Ella Claire Gainsborough {Beauty} (bookshelved) wrote in bellumlogs, @ 2010-06-17 17:05:00 |
|
|||
Entry tags: | beauty |
Who: Ella
What: Narrative
Where: Texas, JFK
When: Today
Warnings: None
In the end, the con had turned out to be a heist.
Ella had tried two more marks for the badger game her mother had planned, but she couldn’t separate sex from pleasure and emotion in her mind, no matter how she tried. For all of Daniel’s insistence than she wanted to be rescued by a prince, Ella refused to accept princes that she wasn’t intellectually interested in - and it was plenty hard to interest her intellectually. Physically she had a type as well - and suave and charming rich businessman? That just wasn’t it.
Jane Austen would be terribly disappointed in her, because Ella saw the allure of Wickham and Willoughby, despite their shortcomings (perhaps because of them). She would have made a terrible Fanny Price, because the would have fallen for Crawford’s starling every single time, even knowing the man to be a cad. She wasn’t interested in perfect men, and she didn’t have any interest in the facade of a perfect man. And she was terrible at pretending.
So the con became a heist, which required only skill and attentiveness (both which she could call up from memory). She no longer reacted to fear as she had after the attack in the catacombs of Bellum, and her control of the vines (thanks to the experience of locking Shane up with them) was becoming more refined daily. The scent of roses when she was afraid, however, was something she could not control. Luckily it was not an impediment to robbing a jewelry store.
The joyeria was in the quiet part of town, and Ella went in first and inventoried, all under the guise of being shown this and that. She was bugged, of course, and she commented on everything casually, while trying on rings for her supposed upcoming engagement. When her fiancee arrived (a skilled man selected by her mother), he came with a gun and a smile. Ella, who was already positioned near the alarm button, shot out the surveillance camera (she’d averted her face throughout the entire farce) with rusty skill but no hesitation, and the scent of roses filled the Mexican joyeria in the thirty seconds it took to clean the place out.
The next to days involved lying low and little else, and by the time Ella had gotten aboard a plane back to New York the product had already been moved. Simple. In and out.
Her father remained in Texas, and when her plane landed at JFK, Ella slumped in one of the seats at the gate. Bellum seemed very far away just then. She’d always longed for home, always wanted a place to stay, to belong. People. It didn’t escape her that she was lonelier than she’d been when she’d moved. She couldn’t remember the last conversation she’d had about things that interested her, about what she wanted, about what moved her.
She had no one to blame for that but herself. But she didn’t know how to fix it either. She did know that she didn’t want to return to four empty walls and a place that felt as transient as her childhood had been. She wanted roots and people who cared; people to care about. She cared about Helena, and she cared about Daniel, but they weren’t here, and she wasn’t going to tell them about what she’d done in Texas, or about her nightmares getting worse, or about her worries about the flower shop and losing herself to a fairy tale that might not be hers in a month.
She wasn’t quite sure where that left her, other than terribly tired of feeling sorry for herself all the time, and so she pulled a book out of her carry-on luggage, and she opened it, and she read.
She wished she could lose herself in the words like she had when she had been a little girl. But she couldn’t. Not anymore.
This time, she was going to need to find her solutions outside of the pages of a book.