like beige-coloured webbing by impossibly large spiders creeping up their proud lengths. Some buildings have already had their transformation complete - bricks swapped out for clear panels, large windows and electricity that beams bright colours down to the concrete of the footpath he walks along.

As he does there’s activity rushing down it. Plenty of people, all of whom give him nothing more than a passing glance. He doesn’t get lost exactly while he wanders through the streets, but Violet’s eyes catch on more things than he remembers, and he recalls knowing Perland’s streets like the behind of his eyelids. But then time marches on, regardless of personal misgivings of how you’ve spent it, and ten years is a mighty duration to be absent from so much as the lifespan of milk, let alone an entire city. In ten long, long years, milk can be taken from the udder, bottled up, pasteurised, further heated into yoghurt, and go off to be nothing but a sour bit of mess no one wants anything to do with. Violet snorts just as tart, as soon as he thinks it, bringing his cloak to wrap tighter as it falls askew from his shoulder as a bluster rolls in from his right - nay, a synonym should not so succinctly describe the truth of the matter, lest it simply be a retelling.

The location, neither, is of any particular concern to him. Violet ambles down the roads that will be buried in snow within the hour with a relaxation that could fascinate a frenzied man who has only heard his mind’s voice speak in his caffeinated high of the past day, because he’s simultaneously in no rush and also desperate to return home. Home itself is a strange word, lackadaisical - perhaps, incoherent - in its definition, because Perland is home in that wider understanding of it but he will, absolutely, freeze to death if he remains outside in it, so he needs to think of it as something a little smaller.

Just a little bit smaller. Relatively worthless though his family name is, it’s still nobility, and the space his estate is built on is a constant reminder of that. He pauses for only a second when he knows where to find the warmth of a fireplace that need not be accessible after he passes his coin purse along to the proprietor. He has none, after all.

So he walks and he walks and he walks and he is uninterrupted in his walking despite the large volume of people he passes by, which strikes him as almost liminal considering how boisterous his walks down these roads would usually be, until he turns a much quieter corner into a deserted alleyway that he remembers and hopes still leads closer to the road he has to take to get to his estate. Then there is a very rough bump into his shoulder and he thinks to himself yes, yes, this is much more like it.

Only to look down at whoever has rushed him down and sees, well. He sees the black boots sharp against the white-speckled grey concrete. The faint lime-green glimmer that rests on his chest. The piercing red eyes that always caught a bit of the sun, settling gold at the bottom of his irises, like the sun lowering and leaving behind a gradient. 

“Oh,” says Violet, somehow stunned. “Pavel.”

Pavel looks up at him, blinks, and then his narrowed eyes blow wide open and he pales. “... Violet?”

“You- you recognise me? Pavel. Pavel, it is you, isn’t it?” and the first thing Violet really notices is that his eyes have lost their glint, because he is shamelessly staring at him like a thirsty traveller drinks from the water of an oasis.

Silence lies between them, like that little empty space of a mattress that they leave in the absence of letting the pits of their backs touch. “Yes,” Pavel says eventually, eyes electing to settle into a scowl that matches the thinness of his lips. “Of course I recognise you, Violet.” He has a hood on himself - dark raven and melty in the overhead night that the lights from the main streets on either end don’t seem to reach, and one that makes him look all the more severe by casting a shadow across the sculpt of his nose and up. 

The relief he feels almost sets his knees shaking. “Oh, oh,” he nearly sobs. “Thank goodness! Thank God! You have no idea how surreal it’s been, returning to Perland and finding absolutely no one recalls me! I stepped into a pub and no one challenged me to a duel - no one even looked up! It was a welcome change of pace initially, but now I frankly just find it eerie, and- oh, Pavel! Pavel, it’s such a joy to see you again!”

To his surprise, Pavel sighs. “Right, sure,” is all he says.

“I,” Violet starts, only to never get where he means to go - he jumps out of his wet boots when there is a bang, and then another bang followed by crashing and yelling from past the corner Pavel came from. 

Noises that are far from unique nor abnormal in Perland, but Pavel glances behind him with eyes the size of the moon creeping into the sky anyway. “Shit,” he says, and then, spitting, “ shit .”

“Trouble?” Violet asks him, casual enough to pass for a Saturday morning.

In reply, Pavel pushes past and runs.

“Hey!” Violet yells after him, and there’s something to be said about privacy here and there about the act of promptly following after someone who is clearly looking to get away, but when that person got away with skin paling and a grimace you’d give a misbehaving welp, he thinks privacy can get fucked for the moment.

The crashing and bashing is not confined to the alleyway they run out of - it bares chase, clearly, grumbling past and into the street. Pavel skids around the corner by the side of his heavy-duty boots and Violet follows and then, just when he’s hoping the four-pronged roundabout will give them at least a brief chance, he hears, “ that way!” and the hoard of rumbling feet approach.

“What happened?” Violet asks as they run. “Who’re these jokers?” He’s got his hand on the hilt of his sword and he’s not unwilling to use it - he’s just got to get the clarity to know exactly who he’s pointing it at, because justice hasn’t died until he has or something just as diabolically cheesy along those lines.

He knows Pavel’s heard him when his pupils swivel in their sockets to look at him, which is then how he subsequently knows he’s ignored him when he doesn’t reply.

“You can tell me if you’re in deep!” Violet tries, as pleasantly as he can when he’s using most of his energy to book it. “I won’t be mad! Everyone gets deep over something at some point!”

“Left,” says Pavel, and then, unsurprisingly, turns left.

That brings them to an empty road that offers nothing by way of people and even less by way of light. He follows Pavel’s footsteps as he forges on ahead but bumbles blindly like a mole as he does, hands outstretched and legs unsteady like he’s taking his first damn steps in the world. Then light, as exploding from a single bright bulb that bores into his eyes. He’s quick to wince, hand instantly over his eyes in the hopes thin skin can prove an effective barrier from the sort of intensity that could evaporate light, but his eyes adjust soon and he can shuffle his way to the side to see what manner of beast has attempted to rid him of his ability to see.

Pavel’s got his leg slung across it already, and it’s a sleek-looking thing that looks like what the paper boy would usually ride around on at the break of dawn as he delivered the morning papers chirping at the top of his voice, but if it had been taken over by the same scaffolding that were attached up the length of the buildings and turned them from brick to something shinier. A bulb at the peak of it, two handlebars on either side, and a fluid motion of dark metal that leads into a plush-looking black seat and wheels bigger than his head.

Violet would personally best describe it as a mechanical horse, and he’s thinking that as he politely gestures towards it. “This is?”

“None of your business,” Pavel tells him. He plasters his ass atop it, quick to place his palms on the handles, and when he twists them a loud howling noise emanates from it, or maybe it really is a whinny from an exceptionally-strange looking colt. From the sides where the exhaust pipes are, a cloud of smoke floats upwards to disappear into the night’s air.

“Fine.” He knows he won’t be getting anywhere if Pavel’s feeling particularly stubborn. His best virtue, that (or a flaw, depending on who you asked - maybe the day you asked Violet himself). “Can two people get on it?”

“I didn’t ask for you to come with me,” Pavel replies, colder than the falling snow.

He huffs loudly, brow creasing and throwing his hands out. “Please. You wouldn’t so much as ask for a cup of coffee, let alone for me to follow you when you’ve clearly got a case of shit on your heel.”

“What do you know about what I’d ask for?” he snaps back, mouth crooked down and brows hardly contrary. “You've been checking in? Peeping on how I’ve been doing?”

“Is now the time to do this?” Violet points out, really trying to be helpful and throwing his hands out behind him. Do you remember? You were running, and I was following? 

“Is it the time to come back ?” Pavel asks, enraged, before both of them sweep around at a barked, “ there !”

The engine roars with a twist of its handlebars. Pavel looks past Violet and onto the road. Something glints amongst the chasers - silver, metallic. The second seat of the bike isn’t quite as safe as the leather seat Pavel gets nor as easy on his ass, but Violet hops on without another word and has just enough time to grab Pavel’s shoulders before the tires skid and they ride off out the alleyway. A straight, bullet-clean path leading onto the main road.

And then, bang. Screaming in his arm. 

Perhaps, had he offered more time to the thought that this humming, bright technological revolution had given more convenience to Perland, it would have occurred to him to realise that one of the most convenient things any fighter can have is an immediate and lethal long ranged weapon. One that, perhaps, was coloured a handy silver, and could catch the remnant light of a motorcycle’s light.

“Son of a bitch! ” he yells, hand flying to where his arm sobs. “Aim like shit!”

“Louder than the fucking engine. Typical,” Pavel mutters under his breath. 

There’s too much pain rippling across him to really take substantial note of the ride, but he does notice the way the technicolour lights whizz past, the relative emptiness of the streets, the way the stars seem to be a little shy and aren’t out, as if they’re afraid that the bright lamp posts and glitzy signs that seem to head every shop or establishment they go past will outshine them. Sometimes it goes bump underneath them and he’s afraid he’ll fly off. The bike glides a little too low at one point, catching on ice, and he damn near does marry the pavement. 

Pavel barely moves, under his palm. Shoulders hopping sometimes, as the road’s uneven nature finds and meets them, and wind whipping his hair in the same way a curtain would when you’ve left the window open during a hurricane. It tickles his cheek and he says that’s why they’re warm in the falling snow. The wind meets him, too, curling through his insatiably messy hair like vexed fingers - it’s nice, he thinks, to be able to think of Perland as worrisome, still. A similar skeleton despite the change in skin. He hopes that isn’t unique to it, either.

“How bad did he get you?” Pavel finally asks, voice loud.

“Hurts,” Violet replies, though he doesn't really know how to assess it while he’s on the back of an insanely fast ride.

“God damn,” says Pavel simply, before bringing them to a stop.

They’re still in Perland - nowhere close to the gates, even, unless it’s changed that fundamentally since he left. Violet peeks over at him, and kind of obnoxiously focuses on how his bangs are long enough now to almost hide his eyes if you look at him from the side. He asks, “is it safe to stay in Perland? They seemed rather… intent.”

Pavel just shrugs. “If they’re that intent, it won’t matter. Show it to me.” 

He doesn’t so much as show it to him as Pavel grabs him by the wrist and twists him to make sure he can see it, but it achieves the end goal of getting his eyes on the hole in his arm handily enough that he would only complain if he were a shitlord with no sense of decorum, and he happens to only be one of those things. Pavel inspects it quietly, eyes jumping around the entirety of the wound, and when he presses his finger around the wound with the delicacy kittens would thank him for Violet groans deep in his belly, wincing his eyes shut so hard if he did it for too long he’d trigger a migraine and then he’d be fucked two ways over. He’s quick to remove his fingers, as soon as Violet voices his discomfort. 

“Not lodged,” he concludes. “Can’t see an entry wound. Nasty grazing, though.”

“Ah,” says Violet carefully, rolling his sleeves down. “Sorry for the false alarm, then. Can’t say I’ve much experience getting shot with anything quite this delicate.”

“Mhm,” is all Pavel says, as he moves to drape his leg back over and get his rump on his bike. 

Like a barely held-back waterfall only blocked by the same dam a pack of beavers have been nibbling on the past decade, though such a description fails to account for the sheer heat in the way Pavel frowns if he so much as looks at him.

It’s silly to think he so much as deserves his time, really. He can acknowledge that. He isn’t the same barely-socialised kid who joined the Raider’s half because he was terrified his entire life would be one house and ten people - he’s older, maybe not wiser, or maybe more of it because he can say he’s not the smartest person this side of the planet anymore.

He tells himself that. Repeats it, over and over again. He’s not the same. No, he isn’t. He isn’t the same.

He’s different, he thinks, exactly as he says, “can I ask now? How you’ve been doing?” A bit of concern for what is really a very concentrated attempt to keep him hanging about a little longer. A child asking for a bedtime story despite his eyelids being heavy, because he doesn’t want to see his mother’s back yet.

Pavel scoffs, twisting his bike’s handles. It roars with adoring enthusiasm, as if it can’t wait to bare him away from here on its back, and Violet can’t help but feel a little put out by that idea. “Why care now?”

“Perhaps because I’m worried about the fact that you have violent people after you.”

“It’s nothing,” Pavel tells him calmly. “I intervened with them mugging an old man, so they turned their sights on me.”

Violet balks at him. “That’s insane. No petty thief could have a gun like that, surely.”

“Gun’s have been in the hands of criminals for approximately seven years now. Smuggled in from Ritania,” Pavel proceeds to explain, and remind him in just as many words that the creases across his face are indeed more numerous than he remembers there being. 

He isn’t sure how to reply to that - to be cheeky about it and laugh feels as though he diminishes it, to apologise profusely for his distance in Perland’s criminal upheaval will only achieve the counter of what he’s aiming and set that engine blazing, taking him away from him - so all he does is blink slowly, lips pulled more taut than the fucking screeching fibres in his shot arm, which is maybe a little telling on what axis he feels more painfully. “You have to understand,” he starts, maybe babbling a little. “I- when I left, it wasn’t- there wasn’t much I could do, so-”

“I don’t,” Pavel tells him slowly, firmly. “I just don’t want to talk about it.”

“Then we don’t have to,” Violet insists. He inches closer, rests his hand on the handle Pavel isn’t holding, and tries to ignore the way his eyes glare at his curled fingers from behind his dark bangs. “I am perfectly happy to not talk about it. We can talk about something else, anything else.”

“Desperation doesn’t look good on you, Violet,” Pavel mumbles, flattened.

With his best grin, Violet leans forward. “But that new hairstyle does on you . Always thought long hair would look nice on you, and the pony-tail look is very chic.”

“It’s just easy to do in the morning,” says Pavel, only to realise he’s immediately getting caught up in his funny little and inescapable rhythm. He straightens his back, pushes him off his handle to rev the engine like it’s a threat and Violet certainly feels like it is one, his heart immediately making itself at home in his throat. 

So, when threatened, you test it. At least, that’s what Violet does, what he always has. “I’ll sit on the back again, I swear I will.”

Another sigh. “What do you want, Violet?”

“I want my best friend to look me in the eye without me getting the sense he wants to dash my brains against the nearest brick wall,” Violet replies, shoving a hand on his hip and trying to make himself look just big enough that he will not fall over if he does elect to drive into him, even though he definitely will and they absolutely both know that.

“And if I don’t want to give you that?” Pavel asks, frowning.

“Then I’ll be really sad,” Violet says. “Because I like my brain in my skull. It’s sort of where it belongs. And also, I like you, so it’s a win-win for me.”

“It’s always about you,” Pavel mutters under his breath. “Always, always.”

“It’s about us, ” Violet insists, his brow curled. “And I don’t think it’s wrong to say that.”

The following silence sits between them like a wide emerald meadow. The sort pepped with little flowers of every colour imaginable and matched by large oak trees who tickled one another by the leaves over their heads, that offered plenty of dark bushes to hide in during stakeouts, but were just the wrong sort of shade to hide him properly when he always preferred colours of the more purple variety and always get found with a gentle fist to the head and a coffee. The sort that would give way to dark nights that didn’t feel so dark when a campfire burned and there were two rather than one.

“One dinner,” Pavel says to his handlebars, and Violet almost misses it. “One dinner, and then you leave, and I leave, and this is over.”

Violet bites his lip. “Okay. I’m fine with that,” he lies.

Immediately after, he is left to feel a little like how he thinks it would feel to knowingly walk to a room wherein a guillotine awaits you. The snow proves only a temporary annoyance as it hasn’t quite built up yet, and it looks perfectly fine, a sheet of white covering what would be the grey of the concrete.

With the walk being of relative ease, Violet attempts to do the thing he knows best passes the time when travelling by foot, and that’s flapping his mouth. Normally an incredibly easy task for him, because he could talk about the consistency of cotton and find a way to make that in a conversation that lasts a few hours. It’s a skill of his, to view the idea of shutting up ever as entirely anathemic to what it means to be himself.

He tries many topics. such as: “It’s so typical of you to go charging in to rescue someone and not think about the consequences. I mean that endearingly, honestly - it’s good of you to not change. I feel like I observed far too much changing on my way here.”

Or: “I always did wonder where you got that gun of yours from, you know! You never did tell me properly. Is it time? Do you think it’s really Ritanian in origin? Do you know ?”

Or: “You know, one of the places we went had a green sky during the morning. A green sky! It still boggles the mind when I think about it, but somehow the fact that the lights are green here too is surprising me just as much. I’d have thought I’d be used to strange colours in places by now!”

Or even: “Pavel, please. It’s just going to make us both miserable. You can at least say something, can’t you?” 

All of it is met with a silent, sharp angle of the side of his face and the edge of his hood that hides his cheeks. He doesn’t wear plasters anymore, not the little white squares that set across his cheek and his jaw nor the one bandage that always seemed perpetually tucked under his fringe, only visible when the wind blew a little too hard and ruffled his essential fur; apparently, he’s content to bare his scars outwardly now. 

Cautious and vigilant that he is, his eyes scan the city around them, the ground beneath them. One would be tempted to presume this means his attention is wholly caught on being alert to any attackers and in fairness, Violet himself thinks this at first - but it’s upon his second attempt when even the wind whispers through the streets of what he’s hoping isn’t going to be a full-on blizzard that he notices when he speaks, Pavel very clearly listens.

His eyes go round in his head to look at him. His brows slide downwards just a little. His lips pull tighter together. Not the features of a man who wishes much to be disturbed by prattling but then, he never did seem to appreciate the sound of his voice.

Mentally he loiters, here, on this point, relatively bemused. Maybe reuniting shone more in his mind than it was to be in reality. He always had a penchant of looking to the shadows and hoping it would all be a little brighter than what he saw. That’s what the chandeliers did, on noble nights - made the dark run right into the corners, and made it so the cynicism of the evening could be dispelled. For there was alcohol flowing, women and men visible, and quiet parts of the locale that you could presume you would not be sighted if you happened to be bent over.

Chandeliers seem awfully rustic for the new Perland, though. Perhaps even those nights are gone.

He hated them. That should be a good thing, he thinks. He does not feel it. A pain dispelled without him; surgery conducted away from his chest; cauterising another’s arm and beaming at you as if to wonder why you seemed unsure. Hollow, or maybe never there at all. 

“This is,” he mumbles, aware this is more to himself in the face of Pavel’s insistence on remaining silent, as they walk down those blinding streets. “Ritania’s influence as well, isn’t it? After the war.” He didn’t even know lights could shine green before this - indeed, the sky was as far as he thought it would go, somehow - but the emerald hue is sharp as it glares at him atop the nearby bar’s roof, and behind it are three other colours from other beckoning signs. Perland’s sky, settled above it, glimmers with the lights as though it has taken them in to create a brand new colour, but he notes no white peppering its night canvas as he used to. It makes it feel oddly uncomfortable; a little unwelcoming, if you happened to think green looked bad on you, or didn’t much like how blue would look washed across your forearms and back.

Pavel merely grunts. Clearly, being strong-armed into this has not done wonders for his sociability. “There’s a place. Kind of old. Three streets down,” he says in place of a reply to his nostalgia-slash-melancholy.

“Sounds good,” he replies, maybe a little too quickly. “Your pick.” It’s the least he can do.

He gets a glance backwards. “... Your arm?”

“Later,” Violet says with a wave of his other hand. “Pain’s already fading. Totally forgot about it until just now, actually.”

He is, of course, lying through his teeth again, but there’s a pretty substantial part of him that’s afraid if he asks for a raincheck on dinner, he’ll not ever get it. He’s sat through worse injuries for longer than however long it’s going to take for Pavel to decimate a meal - he’ll be more than fine. Fine enough to put a meal into his own mouth and chew slowly enough to stop him from saying dumb shit when Pavel decides he’s had enough.

The diner is a comfortable-looking place - he doesn’t wince, at least, when he passes through the doors, unlike the vague headache he’s been gifted by the streets when everywhere he turns to is lit up a new colour with the intensity of a small sun a metre away from his face. It’s empty when they walk in, betraying the time of day - or, rather, night - with no one more than who stands behind the counter. It's headed by an ageing man who looks similarly uninterested in human contact as Pavel is as he walks into the rather small space, picking a table towards the front despite how veritably cosy Violet can't help but think it might be to squeeze themselves right into the corner. Under the burning white light of the lamp ahead and the decorative glow across the skirting board in the otherwise grey and drab room, it has a way of washing out his dark colours to a strange bleached look. 

I hope my shades look better than that in this light, Violet thinks. He pulls a chair out, sits directly opposite from Pavel, and it makes a harsh screeching sound from metal leg against vaguely-polished flooring.

He settles into his chair - resting his elbows on the table, chin in his hands - to silence. Pavel crosses his arms over his chest and dips his head, shutting his eyes as though he means to go to sleep. Quiet and distant, even though if Violet reached out he could graze his fingers against his arm exerting very little effort. Leaving scratch marks as though he had claws there, maybe.

“It’s cheap,” says Pavel, eventually, nodding over at the person behind the counter. He rolls his eyes as he picks up what Violet’s going to guess is the menu, and then throws it in front of the two of them like he’s tossing playing cards.

This time, it's Violet's time to look like a ghost merely haunting some delectable man-meat. Pavel glances up at him, and then curls a brow when Violet kind of opens his mouth and brings his hand there, horrified.

“I,” says Violet, quiet as rain on a sunny day, but decidedly not as pretty. “I forgot. I don’t have any money.”

There’s the sort of pause one only gets when the person in front of them thinks they’ve achieved stupidity that would find them written into history books, recognised for it across the grey of their tombstone. Pavel’s eyes have gone narrow from barely-restrained resentment (because of course, what else would it possibly be?) to about as wide as a stunned audience member would wear, and mouth curled in the way it would be when that stunning is coloured surprised.

“Nothing?” Pavel tries, vaguely in awe. 

Cheeky as he is Violet shoves a hand into one jacket pocket, and then the other - he’s not got a bag with him, so he just gestures oddly when he produces nothing.

His jaw falls open, now the kind of stunned you’d get when you apply a taser directly to bare skin. “What was your plan for dinner this evening if I’d turned you down, exactly? Or even breakfast tomorrow?”

Violet shrugs. “I didn’t really have one. I was hoping the nice chaps at the pub would accept something besides money in exchange for purchasing me something.”

“How did you even think to go on holiday without any money?”

“Oh,” says Violet, and then he smiles as he says, “ohh! Oh, there’s been a misunderstanding. I’m not on holiday; I’ve moved back.”

A quirk of his brow. Pavel’s jaw has gone so loose he could probably swallow a lemon whole and not feel the acid until it starts bubbling away in his stomach. “... As in, permanently?”

“Presumably,” says Violet with a nod. “Assuming, of course, there’s yet space for me. If not, well - I’ve always wanted to visit Cidonia at my own pace.”

Pavel scoffs like a dragon, all heat and bared teeth. As if it's his maw, he snaps the menu open. “I don’t see the concern. She’ll be back, then.”

“Oh, well,” he says sheepishly, palm against the back of his neck. “I don’t think that’ll be happening, actually. She’s the one who dropped me here.”

A pause. “Pardon?”

“We’ve separated.” Violet narrows his eyes, chin resting on the back of his hand in thought. “At least, is the narrative I’ve been left to conclude. She didn’t say it in as many words, but she certainly said something of dissatisfaction, and the novelty of it has led me to believe I’m unlikely to ever see her again. Ah, well.”

Pavel fumbles with his words, blubbers as though he's had his head dunked underwater, but manages to slowly say to the space between them, “so… you’re alone?”

“I confess, I didn’t expect this reaction.”

A grunt, as Pavel throws his hand to the side and glares at him. “I’ve been expecting her to show up this entire time.”

Violet merely cocks his brows. “Don’t tell me that’s why you’ve been so frosty?” he mumbles, his finger on his chin. “I suppose you always were a bit aloof with her, but I’d have thought you would have put it aside for our reunion. Didn’t think you were this petty; honestly, it’s rather funny.”

“Mhm." His eyes go askew to where the light of vanilla lines run along the panelling at the foot of the wall as he rests his cheek on his curled palm.

Carefully, Violet slants his shoulders; angles to the side. He wrinkles his pretty face, nose-centric like it's the treasure trove to a kraken's whirlwind of shipwreckery, and asks, “I can’t tell if that’s agreement or not. And I suppose you won’t be telling me, will you?”

He, predictably, does not tell him. But he does grant him the mercy of dinner paid by his coin, so he’s willing to let that particular frustration get gutted like the fish he passes over, drawing his finger down the menu’s various categories.

They order one thing or another - some rabbit food for Pavel, and some rabbit food of the soup variety for Violet because he is nothing if not careful about food poisoning nowadays having been convinced he lived with a chronic case of it during his time with the Raider’s - and drinks arrive not a moment later. Simple water for him lest his stomach grow too slosh-sloshy when the soup is dunked down his gullet, and a coffee for Pavel. He wants to say something about it not being the best hour for coffee, but he looks at his face and sees the bags under his eyes that are deep enough to be reminiscent of melting wax down the stick of a candle and thinks if anything, the coffee might help him, visibly rattled that he seems to be.

In the ensuing silence (naturally, because it would not be an awkward night without the awkward silences), Violet is left to his own devices. Scrambles for a topic or two or three and comes up short of anything that might not lead down a path ending with Pavel’s foot on the table as he angles a finger down at him and yells a decade’s worth of obscenities at him, and he’s doing such a good job keeping himself civil that Violet kind of wants to meet him halfway here. That, and also, he’d really rather not get shouted at when there's the sort of person behind the counter who will most definitely start laughing at the scene.

Absent of any conversation to anchor himself to, he drifts to what he’s currently decked out in. He’s familiar in an oddly unrecognisable way, he thinks - shaped similar, but detailed different. Hardly the most graceful of designs is he now- his hair has always been terminally uncontrollable, but it appears extra dishevelled now after the impromptu riding of the winds earlier. Though, that it’s to his shoulders now helps a little by making it look more like a trunk of a tree rather than the nest atop one’s branches. A few loose strands here and a cowlick there go a long way to making it feel a lot like time hasn’t passed, so long as he doesn’t let his eyes stray too low.

Yet even then, he looks about what he would recognise had he worn them before. Strict, uniform, marshal and clearly diligent; entirely in various shades of dark grey or black, broken up only by belts slashed across him and the reflective shiny metal that come with their buckles and ribs and edges. Perhaps it might literally be a uniform of sorts. 

To some ends, it’s relieving - the exact clothes he’s selected may be different, but the underlying intent is the same. This isn’t an outfit, but something selected purely as they were conducive to his two simple criteria that anything he picks must fulfil. The first, of course, being that they must be existent and can cover his unmentionables, and the second prioritising comfort over any aesthetic purpose. 

“You look good. Aged well for someone who I had to force to put moisturising cream on every other night,” Violet tells him, tapping his fingers on the table. Awkward motions for an awkward night. Awkward tone of voice for an awkward person.

Pavel peers at him from behind his bangs - a tired shade of red that tinges dissatisfaction. I could be doing anything else but be here in the way his brows are curled, and yet the acknowledgement that he’s here and not simply getting up and leaving anyway in the way his shoulders are slumped and there’s more tension in the air between them than in his body. “Thanks.” And then, “you look like shit.”

He thinks he’d at least give it some more grace, but then if he were looking for grace in Pavel he’d be a madman. He tries mining for it anyway, if only because he finds it easier to talk like this than whatever's been passing for conversation between them until now. “No flattery at all? Nothing about ageing like fine wine? I worked hard for a graceful twilight!”

Rock proves to not split under a fork when Pavel mumbles, “I don’t really pay attention to that sort of thing," to his hands resting in his lap.

It’s less of a funny thought that he kind of assumed it would be, when he thinks about how it would almost never be so empty previously in any sort of establishment that provides alcohol, and feels an incredible pit open up in the bottom of his stomach as if he’d just stepped on clear air. Even though it sucks to acknowledge, what it does do is give him a topic to chase, and he is nothing if not blessed with a maw that can grip onto any poor ankle he wants and refuse to be shaken off. 

This particular nibble is worded as, “how’s Cerise?”

Pavel promptly swallows what Violet thinks might be half his entire fucking body and starts coughing like he’d inhaled smoke into his hands. Apparently, with relatively little effort, he has stumbled upon one that can be thought of as a reckoning to the chin via a clenched fist.

“What, is she off-limits too?” Violet pouts. “Bit selfish. I was friends with her as well.”

He falters, hesitating with a wince, patting his chest roughly. “I would,” Pavel drawls in veritable surrender. “Notion the idea of explaining my history with her as something on the lines of a personal hellscape that I wake up in cold sweats over and reject you outright, but if I say nothing you’ll just ask her, won’t you?”

Violet regards him like how you’d concern yourself with a lamp post on the side of the street, which is to say not especially so. “Not in such a malicious way as if dripping with contempt for your privacy, but you are a fool if you think I have no intention of visiting the woman. The topic of how she has fared these past few years will, sorry to say, absolutely be coming up, if nothing else as a politeness to show interest in her. Not because I intend to torment you, you understand,” he adds in a mutter.

“Blasted small talk,” Pavel grumbles. “Fine. I wouldn’t know. I haven’t spoken to her in a while.”

Not that they were especially known for their, uh, communication, but it still makes Violet cease his incessant tapping to tuck his hand demurely under his chin. I’m listening. “No letters?” 

“Bit awkward to continue exchanging letters after separating,” says Pavel, his brown knitted in a frown. 

Judging him for a failed relationship would be terribly uppity of him, even if he was of the opinion that they had not only a Thing, but a Good Thing. “I’m sorry,” he says cooly, instead of drilling for details like they were clay being found for the biggest fucking pottery class in the world (even though he really, really wants to). “How long was it?”

“A few years. Tried to make things work.” He pauses here, even though there’s only one other way something can go if it doesn't go well. “It didn’t, really.”

He’s so curious but he doesn’t really want Pavel to bolt now that they’re getting somewhere (even if that somewhere is sort of the topical equal of taking him by the arm, pulling it behind him, and then slamming him to the ground chest-first). So instead he goes, “I see. What are you doing now, then?”

“Working,” Pavel says, listless, fingers indenting the skin of his forearm. 

Violet puts two and two together. “Something to do with those guys?” he asks, jerking his head to the doors that lead outside.

He gets seven when Pavel shakes his head. “No. Not in as many words, at least.” A hand of his rises to the back of his neck to rub at it. “I joined the military.”

“You went back to the Raiders, then?”

“No, no,” says Pavel quietly. “The Raiders - they don’t exist anymore. Never refunded after…” he trails off, looking right at Violet, or maybe - hopefully - a little past him. To his vague direction, knowing he does not stand there. “Just normal soldiers and lieutenants, now.”

“Ah,” says Violet, and somehow that’s what makes him feel the most lonely yet. 

He looked up to them. Maybe only so much as they were the only way out for a kid who needed to be something but wanted to be anything else, but still. You don’t devote a large portion of your life to something without feeling even a little sad that it’s not around anymore. More intense than when you go to your favourite café and find out they don’t sell your favourite panini with flank steak anymore, but not by much.

Burned and razed away, nothing more than a footnote in history now. There will be a section within the books that seek to report objectively (or however objective one can be when they are only one person and the world is full of millions) about the Raider’s, and then once that is over they won’t be brought up again unless necessary, when they were something that would tirelessly act as a presence of safety for the difficult streets of Perland. Now, pages in a book.

That section would probably be a longer section than the one about his house, he thinks quietly. Fifteen years upon his taking up of the title of patriarch, Sir Violet Harrison disappeared without a trace, leaving his house in a state of flux and abandonment…

And then he, too. Between pages. Mere words to be cited once, if even that.

It was never for him, he thinks, and yet here he is - suddenly exhausted. Suddenly saddened by the exorability of meaning. He had been asked what it was all for and he didn’t even bother to give it an answer before it rotted away to be turned into papyrus and black ink, hastily typed away by a tired intern who struggles with the words and even more with the waking up at six in the morning.

He can only hope the shaking he feels in his hands does not make it into his voice as he says, “A soldier, hm? That sounds nice.”

“Not as nice as exploring the worlds,” Pavel replies easily, sipping his coffee (finally. It must be lukewarm at this point, or maybe time really does fly when you’re having fun, meaning it stands utterly still when you’re decidedly not). “But it was easier. The structure and orders of military life helped.”

Like how a deer freezes when a spotlight is suddenly shone on you. There’s an inherent loss of individuality when you become something as formless as a soldier, and Violet knows that well if only because he rather appreciated the break from being the reviver of his family when they all looked the same and thought the same and did the same things. 

“Cerise’d ask about you sometimes. Asked if I’d heard from you. She missed you a lot.” He sounds especially tired and wartorn when discussing the abject domesticity of life.

“Did she now?” Violet smiles. “I’ve missed her too. I’ll be sure to see her one day. Is she still in Aakhen?”

Pavel nods. “She took over as Citylord. Sir Klaut stepped down a few years back.”

“Too old?”

He snorts, shaking his head fondly. “He certainly didn’t feel or look it. The man looks better than me despite being double my age, I swear.” His lips curl into a brilliant smile and, despite the slowly falling snow and time outside, for a moment Violet thinks the sun has peeked out from the clouds lying across the sky and through the windows. 

A horribly nostalgic feeling comes over him. Utter warmth, or the soothing of balm to wounds he didn’t know he’d sustained. Like the defrosting of snow before spring. No, like the rejuvenation of flowers that have been battered overhead so long by rain that weighed down their petals they could not enjoy the dampening of their dirt. No, no, like the first break of the sun’s rays upon the new year no no, no, like the breaking open of the chrysalis and he is taking flight though he does not know for what reason he has been clipped until now. Evolution, he thinks, the rebirth into something new, for he has always been so optimistic a person - retrogression, Pavel knows, the slipping back into old simplicities, for he has always been so realistic a person. Though this isn’t a bad thing, for when you are lost, it is said to be best to retrace your steps.

Ah, is all Violet thinks of this experience. The blood rises to his cheeks and colours them a fine pink, and his heart is in his throat. He has missed this feeling of absolute bliss, and is smiling into his forearm as he watches after him, and then misses it dearly when Pavel stops that little curl of his lips to sip again.

He joins him in unison to let the moment pass as silence rushes them down like a pack of feral hounds storming the butchers for the flesh he has denied them, finding it across his bones and digging their rimmed teeth into him. But then, it’s not quite as visceral a feeling as that, Violet muses - more like the silence of the night’s song when wrapped up in a blanket. The silence in your head, when your heart isn’t thumping in your ears and your thoughts aren’t running. Something nice, that he could let himself dip into even though quiet is what let the monsters draw near when he was younger.

Gently, Violet says, “regardless of the circumstance, it’s nice to see you again.” If he’s honest, it didn’t even occur to him that Pavel might not even be in Perland anymore, but, well - coincidences are powerful, and perhaps just another word for a miracle.

“I,” says Pavel, before pausing. His voice sounds terribly dry when he says, “mhm,” and then he doesn’t speak again.

When the food comes it’s best summed up as, ‘appropriate for the price’. The soup is slightly mushy, not at all the smoothness he’d expect from something with lentil, and the bread is that telling sort of chewy that implies it’s been hot before, and then cooled down, and now brought to them just vaguely heated up again. The rocket that it comes with is at least nice to chew on, and the cherry tomatoes that accompany the rocket like how hair will, fingers crossed, always come with the scalp are juicy, if a little uninteresting in flavour. 

Dinner is dinner, though, and Violet isn’t one to turn any kind of free down and especially not when his stomach is probably the loudest thing in the diner, maybe the whole bloody city at this rate, so he pulls the bread apart and dunks it into the soup before scoring a goal with it into his mouth. All quite happily, because at some point you reach a kind of hungry that you could eat bush leaves off a twig you just saw a deer piss onto and find yourself thinking that it actually adds a bit of spice to the impromptu dish-slash-attempt at staving off starvation. Maybe a bit gourmet of you as you get a taste for the bitter ammonia. 

Pavel, for his part, just swirls and swirls and swirls his coffee in his cup. He fails to reply when Violet tries to ask again about the Klaut’s seeing how that had got him the most chatty so far, instead putting the cup down and then busying himself with pushing around a piece of boiled carrot. Upon finally speaking it has nothing to do with them, but instead asking, “how are you so sure she isn’t coming back?”

“She’d said as much, I think,” Violet replies with another hapless dunking of his bread. Drowning it like a torture victim sentenced to waterboarding, for all its gracefulness. “Said I’d changed too much. Not as loud; too pliant. Never felt like she was talking to me anymore, only at me. I almost thought she was joking when she plopped me back here in the middle of winter, but then she threw the hood at me and I elected to consider that clear indication of her intention for any further meeting.”

“There’s still a chance,” Pavel tries.

This is maybe the indication that one of them has spent infinitely more time with her than the other, Violet thinks with a bitter grin. “I’d be a fool to trust her whimsy.”

Pavel has nothing to say to that, returning instead pushing around a clove of broccoli. “I suppose it’s natural, though,” Violet says. “For me to have changed in whatever way she noticed. Perland certainly has. And I think you have, as well.”

“You seem the same as always to me,” Pavel says blithely. “Main difference is you’re not bouncing off the walls.”

Violet peers at him. Curiosity killed the cat but he is no feline, and asks, “is that a good or a bad thing?”

“It’s all bad ,” says Pavel. He stabs the word with his fork and splits the broccoli clove in two. “The way you look and the way you talk.”

“Harsh,” Violet mumbles, swirling his own soup. “I’m already feeling self-conscious.”

Pavel reaches for his coffee, frowning. “She’s right, then,” he says simply. “You have changed.”

He doesn’t doubt that. Actually, he thinks he has, too. “As we are usually to after a decade,” Violet reminds him, and maybe himself too.

“Eleven,” Pavel says suddenly.

Violet pauses there, watching his lips hide behind the cup he has suspended to his mouth, in the way a man looking for solitude goes very small in dark corners. “Pardon?” he asks.

“It’s been eleven years, Violet,” Pavel says, bitter as the frost cloaking outside. “Not ten.”

Colder than ice, but his heart still pounds in his ears and his throat and his chest and his fingers all at once and gives him the feeling of much rather wanting to be ill of it and spit it up onto the floor. A hollow chest might do him good now, considering all the good it’s done him until now. 

“I wanted to,” he offers. “To visit. I really did.”

Pavel’s eyes snap up like the maw of a crocodile sensing movement over the bog sweeping across its scales. “But you didn’t,” he reminds him. “You didn’t so much as tell me you were leaving again. Violet, I thought you were dead.”

“Come on, now,” he tries on a nervous chuckle. “If I didn’t die during the war, there’s no way I would have died afterwards.”

“How was I supposed to know that?” Pavel hisses. “That you were fine? That you were having a brilliant time, until I just happened to hear you two had been sighted in Ritania safe and sound and happy? You didn’t so much as tell me you were leaving - I assumed you had fallen into another Gate and gotten lost and this time couldn’t find your way back.”

“I,” says Violet, before sinking miserably into his seat.

“Eleven years,” he breathes, aflame and shaking from it. “And you never thought to say goodbye. Now here you are.” He curls his lip sourly, like he might be sick. “Here you bloody are.”

Violet sucks his cheeks in, finding interest in a crumb of his reheated bread he’s abandoned on the table. “It was difficult to find the opportunity,” Violet tries to explain, but Pavel’s already shaking his head with a tired expression on his face. “There was always so much to do, and so much to see, and- and you know what she’s like, so enthusiastic and- she was never really one for listening to me, you know that.”

“Violet,” Pavel sighs. “I don’t care anymore.”

“You clearly do, or you wouldn’t still be here,” he insists. Pavel looks back up at him, brows catastrophic across his face and expression darker than the night outside. “And I care, too. Otherwise I would never have bothered! It’s not hard to get a free meal, you’re not special here. I’d have done it with anyone.”

He snorts a laugh, waving his hand at him and rolling his eyes. “Oh, I know I’m not special. You’ve made that plenty clear.”

“That isn’t,” Violet says firmly. “What I meant, and you know it.” He sounds every word out slowly, tries to ensure it can’t be mistaken for another.

“It’s what you said,” Pavel replies, and Violet’s looking right into his eyes as he fixes them on his and he sees red, he does.

“How interesting that you should note that,” says Violet, sounding more than just a little spiteful. “Someone who can’t say a damn word is getting on my back for at least trying. ”

Pavel raises his brows. The skin of his forearms go dark around where his nails now press inwards. “I didn’t ask you to try.”

“There’s a bloody lot you don’t ask me to do, and yet seem plenty happy that I did,” Violet sneers. “Unless you’re going to start complaining now that it was a bad thing I bought groceries for you? When I took your bloody clothes to be repaired because you’d spend all night doing them yourself and not get any sleep? When I paid to get the Goddamn hole in your roof fixed three days before a summer storm?”

“Oh, please,” he grumbles under his breath, rolling his eyes so hard they might as well have slipped inwards for a moment. Louder, he says, “so I should just forgive you?”

“No, no,” Violet tells him, shaking his head like a dog. “You don’t have to do anything. You never have before, so there’s no reason to now, is there? You don’t so much as tell me when you’re happy or sad or sick, Saints help me, I have to stare at you and figure you out from every single pore across your face and then you go and fucking look at her and how, Pavel, tell me - how am I supposed to know what you’re thinking if you’re not saying anything to me and you’re not looking at me? ”

“Oh, of course, how simple it was, this whole time,” Pavel snaps. Defensively, maybe; furiously, definitely. “I spent eleven years wondering what I did to deserve you not even showing me your back before you leave, and it’s because I didn’t suck you off enough.”

“That’s not my point,” Violet hisses.

“Then what is it, Violet?” he says, and it’s with narrowed eyes but a wide mouth and red cheeks and he’s on the verge of sobbing it out, he thinks, and has gone too far but… but. “What is your point? What are you doing here?”

Idolatry and peaceful sublimation in life’s joys, ironically, appears to tire one out if there’s nothing to the side of it. Plain rice with no yoghurt; a smile that has not known sadness, perhaps, though this might be a particular flight of mental fancy that betrays his own personal need to suffer.

Because that’s what it is, isn’t it? An attraction to suffering, solipsism manifesting only when the heart aches terribly. Another bout of irony, brought on by countless eves wondering if Mother will be paying a visit to your room to ensure the corner of your duvet are tucked in well because you had done very, very well at training today and scored a perfect score on your homeschooling test, only to fall asleep and still be waiting in the dreamscape; feeling alive only when you wish not to.

Or maybe this is just what it means to grow up thinking vast affection is best earned through equivalent agony. Mother, Mother, she taught him well. She had smiled when she died, so he’d been told. He thinks it was meant to reassure him. He hadn’t seen her smile in years, and he knew then what the candle fire had been telling him. That you won't, either.

“I just,” breathes Violet, wide-eyed, and heart in his throat like it means desperately to leap out and escape away.

Coming face to face with him again is… there is no difficult way to put this - he is scared like how a dog will be when his owner screams at him in that unknown language. He is scared like how he was when he was seven and his father took the belt out. He is scared like how he thinks Lilias must have been as she plummeted off the cliff into its canyon to melt in the beating Cidonian sun, as if she were nothing more than the ice they’d crunch together on the warm Perland summers (and she would laugh at him when he’d squeeze his eyes together and cup his cheek struggling to get ‘bwainfweeze’ out only for him to laugh when she took too long to eat hers and had nothing more than lukewarm water to ward away the heat). He is scared like he thinks Luluca was. He is scared like he thinks Pavel isn’t. Not anymore. Not after eleven years of nothing. 

Pavel crosses his legs and glares at him, frustrated and angry and long-since tired out. He’s using energy buried deep with his aching muscles, energy reserved for a reunion he never thought was coming. Burning low, words kindling for charcoal that forever ago rolled down the mountain and away from him. 

“I didn’t have anywhere else to go,” Violet admits to him. “Is it so wrong? To come home?”

His shoulders slack. Pavel shuts his eyes like he just wants to go to sleep. “Then keep going,” he says, voice like a lullaby that helps you to sleep and then encourages the nightmare. “It’s not here anymore. You have to keep going.” When he throws his fork on his plate and it makes its loud clash, hunger abated by his fury more than it has been by his salad, it’s louder than he’s spoken all night.

He asks if he’ll be safe driving through the streets. Pavel nods silently as he seats himself atop his motorcycle, placing his hands carefully on the handles. Violet is simply freezing, standing in the middle of the street in the now-dead night, but he means to at least watch him go. Give him the dignity he didn’t offer Pavel, for whatever that can possibly be worth now. So he stands there, pulling his cape over his chest and covering his hands and shivering right down into his boots, and regrets ordering the soup he didn’t even wind up finish because it went from boiling like he was cooking it in him to now being something he’s a little worried might solidify from the cold within him. His stomach feels chilled enough to imply that very thing might happen if he stands out here much longer. It’s best to leave, he’s thinking. Please don’t stay.   

“One dinner,” Pavel reminds him as he twists his handles and the engine grumbles loud as Violet’s breaths.

“I know,” he replies quietly. “Thank you for indulging me.”

He looks over at him, barely shifting his head as he does. Violet means it earnestly and looks at him head-long in the absence of knowing what to say - there isn’t much to say, he thinks to himself. There’s never been much to say to someone who doesn’t much reply, or maybe this is just him trying to make himself feel better for sins he'd happily commit to without thinking.

The engine revs again - the tell-tale sign of leaving, the way a rabbit will twitch its ears or a deer bolts upright or a wolf dips while tensing its back legs - and suddenly he steps forward, a hand held aloft. “If you- if you would,” Violet stammers, and not entirely due to the shivers he is feeling. “I just wanted to… I wanted to say I meant it. It was nice seeing you again.” 

For a long moment, Pavel looks at him. At his eyes, coloured dim like crude amethyst and down the sharp of his aged cheeks; at the space between the bottom of his lips and the start of his chin; at everything that connects his features, ending on his lips. He would not dare humiliate him with further thought into what that could mean, and instead bites them; makes him turn away, looking back to the road. 

“And,” Violet continues, maybe a little emboldened as he takes a shuffle forwards. “Even if you don’t believe me, I did. I really did miss you.”

Pavel firmly keeps his gaze before him, eyes unintelligibly steely as the light from the diner flickers. It casts harsh shapes across his face that outline his frown, and Violet can only let himself hope he will find out what shapes the loud yellow will make when he opens his mouth to reply.

But he doesn’t. Noises rumble instead from around his feet. An overly-sweet pup fidgeting to indicate its patience is up; he has started the engine again with a smooth winding of his wrists, and it growls at him in that frightfully protective way. 

And then he speeds off. A cloud of disturbed snow and grumpy slush from the road kicked up behind him, howling down the road and soon, around the corner. Some of it jumps in fear away from under the tire and lands on the flared hem of his trousers like diving for cover.

The stains of the slurry will last longer than Pavel did, he is left to think.

Chapter Text

The next hour is passed walking southeast to his estate, and it is the longest he’s been alone in years. The only thing that saddens him about this is how little it saddens him. His single path of footprints left in the building snow are soon buried away, leaving no trace that he’s walked down it. He thinks that the footprints he left behind in Downtown must have been cleaned away long before he realised it and the sense this gives him is strange - it settles somewhere in his belly like how the soup has begun feeling awkward and heavy, too cold when he drank it and now a strange and cool blanket coating it like the snow has gone and gotten inside there, too, as if he really will freeze from the inside out from it.

Winding up that long road, the neon lights and bright technology that lights the area around slowly dissipate into the natural light; trudging through gates that creak as the rust falls off screaming in a steel language he knows to be frustration that they haven’t been oiled in so long; peering through doors broken off hinges and the floor of his estate is dusty, no longer the pristine marble white that always met his mother’s heels with a revenant click click and click. With some effort, the sheen could be renewed, but the desire to see his own face when he looks down is actually something he’d rather avoid. At least when looking into a mirror one gets the opportunity to hold their breath, even if just for a second.

And motion offers its own form of warmth, so he finds himself in no rush to reach the main hall. Instead, he simply walks around - down the hallways he wavered and haunted down, recognising the exact shape of the hills when he looks out one window and noting a difference to the cityline’s frame out of another. Through overgrown gardens that are in equal measure too alive with the weeds and long since dead with the toy flowers the old gardener would manage with his tender hand. His personal orchard still stands but only in a loose recognition of the word; the area around each tree is splattered with fruits that have budded, grown, ripened, and then fell off to meet the grass circle that they’d return to, and the twisted, overgrown branches are absent of any leaves - what could have grown in that space between care and total abandonment has done so and since fallen to the ground. It smells abominable. It looks even worse.

It’s easy to slip into old motions. He still remembers on muscle memory the location of the gardening clips and spends minutes on end gently taking each branch into his fingers and cutting them shorter and into things that can be made better in the knowledge that something was not working. Then he takes the broom and slowly begins moving the rot from around those massive brown roots away, to allow them to breathe a bit more. He hasn’t thought as far as what to do with the fruit, and regards the pile somewhat absently. Each something that could have made something of themselves if he had been here, he thinks, perhaps a little stupidly - a gorgeous crunch of a homegrown apple under his teeth and the juice rolling down his lips necessitating the back of his hand to wipe it clean, or one of the head maid’s cherry pies.

The sentiment continues the further he walks through. Flowers that could have made someone happy, lost to angry bushes that have expanded past their pretty little dirt patches that they had been planted in as if made of hands desperately reaching outwards to be pulled out; rooms now empty that housed a person he had known since his very moment of birth, now someone he could never hope to find again for lack of ability to contact; an office he could have done good in, even if it feel as though the temperature drops a solid ten degrees when he quietly glides in and rests his palm on the door. 

He always thinks it when it comes to these moments: that the number of famous dead poets are infinitely more than the ones who live; that artists starve over their canvas and their blood has yet to dry in their veins before they are declared a master posthumously; that he only truly cared about what his mother and father thought when he’d hung over the gravestone that headlined their lots.

It’s almost frustrating to think that this might be his life for the foreseeable future. Ghosting around his past estate with a lack of where to go, thinking philosophies a child might be proud of. At least the stinging and dull ache of his arm whenever he accidentally weighs on it too heavily grants him some excitement by making him grunt through straining teeth.

Obviously, for someone who glances out of the hallway’s windows and sees an incredible skyline that speaks of nothing but improvement to the status of the world and feels just a bit of awe but equal amounts of heaviness in his heart, he goes where he thinks would be best to wallow. Father’s office, the prescription a doctor would give him considering his particular brand of spirited away-ness has left him with plenty of things that remain exactly where he left them, right in the back of his mind and perpetually wriggling as if eternally reminding. We’re still here, you know. You can leave the planet, but you can’t leave yourself.

That was a bit of an overreaction, by the way. But he will not deny it; he has always had a flair for the dramatics.

The doors to the office are large and were strangely ornate, but Violet glances to see even those bits of metal have been taken in one of the various pillages. Naturally, the office did not escape one or more ransackings unscathed. Papers upon papers upon papers everywhere in his Father’s office, most now a sharp yellow as the parchment has dried and ink long-since faded away. Most are in various states of duress, crumpled up or torn apart, and he struggles to read any of them even when he strains his eyes. Some asshole has taken a knife to the large chair Father would always sit on, as if there could be a secret stash of jewellery within its downs. 

The table, then, is a stretched catastrophe, scratches etched into the wood that might resemble something if those who took to habitual plundering were known for elegant handwriting. All the drawers have been tugged out of the table and thrown across the floor. That valiant and loyal inkpot Father loved so much and used for all his work has finally sustained a crack and it’s one large enough for it to simply fall apart in two pieces when Violet picks it up. 

“Did they have to be so violent about it?” Violet mutters under his breath, before trudging forward into this still disaster. 

Three steps forward, one to the left. This puts you right in the middle of behind the desk, where the chair would normally be tucked close so your elbow wouldn’t begin aching from the strain of no support under it. The sun shone right in his eyes as he stood on the opposite end, and he would always wince as he stared at it until his father picked himself up to speak. When he did that, the chair would screech like hoping to chase him away. With the sun behind him, his expression would be shrouded in darkness.

Gently (timidly, really, but he doesn’t want to think that he still shrinks under some invisible gaze, weighty as the room still feels) he runs the tip of his finger across the table. Dust collects and not a little amount but a large volume, painting his pale skin a dark grey before he wipes it on his hips without a second thought.

His heels make the same noises his mother’s did. When he takes a heavy seat on his father’s old office chair, it’s as if he can suddenly see that small boy standing in front of his desk, a somewhat prehistoric mix of absolute adoration and total fear to what was essentially an entire world, spinning before his mercury eyes. Staying put in that chair like an idol doesn’t much suit him when such a statuesque life normally comes packaged with the assumption that you can trust there will be faith and love and prayers to follow as all works of art tend to get from even one devotee. But Violet is still a bit too covered in flesh, bones yet to be disseminated into the earth, to be appreciated as he would like. He thinks it’s hypocritical of him to complain of this when he has done the same thing and only cared about his legacy when Mother and Father could no longer pluck his wings to keep him on their path. 

No change here, then. Perland has marched firmly away from this place in his absence. There is a nostalgia to how it feels to return somewhere and feel exactly the same about it as you used to, as if you are nothing more than a seven year old child utterly desperate to please and yet thinking you have it within your means to deliver the heavens to people who want more than Godhood when your hands are still so small you can’t so much as hold your bowl of porridge in the morning. 

Some papers are on the desk. They haven’t quite avoided the horrors of thievery, but there’s enough of them legible to know vaguely what they were about. All various requests, here and there. Sir Gladstone, I write to you today regarding the matter of my son’s appearance at your upcoming ball; Sir Tennyson, if I could implore you to reconsider our debt; To Madam Baker, indeed, my son’s hand remains free for marriage, and-

Life is a coin, and not one for him to spend. “Not that I didn’t cash it out anyway,” he mumbles, before tearing up that last one and throwing it behind him to litter the marble with the rest of the beggar’s letters.

The chair meets his rump surprisingly comfortably when he sits on it despite the massive gash in its stuffing. There’s a very noticeable bit of the plush that instantly gives way under his weight, but it doesn’t give way, so he considers it safe enough. Better than the hard marble floor at least, and that goes for a long way when he doesn’t have a house anymore so much as he has a pile of debris that in some places yet remains a roof.

Down the stairs. Through the hallways. Steps he has taken thousands of times before, like how foot fall will eventually wear grass down to leave a dirt path for others to follow. A child of his own is a necessity, naturally, for someone else must inherit this house and continue the task to achieve retroactive godhood in the eyes of their kin, but he is 39 and as skittish of the idea as he was when he was ten and arrangements first started being discussed. 

The lifespan of a noble is as easily charted as that of a butterfly. The larval stage, the stage that necessitates beauty and life and loudness and attention, and then the stage where you thrust the weight upon someone else and worry no more about it. He has, he thinks, followed this pattern exquisitely. They always did call him perfect.

“But you’re still here, aren’t you?”

A dead woman can’t talk, so Mother offers no reply. Sadly, a different language is spoken between the walking dead and the really dead.

He takes a seat, in front of that daunting portrait of her and places the candle he has been lighting his way with between them so she looks illuminated from below with a gentle tangerine glow. She died at a blazing 43, but this painting was done when she could yet sit comfortably upright, at around the age of 25 and she looks utterly gorgeous for it. He saw little of her in the last of her years, but there is something incredibly humbling to sit before her and notice that she had passed onto him the same sleek shape of his eyes, the pointiness of his chin, and he does not have a beauty mark below his left eye while she has one both there and under her lips.

He’s four years younger than her at her end. But where does the time go?

“I had a look,” Violet tells her. In the emptiness of the hallway, his voice echoes slightly. He is let to think it assists in the ghosts hearing him, cuddled up within the corners as they are, so perhaps this is less insane than he thinks it is. “The treasury is utterly empty. There was plenty in there before I left - I imagine either the workers helped themselves to it while I was unable to sign off their payments, or the disarray of this location isn’t entirely just because there hasn’t been much sweeping going on in the last few years.”

Silence, though the wind begins picking up and howls briefly as it stampedes past his windows. Still locked tight, miraculously, though there is a horrible draft from the direction of the kitchen that he supposes meant that part of the house wasn’t so lucky.

“Unsurprisingly, maybe,” he mumbles, pulling his legs inwards. “In the absence of anyone being here, the thieves likely swept through. I seem to distinctly recall more heirlooms than what I’ve since found. Ah, well. The joke’s on them, isn’t it? It’s not like any of it sells for much anymore. Not that I suspect much of anything more rural could sell for much, considering what it looks like out there.”

She, frankly, might be the most valuable thing in the estate now, past the temptation of calling it valuable by sheer factor of offering a roof over your head. That, itself, he muses, is something helpful, no doubt! He came here with his tail between his legs to avoid snow on his head, and that has provided value enough to this place despite it all.

Her oil strokes are curling off the canvas. The glint in her eye has been long lost. The picture frame, ornate in its etchings of curls going inwards and shapes growing outwards like the wood it was carved out of can still sprout little oak leaves, is akin to how bark grows when gnawed on too relentlessly by hungry bugs and has lost the gorgeous sheen he remembers it having, when the sun shone through the windows of the entrance hall and hit it just so the brown would turn white. 

And yet, she is all he can look towards. Utterly unravelled, torn apart by time. She is, perhaps, more of a mirror than she is a painting now.

“The lights,” he mumbles. “They burned a bright green. I somewhat expected nothing to have changed, even though it’s been such a long time.”

He raises a hand; brushes his palm wistfully across the wood. He’s a little too afraid to touch the canvas, staying away from her skin. Despite the claim time has on her she remains as gorgeous as the day she passed, he thinks, smooth skin and slim, crescent eyes with sharp black accents of her makeup on the side. The bundling of her dark long hair up into a large pristine bun. The glossy silk of her dress that has been painted with an illustrious sheen, betraying that it was early morning. He remembers when he was younger and her hair would fall past her shoulders to brush against his cheeks when she leant over. Against her skin like fabric, his own is steadily crinkling like paper growing worn from use. 

“I always did joke I wouldn’t let this happen,” he says to himself, airy and almost in awe at the pruning as he inspects his hand. Oh, how it has soared past him. He continues, to her: “I think you’d have liked them, actually. You always liked things that shined.”

Being dead, Mother cannot reply, but he pauses as if he expects to hear her speak anyway. If one is to believe the ideas of reincarnation, perhaps he was right to have done so, for an owl hoot hoots in that little space he grants Mother to say something before falling silent again.

“I wanted it,” he says quietly. “To do this. Shine for you. I didn’t mind it. Being nothing more than your hand.” How could he? No, the leaf does not hate that it must eventually fall off the branch and land on the ground, and the dog does not hate that it will one day perish. The mother does not hate that she must stay idle, and the son does not hate that he must remain meaningful.

(Oh, but hate is so strong a word for so numbing a feeling.)

Mother says nothing back, unsurprisingly. The entire nature of this attempt at a conversation is absurd, and Violet acknowledges this with a rough sigh that blows past his lips and aggravated fingers rustling through his unkempt hair. Usually so good at the personal grooming, he was, but in recent months he’s lacked the motivation. Perhaps that was change enough.

“I suppose I am older, now,” he muses, looking back at his hands. “And I do look it. I had hoped I’d age a little better, but this appears to be an aspect of Grandfather I did not take after. I’m not even 40, but I fear I could be mistaken for 50. I found my first grey hair when showering the other day. I was so upset. She just laughed, said it was ridiculous to mope around about something like that.”

Impassively, Mother peers down at him. She looks a little frustrated, or maybe it’s just him. The light from below her flickers, the burning of kindles at their feet.

No doubt there would have been a bed that escaped the pillaging to sleep on, but there is something oddly comforting about sleeping at her base. The wind feels like her fingers stroking his head as he is lulled to sleep, and the candle wards away the beasts that crawl amidst the dust. He is cold, but it makes him curl up a little more, and he cannot say he dislikes the sense of sleeping on his lonesome for the first time in many, many years.

And then he wakes up before the dark has passed and finds he has already tired of it, missing arms around him. This, of course, is a failure of only himself, finding unending torment in being alone and satisfaction in the sharing of a bed even now, but there is also something a little simpler here: he is restless, born from how your heart will pound when you are happy, but also when you are sad and angry and sickly and so many more things, as though the blood in his body can’t decide what emotional configuration to land on and instead settling to be a little of everything, all at once, everywhere in him, for blood is so necessary to breathe no matter how tainted, or maybe that's part of her little curse.

He rolls over. The candle has gone out - she has clasped it with her fingers and dimmed it, he thinks, and lives for another day atop his shoulders. He does not hate this. He does not hate her. There is only one person he hates, and it is no one past his own skin.

At some point during this - not quite morning, not quite twilight - he grows tired of tossing and turning on marble, concedes it likely did not help his tedious insomnia to be on something that is as hard and cold as the ice that has built up around the lock of his gate that no longer works and hangs limply as he slips past them, and elects to begin forging for breakfast like the somewhat lawless beast he currently lives as.

Sulking around as he is, it’s the prime way to find other creatures scurrying around the depths with him. After he rescues a blanket from a corner of a room to sling over his shoulders - for it is growing colder by the minute, and the snow seems obsessed with the concrete as it refuses to melt - he ghosts down the path, takes an alleyway he recognises, and comes out the other end with something resembling breakfast after pawning off one of the jewels he has on his person. A large red ruby ring, half synthetic and half real - he is surprised it doesn’t go for the price he knows the family bought it for, but considering he has yet to be jumped by someone for what he has visibly slung across him, he’s left to think lesser rarity jewels regardless of carat simply don’t sell for much anymore.

A hot bun stuffed with pork that steams as soon as he takes a bite and immediately hurts his teeth when he bites into it with the sudden introduction of heat when he had been chattering them from shivers mere moments ago. The quality of food overall has not diminished, he is pleased to conclude.

He promptly drops his bun when he turns a corner into the alleyway he had only just walked down and sees Pavel all but moan and fall back against the wall before sinking slowly down it as he grasps at his chest.

“Pavel ?” he yelps, exactly as Pavel manages, “God damn it,” through short and shallow gasps.

His features are pained, eyes narrowed. Sweat beads in excess across his skin, and as his lips are parted in need. Violet clicks his teeth as he tries to get Pavel’s hands to move. Not that he has much luck with it; his fingers are clamped to the point of lightening the dark skin across his knuckles in their strain, so he’s forced to settle his fingers atop the backs of his hand.

“And this is?” he mumbles.

“Nothing,” Pavel replies, before a harsh groan slips out from between gritted teeth.

“What’s wrong?” Violet asks, calm as he can. It doesn’t speak for much, with his heart in his throat and his hands shaking, but his voice is level and his brows can stay firmly downwards. “Were you attacked?”

Wordlessly, Pavel shakes his head. He wheezes weakly, “chest. Old wound. From- from the war,” before whimpering again.

The one he had nursed day in, day out. The one that tore across his chest right down to his stomach. The one that bled all over his hands and that he saw smeared all across his shirt even weeks after he washed it out. Yes, yes, he remembers that one. He asks, “do you need anything? Can I help?”

He’s pushed out of the way, and Pavel retches horribly into his hand. His eyes blow open like magma-filled craters in his skin, and he hacks once, twice, coughing and spitting.

“No, no, no.” His voice comes out quivering; he’s shaking as though he’s freezing alive. “Just- just need a second. Just one.”

One second passes. Then another. Third into fourth into fifth into thirtieth into a minute, and Pavel breathes like a babe suckles on his mother’s teat. Gently, Violet rests a hand on his back; gently still, he rubs his hand there in circles. He offers no words, not least because it appears Pavel could do without his voice. Rather he devotes his efforts to trying not to distract him from his desperate attempts at breathing through the pain (or remembering how to breathe at all; whatever the issue might be), and does this through quietly rubbing his back and keeping space from his face to leave him to breathe his own air.

Pavel coughs and hacks but soon his shoulders stop trembling and soon, soon, he manages to inhale a deep breath that sounds significantly more unimpeded. When he looks up, Violet sees his eyes are glassy and his cheeks are pale in exertion. The sweat has smoothened from beads over to a slick sheen of his face and his jaw hangs loose as he steadies his breathing through breaths that could syphon a meadow clean of its pollen. He looks downright ghastly, less as though he’d just been running and more as though someone had reached down his throat to pull his guts out of him via his throat, arm and all.

“Happens sometimes,” says Pavel eventually, his voice rough like sandpaper on bare skin from the attack. “Chest doesn’t- doesn’t work as good. Can’t run like I used to.” 

“I notice then, running is probably not the best thing you could do,” Violet points out grimly, pulling his lips straight. “So? Am I going to have to make guesses on what happened?”

He looks straight ahead like a cat who hyper focuses on a bird sitting on a bench outside the window. This selective silence is frustrating, but Violet bites his lips. Better to swallow it for now.

Violet sighs eventually, shaking his head. “Let me check nothing’s opened up.”

“It’s not a new wound, it wouldn’t do,” he says.

Then Pavel shrugs him off, settling the back of his head against the wall behind him. “Of course,” Violet returns, and with nothing else for his fingers to do he winds up just wringing them together, a fleshy knot of rejection and slight disappointment. “So maybe - just a thought, here - exertion is a bad idea. Have you thought about not running?”

“Of course I have. But if I waited until it went away I’d be left with an inability to do much,” he explains under his breath, still firm in not looking back at him. “It’s been years. It’s past healing.”

“Even with the help of a healer?”

“A healer was the one who said as much to me.” 

His shoulders are hunched, and his brows are furrowed. Between them and his messy fringe, the upper half of his face looks dark and impassive. “I see,” is all Violet manages.

Awkward as it is to let it settle, Violet can’t think of any topic to fill the gap with. He scratches absently at his arm - at least that provides the alleyway with some noise aside from Pavel’s still-laboured breathing, too far from the roads as it is. 

Shockingly, the one with no social skills wins out this time. “Your arm,” Pavel soon ventures.

“Painful, but manageable.”

Pavel glances at him in the corner of his eyes. He promptly sighs like the dead could take him. “Tell me you’ve gotten it checked out, at least.”

“Yes, well,” he mumbles sheepishly. “I don’t exactly have the funds for it. I had hoped I could dip into my treasury funds for it - and, well, everything else I’m needing - but my estate seems to have been plucked clean of anything worth much of anything.”

“Only in recent years,” Pavel says, and then winces. 

A smoking gun; he’d dropped it and it’d turned the barrel to his foot. Curious, Violet cocks his head. “You’ve visited, then.”

“I,” he says, before cutting himself off with an inflamed sigh. “Yes. Does it matter?”

“A bit. To me, at least,” Violet replies. “I wouldn’t be mad if you took anything.”

“I didn’t take anything. The maids were worried and would ask me if I’d seen you,” Pavel explains. “Eventually, I just went to update them.”

The wind blows past them, sharp and bitter. Violet, quieter than it and spotting a blade of grass that has sprouted through the concrete of this alleyway, asks, “how were they?”

Pavel frowns, sour. He says, “upset. What else?”

When he glances up, Pavel is looking at him with an intensity that could make him rear back if he had more sense. But, he thinks having no sense is likely what led them to this. “What?” Violet asks him.

“Nothing,” he says, blinking his eyes shut and turning away. “One dinner,” he reminds him again, and Violet can just barely resist the urge to roll his eyes as he pushes past him to head down the alleyway. 

“I know, I know,” Violet says to his back, frustrated and throwing a hand out at him. “I’ll leave you alone now! Like you so clearly crave.”

He doesn’t leave him alone. Not that this has anything to do with being creepy, you will understand, but instead for two very good reasons that he think could allow him to sweep the damn man up and shove him in his basement if he damn well felt he had to.

The first is that he has no idea what his days are to look like, so Violet is looking for something that might entertain him somewhat (yes, this is important). His estate is perhaps more depressing than it is boring, which isn’t really anything new, but it’s the one thing he rather wishes would have changed between when he left and when he was dropped here, so he’s certainly not craving any particular need to return on his lonesome.

Secondly, if he’s being frank, he is worried about Pavel. There is clearly something going on batting at his tail with its dark claws, and despite their poor blood that boils between them Violet is unwilling to let anything happen to him. He’s a virtuous man, after all, and cares deeply for people regardless of his personal relationship being good, bad or non-existent. 

“I am such a good person,” is what he mumbles as he watches Pavel trudge through the street, past a couple of pretty-looking stalls, and Violet proceeds to dodge roll into one of those stalls and gets a bouquet on his head and a panging ache in his grazed arm for his troubles.

Besides, when he thinks about walking around Perland on his lonesome - large, brilliant Perland, which no longer only shines the gold he’s come to despise but instead is brightened with perhaps more colours than Violet even knew could exist - he gets the same sort of feeling he thinks you get when you’ve eaten something that your tummy doesn’t especially appreciate you dropping down your gullet for it. To that end, tailing someone isn’t a bad idea. It’s something to focus on through all the lights, especially all dark and broody that he is. It cuts a fine path through it all.

Above the clouds remain grumpy, as if cold and without a mug of tea to warm themselves up as well, and the snow falls steadily if not particularly hard. It has built up across the parts that don’t offer much foot traffic, leaving most grass and later concrete as he nears the city’s square hidden under it and much of it collects on the heads of lamp posts or roofs and the wandering people, as well. 

The daylight drowns the technicolour lights of the tech plastered across the city in natural light that he had seen on his brief walk last evening leaving it less impressive in terms of how lit it all is, but the magnanimity of the technology displayed is perhaps more so now that he can look at it. Signs shine with individual little lights that look like the bright stars in the night sky, but prove more disappointing when you squint to look at them than those that hang significantly more above their sleepy heads because the signs are always some form of ‘go here!’ or ‘spend money there!’. Some more recently-built buildings - pubs and shops and other businesses predominantly, but the updating of the architecture has not missed housing - are made out of a material he doesn’t recognise by sight alone nor texture when he experimentally glides his fingers across it, and are painted lighter colours as if to make their novelty even more noticeable to the average individual walking through. When he tentatively peeks his head into a locale, he finds all manner of things on sale he simply doesn’t understand. 

There hasn’t been a total overhaul just yet. The older buildings are still made of bricks, and their roofs remain in the state they always have been, though the scaffolding that renovates them is clearly approaching from a few steps down the street, like how grass will spread the more you extend the field it’s allowed to grow across. The lamp posts have been cleaned from how rusted he recalls them looking, but many remain the same style he remembers when he last walked down this street. The people - the people are the same, even if they’re not the same people. He can get from one building to another three minutes later and not be stopped by anyone who recognises his face, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t peaceful parents who walk their children hand in hand, nor are there not the vicious-looking men and women equipped from head to toe in various weaponry across tough armour and scowling expressions that those parents quickly rush their kids away from. There is peace to be found in that. 

Not peace for him, though, and his stomach rocks around and tumbles and cries like he’d swallowed a rock.

He peeks around the corner and spots Pavel speaking to a shopkeeper sweeping snow out of the walkway of his store, having been blown in from the side in the way sugar will be powdered across a doughnut. It isn’t a long conversation, from the looks of it - a brief exchange of pleasantries, and then Pavel is off again past the stalls lined with appealing fruits and a variety of other sorts of snacks. A bag in hand, made out of a sheer-looking pale material he doesn’t think he recognises, sways as he walks away with his hands tucked into his pockets. 

Violet is, of course, nothing but insufferable, so he continues to trail after him like the clear ooze a snail is to leave behind. Not that there’s anything snail-like about the speed Pavel walks, though - he’s brisk enough for Violet to have to put a light spring in his step to be able to keep up with him. Fast enough to imply some excitement to be had at the end of this, he should think, which is all the encouragement he needs to continue his little rondo with ye olde espionage strategy.

Then Pavel stops dead in his tracks. Turns on his heels to look him dead in the eyes. It isn’t as though he was trying to hide, but he still rears back as though an alarmed horse lives and breathes in his chest.

It’s a little hypnotic, the way the bag sways when Pavel takes the arm it’s hung around away from its relaxed position and puts its hand on his hips. “For someone so self-assured, you seem awful at approaching people,” he announces, looking almost bored with him over it.

“Just you, actually,” Violet admits with a sheepish little nod. “Don’t suppose you’ve noticed you’re a bit of a private guy.”

"So your response to that is to follow me around?” A pause, and then he sighs. “ Again? ”

"It’s all I have left!” Violet insists with a frown. “You won’t speak to me, so I simply have to observe you. It’s not a crime now, is it?”

“It ought to be.”

He throws his hands up with a pout. They land at his side with a hearty smack as he speaks. “They took my textbooks, Pavel. I couldn’t even study, even if I wanted to! I have no doubt they’d have taken the various plush toys I used to have if I hadn’t the foresight to donate most of them beforehand.”

“How big of you,” he drawls in return.

“Quite. I’m incredibly bored, you know!”

Pavel draws his brows straight. “This sounds familiar.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” he says, very much knowing. “Look, I’m just saying,” Violet tells him with a waggle of his finger. “I know you said just one dinner, I know you did, but you didn’t exactly finish your dish - neither did I, really, on account of that little spat putting me off. So, I say, it wasn’t a full dinner.”

“You really just do everything you can to get your way, don’t you,” Pavel says, sounding almost like he’s impressed.

“One more hour,” says Violet. “One more. That’s all I’m asking.”

“You’ll ask for another afterwards.”

“And then another after that,” Violet tells him firmly. “Look, I just-”

“I know, ” Pavel interrupts him. “I know, Violet. You missed me and I missed you and it was a terrible dinner and you want us to be friends again. I know. I get it. I got it the first time, I got it the second time, I probably got it before you even opened your mouth, for God’s sake.”

Patiently, Violet waits until he’s done, and then he gently points out, “you didn’t say that,” in the same sort of tone someone might announce they’ve found pure diamond, finally, after years of drilling.

He watches his jaw go tight and the circles of his tired eyes quickly morph into strained ovals. Had Violet any urge to look away from this picturesque moment of being a mouse stuck paw-first in a trap that emits particular ignominy from the caughtling, he’d look down and see his fist bright at their knuckles.

“You didn’t say you missed me,” he elaborates, though he doesn’t really feel like he has to, and Pavel’s cheeks go delightfully red, leaping up to the hottest thing in Perland third only to a furnace and then the shy sun that has wrapped itself up in those very grumpy clouds.

Chapter Text

“So, where are you going? What are you doing, ‘ey? In case you’re curious, I’m not doing anything.”

“I didn’t ask,” Pavel grumps in reply.

“But you were wondering.”

He turns on his heel with a grunt, begins stalking away. Violet, obviously, takes this to mean he should catch up in a hop and a skip to be walking at his side. “Errands.”

“What kind of errands?”

“Is that a blanket around your head?”

“It’s the warmest thing I have. Aren’t you cold?” Violet gives him a once-over, up and down with his eyes, and tries very hard not to linger on the cool drop of his jaw into his chin as he drags his eyes back to his. “I can’t imagine that’s built for weather resistance, military uniform or no.”

Just in time to see him blink, no more than mildly surprised. “... I never said this was a military outfit. Do you really think any military would let me wear this much metal?”

“Enough has changed,” says Violet thoughtfully. “It simply wouldn’t have surprised me anymore to think of our military as invaded by men in slick leather and chains wrapped around them as though they’d committed a crime and were runaways themselves.”

A pause. Pavel looks carefully at the cuff of his arm. “Is that really your assessment of this aesthetic?”

“I thought you didn’t care about fashion,” Violet says with a glance aside. 

He sighs, turning a corner. “I care about looking like a twat.”

Violet only stops for a second to look down the road before he returns to walking right by him. Admitting he doesn’t recognise the area would be a bit of a moot point - there’s precious little he recognises nowadays, like the colour of his estate walls or his face when he looks in the mirror. “You don’t. You look great. It’s very nice to see you wearing something more for pleasure.”

Another pause here. “Thank you,” Pavel says.

“You’re welcome, you goose.” He pouts at the misattribution of poultry to his honourable and lupine obsessed name, no doubt. It’s even one of those plump and round pouts. Violet almost feels bad. “I do mean that in general, actually. You look much better than a life of military work would imply.”

Pavel looks at him oddly, before motioning his head to the side for Violet to follow him down another twist of the streets. “... I’m not a part of the military anymore,” he tells him, a vague note of bemusement in his voice.

“No?” Violet cocks his head. “It sounded like you were.”

“I was , after Cerise and I,” and he waves his hand here limply in the absence of saying what it was. Violet doesn’t blame him. “But I walked away soon after.”

He motions his head to the side for Violet to follow him down another twist of the streets. These ones have more natural light flooding through, and he glances up to see the clouds ready for another white tantrum. “I’m surprised,” says Violet. “I truly thought you’d be there until - well, you perished, either in duty or not.”

“So did I,” Pavel mumbles, sounding very far away.

Violet makes a light face, eyes drifting over the road the alleyway has bloomed into. A brightly lit one, this time by large street lamps flooding the area in yellow. With the clouds in the sky, the brightness it brings to the otherwise rat-furred colouration is for once appreciated. “I had,” Violet muses slowly. “Rather thought it would be nice. That after the war, things would be safer, the cities would be unified, and- well, we might not even need the military anymore. If the war was to happen, that would have been a benefit, at least.”

“There is plenty the war could have done for us.” He sounds bitter as he says that, like having sucked a particularly ripe lemon dry right before speaking.

“Your hopes?”

He gives him an crooked glance. “Uh, irrelevant?”

“Right, right.” Violet rolls his eyes, hawkish. “God, but how could you have married her if you’re yet this married to your privacy?”

There’s a strange silence that follows what he had hoped would have been taken as something no more severe than a poke on a very chubby cheek. Then Pavel says, “I never married her,” and Violet stops dead in his tracks.

It takes him a moment to speak, though not for lack of attempting to get his mouth to move from being stricken with an especially potent condition of Jaw-Drop. “A few years,” he repeats, slowly, filtering every damn letter he says. 

With a short nod, Pavel says, “six years, to be exact.”

He exclaims, “six years!” in the agony of hitting your foot on a sharpened corner, only the corner is on fire and everything else around you is on fire as well, now including your foot. “ Six years! You were together six years and you never married?”

“That would be what I said,” Pavel deadpans.

“Why?” He asks as though he’s asking someone why they’d skin his very new and very cute puppy. Pavel looks up at him with very collected eyes, brows drawn straight across either end of his gabella. “That is beyond bizarre, if you don’t mind me saying.”

“I do mind you saying, actually,” he mutters lowly.

“She’s perfectly lovely and pretty, you know. Unless we have to add ‘blind’ to your list of negatives, alongside ‘as emotionally loud as a half-eaten potato’?” Violet tut tut’s him, shaking his head. “I honestly can’t believe that. I was under the impression she would have made you so very happy!”

“Because,” says Pavel in reply to his accusatory squinting and then just doesn’t fucking continue, as though it’s a full sentence.

Which it probably is normally, but Violet’s definition of a full sentence doesn’t settle for anything less than twenty words, so he’s severely under count for him to stop pestering him. “Because what?” Violet demands, hovering closer to him with a frown. “Come on, Pavel, I understand it’s frightening, but you need to be happy too, and if we can identify why you weren’t happy, then-”

“Oh, for God’s sake. Because,” he sighs. “I like men, Violet.” 

In reply, Violet, manifestation of finesse that he is, almost trips on his own two feet.

Pavel’s eyes slide to him, narrow and brows stormy. The hood striking black across his upper face does little to make him look any softer, even as a lash of the bright yellow that lights the street from its terribly frightful grey moulds across his cheek. “Don’t tell me you find that problematic?”

“What? No, no. Don’t be absurd. I’m just surprised, is all. I didn’t think you showed much interest in men.” If he's honest, he’s surprised he even had it in him to admit something like that, but hey, it’s been a few years - maybe the stick up his ass has been somewhat adjusted, pulled out of the fucking crevices of his guts. 

“Hm.” Pavel sounds thoroughly unimpressed with his earnest display of moral chivalry.

“Then again, you never showed much interest in women, either, so I suppose I can’t judge what your way of showing interest is.”

Pavel stares at him in vague horror. “It’s normal. I am a human, not a creature you need a bestiary to understand.”

“Oh!” Violet laughs. “Oh, of course! Then it simply means I’ve never seen it, then!” And he means it as a joke, but the sentiment stings a little more than he thinks it really should.

The errands pass in the same way spring does - calmly, and in a way that warms him up. Empty streets lend themselves way to a gentle amble, and he seems to have understood that Violet is more closely likened to a tick than he is a person so Pavel offers no high speeds in his diligence of handling his tasks. There are foodstuffs displayed by grocery stores and a weapons store that has a second location three streets down, and in the cabinets behind the glass are what look like rifles reinforced with the same technology everyone walks around in. His sword slung at his side feels uninspired in comparison, but he feels no craving to upgrade, even when Pavel walks into one to pick up a newly-cleaned pistol that shines when he holds it aloft to examine it.

There’s a lot he thinks as he watches him do that. Body twisted to the side, arm pulled straight, fingers firm around the grip and resting easy on the trigger as he lines his shot up. The raising of his arm has his hood slip off his shoulder, and where the bump of it melts into his upper arm creases just so that it invites thoughts of running his fingers across it, and perhaps dragging it around to his back where his palms may settle on his trapezius, where he can sigh and gently lean forward until his forehead dotes upon the back of his neck. He gets so into this little mental image that when Pavel pulls the trigger and makes the gun go bang to test its recoil, he almost falls off the bench he’s sitting on, as if he were the one shot ( again) . 

He drowns in his blanket that flutters like a disgruntled lady’s wide-flared skirt - keeps it tucked around his shoulders by his paws under his neck, which means any addition to his hands by way of bags (“Plastic,” Pavel tells him slowly, when he spots Violet looking curiously at the sheer-esque bags that just sway, sway and sway as they hang ‘round his wrists. “Commonly used in Reingar, apparently. And now, over here.”) bumps his chest as he walks until Pavel glances at him as that crinkling noise keeps coming from him like clicking will follow unclipped paws one too many times. Then he unties his jacket from around his waist and slips it onto his shoulders, so his blanket is no longer a necessity. Violet says thank you; Pavel turns away wordlessly, but the last to leave is his gaze. It’s thick and bushy with white tufts, clearly some fur of some type. When he asks, Pavel says he’s made it himself, meaning it’s real material - not the synthetic stuff, draped across his body underneath it.

“Have you got any food at your estate?” Pavel asks him at one point, as a hint of snow has caught on the edges of his hair and a brightness has come across his nose. He sniffles, and wipes with the back of his arm. Violet finds it absurdly endearing, and equally thinks that the way he huffs and shifts on his feet before turning to the side when Violet tells him no is as precious as the way a kitty might yeowl in frustration at you when you return home, all the while padding along with its paws to come and take a seat next to you on the fluffiest cushion you make ready for them.

He buys him just enough for the night to do something with - simple ingredients that even Violet can work with, knowing just enough about cookery to know there’s something even he can do with spring onions, a pack of rice, and some eggs - and carries the bags down the road with him. Warmth, by now, has spread to his cheeks, and he buries himself in his borrowed coat as if he’s not yet been warmed up enough. 

“I was worried, when I saw how much everything had changed at first,” Violet says, casting his eyes around. When you get used to them, the constant colouration of the lights is almost pretty, bringing to mind a peacefully-still kaleidoscope, held by a tired old man than the excitable child craving the eternal novelty. “It’s nice. This is nice.”

“There are nicer things in the world,” Pavel replies on a scoff. “Nicer things you’ve tried, no doubt.” He sounds frustrated - his usual blend of irritability, seeped with the tiredness that has been brewing within him since Violet quite literally bumped into him.

Violet is looking up at the sky, surrounded as he is by him. Ever comforting, the sense of being here. Here, being that nebulous little space that is just his size, in this terrible little place that he was always too small for. In the corner of his eyes, snow has begun collecting delicately across Pavel’s hand-made coat akin to a crystalline headline, or maybe the way the cold settles in the fur of a wolf. Despite it, he is thinking, no, no. No. Nothing is nicer.

“One night,” Violet says, and he reaches out to the hem of his shirt. “One-”

“One night,” Pavel replies wearily. “Okay. One night.” 

Violet asks, “and then?”

He can hear his heart thumping through the howling wind, and his mouth slightly parts to let his tongue dab lightly at the corner of his mouth. Suddenly he wonders if he can feel his heart through the wind too as it crashes and then falls limp against the thin of his chest. Pavel says nothing, perhaps more in love with his silence than he ever was with her.

But the walk back to his estate - this time, oh, what a nice walk it is. Careful and quiet and meaningful. 

Blessedly, Pavel doesn’t react when they reach his estate - a cacophony of aged conclusions in various stages of disrepair (not everything is like the gate that no longer locks, just as not everything is like the garden that has grown bigger than Violet, just as not everything is as sad as the state of Mother) and he walks right past all of them in favour of what remains of the kitchen.

“Be careful,” says Pavel, as Violet throws open the window and does his best to sweep some of the dust away, thinking it wouldn’t make for the best of seasoning. “There’s a nest of mice behind the cabinet.”

When he checks, there are indeed five pairs of beady eyes looking up at him. They’re rather cute, actually - reminding him a lot of the way Ralph used to look over at him from between their legs as they ate dinner, soundlessly (and sometimes not, for he had a brilliant pair of lungs on him) begging for a scrap of whatever they were eating. 

“Oh,” says Violet suddenly, putting the cabinet back. “Where is Ralph, anyway?”

“Passed,” Pavel replies. His tone is sad but stable - clearly, not a new occurrence. “He was 19 - did really well, all things considered. Buried him by the old Shandran ruins. The next few years have the yellow rhododendrons blooming over him.”

“How sweet,” Violet muses, and wonders what the state of Mother and Father’s graves are. 

The fire erupts steadily from there - he’s found some dry twigs and a pot in a usable enough state once they pluck the moss off and pull the weeds out and use some water Pavel has in a canister to clean it. 

Violet had chuckled when he saw him pull the leather bottle out. “You still carry water around?” 

“I don’t spend much time in the city anymore,” Pavel had said, turning the canister around and letting it flood the pot. 

“Too bright?”

There had been a pause. His expression was contemplative as he had watched the water drip, splash, and swim downwards in its miniature flow into the pot. Violet would have liked to fill the blanks in, but he struggles to now, and instead had waited for him to find his quiet little voice.

Eventually, he had said, “just didn’t feel right anymore,” and when Violet had asked further, he’d simply ignored him and screwed the cap back onto his canister before tucking it away in his pack, and then made fire out of wood and a meal out of five-hundred Gold's worth of ingredients that keeps him full well into the next morning.

As the pot boils steadily over the fire Pavel takes it upon himself to take Violet's arm again and slowly, like he is undressing his beloved on the night of their wedding, rolls his sleeve up to offer a clear view of his yet-grumpy graze wound. It is still a screeching red, bright like the shade that colours the sky on particularly clear spring early-evenings, and the skin around it is saddened by association, a much darker red through the waify milk of Violet's skin. From his pack Pavel takes out a first-aid kit and applies the disinfectant, cleans the wound, bandages it up carefully and safely.

"You don't have to pay," is what he says, when he sees Violet looking down at him, curious; maybe a little surprised.

"Thank you," Violet tells him, and he just nods gruffly as he turns his back on him and begins returning his diminished medical items to his pack. Feeling like they were eleven years younger, if he were feeling the same as Violet as he fiddles with the cute little knot he'd tied the ends of the bandages in.

When he sits to eat it’s tentatively, though not because he means to bolt. Violet feels it against his own sheathed rump; the chairs are wet, darker not from wood shade but because the snow has settled on them before they did. He rests his wrists on the table they sit at and it’s equally uncomfortable, so they go anywhere else.

“Not the main hall,” says Violet, standing perfectly still at the base of the stairs that wander upwards. 

He lingers at the entranceway, and casts his eyes to the mantle piece as if he’s a child peeking out from behind the tree to check the seeker has passed him. “Alright,” he says softly as his eyes swivel back to meet his - cast ahead but anchored on him, desperate to not capsize past him - and trudges towards him, the pot of rice delight delicately held in his arms and the blanket finding second life around them like ratty armguards lest he burn them. 

“It isn’t that simple, though,” Pavel reminds him as he passes, haunting upwards stair by stair.

“I know,” Violet sighs, heart murmuring, apparitions loosening around the muscle only to let it breathe. They seem to enjoy watching him flail, and the body struggles so when breathless.

The second floor is only somewhat better than the first, but they find a room soon that the windows have not been shattered in, serving them nicely once the chairs are pulled back up. “Pubs wouldn’t shut up about you once you disappeared,” Pavel says as he hovers his spoon to his mouth. He’s decidedly more chatty once he’s stopped fighting, and Violet would feel bad about having forced his lungs into usage were it not for the fact that he’s been successful about employing this strategy before. Lo and behold, it remains just as effective as it had been some fifteen-odd years ago.

“Oh?” He leans forward with a smirk, eyes glittering. “Damn, what about?”

Pavel glances up at him without angling his head anymore from where he’s got it buried in his meal, which has a way of making him look like he might bite him. “Your tabs, for one.”

“Oh, shit.” 

Pavel leans forward too, curious in that needlessly inquisitive sort of way. Kind of like he’d been caught throwing a ball where he wasn’t supposed to and was now getting drilled on why , pray tell, he thought that was an appropriate thing to do, Harrison. “Why did you even have any tabs? You could have bought out every pub, inn and tavern in Perland and not even noticed it in your coffers.”

“Yes, well,” Violet sighs into his palm, and then shakes his head. “I don’t make it a habit to bring more than I expect to spend ever as I’m already an attractive enough target for muggers-”

“-Attractive is certainly not the word I’d use.”

“-In the non-lustful way of it! You’re such a bitch!” Pavel just rolls his eyes, and then shoves another bit of food into his mouth. “As I was explaining, I try not to bring too much, but, well, one drink at one pub will often lead to another, and then a third at a different pub, and… well, perhaps the use of an inn room to spend the night, and, and…”

“And then you forget when you wake up,” Pavel finishes, very stern about it. “Because you were fucked in the head drunk. Is that the short of it?”

Sheepishly Violet draws back. It’s a little like a game of tug and war, the way they move. “Along the lines of it. What else?”

“Enough vulgar talk to last me to my deathbed.”

Predictable. Violet rolls his eyes privately. He had hoped people would have the decency to keep those sorts of interactions to themselves. “Anything else?”

“Rumours,” says Pavel. “Lots and lots of rumours. Inane ones, mostly, but sometimes there would be stranger ones. Ones that someone had come across your body, rotting away in a hole somewhere. Described the smell and everything. Putrid, aromatic like roses despite it.”

He’s nibbling thoughtfully on his egg yolk, perched on the tip of his fork. “As if it’d be anything like that,” Violet chuckles.

“You can’t exactly blame anyone for thinking like that,” Pavel replies, his eyes down. “You took up half the city, and then utterly disappeared.”

“Did you believe them?” Violet asks.

“Not at first,” he admits. His tentativeness isn’t just in the way his tone carries, but even how his fingers curl as if trying to make themselves smaller on the table. “Obviously. Believing every rumour that ends in your death is a quick way to begin concluding humanity’s only gift is to lie and torment.”

Violet pulls a face. “There can’t be that many of them.”

“There were,” Pavel replies. He doesn’t miss the change in tense; doesn’t acknowledge it, but feels a slight wince attempt to crease his brow. “You were far from unknown, and they only ramped up in the weeks following your absence.”

“And then? What of the months after?”

A slope of his shoulders. “You were forgotten. By all besides the thieves, evidently,” he says with a sweep of his gaze around the room. “People moved on. Gossip travels far, fast and lasts only modestly long.”

“Your hood? You, it seems, have not been forgotten,” Violet points out, slightly dubious. 

“I remained here, Violet,” he replies blankly. “They asked, you know. Where you were whenever I walked and paused.”

He’s looking at him, so Violet meets his gaze back, elbow on the table and knuckles under his chin. Pavel’s eyes shift briefly to look at his blase position and just a hint, his brows lower. “And you said?”

“That I didn’t know,” says Pavel. “I said I didn’t know. Again. Again and again. And they all looked at me like they felt sorry for me.”

“Isn’t that nice? Sometimes it’s pleasant to be pitied.”

Pavel snorts. A rough and angry one, like the huffing of black smoke through a chimney that hasn’t been cleaned in weeks. “Not over something like this.”

Slowly, like he’s speaking to a child - or, perhaps, he is the child, yet learning how to speak - Violet says, “and ‘this’ is?”

He skewers his own yolk brusquely. “Who knows,” Pavel says, bitterness akin to the way nettles will taste raw. “Who knows what this is, anymore?”

He spends so long trying to identify a satisfactory enough answer - that this is miserable and he should stop being such a prick already, or that this is all his fault so he’ll give up and get on his knees already if he’ll just crack a bloody smile, for God’s sake - that the snow is left to blanket the ground in absolute white, and there is only so far Violet can bury himself in his borrowed coat like a seal retracting into his blubber before he twists something in his neck.

“A campfire, then,” says Pavel as he tugs himself up onto his feet, to which Violet groans, puts his face into his knees and exclaims, “in my own house! This is a nightmare!”

Five minutes into Pavel fiddling with the sticks though he is no longer so petty, and he scoots himself closer to assist. “Too wet,” Pavel mumbles, a part of his tongue sticking out from between his lips in focus, and then he draws back surprised when Violet clicks his fingers and a spark hops atop the end of the stick he isn’t holding, and then blooms outwards into a bright orange flicker.

The colour settles brilliantly on his dark skin, melting tangerine against brown. It shimmers in his red eyes, turning them truly explosive. Miniature campfires for all the heat they bring to Violet when he looks closely at them, he muses serenely. They flicker with every crack of the fire after Pavel dips the stick to the rest of the kindle, crystalline in natural gleam.

“How’d you figure out you liked men?” Violet asks, because subtlety is not something a cockroach is born with and he’s more of that than he is a human at this point.

He sighs out of his nose, eyes fluttering shut in something resembling very controlled irritation. Very, very close to walloping him in the face, he thinks. But he doesn’t, because to throw fists at him would risk squashing his little chitinous body, and he’s a good person to people and bugs alike. “Why do you ask?”

“Because I’m curious,” Violet grumbles at him. “Is it really so strange that I’m interested in your life after not having seen you for so long?”

Pavel curses under his breath. “It’s a bit embarrassing to see a 39 year old so desperate.”

“Says the brooding 37 year old,” Violet retorts snidely, and he gets a dark glare shot at him for it. “Well?”

He throws a stick absently into the fire. “Not telling.”

“So be it. I thought about it when I was young,” Violet says. “Under the fine cut of the chandelier, it didn’t matter what you were. So long as you had a body, it was alright. I liked it when people would wrap their arms around me and, well - both women and men have arms.”

Pavel is quietly looking at him, shapely lit orange by the fire. It seems to particularly like his jaw, matching its dramatic fall and adoring the side of his neck before it plunges into his collar. “But?” he mumbles into his knee.

“No but,” Violet continues with a little laugh. “I guess I never came to a conclusion. Does it seem like there should be?”

He doesn’t say anything at first, merely raises his hand to grab a stick and poke and prod at the fire. As it sputters and the sticks crack asunder in the blackness of their bark he swallows dry, and then almost whispers, “There was a soldier. I was stationed with him. He was kind of like you, actually.”

“Handsome?”

“Considerably,” says Pavel. “Fine hair. Always had it tied back in a ponytail. Muscular and obnoxious about it. Made sure to always wear the most bodycon shirts so you could practically see his nipples when it got bloody cold at night. He wouldn’t leave me alone, either. Made it his mission whenever we were set to be guarding the border plains together that he’d try and get me to reply.”

“Ah,” says Violet, and there is a strange knot at the base of his stomach he has to push back against to smile and reply. “Did it work?”

“Kind of, I guess. I was,” he shrugs, listless. “Lonely. I’d just broken up with the only person I was really friends with. I only see everyone else during events, and I don’t get invited to them as much anymore now. And you were-”

He stops. Clears his throat. “So when he approached me, I just… agreed for drinks. Then I was tipsy and he started touching me and I was okay with it. When she touched me it was...”

When he trails off, he seems to be struggling with finding the right word. He shakes his head soon, finding nothing. "Damn,” says Violet. “What happened to appreciating what you had in life?”

His eyes shoot up. “And that is?”

“I don’t know,” Violet muses, bringing a fingertip to his lips. “Companionship? The bed feeling warmer with a second body? Someone to speak to when it’s all a bit too quiet? Despite everything, I valued that sort of thing.”

“But not love,” Pavel points out.

He opens his mouth, and then closes it again as his eyes drop to between them. Pavel has his fingers splayed on the ground despite the temperature - he is struck with so raw a sense that he wants to reach out and hold them, breathe puffs of air on them to stop them from feeling the bitter cold. Wrapping them up in his own cold fingers, and willingly letting him milk him for all the heat he has in the freezing cavity his heart beats in. 

“Depends on the definition,” Violet murmurs, watching Pavel flex his fingers under his gaze. “Maybe I loved what she did for me.”

What he really wants to say is, I’ve lived long enough without love. It was fine to pretend once the novelty of it all wore off, but Pavel’s eyes are hard around the edges and he’s hunched over like a cat preparing to pounce, so he elects to not be quite so cynical in front of the man he thinks could get married to the concept of affection, had he any sense of it. The paradox is almost cute , he thinks to himself.

“The attention,” Pavel says flatly.

“Oh, the attention,” Violet sighs. “It was incredible. I’ve never felt that attractive. She was obsessed with me. For a little while, at least.”

“Could have fooled me.”

“Because back then, you know, it wasn’t about me,” says Violet. “It was about what I was, not who I was.”

Pavel raises a brow. “Enlighten me. As a stupid little plebian, I’m not sure what you mean.” He sounds terribly bored by the concept at hand.

He thinks he was a son, and he thinks he was a fun night for the older nobles, and he thinks he was the only finger on his mother’s tired hand, and he thinks for a few short and magnificent years he was what his father wanted to be. He wasn’t much of anything, but was everything at the same time. He was a canvas and was painted splendidly by those who meant well, but he thinks sometimes even the best intentions can bring someone to the wayside if they didn’t choose for it themselves. Anyone would be upset with the passivity.

And then he thinks he was Pavel’s friend, which wound up cancelling all of that out in its very gentle way. He wasn’t everything when he was sitting across from him and asking how on earth he managed to produce soup better than what he’s had Uptown with nothing but his hands and the most medium quality ingredients in all the land - he was just Violet, and Violet had thought Pavel’s shy, restrained little smirk from behind his ladle, for he only bought one spoon when he moved in and was the type to insist his guest use it, was exceptionally sweet.

What did she think when she looked at me? He is left to quietly ponder, but the implications of it settle heavy in his stomach, as if the snow had gotten into him via the canals of his ears, the length of his nostrils, the tense corners of his eye sockets.

"You're not stupid at all," is what Violet says instead.

"Maybe not by your definition," he mutters, tiredly. "Well?"

“You don’t live in the city, then,” Violet says, for he dislikes the sensation of growing colder than a blizzard’s tip-toes towards them. “So where do you live?”

The asshole fucking whistles. “Brilliant change of topic. Masterful.” Violet just pouts at him. “Anywhere. Wherever."

“Back to being a nomad,” Violet mumbles, poking the fire with a stick and then promptly dumping it into the kindle.

He sighs, pulling his knees into his chest. “It’s different now. Here. I couldn’t adjust.”

“Too bright,” Violet says again under his breath. Even from here, the skyline is a dazzling array of colours. Maybe he’ll get used to it - he always did enjoy the ostentatious bits of life. “Is Aakhen like this?”

A quiet nod. “Cerise, she loved it. It was so bright and glittering. Every night when the sun went down, she’d call me over to look out the window and see the whole city lit up blue, or green, or pink.”

“Never struck me as the type,” Violet says. “Then again, she was always such a forward-thinker.”

“I couldn’t see them,” Pavel murmurs. “The stars, even though it was night. Because it was so bright, the lights down here ate them up. It was hard to pray when I couldn’t see anything. It had never been like that before.”

That last bit comes in a quiet sadness, shoulders slumped and eyes askew in the fire. “Prayer is based on invisible faith, surely,” Violet points out, unhelpfully.

“I know,” says Pavel. “But it felt lonely.”

“She was right there."

He shifts uncomfortably, shoulders hitching upwards and sucking his cheeks hollow. “I didn’t,” he says slowly. “Know how to talk to her about it.”

“You didn’t have to add that last bit,” says Violet blithely. 

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Pavel asks, glaring past the fire at him.

“You don’t say yes, you don’t say no. I was annoying you, and you didn’t tell me to go away.” He shrugs in the same way the disinterested might wave off another cup of tea. Something flashes in Pavel’s eyes as he watches him - dusky frustration, like black smoke going up. An alarm in itself. 

It passes only by him blazing across the grassland. Groaning into his knees, he all but whines, “need this always be about you?”

“It’s not,” Violet says. “There’s only one common factor between your relationship with her, and your relationship with me.”

He winces terribly, almost recoiling as if Violet had hit him physically.

“I’m sorry,” Violet quickly says. “I didn’t- no, I didn’t mean that.”

“Yes, you did,” Pavel replies under his breath, tossing his stick into the flames - they reach up like hands clawing at something invisible in the air, as if a drowning crew stretching for driftwood. “You’re not one to lie, and even when you do, you’re terrible at it,” and then he sighs. Appropriately frustrated, Violet thinks, his own manner of annoyed, tapping his fingers; swallowing them, if he damn well could. 

Now the fire is burning low, and Pavel has either dozed off or returned to his impassivity - either or means the same to Violet, and he can’t sleep himself, because - because there is unity in him now, against all odds, and it is all burning, like he could take those sticks himself and create a wonderfully burning wicker basket for flowers to turn to black in.

“This is ridiculous. He left me, too,” Violet is telling Mother. “I was going insane, I think, and he took one look at me and he left with her in hand. And he calls it wrong. He calls it wrong now. ”

Mother offers no reply. 

“How many festivals did you see, Mother?” Violet whispers. “How many teas did you drink? How many days did you pass doing absolutely nothing of value? Did you even think about it? Did you think about Perland in your wake? Did you think about me? Did you think about the plebians who starved - the nobles we are because of their hunger?”

Eleven years. Eleven years , he thinks over and over again, clenched teeth and heavy heart and besotted misery.

“I thought of him so much,” he says. “I wanted to see him so bad. But there was always more to consume. More to do. More to see. But none of that matters when it’s all so dark. We were wrong, too. I’m wrong. Did you know that? You knew that, didn’t you? Why didn’t you tell me? Are you laughing at me?”

He raises a hand to her - the curling of her oil, the fading of her colours, the scratching of her frame. Timeworn equivalences to the wrinkles around his eyes, and he wasn’t here to see any of it. His skin slowly marries age, yet his heart remains as doleful as the day his father first handed him the talisman. He was seven, he thinks. Seven years old, and now 39, and he thinks he remembers that moment infinitely better than any of the ones he passed with her. Bright, though not tenderly - bright like the way the sun makes you wince. Bright like the way you will rear back when the bushes are pulled past and you are seen by the hunters. Bright like the way the neon lights shine and tell him it has been so long, so long that even the light falls differently here at home.

Father had been so large hanging over him, he had blocked out the sun. It felt, at the time, an appropriate representation of what he was asking of him. It now feels like even the sun was too small. A universe-breaking feat - save us from what we are, when what they were was maybe what they deserved to be. All of them, not just them, and that he had thought on his very last day playing nobleman under the glittering chandelier that swung too and fro like the guillotine he so hoped it was, drink in his hand and a different hand drifting up his waist.

How do you save mud from the trampling? How do you save the branches from the trimming? How do you save the bricks from the falling? How does he save them and himself?

“Was that you warning me?” he says in a voice smaller than how the artist painted her nails. “You knew - and you still let it happen?”

The lights, a hundred metres away, still feel too bright from back here. The answer, of course, is obvious - he has known for years. 

Despite the veritable insanity that comes with the end of the world, apocalypse-nigh, black-coloured evisceration and indecipherable concepts - not creatures, for that would imply some form of biological backing to them, and the Unknown would not so much as bleed even when Violet slashed at them. He has long refused to believe in the humanity of something that cannot spill across him lest he begin mourning the plants he forages through - the annual festival, tinged bitter despite its sweet treat moniker, had gone ahead. 

Suggesting something about morality; practising something about hedonism. He had been exhausted upon returning to Perland and the lights, those Goddamn lights had been shining even then, a wide stage that sparkled pretty colours and glittered painful shines and he would wince, every time he looked at it. Bright blue that it shone and sheer metallics it had brought to their pathetic little city. Someone had died, he had thought, that very day; of something like starvation, or dysentery. They hadn’t the optics to protect the plebeians, and here the lights were beaming into their tired eyes and heating their thin skin. More sugar to feed them with than meat. The children of Downside had looked so thin, even before the war.

Still, being a killjoy assists in no one, and he had already been miserable enough without depressing himself on the state of it all. The brightness would have been attractive had he the eyes to see them with, but they were locked across the lit-up horizon. No greens or pinks yet, but plenty of blue and a lot of yellow.

Pavel had asked him if he wanted him to stay, and Violet had quietly thought to himself, how could you even need to ask that? And he had said no even though he didn’t really want to, because Cerise was incredibly unsubtle about the way she quietly, shyly, kept closing the distance between their hands, and Violet was a damn good friend. If not now, when she was emboldened by the night light and the threat of extinction, it was a question of when it could ever happen for him. And if it never happened for him, he would be silently toiling away in a city that couldn’t care less about him for nobility that thought of the concrete they walked on as more valuable than him, because they walk across the concrete every single day and it never wears away while one wrong strike and Pavel’s skin will split and ease into the ground after being embraced by its ruby charge.

And if that happened, Violet would be utterly miserable for him. Better for him to be stolen away, he thinks, a peace about him; better for him to be anywhere else than here. Better for us all, he is now beginning to think, traitor that he has tiredly become.

(Though, even now he recalls the stinging he had felt as he’d walked away and left; not another word, no insistences. That’s what he wanted, of course, but part of him hurt to acknowledge and recognise that it was what Pavel wanted, too.)

He remembers, later, later, no permission when he had been stolen away himself, taken from the ground he’d lived and though he’d die on and subsumed into glittering space, landing on an entirely new planet. But then , he had thought a week in, tracing circles into the creasing of her bare stomach, burgundy hair a carpet upwards, the Harrison’s - we aren’t known for selflessness. He had been too young when looking up at Mother burning at her stake to recognise what it means to have the assumption of a generation following him, but he knows it now, much much later, when wrestling with the propensity of his father’s need to presume this must continue. They have made their own oath of it, that when born and ascribed their name, they will suffer for sins they don’t understand. He has paid dearly for a very long time. Longer than his skin formed him. Longer, he thinks, than his soul had been conceptualised.

Mother should have burned from the start, he had thought. I wish I’d burned with her, he had then thought, and she had shifted next to him in her sleep. Perhaps as though in response to his sleeplessness, but she was never very selfless herself, Violet had known. He had thought, at the time, this made them a perfect match, individuals in a pair. Conjoinment only hurt upon the split, and he was feeling the ache at his side keenly. The shape there was awkward, difficult to fill when his hair didn’t make much sense and he would look more cloak than muscle, but she fit in a different way - a nostalgic way that brought to mind the hallways and dutiful workers and the way she would look at him with the eyes he inherited slanted tiredly and the lips he did not pull straight. The way he recalls his mother's tone made him feel, soon narrating his shifting dreams in her material absence. He thinks he loved her in the same way; chasing, hungry, finally biting down on plush skin. 

Returning felt like a betrayal of what little resolve he had left. Living for generations of selfishness, and now giving it all up because if he went back to Perland now, it is called a cycle because you reach three-quarters of the way through the circle until you fall upwards like a heart in love and find yourself at the start again.

So it had been declared, decided, demonstrably ordained by his higher power guiding, Mother’s blessing or maybe, in as many words, her eternal curse - hungry for more and more as nobility want, seeking the emotional equivalent of a three cour gourmand’s heaven in two-tone eyes half his size. He could fold her up and put her in him into that hollow hole keeping his head on straight and lets his legs sprout on and he thinks, he thinks, it would only help a little.

Because it’s about satisfying the need to eat for hundreds. Clawing in him. Wondering where he’s gone, and why this is all he can give them when they had dined so splendidly from his bones. Begging why he’s doing this. He didn’t know. He didn’t know, anymore. Because she loved him like you love a pet puppy that follows you around and he loved her like freedom, only it didn’t feel much like freedom at all from where he lay, a planet away, the ghosts still tentative across his skin and calling him back, and he is left to wonder if it really freedom if he is just running away.

“It was too much,” he finally concludes, eleven years later, candle-held aloft to her frame-turned kindle. “I couldn’t do it. Not on my own. But God, I couldn't do that to anyone else.”

Mother has not unlocked the magic of resurrection since he had left the estate the night before nor have the hauntings of the estate spontaneously materialised to confront their failed progeny, and offers no answer to this.

"How you had the sense of it to bring a child - a child, Mother - into this, I'll never know."

He sighs, shifting on the balls of his feet uncomfortably. It’s strangely difficult, he thinks, to word something he has felt since he was born. One would think being so intimately aware of it would make it easier, but instead it has pervaded so much of him that it’s difficult to know where it starts and where he ends, if such a distinction could even feasibly be made between him and filial disappointment at this stage.

“I’m sorry,” he murmurs. “I think- I think this is where House Harrison ends. There isn’t anything I can do.”

Unrecognised in his own old stomping ground - the House had already been fighting against irrelevancy even before Perland’s evolution. It is equal parts humbling and humiliating to think he had been closer to honour having been the talk of every event hall for his perverseness when younger than he is now, earnest and exhausted and well-meaning.

“Maybe if I were someone else. Someone less afraid of this all. Someone more able to bare the weight. But I’m not,” he says, ever so quiet. A voice too similar to his fearful little trembles when waiting outside Father’s door, when he was seven and then again when he was fifteen and then again when he was twenty-one. “I’m terrified, Mother. I don’t know how you two weren’t.” 

Or maybe they were, and that’s why they left it up to him. He’ll never know now, absent as he’s been. Tracks he could have followed, buried in white that melted and had flowers grow through before the snow came back again to tuck them in, eleven times over. Eleven Goddamn years.

The funeral procession, headed by only him, is a quiet and long-overdue event. Lit by only candle-light, snow falling outside and appropriately quiet for the event coating overgrown and decrepit gravestones outside as if summoned by them to bury the dirt patch next to their skeletons that was reserved for his own.

As if to say, you are not welcome anymore, and to that he thinks God, has he ever been?

He doesn’t realise he’s dozed off under her until he wakes up. It’s an uncomfortable, sudden jolting sort of awakening - one moment he’s asleep as cosy as one can be when lying on cold, hard ground for the second night in a row, and the next footsteps are stamping down the stairs towards him in loud thud thud thud’s and he’s snap awake, bolt upright and trying to see past the white length of Pavel’s fur coat he’s gone and melted into. 

The noise would normally be of no concern during busier times, but this is hardly a home anymore - closer to a particularly fanciful nest for bandits and mice, though those are one in the same when it comes to the holey cheese his Head Maid always stocked. He’s careful and deliberate about his movements as he presses himself up against the wall underneath Mother and shimmies quietly along the edge, just to be sure. 

It’s thoroughly unnecessary. When Pavel bursts into the hall his eyes widen as he’s manically throwing his gaze every which way finding him. His cheeks are dark and his chest uneven; when he tries to speak, he inhales and then coughs on it, spluttering, making a strained note with whatever bit of his voice makes it out from his stressing vocal chords, and then his hand flies to his chest as he gasps like he’s been shot.

“You,” Pavel manages, wincing, prickles of gleam at the corners of his eyes and falling back against the wall. “You -”

“It’s okay,” Violet tries, careful as he steps forward with his hands outstretched. “Breathe.”

“Fuck off,” he replies, and then coughs into his hands, groaning as if he’s awoken more reanimated beast then person. 

Fair enough, he thinks. Not like his chattering worked last time. So instead he pauses, and then remembers they still have some water they drew during the errand run.  “I’ll get you some,” Violet tells him. “Just stay here, okay? You’ll be fine.”

He steps away, only for a gasp catches in Pavel’s throat and he launches himself at him. An arm around his waist and forehead buried in his stomach, inhaling in that tell-tale way that there’s something raw in his throat that’s stopping him from breathing normally.

“Stop,” Pavel says, muffled into his shirt. “Stop disappearing. Stop it. Either go or don’t.”

“I just went to see Mother,” Violet says, and he shakes his head again and again and again.

“God, Violet,” he sobs between rough gasps and sour hics, shoulders jumping as he tries to breathe normal and then gulps for air as if thirsty for years before this. “All this, all this, you do all this and then I fucking wake up and you’re not there again. What do you want from me? Is this it?”

He pulls his face up; under his dark bangs, any fire he’d seen glimmering in them has been doused by sleep, or maybe something wetter than that.

Violet pulls his lips bow-string taut. Hoping to hit a shot he’s blind to. “Of course not,” he says, gently as he can, and raises a hand with the intent to cup it around the top of his head and draw his palm across it.

But he leaves the hand for a moment, uncommitted. Placing it on his head feels like the same sort of thing you’d do for a wounded pup and that happened to be colouring his particular grievances at the moment

He coughs again, retching weakly into his chest. His knuckles go light with how tight they hold - Violet’s own flex in sympathy. “You need water,” he tells Pavel softly. “It’ll help. There’s no reason not to have any.”

Before he can do the honours, Pavel pulls away. Shakily, a foot behind the other, and if he were any less cognizant he’d trip himself up. “I think,” he mumbles, entirely unattached to actually speaking the words. More voiceless breaths in the shape of them, Violet thinks, and he feels if they weren’t so close the wind outside that peers in from the broken windows and sets their hair unsteady on their scalp, they would be stolen away before he could hear them. “I think I need to go.”

“What? ” Violet says, aghast. “It’s the middle of the night, and I’m pretty certain that,” he punctuates this bit with throwing his hand out to the windows where the snow still falls like brick when you drop it from too high. “Is the makings of a snowstorm. Where are you even going ?” 

He jolts back when Violet tries to bring his hands to his shoulders. “Anywhere,” he says breathlessly. “Anywhere else. This,” he gestures weakly to the little space between them. “Was a mistake. I shouldn’t have let you talk me into this.”

“It was,” Violet says quickly. He doesn’t follow and take a step forward but damn, if he has to sit really hard on the feeling that he wants to. “Nice, wasn’t it? Getting to hang out together again! I want to do it more, no matter how weird it feels!"

“No,” Pavel’s mumbling. “No, no.”

“You don’t have to be like this.” 

And then he barks a laugh. It stings to hear him like that, so full of brusque anger; Violet can’t help the wince that comes about him, the way he pulls his hands back into his chest. “I don’t have to be like this? Me? So it is my fault, is it? I deserve this. This is what I fucking deserve.”

Of course it isn’t, is what he wants to say, but it comes out violently different when he slowly says, “you’re certainly not making it easier on me.”

“And why should it get to be easier for you?” Pavel asks loudly, sudden enough to almost make him jump in his boots. “ You didn’t make it easier for me , did you? Fuck this. Don’t speak to me again,” he’s saying under his breath, already turning on his heels, hood fluttering behind him like curtains in the wind. 

“Leave, then!” Violet yells after him as he stomps off. “God forbid you actually talk to me for once! Go, you- you -”

His back gets smaller and smaller as he leaves. Soon a dot, like fireworks in the sky. Sweet tang in the back of his throat, uncomfortable in location and nauseous in intensity. There is a peppy four-four song coming from three streets down, being sung along by vague words and vocal addendums by a crowd that would normally spend this time begging for food. Balloons fly upwards like he wishes he could. The baby spring air is still a bit bitter and cold as it kisses his cheeks, but laces his hair like her fingers later will when she hangs over him and puts her full weight on him. A shiver comes about him, but not from the cold - or maybe it is. Maybe he is colder than he has ever been, or maybe he feels the cold so much more keenly because for just a moment, he had felt hotter than he'd felt in years.

Maybe a few short hours of feeling warm is all you need to forget how it feels.

Chapter Text

Three days later, he’s gone fishing.

He’s made a hobby of it - of course, selling his various jewels is an option and one he chooses frequently enough that his hands now don’t feel quite so weighed down with ancient familial heirlooms when he raises them to have it tucked under his chin, slanting against the counter where a lad is dining in a particularly grumpy-seeming pub, though he doesn’t seem to mind the company when Violet makes himself comfortable on the seat next to him.

But damn, a piece of driftwood posing as a man sometimes wants something a little better than tea (being used in the most generous of descriptions in this case, because leaves vaguely simmering in boiled water does not a good tea make) made from nettles behind the estate, or pure water he’s drawn from the well that he’s somewhat suspicious of, considering the slimy texture of the bricks around it. There could be algae growing at the bottom of it and he’d be none the wiser, besides the strangely… thickened texture of the water. So he’s there, asking if he can have a drink with his pretty face in the way he always has, when the doors swing open alarmingly loud and four pairs of feet stalk inwards towards him, and then point guns that lustre like sterling silver at him. 

Guy, predictably, wants nothing to do with this - Violet certainly can’t blame him when he hops right the fuck off his stool and skips in some vague direction away from the open barrels being pointed at them. Had he the sense he could do it without getting shot for real, he’d do it himself. But he’s still kind of riding on the high of having avoided getting a bullet in his arm earlier, and isn’t really motivated to give up that meagre high.

So instead he raises his palms and says, “can I, uh, help you lot?” grimacing when one waggles his gun near his chin a little too enthusiastically.

“Sir Violet Harrison?” the most impressively dressed one says. 

Flippant, he replies, “not really a sir anymore, but the name’s right. Seriously, is there nowhere else you can point that thing besides my neck?”

The cool barrel is only pressed against his it - Violet rolls his eyes. Awfully forward for a daylight threat. “You are hereby under arrest, as organised by the Perland Military and ordered by the Council.”

It only lands a moment later, and he’s still stuck on the first bit. Jaw loose he blurts, “the military ?”

“Come peacefully and we will not be forced to utilise more extreme measures.”

“Now, hold on!” Violet insists furiously. “It’s not a crime to request someone pay for a meal. I’ve worked plenty with the law, I know that for a fact!”

He says, “you may remain silent.”

“This cannot be about my occupation within my old estate. I understand it hasn’t been used of late and is without maintenance, but it’s my estate! The ownership is in my name!” Then he gasps, throws a hand over his mouth in horror. “Unless it really is a crime to follow someone around? The world has changed so much!”

He repeats, “you may remain silent.”

“Oh, brilliant,” Violet sneers. “I’ll be sure to utilise that dignity as I walk with your weapons pointed at my back.” He bats one of the gun's aside like they’re nothing more than flies, and immediately all of them whip back back on him, as if he’d gone and slipped in a hole that was covered with stinging nettles he wouldn’t dare touch. “Calm down . I’m going,” he insists with as much venom as he can manage, and then he’s marched out into the streets where the bruised sky still struggles to keep the snow away from over their heads.

Where he goes is unfamiliar. With the Raiders no more, while he can generally recognise the process he certainly doesn’t the areas. He’s brought to places that bring to mind where he would work, but without the faces that make it easy for him to tell what stage they’re at. Nary a hint of uniqueness to these men and women’s faces and they blur together as he trudges through, flanked on every side, though he’ll be the first to suggest he might have had too much uniqueness for the Raiders. 

“I’ll admit, being on the receiving end of this sort of puts a bad taste in my mouth,” he mutters, and then feels one of those zealous barrels poke at the incline between his back and the crack of his ass. Cheeky. 

When he’s finally sat down he slumps in revolution, arms slung lazily across his chest and sooner staring at the skylights than the soldiers in the room. The lieutenant who walks in looks to be about the same age Violet was when he worked in this business and he thinks to himself, it’s almost alarming, to see someone so young with so many medals slung across his banner. Is this how everyone he’d worked with felt? Is this how everyone he’d stood before felt?

He’s holding a sheet of paper and sounding veritably bored with his tasks, says, “Violet Harrison?”

“What, now I’ve lost the ‘sir’?” Violet huffs, nestling his back grumpily into his chair. “Yes, as I’ve confirmed already.”

The lieutenant nods, adjusting his hat with a weary sigh. “First,” he’s drawling. That’s just poor professionalism. “Allow us to thank you for your work as vanguard in the war eleven years ago.”

Blink. “Uh,” says Violet. “Sure.”

A brief nod. Entirely non-noteworthy. No flair for it at all, Violet thinks. “Our intelligence suggests, however, you were part of a duo in that another male frequently fought at your side.”

Violet gapes at them. “Intelligence? He’s not a myth. Yes, he existed. What is this about?”

“We’re looking for him,” says the lieutenant, and Violet instantly narrows his eyes and asks, “why ?”

He glances visibly towards another soldier, who looks back with a firm expression. “We are,” he replies slowly, which is indication enough to Violet that he’s lying, or at least being incredibly selective about the truth. “Concerned about some of his activity as of late.”

“Such as?” Violet asks, leaning on the table. His decision is split-second and made on a dime, but if he thinks about it later, it isn’t as though he finds himself coming to any other conclusion over what he should do. The mark of a true choice he'd take under any circumstances, of course. For him, it's agiven. “I’ve not heard from him in years, so I’ve no idea what could be so worrisome about him.”

Lie like a dog. They might be a little rocky, a relationship that is tending towards tearing the sensitive flesh of his paws as he pads across tall grass, but that doesn’t mean he’s going to hand him over to them.

“That’s confidential information,” says the lieutenant.

“What could possibly be confidential about a man who doesn’t live here anymore?”

He’s thoroughly ignored, and the lieutenant sweeps past him with, “five days ago, you were sighted with the person of interest.”

Violet drums his fingers on the table, sighing flames out his nostrils. “Is it so difficult to imagine?” he complains. “I returned to Perland and ran into an old friend. He was in a rush, so I followed - and happened to be shot by your men. I’ve yet to hear of any compensation for that, need I remind you.”

“Our apologies,” is somehow expected to be a salve for his wound. Surprisingly, it alleviates it approximately not at all, still very much so there and itching uncomfortably under his sleeve, though the bandages keep it snug.

“That’s not good enough,” Violet insists. “Why were you shooting at a civilian? ”

“That’s confidential information,” repeats the lieutenant, his eyes now narrowed. “Have you seen him since?”

“No,” Violet lies through his teeth and feels not at all bad for it. “Not at a bit. How are you so sure he’s even still in the city?”

Another glance between each other. Violet finds it trite and would really rather they speak with their words. He’s still a little sensitive over this sort of pregnant silence, crossing his legs furiously. 

He gets told, “that’s-” and Violet rolls his eyes a syllable in and finishes gruffly for them, “confidential information. I get it. Is that all you want from me?”

“No,” he gets told, and alongside is given the feeling that he’s lying, too.

A suspicion that is immediately proven, because he sprouts a tail as he leaves. Not that they tell him that, of course not, but it isn’t as though a kitten is born knowing they have a tail. They’re just natural facts of particular existences, such as being a meowing little beast or one that barks into the night or one that walks on two legs, loves the colour purple maybe too much to be considered well-adjusted, and can’t seem to catch a break.

The guy doesn’t even follow him properly, or maybe he’s just a bit too aware of how you conduct any sort of espionage that the way he stalks him is far from exemplary. Too far and then suddenly too close, and then too stationary for him to not blend into the surroundings and be mentally discarded. Violet walks at an easy enough pace back to his estate and the entire time, the chap can’t seem to decide if he wants to stay an fair distance away and view him similar as one would view a venomous snake, or if he wants to breathe down his neck as if he’s the snake and Violet’s the mouse trying desperately to scatter on paws much better suited for the acquisition of comically holey-cheese.

But his appetite has been razed quite handily with the scraps tossed to him by that faithful little military minion, so he sweeps past the pub he had been inhabiting no more than three hours ago with nary more than a glance into the windows as he passes, and then trudges up the route back to his estate, wondering where the best place a mouse would like to hide in a decrepit old crypt.

Past the iron gates that don’t work and the flowerbeds that are more thorn than petal. Between the cracks of the cream-colour pillars, and down the hallway that stretches further than the horizon of a telescope. The wind blustering across his cheeks and the ghosts perched in the corners, watching him stroll in. Easier to walk in a graveyard when you don’t know anyone there, he would think. He’s in the hallway and looking for garden clippers - because if he doesn’t start now, he never will, he muses, a little like he’s already in the valuable motions of concluding something, a mock-up closure - when he hears some enthusiastic squeaking from the kitchen.

The black mop of hair is hardly inconspicuous, even though he’s tried to angle the cabinet in a way that might hide it. Unfortunately it’s too unruly, too wild, to be anything less than something like the way grass will still tickle the bottom of your field of vision when you really mean to be looking at the sunset. So Violet strides over - watches his head snap up as his heels make that forever-arcane click, click, click against the tiled flooring - and then as he’s pulling it back delivers a mildly scathing, “it might have been an idea to tell me that it was the military going after you.”

Pavel frowns up at him. The mouse nest is on his lap, and those beady little eyes all in unison are curious as they peer up alongside their larger little rodent friend, noses wigging out delightfully as they sniffle at the air and curl their itty bitty paws around the edge of the old metal paprika container they’ve crowded up in. If they weren’t wild, Violet would have half the mind to scoop them up and tickle their tummies. “... they approached you?”

Violet nods, straightening his back with a testy little curl of his lips downwards. “Damn near tried to cuff me.”

His eyes widen in horror. “What for ?”

“What else? Obstruction of justice, or whatever,” he says, and he leans forward, hand resting atop the cabinet so he doesn't go and fall face-first into his lap, and continues with, “they’re following me. Either that or get thrown into a cell, I presume were the options. Though,” he cocks his head sadly. “I’ve the sneaking suspicion they’ll be after me once they’ve got you, regardless.” 

“They’re using you as bait, then. That’d be fair to assume. They’re not too fond of us,” Pavel sighs. “You suck. This was the best place in the city to hide. No one comes by here anymore besides thieves looking to drain it of whatever else you had that shined, and the military looks the other way because,” and then he gestures limply to the area, as if to say well, duh - why would they worry about over here? “Why did you even have so much?”

“I didn’t,” he says simply. “Mother and Father did, though. Why’re you here, exactly?”

“I guessed you weren’t coming back,” he says simply, as a mouse nibbles on his nail. 

“Well, I did,” says Violet, and Pavel smacks his lips, tugs his finger away from the curious mouse, and says, “I guess you sure did.”

When nothing follows that mythical little acceptance Violet sighs, and then makes a short grunt as he settles himself ass-first on the flooring next to him. The mice are curious as soon as he does, leaning their noses over their nest in his vague direction and squeaking in the same way he thinks a baby does when they see something they want and garble their way into getting it into their hands.

“I think I’m owed an explanation, considering this has gotten me involved,” Violet murmurs, giving them a finger to play with in the absence of Pavel’s. 

“I didn’t,” Pavel starts, his eyes now on the little mice as they wriggle around to get to this novel item being held out to them. “Mean to.”

“You’re not going to say something about being this prissy because you didn’t want them to come forward to me, right?”

“What? No,” he says with a frown. “I’d like to think you could still handle yourself.”

“Hard to when I don’t know what I’m handling,” Violet points out softly, making Pavel sigh and let his head fall back to bonk the cabinet all grumpy-like - at the noise, all the little mice spin their gazes around to look at him. His eyes squeeze shut and his cheeks scrunch up as if he’s being wrung dry from a pair of invisible hands that have just used him to mop up a spillage before his very eyes.

Then Pavel looks over at him, expression harder than a rock. “They don’t like it. That I’m here, still. They’re concerned about me. Think I’m too representative of what Perland was. It was,” he says quietly, eyes downcast, the foretelling of a storm. “Safer. Where we fought and cared for each other.”

He sits back, lips pulled thin. Paws have started fiddling with his finger again, and he thinks one of them is trying to nibble, so he tugs it back with a glance down at them. There is no apology in their wiggles, so they have forfeited Finger Time. “That’s ridiculous.”

“There are different people in charge, now. No one who remembers what led to it, or maybe they just don’t care. Having someone who does and reminds people is problematic for them. I told you. This isn’t home anymore. Not for me,” Pavel says, turning back to fix his eyes on the corner of the room, where no small amount of cobwebs have turned it into a veritable veil of silk. Something he could have slipped under, maybe, resting on the peak of his scalp and tumbling down the back of his head, his purple hair dyed shades lighter through the whiteness of it. Violet to lilac, noble to whatever came next for him, because it certainly wasn't that, anymore. 

“And you’re back here now because-?”

“Because,” he continues slowly. “I wanted to be. Is that so wrong?”

“Not really,” Violet says earnestly. And then, sobered, says, “though maybe a bit stupid, all things considered.”

“It’s the sort of place I can’t stay away from,” Pavel tells him. “Here. Home. What was, at least. Even if they chase me out, I come to clean my pistol and get new magazines and maintain my gear here. And no one rats me out. Because it’s money, and I’m recognisable enough to the people from before that are still here.”

“Then why did you leave? ” Violet asks. “If they’re worried about you, you could prove them wrong! ” 

“Why should I?” Pavel says, sounding about as exhausted as if he hadn’t slept a week. Considering the circles under his eyes, maybe he hasn’t, Violet thinks quietly. “This isn’t home. This isn’t where I wanted it to be. Not anymore.“

“Why?” Violet urges, because he’s spinning around the answer and he thinks he’s owed at least this courtesy. 

“Because,” he says, and he says, “because we’re,” and then he says, “because you’re,” and then he says nothing else as his mouth shuts and his throat tightens, that alarming paradox of having so much to say - eleven years of it, he has been waiting for this for eleven years and God, Violet thinks he's been waiting even longer - that it all blocks the entrance way of his throat.

Violet spends the wait for him to order his words watching the threading of his brows; the deep breath that brings his chest to a wide plumage like the wingbeats of a bird; the wetting of his lips, frantic and the same dark shade as his tender cheeks. 

His lips part and finally, finally, in a whisper they say, “do you know what I thought about, in there?”

His eyes are distant, far-off, and yet Violet knows he is looking at nothing but him. The attention almost makes him shrink, and he is used to the eyes of many but he is perhaps not used to eyes that a worth a damn to be lavishing across his body, to be viewed as if any second might well and truly be the last moment he can see him, a single, special drop in a river that flows without cessation and never seen again once it passes that part of the bank. 

“No,” Violet breathes.

“You,” says Pavel. “I thought of you. I thought about how you were what made it feel okay to be here.”

Violet swallows. “I didn’t do anything.”

“No, no,” Pavel insists on a breath. “You were brilliant. You always put yourself in front to protect us. You didn’t have to but you did and you don’t- you don’t know what it means to me. I never told you, did I?”

He nears closer, entirely innocent, but when Violet glances to his lips, he sees his eyes widen, just a bit. “Never,” Violet tells him.

“Everything,” Pavel says. “It meant everything to me, so when you left… all that was here for me was a place that would happily let me die if it meant one more day of the nobles getting to see the sun rise.”

“This place does that,” Violet mumbles. “Has a way of crushing you to pieces.”

“You do, too,” Pavel sighs, his eyes falling shut, and Violet’s heart aches enough for it to feel torn asunder. “Like a stab to my shoulder. No,” he amends quietly. “I’ve been pierced there, and it doesn’t measure up.”

“So you left.”

“You left, too,” Pavel shakes his head. His bangs are long, and when he angles his face down they cover his gaze like a curtain would hide the sun from you on a too-blinding hot day. “What was I supposed to do? Stay, when every piece of concrete and brick reminded me of you?”

He wriggles, appropriately mouse-like and uncomfortable. “It’s just a city.”

“It is,” Pavel agrees, to his surprise. “Nothing special. Absolutely everything is rotten, right to its core. But your cologne always masked it and made it smell like roses.”

“I don’t use rose, anymore,” is all Violet manages, feeling a little silly with it.

There is at least a sliver of a smile in his voice when he says, “I’ve noticed. I get it. It- it’s frustrated me, too. I think about it a lot.”

He looks over and suddenly his eyes are utterly entranced by his. Violet blinks, somewhat like a gentle roll of his shoulders to brush leaves off after rushing through bushes, but all it does is make the corner of his lips curl upwards as if to catch those floating leaves. 

“What, not speaking much?” Violet asks, faintly surprised. “But you love the inside of your head!”

There’s a long silence. “You’re not in it, though,” he says.

“If you picture me mentally, I can be inside and sit on your brain chair.”

He laughs again, when Pavel pretends to knock him with his knuckles. “I meant, it’s all well and good to be thinking, but if I can’t say any of it, it’s not like you’ll know any of it.”

“I think I can vaguely understand some non-verbal parts of you,” Violet preens, with a flourish of his hands. “Do you still wring your hands whenever you want to ask something?”

Pavel blinks, and looks a little like someone’s thrown something soft at the back of his head without warning. “Um, pardon? What, do I do that?”

“You do!” Violet says brightly, folding his arms across his chest. “At least, you did. You’d do that, and then whenever you were hungry was the only time you would slouch when you were sitting, and then… oh! I remember whenever your feet hurt, you’d walk on the sides of your feet and avoid your heels.”

He’s started smiling again. In that very Pavel sort of way, the way that almost feels reassuring in that much has changed of them and yet, perhaps the most important bits haven’t. He smiles like how it’s considered day at one in the afternoon despite the sun being completely hidden by a thick blanket of storm, and the sky it sits upon about as dark as a night could be. He smiles like he doesn’t really know how to, but absolutely must at the present moment and has figured out a very silly and small way that works just for him.

“That, too,” Violet says softly, smiling from ear to ear. “Whenever you were happy, you’d just barely curl your lips up. It- I suppose I've been unfair. You speak plenty, don't you? In your fingers and your eyes and your chest."

He sighs, letting his eyes flutter. "I don't get the sense it's much help."

Violet smiles, maybe a little grim. "I'm just a special case," he murmurs. "I'm used to people telling me things."

"Things like you're attractive."

"Things like I'm doing well, you know? I like hearing it."

"Things like you're loved," Pavel says, looking away tiredly.

"Things like I'm a genius, of course."

"I remember," Pavel starts on a subtone, barely audible if he weren't already listening. "Whenever you were feeling down, you’d laugh differently. In your throat; not quite as deep.”

“Really? Wow. I didn’t know that.”

“You did just that, on that night,” Pavel says in a tight whisper, his jaw locked again. Violet’s face falls - and they were doing so well, cultivating the comfortable atmosphere. “Laughed like it didn’t touch your belly. I should have stayed. I think about what I should have done all the time. I always told myself, ‘maybe if I’d listened to myself and gone with you’. Even if I couldn’t say anything, just being there...”

“‘Maybe if I’d’,” Violet murmurs, and they’ve locked eyes again. Briefly, his breath locks, but not negatively. More like how something new, something anticipated, comes protected in a clear seal or a bag that makes it take just a little bit longer to get to the core of it. “‘Let myself say I wanted you to stay’.”

With those firm eyes, so red but so comfortingly so, easy to mistake for fire but really just the soft leaves of autumn that bring with it scarves to bundle up with, hands to hold for warmth, Pavel says. “I would have.”

“I know,” he says. “I know. That’s why I didn’t. The night is to be enjoyed.”

“I’d have enjoyed it with you,” Pavel says. “It was always…” and there’s the sense he struggles here, pausing and swallowing something in his throat, but he pushes through it with a creasing of his forehead. “Fun with you. Even when you were upset or we weren’t managing, just knowing you were there could make me feel better.”

With the exact same tone as before, he says, “your life is to be enjoyed.”

And the crux of it all, the thing that makes all else simply fall away in the face of it: Pavel, up onto his elbow looking down at him, brows threaded straight across his forehead and his raven locks framing the sharp angles of his face like the white porcelain of a plate around a dish, just says, “I haven’t enjoyed a second of my life since you were taken away from me.”

“That’s,” Violet almost sobs, the sight of it making Pavel snort breathily and like air has been lost to him. “Such crap,” and then he barrels into his chest. A quick ‘whoa!’ is all Pavel manages, before Violet’s arms find their way around his waist and lock there tightly, his face burrowing into his chest, waist screaming from the sudden movement but unregarded as important at the present moment.

Because, because, he is whimpering, “I missed you so much, so so much,” into his chest like a chant to summon a rope to tie them together again, again and again, and Pavel spends a moment to look at him like this: broad shoulders slanted in his arms, the crown of his head weakly pushing against his body like the bumping of a kitten, the odd angle the bottom half of his body is angled from the way he leapt so quickly. 

He sighs. Wraps his arms around his shoulders and shuts his eyes. “I missed you, too,” Pavel finally says, and for the first time in many, many years, he thinks he’s sure of it.

They stowaway later, rats in the night silently skittering. No longer the proud wolves they were emblematic of, or maybe it’s just too close for comfort to call yourself akin to a pup who sniffs at the corners of a household and then is shooed away by the ferocious owners. You can bare your teeth, but when you don’t want the house, then the energy isn’t worth using. Better then to rush past the horizon, lick your wounds if you have them, or maybe just settle into one another to sleep the dark away. 

As Pavel is inspecting his bike for safety, Violet bids a goodnight to the mice. “Good little guys,” he’s saying, watching as one flops on its side to get tickled on its belly. “You’re surprisingly well-kept, all things considered. Let me guess - Grumpy over there’s always been bad at practising what he preaches, no matter what he says about survival, and he’s been giving you little baths with his canister and feeding you, right?” 

Squeak, squeak, they say, curiously peering over to look at him, and Violet grins as he pats them all on their little heads with the tip of his finger. Pulling himself straight he hops out of the window, glancing behind him as he does. His tail is extremely unsubtle about the way he pulls himself away from the door and rushes into the ink of the night in the opposite direction, but he doesn’t think he has to be anymore. They’ve certainly abandoned all preconjectures, so he can’t act surprised when they do too.

“You’ve done your errands, then?” Violet asks Pavel, hunched over his bike as he is. 

He nods. “Not much to do. I’m self-sufficient. But it’s hard to handle these sorts of weapons out in the wilds.”

He says that last bit while tapping his waist where his faithful pistol waits. “I guess you don’t really have the right parts for proper maintenance.”

“That, and also no bullets,” Pavel says. “Back then, I only had a single cartridge. Other people in the wilds didn’t know that, but I did. And then I come here, and cartridges are sold next to coffee. I could shoot a bullet a minute here and would be no worse off for it.”

“It’s sort of horrible when you put it like that,” Violet says.

Pavel shrugs. “It should be.”

“So,” Violet sort of announces, under the wind’s étoile. Pavel catches it anyway, his gaze flickering to him. “Solitude to be your best friend, never married but once separated, and you’ve smiled about three times in the time since I’ve returned.”

He sighs like he’s expunging some great evil from the depths of his belly. “Your curiosity never dies, does it?”

“If it were to, I wouldn’t know you in the first place,” Violet replies wink a bright wink. He turns to him, and the wind is frustrated that he turns from her performance and blows his hair askew. It takes a few fingers to hold them out of his eyes. “You were hardly the companionable type when I first approached you.”

He breathes harshly, lips ajar. The exaltation of spirits, maybe. Whatever possession has gripped him, he hopes it hangs on. He’s rather enjoying this more talkative edge to him. “Yet you stayed.”

“Yet I stayed. Do you hate it?” Do you hate me? A question for the childish, but he’s suspecting he might not have matured as much over the decade as he thought he had. 

He doesn’t speak for a bit, silent as he adjusts some handlebars at the peak of his bike, before he pulls his head up from the grass at their feet. But his expression isn’t taut, or angry - it’s three shades of agony, sadness and hurt and the sudden recognition that there’s a lot less that binds a person to another than you think having stagnated for eleven long years. 

He says, “you have to understand, don’t you? You left. You left without a single word and when I kissed Cerise all I wanted was to be sick.”

Violet stays quiet, drawing back. The wind continues its dance between them, and the waving of Pavel’s dark hair in it blends like painting different shades on a canvas of the night sky to create the perfect little picture of it. 

“She knew, you know,” Pavel continues, with an almost frantic tone to his voice. “Six years with her and I never told her I loved her once. The first time we slept together, I imagined you. I never touched her again after that. A year in. Five of her years lost to this. ” He throws his hand like its dirt between them.

Not knowing what to say, Violet shifts on the balls of his feet, “If this is a confession, it’s a pretty rubbish one,” is what he manages, evasive in a very tiresome way. 

“It's not," says Pavel. "I don't think it matters anymore, even if it was."

This time, Violet doesn’t try to say anything. Even a quip would feel in bad taste, and it feels as though the snow has gotten down his back with a coldness permeating the skin at the base of his neck.

“When you left,” Pavel continues. His voice is small, quivering, and Violet almost dares not breathe lest he break it to pieces. “What was I supposed to do? You were- we were… I don’t know. What were we?”

There’s a space they inhabited, he thinks, between the long nights spent over candlelight or the dinners he would gladly exchange all the coin in his treasury if it would extend the duration he could watch him rosy-cheeked and loose from the alcohol for another minute or the patrols bathed in sunlight from ahead, in the way that everyone in the midst of summer will always spend their indulgences as if indolent, perpetual, chronology frozen unlike their hearts.

But summer will change to autumn, and then the leaves fell and they still patrolled and they still dared the stars to retire before them and meals became homemade soups that he would bring his finest mulled wine over. It would always be the most expensive thing in the room by far, and they would mercilessly drink at it until there was nothing left but to ration the remaining sips out until they simply couldn’t remain upright anymore. And then autumn into winter and snow would crunch under their boots and clouds would grey the skies and meals would be warm and hearty and then.

And then what? What did he replace those with?

Always another event. Always another position, always another barbed word delivered like love but heard like lashes. Always another teacup, always another plebian to siphon from. Always more sugar. Always more crowds, always more lights to burn his eyes, always more dragging him places always more rooms full of nothing but heat always more emptiness in his heart when he is left in bed to nurse whatever it is that aches terribly and the shower is on always more, more, more.

Before. Back then. That space, that quiet little space of routine and comfort and amnesty found within another. That love they had, it dawns on him.

“I searched for you,” Pavel whispers. “When you disappeared. I let it be for three agonising weeks, let the rumours wash over me, and then I searched every last area thinking - hoping - I’d find you, dead or alive. Something, to know you hadn’t simply gone without a word.”

Maybe I wanted to be, Violet thinks. This is something he doesn’t dare say - there is no reason to invite him into this maelstrom of golden suffering, he muses quietly.

So instead, his arms wrapped around his body like they’re someone else's, in such a small voice that the snow that drifts gently downwards could collect upon it had it more a mind to stay perpetual, he whispers, “on the night of the festival. There. Do you know what I thought about?”

He is silent when he shakes his head. This is only politeness, to indicate he is listening, but in that irrational way that grips you when these things happen it only infuriates Violet more because he is so damn tired of him not speaking.

“I thought about you,” he says. “You and me. I thought about how much I wanted to speak to you and tell you I was so, so scared of the next few days, and then what came afterwards. I wanted to tell you that I didn’t know what was going to happen and for once, I was worried about what I was going to do next. Without Lilias, what was I supposed to do?”

“You could have told me that,” Pavel says. “I’d have stayed with you, if that’s what you wanted.”

“How could I when I knew you were to be off with her?” He says, miserably.

It was almost pleasant, he thinks privately. To be stranded on an entirely new planet, under an entirely new patchwork of stars that he didn’t recognise and who didn’t recognise him. Remembrance tells a lovely anecdote of immortality, because if you never forget them as long as you live have they really died at all, sitting atop your shoulders and sleeping in your heart, and his mother still lives on in the cranny of his heart that does not widen with his breath and instead felt like a skewer when the scent of tea is too floral and his garden must be overrun now, his halls must be dustier than he left them, the portrait must now be slowly decomposing just like all the bodies of his family in the ground have years upon years ago. All being thought in a bed warmer than his cheeks when she slings her arm around his waist and nestles closer, and doesn’t smell oddly of newly-washed dog or chopped onions or sweat, because he was always terrible about not taking showers before he went under his new sheets.

If he’s made too many mistakes here, then he can start anew with someone who didn’t know any of them. It helped that she was a pretty girl and rows upon rows of previous family patriarchs and their ladies - not a single one reflected what it felt like to look at Pavel, with stern eyes and ginger hands on the man’s arms when all he wanted was to squeeze him tight. 

The wobbling of his voice has Pavel immediately draw nearer, a firefly to its light. “I didn’t know what to say,” Pavel admits. “I thought it would be better to leave you alone that night. You- you were shattered, I knew, and I thought just stepping away would help you sort your thoughts out...”

“No, no,” Violet says. “I’m so sick of being alone. I thought you understood.”

A pause. Quieter, he asks, “then why’d you let me go? ”

He says, “it was easier,” on a mumble and Pavel sighs, hangs his head, and his fingers are tight to lighten the skin around his knuckles.

“I’m sorry,” Violet says. “I was just...”

Scared like the winter was to roll in and wipe his crops clean, nary a stock of food to get him through the season. Scared like he was ten again and hadn’t seen his mother all day, and her ward from three nights before had dissipated leaving the night monsters under his bed to crawl back from their battle lines. Scared like the true amethyst of his talisman reflecting his face back at him, yet rounded by lack of years on this earth before he was gifted his responsibility, and interpreting it as being one in the same.

“I don’t think I would have known what to say even if you had stayed,” Violet admits clumsily. “It’s all well and good to say this now, but…”

He glances over to Pavel to see him glancing over at the hanging moon, or maybe past it where the stars are so far away and so very small but well, so is a tiny little butterfly to sit on them. When he looks back at him, there is a dead look of despondence in his eyes, like the hard, cracked ground once all the grass has been removed. 

“It’s okay to not need words,” says Pavel, maybe a little slower than he should. “If you wanted me to, I’d have just stayed. I think about it all the time.”

Violet snorts, maybe a little mean. “Considering the night you must have had, I can imagine.”

“We didn’t do anything,” says Pavel, earnest and sweet, to Violet’s surprise. “I- I couldn’t say anything to her. We just sat there and watched the performance for a while and then left.”

He clicks his teeth, honestly amazed at this outcome. “You’re just bad in general at that, aren’t you?”

“It’s,” he sighs rough through his nose, chest deflating like a balloon almost cartoonishly. “Hard. To tell her things. Those sorts of things, at least. I knew I should have - she was under the impression of it all, but every time I moved to I felt uncomfortable.” Roughly he shakes his head, like the snow has grown too heavy for it and he’s removing it like a pup would rain water. “I kissed her once on the cheek of my own volition and it felt like agony.”

“That might have been your first indication that something was wrong.”

“Maybe. But then I thought,” and then he sighs again here, loudly, right into his hands like he means to catch it to put in a bottle later. “Then I thought, that’s just what being in love is. Because it hurt plenty when-”

Then he freezes, eyes blowing open wide like he’s watched a bomb go off behind him. Perhaps, considering the military is coming after them, this is an unsavoury metaphor.

“This is a confession, then,” Violet mumbles.

“No, no, uh,” says Pavel, before saying, “that’s not. It’s not what I meant. It’s not.”

“I’ve been in love with you for decades,” Violet tells him, and as he watches his jaw practically unhinge. “Since the moment I met you. You helped me be better. Less drinks, less women, less everything - I didn’t need anything else, when it all paled in comparison. I wish I could have been better to you.”

In trying to be better to both of them, all he did was fail them both. Mother and Father may be dead, but God, he isn’t, and he wonders if that’s penance enough. If this is a chance he has to take, lest he burn in the same absolution he knows they are. If the opposite of this will push him on that path, selfishness be damned - maybe there is no way to do this without another join him. Maybe he's just the type of person who comes in halves, having been born for someone else from the start.

“I thought,” he swallows thickly, and Pavel has progressed onto looking like the bomb has become approximately ten of them. “That meant you deserved more. Than me. Better than always chasing the latest clout or worrying about the upcoming scion, or whatever. So I let you go without saying anything and I, well…”

“God, Violet,” Pavel sighs. “They really fucked you up.”

“This is awful selfish of me to drop on you, I realise, but-”

“Fuck, of course it is, you dick,” he bites out. “What do you even want me to say?”

He shakes his head. “Nothing. You don’t have to say anything.” That isn’t what he’s looking for, after all.

Red flashes from past the building. Violet sees it down the hall. “I think you’re out of time,” Violet tells him and Pavel is quick to nod as he pulls himself up, and then settles on the seat of his bike, though he is mighty resistant about it. “Where are you planning on going?”

He shrugs as he warms the engine up. It’s been on the entire time they were talking, so there’s hardly any need for it, but Violet thinks he doesn’t want to point that out. “Maybe back to Constella. Should check on the ruins - it’s been a bit since I was last there. You?”

“I’ll make do,” says Violet, his forehead creasing. “Maybe not here,” he says, glancing back at the towering estate. “But… somewhere. It’s not home, but-”

But when home feels a little more fluid than a house or a city, with eyes that flame crimson and skin that can’t seem to ever stay clear of scrapes or cuts, he muses, maybe home simply isn’t somewhere he gets to have. How else can he think of snowed in winters side-by-side as home more than his estate; the way the grass shone like emeralds in the merciless summer heat when he accompanied him and his pet to the wide breadth of meadows more than with her?

He’s hesitant, idling as he nibbles the bottom of his, making his engine yell excitedly with another absent turn of his wrist.

Like a hand being held out for him to hold, Pavel says, “come with me. Don’t stay here.”

He dares him to look away, eyes locked on his. Violet can’t so much as blink, lest he lose this pointed glare. 

“If this is about the confession-”

“It’s not,” Pavel hisses at him. “You could be the straightest freak on the planet and I’d still want to throw you over my second seat,” he throws a finger here behind him, to the smooth metal that covers his wheel. “And practically smuggle you out of here.”

“You don’t mean that.”

“God, maybe I don’t!” he throws his hands up in what looks to be giving up. “Who cares, Violet? We don’t live in that kind of world. We live in this world, where you talk about having sex with men just as much as you do women, and that means I have a chance. Logistically speaking,” he adds on hastily, as if he almost forgot this was all hypothetical, really.

“Maybe I’m into men, too,” Violet suddenly - and very unhelpfully - muses here. 

“Maybe I want to kiss you,” Pavel sneers at him, revving the engine in warning. “Maybe I thought about you when I kissed Cerise and maybe when I fucked that guy I was thinking about you, too.”

“You don’t have to do this, you know,” Violet tells him. “You’re allowed to be angry at me.”

“God, but it’s hard to be!” Pavel groans loudly. Loud enough to alert the military to where exactly on the estate they are even if he hadn’t had a tail, Violet thinks with a snort. “It’s so hard to be angry at you when you’re like this. All pathetic and hunched like that. I remember when you’d stand so upright and puff your chest out and looked a lot like a tree. Now you don’t even pass for a bush.”

Weakly, he chuckles. It comes out of his nose, and becomes a thin cloud of mist that soon dissipates in the air between them. “You’re really great at these unappealing comparisons.”

“No, it wasn’t unappealing,” Pavel tells him, and then he says, “it was just like home, to be with the trees,” and then he whispers, “Perland was so different. So little life, here. And then you, like you had life enough for the whole thing.”

“Sorry,” says Violet, a little unevenly. Eyes to the side and fingers curling within each other, tapping his boots together like a one man orchestra of awkwardness.

“You’re not forgiven,” Pavel tells him firmly. “But dammit - you don’t deserve this either.”

Violet steps forward, his hands coming to rest on his knuckles, diligently waiting for his answer before snapping the reins of his glistening horse and driving off into the future, past this time not abandoned but left behind. Between the future and the past, they inhabited that. Houses that weren’t there before and now aren’t; children that he was looking towards and fears that he had not deserted. Nothing more than what they are. 

“Go on,” he whispers, almost pleading - the needy note in his voice is pungent like fattened peonies, and he watches every crease across Pavel’s face deepen as he just barely parts his lips to allow for a sigh that Violet feels collapse across his nose. “Tell me what this is.”

Speak to me. Finally. At the end of the world. A stretched, barren wasteland before them, with nothing more than a promise of florals and security past the horizon. They have walked for so very long, hungry and tired and longing for more than a cracked desert that merely offers them grounding for their feet but if they let it happen now, maybe they can have a little more. Maybe, if they hold on tight this time, the sweat can trace the laces of their fingers, escape between them, and then land on the ground to make a blade of grass that tickles their feet and makes them laugh. For the first time in eleven years that felt longer than a thousand. Say what you mean. 

Pavel says, “I wish this was all you needed,” quietly, mournfully, and then something flashes in his eyes as he looks back up with a start when Violet murmurs, “God, but I think it is,” and that something is, he thinks, joy. Relief. Maybe exasperation in only the fondest sense of it, if he wants to be mean about it.

It’s so simple in retrospect, that none of any of that mattered when they were together. He was not nobility strangled by fate coloured red like the candle-fire, and he was not a plebian left to scavenge and become the soil soon plugged up by the city’s concrete streets. 

He was just Violet, and he was just Pavel. Nothing more but nothing less, not at all lesser. No matter what. 

Because they’re pack animals, in the end. Suffering severely when without the other, and they say that every wolf is just looking for that higher order purpose of its own mobile home. To a wolf - a simple creature, who feels affection and fights and hungers, too, and is just as afraid of all the bright lights of Perland as Violet thinks the two of them are, for they would rather not draw too close on their lonesome, and staying is out of the question - what can be more lit up with meaning than what he feels now? When he clambers atop the back of Pavel’s motorcycle, slips briefly on the stainless steel of the cowl cover in his rush, and then grabs ahold of his waist when he mumbles, “hold on,” and the engine roars, splutters, screams in delayed victory as red lights slash across their path. The snow and dirt they throw up behind them is only the ugliest of ceremonial bouquets, but that’s alright - none of this has felt very pretty, for a very long time. 

And oh, how mobile a home they are to each other, to have been lost in their absence. Winter blows in and without a roof your are snowed in, and then spring comes and it all melts sinking into the fabric of your fur, and then summer comes to make the heat rays burn across you like it does their crop production every year until fall sweeps in and you find more leaves than clothes on your back. A planet apart and still missing the Goddamn necessities of your heart, unused to the sink here and not liking the kitchen’s utilities. Small things that built up and frustrated, reminders that things could have been better, even if the sink was always clean while Pavel’s always had some clogging, and the kitchen could cook more than one thing at a time instead of having to rush cooking the eggs before the toast went cold and hard.

Violet wraps himself around Pavel’s waist - feels him settle back into the ring of his arms, hears him hum in something that sounds a little bit triumphant. They’ve sped past the gates, the expanse of the stars quickly growing more visible once they’re past the aura of lights from the city, and it doesn’t take long for it to begin ageing in his mind before it’s entirely and briefly forgotten about when he pulls himself as straight as he can get while holding on for dear life and looks upwards at the stars whizzing past them. They’re streaks of light as they zoom past, white lines in the sky like cables on dark carpet, or maybe closer to jewels peeking out from the boulders they’re in with the handlebars of Pavel’s motorcycle being their little mining helmet. Underneath them the road soon loses its smoothness to a wild and ornate path that goes bump and makes him hold on tighter.

“Constella, right?” Violet mumbles, pressed up against his back, speaking it into the oak-coloured bridge of the peak of his shoulder and the trunk of his neck.

“If you want,” Pavel replies. In his voice is a smile. Brighter than the stars in that grand overhead dome, he muses. “I’m in no rush. It isn’t as though the flowers will bloom during winter.”

“What if I told you I already missed Perland?”

He shifts in his arms, sort of like the way jelly with rock if you hit the table unintentionally. Violet can’t help but wince; he’s getting a bit tired of accidentally ruining this poor man’s mood. “Do you still want to be a nobleman?”

“I don’t know,” he says slowly. “I’m greedy. I want both.” True freedom is so appealing, and yet part of him feels almost lonely now, having forcefully shed himself of the ghosts of fate's past. They spent so long with him, came everywhere to him, even when the world was not his. Perhaps that’s what he misses, more than he does Perland herself.

“I wish I could say those weren’t incompatible,” Pavel murmurs, mourning gently on his behalf. Perhaps he’s too numb for the reality to have hit him yet, and so he does not join him.

Violet sighs instead, resting his cheek this time on the croon of his neck. He feels him shift again, but this time it’s anything but uncomfortably - he hears him chuckle in the depth of his chest, and then he angles his head to get his chin out the way so there’s more space for his big-ass head there. “I don’t think they were,” he says, careful of his tense.

“That’s the optimism talking.”

“You always were such a rock.”

Pleasantly - forcefully so, Violet thinks, but not thoroughly - he asks, “want me to turn around?”

A pause. The hum of the engine is steady and relaxing, in the same way it’s relaxing to watch a river flow down from the bank. “No,” he answers. “I’m looking forward to this.”

Pavel’s hand goes to his gear stick; he drags it up and steadily, the humming becomes a song, loud and rumbling and persistent. “So? Anywhere in mind?”

A pause. He thinks about this, and it feels like the turning of cogs that have rusted over somewhat. He feels a little like he hasn’t done this for a while. It’s no surprise then that he mumbles, “I have absolutely no idea.”

“You can do whatever you’d like now,” Pavel tells him. “Anything.”

Violet can’t help but cringe into his back. “That’s a lot.”

“We can start small,” he says. “Take it day by day. Decide what you want to do for yourself. Like… what do you want for dinner?”

He hums in the fabric of his shirt. It’s softer than the pleather texture would imply - he’s happy to nuzzle a little deeper, and is overjoyed when Pavel pushes back gently against his forehead. “Mm. What’s on the menu?”

“Whatever’s on the first pit stop we touch down at.”

“I’ve been wondering about this. Is it really safe? The military was awful persistent,” Violet says, brows knitted in vague worry. 

“Nah,” Pavel mumbles. The bike goes over a small pebble, he thinks, and his shoulders jump a little with the hop. “We’re not criminals. They won’t do anything if we’re not there. Not their jurisdiction, even if they wanted to, once we’re out the Perland area.”

“Okay. If you're wrong, you're getting hung first. I want soup.”

“You’re getting more than just liquid. I don’t want to keep stopping so you can piss.”

“Soup and garlic bread?”

“I can’t stand the smell of garlic.”

“You might as well let me starve,” he grumbles, hears him chuckle, and then he turns back to the landscape speeding by them. 

The bumps in the road are more frequent now, and rather than surprising he’s come to think of them more as if offering a nice break up of the galloping of the engine. Around the roads, the desolate earth still remains, patches of crops specific to the city where they can manage them long-since left behind, but as they shoot like a bullet further down the road and towards the border more greenery greets them. A tree here, some bushes there - a fox, at one point, watches them curiously from atop a rock, and its yellow eyes as they speed past are warmer than any of the lights that had shone in Perland. Before he next speaks they have broken into the better quality ground that indicates they’re approximately halfway through to the Aakhen border. More trees spring up here, and in the darkness of the sky the leaves melt into it. Large blades of grass hugging fences that guard tall shrubbery, the tell-tale shuffling noise of beasts in the night finding this their best hour to strike and growing startled when Pavel’s headlight cleaves the night before them in two.

There’s a split in the road, and Pavel takes the left. “Try to forget about it. Perland. It’s not what it used to be.”

“I know,” Violet murmurs. They’ve gone so far, but the moon is still in the same quadrant in the sky, just slightly to the left of where it was when they’d left. There is something very reassuring about that. “I just wish I’d been better to her.”

He’s quiet for a moment. “I wish she’d been better to you,” he says, and it makes Violet’s heart ache terribly to think about. “More than just letting you survive.”

“No,” says Violet. “I wasn’t surviving. I was entirely adequate in life.” Fed daily and clean and uncold; to imply he was anything but kept for would be an insult to those who weren’t.

“Not living,” Pavel says. “Surviving.”

Perhaps I was with you, is what he wants to say, thinking of the comforting glow life took on when he was in his vicinity or there was at least promise of closeness, in all the same ways it feels brighter when the edges of winter suggest the passing of the baton to warmth anew, but his throat is tight and his jaw is somewhat locked up. He hopes to say it in the way he tightens his hands into his shirt, pressing his forehead against his like he thinks in doing so, it really would take a cleaver to pull them apart.

“Stupid sap,” Pavel laughs quietly. Maybe it’s predictable in it’s own dumb way, that he’d know how to read his mind by now.

Violet reaches up, grabs his blustering ponytail, and tugs on it (with the potency of a newborn - he’s not in the mood of causing a violent motor vehicular accident that winds up with them a mish-mash of bodies, in reality). “Says you.”

“Beer or wine tonight?”

“Told you. I’m greedy as hell. Both, and I’m sleeping on the bed, and you’re coming with me.”

“Yeah,” says Pavel, laughing, lurching alarmingly as a pebble larger than a knuckle passes them by. “Yeah, you sure fucking are.”

The true confession - the writing on the wall, really, what he could have looked down and said written in the way the earth stayed steady for him with him and then shook terribly when he was not, for all the way he’d managed to hide it - Pavel delivers in the middle of an explosive argument not even a week later. Violet is just in the middle of waking up in a warm bed that he thinks he’s earnestly happy to be a part of this time, instead of feeling as though the bed is being weighed down by the same thing his shoulders are whenever he pulls himself out from under the covers and trudges over to brush his teeth, and as he snakes his arms around Pavel’s waist while he stands at the sink of the inn they’ve kipped at, he spins around to face him and says, “you are so fucking selfish. You’re such an asshole. You are never doing that again, okay? You are telling me what’s happening next time,” and then says, “I love you so much, you piece of shit,” and then says, “what do you want to do for breakfast?” before poking him in the chest with a finger that is about as accusatory as a pair of fucking iron-clad cuffs.

To which Violet, in his yet-sleepy haze of not really knowing what’s happening, frowns at him and bats his finger away to slur, “I damn well better hear you tell me if you don’t want me going,” and then, “I thought about you, too. When she kissed me and God, I think I thought about you before I even met you,” and then goes, “pancakes or I’ll throw a fit,” before he steps forward and shoves his lips onto his.

There’s the faint taste of mint and a wetness across the bottom of his lips, some collected at the corners too. Pavel’s hips bang terribly against the sink as he’s pushed up against it, and when Violet plants a hand onto his Pavel wastes no time in lacing them together, like he’s making a tapestry out of their fingers.

“Awful,” Pavel’s mumbling between kisses. “Terrible.” Kiss. “Maybe if I-” Kiss. “Do this enough, you’ll-” Kiss. “Get the picture.” Kiss.

“Enough,” Violet hisses. He tightens his grip around his wrist tight enough to make a dark bracelet when he later pulls away. “You are going to regret this. I’ll never leave you alone, you know.”

“Good!” Pavel snaps in return. “Good! That’s all I want. That’s all I wanted!”

He kisses him again, and against his lips mumbles, “it’s all about me, is it?” grinning madly.

“Right back at you,” Pavel chuckles. “Ruining your life for me. Aren’t you embarrassed?”

“No,” he tells him. His grin is stretching across his face, sleepy flush resting across the bridge of his nose and flowing down his cheeks like foot traffic across its bricks. “No, not really.” 

In the upcoming years, for things are never easy, the loneliness of turning away again will eat like moths do his pretty petticoats abandoned within that dead estate, and he will feel it painfully when he reaches his mother’s age upon her death, and then again the year after when he realises he only knew when his father was born when he chances across a passage regarding his family in a brand-new historical book released only a week ago. He will be standing in the middle of the Constellan plaza where all the little travelling merchants put up their stalls and the next moment he will be on his knees because the part of the chapter on Perland’s nobility that details the Harrison’s will end discussing how the youngest disappeared after the war and never returned, leaving the estate in the purgatory reserved typically for the judged and the barred. 

But then he will get past it, and he will return to feeling just an edge more comfortable in his new body. This one fits perfectly, he will think - the other like too-worn shoes that no longer fit his skeleton, or maybe it never did. His new one provides ample space for Pavel to cuddle up within, and also for him to hide sheepishly behind when they meet Cerise again for the first time since their separation, this time as a trio. He will know when Pavel has firmly forgiven him, finally, when on the first day of spring they visit the Shandran ruins, and he takes Violet’s hands tenderly in his when he manages to snip himself while cutting the yellow rhododendrons he was trying to help clean up. He will think he will never know if Mother and Father will ever find it in their chests to forgive him, and he will finally be able to smell Pavel’s cologne when he lets himself think that maybe, he doesn’t have to.  

For now, though. For evermore, now. He tastes of mint and affection and frustration and exhaustion and water and fire and aged wine, mulled berries and aloevera and laughing, laughing, “God, is that my cucumber moisturiser? You ass, I barely have any left! You better share, I’ll get some on my lips like this, see, c’mere-”