Alexander Murphy is (predacious) wrote in doorslogs, @ 2013-08-24 03:04:00 |
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Entry tags: | hannibal, remus lupin |
Who: Alexander and Eloise
What: Talking
Where: Tomes
When: The night after they spoke on the phone
Warnings/Rating: Talking about Alexander's suicide, vague incestual overtones.
Tomes was eclectic, crowded, strange and odd. Even in the evening, it was filled with curious visitors. Stragglers, college students, local homeless, geeks and wide-awake octogenarians. Even late at night, they sat in the old chairs and climbed the stairs and read things they would not buy. There was chatter, quiet and hushed and somehow never climbing to anything more than background noise. The store, blatantly based off a beloved stop in France, was a novelty in the city of neon glow, and it was quickly becoming its own creature, differentiating itself from that place it owed its beginnings to.
Late, the lights were quieter inside, not quite so raucous, and not quite so awake. Whispers. It was sleepydust then, and there was no real system for the clutter, not beyond general themes that made sense to the fractured mind of the woman who lived amid the narrowly lined walkways that wound four stories high in the desert. Someone played Chopsticks on the piano, and the music twinkled and carried upward.
The fourth floor was the place Eloise slept, when she did sleep. There was a typewriter by the open window, and there was an old, small wrought-iron bed pushed against the wall. There were two chairs, lush and cracking at the arms, and a small table between them for tea that had gone cold much earlier in the evening. The room smelled of Parisian cigarettes, slightly sweet and stale smoke. It was there that Eloise was seated, trusting the college student on the first floor to manage things until her shift ended at sunrise. There was no real cause for concern; Eloise didn't need the money. Possibly, she needed money less than she ever had in her already obscenely wealthy life.
Still the family heiress, she now had the added benefit of a bestseller under her proverbial belt, and the shop could rot financially; she would not care.
She sat there, blonde hair loose and a black dress that belonged to the 20s on her willowy frame. Bare shoulders and a fringe hem to the knee, and thirty was visible on her features. There were small lines at the edges of her eyes and around her mouth, and her long fingers were no longer as smooth as they had once been in their years of softness. She stared out into the night, blue eyes and nothing really to recall, despite the fact that she wished it was not the case. Could she sit there alone, she wondered, and die upon that chair with no one below being the wiser? Yes, yes, she thought she could, and that was the truth of things. The play was done, the curtain drawn. There was no spotlight now, and there was only madness upon her cheeks.
Her feet were bare, dirty at the soles from her nightly walks around the block. Three am was her witching hour, and she glanced to the clock. Not yet. Not just yet.
The night held no witching hours for him, no hour of the lonely wolf, or the solitary, fat moon that flooded the night with silver-white light. His glance cast upwards to regard said moon. In a few nights, she would be full, and most humans would be able to see at least a little by her light. Alex already saw plenty, having spent years adjusting to a world without the sun, with only the reflection of the sun's light on the moon, and a thousand flickering candles on different surfaces.
That was one of his favorite things. Bright lights hurt his eyes, false light even more so, but that had been true since he'd died. He did not miss the world of light as one did not miss a rock in one's shoe and all of his shoes now were comfortable. Even the stylish calf-skin boots he wore now laces laced all the way up to his calves, the leather supple, the soles on this particular pair silent. Sometimes he preferred silence to having his presence announced by his own gait.
Or, in tonight's case, announced by the slow and steady thud of his silver tipped cane on the ground. If she was a flapper brought forth from the 20's, fringed and wild-kneed, he was a gentleman cast out of an older time, clothed as he was in his frock coat, the top hat, the gold pocket watch tucked into his waistcoat and the silk cravat at his throat. Old houses were not the only aged things he loved (and he refused to think of her as vast in years, no matter how she saw herself), but some modern conveniences were necessary. Like the car he was riding in now, rear windows blacked out, his driver lacking a top hat but not lacking the pressed and tailored three piece suit. Some things in life were messy, others not, but there was no cause for anyone in his employ to be anything other than finely groomed.
He was silent in the back of the car except for the slight rustle of his pants leg as his toe moved up and down, too slow to be a nervous jitter, but rather rising every time light flared in the front of the car from the street lights. Soon it was impossible to tell flashes from one another as they drove past the Strip, lights set to full blown glare twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, every day of the year. The soundless tap of his foot resumed once they were past it only to stop again when the pulled in front of Tomes. He rather liked the name, liked the suggestion of it, liked how it filled his mouth instead of being barked out like books.
"We're here, Sir." The driver announced as he slid the car into park. Instead of waiting for him to come around and open the door, Alexander exited on his own, cane first, then the matte black of his boots.
"Wait here," Alexander said in return as he stepped out, a gloved hand pushing slightly at the door so it fell shut. He glanced up at the curious building before he strode inside. Every available surface was stuffed, littered, and playing home to books of all shapes and sizes. He approved, very much, and even smiled at the inscription above the door. Angels indeed. What wasn't covered in books housed chairs, a piano, and even at the late hour, a few people. Old, young, and to all of them Alexander tipped his hat, offered them the slight curl of his lips that could be called a smile, but he wasn't here to see them. They were mere spectres on his radar, shadow blips while he was focused on the one person he was here to call upon and began to ascend the stairs, slow and steady, the tip of his cane tapping out his cadence.
At the fourth floor, a closed door barred him from going any further. Was she behind it? A rarer, truer smile pulled at his lips as he lifted the rounded head of his cane and rapped lightly at it, but never was a raven dressed as he.
She looked at the clock, and then she looked at the closed door.
"Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary, Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore, While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping, As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door. Tis some visitor," I muttered, "tapping at my chamber door — Only this, and nothing more," she quoted, loudly enough to be heard, but still something reverent hush.
She became lost in the words, and by the end she had forgotten why she'd begun. It was only the shadow beneath the old and warped wooden door that drew her back in, remembered.
She didn't call for him to enter, though she knew it was he. She stood, patter and dirty feet to the door, and she set her hand upon the wood. She felt the grain in the flat surface, and she knew he would be able to see the shadow she cast along the ground. And there was hesitation. She'd not seen him in so terribly long. Since Earnest was born, just after, and not since. It was a long time, and she had changed. The years had changed her. The past three months, hospitals and medicine. weight lost and forgetfulness destroying her appetite. She had changed, and she considered leaving closed the door and letting him remember the sister he had known.
"Wait," she said, finally, after a time indeterminable. She undid the latch. She stepped away.
She sat herself upon the chair she had vacated, and she lit a French cigarette from an old and silver case. Her fingers shook, and she looked up to verify the light overhead was doused and would not illuminate the lines on her face and gauntness upon her cheeks. The moonlight, she was kind, pallor and shadows, and she finally nodded, ready to begin the performance.
"Enter."
He smiled at hearing her voice, mouth moving over the same words she quoted, but his voice was silent so he might enjoy hers more. Still he waited, death silent and still, through seeing her shadow beneath the frame of the door for that one word that might command him to do as she willed and past the unlatching of the door.
Then it came as he knew it would, as she knew he would come. It had been too long since he'd seen her, but they had been on the widest points of their respective orbits, facing far and away from one another, only to have gravity and the motion of the universe to bring them close again. He reached down, fingers encased still in well oiled calf-skin gloves, slick and dyed in soft heather grey, and opened the door.
He had waited years to see her again and now that the moment was upon them, he no longer felt like waiting as he stepped through and into the mercifully dark room. Alexander remembered only to tap the door with his boot to shut it, cane set against the wall and his hat removed before he was reaching for her. Only when he saw the gloves again did he remember to remove one before he reached for her, mistress of his planetary axis, his thumb smearing over too sharp a cheekbone. She was still as beautiful as she ever was and the moonlight was kind to her, yet she was still too gaunt, worn thin like overused lace.
His fingers pushed back, curling around too thin neck as he drew her to him. "I would kill him for what he has done to you," he whispered, fervently. passionate as a medieval knight defending his lady. Then the word came rolling out of him, warm to contrast the cool tea she liked, honey grounded by whiskey, "Sister."
He looked the same, and yet he looked different, and she did not rise to meet him. She waited for him to come to her, and she let her pale gaze travel and travel as he moved. He was a beautiful broken reminder of a childhood sewn carefully with stitches of make-believe. This thread, loving parents. This thread, a happy future. This thread, dinners together with laughter and smiles. This thread, skinned knees and grass-green socks. This thread, bedtime stories and no monsters under the bed. The threads had woven together all the Murphy children and tried to make whole little creatures of dolls built and crafted for the curios. Lines and lines of little heads - blonde, brown, black, ginger - pretty pictures for political guests to coo at. Darling, darling, all of them, and Eloise had always curtsied lowest with her blonde curls that bobbed from the ends of plaid ribbons.
She watched the removal of soft grey with the kind of regal curiosity befitting the royalty that her mama insisted someone in the family marry. Burkes, a tie to the royal line, and that was all up to Chloe now. She watched the glove, and she tugged it free of his fingers as his hand found her cheek. She tipped her head upward, glove upon the aged lap of her dress and one of her hands slipping within the much too large calfskin.
She allowed his fingers to push, every bit the acquiescing regent, and she was a quiet whisper and nothing of her confidence upon the stage when she broke that post-Sister silence with her own voice. "He did not do this to me, my protective brother. Not only him." And it was truth. Gabriel had, perhaps, forged this path through neglect. But he'd not poured the final concrete upon the road. She glanced about the room, hungry for her typewriter for the first time in months. But it was a futile search, because she did not truly intend to move. "I went to London. There, I faded. There, to the country. There, to the page. There, to here." And she was caught, stuck, and her be-gloved hand reached for the tea. "Will you pour?"
He watched as she put the recently vacated glove on her own hand, still warm from being so close to his own skin. Alexander did not, would not begrudge her this. Knights fancied favors from their ladies, kerchiefs and ribbons, something which they had once held close that captured their scent so they might always have a memento of that one moment when they were invincible. But between them it was different, it was her following where he'd been, a sharing of space that could only exist between the two of them.
But if she wanted to know how it felt, how it truly felt, she had to feel from the outside as well. His still-gloved hand came up, the other slid down, and they met on either side of her trachea, framing that space where her dust-fragile voice came from, where he could feel the wind vibrations of it against his thumbs. "Mmm," was all he said of Gabriel. Life then. It had snapped at him too, run him down into an early grave where Death said no and kicked him back. Hell's hounds had stopped then and he had to die to learn how to breathe. His life had to end, shooting out of him in spasming heart-beat fountains. Life was an infernal ten-titted bitch and she was not allowed his sister. He'd paid price enough for his own sanity, enough to reclaim her as well.
"I will pour," he said, the low strum of a cello as his bare hand reached for the pot, measuring its warmth first. Cold. How long had she left it out? His fingertips stroked over the handle before they hooked around it. "It needs to be warmed." The south had a truly obnoxious version of tea, iced, with a half pound of sugar poured into it -- he had tried it when he first arrived and spat it all over the table as soon as it assaulted his taste buds. It was a horrible display of manners, but it was a horrible perversion of a favored drink. Tea should be hot, at the very least warm, though he knew she preferred it on the very outer edges of what he deemed acceptable. He could indulge her this and if he found it too cool to his liking, it'd be warm enough to taste it from her lips.
Before the madness set in, she would have swatted at his hand upon her throat. She would have done it as Blanche DuBois, all exaggeration that accentuated a long, pale and slim wrist. But she didn't swat. She tipped her head for that gloved touch to her trachea, and she wondered at his madness. She no longer pretended they weren't mad, the lot of them with their broken wings and badly knitted hearts. She accepted now, and the smile that always lit the parties of her youth had faded to no more than the nightlight in one of the children's bedrooms. No more the twirling girl in the white skirts, and she took his hum as a sound without trying to tear it apart like something made paper mache from a single sheet.
His very polite offer to pour brought out the refined. The girls in the Murphy family had all been taught etiquette alongside their politics, and Eloise had always much preferred the prettiness of teas and curtsies to the plights of inhabitants of third-world places that she would never see. "I like it lukewarm," she reminded him, but she loved him, this brother of her youth, and she motioned to the small door at the end of the room. "There's a burner, if you prefer," she said, and it was almost normalcy, that wave of hand and selection of words.
She stood, thinner and thinner now that the moonlight from the window found its path through the old dress and to the skin and bones beneath. She stopped at the window, where the view beyond was nothing like Paris in Spring, and she breathed in the salt dry and wished for humidity upon her throat. "How can you love it here?" she asked. She knew he loved his new home, and she assumed that love carried to this city entirely. "Before I came here, I was happy," she said, looking over her shoulder. And that had been so many years ago, when she'd been just a girl.
He was less mad now than he had been, before life returned to death.Then his brain had been mad, chemicals not falling into place like good little soldiers out to kill and shoot and do all the things soldiers did. It wasn't until undying life, or dead unliving that they finally fell into place. Or perhaps he simply didn't need them anymore. It was of little concern to him, beyond the fact that it had happened, and now, if he was broken, it was in an entirely new way, separate from what he had been.
"There is lukewarm and there is cold. This is cold," he said, gently, lips set upon a curve. He indulged her preference as she indulged his, a tricky balance that could only be forged between them. No parent provided or paid for education would do the same. He had started to lift the pot when she rose, like a flock of pale birds, raven beak lean. Alex, who rarely bit his tongue against saying anything, kept his flighty words behind his tongue when he saw how she truly was.
They all tended towards leanness like latex balloons stretched out to tendons and bones, but this was far different,. This was her bones, like she was a straw girl stuffed into human skin and he liked it not at all, not one fucking bit. The question snapped him out of his displeasure for the moment, focusing on her words, the voice that had cradled him to sleep on yestermorn. "The city is cheap costume jewelry, glittering and fake pieces of glass, yet hiding in the baubles I have two priceless pieces, lurking where untrained eyes cannot see." If she wanted to know why and how he had fallen for this city, she need not look further than the mirror.
"Why here?" There were other cities that could have suited them all better, where they could have made a sultan's dream out of genie's and stuffed to bursting pillows. His world was made of dreamscapes, endless hedonism piled into centuries old luxury, while her world seemed to be fading into the slim, reedy smoke plumes from narrow stacks.
She returned his smile by rote. Her curve of lips similar to his, biology and familial connection in that quirk that almost resembled a smirk. It was thoughtless, returning the smile, something born of lonely holidays and ceilings that were too tall for children to ever dream of jumping up to touch.
And from the window, she heard him speak of his city, and she understood. Thin and nothing, wasted away, she understood. She turned, cheek and profile in the moonlight. "You always did like the unexpected treasures most among us," she said. She had always wanted what shone brightest, what adored most. Chloe had always wanted to be in control of her treasures. She wanted to select them, to draw them to her and claim the victory. He had always found the strange things, the quiet beauty that didn't scream loudly in demand. It was like him. It suited him, and she looked out the window and wondered where the desert moon shone down upon this house that lurked in the city he loved for its very unloveable nature.
Why here, and she listened to him with the tea.
"I don't know," she said of the desert. Gabriel had wanted to settle here, and here they had settled. He'd always refused to speak of his work, and she'd learned not to ask. She'd thrown things instead. Expensive things, when she had the energy to care. When she'd wished to lure him back to her through words and voice and gesture. "I never cared where we lived before the children. After, I was trapped," she said, a shrug of bony shoulders. "I love them so, but I am not a mother." She had said the words over and over during the hot English summer. She forgot them for days on end, when the heat was high and she forgot food and water. "He didn't come home for months after Christmas. Nothing. He was nowhere, and I came to hate this place where no light shone. Children demand their own light, Alexander." As if that explained everything, and she did not begrudge them this.
It was perhaps what drew them so close, he with his quiet treasures, her with her bright ones. As a child he'd been the perfect audience, rapture not handed down by some deity, but by his sisters, but most of all by his fae sister with her teasing eyes. Siren eyes set within ice carved features. Features now that were thorn sharp from her weight loss; he disliked it so.
This place, this shop, they were to his taste, like fully nuanced wine, but for her? Agony of the soul was not for her; they were black spots tarnishing the bright colors of their portrait. Broadway, her name ringed in too bright light bulbs would have suited her better. Adored by thousands, her name on her dressing room door in a gold star, rooms filled to the brim with flowers sent by worshippers ready to supplicate themselves on the stage of her altar. Yes, those things were for her, but they had gone, gold light fled and he hated all those things that had taken it away from her.
All too well he understood that she could not provide that light, that it needed to be directed at her so she might reflect it. Her husband refused her that light and none of them ever did well with refusal, least of all when they made their desires clear. He inhaled slowly, more of a show than what was needed as he walked towards the referenced burner. This place was a strangled artist's hovel and he might have found himself at home with it in those first few months after he had died. "Truly, sister, how much of you did not care and how much of you was playing the role you had cast yourself in?" The loving, doting wife, who loved a man she thought magnificent but was as untouchable as the moon.
"You should return with me," he said as suddenly as light flared from a match. "They are not misers with attention." He reached for the kettle, checked the level of water inside, and set it upon the burner to warm it above tepid. "And there would be plenty to give you attention, no matter which role you chose for yourself."
No, refusal was not something bred in the Murphy line. Tolerance of refusal was something weeded out through the years, like bad skin and bad teeth. They had been raised beautiful, born for adoration. Born for podiums and lecterns. Born for stages and screens. They were meant to make a difference. They were legacy. They had always been legacy, even more than they had been people. Children once, but never intended to stay simple and happy. And they had failed. All the riches of Croesus heaped upon them. The best educations, the best etiquette, the best genes, and yet they were nothing. He would argue it was not true, she knew, if she said the words. But what they were, it was not as their parents had wished it. They had been brought into the world for a purpose, and they were not fulfilling it. She would never. He would never. Chloe, perhaps, with her different kind of resilience and cruelty. Chloe, the one born to grow in the most infertile soil, and she never would have thought it.
"I loved him," she said simply of Gabriel. "I love him, but I hate him all the same." It was not the answer to his question, and it was not the answer he sought, but she felt it explained it all. And that was madness and straying, perhaps, but it remained true. "Once, I thought he would be the one who saw me. The one who truly saw me, but he doesn't." Sadness, and her expression turned hard then, distant once she felt the sadness seep into her bones. "I will not cry." Random. But true.
The offer made her turn, and she watched as he reached for the kettle. "I should not," she said, though the smile had returned to her lips. A distant and ghostly smile. "I am done with happiness, Alexander. I am done with roles." And was this madness a role? Perhaps, but this was crafted for her self. It was carved from her bones like ivory, and it was no stage's light that she could shut off when no one was looking. "I am." It was a full sentence; complete.
It was an answer, but not one he liked. So she had not cared, she had cast a man that couldn't see past his own nose to see her truly and he had failed her and the cost had brought her to this. A garden where roses did not grow, but turned into brittle thorns on the vine, where their petals fell to the parched ground and careless feet trampled them. No. This was no true place for his sister, a halfway house perhaps, for her ascension, the very bottom of the pit for her emotional state.
He would make the offer again, later, when she was more apt to say yes, to want to be back in the light she craved. For her, he would share. For her, he would have to be Edison with the light bulb, gradually lighting her golgotha.
The rest of what she had to say did not surprise him. Tears were not for them, bred out by generations of good English blood. Even in his darkest times, he did not cry, but carried the aching things around inside of him until he had to let them loose by slicing through his veins. He had succeeded wholly on that front. Leaving the pot, he crossed the room, cloth whispering until he was standing behind her, looming as monsters did, before his arms grew ravenous and he drew her into them, her back to his chest. There he could feel her bones like fragile birds wings against his chest and he did not like the sensation.
"Then let it not be a role, but be who you are, sister," he whispered, lips to the curve of her ear. "They will love you when you want love, cry for you when you cannot cry for yourself, press their faces to your hands and kiss your fingertips." The tip of his nose ran up the back of her ear, nostrils flaring as he breathed in her scent, old tea and ink and considered, his hands flexing slightly where they rested above the curve of her ilium. His lips drew together as if he might kiss the bony ridge directly behind it, but he refrained, in favor of breathing out slowly against it, marking it with his breath as his saliva might. "Must I beg you?"
She knew he would not like her response. She knew it, as she knew the sun would rise and nothing would change with the dawn of a new day. She knew it, as she'd known the audience had not adored her upon that stage, even before the reviews and the interview with the theater managers. She knew it, and yet she knew he would not push it. Like Chloe, like herself, he was wise and slow. It was a Murphy trait, perhaps, scheming. They were all machinating creatures, beautiful and dangerous in their intelligence. He would not grab her by the hand and demand. No, her brother would coax her like one coaxes a skittish kitten, and he would have the patience for it no one else would have. She knew, standing there, and it made her smile.
When he drew her in, her back to his chest, her eyes closed. She knew she was jutting bones and hard things, and she wondered if he felt. She wondered if he felt, or if he was remembering the softness of youth. She had always been willow-thin, but nothing like this, and she hoped the memory was stronger than the reality for the man with his arms around her.
The words against her ear were promises. They were the things, once, that she had been sure would be her due. It was cruel kindness, and she exhaled at the feel of his nose against her ear. Breath, and that meant he still lived. Despite his beliefs, this new non-life he had shrouded himself with, he still breathed, and her hair twitched with his exhale. "I am," she repeated, though perhaps he would not understand. "I crave nothing, Alexander. Adoration is false. Love is a lie. I like the pain of the nothing. It gnaws at my belly, and it claws at my soul, and it's a perfect match for how my heart feels, for how my head feels. It is fitting, and I yearn for it. I am, and I crave nothing. No new life, no new adventure. I have given up with trying. I have tried. I thought the divorce would bring him back. I thought his injury would bring him back. I thought the stage would bring me back. I did not understand that there was no back, because nothing was mine to begin with. And none did come. And now I do not want to return."
Alexander listened to her. There was hearing without listening, and pretending at listening, but then there was listening and understanding. In the first few moments when he'd woken up in the hospital bed, pristine white bandages wound from his elbows to his wrists, he had wanted to go back to Death's embrace, beg her to take him as the pitiful soul he was, but there was no going back, no return in his cards or hers. His fingers pushed out, palms cupping the angel wings of her ilium. It jutted out too far, yet his fingers curled around her sides all the same as he hovered behind her, like a fallen monstrosity leeching life from her.
He tilted, nose against the valley between her thin throat and shoulder. Exhalations were warm while his hands were not where they held onto her thinning body. "You cannot go back," Alexander said quietly, something like an ache in his heart for her. "As I cannot go back to what I once was. Bring your typewriter, bring your cold tea, bring whatever you like and come back to my home with me." The tip of his nose brushed her hair back further from her ear. "If you want silence, I will ensure it. If you want muses to frolic around you all day, inspire you until your fingers are numb, I will provide them. If you want to be my nightly spectre, pale in your white dresses, I will take you out beneath the moonlight and dance with you. If you need me to protect you, I will be both shield and sword. Whatever you need sister, I am yours."
The touch was contact, and the touch was humanity, and the touch was so much more than she'd had in months. She sighed a broken sigh, and yet she couldn't feel it. It was all distant, cotton and murky distance. Far away, and she longed for the day when fingers on her skin felt like callouses and heat. She had been snuffed out, and she no longer remembered flame, but she remembered liking the way the flame felt, and perhaps that was the worst part of all. And he was right to liken it to his own deathwish upon waking. She had never tasted that sweetness, but she had come so very close. Her breath had turned sweet, and she had known it was on the horizon, and she yearned for it like a curtain call.
She wished she could quicken for him. She wished she could turn and tell him that he could have what he wished of her. She wished she could put on the stage makeup and the costume, that she could take the part of glittering sister. She wished all these things for him, and she would have obliged him, had she been able to. But she could not. She was a husk. And all she could do was incline her head, drop her chin against her bird's cage of an upper chest. "I will think," she promised him. She would. She would think. "I will sleep, and I will think." It was more than she had promised anyone else. It was more than she would promise Gabriel, should he come. It was more than she would promise God himself, should he show himself at her door. "I will try." Which was a better promise yet, and she turned in his arms and looked upon his face in the moonlight. "I promise that I will try to want to leave." Perhaps she would succeed. Perhaps, for him, she could.
Her declaration was met with the steadfast calm of a man absolutely sure of things. Alexander was sure that his sister would do all that she said and he was sure of his ability to talk her away from the ledge she stood upon and away from her spirit's graveyard and to his home. It would take time, and patience, both of which he had in plenty. The dead had nothing to fear, not the natural end of their life that had already been met and would not be met again for decades to come -- of this Alexander was also sure. "Do you think your thoughts would change so much in my home?" He asked her, slow sweet as she turned in his arms.
He lowered his face, touching his nose her cheek, side by side like they might have been if they had been twins within their mother's womb. "Perform when you are ready," he whispered to her, warmth to the corner of her mouth. He did not need her to be the glittering sister he had always known, not until she was ready, until the light shone in her veins again. Until then he would have to cast whatever light he could on her, though his was as pale as the light coming now through the window and onto their skin. It was not the bright gold of the sun, nor did it have the flash of marquee lights, but it was his, and he would not be stingy with her. "I will be here when you are quiet," he whispered, the words meant only for the dark spaces between them that could never live in harsh light. His naked hand left her hip to come up to her cheek, thumb across the bone crest of her cheek. "Or when you are loud. When you perform for the packed playhouse, and when you are alone in the dressing room later, shivering with your joy. I need nothing more from you than for you to be close to me."
Would her thoughts change? No. But she loved him enough that she would weigh the pain her eventual end would cause him. Like the elderly that gave up their food and began to wait, she was not truly living. It was just a waiting room now, the world, and she would not bring that into his life without thinking it through once, twice, thrice. He was not Gabriel, who would become angry and not understand. He would know, and he would see, because Alexander truly looked at her. He saw her, and things would not escape his notice like they would for the people who came and went in this shop with its madness and eccentricities. She was like the books, collecting dust until they fell apart beneath even the most careful of fingers, and she would spare him that in a way she would not care about sparing others.
She did not tell him, then, that she did not intend to ever be ready. She had said it, and he had heard it, and she knew it was hope that fluttered its wings within his chest. She let him, instead, have that whisper against her skin. And maybe it all came of not being touched enough as children. Distant hands and nannies hired for their references and not their loving natures, and maybe it made unnatural things of them all. Were she inclined to touch the typewriter that gathered dust beneath the window, she might want to tell that tale. A cautionary thing about what children become if they were forced to become. His thumb across her cheek made her lift her pale blue gaze to him, and there was cracking in her face that was beneath the skin and had nothing to do with age. She knew he spoke truth, and she knew he would hold her hand to the end, should she allow it.
She pressed a dry parched kiss to his cheek, a thing flaking away from once-pink lips gone dehydration dry, her breath sweet like dying roses, and then she pulled back and looked upon him once more. "I will write," she told him. She would. He had her promise in this. She would not go without contacting him once more and, again, it was more than she promised the world, the man she had loved, her children, her parents. She would write him.
Most people, when desperation clung to their veins and fueled their muscles, pushed too hard. They went to the very outskirts of behavior in order to get what they wanted, what they believed they needed. He had gone to that place once and it had ended with him as he was now. And now he could see it in his sister's sun pale irises, smell it on her too sweet breath. Depression was not some foreign foe that made him wring his hands and wonder at what he could do to chase it away from her, no. He knew better.
For as much as he might want her to live, either in the sun where he could not, or beside him in the moon in a place where a sister and brother ought not, didn't matter to him. As long as she lived -- but he could not push. He had to tempt her as children might learn how to walk -- that was what he had to do, all that he could do. It would be up to her for those steps, for her to travel the pit she found her emotions in now.
In his gaze was no pity, even as his heart twinged that she might have to do this. She was strong and even now, as her bones felt bird fragile, his gaze held a special kinship for her, deeper than family, deeper than the blood and the DNA that had made them both, with the utter knowledge that they might share more of life's path with one another. "And talk," he murmured, turning his jaw so that the corner of his mouth might court the corner of hers. He would take her lips to his cheek, but always he wanted to give her more than she had given him. "I have missed your voice, sister." It pushed the very boundaries of acceptability, and he let it linger for the span of one more beat of her heart before he shifted back to her cheek. "Don't deny me my small pleasures, lest I be forced to come here and haunt your steps."
She knew he understood better than anyone, and she hated bringing this to his door because of it. It was one thing to think, to believe understanding. It was another thing to know what it felt like to yearn for nonexistence. She knew he understood, and she both loved and hated him for it. But he was not Gabriel, the children, their parents, or even Chloe. He was something different, something apart and, in his own way, he had left the normal panderings of life behind. She didn't understand what he had found in this life he lived, but there was no doubt that he lived it. He had gone, and he had come. He had kissed not-existing upon the lips, and he had somehow found the will to return. She did not believe she was the same. There would be no new and unique existence for her. She would not rise again, as he had done.
"And talk," she promised against the edge of his mouth. She was not whole, and she was not well, and she was not sane. She did not think it a threat, his promise to haunt her door. She did not think any of anything. She had always known he loved her more than the rest, and she had kept him at arm's length, without ever pushing him too terribly far away. Now, madness and sadness and the gnawing at her belly made the game feel pointless, because it too had been about being adored, and being adored no longer spoke to her as it had done. And she nodded. "And talk," she promised, though there was nothing in her voice that spoke of quickening. For him, she would talk. For herself, she would do nothing save wait. But this conversation was not about her, not any longer, and she breathed the night air as she put space between them.
"The sun will catch you out," she told him, a glance toward the lightening sky and her own eyes tired and drooping at the corners with age and exhaustion. "Bid me good night," she said, her hand slipping from his pilfered glove. She held it back, that calfskin of soft grey, a long and too-thin arm, willow-reed bones and bird's wings.
His adoration was not bought by being pushed away nor pulled close, but the simple magnetism that happened between two akin souls. Alexander had known the game afoot then and had played the steps, played the lovestruck prince as she needed, the protective brother when required, but they were all mirror-selves of him, reflecting best what she needed, and now, here, she needed no reflection of him, only the laid bare naked self that they could show no one else. When the game ended, he still knew her and mayhaps he was the only one that could truly say that.
"I've been with his pale sister all evening, I should daresay that he'd like to chase me away," he murmured with a slight curving of his lips. But she was right and he hated the sun's warmth on his skin, hated the bright light it brought that pained his eyes. The glove though, he took it only for a moment before he hooked his index fingers in the opening and held it out to her, ready for the knobbed branches of her fingers. "Keep it, sister, and remember I held the space first. Think of me when you put it on. Unless you want for a pair of your own that have never graced any other fingers in all their existence."
She looked at the glove. Her gaze was a drop of slow paleness, and there was a moment of confusion when she didn't understand that he was offering it back to her. But she obliged. She closed her fingers around the soft grey, her grip light and long boned, and she pulled the glove to her belly and held it there, the soft rise and fall of breath barely stirring her hand or the calfskin in her grip. She shook her head at his offer of another pair, and she just touched a finger to his cheek. One, two and then a third, and then she moved around him and opened the door, the kindness one she felt he deserved. An ushering, since he had come to her. An ushering, since he had come to her. An ushering, something respectful and sad, because she had it in her, yet, to do it. Her free hand rested upon the doorknob, bones visible through the skin of her fingers.
"Sleep well, brother," she said, hip against the edge of the door and the wood supporting her insubstantial weight beneath the old dress. "I love you," she whispered, and she always had. Since they were children and alone in all their opulence.
"As I love you," he replied, meaning it with her as he meant it with no other. Retrieving his cane, the polished grip sliding easily into gloved palm. "We will speak again soon," Alexander promised her, lingering for a moment on her doorstep, bare hand on her hip, warmth seeping into skin that would not hold it. He gave her one dry kiss to the corner of her mouth, a brief sharing of breath and skin before he retrieved his hat and left as he had come, silent and with the shifting of shadows.