Acton did not like it here, either.

The music was fine, but his ears were closed to it; all he wanted to hear was the undulating rise and fall of the gypsy ballads that chased him into dreams every night. The paintings he barely spared a glance for, and he could hardly watch the dancers at all without feeling something cold and knife-like gut him and twist. This wasn’t the kind of pain he was accustomed to. This kind lingered. It was proving resistant to every kind of medicine he tried.

But let it not be said that Acton was the kind of man who gave up easily. Dandelion wine he’d had, and honeyed mead, and some sort of silver-veined plant a golden and antlered stranger had offered him with a knowing smile he didn’t care for at all.

Still he ached, but his edges were dulled, and the flame in him that ate and burned was a low thing now.

He drifted aimless through the cloud, less like smoke and more like a rough log on a laughing stream. There was little grace in him at the moment, just a blurred kind of interest; the world around him seemed muffled, like he was separated by a veil. In a way it was pleasant, and it should have let him forget; instead he returned again and again to the thought of Denocte, a stray dog unable to do anything but worry at his wounds.

The buckskin did not notice the shape just behind him (which did move like smoke, which might have reminded him of Raum) until it spoke with a voice that was meant to echo through a canyon like wind.

Hello, Acton.

Oh, what luck he’d had, ever since Bexley Briar caught them in that cave. Tonight he felt close to believing in curses.

First he stopped, and it was near enough a stumble that his pride would be wounded under normal circumstances. And then he turned, smoothing his expression as he did, though maybe it was dark enough so that she couldn’t discern anything, anyway. Not that she knew him well enough (knew him at all) to tell when he wasn’t himself – though when he met those bi-colored eyes he remembered again the childhood myth. This time, he was too far gone for even a flicker of unease.

“Seraphina,” he greeted, and curled his lips into the beginnings of a grin. “You look well.”





@Seraphina eeeee

these violent delights have violent ends

With any luck he wouldn’t remember this encounter.

The problem wasn’t that he didn’t like Seraphina; the problem was he did. From everything he’d heard and seen, she was easy to admire, easier still to respect, and Acton was cognizant enough to know this wasn’t a good look on him (or anyone, for that matter).

Then again, neither was conspiring to spy on her kingdom, or very nearly murdering one of her subjects. So really, how much worse could his position be right now?

The buckskin took the thought as a comfort, and swayed a little on his feet like a limb in a breeze. At least until he asked her (well, not asking - the desert queen had perfected the statement-as-question) the inevitable.

Somehow, impossibly, it had felt like a secret so far. Hardly anyone had spared him a glance; aside from the other Denoctians, nobody seemed to know or care about the masked stallion with the glint in his eye.

“They are,” he answered, and that dark smile bloomed into a grin. There was something wrong about it, a twist at the corner of his mouth. He thought back to the trek here, days of sun and dust, how he couldn’t coax a word from Isra until they were well beyond the scarred and ruined pass. For a long moment he said no more, running his tongue across the back of his teeth and thinking of Raum and his family. He wondered how many times they’d faced the same conversations.

“I am home,” he finished at last, and laughed the harsh, black, humorless laugh of a crow. Oh, how the words hurt him, and how he welcomed that pain.

As abruptly as he’d stopped (but with a little more grace), he turned and began to walk again. He couldn’t remember, exactly, what it had been he was heading toward, but he sure as hell preferred it to standing still.

He spoke again before she could do too much with his response – namely ask him to elaborate. “You’re a long way from your desert, yourself. I take it that means you successfully put down that rebellion. I’m not surprised – I could tell you were capable.” He flicked her a look, but kept moving. The faintly sober part of him wondered if he’d slurred any of his words; he had the feeling he had, but couldn’t seem to drum up some concern.

Surely that was no way to talk a queen, but he could remember a hundred hazy nights across a scarred and beer-sticky table from Reichenbach, drinking and laughing and scheming toward dawn. Gods, how he missed those riotous, unburdened days. He was certain now he would never see them again.

This is what he had instead: weaving drunk through a crowd of strangers (in Denocte, even the crowds had felt like family), making mistakes he was sure to regret in the morning.





@Seraphina

Yeah, well I saw a snake in an apple tree
You know I didn't trust a word that he hissed to me

Acton was surprised by how talkative, how forthcoming she was being with him – she hadn’t struck him as the type, and certainly not to him, who by all accounts should be her enemy. But he shouldn’t have been: in a way, he was a perfect confessional. He had no room to judge (nor was he the type), and he was inarguably inebriated.

You are no more home than I.

Well, there was nothing he was going to say to that; he only smiled tightly at her, close-lipped. It wasn’t until she continued that his expression faded into neutrality – but it turned curious at her talk of the attack. Acton hadn’t heard much of it, but the mention of Maxence made his heart flutter with a familiar thrill. He knew it was an awful impulse he should feel guilty for, but the buckskin couldn’t help but be a little sorry the pegasus had been eaten by the very type of beast he’d bragged of slaying. He had been an excellent foil, a terrific enemy to have.

Everything had been far less complicated, then.

But it is her talk of revenge that had him grinning, however briefly. Fire and blood – what was it she had said, so long ago? The desert breeds quick tempers. “I wouldn’t know anything about that impulse,” he said, and tipped her a wink, too drunk to think better of it.

The night was gathering around them as they continued to walk, the firelight making everyone’s features long and dramatic. Acton kept an ear keyed on her as they walked, but his gaze roved the crowd. Everything was achingly familiar but just a step wrong; he knew none of the faces, none of the laughs. He didn’t know which way the path would twist ahead.

It felt a little like being an orphan again, alone and fearful in a way he’d always hated admitting, even to himself.

So there was some measure of schadenfreude to hear her talk of her own problems. Still, her talk of putting her faith in the wrong people made his gaze narrow and his mouth twist as he thought of Denocte and the new regime. “You’re not the first to misplace your trust.”

And Raum…

Acton noticeably faltered, but smoothed his gait without a word. It was not a matter of confessing his and his friends’ sins; he would own up to those just as boldly as he would have at home. It was the reason said sins had been committed – motivations that seemed so pointless now. His loyalty was a broken compass, and the spinning was enough to make him dizzy.

He did not want to talk about Raum, or about Bexley. They were subjects too close to him to want corrupt his thought with a haze of cannabis and booze, and so he side-stepped them neatly when he answered.

“And yet here you stand, whole and still in charge.” He flashed her a grin. “I hope you realize nothing that happened was your fault. You inherited every problem that came to pass. Wheels that were already turning. But now…” the buckskin trailed off, licked his lips. When his eyes slipped to hers, they were slyly appraising, and his lips were curled.

“Now you’re free to choose what comes next for Seraphina.”

Some part of him, of course, knew that he was wrong; the black irony glinted somewhere in his flint-and-tinder gaze. But Acton had never had the sort of responsibilities she carried on her gunsmoke shoulders. His decisions had ever been his own to make, the disastrous as much as the successful (maybe more of the former, lately). He was not ruled by people or the gods – only by his own heart.

Of course, he was the one wallowing in chemicals and self-pity.

Of course, they were both unaware that the gods were soon to come.





@Seraphina <3 hello novel

just a match begging for fire

“No,” he answered her, bald honesty for once. “Not me, personally. But all of us, all of Denocte, not just because of that damn gate but because they made no effort to listen-” that far, that much, before he caught himself, shook his head like there was a buzz between his ears.

But it was enough, not just too much to tell her but enough to get that black roiling in his stomach again, that angry flame that ate and wanted and wanted and ate. That needed somebody to blame. And the regime he’d left was good for that, yes they were, with their knowing smiles and their we know best and their disappearing behind closed doors while Isra wept and still smelled of singed hair, of burning.

They’d almost killed her, they could have killed any of them, and hung their power like a gallows over all their heads. And they hadn’t done more than pretend to listen to their people.

It was the kind of wound that stung and stung the more you worried at it, and it was back open now.

She was close to him now, but he was hardly aware of it, except when he nearly drunken-swayed into her. He was too busy being back there, in the smoke and anger of it, all action and dread. A clamor of voices that all rose together and were silenced, dismissed.

And for what? Acton couldn’t figure it, especially not now, head muddled and dizzy with music and drink.

Luckily their walking, their conversation, was a tide and it carried him on, until he blinked to find her staring at him after his careless compliment. She was right – he didn’t know the measure of it at all, what it took to rule a land. He’d never wanted that, never sought it.

Those unmatched eyes once more unsettled him, and he stopped. A cool breeze tugged at his dark hair and her bright, and pressed against his cheek like a kiss. Her words were serious (were they ever not serious? She is his opposite in more ways than one) and he listened to them with due gravity, but he could not help matching them up against what he’d seen from his own king.

“You’re right,” he said, and meant it, the same kind of open, almost angry honesty it had been before. He felt, drunk and otherwise off-kilter as he was, that he could fall into those eyes that met his own, and that if he did they would burn him alive. “You’re right,” he repeated with the listing firmness of the fairly drunk, “and that’s what makes you better than the rest of us, Seraphina.” Acton did not say it with any kind of crooked sarcasm or eye-rolling judgment. He said it and thought of his own regime, who he could not picture standing here and saying fault is irrelevant.

It was a relief when she turned away, and he could feel his body loosen when the weight of her gaze moved off of him. Suddenly the night had sound and color again, and all at once Acton felt terribly tired. Bone-weary.

At her last words he twisted an ear, dropped his chin another fraction. Before he answered her he started moving again, back to his aimless walking, tugged on by the pull of the crowd.

“I thank the gods I’ve never wanted it, then,” he said darkly, and did not laugh.

He was going to have a wicked hangover tomorrow.





@Seraphina <3 sudden dogleg to sadtown

 

“Yes.” The word was bitten off, hard as scorched and dried earth, daring her to question him further.

What Acton knew was that loyalty was a two-way street, and his love for Reichenbach did not matter a whit if his king’s love had shifted to something else (something smirking, with scales of ivory and gold, and eyes that glinted like a snakes’). For years the Crows had laughed at their leader’s wayward heart, but none of them were laughing anymore. Reichenbach had been a home for all of them, bastards and orphans and misguided children, and he had made a home out of the Night Court.

And then in the space of a handful of decisions, he had let that home become a cage.

Acton remembered what it was like, to live in a cage. To be punished for doing the only things he knew how to do. He remembered what it was to be taken advantage of, to be manipulated, to be promised his freedom someday. Soon, soon, if only he listened and did what he was told.

He had tried to obey, and it had changed nothing, and so freed himself the only way he could.

It had been harder the second time, but he’d done it all the same, and he’d rather drink himself to death than allow himself a second to regret it. Besides, if it was only him he might yet have stayed – but there was Raum, and Sabine and Rhoswen, and Isra and her endless fear. The stakes had been too high.

And anyway, Acton would never have been able to keep his mouth shut. The thought twisted his lips into a brief, incongruous smile. “I suppose I could have stayed and been eaten by that oversized lizard. Would have solved problems for a few people.”

What would he have done, had Seraphina voiced her disappointment then? Laughed, maybe, at how wildly different they were – a point her next comment only drove in deeper. He felt something like the same disappointment, the same lack of understanding.

“There is always a choice.” To run, to fight, to say fuck-all to the gods and burn the current way of things to the ground.  Of this he was certain. She could have done any number of things, just as the Night Court regime could have, and he shook his head at her almost dismissively, like a wave of his hand. “Not making it doesn’t mean there isn’t one.”

Her next question followed him like a ghost, and when the words finally caught him he paused like a boat at the end of its tether. Acton barely took the time to consider it, just shrugged a burnished shoulder before replying.

“I want what everyone does. I want the people I care about with me, and the freedom to do what I want.” Of course there was more to it than that, but he was too hazy-drunk for details, and anyway that was the bulk of it. The buckskin had never cared much for power or prestige; he wanted to have fun, wanted to be good at what he did, wanted the brotherhood of his little rag-tag family.

But his family was fractured, he was purposeless, he was miserable. He felt his lip curl in something that was between a sneer and a snarl, and forced it away with a swallow.

“And I want another drink. So unless you’re planning on buying me one…” He threw her a last burning glance, wondering at the way her skin seemed to drift and shift like smoke under the moonlight. If he was looking for something in her gaze, he did not find it. “Have a lovely night, Seraphina.” When he turned away from her, he could still feel the weight of her gaze settled like an spear-point between his shoulder blades, and he did not care for it one bit.

With the right mixture of liquor and luck, maybe he could forget this conversation had happened at all.





@Seraphina bit of a bleh post from me, sorry. this has been a great thread!