boy meets girl where the beat goes on / stitched up tight, can't shake free
Red weaves and spins and dances, always at the edge of sight.
Caine sweeps past a corner, and red is disappearing around the next. He wades through waves and waves of guests, and red floats above them all, a candle flame across a sea.
It has become a chase, but rendered in slanted calligraphy and set to ballroom-step: Caine the dark pursuer, Red the rose-wreathed temptress.
At the beginning he had thought it a garment. Red silk, as fluid as wine, a robe clasped to collarbones like wings. But then red lingers a bit too long in the crowd, and he gets a bit too close, and Caine's lips part in a wisp of a laugh when he sees that it is a girl.
The red is apart of her, and just as the answer to the riddle he has not known he was solving touches upon his tongue, she is gone. A light winking out to shadow.
But he says her name anyway. A whisper, softly panting, his breath streaming out in white. "Moira." Raggedly Caine drags through his hair, loosening the interlocking braids he has not worn for months. Fire opals cling to his face and neck like looping pearl strands, finery he has not donned in seasons.
He looks down as a girl, but not the one he is looking for, touches his shoulder and asks him sweetly if he is lost. Sorry, no, he says, smiling briefly (will it lessen the sting? he has always wondered. and then he wonders if he does it because it is polite, or because he cares.) before ducking past her and striding forwards until the holly-wreathed room is spread out in front of him like a map, dewey chandeliers sparkling like tears, violin song ebbing and flowing, a thousand nameless faces, a thousand beating hearts.
Caine spins slowly in place as he searches for her again. It cannot be this difficult to find one girl of flame in an ocean of gold—
And then a tendril of light curls around the stem of his wineglass and Caine blinks twice in muted surprise.
He is startled, so much so that he lets go of his glass without a struggle (though he wouldn't have, anyway—he is not the sort to struggle). The teary chandeliers and bobbing black lanterns above him dim, and dim, and dim.
She is standing in front of him. His wineglass, still full, is raised to her painted lips and he watches as she drinks it all, her throat bobbing, until there is nothing left but dregs.
"I thought I'd never see you again," Moira Tonnerre says, and Caine thinks: She hasn't changed at all. Skin redder than wine; pools of gold for eyes; dished head; hair shot through with star-silver; kohl lashes; kohl lined.
The Phoenix.
The magic, however, is certainly new.
He can't quite believe she is here.
"Moira," Caine says simply, before letting his voice fall to silence as he quickly re-orchestrates his expression: tucking away sharp corners, dull edges, the gleam of liquor, the thump of felled wings, the hunger of a magic that refused to be anything but red. Then he looks at her and the lanterns wash gently over them and the chandeliers fade only to candles and the world, he thinks, slows down to the beat of his heart.
He wears his wings like a cape, and black feathers fall away like ink drops.
When he smiles—that is genuine. It begins small and then spreads wide, and the warmth in it is new. That, he is proud of. It has taken him a long time to learn how.
There is something teasing to it, too: an echo of someone he used to be, half-remembered, half-revived. "Would you like me to fill your glass, Lady Emissary?"
When Moira blinks, the wineglass, lighter by degrees, will be back in Caine's possession. "By which I mean," he says, holding the glass so it refracts her light, "I am glad you found me—" slyly he casts a glance towards the nearest attendee, her ears perked to casually attentive, "—before I started turning over their hems to find you."
