Acton

Acton had never been the kind of man who was good at handling worry.

It wasn’t coded into him to be anxious; when it happened, when that black thick feeling crawled beneath his skin like tar, he tended to look for the nearest distraction. Best to get drunk (or pick fights, or blow shit up) until the feeling passed and the situation resolved itself.

But this was not a normal worry. This was Raum, and Raum had teeth.

For the first time in his cavalier life the magician was too worried to drink, too worried to eat. He wound through the masquerade the same way he would as a Crow, sticking to the shadows, watching all with his banked-fire eyes. Acton did not wear a mask, and the skin of his throat itched where Raum’s claw had caught him and begun to cut.

All that to say, his feelings were complicated when his gaze finally caught the bright blue of Bexley’s. For once her grin did not make his heart jump like a souped-up engine below the hood, hungry for the starting line, but he tried to match it all the same, and at once shifted course to meet her. In the same movement he altered his gait, too - no more back-alley glide but the kind of swagger he was known for, like nothing in the world was wrong. Like he was already three sheets in and ready for more.

In the space between seeing her and reaching her his heart tripped over and over itself, and his mind replayed every warning Raum had given him about Bexley and what he’d do to her. They had been nothing, they had been idle threats. But that was before.

The music was swelling when they met, and he ghosted his lips across the bridge of her mask, still wearing that grin (like a mask of his own). “Goldilocks,” he said grandly, “you could stop a man’s heart, looking like that.” Any eyes on them had moved on, by now, and did not see (or thought nothing, if they did) when he reached just behind her mask, for the shell of her ear, and dropped his voice to a lover’s whisper. “We might have a problem.”





@Bexley

Acton

Gods bless her for how well she knew him, and how much they were the same; foolish and fearless and ready to fight.

No small wonder, really, that they had nearly killed each other. They both had been born with kerosene instead of blood, and with matchstick hearts and tempers shorter than a fuse. It was not much of a stretch to look at Bexley Briar and picture her setting the city alight (again) on his behalf - and oh, Acton loved her for it.

A shame that love had never been enough for anything.

She knew him for a liar from their very first meeting (a summer night like this, bonfire-smudged, midnight-dark) and it is no surprise to him that she saw through him now. His show was more for others’ benefit, an audience whose eyes weren’t even on him but might turn, any moment, with a flash of blue.

In the cacophony of the music and the dancing and the voices and the drink they are nothing, just two more bodies, disguised gold. Acton, even this close to her, does not note her terror - it has always looked so much like her rage or her want, and both of those things he knew well.

He couldn’t help but smile when she spoke, even now. Even with pricks like a ruby necklace dried to scabs across his neck, with his sides scraped from a cold cave wall (the both of these disguised by his own illusion-magic). Acton even laughed, when she said when do we not. “So pragmatic,” he answered, light as though this was any other conversation. The scrape of her teeth grounded him; he pressed a shoulder against her chest, watched the way the candlelight glazed the edges of her bone mask in red.

“It’s Raum,” he said, breathing the name out like a swear. And then a new worry blossoms like an inkstain in his heart (how can it hold so many? it isn’t made for it; surely it will burst) and he felt his spine tense, even as he fought to keep anything but pleasure from his face. “Is Apolonia here?”

Surely Raum wouldn’t. Not when he was after bigger prizes, dearer blood.

But the memory of the cave is still too close, and it is too easy to picture his body there, crumpled like cinders, dried ashes after the fire has been fed.




@Bexley

Acton

Somewhere, she says-

well, he couldn’t help but laugh at that. Neither of them were fit to be parents, maybe - neither fit for anything but colliding again and again with each other like stars, leaving wreckage in their wake.

Or maybe that was just their glory days.  

“I hope I haven’t fucked up your life too badly, Bexley Briar,” he said in a voice that was almost-but-not-quite a whisper, and pressed a kiss to the skin above her nose (so near the streak of scar he’d put there, though that and the rest of her face is hidden by that bone-and-gold mask). For a moment it was enough to take his cunning, hunting gaze from the party-goers and let it rest on her, brighter than it had been.

At least their daughter carried a weapon. Acton had never asked if she knew how to use it, but it felt like a safe assumption anyway. Probably she had been born with it strapped to her hip, like Athena sprang from Zeus (he could imagine it, anyway - he hadn’t been there for the birth. Hadn’t been there for anything important, he was beginning to understand, but everyone knew you couldn’t serve two loves. One always had to be a little underfed).

Maybe it was just the scent of her, all sand and fire with coals too hot to smoke, that put him just a little more at ease. Maybe it was the way he could spot nothing more false than the lies the partygoers wore, their masks and clothes and pinned-up hair. But in any case the buckskin blew out a breath, and thought he isn’t here.

Of course that just meant he was somewhere else.

The fucked-up thing (well, one of) was the way his heart did a little pitter-patter, a little somersault, at the thought of the hunt. Acton had always loved a challenge - otherwise he would never have applied himself at anything, love or cards or fistfights - and wasn’t this, in some way, the greatest one of all? But the magician tried to pretend otherwise, tried to pretend it was fear and worry and not the adrenaline that always came with another Crow mission.

At least it made him feel more like himself.

“I’m gonna go check on a couple things,” he said, all casual, as though he hadn’t just told her (well, sort of) that his best friend might be going renegade, that he might have a new target for that knife he so loved. “Keep an eye out for him - I don’t know if he’ll try anything here but he attacked Isra a couple nights ago.”

He did not want to step away; that’s what he told himself, that’s what he believed, even as he could feel prickly anticipation like champagne bubbles in his bloodstream, heady but sharp. Acton was ready to step out into the night, the summer air cloudy with bonfire smoke, thick with incense.

But when he looked back at her, deadly and gorgeous in the strange and changing light, he almost stayed.

“O will be fine,” he said, not knowing who he was reassuring. “But maybe if you see her tell her to keep her eyes open. Don’t talk to strange men, yada yada.” A smile at that; telling their daughter to be careful would be like telling a wolverine to look out, or a harpy eagle. “I’ll see you soon,” he promised, and turned away.




@Bexley