Carnival: Sadie M & Damian W + Open
Damian had never awoken bright-eyed. Nor had he ever been busy-tailed. He was never dull—no, he was too alert for that, too spark-and-crackle, but the glint in his gaze was flinty; it was cold. It was distant. It was superior, with the cut of steel to soft flesh and the point of blade at throat pulse. Dark skin, a jaw cut hard, and eyes like jadeite nearly too big for his face, he did not look like anyone else, even in the sea of freaks that was the Carnival. Egyptian and with a thin, wiry frame. If that did not set him apart, then certainly his demeanor did. The wash of people parted around small, hoodied form, the way schools of fish opened for a predator, closing back up behind him. The man did not worry about things like fitting a place that fit, but he had been raised as a sword—to cleave his own space through violence and to believe that well-earned, when paid in blood. Of course, he had neither metaphorically nor literally stabbed any of his employees, but he did not care how he was seen in their eyes. Just as he would not care how this Sadie woman viewed him.
He knew he was meeting her, as Misha had informed him. Misha, the ray of sunshine on a closeted bouquet of flowers. Bright, warm, and welcoming—all of these things his boyfriend was, Damian was not. He awaited his auditioner in the ringmaster's tent—a small, candy-cane striped structure off from the big tent, where the flaps were kept down and the lights within a dim, watery yellow. He sat, leafing through various bills and proposals, and he smoked a cigarette. After a while, and after no initial appearance, he texted Misha to inform him of this—Sadie had yet to show. (So long as the woman asked for him by name, she would be immediately directed to his tent. Which meant she had yet to do this.) He took to sketching in an old sketchbook with a dull-nosed pencil, graphite scratching whimsy that certainly did not look as if it could come from Damian onto paper. Smoke threaded from cherried end of cigarette. He sighed and if he heard any 'Eastern' music, he ignored it. He was tired of Westerners and their butchering, anyway.