Who: Evelyn (closed, narrative) What: Evelyn is sort of undercover insane, slightly. Where: D4 When: Before her meeting with Lotte. Warnings: ...creepy? Some blood mentions.
Preparing to face the day was a fairly easy tactical maneuver. A little blush, just enough pale foundation to smooth out any unsightly blemishes. Mascara was key--the longer the eyelashes, the more doe-like the eyes, the more innocent the affected effect.
Just a touch of gloss to finish the look, and there she was in the mirror, a godforsaken mess, never looked better.
She had a coffee date with a girl this afternoon. She was looking forward to it. She liked meeting new people, finding out everything about them, breaking them down into tiny, bite-sized chunks for her consumption. She liked it best if they were still friends when she tore their lives apart. She never felt more satisfied than when they came sobbing to her for comfort after the kill. Smiling over shaking shoulders and there theres.
Her phone, sitting on the vanity, was blinking. She flipped it open. A message from mother, who had (to Evelyn's great displeasure) learned to text, so she could even pester her that way now. She'd have to call her and add a new caveat. No contact. She couldn't stand to be nagged three times a week about Trenton over text as long as she was living in the building.
She'd get to him in her own time. A little thrill went through her at the prospect. If nothing else, she couldn't wait to talk to him. Something about the quiet ones gone wicked tickled her. It made him more complex than his brother, sweet as he'd been, and she liked that.
Evelyn liked a great many things. She liked fluffy white clouds, handsome men, men who were inappropriate for her. She liked singing, and carrying her parasol to turn the heads of New Yorkers (she'd done it on her first day there and what fun to see their faces!) and keep the sun off her delicate skin. She liked lotions that smelled nice and softened her long legs. She liked bundling up for the winter weather but relished the feeling of the sunlight on the tips of her fingers when she extended them beyond the parasol's shadow.
She liked coffee, cakes, teas, perfumes, things she could collect like little guardians on her vanity. She liked old photographs, and had several stuck into the crumbling frame of the mirror. She liked long showers that were blisteringly hot. She liked sleeping with her face turned toward an open window, so that she could see the moon. She liked rain on the roof, and the shadows rain made, rippled and wide, on dark, stormy days.
Indeed, there were very few things Evelyn didn't like. She liked her stuffed rabbit that she'd brought from home and tucked under her pillow every night. She liked the boxes of things from when she was younger that her mother had insisted she bring but that she had refused to unpack, instead pushing them into the back of her closet. She liked biting her nails. She liked the sensation of white heat at the corners of her eyes, the cool swish of her eyeliner pen as she drew a line beneath the lid, giving the tears a little rail to run down so that they never touched her cheeks and were never even there, really, since she didn't actually cry them (it was a neat trick, and it had taken a long time to perfect, and she was proud of it).
She liked her books. She liked building them into towers and sitting in the middle of them. She liked being under the covers with the blanket pulled up over her head and pretending nothing could ever get through. She liked standing somewhere crowded and imagining she was somewhere else. She liked to scream in her head and see if anyone noticed.
She liked imagining things very much: that she was a statue, that she was immortal, that no one could see her at all. And when the imagining got to be too much, she would ground herself--a quote from the old textbooks she was always reading, chiding herself she still needed to get milk, no matter how little stock she put in her own existence. So what if she did wake up tomorrow and discover she'd finally disappeared?
She liked playing queen. A silly vice. She was twenty-two, for goodness sake. But she would still do it, sometimes, standing in her apartment, pointing a long finger across the room at her imaginary courtiers and insisting they bring the perpetrator before her. The kitchen became her audience room, the tall chair at the counter her throne. She drew her finger across her neck, and her guards put his head in the guillotine.
She got to pull the cord to drop the blade herself. As queen, it was her right.
He screamed in silent horror, and he knew what it was like to be soundless. Because he had no breath anymore, you see, because his head was on the floor several feet from his body, rolled to her feet, blinking its last few seconds of life out at her stupidly.
She remarked to her courtiers something witty about getting blood on her flats, and they thought she was hilarious. She nudged his head with her foot, and it rolled to face the other way, and she never had to look at it again.
When she was queen, that was how things were done. Quickly. Cleanly. With a degree of mercy. Let no one say she was not a magnanimous ruler.