Mayfair Manor

[Okimiyage]

Dorian gave his antagonist a nasty glare, then realized that contorting his features as such was liable to cause wrinkles. Relaxing his face, the man swept a lock of hair behind his ear in a gesture that could only be described as ‘preening’. “Other people will never be able to love you as well as you love yourself, darling. You act as though there’s something wrong with a little self-confidence.” Arching a brow, he gave Jack a smug, cat-like smile. “Although I don’t blame you for being jealous, you’ll have plenty of time for that when you’re playing housewife.”
With a languid stretch, he drained his shot-glass and sauntered out of the room, with a distinctly icy air. Enough of being insulted. Time to get dressed.
Jack was wrong, of course, but he didn’t have to be such a b***h about it. Dorian wouldn’t have hung out with the cousins if he didn’t like his family, at the very least. Getting all done up for weddings and all that was fun, but the good genes of the Mayfairs always ensured that there was a healthy amount of competition for the attention of any semi-attractive guests at the family events. Dorian didn’t mind competition—thrived amidst a good challenge, in fact—but he would have found it gratingly unnecessary if he’d actually been looking for a long-term lover.
He reminded himself that he wasn’t. Anyways, he was young. There would be plenty of time to settle down in the future. Why the cousins felt it urgent to rush into these arrangements, Dorian would never understand.

Passing Cian on the stairs, Dorian chucked his empty shot glass into the other’s hands. “Come on, don’t keep them waiting. You don’t get many nights like this as a married man. Make the most of it.”
This was Dorian’s idea of encouragement.

Cian blinked up out of his reverie as the shot-glass came plunking into his hand, then sighed and shook his head. Antha passed Dorian on the stairs, miraculously managing to avoid tripping over the train of the man’s extravagant dressing-gown, and sat down beside him.
Cian listened patiently to what she had to say. As her jaw came down to rest on his shoulder, his arm came up, almost automatically, to drape loosely around her waist.
“You don’t have to explain,” he said, quietly. “I trust you. All that I ask is—“ he paused, turning over the thought. What did he ask? What could he insist on, knowing what he did, without being selfish? “Be careful.” The shot glass in his hand flipped, spun briefly on the tips of his fingers, and then dropped to be clenched within them. “Come back safe.” He sighed, and unwrapped his hand from around her, and let her leave, tossing the shot glass from hand to hand.
He couldn’t protest. If he had been taught anything in the years of being in raised in the mess of a nest that the Calais called a ‘home’, it was that there were…obligations. Antha had more of her fair share of them. And his obligation was—for the moment—to be a good husband. A good father. To go out and have fun at this bachelor party, so that she could excuse herself for an evening, to not ask questions where questions would ordinarily be due. If that was all she asked of him…well, Cian could handle it.
Standing, shouldering his bundle at Jack’s request, giving his wife’s back only a little of a despairing look, he returned his child to her coterie.

Upstairs, Rynn locked his hands together as Alistair did his best to give the gist of the situation.
The low lights of the library’s lamp sconces cast their glower across his face, giving it a curiously pensive quality. The universe did not shift like that for any idle reason, it would not have quaked like it did if there had been nothing at stake, here. The ‘ghost’—the mirage, the premonition of the boy whom Sebastien would be—would not have crossed space and time for speculations.
When Antha joined them, Rynn barely noticed, pacing the floor like a scholar. There was a well-worn groove beneath the carpet where others had walked the same strides before.
For a moment, Rynn paused his pacing, and opened his mouth as if to speak to her.
Then, it shut again, sharp as a trap. Antha knew what he had to say. Something was going to happen tonight—something that would change the course of history, and it was up to them to make sure that it went right. There was no room for petty romantic intrigue here, no room for Rynn’s redundant contributions, no room to waste on the mights and ifs of what could happen. They had to make this work, if it meant spinning time like a top upon the finger of the Mayfair legacy.
Finally, his eyes flashed, glowing with the sallow light as they landed on Antha’s recumbent form, and the question she had asked perhaps a minute ago finally registered.
“Ah. Yes.”
“The ancestors are out. They’re going hunting for the next of kin.”
After a moment, he realized that his audience would need some kind of explanation. The Mayfairs did not use the same vocabulary as the Calais.
“it’’s fine. They’re…very good at waiting. But it means their—the twins—their powers are waking up. As Alistair’s encounter with Sebastien would indicate just as well.”
His shoulders twitched in a weak approximation of a shrug. “It’s unusual this early on. But it’s not entirely unexpected. After all, I’ve been sleeping under your roof for quite some time. To their mind, I’ve abandoned the ancestral grounds. Of course they’d seek out their new residence, their new heirs.”
He paused, rubbing his nose thoughtfully.
“It might be just as well if we go elsewhere tonight. That would confuse them, give us a few days. Unless, of course, they’ve already become attached to this place. They’re unpredictable like that. They don’t see like we do. Time is just another corridor to them.” He turned a sharp glance to Alistair. “Which might be why Sebastien moves through it so easily. With even a fraction of their…experience, I don’t like to think what doors he could open at his will.” With a laugh that was half sigh, half hollow stab at humor, Rynn collapsed on the couch next to Antha. “We might have created a monster.”  

[XCandy and LunacyX]

Before Rynn had even finished, Alistair had gone stiff as a frightened cat, staring across Antha at the other boy with wide, incredulous eyes. Afterwards, in the brief moment of silence as Antha went terrifyingly still, he gave a helpless sigh and the irritated murmur of, “I can’t believe you told her.”
But then he stopped because Antha had stood up, a little unsteady on her feet, holding a hand up as if she needed a moment to process what she had just heard. “You saw my son?” she asked finally, her voice like the calm before the storm, eyes narrowed dangerously on her twin, “Moving through time, what…what does that even mean? What happened?”
“Evie…” Alistair murmured, helplessly, “There’s nothing you can do. I didn’t want something else worrying you when---” But Antha cut him off, refusing to let him wind around giving an answer.
“Do not ******** with me where my son is concerned, Alistair,” she shouted, so violently that he nearly flinched, “I will break either or both of your minds to find out if you won’t tell me.”
She had barely turned her cutting gaze on Rynn, he being the easier of the two to break, when Alistair made a grab for her attention. “He was just a messenger, Evie!” he shouted desperately, seizing her by the wrist, “He just…” The boy sighed, helplessly, lowering his gaze like he didn’t know how to proceed. Antha was glaring at him intently the entire time, ruthless, every bit the protective mother lioness ready to pounce. “Antha, listen to me.” While he settled into quiet resolve, speaking gently, Antha tensed up suspiciously. He tried to soothe her, taking her hand and offering a weak smile. “The danger is ours,” he whispered, gesturing to Rynn to indicate the plural, “He only came to warn us. But more importantly, Evie…if I told you what’s to happen after you’re gone, do you think your resolve can really take that blow? Can you bear to know what we have to face when you can’t do anything about it?”
It was then, finally, that Antha wavered. She seemed to be considering the idea very seriously, eyes flashing darkly at her brother, and he pounced on that weakness as his only chance to calm her fury. “Nothing is ever going to happen to your children, Antha. We would never let it. We have an entire family that would throw their lives between those kids and any danger without a second thought. No, we’re the only ones in danger, but Antha…you have to let us deal with it ourselves. You can’t help, you’ll be long gone. And we can’t put that on you when there’s nothing you can do, especially with so much already on your mind. So…trust me, okay?”
Several long moments passed afterwards, Alistair staring desperately up at his sister as the struggle played out across her face. Like she couldn’t bear the idea of not knowing, of being completely useless in whatever was going on, but acknowledging deep down that Alistair was probably right. Knowing would only test her resolve to meet her fate, or else make her sick with worry beforehand. She had to trust her little brother.
Without a word, only an irritated, despairing gleam in her eyes and the smallest sound of frustration, Antha turned and stalked out of the room, slamming the door behind her. Relieved, Alistair let out a deep breath and slumped back in his seat like liquid. “You are so dense…” he murmured quietly, glancing sidelong at Rynn, “You shouldn’t have mentioned it to her. Things are difficult enough without adding this s**t to her list of troubles.” But he sighed as if there was no helping it, no going back, standing up and towering over Rynn on the couch with arms folded. “You have no idea how close we just came to brain aneurysms. Evie’s power to break minds is no joke, and it gets messy when she’s in a fury like that.” And then, running a hand back through his vivid curls, a thought seemed to occur to him and he half-laughed, musing, “That’s twice in one day I’ve had to save you. You seriously owe me.”
Before there was any chance of a reaction---before he’d actually thought about it, really---an idea seemed to occur to Alistair and he acted on it instantly, exacting repayment in the form of a kiss. There was no mistaking it for a joke, he was perfectly serious about it, brief though it was. “That’s your payment,” he said when he drew back, grinning, “If you don’t want to have to pay it again, be more careful from now on.”
He had hardly finished when the door was thrown back open, Antha appearing in the door in an irritable fit. “What are you two still doing in here? We have work to do.”
“Work…?”
“Training, in Rynn’s case. I need to watch him or the airship will devour him. And I need you to refortify the house. We have our own ghosts to protect it, but I don’t want to take any chances in letting the Calais ancestors make themselves at home. They can pitch tents in the garden until they fade out for all I care, but I don’t want them back in this house.”
“Got it,” the boy said, like it was a trifling detail he simply hadn’t thought of, and then looking at his sister gave a heavy sigh, muttering, “Ahh, it’s no good. You’ve already marked him, he’s tainted.”
For her part, Antha blinked as if she had no idea what was going on. “What in the hell are you talking about?”
“Nothing,” he brushed it off with another sigh, stuffing his hands in his pockets and strolling towards the door, “Just thinking about Rome, that’s all.”
When he was gone, Antha watched him vanish down the hallway and then turned back to Rynn with narrowed eyes. “I’m not even going to ask why you’re so red,” she declared after a moment, walking over and seizing his hand to pull him to his feet, “Since Airi’s involved, I can more or less guess.” And judging by the mention of Rome, he was irritated that she’d kissed him first, even if she barely remembered it in the chaotic mess of the memory. “Never mind, let’s go. Your begrudging sense of sexuality aside, we have work to do.”
Alistair was already busy when Antha brought Rynn up to the attic, shoving aside boxes and taking chalk and a container of what appeared to be blood to the windows and baseboards with a fine-tipped paintbrush, the very faint figure of Marguerite trailing excitedly behind him. “Evie, I need your hair,” he called as she passed, twirling a lock of his own around his finger, “Mine’s not long enough.”
“Check the brush in my room,” she replied, and then pausing added, “I think Pierce kept yours when he cut it. That’s enough for a lifetime of wards.”
While he hopped to his feet, seeking out Pierce, Antha dragged Rynn through the forbidden door, closing them in the altar and opening the door again to the airship. “We’re going to be spending a lot of time here from now on,” she explained as she kept walking, exiting the cabins and tromping down the steps to the belly of the beast, “Cassian is our medium in this whole affair. Without him, there’s no ritual. We have all the pieces but the magic, the actual fiber of it, exists solely in him, and we’d need decades to fashion a new ritual from scratch.”
Entering the control room, she took up a microphone from an aging piece of machinery, pressing the button until the speakers all throughout the airship crackled to life. “Cassian, please report to the upper deck sick bay. I repeat: if you want to see Nero put back down and you ever want another mermaid again, report to the upper deck sick bay.” Replacing the microphone, she gestured at Rynn to follow her back out, murmuring uneasily, “It’s not safe to stay down here too long. The imps, you know.”
Back upstairs, in the lavishly appointed first-class section, she led Rynn back to the rundown infirmary, gesturing for him to take a seat on the hospital bed. “I’ve never explained it to you fully, have I?” she mused while she drifted around the room, locking the doors and rummaging around in cabinets, “It took an entire coven of first-generation vampires years and years to concoct the ritual that put Nero down. Theoretically, we could craft something similar that could be carried out by witches, but we simply don’t have the time, and absolutely zero room for error. If this doesn’t work on the first try, that’s it, game over. You can only sacrifice me once, after that it would take sacrificing half the city, and once he knows what we’re up to, it’s not likely to work. But that’s why you’re the key, Rynn. Dead magic like yours is the nearest thing to vampire magic, and you have enough power lurking in you to do it yourself. You just have to---ah.” Nearby, the paper curtains rustled and Antha narrowed her eyes. “Cassian. We can begin, then.”
Turning, she pulled a chair over beside the bed and instructed Rynn to lay down. “This will hurt,” she warned him, setting her phone on the bedside table with the timer running. “Do you remember what we did before? Think of that as a preparation. This time, instead of crawling through you, you’re actually going to be linked to Cassian. He’s going to focus on the ritual they did and essentially, you’re going to be him in his memories. Every time you go through it, it will bend your magic a little bit, warp it and shape it until, eventually, you’ll be able to do it yourself in reality. Just try to focus on the magic---the distinctive feel of it, the texture. Feel how it reacts when it comes into contact with Nero, how it takes all that dead flesh and paralyzes it, how it puts him to sleep. That’s what you have to be able to do.” Glancing once at the timer---which ran erratically, slowly for a while and then quickly for a while, with no rhyme or reason to it---Antha glanced at the flash of a shifting blob that hovered over them and then sat back in her seat, looking at Rynn. “Are we ready to begin?”

Downstairs meanwhile, while the boys were plotting out their exact course of action---which strip clubs in which order---Alistair appeared in the doorway with eyes narrowed at Pierce, demanding shortly, “My hair, what did you do with it?”
He gave a start at that, brows furrowing. “It’s in a little blue box in our room. In the corner I think, with a bunch of magazines. Why?”
He noticed for the first time as the boy turned around the he had Antha’s silver brush in his hand and was carefully picking strands out of the bristles. “Calais ghosts,” he answered simply enough, as easily as if were only a rat infestation he was dealing with, “Evie wants the house’s defenses tweaked to keep them out. We were due for a tune-up anyways, most of the wards are faded and not up to our standards to begin with.”
“Should we be worrying?” Courtland asked in a purr, leaning forward with his chin in his palm, and Alistair paused just in the hallway, seeming to think about the question.
“I wouldn’t,” he said after a moment, shrugging, “Not yet, at least. The Calais ghosts are powerful, but we live in one of the most powerful magic fortresses in the world. We just never really had to defend against ghosts before.” They tended to stay in the same place for the most part, after all.
When he was gone again, Courtland hummed to himself, glancing towards the stairs and murmuring, “Alistair’s scrawling wards in blood and hair and Rynn’s taking magic lessons with Antha in the airship. I wonder which I feel sorrier for?”
Unanimously, the rest of the cousins instantly offered their votes. “Rynn.”
Courtland grinned wickedly in response, with a hint of sympathy for good measure. “I’ll have to agree, since darling Alistair isn’t using his own blood. There’s nothing in this world that could sway me to take crash courses in magic from Evie, not with the s**t she likes to get into. I’m still curious where she picked up necromancy…”
“Forget the Calais ghosts, should we be worried that she’s helping Rynn weaponize his magic right now? She’s the only person I know that can cause someone else’s brain to bleed out just with her mind, and I’d like to keep it that way.”
“Rynn doesn’t have her power,” Courtland reminded his cousin, a little uneasily, “He never will. No one ever will. Which is probably for the best, in the end.” When even Antha admitted that no one should ever have the kind of power she did, not even her, it was probably true. “So, the Gold Club? Or are we thinking something classier?”  

[Okimiyage]

Rynn didn’t seem to notice the reaction that his words had garnered, at first. He was staring absently into space when he began to feel the heat of Antha’s glare on the back of his neck. He swung about, and the indignant what he had been preparing died halfway out of his mouth and turned into a faint, despairing ‘oh…’.

Stupid, dense Rynn again. He was expected to withhold so many secrets these days, how in hell was he supposed to keep them all straight?

Still, although the blast of her voice made him flinch, he did not cower back into the cushions, or hide his face. What could he repent for?—other than opening his stupid blabbering mouth, that is. Sebastien had chosen to deliver his message to Alistair, not his mother—and no matter how indignant it left her, she had to accept that there had been a reason behind it. Rynn couldn’t imagine that any offspring of Antha’s would traverse such distances for some idle amusement.
Perhaps it was because, while they would never know their mother outside of portraits and photographs, in the future which that Sebastien had come from, Alistair was the closest thing he could get to her doppelgänger.
But Antha hated the idea of being useless, especially here, where her children were concerned. Rynn could understand that kind of protective instinct.

Still, Alistair’s soothing words seemed to cast their magic effectively upon the bridling mother. Although Rynn saw the beginnings of an argument working their way up her throat, she forced them back magnificently and stalked out of the room, as affronted as a cat brushed backwards.

He hadn’t realized he’d been holding his breath until then.

Rynn let it out in the same moment as he gave Alistair a helpless little shrug.
“I’m sorry. I wasn’t thinking—I let myself get distracted by—“ he made a little loop with his upturned pointer finger, raising it towards the ceiling as if to indicate the spirits above. “—well. All of this.”
“Although you’re right, I do owe you. I don’t think there are many people outside your bloodline that have worked Antha up quite so much in one day and lived to tell the tale—we really ought to warn her about her blood pressure next time—mmph.“
It was at that moment that Alistair shut him up, namely because the other boy’s lips were on top of his.

When the other withdrew, Rynn’s face was scalding red as though he’d been dunked face-first in boiling water. He cleared his throat, dug in a finger around his collar, and stood so swiftly that he nearly knocked his head into Alistair’s. He didn’t know what to say. Words spun in his head like a kaleidoscope, but none of them made it to his lips. Despite his burning face, he felt frozen in place.
Luckily, before he could figure out how to react. Antha rescued him. He ducked his head to avoid looking at Alistair, and exited into the hall gratefully, if gracelessly.

Once the door was closed, he bit his lip, tasting Alistair there, and turned his eyes towards the ceiling. The world felt turbulent, like the roiling waters of a whirlpool, and Rynn hanging just below the surface.

“…tainted,” he muttered to himself, just under the range of hearing, reviewing the past few minute’s events as they walked along the corridor. The word made him want to growl, and he didn’t know why. He’d made such an effort to remain detached, pure of purpose. Did any of it matter, now?

Upstairs, as Antha shoved away the clutter to clear a space for their workings, Rynn settled on top of an old steamer trunk (which, to his chagrin, would leave a clear imprint of its dust upon the back of his trousers) and watched the red-haired twins work. He didn’t have long to wait; the two worked in tandem, like the gears of a well-oiled machine turning smoothly against one another, without need for any spoken direction. It seemed only seconds before Antha grabbed his hand, pulling him up, and dragging him through a door that stank of blood and sacrifice.

Rynn’s feet stumbled on the threshold. He already didn’t like it here. He could tell that it was a construct, much as the catacombs beneath the Calais labyrinth had been, but that didn’t put him any more at ease. The catacombs had been familiar where this was foreign, filled with the comforting presence of the ancestors and their power—whereas this, this foray into Antha’s groaning metal abstract, was filled with impressions of terror, pain, vengeance.

Perhaps they weren’t so different after all. It was only that here, Rynn was the foreign presence, the alien to Antha’s native land. He thought he could hear giggling, distantly, through the pipes.

It was cold in the airship. Despite himself, Rynn found himself shaking the frigid air off his arms. When Antha directed him towards a reluctant seat on the hospice beds, the sheets were as hard as a sheath of ice. “I don’t suppose I could ask for a blanket?” he mumbled, as he lowered his head onto the hard, frosty pillow. His breath was beginning to come out in a fog. He tried to remember the heat that had only so recently left him, the kiss that had cause his skin to burn in the library below. He tried to remember what it was like to sink into his magic, like a warm blanket—like a lover’s embrace—the comforting, numb feeling as his senses grew dull and sleepy, and his mind woke.
Eventually, the fog disappeared. Rynn’s body temperature dropped, but he didn’t feel the chill.
The ancestors were singing. He had not yet opened his eyes, but Rynn could see a light ahead of him, growing out of the void ahead like a white bloom in a midnight garden.
Cassian.
The name chimed like a bell through his consciousness. He couldn’t remember where he’d heard it before. All that mattered was that this was what he sought, like arrow to target. Antha had primed the path for him. He simply had to follow.
As he drew nearer to the light, he began to see that it was no light at all, but a pale, formless mist.
There were faces in the miasma, or perhaps that was only his imagination. For a moment, he could see his brothers, and himself, masked and robed, amidst the menagerie of the ancestors—lion and sparrow, stag and hare, fox and falcon, all shifting through the fog without words or expression, singing in a rhythmic, wordless, interminable chorus.
He was within arm’s reach, now, and the mist reached back for him in thin, coiling fingers. Rynn knew better than to demand anything of the spirits. Their gifts were capricious, to say the least. It was not the proper form to demand their favor, only to barter for it.
Antha Mayfair could not understand the way that the Calais bloodline conducted their rituals. Power was something that she demanded from the universe, and it suppled in dutiful obsequence. It did not need to be cajoled forth.
The boy—for that was all he was, now, nameless amongst the endless cache of dead and forgotten names—remembered what it had been like to speak to the ancestors. It had been so long since he had slept atop their sarcophagi, since he had seen them like this.
In the dreaming world, where Antha waited for him to awaken, tears began to creep from underneath Rynn’s long eyelashes. He neither sobbed nor stirred in his trance; only the trailing salt water, crossing his pale cheeks, marked his progression.
In the dream-state, he said:
I have been given a kiss.
And they sighed, remembering the sweetness of a kiss, remembering all such kisses that they had received in life.
He said,
And a new home.
And they snarled, and growled, and chittered amongst themselves—for who was he to abandon their home, their ancestral grounds, over which so much blood had been spilled, and so much had been sacrificed?
He held up his hand, his palm opened, and they quieted. The mist coiled about his fingers. Surprisingly, he found that his voice was steady.
For your sake, I would have spilt her life’s blood upon our altar.
Again and again, I tried to complete that ritual.
Again and again, she has forgiven us.
The voices of the ancestors quieted. In the stillness that followed, the boy drew a shaky breath, and went on.
We cannot continue as we have.
Our land is barren.
Our blood is stale, and black.
No magic, no art, could return what we have lost.
The voices of the ancestors grew at this, their whispers forming a tsunami on the verge of collapse.
But she has given us new blood—
Silence.
Strong blood.
Unlike we have ever seen.
The boy’s eyes were wary. Behind their masks, it was impossible to calculate the reaction of the army of spirits which gathered before him.
For the future which I have been shown, I ask your aid. Your allegiance.
What the future may hold—
he hesitated at this.
I do not know.
But it is better than no future at all.
For my failings, I ask forgiveness.
Take of me what retribution you will.
But consider the price we have all paid for it.
He closed his eyes. His hand fell to his side.
The clammy mist folded in around him, but he remembered the kiss that burned.
When he opened his eyes, there was nothing but gray, endless fog.
The ‘ground’ that he stood on sank away. He could feel his slow descent begin.
But it would have been much faster without the hands that wrapped around his limbs, passing his body from faceless form to form. The ancestors did not clutch greedily at him as they once had. They caressed his face, laying their own cold kisses upon his cheeks, his eyelids, his forehead. When their own lips pressed against his, he could feel the air that they stole upon parting.
Rynn could not remember what it felt like, the embrace of the ancestors. He could not recall when their hunger had last been sated.
Upon the hospital bed, the rise and fall of his chest slowed, each intake growing more and more shallow.
Eventually, it stopped altogether.
In the depths of the void, Rynn found himself staring in the face of another whom he did not recognize.
An electric tingling spread through his body, starting at his fingers and rising towards his chest.
He did not know the name of this spirit, but he could guess, in a whisper that startled one who thought he had no more breath to give.
“Cassian.”

Downstairs, as Cian made his rounds amongst the celebrators, the mention of his old surname caught his ear.
The cousins had made sure to fill his glass with brandy already, nearly to the brim, and Cian took a swig from it in preparation before he dared to assess the situation.
What he heard next, though, nearly caused him to spit out his liquor.
“They’re here?”
The ghosts had always been part of the maze, trapped securely within its endlessly twisting passageways. It was impossible to imagine how they’d gotten out—
But then, Cian recalled the collapse of the catacombs, the way those immaculately carved supports beneath the labythinth had cracked and fallen to the wayside in the wake of Antha’s power. s**t.
Another gulp of brandy, this time to steady his nerves. Cian pulled his sleeve across his mouth, then gave Alistair a glare that could have knocked most men off their feet.
“What the hell, Airi. You could have warned us, for chrissakes. Don’t tell me that you three are conducting rituals and s**t right over the heads of my children…”
The look on Alistair’s face, nonchalant as only a Mayfair could be, caused Cian to groan.
“So help me, I’d threaten to clock you if you weren’t on your way to repair those wards.” Glancing around at the red-headed flank of cousins, half of them already inebriated, he gave out an exasperated sigh. “I don’t suppose it would do any good to storm up there, would it?”

Dorian pushed his way through the crowd, eyes aglow with the warm light of the whiskey his cup contained. His crisp white shirt was already on the verge of rumpling, and they hadn’t even left the house yet. “Oh! Well, I could volunteer—” He pointed in what seemed an arbitrary direction, then spun towards Courtland, so that the extended finger was aimed towards his intended. “Also, yes, Gold Club. Cian hasn’t been there yet, has he?”

Momentarily distracted, Cian gave a derisive huff. “Of course I’ve been there. I haven’t been locked in a hermitage like Rynn for most of my upbringing—“
“But you haven’t been with us.” Dorian interrupted, making a grandiose gesture with his drink which—unfortunately—resulted on half of it spilling on the nearest available shirt. In this case, Jack’s. “So you haven’t really been at all. We’d be doing you a complete disservice if you were allowed to settle into the life of a house-husband without exposure to this range of experiences, my dear. Antha would cry if we let you escape at this point.”
Twisting his head in order to complete the theatrical pose that he then assumed, Dorian flung a sly wink in Alistair’s direction, from the eye that Cian couldn’t see. The message was clear enough: ‘Get going, while we distract the worrywart.’  

[XCandy and LunacyX]

“You can storm up there if you’d like,” Courtland sighed, idly swirling the amber liquid in his glass, “But it won’t do you any good. You could walk right into the altar, but you won’t find them. The airship won’t open for you, only one of the aristocrats, the architects. That is, us. And there’s not a damn one of us that would take you there, knowing what it would do to you, and what Antha would do to us afterwards.”
Casting a fleeting glance at Jack, something seemed to pass between the two boys and the latter popped up behind Cian, resting his chin against the top of his head and rubbing his shoulders, “Just relaaaaax. You need to learn to do what we do---pretend nothing is happening and let Antha handle it until she decides otherwise. She knows what she’s doing, and we only get in the way.”
While that was happening, Courtland seized Dorian by the sleeve, pulling him close enough to whisper without being overheard, “Go check on them, will you? It makes me uneasy, Antha being alone in the airship with prey…” And Rynn was just the kind of target the airship loved to devour, pretty and angry and powerful. Even if Antha was the master controller for that little sentient universe, he didn’t put it past the airship to try and push her. And Dorian was the only one that wouldn’t be missed at the moment, though he didn’t mention that.

Back in the aforementioned sentient universe, by the time Dorian walked into the infirmary, Antha was sitting on the sickbed, leaning back against the metal bars with Rynn’s head in her lap, brandishing her butcher knife in the direction of the door. “Oh, it’s you…” she murmured, quietly tucking the knife back between the mattresses beneath her, “Come in. Lock the door behind you.” Judging by the blanket firmly tucked around the unconscious boy, her current position had more to do with keeping him warm than anything, her fingers absently running through his hair merely an anxious habit. “I don’t know what’s happening in there,” she said lowly, looking down at the crown of his head, “But it doesn’t feel like it’s going according to plan. I linked him and Cassian without any problems---” She lifted his hand to demonstrate, and behind the physical part of it, something ephemeral trailed just behind, a silver shadow. Cassian. “---but I think the problem is in his head. You can take the boy out of all discernible reality, but you can’t take the Calais ghosts out of the boy, I suppose.”
Sighing, she gestured for Dorian to sit down in the chair beside the bed that she’d earlier inhabited and then fell into a heavy silence, turning her gaze back towards the wall until it was distant and hazy, just quietly stroking Rynn’s hair.
She wasn’t sure how long had passed in silence, only the distant creak and groan of the machinery of the airship, just that it had been a very, very long time. But suddenly, like someone woken from a long dream, she whispered to Dorian, “How do you think James felt?” It was hard to say why her own story had been stuck so sharply in her mind, particularly at that moment. It had haunted her when she was younger, but she’d long since made peace with it. And yet, at that moment, she was considering it all over again like she’d heard it for the first time, her heart still broken for her ancestor. (OOC: If you haven’t read that manga yet, you should do so at this very moment.) “I always understood, in a way. It was never going to happen. James and George…there was never a happy ending there, so I always understood them cutting their losses and doing what they knew they were supposed to. And if they hadn’t, none of us would be here. Our very lives hinge upon them doing as they did, because their separate descendants made Julien. But at the same time…” She made a small, frustrated sound of confusion, like she wasn’t entirely sure what she was thinking or feeling. “I can’t wrap my mind around what James was thinking that morning. I keep picturing him sitting in his room in his best suit, surrounded by bad luck fortunes, completely just…devoid of all hope. To love someone that much---so much that it just kills you---and then just quietly let them go…I suddenly feel like I understand it completely, and at the same time like I understand it less than ever, and it makes me angry. Why do you think that is?”
It was about this time that Antha broke out of herself, her trance, with the sudden realization that there were tears on her cheeks. Hastily wiping them away, she shook her head and pretended it hadn’t happened. “I don’t know why they’ve been on my mind like this lately. Maybe it’s because of Courtland and Jack. They always reminded me so much of James and George. About five years ago, it was like history was repeating itself. You don’t know that story, I was the only one who actually watched it play out, and Pierce to a degree, but it was like they were in a play that James and George wrote and they couldn’t escape it. I said before that I was sorry for the way I treated Jack back then, for pushing him until he broke, but that’s a lie. I was watching Courtland turn into James before my very eyes and I absolutely couldn’t stand it. I had to change the ending, no matter what it did to Jack. But now that I think about it…” Her eyes flashed once, darkly. “Maybe you don’t see it, how deeply in love they are. They were back then too, even if Jack refused to accept it. And I could’ve destroyed Jack getting them to this point---I accept that, all of it, that I took a huge risk with his sanity and only succeeded by pure luck---but somehow…I had to do what James didn’t, what Courtland wouldn’t. Because this kind of ending is worth the risk…isn’t it?” For the first time in her musings, Antha turned and looked Dorian in the eye, and was oddly serious about it, intent on receiving an answer. Like there was something else involved, something she was trying to convince herself of that had nothing to do with Courtland and Jack or James and George.
On the bedside table, her phone made a short sound of notification and she snapped out of her daze, glancing at the timer which marked five hours. “Has it really been that long?” she murmured, and turned all of her attention back on Rynn, gently peeling Cassian’s spirit away from him before shaking his shoulder, quietly calling his name. “Wake up. It’s over now, we have to go back.” Back to the real world and out to Satis House.
What she’d said to Cian was true, there really wasn’t any rest for the wicked.  

[Okimiyage]

When Rynn came to, his chest heaved—
he choked for a moment, with the unfamiliar sensation of air being inhaled into his lungs—
For a moment, all he could feel around him was death—the grey fog of death, the unforgiving smoke and mirrors of the afterlife.
His heart stuttered like the recalcitrant engine of an antique car, and the boy jerked up underneath Antha’s hands, gasping for air.
Cassian moaned with this mouth, a low, rattling sound. His shoulders shook.
And then, Rynn thought--bringing a dead soul into the living world, or the dream world—the airship, whatever this place was—they could not do so carelessly. It was necessary to banish such a spectre, first.
His mouth opened, and silver mist poured forth.
He could feel Antha calling for him, summoning his consciousness towards the surface of his body. At the same time, Cassian’s clinging presence was a lead weighted anchor to the planes beyond.
He could not remember what it felt like to rise again, out of death.
He could not remember the pounding of his own heart, or the stagnant flickering of his eyes as they opened, pupils like wide pools of ink.
Rynn’s body twitched, beneath Antha’s feather-light touch.
The command was nothing, at first. Barely audible, barely decipherable.
get out. get out. get out.
But as the mist from his mouth rose into the air, other voices joined Rynn’s.
you will not take us back again.
Beneath his shuddering body, shadows twitched—just his own at first, then others which layered and accumulated like fallen dominos.
get out. get out. GET OUT.
The roar of their voices, an army's marching chant, echoed through the airship—quavering in the pipes, making metal walls tremble.
Rynn came to: upright, and panting as though he had just run a marathon.
He was perspiring. Pearls of sweat rolled down his forehead, his cheekbones, dripping off the bones of his jaw. The boy had never felt so grateful to return to consciousness. He had never realized how he’d had taken his life for granted, before he had taken steps into the realm of the dead.
But still, it had been worth it. For the ancestors. For the chant they recited, drawing him forth from the spirit’s embrace— even as he remembered—
Cassian
All smooth, milk white limbs
Eyes like a snake—glowering, seducing, enticing—
Hair that wafted through the air as though caressed by gentle currents of the sea—
and his small, shapely mouth, red as a pomegranate
whispering:
how sweet it would be to fall into the arms of death
how kind it would be to give up your unmitigable hope—
how empty those efforts above—
how meaningless: the pale, limpid light of life
displayed in cold contrast
with the velvet, endless embrace of this void.
—

He could hear Antha’s voice, but he couldn’t make out any words.
Cassian’s presence shed from his consciousness like the skin from a snake. Rynn tried in vain to grasp after the fleeting sensation, sink his nails into the presence, struggling to hold this soul close to his side—he didn’t really know, after all, what Antha had directed him to this spirit for—the least he could do was keep it with him—
But Cassian’s essence dissipated within his grasp, and all that remained was his icy temperature, clinging to his fingers.
Rynn coughed hard, his shoulders jerking within Antha's hold—
The silver mist came out in a great, viscous clump—
and solidified into a souvenir within Rynn’s palms:
a marbled, luminescent grey pearl.
The boy met a blond haired Adonis’s eyes first, his pupils huge, darting from corner to corner, and his heart pounding through his thin silk shirt—
Dorian blinked, then flashed a cheeky grin towards his mistress.
“He looks like he’s been through the wringer, Antha. What the ******** kind of mission did you send this pup on?”
Collapsing into the chair which she’d indicated previously, Dorian laced his fingers together and crossed his legs.
“My darling Antha, my sweet cousin…
You must realize—is what you speak of, is that not love in its highest form?
To love someone so much that you can let go of them, without regard for your own desires—to love someone enough as to grant them the freedom to make their own choices, no matter how poor…”
Dorian raised his knuckles to his mouth, kissing his bones beneath their frail sheath of skin.
“It’s something that I should aspire towards, perhaps.
We can’t always protect those which we love, no matter how mighty our powers.
Perhaps James understood that, and accepted it.
That’s the difference between you two.”
He craved a cigarette, but Dorian had brought none.
Instead, the man’s hands groped towards the silver mist that even now made a trail around Rynn’s thin body, weaving patterns which coaxed the intangible spirits along a path to his lips.
“Antha.”
Her hands were on him, cool as any balm, and the residue of Cassian’s spirit was stripped away, dissipating against the celiing just before it touched Dorian’s lips—the man made an irritable sigh as though he’d been looking forward to a particular kind of high—
Rynn winced, shut both his eyes, and reluctantly peeled just one back in order to peek at Antha.
“Goddammit. You could have told me that you were sending me toward that.”
Then again, maybe he should have been flattered. It wasn’t often that he was called upon to tread into the world of the dead. And it certainly did take skill.
Shaking off the chill, Rynn climbed out of the bed. His head swiveled, and then his eyes locked upon Antha’s on the second rotation.
“Are we done? Does this mean we can leave now? No offense—it’s just that being watched makes me uncomfortable."  

[XCandy and LunacyX]

For a moment, Antha sat quietly, staring at Dorian with an unfathomable look in her eyes. She was still looking at him when Rynn first stirred, her eyes intense enough to pierce his very soul, when, inexplicably, she uttered one word. “No.” Like it had taken her a massive amount of time and consideration to come to the conclusion, whatever the hell it was, and her resolve was ironclad. But she never explained it. Rynn came to and rose and she yanked him back down, calmly restraining him and laying a hand across his forehead. “Don’t strain yourself,” she murmured simply, like she was a million miles away.
That was when Cassian, freshly freed from the fleshy restraints of Rynn’s mortal coil, flickered into sight, shaking and trembling like a dog might shirk off water. It was this that brought Antha out of her thoughtful daze, sliding off the bed and going to stand just before the wispy white cloud as if she was listening to it, eyes sharpening intently. Whatever it was, she was intensely displeased. “I don’t want to hear complaints,” she said after a moment, holding up a hand as if she was interrupting, “It serves no purpose in this situation, we have absolutely no options.”
The cloud shivered, somehow angrily, contracting and expanding and rearing back, but Antha just gave it a look of displeasure and it withdrew several feet. It seemed to struggle for a moment, which visibly confused Antha for a split second before it began to reshape itself, condensing into a human figure with a traditional Roman haircut and fine toga, tall and lean with frighteningly sharp eyes. He didn’t believe she took him seriously enough in his natural, amorphous form, so he took on the visage of himself when he walked the earth, despite the heavy toll it took on him.
They stood staring one another down for several moments---no one could have mistaken it for anything but a battle of wills, two incredibly stubborn people trying to make the other accept their word as the correct one---before Cassian crossed his arms, his translucent lips moving and a deep, commanding voice issuing from them. “He hasn’t the power,” he said, the be-all and end-all, “Whatever he does have is not his, it belongs to other ghosts. If we are cursed to a single opportunity, we need another candidate. There is no way around it.”
“I’ll tell you this once more, and I hope this time you’ll listen,” Antha hissed, facing him defiantly and stressing her next words, “There is no one else. If other spirits are interfering, if they’re holding back his power, then you need to do something about them first.”
“We need another,” the spirit repeated.
Finally, Antha resorted to yelling. “Rynn is all we have. The only others powerful enough to do it cannot, for various reasons, or in my brother’s case, would simply rather let Nero live so that I might live. Do you understand that at all?” She very carefully did not mention specifics with Dorian around, that Alistair could not sacrifice her because they were connected and Nicolae flat-out refused to do it no matter the consequences. That detail of the entire situation, her sacrifice, seemed like too much to divulge. “If you can’t find a way to bend his power, to teach him the magic he needs, it’s all over. Is that what you want?” She advanced on him, and the phantom very nearly stepped back.
“I sacrificed half of my city to put him in the ground,” he reminded her roughly, nearly a growl, “I razed my own city, my home, the capitol of the empire in which I shared ultimate power, to stop him. There is nothing I would not give to put him back down. But it is for nothing if he is not capable of seeing it through!”
Irritably, Antha made a motion for silence, which he only begrudgingly obeyed. They were getting nowhere, and wasting precious time doing so. “I don’t have the time for this,” she muttered, strained, “I don’t have the time to waste another single moment on this. This is the only goddamn thing you have to do, giving him the ability to enact the ritual. If you can’t---” He tried to protest, but was shot such a sharp glare that it silenced him. “---that is your own failing, and I refuse to accept it. Find a way. I’ll do what I can, but this is your responsibility. We’ll be back tomorrow night, and I expect things to go better than this utter waste of a day.” Turning, Antha seized Rynn by the wrist and stormed off, motioning for Dorian to follow.
She said nothing on the way back. She only stalked through the groaning hallway and slammed the door, opening it back up to the attic. Opening the door again, the barrier was decidedly, almost painfully stronger than when they’d left, pressing down and washing over them as if loathed to let them through. It was a true testament to Alistair’s skills.
“You’re back,” he greeted them when he heard the footsteps, his head popping up from behind a stack of dusty boxes. Antha said nothing, only made a gesture at Dorian and Rynn that they were dismissed and crossing to the middle of the attic before abruptly laying face down on the threadbare French carpet. With a pitying sigh, her twin gave a thin smile and crossed over to her, squatting with his hand in his palm, a smear of dried blood on his cheekbone. He didn’t ask questions, he knew, but nor was there anything encouraging to say on the matter. Instead he said, as if everything was perfectly normal, “You should eat before we head over to Satis House.”
“I’m not moving,” his sister insisted obstinately, her voice muffled and face hidden beneath the thick coils of her hair.
“So…soup with a straw?”
“Shut up.”
Surrendering with a wispy sigh, Alistair looked up at Rynn. “You guys broke her.”
“I’m not broken.”
Alistair continued heedlessly, “We’ll give her half an hour, so try to get a little rest, okay?” He smiled, as sweet and sunny as ever, but there was something very nearly suggestive about it, a sliver of a reminder about what had happened in the library.

Over the next half hour, Alistair managed to get his sister to eat half of a sandwich and drink a glass of milk, but only by reminding her while no one was around that not eating wasn’t good for the baby. For the rest of the time, she laid face down on the couch in the nursery, refusing to move or speak.
But then the clock struck five and she sat up and returned to business as usual.
Most of the boys were already dressed for the wild night and running eagerly around the house, whispering and snickering over bets and downing shots. Even Lawrence and Cyrus were begrudgingly present, the latter after a few hours of coercion from his brother, standing awkwardly around and looking at his drink. His daughter, tiny little silver-haired Victoria, had therefore been added to the babysitting cache in Mayfair Manor that night and was quietly trailing Malakai with her doll in hand.
While the boys gathered in the kitchen, Courtland demanding a grand toast before they headed out, Michael glided in with Antha at his heels, holding Sebastien like letting him go would only lead to disaster. “Center for Disease Control?”
“Right here,” Michael sighed in response, tapping a list of numbers on the refrigerator.
Antha pursed her lips, eyes flashing darkly as she tried to run through every possibility, “The numbers for all the strip clubs, in case you need to get ahold of Cian? All of them?”
“Every single one in the city, and I made Courtland write down their tentative itinerary.”
“Dr. Hanrahan?”
“Antha,” he said finally, exasperated, turning to face her, “We’ll be fine here. Really. I raised twins, remember? And yes, one of them was Malakai, but the other was Nicolae. If anything happens, I can handle it.” Holding out his hands, he said firmly, “Now hand him over and off with you.”
He very nearly had to take the infant out of her hands. But eventually, with much pouting and reluctance, she handed her son over to his waiting arms, still anxiously rattling off instructions. “If they get fussy, give Sebastien the little stuffed bear and Vanessa the white bunny. It’s their favorites, do not mix them up.”
“I’ve got it.”
“And when you put them to sleep, Sebastien likes to hear a story, but Vanessa likes hear a song.”
“Evie---”
“But not Mary had a Little Lamb, Sebastien hates that song and you’ll never get him to sleep.”
“Antha, if you don’t go, I swear I will read them every fairytale about evil witches I can find.”
“Alright,” she relented begrudgingly, throwing her hands up in surrender and taking a deep breath, “Okay, I’m done.” She gave each of them a kiss, Sebastien in Michael’s arms and Vanessa in Malakai’s, and then forced herself to walk away, turning her attention instead on Cian. “Watch out for these animals,” she warned him quietly, idly adjusting the collar of his shirt, “They don’t know the meaning of the word ‘restraint’. And remember Courtland, if anything happens to him, I’m holding you responsible.”
“We’ve got him, Evie, don’t even worry your pretty little head about it.”
Rolling her eyes at her cousin---he was already drunk and exuberant, and barely paying attention---she sighed as if there was no help for it and kissed her husband goodbye. “I love you, go have fun.”
It was at this point that Alistair took her hand and dragged her out of the room, fearing that any longer and they’d never get her out of the house. Waving goodbye at his cousins with his cheeriest smile, he called, “By the way, we’re taking Rynn. Have fun, byyyyyye~!”
“The hell are they up to?” Pierce murmured, eyes narrowing at the door where they’d vanished.
“Don’t know,” Courtland responded flatly, “Do not care. Not one bit, because I’m drunk and we’re going to go see naked ladies. Naked ladies!” The last he added in a cheer, pumping his fists. “Alright, one big toast and we’re off. Ready?”
Looking expectantly around, his glass held aloft, Cyrus cracked first, holding his glass up and toasting him with, “To matrimony.”
“No one wants to hear that from a divorcee,” Pierce said, joining in, “Here’s to pissing Julien off more than ever before.”
“Fancy clothes,” Jack said simply, with an excited little nod.
Grinning, Armand added, “Cheers to less competition.”
“Here’s to less paperwork than a civil union,” Lawrence muttered, “Thank you Supreme Court.”
Pursing his lips, Courtland glanced around and said uncertainly, “Parenthood?”
While most of the cousins muttered uncertain agreements, Jack and Cyrus smiled. “To parenthood,” the latter agreed, and regardless of their personal opinions, everyone cheered and clinked their glasses together.
“To the strip club!” Courtland demanded, pointing dramatically towards the front door, “Excelsior!”
Watching them run (loudly) out with an amused half-smile, Michael turned to his son. “You’re certain you don’t want to go with them?”
“There are few things in this world I want less,” Malakai murmured, paling at the thought, “Last time was just…” He shuddered, shaking his head. “Besides---” The boy perked up instantly, turning a blindingly sweet smile on his niece in his arms and laying a kiss on her forehead, “I have the prettiest girl in the whole world right here, isn’t that right? Yes it is. Who’s Uncle Malakai’s pretty girl?”
While the baby cooed at the attention, Victoria made a face and tugged on the hem of his shirt, demanding lowly, “Me too, right?”
Malakai smiled repentantly, leaning down and pressing a similar kiss on her forehead. “You, too.” Seeing that she was only slightly mollified, he handed Vanessa over to Liesse and hoisted Victoria up in his arms.
She latched onto him affectionately, made bright and cheerful by the attention. “Is my daddy really going to go look at naked ladies?”
“Let’s go play dolls,” Malakai said hastily, with an intensely uncomfortable smile, and turned to take her in the parlor as she began enthusiastically babbling scenarios she’d been thinking of for the dolls since the last time.
“It’s terribly awkward to raise children in this house,” Michael sighed meanwhile, reaching in the fridge for two bottles, “They’ll probably know more about the birds and the bees than me when it’s time for the talk.”  

[XCandy and LunacyX]

In the car, Alistair ventured a bemused little smile, not saying anything for a moment. And then, very quietly, he whispered, “It’s not like much of anything.” They had entered the city proper now, the serene darkness of the swamp replaced by electric lights from every direction. “I don’t remember dying, I was only a newborn. Then I just…was, and I stayed that way for what could’ve been an eternity, mostly by myself, following Antha. And then I was here, in the flesh, and that’s it.” It wasn’t a terribly exciting story, as he knew. He wished there had been more to say, but unfortunately there was not. He had existed, and there was little more to it than that.
When they pulled into the driveway, the house was dark and quiet, only a single light shining from one of the side windows, the nursery. It took Alistair only a few moments to rouse his twin, who was unstable and languid with drowsiness, her hair mussed and eyes unfocused. “Come on Evie, let’s get you to bed.”
The girl shook her head, sliding out of the car with some difficulty and murmuring, “I’m hungry.”
“I’ll make you something,” her little brother offered, and vanished into the darkness of the kitchen once they were inside.
Antha went immediately upstairs to look into the nursery, and was not entirely surprised to find Malakai sprawled out on the couch asleep, a book of nursery rhymes in one hand and a stuffed elephant in the other, Victoria tucked under one arm in her flowing, frilly nightgown. The twins were asleep in their cradle (just the one, the other was left empty with disturbed sheets, likely because Vanessa would not settle without her brother) their favorite stuffed animals clutched in their respective hands and a mountain of others strewn on the floor. Smirking to herself at what had clearly been a frustrating and exhausting night for the babysitters, Antha noiselessly crossed the room and took the elephant and book from her brother, setting them aside, covered him with a blanket, and switched off the lamp. In the vague light from the hallway, Victoria stirred and rubbed her eyes, catching Antha by the sleeve, but her aunt put a finger to her lips for her to be quiet. “Everyone’s sleeping.”
The little girl yawned, nodding, and took a quick look around before whispering, “Where’s my daddy?”
“He’ll be here in the morning,” Antha reassured her quietly, gently stroking her silvery blonde locks, “Go back to sleep and it’ll be morning before you know it.”
The little girl nodded drowsily, rolling over and nestling against Malakai, and was instantly out like a light. Antha smiled, quietly adjusting the stuffed cat under the child’s arm, and then left before her presence could wake the twins.
Fifteen minutes later, she was alone in the kitchen eating a sandwich Alistair had made, already dressed for bed, when the boys announced themselves by the flash of headlights through the windows and distant laughter. She met them on the porch when they’d filed out of the cab, with a murderous glare for the noise they were making and a promise that if they woke the babies, they were staying up with them. “More importantly,” she demanded in a whisper, arms folded, “What did you do with my husband?”
“Courtland wanted to take the street car,” Jack whispered, loudly, inexplicably possessed by a case of the giggles, “He took Cian to watch him.”
Sighing---there was no telling what kind of trouble Courtland could find between the bar and home---Antha motioned for them to get inside already, all of them stumbling and snickering. They got the unconscious Vittorio as far as his room before waking Dolly Jean, who anxiously helped get him into bed and then shooed them out when they tried to help change his clothes. Armand, who sometimes forgot that he didn’t live at Mayfair Manor and so had gone with the wrong group, stumbled a few times into the wrong room, first Julien’s and then attempting to enter Rynn and Liesse’s room before ambling into Antha and Cian’s room, only to be led back out by Jack as soon as he’d gotten his shoes off.
Antha returned to the kitchen and set about making tea, and was joined by Jack at about the time it was finished. “You look haggard,” she observed quietly, glancing at him sidelong and fetching a second teacup.
“Nah,” he protested, dropping into a chair at the table, “I’m peachy.” His cousin said nothing for a moment, only poured out the tea and took the cups over to the table and then sat across from him, staring expectantly. It took less than a minute and two sips for him to give in, sighing and staring down at the swirl of steam from his cup. “What if he hates me?”
“Who, Courtland?”
“No.” He fidgeted uncomfortably once, laying his hands in his lap, and answered in a whisper. “Adair.”
Antha sipped her tea, as if there was no real gravity to the discussion at hand. “Why would he hate you?”
“Because I took his father away from his mother.”
“But you didn’t.”
“I know,” he admitted, quietly, and then gave a frustrated little sound and began trying to explain himself, “I know that, but what if he doesn’t understand? I mean, I haven’t forgiven Julien for his fling with my mother twenty years later.”
“That’s different,” Antha replied, calmly and surely, “You were separated from your family because of it, and Julien never took responsibility for you. You’re more like Uncle Michael in this situation. You’re going to love this kid, right?”
“I love him already,” he said without hesitation, and then gave a little sigh of defeat, “It’s just…I don’t know, I guess I’m afraid of him. Not of him, exactly, just…”
When he couldn’t find the words, Antha laughed, setting down her teacup and leaning forward conspiratorially. “Of course you are, it’s ******** terrifying being a parent. You think I’m not afraid of my kids?” Another laugh, her voice lowering slightly as if to be sure she wasn’t overheard. “I’m terrified of them.”
Jack, his eyes opening wide in wonder, likewise leaned forward, whispering, “Really?”
“Petrified,” she answered easily, nodding, “All I can think about is every little way that any single thing I do might screw them up and how they might hate me forever because of it. And I only have a few months to mess them up, you’re facing an entire lifetime.” Leaning back in her seat as if she hadn’t a care in the world, she took a long sip of her tea and then shook her head, ending very casually with, “It’s all perfectly natural. Cyrus tells me it never goes away, but you get used to it.”
Her cousin gave a dry but relieved smile, relaxing slightly as he took his tea back up. “So…endless atrocities and monsters later, you’re scared of two tiny people with less combined intelligence than a cat?”
“Absolutely terrified,” she confirmed with a nod.
Another moment in easy silence. “I still blame you, you know.”
“That’s fine,” she accepted it, smiling slightly, “It is my fault, and I worked very hard to get to this point.”
Jack smiled back, scoffing like there was no help for her. “You’re incorrigible.”
“The ends justify the means, as they say,” she replied, setting her empty teacup aside and rising, going over to press a kiss to his forehead, “Now go to bed. You’re getting married tomorrow.”  

[XCandy and LunacyX]

In the few minutes that they waited for the street car, Courtland stood with his hands in his pockets, grinning like he had a secret. The glass doors had barely parted when the conductor glanced their way and then quickly looked again, exclaiming, “Hell no,” and yanking the lever to close the doors again. But Courtland had already pitched himself forward and muscled the doors open again, shouting, “You can’t turn away passengers, it’s the law!” The conductor grimaced at that, anxiously adjusting his cap and looking straight forward in acknowledgement that he was right. Courtland just cackled, skipping up the metal steps and throwing enough change for five people into the machine. “I told you,” he said, whirling around to face Cian in the empty trolley, leaning against one of the gold poles, “I like the trolley.”
The conductor made a small grumble but said nothing until the boys were seated and the machine was making its rickety way down the street. “At least the other one’s not with ya’…”
Not even considering for a moment that this wasn’t an invitation to open up conversation, Courtland leaned forward and folded his arms on the next bench up, grinning in perfect amusement. “She stayed home with the kids. Or she went to the swamp. I don’t remember, she did something else.” The man gave another harrumph, like it was very typical of one or either of them. “Besides, it was a bachelor party. Girls can’t come to a bachelor party.”
Not quite able to let that one pass, the man met Courtland’s eyes briefly in the dome of a mirror overhead, remarking, “And you didn’t burn the city down? I’m stunned.”
Courtland laughed, but said no more. Safe in the quiet, gently rattling confines of the street car, he seemed to simmer down from his drunken exuberance, nestling comfortably against Cian’s shoulder and trying to stifle a case of the hiccups. “You know, it’s kind of thanks to you that we’re getting married,” he mumbled in an unsteady slur, shoulders jumping with another hiccup, “Because you married Antha. Did we ever tell you that? We were supposed to get married before you came along, because the family thought she’d get knocked up and neither of us would ever marry anyone on our own and she’s the designee, and I’m the next head of the family. We probably would’ve done it, because why the hell not? There were no kids to think about, just the family breathing down our necks. But then you came along---” He gave a particularly big, dopey smile, lifting his head and affectionately pinching Cian’s cheeks, “---all pretty and romantic and everything worked out. All problems solved.” The boy laughed, hiccupping once in the process, and then settled laxly back in his seat. “It would’ve been weird. Like…super weird. You don’t know Evie like I know Evie, the way she is now is really recent. The Antha I know was the one that wanted to watch the world burn. We used to stay up until dawn trashed on whiskey, locked away in a hotel or her room over the garage, her in her ripped clothes and gobs of smeared eyeliner, and she’d talk about how she wanted to break her own heart every day of her life, how she always wanted to feel like she was dying. She’d lock her door and spend days cutting paragraphs out of old books and nailing them to the walls, break into bookstores and burn entire shelves of novels she called trash. She threw darts into a world map until it was totally covered and said she’d go to every single place a dart had landed once she was old enough to escape. She’d buy plane tickets to the other end of the earth and get drunk and burn them.”
Slowly as he was talking, with a dazed little nostalgic smile on his lips, Courtland’s eyes had begun to close, his voice lowering little by little until finally he was whispering, dreamily, “She’d have a cigarette in her lips and scissors in her hand, high as a kite on a handful of random pills, hadn’t slept in days, and stroke my hair and tell me everything was alright…that she loved me, that I was her favorite…nothing was ever going to hurt me because she’d murder it first, even Jack, if she needed to. Evie and me, we…nothing ever came between us. Perfect harmony…perfect love…” It was about this time that he fell asleep, so far down in his seat that he was in danger of sliding into the floor, snoring gently.
At the next stop, only minutes later, the conductor cleared his throat and nodded out the window to Mayfair Manor, dark and silent to match the rest of the houses down the block. Courtland woke with a start at the sound, glancing wildly around as if to make sure no one had noticed him sleeping. “We here already?” he asked, a little loudly, fumbling for the railing and struggling clumsily to his feet, “Awesome. Goodnight, trolley master. You…you keep this trolley in line, okay?”
“Mind the stairs,” the man called flatly, like he was used to it, a split second before Courtland nearly tripped down them and fell flat on his face in the street.
Pretending like it hadn’t even happened---or just forgetting, it was hard to say which---the boy ambled across the dim, quiet street, humming to himself, only stopping at the cracked sidewalk to exclaim in exuberant astonishment, “Evie!” The girl, sitting quietly on the stairs in the dark in her pajamas and an oversized sweater, smoking a cigarette, was watching her cousin in gentle amusement, the shadow of a smile on her lips. Courtland, on the other hand, forgot where and when he was, flinging open the iron gate and throwing his arms out wide, proclaiming loudly, “Speak of the devil and something, something, there she is!”
“Everyone’s sleeping, Court,” she responded quickly, her words hushed, and his entire body drooped repentantly, mimicking the finger she put to her lips for silence. Glancing first to him with a little smile, equal parts amusement and pity, then to Cian and back, she called quietly, “The bachelor party went well, then?”
“It was greeeeeeaaat,” he whispered enthusiastically, stumbling and practically falling on the stairs beside and one below her, leaning back on his elbows, legs splayed, head thrown back to look through the leaves to the twinkling stars, “There was champagne, and tequila, and naked ladies, and dancing, and I…Evie, I might’ve drunk too much---I might be drunk too much---I might be too---” While he tried to get his words straight, his eyebrows knitted together like it was a real problem, Antha laughed quietly to herself, looking at Cian and nodding towards the door as if to absolve him of his role as Courtland’s babysitter.
Inside, when the door was closed on the dark, still hallway, Jack poked his head out of the shadows in the parlor, putting a finger to his lips for silence. Smiling very gently, motioned for Cian to follow him and led him over to his post by the window, hidden in the white lace curtains and shadows. If it hadn’t been clear before that he was eavesdropping, it was made so in the next moment by the rapt, concerned look on his face as Courtland and Antha’s voices drifted past the glass, intently watching their backs.
“You smell like Cian,” the boy mumbled, partly confused.
Antha smiled, with just a touch of guilt, plucking at her sweater. “I raided his side of the closet again.”
“You promised you would stop stealing his sweaters!”
“I lied. Sweaters are more comfortable when he’s worn them.”
“Evie---” With a heavy sigh, Courtland’s head fell sideways against her pale legs. “I’m getting married.”
“That you are,” she agreed calmly, reaching over to brush out his tangled curls.
“I’m going to have a son, Evie. A baby. How freakin’ crazy is that? What if I screw him up? Like---like what if he wants a blue Transformer for his birthday, and I accidentally get him a red Transformer for his birthday, and he turns to a life of petty thievery?”
“Well that’s just ridiculous, Court.” Though he couldn’t tell it at the time, it was clear by the tone of her voice that she was subtly making fun of him. “Everyone knows kids always want the yellow Transformer.”
“I don’t know, Evie, I just don’t know these things!”
“Courtland…” Sighing with a hint of amusement, she ran a soothing hand back through his hair. “You’re going to be fine. Really, Court. All you have to do is love him, and if you make any mistakes, you’ve got Jack to back you up, and Cian, and Vittorio, and Uncle Michael, and an entire family full of other people who know what it’s like raising children and can help. Everything’s going to be fine.”
For several moments, Courtland said nothing. He sat quietly leaning against her legs, thinking to himself and basking in the soft caress of her fingers in his hair, before a slow, dazed little nostalgic smile crept across his lips. “Evie, do you remember the night about four years ago when we went to see The Killers?”
That seemed to take her briefly by surprise, though it was quickly replaced by the same fond nostalgia, the softest laugh as she looked up at the stars. “We went in the coat room and paid the attendant to act normal, so we could jump up in the window and scare people.”
“And we were so excited that we got trashed way before the show,” he added, smiling so wide that the corners of his eyes crinkled, “Pierce was so goddamn fed up with us, running around screaming and jumping up and down. He said we were ‘so uncool’.”
“He tried to get the bartender to cut us off,” she reminded him, nudging him slightly with her knee, “But we stole a bottle of whiskey.”
“And then the show started, and you climbed up on my shoulders to see better…”
“And then our song came on.” The two quieted, subtly, despite their persistent smiles.
“We dragged a table to the middle of the floor and climbed up on it to dance,” Courtland continued with a vague laugh, “And Pierce went to the other side of the stage and pretended he didn’t know us. He walked ten yards behind us the whole way back to the hotel so we wouldn’t embarrass him, do you remember?”
“I do.” She laughed outright at that, head tilting and gaze trailing down to the leaves of the trees across the street. “And then he passed out on the couch and we went to the roof.”
“Not right away,” he corrected her hastily, his eyes big when he raised his head and looked at her. “He kept trying to get one of us to sleep with him, remember? He wanted it baaaaaad, Evie.”
“Doesn’t he always?” she mused, smiling teasingly.
“But I wasn’t interested. I would’ve rather been on the roof drinking whiskey until dawn with you. It didn’t matter what it was---breaking into bookstores, vandalizing boats, hanging out in the graveyard getting wasted---I would always choose hanging out with you over anything. It wasn’t about the sex---though, I mean, that was pretty great---but…” Courtland smiled, staring somewhat distantly at the flagstones beneath his feet. “It was always different with you. We were always outsiders in this family, we came here from dark, lonely places and no one else really got us. But you always got me. I…god, I never even told you about Jack. You just knew. And you never said anything about it, you just…you just fixed it. No matter who you had to destroy to do it, you did everything to make me happy.”
A faint, weak smile played on Antha’s lips, her eyes darkening as her fingers locked together, resting on her knees. “I told you outright, didn’t I? That I wouldn’t change you for anyone’s happiness in the entire world.”
“You were so brutally immoveable,” he murmured, like he knew it was technically a bad thing but couldn’t help his own warm feelings regarding the matter, “You would’ve sacrificed any part of anyone or anything for me. It was the lowest point in my life and you were the only thing that ever made me feel okay.”
“I could say the same,” she interrupted calmly, “And my low point was so much worse than yours, Court. I fell apart, totally and completely. I broke, and you put me back together.”
Sighing softly, Courtland followed her gaze up to the stars and said in a soft sigh, “We’ve been through a lot of s**t together, Evie.” He smiled, bittersweet, as he reflected on it. “I mean, Jack is the love of my life, but…” He turned to look up at her with intent seriousness, their eyes locking, and neither was terribly surprised at the tear that suddenly came rolling down his cheek. When he spoke, it was like an oath. “You, Evie…you are my favorite ******** person in the entire world, and you always will be.”
Antha was a little more surprised in the next moment at the few quiet tears that spilled over her eyelashes, but she never broke their intent gaze. “I know,” she whispered, with a weak, fond smile, “And you’re mine.”
Courtland tried to smile back at her, but it was too much. He laid his head in her lap, turned away so that she couldn’t see his face when the first sob racked his shoulders, the tears pouring down his cheeks. “Just this once…can I say it?” he whispered, and after a tense moment Antha nodded quietly. Taking her hand from his shoulder and into his own, pulling it jealously under his cheek, Courtland broke. The tears coming uncontrollably, entire body shaking, he whispered in the most heartbroken whine, like a child completely overcome with emotion, “I don’t want you to die, Evie. I can’t bear it, I can’t. I can’t think of being without you---I can’t imagine that world.”
Antha tried to soothe him with soft sounds and the stroke of her fingers in her hair, but the tears wouldn’t subside. So instead, for the first time that she could remember, Antha allowed herself one true moment of grief over her fate. Doubled over with her head resting on his, his arms pulling hers tightly around himself, Antha broke, sobbing quietly with her cousin.
Jack stepped away from the window at this moment as if it burned him, turning and tiptoeing quietly away. “I was worried about her,” he explained in a whisper to Cian, head turned as he hastily flicked away a few droplets of moisture on his lashes, “I wanted to see what she was doing out there. But now I feel like I’ve intruded.” He cleared his throat, stepping out of the parlor and walking over to the foot of the steps before stopping abruptly, turning back to Cian. “I forget she’s not made of iron sometimes,” he whispered, as if admitting to something dreadful, “She does that---she throws herself into your problems until you forget that she might be hurting. Because she can’t stand people knowing it.” He turned again, making his way up the stairs, but stopped halfway and turned again. But he wasn’t looking at Cian this time; he was looking at the door, with such acute pain in his eyes, such complete helplessness. “Everyone is so worried about what will happen to you and Nicolae when she's gone,” he said after a moment, huskily, “Nicolae will probably take it the hardest---it'll surprise me if it doesn't outright kill him...but Courtland isn't far behind him. People forget that---that Courtland and Antha have invested more in each other than anyone else.” There were worlds of things in those few words. Concern mostly, because he knew just how intensely losing Antha would affect Courtland, and frustration that there was nothing he could do. But also love. Love for Courtland and, in Jack’s strange way, an intense love for Antha, because they had their love for Courtland in common, even if they were drastically different types of love.
This time when he turned, he vanished up the stairs and into the darkness, his door closing gently down the hall.

Three hours later, a van full of workers found Antha and Courtland asleep on the porch, the former propped against a pillar and the latter sprawled on the stairs with his head in her lap. They woke them only very tentatively, explaining that they had been hired to set up for the ceremony. Courtland, dazed and hungover, did his best to rally himself and took them around the house, showing them the gardening shed where some of the equipment was stored and the area where it was all to be set up.
Antha went inside and dragged herself up the stairs. The twins began crying at the first creak of her step, and she very nearly mimicked them, but upon entering the nursery found Malakai up and soothing them, taking one look at her tired face and urging her to go back to bed. She took him up on his offer, giving each of her children a kiss and then leaving them with their uncle.
She was very quiet in entering her room, tiptoeing across the dim squares of golden light filtering through the heavy translucent drapes and slipping into bed as quietly as a thief, nestling against Cian as naturally as an affectionate cat. She liked to lay her head on his chest and listen to his heartbeat as she fell asleep, it felt unnatural to close her eyes without it these days. It was like counting sheep---one thrum, two, three, four…  

[Okimiyage]

CIan settled into his seat, head rolling back against the stiff wooden bench, and tried to close his eyes. But the insides of his lids were just sparks of color; that didn’t help. If anything, it gave him a headache.
…because you married Antha.”
Courtland was talking. With an effort, Cian sat up straight, cracking the bones in his back, and tried to pay attention. The pinch on both of his cheeks definitely helped him wake up—Courtland pinched hard.
From the way he described Antha, it reminded Cian of himself. Maybe that was why they got along so well. He’d never broken into a bookstore, true—it was hard to feel as passionately as Antha felt on the subject of literature, when the numbingly dull thaumaturgical texts of the Calais library were all you had to fuel an obsession of that type. It sounded like fun, all the same. It was probably a good thing that Cian had not known Antha during her heyday…they would have only encouraged one another.
It didn’t seem to matter if Cian was cognizant, anyways; in a moment, Courtland's rambling trailing off into incomprehensible mumbling, he was sleeping like a child. Cian tried not to think about what he had said about the swamp—easier to just write it off as drunken rambling.

Cian was honestly grateful to get off the trolley, after the looks that the conductor had been flashing him while they rode. When he saw Antha waiting for them on the porch, it was even more of a relief. Not just because it meant that he didn’t have to be the one to tuck Courtland into bed, but also because…well, he’d been worried. He’d tried to enjoy the night, but it was hard when every other shot was interspersed by deep speculation on where Antha could be. He trusted her more than anyone else in the world, but he still didn’t know whether he trusted her to not get into trouble. It seemed to be one of Antha’s peculiar gifts.
They came up the stairs with Courtland all but using Cian as a crutch. It was lucky that the other man was there, though; he helped soften the fall, when Courtland tipped over into his precarious, swaying perch on the stair steps.
Cian gave his wife one of his infamous crooked grins, made slightly wicked by his hooded eyes. “It was a night to remember,” he murmured, reaching down and laying a kiss amongst her tangled red curls. “Although I’ll be very surprised if anybody does remember it, by morning.”
Standing back to regard her, he twisted up his nose as he recognized his sweater. Still—as he patted her on the shoulder—there was no point in making a fuss over it now. The long sleeves, pulled over her hands so that only the tips of her fingers stuck out, like little paws, even rather suited her.
“Stay warm.”
With that, Cian trudged on into the house. He only stumbled once, at the lintel, which was a little impressive considering what he’d had to drink that night.
But when Jack beckoned to him, he faltered. His fingertips hovered indecisively above the door handle, before finally pushing it shut, and going to join the groom to be at the window. He couldn’t imagine that Antha would be happy to find him eavesdropping, but—as Dorian had suggested, earlier—there was always room for forgiveness.
She made it sound so simple, child-rearing. Of course, it was probably for Courtland’s benefit. No reason to scare the poor boy off, not just yet.
And then it fell apart. All those comforting words added up to…nothing. Just the despair, the awful reality that they’d all been pretending to ignore for weeks now.
Cian found himself pulling back from the window. His eyes were wet, and he didn’t want Jack to see. This was the point where he was supposed to be strong. Antha was counting on him to be strong, strong enough to pull through the grief that crippled everyone who knew her.
He followed Jack to the stairs, his face difficult to read. There was some terse crease in his features—a whole novel would have to be written, to convey his expression—but there were not succinct terms in which to describe it.
If what Courtland had said was true—and he was too drunk to lie—then losing Antha would be like losing a limb, for him.
“You’ll have to be strong, for him. She’s been the anchor to this family. There’s no replacing that, not for everyone, but…we can try.”
He was purposefully avoiding looking at Jack. Any kind of emotional display felt, at this point, as though it would have been encouraging the inevitable breakdown.
He glanced back towards the lace-edged curtains.
Cian couldn’t imagine what being in Courtland’s shoes at the moment would have been like.
It seemed petty even to admit that he’d miss her, too, in the face of all that boy’s grief. Any sort of consolation was…inadequate.
For the longest time, Cian had been pretending that all of it was just a bad dream. A premonition that might never come to pass, a grand prank, a case of radical theatrics. It was better than admitting the truth. He couldn’t tell Jack how he felt. Hell, he couldn’t even tell Antha. He didn’t want to guilt her—not after everything that she’d been through, already. Not after all the stress that the family had already piled on her shoulders.
So instead, he went upstairs. He undressed in the cold, still bedroom, and lay down beneath the duvet. He tried not to look at the window, changing slowly from black, to grey, to gold.
When Antha came in, he was still awake. But he pretended to be asleep—and it wasn’t long before, with the reassuring weight of her body nestled against his, that he finally passed into an oblivious, dreamless slumber.


He woke up the next morning with sunlight streaming through the blinds.
What time was it?
His wedding outfit was already laid out across the back of the chair facing Antha’s vanity. All stark, solemn black and white. It was very proper, but Cian would have been lying if he’d said he didn’t wish for more color.
The house was already abuzz; he could hear the sound of excited conversation from below, muffled and indistinguishable through the stout wooden floorboards. Muzzily, he lifted himself onto his elbows and peered through slitted eyes about the room. Where was Antha?  

[XCandy and LunacyX]

Antha was not in the habit of waking gracefully, particularly not of late. Neither was it the case this morning. When Cian began to rise, the bed shifting beneath him, Antha bolted up, her unfocused eyes opened wide, declaring automatically like someone had accused her otherwise, “I’m awake!” She remained on alert for a few more seconds, looking around herself, but when she only found Cian she relaxed again, drowsily rubbing her eyes, and whined instead, “Why am I awake?” Taking a moment to kick the covers around her feet straight again, she gave a little groan and rolled over straight onto Cian, yawning and settling back in to sleep.
Predictably, however, her earlier declaration had not gone unnoticed and a knock sounded at the door. Antha didn’t even have time to ignore it before Courtland burst in, dragging Rynn by the collar, and bid them cheerfully, “Good morning!”
Antha groaned all over again, with real annoyance this time, burying her face in the crook of Cian’s neck and lamenting quietly, “I forgot to lock the door…”
“Rynn doesn’t have anything to wear to my wedding,” Courtland was complaining meanwhile, practically throwing the boy into the chair by the vanity and going over to fling open the closet doors, “His suit is incredibly boring, he at least needs a good shirt. Cian has similar coloring, something of his should work.”
“Courtland,” Antha began, equal parts groggy and exasperated, “You can’t burst into someone’s room first thing in the morning and start stealing their clothes, even if it is your wedding day.”
“It’s noon,” the boy countered, as if that was the crux of the argument, taking two shirts and holding them up to Rynn, wrinkling his nose at both before he caught sight of the suit on the back of the chair. “Cian, is that what you’re going to wear? You can’t wear that, it’s so boring. Come on man, you have a fashion sense, there’s no excuse.”
Sighing heavily, Antha lifted her head just enough to rest her chin on Cian’s chest, facing him as she asked despondently, “He’s not going to let us go back to sleep, is he?”
Another knock sounded on the partially open door, announcing Alistair as he peeked in to see what the ruckus was all about. “Sorry, Evie, did he wake you up?” he questioned, with a little sympathetic smile, “He’s been running around like this for an hour, there’s no helping it.”
“Magic pills,” Courtland said, grinning as he took a little box out of his pocket and rattled it, “Evie, you want one?” It was her instinct to hold out her hand and demand one as the only thing that would get her out of bed. But at the last moment she remembered her ‘delicate’ condition and shook her head. She allowed herself far more than Vittorio or Jacob would’ve if they’d known about her condition, but hard drugs were over the line. “Are you sure? You don’t look like you’re going to get up on your own.”
“I like sleep,” she pouted, just as Pierce curiously poked his head in the door.
“So this is where everyone went.”
Giving a deep sigh of annoyance, Antha said in defeat, “Apparently our room is a public space now. By all means, join the damned party.”
“I’m trying to find a shirt for Rynn,” Courtland explained instead, ignoring Antha as she grasped the edge of the sheets and pulled them over her head, “What do you think, this one?”
Pierce gave a ‘hmm’ of thought, observing the shirt Courtland held up in front of him and then taking up another to hold up to the boy. “No, he doesn’t have Cian’s physique. This one looks better with his complexion and frame.”
While Pierce went to browse through Cian’s side of the closet with as little regard as Courtland had, the latter went over to the bed and seized Antha’s exposed foot, yanking her bodily out of bed and hoisting her up off of her feet, smiling delightedly as she yelped and kicked her feet in the air. “That’s better. Evie, you got my recommendation on your outfit as my best man, right?”
“Yes, but you seem to have this wedding business confused with a cabaret, Court,” she responded, squirming to be let go, and then briefly stilled before whining, “Why is it so cold?!”
“The florist said it would keep the flowers fresh,” Courtland explained, reluctantly releasing her so that she darted back into bed, piling the covers over her legs and pulling Cian’s arms around her shoulders. “Anyways, I don’t care what you say, I don’t want any of this ‘formal’ nonsense mucking up my wedding. For once we don’t have to do the whole Catholic song and dance and I’m going to take advantage of it.”
“I don’t care what you do,” she sighed in response, “Just so long as you get the hell out of our room.”
“Not until you get up and get dressed!” he protested obstinately, pouting and crossing his arms, “There’s only three hours left. I’ll dress you myself if I have to.”
The girl inched back, bristling like a cat readying itself for confrontation. “I’ll kick you, Courtland Mayfair, I swear I will. Is that what you want, a black eye on your wedding day?” Alistair, in perfectly good spirits, walked over and took Rynn’s hand, leading him quietly out of the room in anticipation of a fight. Pierce, hastily deciding on one of Cian’s shirts, ran out after them. Antha remained tense and sharp-eyed, staring Courtland down until she saw the first flicker that he was ready to back down. Pointing to the door, she said sternly, “Out.”
“I’m coming back in fifteen minutes if you aren’t downstairs,” he declared, inching backwards towards the door, “And I’ll tell Uncle Michael you said he could dress the twins today.”
“The hell you will!” she yelled after him as the door slammed closed, his cackling vanishing beyond it. Antha sat with her arms crossed, irritably muttering, “I’d like to see someone else try to dress my babies up for their first family event. Just let them try it and see what I’ll do.” She gave a little huff and slipped out of bed, going over to turn the lock on the door with a satisfying clank. “We’ve done a terrible, terrible thing to ourselves by letting Courtland have an entire day as the center of attention,” she concluded after a moment, collapsing face-first on the bed, “His birthday is bad enough, I can’t even imagine today. If he doesn’t have his name in lights ten feet tall on the front lawn, I’ll be shocked.”
Sighing and yawning and combing her fingers idly through her hair, Antha forced herself to rise again, turning and laying a sweet kiss on Cian’s lips and giving a vague, tired smile. “How was the party? I haven’t seen Courtland so drunk in the longest time, and they had to physically drag Tori into bed. Poor Dolly Jean, she nearly had a panic attack when she saw him.” And then with a little shifty, guilty sideways glance, added, “Not that anyone was waiting up.” Which, of course, she had been. Unknowingly, they were in similar situations---Antha trusted Cian, but couldn’t help but worry, especially around her cousins, with no one to monitor them.  

[Okimiyage]

Even dead asleep, Cian had instinctively wrapped his arms around his wife when she had come to bed. Now that she was stirring, he seemed very reluctant to give her up. As she began to stir, he ducked his head into the hollow between her throat and shoulder and buried his face against her, issuing placid grumbling noises. He had claimed this pillow and it was not allowed to run off on him.
Still, that was until Courtland burst into the school, yelping something horrible inaccurate about the morning.
Cian growled something conveying what he thought to be a very sensible ‘******** off’, and retreated further into the down comforter.
Oh. Right. The wedding.
Hell, he had to be polite today, didn’t he?
He peeked out from under the covers, sparing a second to glare at the sunlight slanting through the blinds, and then reaffixed his attention on Courtland just in time to see Rynn presented like a miscreant child. It put him in a better mood immediately.
Rynn had his arms crossed and his brows knit in a way which the 16-year-old boy probably thought was intimidating, but Courtland would have most likely described as ‘cute’. He looked like he was having about the same quality of morning as Cian.
“I keep telling him, but he won’t listen. I’m not doing it. I’m not going to be dressed up like some kind of—of decorative furniture that needs to fit a certain color scheme. Besides, black is very respectful.”
Cian propped himself up on his elbows. “I suppose it’s a little dour.” he finally acknowledged, making use of language for the first time since he’d officially woken up. “Isn’t the point of wedding guests to provide their service as—er—decorative furniture, anyways? It’s considered very rude to attempt to outshine the bride, you know.”
Which probably mean that Dorian would show up in a suit made of iridescent peacock feathers, knowing him.
Rynn, in the meantime, began tapping his foot. “Don’t you have anything better to do today than harass me, anyways? You’re about to get married. I’ll sit in the back if my attire’s so offensive.”
This finally got Cian’s attention, as he sat bolt upright. “Oh, no. No, no, no—you don’t get to abandon your fraternal duty that easily.” It almost sounded like Cian was upset, but Rynn was close enough to see the slightly evil gleam in his brother’s eyes. “You’re part of the family, Rynn. Antha’s brother-in-law. You get to sit right on the front row.”
Rynn looked momentarily thoughtful, then turned to Courtland.
“Fine,” he announced, cracking his knuckles. “I’ll do what you want. I’ll be ‘colorful’, even. I’m going to find the most garish items of clothing that this house has to offer, and wear them all at once.” Snapping his fingers, he leveled a glare at Cian. “You!—leather pants. I know you have them somewhere. And something with plaid. Or fur. I might need to borrow some of Antha’s jewelry, too.”
Cian snorted. “You would not fit into my pants, little brother….assuming that I even owned a pair of leather pants, which I have yet to admit to.”
“I’ll find something worse.”

He was still hissing dire promises concerning chartreuse and gold chains when Pierce all but dragged him out of the room, and Cian collapsed back into the pillow-festooned headboard with relief.
“Ow. My head.” Rubbing his open palm against his brow, Cian stared up at the canopy. On the floor below, he could dimly hear Rynn’s offended squawking continue. “They’re always so loud.”
“The party was good. It was a bit surreal—I know I used to be a bit of a cad, but I’ve never walked into a room and suddenly had the attention of every woman in it. They said they’d partied with Mayfairs before, and even the ones who hadn’t knew about us. Courtland seemed to quite enjoy himself, from what I can recall.”
Glancing towards Antha from beneath his lashes, he added. “They were all a bit orange for my taste. I was almost sorry we didn’t have Rynn to sneak in, it would have been hilarious to watch him turn into a tomato. I hope he didn’t give you too much trouble.”
Then, blinking, he sat back up again. “Wait, did they say three hours? Until the ceremony?”
Cian pulled his lips downwards in a blanche. “s**t. I had planned to get Courtland a wedding gift that wasn’t a humorous lap dance.” Although the dancer had seemed to enjoy herself quite a bit, Dorian had made off with her afterwards.
“I suppose he’ll have to accept an IOU. Or cash. There aren't any antique Chinese vases lying around the place that we could stuff with bills, are there? Or would that be tasteless? Dorian's already called dibs on getting them a toaster.”  

[XCandy and LunacyX]

“I think the rule is that you have a week after the wedding to hand over the presents before it’s late,” Antha mused, stretching her arms up above her head as if she was finally resolved to rising, “And the last thing Courtland and Jack need is money. You do realize they’re paid a fortune every month that they hardly even touch because they live here? I once watched Courtland use a hundred dollar bill as scrap paper just so he wouldn’t have to walk upstairs to get actual paper.” This was said with just a twinge of disdain. Money meant nothing to Antha, she had too much to care about it, but where Courtland had no care for the power it held and the regard he should pay it for his and the family’s standing, Antha had both in spades. Plenty of witching families had power---the only thing that set the Mayfairs apart was their fortune. Being reckless with money was one thing, but disregarding it entirely was quite another. It was one of the few things she and Julien had ever agreed on.
Abruptly, her brows knitted and she turned to her husband. “Did you say Dorian is getting them a toaster?” She groaned, shaking her head, already exhausted by the matter. “I wish he wouldn’t insist on being so antagonistic for his own amusement. He’s already alienated the entire family, at this rate they’re going to turn against him.” Jack already had, but she didn’t mention that. Acknowledging the animosity seemed like it would make it concrete, and she didn’t want that. “Why would he get them a toaster, where does he think they’re going? Those boys will die in this house even if it falls down around their heads first. They’ll think he’s trying to push them out.” She didn’t question that Dorian meant no such thing, only perhaps a joke. What he didn’t realize was that no one was joking with him anymore.
“Actually---” she continued, changing the subject as she climbed out of bed and went over to the closet, “And this is the first time I think I’ve ever been able to say this---Rynn was no trouble at all. Though I’m not sure he even had the opportunity to be trouble…Nicolae was in a mood.” She rolled her eyes, marking it as an annoying and common occurrence. “And I think he had other things on his mind.” Plucking the articles of clothing Courtland had specifically designated for the day out of the closet and tossing them on the end of the bed, Antha turned and folded her arms with a wicked grin, her eyes glittering conspiratorially. “Do you know, I left Rynn and Alistair alone for two minutes in the library yesterday, and when I came back Rynn looked like he’d been absolutely painted red. There’s a tension there now, I noticed it last night.” Giving a little chuckle to herself, she rummaged around in one of her drawers and then set about changing, reveling as she did, “Begrudging, confused sexual tension, if I had to bet on it. Airi may seem more a sheep than the rest of us, but he’s more a wolf than most of us beneath it. Well…” Pausing, her new shirt half-buttoned, a grin flickered back across her lips and she leaned across the bed just quickly enough to n** his earlobe with her teeth. “Still less wolf than me, obviously.”
When she was dressed, surprisingly quickly it might be noted, she went to turn circles in the mirror, scrutinizing the choice of outfit Courtland had made for her. “I can’t help feeling this only goes with bunny ears,” she sighed in conclusion, shaking her head as she pulled a tie beneath her collar, “Oh well. It’s Courtland’s wedding, I suppose I should give him what he wants.”

Across the hall, Rynn’s behavior had taken the boys a little by surprise. To Courtland, it was like watching a door creak open---intentionally or not, Rynn was playing their game with them, and they immediately seized upon the opportunity. Hastily grabbing Rynn’s hands up in his own, eyes sparkling, Courtland said intently, “There’s a fuchsia paisley print shirt from the sixties in the attic.” Turning, practically bouncing, the biggest grin on his face, he ran for the door calling, “I’ll have Jacob get it, be right back!” Silently, Alistair seized him by the scruff of the neck, tilting his head disapprovingly.
“Paisley’s good,” Pierce agreed, nodding, with a similar grin, “If we’re murdering fashion today anyways, why not? I’ve seen Rowan with some of those massive, clanking gold chains before, that her kind are making so popular, I bet we could nick some of those off of her.”
Hands on his cheeks, practically shrieking in excitement, Courtland exclaimed, “Rhinestone belt buckles!”
Sighing, half pity and half amusement, Alistair cast Rynn a sympathetic glance as the boys both darted out of the room to gather supplies. “Never give them a chance to call your bluff,” he warned him quietly, knowingly, with a faint touch of a teasing grin, “Unless your wedding present is the resulting pictures? Believe you me, they’ll be pulling them out at every opportunity for decades.” But assuming naturally that Rynn had too much pride to ever let Courtland dress him, especially with the promise of sixties relics, Alistair took him by the shoulder and led him downstairs, past the rows of flowers and into his room, going over to his closet and flipping through his own clothes.
The agreement between Pierce and Alistair concerning the room they newly shared was quite apparent on first glance: they had split it down the middle. The room had the baroque, striped wallpaper and gauzy white and gray drapes in common, and one sofa and painting in the middle, but otherwise shared very little. To the right, Pierce’s side was modern and stylish, just a little edgy, with a sleek metal bedframe, tons of clothes neatly packed into racks, the black and silver dresser neatly lined with bottles and containers of all sorts of stylish products. Alistair’s half of the room, on the other hand, was cluttered and lively and colorful, the walls crammed with an eclectic mix of prints, a striped steamer trunk littered with trinkets at the foot of his art nouveau bed, gleaming stars hanging from the ceiling, and random instruments all pushed up along the edges of the room.
As he realized Rynn hadn’t seen his room yet, and realizing how odd it probably appeared, Alistair gave a little wan smile, glancing over his shoulder as he explained cheerfully, “I like things. It’s a little difficult to explain, but…well, did you ever see The Little Mermaid? It’s kind of like that. I never saw anything properly before, and now that I can fully see all the colors and patterns and lights and sparkly things…I can go a little overboard.”
Closing the painted door of his armoire, he handed a few shirts over to Rynn. His style was more in line with Courtland or Jack’s, intricate and ornate, but very close to Rynn’s size and fit, and entirely less garish than the cousins would’ve preferred. “Pick one. It’ll keep Courtland off your back without all the paisley and chartreuse and gold chains.” Satisfied, he turned and went over to his bedside table, which was clearly circus themed and probably meant for a child, taking up a pack up cigarettes and putting one to his lips, habitually touching the top of a carousel music box as he did so that it whirred and the horses set into motion, calling out a tinkling melody. “You’ll have to forgive their exuberance,” he added, like an afterthought, turning and dropping down onto the bed, grinning at Rynn with his hand over the post of his bed and his chin atop his hand, “I don’t think they’ve ever heard you talk to freely around them. And even if it was an honest threat, that’s how we joke with each other. They’re thrilled.” Which was an understatement, if anything.
“But you’d better go before Pierce finds you here and tries to fix your hair,” he concluded, motioning at the dresser on the wall opposite, his grin turning just slightly wicked, “Unless you wanted to watch me change?”

Outside, in exile until the ceremony, Jack was listening to his grandmother reprimand him on the informal setting. She had arrived very early that morning, hardly after Courtland and Antha had left the porch, and spent some time exclaiming her shock to him while he languished half-asleep in his bed. But she had recovered from the dual surprise of his split decision to marry and that he was marrying another man, and was now insistent that if her grandson was going to have a wedding, it was going to be done right. Michael had managed to escape earlier, claiming that he should look in on the twins, but Liesse and Victoria had likewise been dragged along, the latter designated by Suzette as the flower girl, to the little girl’s delight.
In the midst of all this commotion, Malakai was napping in his hammock just outside of the newly-erected seating area, though it didn’t stop Suzette from occasionally demanding that he agree with her. “The arch isn’t even proper, it’s broken. I can understand that you don’t want a church service Jacques, but this won’t do at all.”
“It’s fine, grandmother,” the boy sighed, anxiously rubbing the back of his neck, “It’s not about the ceremony.”
“And you can’t just have Lionel officiating---he’s a dour and unpleasant man, you know that, and this is not his area of expertise. You must at least have a proper officiate. You agree, don’t you sweetpea?” She added the last to Malakai, glancing at him, but the boy didn’t budge. Jack was rather beginning to suspect he was feigning sleep to avoid the entire thing. “Well, nevermind. If I can’t convince you to do this properly, we can all at least look proper.”
“You are not going to be happy with Courtland then, grandmother…”
“What about our little peach?” the old woman continued, draping an arm around Liesse’s shoulders and lovingly stroking her hair, “You haven’t even given her time to get a lovely new dress.”
“Is she ‘peach’ now?” Jack asked in exasperation, not even bothering to respond to her complaints anymore.
The moment Suzette turned to address her grandson again, Malakai’s arm shot out and had snatched Liesse before the old woman could notice, pulling her down into the hammock and locking her in his arms. The entire time, he never once gave any indication of waking and Jack pouted for being right, hissing quietly, “Traitor.”
Malakai gave a small hum that could’ve been in sleep (but only Suzette was still buying that), burying his face beneath Liesse’s shoulder to hide from his cousin’s accusing stare. He wasn’t getting dragged into this, and if Jack had any ideas to the contrary, Amadeo was on guard in a little fuzzy ball beside Malakai’s ear.  

[Okimiyage]

Cian spread his arm wide in a stretch as he listened to Antha's reproach. “It’s the classic newly-wed gift,” he protested, finally. “Everyone I talked to at the bar said it’s what they really would have wanted.” Cian paused, then acknowledged his mistake. “I’ll have to think of something else.” Her husband opened his mouth in a lion-like yawn, and swung his legs off the side of the bed as Antha dressed.
There was a distinctly predatory look in his eye as their eyes met, in the mirror of her vanity. Cian’s hands hung loosely beneath his crossed arms, as he leaned forward and rested his elbows on his knees. “Rynn needs a little bit of the wolf, I think. You saw him the other night at the bar. He doesn’t do anything that’s honest without being a little provoked.”
He trailed off. There had been something else that he was going to say, but now, looking at Antha, he couldn’t remember it. Climbing out of the bed, he crossed the room slowly and positioned himself behind her at the mirror, leaning over in order to nestle his chin against the thin ridge of her shoulder. “You’d be a cute bunny,” he said, as if it were the most natural thing in the world to comment upon. His hands flexed around her hips, trailing down into the pleats of her skirt, and then receded to wrap loosely around her stomach. “We could stay up here for an hour or so, right? Pretend we fell back asleep. Lock the door. What could they do to us?” Cian nudged his nose into Antha’s curls. “We’d really only draw attention away from the main event, right?”

Below, Rynn was looking a little alarmed at how eagerly the cousins had taken to their quest. He was too proud to call off the hunt, though, at least until Alistair had led him a little way out of earshot and he was able to squeak, through gritted teeth, “help…me…”
Only when the door was shut behind them, and locked, did Rynn breathe a sigh of relief.
“What kind of monster did I unleash?” he muttered to himself. He didn’t really expect an answer, but Alistair gave the explanation anyways. If Rynn didn’t appear to be paying attention—his eyes were darting back and forth around the horde of treasures which Alistair had accumulated—it was only because he was distracted by the room’s decorative schizophrenia. He only found it a little unsettling to admit how easy—and in a way, enjoyable—it had been to fall into the same habits the cousins, which he had once found so irritating—to mollify them with a quick joke instead of resisting until the bitter death. So instead of admitting anything, he spun the conversation back to Alistair. “Don’t apologize. You’re like a dragon,” he said, half-admiringly. His inquisitive fingers set one of the stars above the bed swinging “It’s pretty.”
Then, with less admiration and more wonder, “…But what’s ‘The Little Mermaid’? And how do you find anything in here?”
Wandering over to the closet, he picked a shirt the color of a ripe plum off the floor and made a vain attempt to shake out the wrinkles. There was something about Alistair’s messy wonderland of a room that made Rynn want to put things in order. Setting it aside on the bed—that was a futile task which would have to wait for later—he investigated the rest of the closet as Alistair smoked his cigarette down to the filter.
Finally, Rynn struggled back out from between the heavy sheafs of hanging garments, and presented his choice to Alistair. He wasn’t used to wearing colors, and he needed reassurance that he’d picked the right ones. “It’s blue,” he said, as if Alistair couldn’t see that for himself. There was no small trace of resignation in his voice. “Courtland can’t complain about that, right? Blue is a color.”
Courtland might have complained a little. Rynn didn’t have Cian’s ‘fashion taste’.
Rynn glanced towards the door, folding his outfit over his arms, with an expression that betrayed his reluctance to set foot outside. “…Can I just change in here, actually? Liesse and Dolly-Jean no doubt have our room to themselves, and it’s either in here or in a bathroom. And honestly—“ Rynn winced as a shrill cackle of glee made its way through the floorboards. “…I’m worried about what will happen if I set foot outside without something suitable on. I think they found the paisley.”
Rynn didn’t exactly wait for an answer, laying out his outfit on the bed already. Although Alistair and Rynn were approximately of similar height and build, their coloring was somewhat…incompatible. All they shared in common was their pale skin. Rynn’s hair was the soft brown of a wren’s wing, streaked with gold like light through a glass of whiskey, where Alistair’s was like Antha’s, red as blood. Where Rynn’s eyes were the mottled hazel of dying moss, Alistair’s were the unnaturally vivid hue that only the Mayfair emerald matched in splendor.
Still, somewhere in the closet, he’d cobbled together an outfit that (hopefully) wouldn’t bore Courtland, and wasn’t a total eyesore, either.
The shirt had no collar, just a band of stiff fabric around the throat, a bit like a priest’s—that way, Rynn didn’t have to bother with a tie. The gleaming white buttons, lustrous in a way which was reminiscent of a pearl, led down into a vest—the ‘it’ which Rynn had cited as his obligatory use of color. The vest could have been described as ‘blue’, but this was doing the fabric a gross injustice: ‘blue’ was a term to be used for military uniforms, denim jeans, birds and national flags. This, instead, was a subtle slate whose hue could only be defined in highlight. The closest comparison to be made was that of a cloud-streaked sky, a shallow river, fish-scales and foam. The charcoal-grey, loosely-tailored jacket and trousers finished it off. Rynn’s only concern was that the black oxfords that he wore were too dark for the rest of the ensemble—unfortunately, Alistair did not share the same shoe size as himself—
Rynn stopped, suddenly, and reviewed the last few minutes of his thought process.
Oh, ******** heart-rate was suddenly what Rynn could only describe as ‘agitated’. This wasn’t normal, not for him. What did it matter if the shoes matched? Was it Courtland’s influence? He had just watched the groom go through (and utterly dismiss, if not outright damn) the entirety of his own wardrobe and Cian’s. Maybe it was Alistair. Mayfairs enjoyed practical jokes, the cousins were like a pack of mad leprechauns when you got them started, maybe this was their idea.
The idea that Rynn could actually enjoy the process of matching colors or clothes was not even a possibility that occurred to him. Rynn stared his suit down, brow faintly creased in a fretful way.
“…maybe I’ll just go in black. Black is a classic.”

Downstairs, Liesse was fully embracing her new role as ‘peach’. “So this is what grandmothers are like,” she said, beaming. It was as though she’d found a satisfactory conclusion to a particularly difficult puzzle. The grandmothers in the maze were not like this at all. She’d always suspected that it was because they were dead, but she never had any hard evidence. Suzette was a very refreshing experience.
She didn’t understand why Malakai and Jacques—er, Jack—seemed to have a distinctly minor key to their voices when they responded to her. All the same, she didn’t squirm away when Malakai pulled her onto the hammock. Instead, she smoothed her skirt down and turned to the side just enough to avoid Suzette’s inevitable glare.
“I think it’s nice,” she whispered into Malakai’s ear. “The garden looks beautiful this time of year.” She glanced towards the end of the aisle, and added, “They can always pretend that the arch is ‘artistic’, right?”

At the end of the drive, a taxicab pulled up. After a few moments of negotiation, the back passenger door was kicked open, and Dorian climbed out onto the sidewalk.
He had thwarted Cian’s prediction: for once, he wore a modest white shirt, and a silk navy tie which was fastened to his chest by a single diamond stud on the end of a pin. He had belladonna in his breast pocket.
He’d arrived early, which was rare. Still, as he recognized the back of Suzanne’s head amongst the distant square of guests, his jaunty gait down the walkway slowed. Damn. He should have brought his flask.
No, that was despicable.
Still, he couldn’t stop now. Maybe he could sneak into the house and avail himself to the liquor cabinet later. For now, he’d just have to brace himself.
“Think of it as a gauntlet,” Dorian muttered, under his breath.  

[XCandy and LunacyX]

The struggle on Antha’s face was apparent. On the one hand, Courtland was running around completely unchecked and was likely to force their bedroom door at any moment. God only knew what he was doing to Rynn. But on the other hand, Cian was very, very close, all body heat and bare flesh, his tawny curls still tousled from his pillow, and he had that look in his eyes. It was an absolutely unreasonable situation, he knew she couldn’t keep her head straight when he gave her that look.
After a moment of deliberation that fizzled out into little more than blind animal instinct, she pressed a hand on his chest and shoved him back onto the bed, as casually as if it could have been an accident. “Mind the clothes,” she said, ripping the tie out from around her collar again, her eyes glittering absolutely wickedly, “Or else you’ll have to answer to Courtland.”

Downstairs, lounging quietly on his bed, Alistair was watching Rynn with narrowed eyes, like he would pierce him with a gaze, soul and all, until he knew what the other boy was made of. At length, watching him struggle over his outfit with no other apparent concerns, Alistair laughed, turning and shaking his head, murmuring, “Behold the day the sheep wandered into the wolf’s den, and then asked the wolf to let him stay.”
But then he said no more on the matter, turning and taking up one of the scattered cards from the trunk at the foot of his bed. “Don’t try to make order out of all of this. I won’t allow it. I like it just as it is---” His eyes sparkled, lovingly, turning the card around in his fingers. “---wild and glittering. When you have endured such acute silence and emptiness for as long as I have, this kind of lively chaos…” He smiled, with infinite affection, laying a kiss on the rows of hearts printed across the card and letting it flutter down to the colorful patchwork quilt. “…is so exquisitely beautiful.”
Quietly, he unfolded himself and rose, going over to where his outfit for the day was hung with care. “There’s a reason we dress the way we do,” he said, turning his back on Rynn as he unfastened the buttons on his shirt, “Appearances are a form of power. It’s like the peacocks that spread their feathers when confronted with a threat. It’s the same reason nobles used to put so much time and effort and money into their appearances. Normal people aren’t like us, they don’t look at someone and see their power, their goodness or malice, they don’t watch to see how someone’s eyes shift like we do. All they see is how that person presents himself, what he looks like. With your pride, I’m surprised you aren’t more conscious of it.” His eyes narrowed, gaze cast over his shoulder. “Beauty is a great weapon, and you are immensely beautiful, Rynn. Learn to use it.”
Just when he looked like he might’ve begun shedding his clothes, Alistair turned and flashed a teasing grin, as if the show had been very purposefully executed, and pulled a screen between the two of them so that one could not see the other. When he emerged some minutes later, he was dressed rather elegantly in an ornate rouched velvet jacket and black leather pants Pierce would’ve been proud of. “When in Rome,” he said, with a little twinkle in his eye, adjusting his white silk shirt. “But you know, if you truly insist on wearing black…” They were an inch apart in a heartbeat, Alistair with his wolfish, suggestive grin. “I could always make you red.” It was hard to say if this was an offer or a threat, Alistair had a gift for rolling them all up into one. Either way, no one could question that he was perfectly serious.

Outside, while Suzette was mercifully distracted by her unfortunate grandson, Dorian’s arrival had not gone totally unnoticed. Lucy, who had just arrived but hid herself behind a tree upon seeing a cab pull up, jumped out and upon Dorian’s back as soon as he had taken a step past her, laughing at having amused herself. “I wasn’t expecting it would be you,” she sighed, still with a grin, “But you’ll do. How was the bachelor party? Armand tells me they have money on what disease you picked up from some orange stripper.” The girl clucked her tongue, turning in a whirl of silk skirts printed with pastel flowers and heading for the door. “Very naughty, Dorian.”
But thus her interest in him was squandered and she waltzed into the house, past the rows of spring flowers cluttering the hall, and sought out Courtland at the foot of the stairs, pouting and arguing with Pierce. The look on his face became more pronounced when he saw Lucy, like a wounded puppy begging for solace. “Nobody’s getting ready,” he whined, stamping his foot, “Antha and Cian are at it like beasts again, Malakai is taking a goddamn nap outside and took Liesse with him, and Alistair and Rynn have suspiciously vanished together.”
“That is interesting,” the girl purred to the last, eyes sparkling, peeking into the parlor as if she might find them hidden in a dark corner, “I can only imagine what they might be doing. And I like the mental image.”
Ignoring her, Courtland cast one look at Dorian over Lucy’s shoulder and wrinkled his nose, sighing, “Dorian, you look terribly boring. You’ll have to sit in the back.”
“Oh cheer up, precious one,” Lucy cooed, taking his face in her hands, “It’s your wedding day. Everything will be lovely.”
“Or else there will be hell to pay,” the boy agreed, nodding, and kissed her cheek now that his good cheer was restored, “We’ve already had to patch up the arch. It reeks of Antha and Cian’s doing.”
“They do break things, from the sound of it,” Lucy agreed, grinning wickedly at the distant sound of something thumping violently to the floor.
“My heart goes out to Jacob,” Courtland laughed, turning and starting up the stairs, “He has to clean up after them.”  

[Okimiyage]

Dorian looked decidedly put out. “I was trying to look respectable, but I have practically nothing in my wardrobe that’s suitable. Anyways, the harpy that you all let me take home would hardly let me get dressed in the first place, it’s a miracle I even have a shirt on at this point.” Dorian’s sigh was clearly intended to convey tragic, interminable suffering.
“Anyways, nothing happened,” he added, sharply dropping all dramatics in response to Lucy’s attack upon his virtue. “She passed out before we got home, and despite what you all think of me, I am still a gentleman in some ways.”
Glancing over his shoulder, and squinting as a ray of sunlight beamed squarely into his eye, he added, “I showed up, anyways. You should all be satisfied now, right?”

Upstairs, Rynn fidgeted with the gauzy sleeve of Alistair’s borrowed shirt. “I never thought of what I looked like, before I came here.” he said, slowly, turning Alistair’s advice over again and again in his head, as he dressed. “I could always see myself in my sister’s face. Mirrors seemed…superfluous.”
He could dimly glimpse Alistair’s slender silhouette from behind the thin paper of the screen—his garments falling away like the leaves of a tree.
There rose in his breast a sudden, overwhelming urge to bolt, but Rynn suppressed it.
“Hair like Antha’s—like yours—shocked me, at first. I didn’t know anyone ever had such red hair. I thought everyone must look like my siblings and I, because they were all I had to compare against. But when it’s all you know, well—beauty seems like a quality not worth acknowledging, then. Maybe that’s why the Mayfairs generate it so naturally. You’ve never had to question your own power of attraction, not with the attention of the whole city on you. Hell—“ Rynn gave a faintly derisive snort. “You could have brought down the whole bar in that hole-y, threadbare sweater the other night. Peacocks pale in comparison. After all, they need their feathers to impress. They have to dazzle. You…don’t.”
Doing up the gleaming buttons of his shirt, Rynn thought perhaps that ‘dazzle’ was the wrong word for it. ‘Dazzle’ was a word reserved for the sparkle of cut stones, carefully, artificially primed to catch the light in all the right ways. Alistair had the gleam of a baroque pearl, uncultured yet prized, and entirely irresistible.
Alistair pushed back the screen, and Rynn paused for a moment, caught in the middle of that embarrassing thought, before he shrugged the dove-grey coat over his shoulders.
“Which isn’t to say that you can’t,” he acknowledged.
“Er. Dazzle, that is.”
His gaze drifted very pointedly in any direction but downwards. “The leather pants actually don’t look as terrible as I thought they would. At least Courtland won’t be disappointed—he seemed extremely enthusiastic about the prospect of seeing those in the front row.”
Rynn was actively attempting to avoid blushing. If he’d known any magic that would have made his skin as opaque as Cian’s, what he wouldn’t give for that blessing.
As it was, he was doing very well—only faintly pink—until Alistair stepped up, and put his own face within an inch of Rynn’s. He could swear that the other boy could hear his heart hammering.
“Sometimes, I swear somebody put you up to torturing me,” he muttered. “If I find out it’s my brother, I’ll fight him, I really will. You tell him that.”
He hoped it was Cian, anyways. If it was Antha, he wasn’t sure what to do. He couldn’t fight a girl, and he had absolutely no chance of winning even if he did.

Upstairs, Cian and Antha lay collapsed together in a tangle of limbs, utterly spent.
It was a good start to the morning.
Cian wound Antha’s tie, which had been used as an impromptu blindfold, lazily around his fist, just out of her reach. “I’m horribly tempted not to give this back to you,” he murmured. “The respectable look just doesn’t suit you, bunny.” A mischievous smile glimmered at the corner of his mouth. “Then again, I’m sure that’s why Courtland wanted you to wear it. You’d steal the show in one of your usual frocks—I’d spend the entire ceremony beating off other men and their marriage proposals.”
Cian rose from the pile of cloud-soft pillows with great reluctance, and offered his hand to Antha to help her do the same. “I suppose we’d better get ready.”
Glancing towards the antiquated clock on their bedstead, he wrinkled his nose at the time it displayed. “Uff. We’ll just have to hope that the grooms are in a forgiving mood. Then again, getting married is supposed to be the happiest day of your life, right? They hardly have a choice in the matter.”