Bernini's Monster.

Luce

Few enough of the city's residents are aware that at least one of the city's art museums has extended hours each week. Tonight, it is the Legion of Honor, perched high over the city in Lincoln Park, with its great plaza and fountion, its sweeping view of the Golden Gate Bridge.

The museum's halls are therefore quite nearly empty. Here are there the odd art lover haunts a familiar gallery, wanders through the forests of Pisarro's pointillated portraits or hall of ancient art, the black figure Greek vases displayed on velvet flocked pedastals, flooded with light. A clerk drowses in the museum shop, HOLIDAY MERCHANDISE CLEARANCE, declares the sweeping sign mounted over the archway leading inside. Two more workers are wiping down tables and upending chairs in the now-closed restaurant. The security guard at the front desk doubles as docent tonight, and has little to do but the cross-word puzzle in front of him. The whole building is drenched in this sort of emptiness, the exhibition halls mostly deserted, and the great works can be attended to alone, in long contemplation.

In the Baroque Gallery - Number Six - the collection has been rearranged for the display of Bernini's Medusa, visiting on loan from Rome until mid-February. Just one visitor has made it so far into museum since the 7 p.m. reopening for "evening hours," and she stands alone, as close to the marble sculpture as she can without setting off the alarm system, hands clasped behind her back, her chin high, staring up into the Gorgon's anguished face. Her own expression is rapt; only the steady rise and fall of her shoulders suggests that she is even alive, so still does she hold herself otherwise.

Brian Hayes

Qualifying Brian does not take into account the notion that he has any interests in life other than his work, or his children, which the discerning audience would not be considered paranoid or mistrusting if the suspicion arose that he was hiding something, if he was not outright manifesting a truth that had no grounding in reality. He has given no indication, previously, that he would have any interest in frequenting art galleries or museums by himself, but Luce has seen him out in public twice, now, and both times that is precisely how he was.

There is no yearning in him, really. If he wanted to be back in Washington, that is where he would be, with the wife who he never mentions and the son who he spoke of briefly in a tone that was at once concerned and hopeful, like the boy would outgrow whatever weirdness he was displaying.

He does not want to be back in Washington, even less so now than before. The newspapers were late in covering the breakout of the prisoner from Yuma, likely owing to the police department making a valiant effort to keep details from the press, and Brian could very easily apprehend the man without assistance, just as he finds Luce without having to exert seemingly too much effort.

It's possible he just happens to be here, that tonight is an off night that he isn't working. He's wearing boots and jeans, but there is no adolescent casualness about his attire: he also wears a button-down shirt. Tucked in. With a belt. With a navy blue windbreaker that does not but may as well have FBI stamped on the back.

Marriage has assured that he doesn't have to dress to impress anyone, and somehow the weapon he holsters to his body did not set off the metal detector.

There are senses besides sight that grant Luce knowledge of the man's presence before he arrives. His footfalls are unhurried.

Luce

The first night they met, the girl - young woman, rather, for girl suits only the slightness of her tall, lean frame, the signifiers of youth in her bone structure, while woman, well, that suits the immediacy of her presence - she was dressed with a certain casual chic. The second night; it was dark, and she had pulled up the hood of yet another hooded cashmere sweater in hopes of concealing some of the more recognizeable pieces of her identity - the cut and color of her hair, for example, the shape of her face; the clear blue of her eyes.

Tonight, alone in the Baroque gallery, she is dressed to kill. The fitted black lace sheathe has a modest neckline, mock-turtleneck collar, and long sleeves that come all the way down to her narrow wrists. These rather severe, perfectly modest lines are all in sharp contrast to the length of the skirt, which covers approximately 1.23 inches of her thigh, leaving the rest of her curving thighs bare. The outfit is completed with a pair of calf-high black leather boots, wrapped in buckles. The heels are low - no more than 2 inches - but still enough to lift her to a shade under six feet tall.

A small clutch hooked on a long chain strap is slung across her body. The chain bisects her torso diagonally, while the bag rests carelessly just behind the faint curve of her left hip.

The echo of footsteps down the long gallery hall tug at her conciousness, though it takes her several long moments to wrest her attention from the elegant symmetry of the marble in front of her, the anguish on Medusa's face as the Gorgon caught, mid-transformation, woman to monster, snakes writher where hair once flowed.

Then, all at once - as if she had just awoken from a reverie or a trance - her spine goes stiff, destroying the inverted effect of her negligant posture. Her shoulders square wider. The creature shoots a low glance over her shoulder, down the long gallery lined with dour-faced dutch Burghers and soft-eyed, quiet-mouthed servant girls staring out from dark-paneled rooms at the promise of sun cutting through leaded-glass windows. Her pale brows draw together, quizzical, wary, when she recognizes Brian as he draws closer.

She pivots, half-turning, wariness now stark in every line of her body. Her spine is straight, her mouth - painted a rich crimson tonight - is just open. The easy humor that defined her eyes the first night they met is gone; banked suspicion darkens them tonight, instead.

"This is quite a coincidence," in a low tone that suggests she believes it is anything but.

Brian Hayes

"I was in Italy," he says, seemingly apropos of nothing, and it would be a lie to say that he hadn't stared at her dress before she turned around but now that she has turned around he's looking right at the sculpture, with its eyes that have no human characteristics but are tormented, all the same, in a way no mortal could ever comprehend. "Years ago. I saw his sculpture of the, ah, martyrdom of Saint Lawrence in Florence. It's one of his earlier ones."

It's entirely possible she's seen it in a book, if she hasn't seen it in person. It's not quite so possible that a man who dresses like Brian, who keeps to himself, who hasn't shown the remotest interest in art or history or anything like that previously, would have thought to go to the goddamn Galleria degli Uffizi or that he ever would have had occasion to be in Florence in the first place.

The US military has air bases scattered throughout Italy and Sicily, but that's besides the point.

"Anyway, I heard they were showing the Medusa here, so."

Luce

"Were you?" Her brows rise in neat little arches above her eyes, darker now. Perhaps that is a trick of the lighting in the room; Medusa is to her back, brilliantly, sweepingly uplit by the museum's curators, to revealing every living curve in the creamy marble. And so she is backlit, her cropped hair haloed with light, her sharp features in shadow.

The question is cool, her aspect distance, chin high, that wary tension written into her frame, every inch of it. Just once her attention flicks away from him, touches on the security cameras mounted in the corners of the room to assure herself that the little green lights remain lit.

He mentions the martyrdom of St. Lawrence and some minute shadow of that skepticism eases. Her tall frame remains taut, her spine arches, her shoulders back. Her hands have loosed from their light clasp in the small of her back. One is loose, the other wraps into the chain for her little bag, where it crosses her hip.

"A Firenze, come avete potuto prestare attenzione a tutto ciò ma Davide?" This with a faint twist of her mouth; a shadow of her easy smile, as her eyes touch his profile. That wariness - the immediate, physical expression of it - lingers. He has seen it in women before; though likely he himself rarely engenders it. "And how do you find her?"

It may take him a moment to understand that she means Medusa, the sculpture, bathed in light in the center of the room.

Brian Hayes

Brian is both blessed and cursed with a face that strikes observers as boyish, even pushing 40 as he is, even cropping his hair close to his scalp and possessing a restrained air as he does. Even when he was confronted with a madman holding the cheek of a teenage boy, prepared to advance upon him and likely do the same thing were he to falter, the man did not raise his voice. Panic doesn't seem to be something he does until he thinks he is alone, and even then it was purely a physiological response he could not help.

His adrenal glands still function.

At any rate, he looks relatively harmless, until one considers that in the line of work he's in, he's had to learn how to lie. He belongs to the System, is in opposition to everything that his generation had railed against when the were younger. Worse than a paper pusher, he enforces laws that don't appear to truly have public safety in mind.

That's all the newspapers pay attention to, isn't it, the pepper spraying and the billy clubs, the use of taser technology and unnecessary force. The media aren't interested in a federal officer protecting an injured man so that bystanders could get him to safety and talking down a violent man using nothing more than patience and compassion. They would have been plenty interested if Brian had beaten the man within an inch of his life, but he hadn't, and now that man is running free, likely within the city limits still.

So, Luce speaks Italian, and he doesn't look at her with bafflement on his face. He laughs, understanding both the question and that it is rhetorical, then finally looks back to her when she asks how he finds her.

He looks back to the statue as he responds. His tone is somewhat meta: he feels amusement at having had the reaction that he has to seeing a hunk of marble chipped down to resemble the severed head of a mythological creature.

"Terrifying," he says. A beat, almost a hesitation: "Canova, Cellini... Dali... they all showed Perseus wielding her severed head. Like a, ah, commemoration. This is unusual."

Luce

"Men always make her into a monster," the girl remarks, her voice low, her gaze still lingering on his profile. The room itself is wrapped in silence and shadow, except for the echo of their voices; the imprint of their shadows against the other works ringing the room. These, all these, pale in comparison to the masterpiece that is Medusa. Not the Medusa, the face on Perseus' shield, but something else entirely. " - only a monster, whelped of darkness, made to huddle within it, befouling the earth until a hero comes along to slay her."

She half-turns, flicks a gaze once toward the sculpture's anguished eyes, her soft, shocked mouth, her lean body turning inward. Her free hand flingers at her hip, fingers twisted into the chain slung across her body.

"Bernini sees her as a lover might have done. Just before he turned to stone." There is a subtle movement from her, in his peripheral vision. A flickering glance off down the hall through which he just walked, lingering attention paid to the passage even as she discusses the sculpture in a tone that can only be described as musing, dreamy. "Makes me want to kiss her free of that stone and those snakes; and whisper some word of warning before Perseus can come destroy her."

Brian Hayes

Her gaze lingers on the side of Brian's face, and the entire time she watches him, eyes that are a blue no less piercing than her own--his are like lasers, though, where hers are ice; when Brian looks at a person, it doesn't cause the hairs on the arms and the back of the neck to raise, but they both can do enough damage in their own ways--remain trained on the head of the Gorgon woman made monstrous by virtue of storytelling.

Turned to stone herself, Brian has read, extensively, or else he would have commented on her beauty, on the detail Bernini assigned to the coif of snakes, the unholiness of her eyes. What he had said was that this was a departure from typical presentation of her figure. Everyone else presented the vanquishing hero, yet this Baroque sculptor just left the world with this.

Luce hears him say it's terrifying, that it's unusual, but there is a muted sadness in his eyes that would become pity were he to truly believe that this creature actually existed, once. It isn't belief, but at least there still exists doubt enough to feel for this slab of marble.

(If he were to reach out and touch Luce, he does not think he would find her skin as cold as the stone before them. Neither has he thought about reaching out and touching Luce. She's young enough to be his daughter, and besides that, he's married. Not happily, unrequitedly if one were to hear the truth, but still. He belongs to another woman.)

Then she speaks, expressing an active sympathy for the mortal Gorgon that the lawman does not possess. His expression flickers, and now it is he who looks upon her profile only to find her gazing at the statue. What he sees on her face is not purposeful restraint but more like quixotic intoxication.

It pains him to say anything, but one must suspect he cannot help it. She's the same age as his daughter, though they look nothing alike.

"By Ovid's account, Medusa was a priestess in the temple of Athena," he says. "Supposedly, her beauty drove men to... how did he put it... 'jealous aspiration.'"

Okay, so he's easy on the eyes, he can talk down crazed psychopathic killers without resorting to brute force, and he's at least intelligent enough to know what to do with literature besides using it to beat people to death. There has to be something wrong with him.

Luce is already wary: there is no earthly reason why he ought to be here, now, of all the times he could have chosen to patronize the museum.

"I'd suggest 'Poseidon' be that, ah, word of warning to the poor girl."

Luce

The creature flashes Brian a look - brief, wreathing and sharp. Her features are still, her mouth - glossed tonight, rather than painted its customary crimson - is still, set in a pensive expression that matches the loose note of inquiry between her brows.

There is another moment of that scrutiny; another flicker down the hallway, behind him, for any errant shadows that might be loose in the museum. Then and only then does the expression soften. Some suggestion of humor carves its way across her mouth and she makes a soft noise in the back of her throat, a half-swallowed laugh, lifting her sharp little chin in faint acknowledgment of his comment.

Her pale blue eyes drift back to the statue, then. Though the wary alertness framing her shoulders does not ease.

"Fat lot of good it would do her." Her voice is low enough that it seemes more likely to be swallowed by the deep, abiding corners of the gallery than to be echoed back by the thick stone walls. He might have to strain to catch it; or rather, strain to be sure he hasn't missed anything. There's a rich underlying ruminative quality to her tone, a little distance, interior. Even private. "When a god wants you, I expect he'll have his way, hmmm?

"No matter how well prepared, how thoroughly warned you are."

Brian Hayes

This entire interlude is not entirely unlike a violation, itself. He caught Luce unprepared, at an hour when she thought herself to have no threat of interruption, and certainly not by a man to whom she is now linked through the temporary aversion of deepened tragedy whether she wants to be or not.

He gave her his card, and the card felt normal in its boringness, and it does not matter whether it's living in that clutch slung across or torso now or if she glanced at it once before throwing it away. It was enough.

Yet he stands here now, a matter of unspoken necessity bordering on urgency to his having appeared at a time when the rest of the city normally passed by the museum, lit up at night and sentinel, standing against the forces of time that would have otherwise obliterated these works of mortal men. Her fixation on the stone likeness of the fearful Gorgon's face possesses an intimacy and an understanding that Brian does not have.

What he also does not have is the awareness to be thankful for what he lacks.

They are standing close together, and there is no background noise to distract him from what she says. Brian, who had looked back to the marble effigy when Luce expressed the futility of warning her away from one danger, is nevertheless giving the girl his full aural attention.

"Who was it... Jack London... wrote that the greatest instinct man has is to avoid the Real. Man, awake, is compelled to seek a perpetual escape. He suggested Medusa is a symbol of nihilism. Anyone avoiding her gaze was actually avoiding the reality of the universe's depressing meaninglessness." A beat. "Doesn't matter whether it's one god or thousands, the deities in those stories only give their children enough free will to hang themselves with."

Luce

"Nihilism is a young man's vice," she returns. "Really. No one over the age of thirty can afford to engage it in. Too indulgent, self-indulgent. Not unlike the gods in all those stories."

Her voice is still quiet, though now it is interrupted by the steady click of her bootheels on the marble floor. She takes a step back, pulls her attention firmly away from the anguished marble face and begins to circles the marble, pale eyes flashing over the gleaming carrera marble surface, the writhing nest of snakes being born from the woman's hair. Her left hand is steady on the metal clutch at her hip, while right hand is still twisted in amongst the links of the chain bisecting her body. Her tall, lean figure seconds a scattering of soft gray shadows moving around the gallery in strangely interlinked patterns as she circles behind the bust.

"Makes man the center of the universe; only his gaze gives the world meaning. Perhaps the men avoiding her gaze have spent so long constructing women as dark, as other, as secretive counterpoints to raw male power that they are unable to look at her straight on, and see a woman staring back. Her head full of snakes, all that strange wisdom that comes from eating apples, swallowing seeds.

"You only have to look at the Medusa straight on to see her, Helene Cixous would say right back to Jack London; a wholly different conversation," the supple edge of her mouth, curved wider at the corners. Luce is no longer looking at Bernini's anguished Medusa, but is staring over the writhing snakes at the strange, her own gaze guarded, remote, her pale eyes ringed in dark shadow. Little points of light reflected off the sequins in her short black dress dance along the marble bust. "And she’s not deadly. She’s beautiful and she’s laughing.

"Why are you here, Brian?" His first name feels - intimate - in her quiet, faintly accented voice. There's a directness to the question, and to the sweep of her pale gaze over his face, a sudden, scouring directness.

"Are you following me?"

Brian Hayes

Brian betrays no emotion, but he is not devoid of it, either.

Throughout the conversation, he had alternated between looking at the marble's subject, whose impact on men lanced through the ages and continued to be a source of fascination for those who could bear to look upon her, or read through the countless pages written on subjects that few youth find interesting until something strikes a chord within them. As Luce circles and casts her attention back at him, he might have kept looking at the face of the Gorgon rather than the woman standing behind her, wreathed in light and powerful in the terror she could instill in an unwitting creature.

(Oh, she does not terrify him, but she does intimidate him, at least the first time they met she did. Brian is confident, has every reason to be, but he isn't cocky, and he isn't a conquerer.

Neither was Perseus, really, but Brian doesn't have a legion of gods to call upon for help.)

"Why? There isn't an APB out on you, is there?" he asks, as though her question is funny, to him.

Luce

She flashes him a brief, cool half-smile at the question. Medusa is forgotten now, and the weight of her pale, now-remote gaze lingers on his still-boyish face. She meets his eyes - when and if he looks at her - without flinching, without embarrassment.

"No." The cool half-smile sharpens, briefly. Her clear composure makes her seem older than her fine features. Lift her from her early twenties to her late twenties. Early thirties, perhaps. "No, I'm sure I'm not wanted.

"I'll leave you alone with her then, shall I? I expect I'm distracting you from your appreciation of the work with all my chatter."

Still, her voice is quiet, the marble bust of the Medusa writhing between them. The gallery behind Luce is full of old masters, and lost in deep shadows. The long corridor behind him that leads back to the Legion of Honor's central hall is more brilliantly lit, backgrounds him in light, and casts shadows across his features.

Brian Hayes

Luce's verbal taking of leave has Brian attempting but ultimately failing to suppress a smile. That first night they met, whenever she said something that was humorous or charming enough to warrant an outward show of appreciation, Brian had seemed self-conscious about laughing or even smiling. Showing teeth, maybe, or even simply making too much noise is something that is frowned upon in his line of work.

Investigators and lawmen do not like sudden anything, let alone noises. Here in this environment, every rustle of fabric or cleared congestion of one's sinuses echoes through the corridors, composed of the same material that has transfixed Medusa's tormented gaze in existence. Without the vision, such as it is, of artists and musicians and writers, the rest of them may as well have stumbled through thousands of years of idle history utterly blind and ignorant; sudden noise, to men who have to sift through the bullshit left behind from those who remain blind and ignorant in the modern age, is a distraction. It costs them time, and to talk to any investigator worth his salary, there is never enough time.

A decade ago, less, Brian may very well have been teased for being 'pretty.' He's getting older, but when he smiles--or, as he does now, tries not to--it shaves off near as much time from his age.

"Alright," he says, if only to give her the chance to begin to make her escape.

Should she start to walk away, Brian lets her go a matter of meters before his voice bids her wait, though he does not say the words themselves.

"Although--you read the news?" Read is present simple tense, not past perfect; it is searching for description of routine, not a finite moment in time. "The cannibal escaped custody."

Luce

He gives her the chance to make her escape, and she takes it. Her gait is long-legged and sure-footed, the low heels of her boots make a clipped noise against the marble as she completes her circuit around the marble bust, loosening her right hand enough from the metal links of her bag's long strap that it begins to swing at her side. The wary edge of her attention lingers on Brian as she circles the sculpture, then cuts sharply down the long, empty hallway as she completes the circle she started and walks past him.

The fitted black dress whispers against her skin with every movement, a susserant, constant counterpoint to the clipped precision of her heelstrikes against the floor. What was an even, perhaps too-slow pace is beginning to speed up as she begins down the hall, when Brian asks whether she reads the news.

The young woman's tall frame freezes; lifted through the spine, and also still, sharply so. Even the rhythm of her breathing is briefly interrupted, and for a fleeting moment she is utterly still. Still as a statue, as one of Medusa's frozen lovers. Somewhere in the deep hallways, a tic-tic-ticking as a heater deep in the bowels of the old museum kicks on, with a quiet rush of air.

Does she read the news?

"Every night." Poised for another step, she remains - where she is, some few meters down the long, quiet hallway, directly beneath the unwelcome eye of a stiff tulip merchant, dressed all in black, painted within the confines of some gloomy seventeenth century room. Luce cuts a glance back over her shoulder at Brian. The patterned sequins cast a filigree of light across her features.

The cannibal escaped custody.

"I know." Her face is a taut, pale wash above the black sequined dress. Her eyes seem - darker, somehow. With a soft, haunted edge. "I saw."

Her glossed mouth is pressure together then, a moment's consideration as she shunts a glance aslant, at the next painting down the hall, a fulsome, well-fed woman with a long face and a longer nose, staring down through her pince-nez at either her ample bosom or the equally ample bowl of fruit on the sidetable before her.

"How did you find me?" - she asks, again. By now the question must seem quite nearly rhetorical. Her breath is drawn back, withheld. " - did he send you?"

Brian Hayes

This has been the downfall of more than one arrogant, self-indulgent male throughout the course of history: he sees something he does not understand, and he is compelled to dissect it until he thinks that he does, not grasping the fact that in not understanding he has no concept of the very reality he mentioned as being the impetus for withheld eye contact in the men who found themselves confronted with the beautiful, doomed Medusa.

Brian, though, is not a scientist. He is not interested in tinkering, he'll claim, and he'll be mocked for wanting to protect the masses, for speaking of them as though they are capable of great things rather than simply existing as a tumor metastasized across the face of the planet.

It is not until she ceases moving and turns to address him that Brian takes his attention off of the statue. He pivots, slightly, to address her, but he does not pursue the blond woman. There are cameras everywhere, yet they cannot suss out his motives any more than she can.

Her question has his brow furrowing, the muscles around his mouth tensing. Dappled in darkness such as he is, it's hard to read his eyes. That he is here, right now, without explanation, has to lend him a sinister edge that he hasn't had the last two times they met.

"Nobody sent me," he says, and maybe she's seeing that amusement he's displayed isn't amusement so much as bafflement. He reaches up to scratch the back of his head, briefly, his blunt nails making the follicles protest. "Luce, I get it. The big scary FBI guy keeps showing up the same place you are... you think someone's looking for you... simplest explanation would be the two are connected. Now, I can stand here and tell you that they're not until I'm blue in the face, but I'm not going to. You were present at the scene of this guy's last known attack." A beat. "I'll find him, but I'm concerned with your safety until then. Just as a... a baseline. That's how it is. But I did not follow you here, nor do I have you under surveillance. Alright?"

Luce

Two things: 1. Heightened Senses; 2. Auspex 2: dif 8 -2 for heightened senses.

Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (1, 1, 4, 5, 9, 9) ( fail )

Luce

Toreador do not fail. +1 dif for prior failure.

Dice: 6 d10 TN7 (2, 3, 4, 8, 8, 8) ( success x 4 ) [WP]

Luce

The brief speech has her flicking a glance over his face as he speaks, pivoting in place back towards him, cheating her tall, lean frame so that she can study him nearly straight on without leaving her back open to the empty hall. There's a certainly quickening in her expression - some tension that frames her pale eyes, and a certain curious, open curve to her small mouth - that accompanies the look. It seemes a close study at first, but there's something briefly unfocused about her attention, a certain way she seems to look - around him rather than directly at him.

"I'm careful," she assures him, with this brief, winsome curve to her little mouth. Her voice is low; that little half-smile is bittersweet. "Laying low, for the next - " a faint, narrow shrug of her narrow shoulders completes the thought. For however long is necessary, she seems to say. Offering the thought with a certain air, some sense of surrender to the vagaries of time and attrition. "Though I appreciate your concern."

The hallway shunts her voice toward him, dampens the vibration of it. Absords some of the texture. Still, she does not shout, and speaks to him with that same directness, her eyes affixed to his face now, to his eyes.

The moment passes. She lifts her chin toward him, the gesture is one of inquiry rather than command, and it sends the narrow chain earrings suspended from her ears dancing with the gesture. Diamonds wink and dance at the end of each little chain.

"I don't suppose that I can persuade you that finding him is someone else's duty. Not yours."

Brian Hayes

From looking at him, she only has his current mood, any shifting or uncertainty, and what she has is this: a man, one of the few in this world possessing noble intentions, caged by his own worldview yet still maintaining an idealism that is warring with fear, of all things, being in her presence. It is a bright aura, if depressingly beatific.

She doesn't get an answer as to whether he's lying or not. If he is lying, which he may very well be, it was not with malice in mind. Speaking of saints, Bernard warned that Hell is full of those who carried out evil with good in mind. If Brian were destructive, or out of control, or vengeful, Luce would be able to see that.

But he's not, and he can't tell what she is.

That question has Brian huffing out a touch of laughter at a respectful decibel laughter, more of a sigh than anything else, and he drops his head to look at the rug beneath their feet for the first time. It is not immaculate; the museum has been open all day, and the cleaning crew will not arrive until late in the night. He considers her implicit request in silence.

There it is again. Orange. He knows this creature is dangerous, might even know that it is undead. It has to be stopped. The orange is overpowered by that blazing yellow again. In art, orange needs red to exist.

Brian lifts his eyes first, then straightens his spine, stands at his normal if unimpressive height.

"He's crossed state lines, Luce. As of right now he's a federal fugitive. As far as the powers that be are concerned, it's just as much mine as it would be anyone else's."

Luce

At last, she untangles her remaining hand from the chain slanting across her narrow torso. Perhaps she has a weapon in there, tucked in with her gleaming lipgloss and sleek black compact. Perhaps the back itself is her weapon, the closest thing she had to hand.

With a darting glance back down the long hallway, which lingers long enough to absorb the stillness of the shadows, the silence that lingers outside the bubble of noise their make, breathing, moving, speaking - she turns fully back to him, takes two, perhaps three steps back in his direction.

Medusa is forgotten. Her eyes are fast on his face, the pale blue still drenched in shadows, darker and somehow wider, large for it. Her hair is loose, cropped and wavy, more platinum than gold, though here and there threads of the underlying, native gold gleam through, untouched by whatever dye or wash she used to achieve the ice princess effect such pale hair gives her.

Her shoulders rise and fall with every breath; the dress whispers against her thighs with every step she takes. It is just this side of modesty, short enough that it might be illegal in certain southern states. Still, she wears the dress with a remote confidence that feels - stark, regal, perhaps just a little bit hungry.

"He won't be alone. You know that, don't you?"

Brian Hayes

The light is attracted to Luce, wants to climb around her, keeps glinting off of her hair and dancing among the sequins on her dress. Bless him, Brian looked at her, once, and it has to be a temptation to glance down at the hem of her dress to see what her thighs are doing, but he does not.

His hands are still visible. He has not sheathed them in a set of pockets, either jacket or jeans; they're clasped in front of him, as though he's patiently waiting for judgment to be rained down upon him. It is worth mentioning that though he is right-handed, the hand that bears the ring is the dominant one in this pairing. With his hands held as they are, Luce cannot see the ring clearly, yet she must know it's there. When they sat together in the café, when he held up his hands that night before Christmas, it had caught the light as Luce does.

(The woman who put it there takes hers off when she leaves the house. Some nights she forgets to put it back on. Hannah Hayes thinks her father is an idiot for believing the lies her mother tells even when he's caught Hannah herself weaving some truly Oscar-worthy ruses.)

"That's what you said last time," he says, "before rushing off into the night."

Luce

That earns him a wry twist of her glossed little mouth. "I had a date," she tells him, by way of explanation. The wryness touches her eyes, too. Makes her steady gaze momentarily conspiratorial, wholly self-away. The excuse sounds minor after the life/death starkness of the assault, the tension in its aftermath. She acknowledges all that with a low sound, which is born and dies as easily in the back of her throat, resonant through the cage of her chest without ever being given full voice.

"One more, at least," she tells him, her breath withheld now. held back, except when it is necessary to speak. "Priest or leader, both somehow. Someone to fill him with bad Latin and worse prophecy. Usually two or three others, at least. Fellow acolytes. Perhaps not so strong as he, but equally as brutal.

"Suicidal, to confront them alone."

Brian Hayes

He is very still right now. That idealism can very easily become resolution, but the fear is gone. It was never outward to begin with. Luce had to call upon the powers of extrasensory perception to notice it, and now it's disappeared again.

"These priests and acolytes, do they not bleed when they're stabbed with a knife, either?"

The fed's tone is dry, as though he knows the answer and knows she knows the answer.

Luce

For her part, she ignores the question in its entirety. Her only reaction is a miniscule shake of her pale head, coupled with a certain narrowing of her glossed mouth. A certain binary reaction between her brows - drawn briefly together in a way that presages a frown. The frown, however, never blooms. Her eyes are steady, reflective.

"These sort of men can't really hide," she tells him, low-voiced. She has walked back all the meters between them; is now close enough that he can see the subtle shifting of shadows across her features as her shadowed eyes explore his face. "They think they were meant to rule. But other men will hunt them, if - " A sharp brief inward, the opposite of a sigh, pulls her shoulders minutely upward in an arc of tension.

"Brian." Impulsively, she reaches out, catches his left arm at the elbow with her own. Her touch light, but steady. "If you find them, you should deal with them from a distance." Thumb close to the inner joint of his elbow, fingers splayed wide and sure beneath his forearm. "You understand?"

Brian Hayes

But other men will hunt them, if -

"If I sit around and wait for them to kill someone else."

And then she's reaching out, taking hold of his arm again, finding him just as solid yet just as fragile as he was last week. His windbreaker is insulated, the outer shell cool beneath her fingers. Beyond what her heightened senses pick up--he was around a smoker but does not himself smoke; he does not use cologne; his clothing is clean--she cannot smell the coppery adrenaline odor that had clung to him after his first standoff with the madman.

Brian releases his hands, letting them fall away from each other, but he does not try to yank his arm out of the thinner woman's grasp. It's almost as though some part of him senses that she's stronger than he is, or has the potential to be, but he would be afraid of her right now if that were the case, and he isn't afraid. He's galvanized.

He doesn't take his eyes off of her face. Luce can see that his respiration rate has quickened, but he isn't breathing deeper or heavier. Likely his heart has started racing, but she isn't reading lust in him any more than she finds fear.

What he wants to say is that he would not be alive right now if he thought he could take down a psychopath--a monster--with his bare hands.

"Yeah," is what he says instead.

Luce

If I sit around and wait for them to kill someone else.

She breathes in sharply, then. As if she could inhale his idealism. Distill it from the cool air around them, then open it up again, decant it, let it breathe. Her hand tightens, briefly, on his forearm, the nylon windbreaker whispering beneath her grasp. And she flashes him the surest, saddest little smile, just enough to curve her mouth wider, to make the darkened clarity of her shadowed gaze gleam.

"Be careful," she asks him. Instructs him, really. Her grasp on his elbow loosens, and her hand slides down his forearm until her cool fingers cross his palm. She clasps his hand, squeezes once, that faint little curve lingering on her mouth the whole time. "Will you?"

Then lets him go at last, her long arm falling back to her side. The motion is interrupted just once, when she reaches up to tuck a few stray curls behind her ear. "I have to go."

Brian Hayes

So far as he can tell, Luce can take care of herself. What leads him to believe this, he couldn't say with any certainty, other than this: she is young and blond and comely, living in a major U.S. city, and looks older than she ought to, thinner than she ought to, but not defeated.

There's the ignorance, again. He has no idea how Luce she is, and she has no idea if Brian would believe her if she confessed. It is none of his business, anyway.

She can take care of herself, and Brian, despite the ring on his finger and the family that seems to only exist in photographs, the cadre of colleagues and a direct line to request backup or supplies or whatever he might need to carry out the basic functions of his job, is alone. Maybe he thinks he has to be. There is no yearning in him, not even when she slides her hand down his arm and grasps his hand.

It's like a rite for the dying, that sad smile with those scant words and that squeeze, as though this is the last time their paths will cross. True though that may be, Brian doesn't have that fatalistic air of a man walking off to his own execution. Suicidal, she'd called anyone who would go after these creatures alone.

Psychotic, a psychologist would call the entire situation.

"Okay," he says. He doesn't offer to give her a ride, and steps back as though he is fully intending to go back to browsing the gallery for a few more minutes before walking out that front door. "Happy New Year."

Luce

"And to you and yours," she returns, her eyes quick, fixed on his the whole time. "Good night, Brian."

With that, she pivots one hundred eight degrees and begins walking away. Sure, assured, her long sweeping gait, as she walks down the shadowed hallway, the long-dead merchants and nobles staring blindly out of their canvases at her, heels clicking sharply with every long, sweeping step she takes.

Unhinged.

Luce

The night is cool and cloudy, the streets radiating from Union Square are crowded long after dark with shoppers, bustling from store to store. The whole core of the city is illuminated, brilliant threads of lights wrap the picture windows, the holiday displays. Glimmering silver-white snowflakes - non-denominational, you see, and all the snow the city will ever see - hang from the streetlights, brilliant, this ward against the dark.

The streets have a bright sort of energy. Buskers play on the corners, some good, somet terrible, all working at Christmas music now, except for a lone outcast who keeps playing the Hannukah song over and over again. Bell-ringers are out in force, though few of these are working for the Salvation Army. San Francisco is not their favorite territory. But other charities take up the slack.

There's a disturbance of sorts, though. In a little public plaza tucked between a high-end lingeree store and a clothiers. From a distance, it isn't precisely clear what it is, though people who would normally use the plaza to cut from one shopping street to another, ducking briefly through a dark stretch of at the other end of the plaza are instead clustered around the edges, in sharp little knots. Frowning, craning their necks, asking each other what's going on in hushed little asides.

High on drugs, someone says. PCP will do that to you.

Is it a domestic thing? - someone else asks.

I was supposed to meet my husband at Perks -

- the coffee shop nestled on the square, behind the lingere store, across the plaza. And so on, these little ripples of rumor opening through the crowd like rills.

Brian Hayes

The very idea of participating in this holiday fills him with a sort of dread brought on by the approaching icy fingers of faithful hypocrisy approaching his throat from just beyond the scope of his vision. It's a charade, every year, because abstinence from Christmas in the absence of religious conviction strikes the public as being aberrant. The sort of American who does not celebrate Christmas is the same sort of person who does not marry, or chooses not to have children, or professes to prescribing to a political or economic system other than the one currently in place.

People who do not participate in the Christmas tradition have unwanted attention cast their way, and a man like Brian wants to blend in, not to stand out. So he goes last-minute shopping like the rest of the country.

Unlike the rest of the country, or even the rest of the city, he wears a shoulder holster underneath his off-duty jacket. Despite the street clothes, he is currently armed, and when he hears the concussion of a disturbance bouncing through the crowd, he does not ignore it. Brian, carrying a stressed shopping bag and wearing a baseball cap, aborts his previous trajectory and moves forward to investigate.

"Excuse me," he says as he picks his way through the crowd, when he has to say anything at all, or "Permiso," and that is all.

Luce

He shoulders his way through the crowd with a certain purpose, and the milling, concerned people move aside for him. There's something official in his trajectory, some imprint of authority, that carries over from his human life, gives him a certain gravitas at just such moments. There is an open space with a few park benches where the earliest witnesses are clustered, and beyond them, just in front of the fountain still trickling water in the middle of the plaza - a tall man in a torn track suit, his face twisted, garish. Blood is spattered down the front of his t-shirt and he's not shouting, anymore, just sort of growling, this steady drumbeat of sound, angry as hell.

Some of those clustered around the benches are kneeling. There's someone on the ground, but before he gets a full sense of what is precisely going on one of those spectators - a tall, skinny kid, with a dark hood pulled up over his hair, pulls away from the bench, grabs his arm with a woman's fine hand, a look of startled recognition, fleeting but immediate, pale face, blue blue eyes.

"Brian?" Out before she thinks it, but she steps physically into his path, eyes clear and wide. "What are you doing here?" And looks beyond him, maybe for the kids she knows he has. Her voice drops, but it still carries between them. " -- is your family around? You need to find them and get out of here. This isn't safe. You need to go - "

There's urgency in her voice; bright and persuasive. Fear, too, though it is taut, controlled rather than panicked. Her features are shadowed by the hood, except for the spark of her eyes, reflecting the ambient light. Pale hair covered by the hood.

"Trust me. You need to get out of here. Now."

Brian Hayes

"What?"

He's seen dead bodies before, countless of them. She can see that on the man's face, in the lack of reaction in his eyes; he's confused by her presence, maybe, or the scene, or else that's simply the most natural-sounding human response he can think of at the moment.

"No, they're in Washington." He does not pause before he continues speaking, though his voice drops to a hush. There isn't any time; this isn't safe. "I'm a federal officer, I can't just go. What's going on?"

Luce

The person prone on the ground is not dead. Not yet. Someone has a towel to his face and someone else, a woman in a short, leather coat looks frantically over at the pair of them, back toward the man in front of the fountain, whose growling rant crescendos upward and back down. He looks - caged somehow, in the middle of his menace.

The girl in front of him is bright, sharp. She cuts a glance back over her shoulder as some stumbling tango of words breaks through.

"He's nuts. Unhinged. It's - please." A sharp glance down at the woman, and the teenage boy, prone, bleeding on the ground. Someone took a huge chunk of flesh out of his cheek. Biting. Tearing. Stranding muscle is visible, and the sharp, pale edge of his jawbone, the attachments of his teeth. "Help her get him out of here. I think he'd attack paramedics. Would you - "

A brief, helpless look back over her shoulder, this absolutely low-voiced, sharp and wary. The bloodied man is muttering, repetitive phrases, only a few words audible. They sound ominously religious, and darkly so. Father this and thou that. "What if he has a bomb?"

Brian Hayes

The man who just arrived on scene possesses no special characteristics or aura that would suggest to a bystander that he is equipped to come rushing in and avert what damage there is yet to be done. By the time he arrived, dressed in clothing that is meant to downplay his notice, a boy not much older than his own son had been torn open.

(He'd mentioned his children, hadn't he, the night they met, disclosed that he had a daughter in college and a son in middle school, and he was happy when he spoke of them but there was no mention of the woman who put the ring on his finger.)

That look thrown back at him is answered with steadiness, Brian holding himself still but for the movement necessary to set down the handled bag he was carrying.

"Then I'll get hazard pay for this," he says, without cracking a smile. It's not cockiness that drives him forward. Surely he's nervous, thinking of his children, as he shucks the hem of his coat aside and pulls a badge from an inner pocket. A leather holster reveals itself in the moment that his jacket is in motion, but the weapon remains dormant. "Call 911, they'll dispatch police before the ambulance."

Crowds tend to either disperse or root themselves in place with the arrival of someone in charge. Now that they're aware of Brian, the man does seem to have a confidence and a way of carrying himself that projects authority. Would make one wonder what Luce was doing with him were not for the fact that the attention of the consensus is somewhat hooked at the moment.

Luce

The girl - his daughter's age, a few years older, perhaps. It's in the self-possession rather than the soft lines of her face, in the way she holds the sharp edge of her fear inside herself - curses beneath her breath. Not in English, but in French, and steps back from him as he walks forward. A moment when she sharpens herself to intervene again. Straightens her shoulders a moment, then cuts a glance back to the crowd.

"Come help him - " low and urgent to the two nearest men, a gesture at the badly injured boy, sharp, pleading, as his mother hovers over him, praying in lucid, fluent Spanish to the virgin and St. Nicholas and any saint she can remember. Luce does not get near the boy herself, but crosses her arms angrily. "You - shouldn't." One last attempt from the girl, shrouded in her hoodie, sharply angled, behind him. "He's dangerous."

Brian holds out the badges, hazard pay. If there's an official report, someone will write that down. Admiringly, in the narrative. Some witness will remember it, attach the words to the parole officer.

The man by the fountain is - six feet tall. More or less. Built, an excess of both fat and muscle, dressed on a beaten up warm-up suit and an old t-shirt from some godforsaken high school. The mascot is covered in blood spatter. And he's standing there, muttering over and over in a mixture of English and the world's worst high school Latin about the Father and his hands and the judgment day to come, a loose association that seems more memorized and bawlderized than learned.

There's some sort of invisible line, a half-dozen feet closer than the ring of spectators. When Brian crosses it, the man looks up. Sharply. Sniffs the air as if he were an animal and swings his head, his bloodshot eyes, his dead white skin. "Where is that bitch -" enters the lexicon then, and "come get me, pig." does too, as he sort of shambles forward, shoulders moving like small boulders as he does. A switchblade is sunk to its hilt in one shoulder. He is not bleeding from the wound, and does not seem to notice it.

He has a chunk of the boy's cheek in hand, shreds of skin and muscle hanging from teeth that he has filed into points. Threat inherent in his posture.

Brian will not see it, but the girl follows him, a few steps behind. Nervous, angry, her arms firmly crossed, the hood low.

Brian Hayes

[le pause!: part deux]

Brian Hayes

There was a time when he, with fewer lines around his eyes and a bagginess to his clothing brought on by a young man's insecurity, would have seen something like this--a blood-splattered madman with needle-sharp teeth, pieces of human flesh caught between them like he'd had at the boy as though he were a serving of corn on the cob, a slab of cheek in hand like a plane ticket or a pamphlet--and been terrified.

What the onlookers see as Brian chooses to engage the subject rather than cower out of sight and wait for the authorities to arrive is nothing that could be considered awe-inspiring. He is below average height for an American male, dressed as though he is attempting to blend in, yet as soon as he reveals that badge and steps in to take charge of the situation, he becomes, to them, a solid figure, a throwback to an age where men did things like this without thinking.

Surely he's going to get himself killed, and a microexpression passes when the madman asks where is 'that bitch.'

(It happens in less than a second, connections being pushed together to make up an idea of what it is that happened here, but he isn't looking right at it, likely won't look right at it until later, and even then it won't make much sense. Luce was here; Luce wanted him to leave; this madman [creature] was out for her not him and he went and got in the way.)

Brian sees the blade. He sees that the man isn't bleeding.
Luce cannot see his face but she can see his shoulders shore up.

"Hey, man," he says, holding up both hands in a gesture of peaceable will that still displays the badge, "I'm not here to 'get' anybody, alright, I just want to talk to you."

Those who are staring at him can feel a wall of authority projected from it, an innate impulse to obey and not engage; once he sees that dead wound, Brian knows this particular procedure isn't going to go off without a hitch.

Luce

The dead man makes a few snuffling noises. Like a hog. Opens his bloodied mouth wide like he is going to laugh, but it comes like a dry-husked noise, choked with a the blind, stupid cruelty of some lower-ordered mammal. Something short-haired, greedy, and beady-eyed.



It ends with a widening smile, the sort that shows off his teeth. Top and bottom, from incisors to canines to the molars, all filed, crudely. The laugh sends a spray of bloody fluid spattering from his mouth, dislodges a few choice bits of meat that he catches with the back of his wrist before they slip-sliver down his chin, pushing them back into his mouth where he starts chewing.



Again.



The laughter interrupts the catechism, though. Gets the stranger to focus on him, narrowing his eyes in consideration as he chews. Briefly he searches the background around Brian, behind him, flexing his bloodied fists reflexively as he does. The search is sharp but furtive, a sweep of the crowd, each point of contact has him pulling back his lips from his teeth and sniff-sniffing the air.



Then his dark, bloodshot eyes swing back to Brian. There's a deep moment of tension, the impulse to obey at war with the equally deep impulse to tear apart anything in his way. To drag -



The bloodied man takes a step forward; another, focused on the badge now. His attention swinging back and forth between the badge and Brian's face.



"You wanna talk." Gravelly, in human. He flexes his bulging shoulders and sniffs. Drops the hunk of the boy's cheek to the bloodied pavement with a wet splat. And nods. "Talk." A quick, stupid grin. "Then we pray. Then we eat."



The girl behind them is absolutely silent, turned so that she is not watching the man dead-on, but standing sidelong, her eyes on the crowd. Steps behind him, just an interrupted, low-voiced curse and a warning to someone to Be Careful, so quiet it is hissed, barely audible. Brian can hear the shuffling in the crowd behind him; most watching him, some dispersing around the edges. A couple of men, urged on by the girl, trying to move the boy, back, further out of harm's way.

Brian Hayes

Let's get something straight: Brian is not fearless. He is not standing before this man all in a cocksure swagger, utterly assured of his chances of survival. Anyone looking at his can see that he isn't blinking, that his blue eyes are loud with nerves, but he isn't trembling and impotent with terror. He is operating on rote memory, not impulse, and if he doesn't do something, then that boy behind him is as good as dead.

The scuffing of shoes on the ground behind him has Brian altering his stance, his positioning, as though he is going to be able to serve as a wall between the cannibal and these good Samaritans.

"Alright," Brian says, with the tense friendliness that is mastered only by those who have had a gun to their head. "Alright, sure, man, you can pray if you want, later, I just need you to stay where you are for right now. We got a hurt kid, here."

'Hurt' is an understatement. 'Kid' is too idle an identifier. That is someone's brother, someone's boyfriend, someone's son. Brian looks brave, right now, but with his bravery comes a sort of ignorance. He believes insanity to be the cause for the attack, or drugs. If he's just gentle with this guy, if he doesn't do anything sudden or loud, he can get close enough to restrain him.

It's no wonder Luce is angry, yet to onlookers, it is.

"What's your name?"

Luce

The Good Samaritans are nearly as focused on the madman as Brian; wary, this close. Exposed as they slip into the ring of what seems to be his focus. The length of his sweep. The people surround him as if he were a vicious dog on a chain, just outside the radius of his sweep. And creep within it only reluctantly, watching forward, tense. The mother has stopped praying, though. Or rather, she has started praying more quietly, struggling to control her breathing as if that might help her stay behind the protective barrier Brian seems to be - projecting, forward, into the tense, taut space of the square.

"His head - you've got to hold the - " the girl's taut whispers, sharpened with her faintly foreign accent, break through the general murmuring of the crowd. Somewhere, beyond this scene, laughter, Christmas carols, the canned sort blaring from speakers. The sounds of traffic. No sirens. Not yet.

--

"Meat." Once Brian has the man's attention, it seems stuck. He's staring at the badge, mesmerized, with the swaying threat of a cobra. What happens when the snake-charmer's song stops? He smiles a big, thankfully closed mouth grin, and brings one of his big hands up to his mouth. His nails are crusted with blood, new and old, and the fluid runs down his fingers, over his shattered knuckles in dark, narrow ribbons. With a certain grotesque precision, he begins to pick out bits of gristle and viscera from between his filed teeth, mouth pulling wide to the right as he works.

"That kid's meat." A grin, sudden. Like a toddler who just pushed the round puzzle piece through the square hole through sheer dint of perserverance, which dims as Brian asks his name. Something dark and vicious spasms across his features. "I don't got one.' The look he shoots Brian is rank with anger, suspicion - " - why you asking?"

Brian Hayes

Even expressions meant to convey nonchalance come across as though Brian is standing on the edge of a sixty-story building and could be knocked off at any second. He has a latent degree of charm about him, a part of his personality that he keeps as close to his vest as information about his past or his profession. Luce may have noticed this the night that they met. He was quiet and respectful, intimidated by beautiful women yet intelligent enough to hold a conversation in the midst of being interrupted.

This is as close to the opposite end of the spectrum as one can get, and in hindsight, one can posit that the intimidation he had felt was strangely similar. He had no idea why, at the time. Surely, Luce was not a blood-hungry pain-resistant lunatic, yet to those who are drawn to and love them, women are the deadliest creatures walking the face of the Earth.

Brian isn't thinking of the woman behind him right now. He's thinking that he has very little goddamn wiggle room with this creature. That question as to his name shoves another piece of evidence forward. The mentally ill have all sorts of names for themselves, or they're proud, or they're delusional, or they're shy.

This is akin to Brian having inadvertently stumbled upon a stash of bodies while killing time waiting for the tea kettle to boil.

"Just wanted to know what I could call you, is all," he says. "You know, something besides 'man.'"

Keep talking, he has to be chanting to himself, keep talking so he's looking at you and not at them while he's wondering where the fuck are the cops, where the fuck is the ambulance, this city was supposed to be quiet and have nothing happen and here he is mentally calculating how quickly he can draw his weapon if this guy bolts toward him.

His hands are still in the air.

Luce

A stark, raw look. The way the light hits him; some trick of the shadows. The movement of the fountain, the rippling crowd that must feel to Brian as if it is huddled behind him, all staring forward, crowding behind the faint flicker of light he holds up. There's noise, movement behind Brian, but not the sort he has time to process. Strange the way the brain begins to filter - necessary, unnecessary - when survival hangs in such keen, finely bladed balance.

Maybe he's imagining it; not a trick of light or shadow or sound, but of time. It's dilatory effect. When you begin to pay attention to every passing second, each seems monumental. But there, in the madman's eyes, this crawling, piercing moment of lucidity.

"Ginger called me Dad."

The madman's hand falls away from his mouth. The fountain plashes fitfully behind him.

(Behind Brian, the lightest touch on his spine. Through coat and jacket. A small announcement of presence. "They got him away," the girl's voice is lashed tight, light a mainsail in the storm of the century. She is whispering, low enough that Brian has to strain to process it. "You can start backing up now.")

The admission - removes something from the madman. Something raw and essential, visceral. He looks away - lost and - and shaking with something that starts in his shoulders, in his spine. Then whatever it was breaks open, shattering as easily and thoughly as an eggshell and he swings that look back to Brian. Wide, raw teeth.

"Boss called me Meatshield."

In the far distance, a siren begins to sound.

Brian Hayes

He does not jolt at the brushing of fingertips against his jacket. He knows she's there; he knows it's her; he knows she wants him the hell out of here, wants him to not be standing in stasis with a razor-toothed monster who is more powerful than Brian can likely imagine. When Luce murmurs to him, Brian does not look away from his target with even a hair's width of lost vision, does not lower his badge or the other empty hand. That other empty hand is as necessary to his continued survival as that badge is, right now, because if he gives the creature the impression that his [un]life is in danger, then that will make his own job that much more difficult.

"Alright," he says. "That's... your boss must be one of those gamers I've been hearing about. Warcraft and all that. I don't see the appeal, myself."

Sirens grow closer, but he takes no solace in them. It could just be the ambulance hurtling across town as quickly as it can, but there is a subtle difference to American emergency service sirens. Brian knows he doesn't have much time before another complication presents itself. The thought hadn't occurred to him, when he asked Luce to call 911, that this was an inhuman suspect they were coming to arrest.

There is nothing to be done for it now. They cannot let him go, and if Brian lowers his hands before they slap the cuffs on him, then there will be more meat taken, more bloodshed, a nameless menace loose in the streets of San Francisco.

It is not the optimum outcome, but no one dies. The boy may, yet, but everyone who was upright at the time that Brian appeared on the scene walks away, and it isn't until the menace is wrested into handcuffs and the police have him locked in the back of whatever vehicle they choose to transport him in that Brian relaxes.

He doesn't see Luce right away, so he puts his cap back on and runs his hand down his face. It doesn't help; his palm is slick with sweat, and as he looks, he can see that now that the danger has passed his hands have started violently trembling.

"I need a goddamn drink," he says, when he passes her in the dispersing crowd.

Luce

The girl has become as anonymous as she can be; a boy, probably, to anyone who sweeps by her in the dark, without another glance. Tall and skinny and awkward, slouched in a hooded sweatshirt. It's too dark and chaotic to notice that the sweatshirt is a cashmere sweater, not some cheap piece of athletic wear from Hot Topic or Old Navy. She has wedged herself onto a halfwall away from the main area of the plaza, her other things - shucked in a moment of extremis - retrieved from the trampling crowd and stuffed beside her in a concrete framed planter, with an evergreen wrapped in lights that someone turned off, somewhere in the commotion.

She hits the ground beside him, though, this sharp, curt glance sweeping upward at his features. Dropping to his shaking hands. She is all sharp angles, sweeping a look behind them, suspicious of it all. The crowd and the cops, the ambulance drivers lifting the kid into the bus. The Good Samaritans and the bad.

"That was stupid," she tells him, still low. The harshness to the words, though - seems, internal, somehow. And when she repeats it, beneath, a stubborn, reluctant sort of admiration. " - really fucking stupid." She's quiet, then. A long moment, before, " - you all right?"

Brian Hayes

At her accusation, her assessment of the situation, Brian just laughs a not completely steady laugh and wipes his hands off on the legs of his jeans. Retrieving his shopping bag as he did, he has to switch the handle from one hand to the other to get the clammy salt water off his flesh, and it kills time in the silence that stretches out after she speaks.

The wedding band on his finger represents as much of a lie as anything else about his life, but the children he'd spoken of over tea the other night were not. There was no fabricating that relationship, nor the reality of the situation: they are used to living without him present, but to live with him dead would be beyond words.

That the paramedics loaded the boy into the ambulance rather than calling for the coroner was as good a sign as he could hope for at this point, and he never drew close enough to be stricken by his target. Still, it was stupid, and he does not attempt to paint over the cracks with words about duty and honor and societal obligation. He could have kept walking, but he didn't, so he does not tell her that he thought, for a second or five, that he would be killed tonight.

His badge is back in an inside pocket of his jacket. The gun never left its holster. Another positive.

"Yeah," he says, "I'm alright." There is silence for a time, but then he asks without really asking: "That was your knife, sticking out of his shoulder. Wasn't it."

Luce

"Maybe," she returns, sharp and quick. The bright energy still coursing around her. She keeps the hood down over the pale wash of her hair, tucks the expensive jacket firmly in her arms, and slips a dark, olive green messenger back over her shoulders, settling it against her hip. Then buries her hands in her front pockets, hunching forward, shoulders drawn together, in this bunchy way that changes her profile, entirely.

"Fat lot of good it did." This noise, not quite a laugh, and raw somehow. A sharpened sigh. "This fucking place." That is muttered like a curse, like the punchline to a private joke. A particularly unfunny private joke.

She takes a breath, deep, as she sends another look skittering over her shoulder, up and down the street. At the reflections in the picture windows, the faceted display of lights up and down the street. "You know he probably wasn't alone, don't you? How the hell did he get here? Someone had to -

"I mean, he couldn't exactly hail a cab, could he? Who the hell would pick that crazy bastard up?"

Brian Hayes

"Have you ridden the BART lately?"

It's mild teasing, the notion that flesh-hungry lunatics with capped teeth could be deemed strange in a city such as this one clearly not having entered into his mind. Walking beside her, moving away from the epicenter of tonight's chaos, he doesn't even appear concerned that there is an accomplice lurking in the shadows when Luce glances back.

Teasing, yet it's also a rhetorical question. Brian knows, better than many in his field, that moments of normalcy rarely last long enough for full recovery to be attained before the next incident. He does not believe himself to be entitled to a break long enough to grab a beer and text his children to make sure they're at home and safe. He has not even looked at his cell phone since pocketing his badge and turning away.

The sight of them, Brian with his solid build and his utilitarian wardrobe and Luce tall and willowy and dressed like a fashionista's vision of an urban dweller, has to seem strange. Maybe he's escorting the girl home, she having been at ground zero when he arrived. They speak as though they've met before, yet no one is around to listen too closely.

"Guy like that can't have too many friends, I wouldn't be too worried if I were you."

Luce

That has her huffing out a voiceless sort of laugh, long on sigh, short on sound. She shoots him a brief glance, her sharp features shadowed by the sweep of the hood of her cashmere sweater, pale face patterned in multicolored shadows by the wash of Christmas lights around them.

"No." Something ironic bleeding in around the tension so sharp in her voice. "But I did go to a house party in the Tenderloin last weekend."

Of course she did.

His reassurance does not ease her wariness. Though perhaps it has her hiding it, slipping it beneath other, more ordinary glances, following the movement of their bodies in the reflection of the shop windows, following the path of a couple breezing by them, entirely unaware of the drama that lurks ahead.

"I just - " a sharp, wary, weaving look at his profile. "I don't mean to sound paranoid, but you don't get that nuts without help. A cult or something. I don't know. I just think you should be careful. You know? For a little while. Just - just to make sure. Or go visit your family. Right? for the holidays." She breathes out a stutter-stop breath. "In Washington?"

Brian Hayes

The path he walks is not one that has instilled in him a sense of uncertainty or fear. Plenty of other men would be considering flight back to Washington to be with their families, not because they were running away from madmen who now knew their faces and where they tended to hang around, but because that is what normal people do during the holidays. America is preparing to shut down to grant its citizens time off of work to exchange presents and drink and reflect on the year that has just passed.

When Luce offers that up as a suggestion, he does not do so much as wince or shake his head. The idea is quaint, almost, but Brian doesn't laugh or cast her a wry sidelong glance.

On the contrary.

"If you know something," he says, "or you have information, that would be more helpful than telling me not to get involved."

It hadn't worked half an hour ago when there was an obvious danger waving a boy's cheek around.

Luce

The girl makes a sharp noise in the back of her throat. Shakes her head once, though he can only sense that, really, in his peripheral vision. The movement of her body, the keen edge to her energy; live-wire, as if she were still ampted up on adrenaline from the scene, or swallowing down the sick flood of hormones that might flood her bloodstream in its wake.

The response is entirely negative. "I don't know anything, except that a crazy homeless man decided to start eating some kid in some courtyard. And then you stood him down with a badge, while he muttered like he was some extra in Rosemary's Baby.

"And I'm going to lock the door and check the locks, like, seven times before I go to sleep tonight, and that seems like a wise move for you too. That's all."

She reaches out, catches his elbow briefly, glancing just - down, not up, at him, The ambient light glitters off the surface of her eyes, making them dark and remote.

"I gotta go. Take care of yourself, okay?"

Brian Hayes

Her hand finds that the flesh beneath the coat is solid. He is not a phantom, not some ghost of a man who simply wanders from city to city stopping violent crimes and saving lives. Adrenaline, the rush of fear, has made him profusely sweat, and the body heat has managed to permeate a jacket that is designed for cool but not brisk temperatures. This city rarely grows cold enough to chill those who go out unprotected.

His eyes are no longer scared-to-blink wide, but in this low light, she may have difficulty remembering what color they actually are. In the café they had been a shade of blue that was metallic. There is no reason to believe that they have changed since then.

Humans can't change their own eye color.

When she looks at his face, Brian stands still, weathering her touch and her scrutiny, and his residual bravery holds up long enough to offer her a smile.

"Here," he says, to hold her attention a moment longer, and reaches into his wallet. He produces a business card, boring white with blue lettering.

So he wasn't lying. He is, actually, on the FBI's payroll. When he said Washington, though, he had not meant the District of Columbia. He had meant Seattle.

"My cell phone's always on, so if you need anything, you know. Call."

Luce

The offer has her searching his features again. Her own are briefly still; the faint curve of her pale cheek, the tapered line of her jaw, eyes wideset and wide in the darkness. Her hair is cropped, curled messily behind an ear under that hood. The three buttons on the strap of her messenger bag catch the light.

This machine kills fascists, declares the first.

Thy fearful symmetry, the second.

Dumbledore's Army, the third.

Her self-possession undercuts every illusion of youth she employs. It's there in every expression, even sharpened with wariness, even washed with residual fear.

The creature reaches out, takes the card between her index and middle fingers. Glances at it, back at him. "Yeah, okay." And lifts the card upward like a little salute, before slipping it into her messenger bag.

"Thanks. Take care."

Then she lets go, slips away. Some other direction, though she stays to the main streets tonight, avoiding every shadow, every alleyway, finding comfort in the vast anonymity of the Christmas crowds.

Brian Hayes

[LE WRAP]

Ice skating.

Francis Mercer

*Francis steps out of an Audi A6 luxury car after finding parking at one of the many garages. * "I'll be back before the final bell." *He whispers to the puzzlement of the valet as he hands over his keys.*

Francis Mercer

*He wanders the streets as if aimlessly lost. The sounds of the city playing out like a bewildered orchestra without an orchestra and he the sole audience.*

Francis Mercer

(without a conductor rather.))

Luce

"Do you ice skate, Mr. Mercer?"

This was the voice mail the Malkavian received, sometime after dusk.

"The rink is open at Union Square."

There was no name, no particular time. No return number left. He knows her number, though. Can see it quite precisely on the phone. Perhaps two brief meetings is enough for a musician to recognize her voice - the faint overlay of French to her English. The way it draws her vowels higher into her palette, the way she elides her consonants. Her accent is not pronounced, but it is there to be heard, even via a poor cell connection.

-

And some two hours later, a tall woman with blond hair, cropped shoulder length, tonight, leans against the fencing surrounding the ice skating rink in front of the Macy's store. Half a block away, Occupy San Francisco protesters huddle beneath their tents, protesting corporate greed. Here, all is golden. Including her.

Francis Mercer

*He holds up the phone occasionally to his ear to hear her voice, replaying the voicemail over and over again. Occasionally, he is stopped by someone that recognizes him but he presses on after a polite greeting to a fan. He finally reaches the skating rink and approaches the bright lights overhead as if entering a stage.*

Francis Mercer

*In his free hand is a leather skate bag. It looks somewhat used, as if forgotten some time ago in a closet collecting dust. He finds a bench and sits, waiting while listening to the voicemail once more for the umpteenth time.*

Francis Mercer

Still there?

Luce

He may not recognize her immediately. The first two times they met, she was dressed in designer clothes - a golden cocktail dress and stilettos as she emerged into the dark and nondescript alley where he plotted with a Tremere; something equally figure baring in the starkly modern halls of the city's Elysium. Tonight: dark jeans and layers. From behind just two are visible - the soft gray of a hooded cashmere sweater, and the dark red of a crisply tailored military-style jacket.

She is tall - as tall as most men in the area, with several inches on many of the women - and lean, with a narrow, androgynous body that would be boyish were it not for the fitting of the coat, or the loose waves of golden blond hair brushing the shoulders of her coat. Luce lounges forward, bonelessly forward, against the fence, watching the skaters swirl by. She is not ignorant of the crowd moving around her, for all that she seems apart from it.

Moments after Francis sits down on the bench, worn skate bag in hand, she straightens. Finds him with a sort of unerring direction - sharp eyes, perhaps - and ambles over, hands in the pockets of her hoodie, the jacket hanging open around them.

"You came prepared," to Francis, low, as she reaches the bench. "Admirable."

Luce

(REALLY sorry. I thought I posted something in there, but like. the button was not working. I thought I posted something 10 minutes ago, and kept trying but it wouldn't go through. Had to restart the browser. Many apologies)

Francis Mercer

NP. Thought you had d/ced

Francis Mercer

*He looks up to the woman. He looks to her face and nods courteously.* "It has been many ballads since I last danced beneath the great Noel in the City of Sinatra."

Francis Mercer

*He rises and takes a step back, offering her a place to sit and lace up her skates.*

Luce

She is carrying rental skates; from the booth by the rink. They are an ugly taupe, deliberately so. No one would want to walk away with these. Beneath the half-buttoned cardigan sweater: a fitted t-shirt declares that she is on Team Jacob. That might be irony, though perhaps there are no musical expressions for the concept, and the idea is lost on Francis.

Still, she folds herself to the bench with a certain graceful efficiency, born as much from the elegant lines of her spare frame as from any native grace, sitting in the place he offered.

"I would have imagined Vegas the city of Sinatra. The rat pack; Ocean's Eleven." The flash of a brief, stirring little smile sidelong, as she toes off her boots and begins lacing up her ugly taupe skates.

"I never thanked you for Ondine."

Francis Mercer

*He is dressed in a long autumn coat over woolen pants and an elegant cardigan vest over a carefully buttoned white chemise. He kneels in front of her and readies to slip on the skates on her feet. He shakes his head. "Twice he sang. New York... New York."

Francis Mercer

"There is no need madam L-luce." *The name still comes to his lips with some difficulty.* "Gratitude for the escape from the Lady of Organs."

Luce

There's a moment's surprise, when he kneels to slip her skates onto her feet. This sharp look, weaving from her pale gaze, framed by her golden hair. It lingers, her own hands falling from the laces as she surrenders the work to him.

There is mud on her boots; and motor oil. Close to her body, she smells of Chanel No. 5, car exhaust, and clove cigarettes. She extends her toes as he slips the skates on, watching him, the sharp look not quite disappearing, though it settles behind something else in her eyes. Aware, lively, in its way.

"Rockefeller Center," dawning awareness, this slow little smile of recognition as she takes his meaning. "You've come here from New York, then? Or you skated there once, before?"

Then a brief, certain shake of her pale head. "Let me thank you as I well. Your escape, and mine. How do you feel about Debussy?"

Francis Mercer

*He places her foot delicately into the boot of the skate. His hands and fingers are definitely those of a musician. Practiced, careful, yet firm. He laces the skates, his movements coming almost as if he were playing some mock violin. He shakes his head in negation. "To learn at the academy. My first concerto was here when I was but a soprano."

Francis Mercer

*At the mention of Debussy, the laces of the second skate slip through his fingers. He looks up with an expression of wonder although it is uncertain if he looks up at her, the stars in the sky, or both.*

Luce

"Julliard." The creature supplies, the faint upward lilt in her voice turning the single word into a question. The edge of her neat little mouth - not crimson tonight, merely glossed - curves wider. "Were you a child prodigy, then?"

She is still, patient as he laces up the skates with his nimble musician's fingers, and patient when the laces falls away and he looks up - at her or the sky. Her chin rises, following the track of his gaze to the clotted, cloud-covered sky, sparkling with the reflection of the lights ringed all about them in Union Square. Her brows are lifted in delicate arches, a universal query.

"Danse bohemienne. Would you?"

Francis Mercer

*He nods in reply to her correct guess of Juliard and as a child prodigy. When she asks of the Dance Bohemienne, he snaps back at attention from whatever reverie had ensnared him and back to reality; or at least relative to reality for a malkavian.* "Of course." *He replies without a moment's hesitation. He finishes lacing up her skates.* "But for now Princess Odette, the lake awaits us."

Francis Mercer

*He rises from his knelt position and sits beside her. He pulls out a pair of skates. They look in better shape than those of the rink, but not by much due to disuse. He slips off his loafers and begins to tie his own skates on.*

Luce

"You name me far above my station," she remarks, that faint smile lingering on the curve of her mouth. He rises, and she kicks her boots under the bench, extending her long legs to test the feel of the skates on her feet and ankles, turning then this way, and that.

"My Sire was a dancer, in Diagahlev's Ballets Russes. Though he danced to Stravinsky more than Tchaikovksy. Not that I ever say him dance." There's a singing pause; she's distant in that moment, looking not at him but at the skating rink glowing in the Christmas lights, the steam rising from the cold ice into the relative warmth of the San Francisco night lending the scene something of a muted, oracular glow.

"I could not tell you the last time I skated, Mr. Mercer. If I fall on my ass, you are welcome to laugh." The muted grin shifts into something - different; challenging maybe. Daring even.

Francis Mercer

*He lowers his eyes in disappointment when she mentions she had never seen her own Sire dance. It is followed by a faint smile on his undead lips.* "What is song without sorrow and joy. Bitter sweet as you said at our first trio." He stands up once his skates are fastened and he offers his arm for her to steady herself to stand.*

Francis Mercer

(change without to BUT. getting a bit late and the musical allegories are getting tough :) )

Luce

"Mmm - " the noise she makes in response percolates in the back of her throat, this quiet, contemplative acknowledgment of his comment. Perhaps even bittersweet itself.

He offers his arm; she rises, accepting the assistance on the unfamiliar balance of the skates. Though she is neither dancer nor athlete, she does have a certain feline instinct to balance, and there's perhaps less of the thready unsteadiness in her stance that he might have expected with her warning about the last time she skated.

There are people all around them, though the rink is not particularly crowded tonight, a weeknight, and late enough that the stores are beginning to close.

"I am afraid you will find our society in the city rather dull, after New York. But I hope you are settling in well enough, for as long as your score keeps you here."

Luce

(grins) no worries. if you promise to always overlook my typos I will forgive you yours!

Francis Mercer

*He makes his way first onto the rink. He plants his foot deep into the ice to secure his footing before helping her onto the surface.* "Sometimes we must forgive the 9 crimes and appreciate it for its secret treasures." He looks down at his hands in disdain when she brings up the word score. "I... "* he trails off fighting what looks like a confused expression; not at her words but something ... else*

Francis Mercer

Deal! :)

Francis Mercer

*His fingers twitch and his jaw tightens in response.*

Luce

Luce steps just once, shedding her jacket to toss it carelessly aside, favoring instead jeans and a cardigan. The cardigan is long, and warm and pale gray. Before they step out onto the ice, she tips up the hood, which makes her seem younger; or rather, less timeless, for she always seems young. More anchored to this particular place and this particular night.

There's a sharp glance; sidelong and alert. She does not miss either the look he casts down at his hands, or the tightening of his jaw. Her profile is a sharp thing; high cheekbones, a tapered jaw that speaks of youth, both finely made. Her pale eyes are large and wideset, above those high cheeks. Enough that is the right lighting, she might seem less human than alien; carved rather than born.

That image lasts for a moment he likely does not see, ringed by the stillness that accompanies her alertness. Blue eyes narrow and her arched brows fall, flattening in thought.

"Come." There is a certain authority in the word. She steps onto the ice after him, testing the sharpness of the blades at the bottom of her skates, the keenness of the ice. It is dull, sludged from the evening's crowds and slow - but fast enough for her purposes.

The creature reaches back for his twitching fingers, her hands cool - but not cold, warmer than his - her grip firm. And off she goes, skating without a word, blades pushing firmly at the sludgy ice. Pulling him behind her insistently, speeding up as she skates as if she could drag him out of - whatever that moment might have been.

Francis Mercer

*He follows reluctantly at first, as she can sense the muscles tense in his long fingers. But as she holds on, they slowly return to stillness of their immortal bodies. Eventually, the lucidity returns in his eyes and he looks up from his hands to her and follows now with purpose.*

Luce

(grins) it's getting a bit late for me, am thinking about doing a bit of narration toward a close in my next post. Am going to roll first to see if she falls on her behind, though. (Grins)

Luce

(and she skates how well? Dex + Ath)

Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (1, 2, 2, 5, 7) ( fail )

Francis Mercer

*He pulls up to her when it is clear the moment has passed and she knows she can slow down to a more casual pace. In hushed tones, he speaks as if ashamed. "Pardon the intermissions... they come before the curtain calls..."

Luce

(and the next time around - )

Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (2, 3, 4, 7, 9) ( success x 2 )

Francis Mercer

Dex + Athletics

Dice: 3 d10 TN6 (4, 4, 9) ( success x 1 )

Luce

The Toreador skates impetuously, throwing herself into the movement, shouldering aside the more sedate couples and groups drifting in their narrow little circles around the rink. Momentum creates enough wind that her hood flies off her head and her sweater swings wide. A human girl would be glowing and pink-cheeked from the effort and the cold; perhaps sweating beneath her warm clothes after the first circuit or two. Luce is not human; and she merely remains as she ever is, cool and bright and sure. And gleaming.

That too.

She breathes the whole time; constantly, regularly, never becoming out of breath, and says nothing more as they circle the rink, again and again. Focusing, instead, on the cutting sound of the blades in the ice.

She loses control, of course. Just as he pulls up to her with his apologies for the intermissions, some stray block of ice as she turns back to him sends her sprawling - inelegantly - right onto her back. She barks out a sharp curse as she falls, then lifts up a hand to him, waiting for him to help her rise.

"Don't apologize," she tells him, perhaps as he grasps her hand to help her up. "We all have our demons. Some more immediate than others."

Francis Mercer

Yeah, getting late here too. Will wait for you post and we can call it a night. Will probably write another mood post after this tomorrow at work lol

Francis Mercer

*He pulls her back up to her feet, barely keeping his own stance in the process. He keeps put a hand on the side of her other arm to steady them both. Noticing his own hand, he slowly pulls away awkwardly.*

Francis Mercer

Dex + athletics round 2

Dice: 3 d10 TN6 (7, 7, 8) ( success x 3 )

Francis Mercer

(pulling away the hand on her arm, not the one that helped her up)

Luce

Perhaps she is chastened by her sudden powers of prophecy. Exactly the crash she predicted, caused - as ever - by her own forward movement. She rises with a little huff, bright-eyed from the exhilaration of the fall as much as flight.

If she notices Francis' awkward moment, as he pulls away his free hand, she makes no comment on it, arch or otherwise. Nothing scathing, nothing sharp. Instead, she favors the Malkavian with a brief, contained smile as she regains her feet, tucks her left arm firmly into the crook of his right, and begins skating again. More slowly this time, without collision, though as they move side by side he can feel how she wants to push herself always forward. Ever so slightly faster than is precisely good for her.

-

Perhaps there is small talk, as they sweep around in circles, dead amidst the living. She is mostly hummingly silent, enjoying the blast of frost against her skin, the sharp scent of ice and metal in the air around them, the overlay of Christmas lights, their reflections smeared in impressionistic patterns on the ice. When the rink closes, she allows him to remove her skates if he so wishes, returns them to the kiosk, and takes her leave with a quiet - "Merci. Bon soir." - and little more.

Luce

THERE we go. (grins) sorry, I wanted to give the scene a sort of ending. Thank you for the RP, I enjoyed it!

Francis Mercer

Likewise. Good night. going to post his farewel quickly and head off to bed too. Catch you soon

Francis Mercer

*He takes her arm in his, when she pushes for speed he adds an extra stride but keeps steady to avoid sharing her previous fate of falling. He too is silent, but just a light hum of the opening of Swan Lake. He makes an effort to rush the blood to his skin to give the appearance of living although not with the same proficiency.

Always the gentleman, he helps her with her skates before his own. He replies with a polite. "Bienvenue, et bonne nuit Madame L-luce." His rich voice cracking like a teenager's at her name.

Dame Quadra

Zazh

Dame Quadra's stare at Zazh is easily caught, as Luce's attention flicks from her to him to respond to the query about 'spending more time'. There is a fluctuation...a brief faltering in the Dame's manicured mask, smile wincing and eyes slivering a hint to closed. It lasts a moment, perceived by few but for Luce's exceptional perceptions.

Then, she is turning her full attention to the svelte 'blonde', receiving her with a delighted smile and the warmth of hands reaching out to touch just above hips, placed in the grooves of the mid-section. The french good-bye is treated much the same, the second of the two lingering pecks taken with a hand brushing Luce's cheek and a 'Lovely' breathed past her ear, before the Dame retreats, hands primly settled in front of her, entwined and respectful.

Her gaze returns to Zazh who is watchful and calm, mouth quirked to a familiar and reflexive smile.Luce bids her good byes, mentions the presence of her number, which garners a perked brow toward the Dame. Her nod sets his hand to clapping at his rear pocket, fishing for a slip of paper.

He pulls it free, folds it in half and without a word holds it out toward the Dame, clipped between index and middle finger."Thank you, Sir. It was an honour to catch you during my visit. My hope that you'll entertain my presence once again should I play further within this territory."

Zazh's grin remains as is, a brief flourished bow, more stately then one might have expected from him, offered."Of course, Dame Quadra, how could I refuse? Should you and yours have need of me or my services again I will gladly make myself and my resources available to you."

He hooks an arm out for Luce to link her own into offering the tall blonde a 'Shall we?' before tipping fingers toward the Dame who smiles in reply, her gaze lingering with Luce a moment longer before she turns toward the Dressing Mirror.

* * * * *

"You seem to have made an impression..." Zazh offers as they begin to make their slow way down the dark hall. The hum of ambient music and hush of gossiping voices begins to push through the curtain. Iilda the small waif of a thing, is waiting by the black fabric draw, watching their approach with the sort of immortal hesitance of childhood.

"A shame you did not want to stay. I think she might have made an exception to her payment rules for you..." Zazh begins to pat himself down, fishing it would seem, for one of those slim black cigars, which he tucks into one corner of his mouth.

Luce

Luce's gaze lingers on the Dame, remote, perhaps a little bit veiled, until the other woman turns back to the dressing mirror. And even after. That sense of mesmerism halos her and she seems - again - pinned in place, the full sweep of her pale eyes affixed to the other woman for a heartbeat. And then two, and then three full heartbeats.

Breaking away only when Zazh offers her the crook of his arm. She cuts him a sidelong glance; not sharp, but spiked with something both banked and bright as she slips her own into his with a by now careless, familiar ease. Matching his stride, tucking her willowy frame closer to him than is strictly necessary, with that thoughtless, practiced closeness, as if the warmth of his body were somehow necessary to her own.

Far all that, a certain aura of distance surrounds her; they leave the warm chaos of the dressing room for the cool dark of the long corridor, and she casts a last glance back, thoughtful and precise and shadowed, as her pupils begin to dilate, adjusting to the darkness of the hall. He suggests that she made an impression, and her initial, "Mmm," has that sense of placeholder about it.

Though it draws her attention back to him, clearly and distinctly. A moment where her eyes adjust, pulling him back into focus.

"Are you going to share?" she asks, in her low voice. Quiet, humming in the back of her throat. The question is matched by a look, not sharp but so very present, the flash of her gaze in the dark hallway. There's no other response, just that look - clear, edged a bit but otherwise contained. It may take him a moment to realize that she is speaking of his cigar, dark and narrow, which he has just tucked into the corner of his mouth. The spark of humor does not diminish. It lingers in her eyes. In her red mouth. Melts slowly on her tongue. "Hmm?"

Even in the dark, her eyes conspire to gleam at him, the supple humor supplanted by a sharpened focus. "Her price? I thought you said she could not be moved by money."

--

"Do you know, when I first walked in, she asked me," a moment later, with a subtle shift closer to him, tightening, faintly, the knot made by their locked arms, "when I first walked in," She is no longer looking at him, but down the hall, at the child waiting by the black curtain. Her face is cheated toward him, in quarter-profile. There's an edge to her mouth; the suggestion of an incipient half-smile. As if they were old friends, sharing confidences, walking down a dark hall toward some promise of a crowd. " - what brought such an offering to her door."

The narrowest pause, a clear glance back to him, brows lifted in query. That sense of quickened solidity about her, as her eyes touch upon his, and then his brow, and then his mouth, lingering long enough that each glance has a near-physical presence. Her attention swings back to the girl as they walk. "Is that what I was meant to be, Zazh? Your offering?"

Zazh

They halt.

Or more accurately, Zazh stops them in the middle of the hallway. His arm loosens, swinging her inward slightly until they are facing one another, that former closeness advancing enough that he is glancing slightly up into her features from a mere foot away. His arm straightens some, stretching before the hand vanishes somewhere within the pockets of his pants to grasp for the zippo that is rarely out of his reach.

His smile is...humoured. Tolerant. A suggestion of the composed. He pulls the Zippo free and with it, a small casement of silver, unembroidered and plain. It snaps open and he offers her one of the slender black pieces that govern his oral habits, the zippo cupped in the palm of the same hand. The fingers of his other, pluck the cigar from between his lips and he stares at her, as she fishes out one of the sticks for herself.

"Did I say that?" He looks momentarily (falsely) confused before chuckling "I was referring only to her shows. She plays for crowds and people of her choosing. It is a means of controlling her client base. An inventive one at that. Pars down the number the indecencies she endures and instils a sense of control few of those in her profession can muster."

He flicks the zippo for both of them, allowing Luce to light before he sets his own to the flame. The rich piquant of dark chocolate is mixed in under the heady tobacco. The zippo flicks shut and both case and lighter are pocketed again.

* * * * *

Her glance to the child is enough for him to stare around her shoulder, at the slender Iilda as well. A smile creeps his features, which sends the skittish thing's own gaze down and her hands fidgeting infront of her. Zazh returns his attention to Luce, the smile fading into a haunting thing. The cusp of a reflex difficult to fully dismiss. Ever there and suggesting.

"That would imply you are mine to give away. Which would, in turn, imply that you are mine to keep." The last word is left there to linger between them, his head bowing forward slightly to peer at her from beneath a perked brow.

"...do you imagine that something has changed since our fateful discussions of 'Collectible Commodities'? Should I be polishing a pedestal or preparing you to be mounted-" The grin blooms again "-somewhere in my private estates?" He steps a touch closer, sealing the gap that he can lift a hand to her cheek, brushing the back of his knuckles across the pale and smooth flesh, eyes watching those crimson smeared lips.

"If you're ready to be Collected I'll answer your question."

Luce

Did I say that - he asks her, and "You did," she replies, with a certain careful precision. The consonants distinct enough that he can hear the moment her tongue hits her palette, then her teeth to shape them. She chooses a small cigar, bites off the end with a certain practiced ferocity, and holds it carefully for him as he lips the Zippo to her own. Her eyes fix on the flame; jaw tightening minutely as she watches its fickle little dance.

The first breath flares the little flame; catches the packed together to light. Something dark moves in her gaze, before she closes her eyes against it. Savoring the blend as the smoke fills her senses. Tension is evident in her body; in the long sweep of her trapezius muscles, framed by the flared collar, her shoulders just forward and curved faintly inward. Opening her eyes, a sweep of soot-stained lashes, she blows a narrow stream of smoke out of the left corner of her mouth, holding the cigar carefully, away from both their bodies, in a loose, negligent hand.

--

"I never imagined you would offer me a choice. I'm sure I told you that I am not collectible."

Except for that first, deep breath of tobacco, her breathing is shallow now. Just enough to lift her shoulders and breasts over the constraining line of the corset. To move the wrapped frame of her pale blouse around her bare shoulders in an engaging display. Her own smile has disappeared; though she stares down, directly at him, her pale eyes have that remote edge to them once more, narrowed, just hooded, as if she were staring into the blaze of the setting sun. She makes a low noise, near a laugh, but too dark for true humor.

He steps closer; and her gaze sharpens. Gives him this brief, razor-sharp flash of her teeth, white between those smeared red lips when he suggests - mounting her, somewhere in his private estates, and that dark thing in her eyes again, a certain undeniable tension evident there, which only deepens as he steps into her space. Her nostrils flare, and she presses her little mouth quite deliberately closed, this firm seal that feels - prim, caged, withheld. This time, when he brushes his knuckles across her cheek, she does not curve into the touch.

"I'm not ready to be collected, Zazh." Her voice is quiet; his name nearly an afterthought, though it is pronounced so precisely, with this upward lilt of her chin that shows off the long, curving line of her neck; the way it folds into the hollows of her collarbones - so precisely it sounds like a kiss. Her eyes are distinctly hooded, now. "Are you ready to collect me?"

Zazh

"Hardly."

He let's his hand fall away, the grin spread to it's usual skull severing width. She is frozen, imperial. A hostage in a moment of lucid clarity. He seems to appreciate such, if the humour displayed to her cold efficacy is any indication. He steps just slightly around her, shoulder to shoulder, his arm striding out for her to link once more when she finally moves to face the small girl by the curtain as he does. His cigar sets to his lips, puffed on casually, the acidic stain forcing his eyes closed against the smoke. Thin as slits.

"You're not matured enough for me to collect just yet. Still rebellious. Still detached." He begins the slow walk toward the curtain ahead of them, the hallway narrowing in it's darkness, like some tunnel stretched thin at the membranous centre. A vision of perspective, undiluted by variables or factors. A metaphor for their time together. A suggestion of where they are headed and what sort of finish line awaits them.

"You have airs and promises of honesty, but not enough truth for me to feel quite satisfied. Your physicality is mutable and I like that-" true excitement there "-very much. Gives you a freshness that is at once daring and comforting as well. You taste like threats and energy, calm and cool and collected and behind all that posture and pomp and prim and priss, I swear something very nearly..." He hums, a sensation she can nearly feel in the crook of his arm, throughout his body.

"...growls, when I'm near." A chuckle. "Though perhaps that's simply my ego running away with me."

A few steps closer, deliberately slow, Iilda waiting for their arrival with a down-turned gaze.

"You speak with intelligence and wit and these are commendable. A welcome trophy on the arm of any well to do Politician. An accessory to fame, fortune and notoriety, you would make a well off man mid-way through his mid-life crisis proud. Proud as a father, no doubt." If the irony of that statement registers with Zazh he does not seem to offer it. There is no sting meant there. No caged insult.

"But there is still a fundamental core that you are keeping from me. Something that, were you and I to retire from view of all others, to places and times where we might be comfortable to let our hair down and our thoughts divulge, you would still be the prim and proper you...and thus demand that I be the trite and boorish me." A cluck of his tongue.

"Perhaps that is how it's always meant to be. A shame, given the things I could show you. The nightmares of the abominable and the things-..unadulterated I could lay at your feet or 'round your shoulders."

He stops then, turning to stare down at little Iilda. The cigar is lifted away from her, the smoke wafted clear by Zazh's errant hand, a momentary kindness as he leans slightly away from Luce to offer-

"Be sure Dame Quadra avoids the Round Creature in White and the Starving Couple. Neither is looking for anything more than their due and entitlement. The-" A pause. Zazh lifts back up and turns to Luce, a brow perked.

"Since you've taken yourself off her list of clients this evening, would you have a replacement from tonight's audiences in mind to which the Dame should focus her attentions?"

Luce

Hardly - he tells her, and her brows rise, and she laughs, low, a sudden, quickening sort of laughter that has her mouth curving upward to contain it, to hold it back inside the frame of her body. Still it lives there, in the curl of her shoulders, or the engaging way she accepts his arm again when he turns away from her, side to side rather than face to face, and offers her his arm.

She takes it of course, easily as she always does, with that same sense of banked energy she often displays a perfect counterpoint to their slow walk down the dark corridor. Her hair swings in loose, pale waves and she shakes it back from her face, then perches her own cigar in the corner of her mouth, long enough reach up and tuck her hair behind one ear, without letting go of his arm. Listening, all the while, as he discourses on her charms and her failures. Her airs. When he hums his appreciation for the beast in her, the last skin of ice breaks, and she cuts him a sidelong glance, gives him a closed-mouth smile, which still somehow promises teeth.

"I do bite," her pale eyes flashing humor as he speculates that that is merely his ego running away with him, " - among other things." Then, a brief, flickering glance at Ilida as Zazh continues. A welcome trophy - earns him a sidelong glance back, her brows rising cool about her gleaming eyes. She does not respond, though. Not precisely, just listening now, as he continues, her humor banked now, cooling into something piquant.

She blows out another thing stream of smoke; away from him. Away, too, from the girl.

"Do you know, sometimes I would like to show you." She is not looking at him when she says it; nor at the girl, but at the curtain behind her. The curtain moves in uncertain time with the drift of conversation from without. The voices are still murmurs, but here and there the clink of a glass or phrase or two comes through without interference, one of those mysteries of spaces.

She is in profile, then. Oh, imperial again. Her chin high, her platinum blond hair just framing the fine architecture of her features, grazing the sloping line of her fine chin. And her voice is quiet, forward. Remote once more, belying the words themselves. She cuts him a brief look, then, more a flicker of her eyes, the look raw and hungry, her brows high, lashes shading her gaze. " - but there are rules, Zazh. We all have to follow them. Even rebels and prodigal daughters.

"Even hares that move like hounds."

This ends with a supple twist of her mouth, her attention drifting back to the girl as Zazh offers his advice on the evening's crowd without. "Hmm?" when he pauses, turns back to her, she's watching the curtain sway with the drift of the patrons outside. She turns back to him, a look of inquiry on her face, though she soon takes his meeting and her mouth curls wider with pleasure. "The woman," she tells him, immediately. "with the curling hair. If not her, than the businessman.

"I liked the way he loosened his tie."

Zazh

He hums throughout their conversation, all the way up to Iilda. Even throughout his brief digress toward the young girl, who glances up attentively at the both of them, her pale features and distantly broad eyes both luminous and quaint at once. A true beauty in the making, she stands perfectly still and silent, as if awaiting some semblance of instruction.

I do bite...among other things barely gets a response. A chuff of quick laughter, that levels off without Zazh turning more than a glance back at her, and not even a full one at that. Luce continues to puff away on her Cigar, seemingly content with the piece, while simultaneously carrying on a conversation he is only partially aware of. Or at least, partially taking part in. It isn't until she says something to gain his attention, that Zazh's reaction seems to...electrify:

But there are rules, Zazh

He watches her. Intently, after she has spoken her answer. He has yet to confirm anything for Iilda who continues to wait with the patience of the obedient as Zazh's gaze, body language and attentions shift to regard Luce with a diminished smile. A rapidly cooling temper. The scrutiny she has come to know from him these last few weeks...months?...years, it seems like? Is quite palpable at this moment. The regard, seeming to dissect her phrasing as much as her presence.

Until, at last, beyond all reflex, the smile has vanished. The man is a goblin. A monster behind a gun. He steps forward, into Luce's path, between her and the Curtain, unlinking their arms in the process, a less gentle more mechanical disengaging. He closes the gap between them, head tilted off to one side, one eye more prominent than the other.

"Really..." A pause. His voice is low. Husked, as if aroused and yet the sibilancy the...sharpness of his tone is like some poised rattler, shifting soft ripples of that infamous sound from some undisclosed location.

"Rules to follow, even for rebels. Even for Hares and Hounds. Creatures of repute and Notoriety. Things that go in night times and darkness. In sunlight and breath. Things that taste of blood and back again times before blood was the norm in the veins of the many." He hums again, something soft, negligently vicious, the dismissive snarl of a predator in search of a challenge and found...a hare.

...Beside them, Iilda is cringing. She steps back a step, eyes sliding shut, the darkness of the hallway almost swallowing her lithe frame from sight.

"You, the resistant. The unrestrained and restraining." A hand rises to hover knuckles over her chest, near the hollow that haunts the base of the throat. "You, the willful. The demanding. The assured and certain. You who would deny and replace and fathom beyond your means-..." He stops abruptly, hums again. Something imperial in that tone. Something dreadful. His foot begins to tap lightly, the ground. His eyes are shards, not pools, of black. His jaw, clenched and fingers curled.

"You would tell me of rules. To be obeyed. Learned and worshipped because they are what?" His hands spread. His foot taps. He hums between words. "Things unavoidable. Immutable. As relentless as death? Fate? Destiny? Some mythological ideal of the Immortal worth?" A flippant hand lashes out at the air, as his foot taps. As his hum rises. A cadence to it now. A low thing, husked and baroque.

That stops. Abruptly, with the sharpness and deafening of a great calamity gone.

"Close your eyes."

Zazh

(Sovereign 2: Dictum Dice pool Charisma 4 + Actor 4. Difficulty 9 - 2 for Bunk - 1 for Glamour spent. Wyrd call. 1 Glamour)

Dice: 8 d10 TN6 (2, 2, 3, 3, 3, 6, 9, 9) ( success x 4 ) [WP]

Luce

WP

Dice: 7 d10 TN7 (2, 4, 5, 5, 6, 6, 8) ( success x 1 )

Luce

Startlement chases across her eyes and mouth - the former widening, the later narrowing - as he rounds on her, disengaging their arms. She pulls her own back, sharply, abruptly protective, her shoulders rising, her right leg inching backwards when he advances forward, sweeping a hand over her chest, close to her throat. She has stopped breathing by then; holds the air she has swallowed inside her. Swallows it, willing herself steady as she watches him with huge, stark eyes.

The cigar drifts, forgotten now at her side. Her fine mouth narrows, firmly set - and her gaze drops from his eyes to his hand, expecting, at any moment, to see the barrel of that gun, ugly and dark, trained upon her.

Close your eyes.

In that moment, her gaze snaps back to his face. Her jaw is set, stubbornly so, a band of tendon evident in her cheek, this flaring sort of recognition sharp and evident there - a moment's mulish resistance before the creature's eyes snap shut.

She breathes out, expels that lungful she has been holding the whole time. Her entire body is taut, now - braced, her elegant shoulders curved forward, shivering, so faintly, inside the frame of the white blouse.

Zazh

The press of him is slow. Settling in along side of her, with that same proximity she is fond of manufacturing, perverted to his own conclusions. His features touch the side of her cheek, a hand rising to cup the other end of her face, ensuring whatever flinch may (or may not) come, is resisted.

"Still now. Stand perfect and still."

A whisper. A hum of heat. She can feel the lips peel back from his jaws, teeth flashed in that gesture. She can feel the tension riding his fingers and arms, his body as a whole, threatening a moment's violent outrage, though...it seems not entirely directed at her. Moreso a radial response. Less the berzerker and more the Grenade. Indiscriminately contained.

She can hear the soft whimper of a child nearby. He hisses, turns it into a 'Shhhhhh' sound that immediately dispels the tension riding his frame. At once, his hand is a brush along her cheek, his nose and brow pressed to the side of her features.

"Rules are meant for those beneath and below. Those incapable of doing anything but as they are instructed. To receive, commit or sacrifice is to know the principles of compromise and such is weakness. Such is dogma. Such is the regulation you live by. You and all those like you-" A brief moment of venom "-who sit and ponder rebellion while hiding behind the whispers of 'Wait for it. Wait. Bide our time. Be still and wait.' " He sounds as if he is speaking for someone just then. As if repeating some words he'd heard before. The lips curl again, flowing up her cheek like some water heated razor.

"Incapable of resistance beyond your token freedoms. Beyond your what is now. You are a creature of Nods. Acceptances and Yessssss-" Hissing cut short. Another reflex, drawn up from below. "I've known you. Your kind. Your type." A sharp clip of teeth on that word. "Terrified of true change. True motivation. Terrified to do little more than hide, even if it is in plain sight-" That cheek brushed hand washes over her throat, fingers running up to beneath the chin and gliding smoothly into that hollow between the clavicles.

"Your rules do not interest me-" Disenchanted. Dismissive. Disappointed. "-for respecting them would mean obeying them and I will not obey anyone. Not for long and not without consequence." His jaws open, as if he might swallow her, as if yawning to devour. Teeth press to the flesh of her cheek and a breath like lust or hate, gusts free of his nostrils.

"I will give you the choice here and now. For as long as this Dictate demands, you will either spend the next hour at my side beyond the curtain, doing as I say and speaking as I wish."

A pause, his lips depart and touch a contrary kiss of extreme tenderness across her earlobe.

"...Or you will spend it telling me every little secret you hold in your strangely beating heart."

Luce

Eyes closed, pale brows contracted over them in a narrow, seeking expression. Still, she seems to sense his movement before he makes it; turning, blind, to follow the thread of his breath or his heartbeat, the whisper of his suit over his body as he presses in close against her. And then she does not so much flinch as begin to 'look' away, revealing the long line of her throat to him, pulling back, or curving into the heat of his fingers on her other cheek. Her skin is cool, satin-smooth beneath his rough fingers, and though her eyes are closed, her mouth is open.

One breath, then another.

He may have the impression that she is going to sag against his arms; that the bones of the corset at the only thing holding her upright until he instructs her (instructs her) to stand perfect and still. Her spine ratchets up in that moment. Every muscle in her body is contracted with tension and when his teeth are bared against the curved plane of her cheek, she half-expects to feel the razor cut of fangs against her skin a moment after. To feel them driving into her neck and her body convulse with reflexive pleasure. To feel her blood flow down her fine white throat, laid open.

The barbs hit home; some few of them deeply. She does not reply; does not move, but that much he can feel in the frame of her body, some deep, lashed, nameless response she holds leashed inside of her, so thoroughly it leaves her trembling with something that is nothing like fear.

She turns her head, just, to following the warmth of his breath, then arrests the gesture abruptly. Still. Perfectly still.

Her breath comes again -

every little secret in your strangely beating heart

- and she exhales, this sharp little huff of air. Swallows, her eyes screwing more tightly shut, her jaw snapped so tight that her molars grind together.

Her voice is low, strangulated, raw. "As you say and as you wish."

So familiar the ache of it is palpable in the air around her. So familiar he can taste it on her skin. Could inhale it from her pores.

Could drink it in her blood.

"May I open my eyes?"

Zazh

"Of course."

She would find him before her then, head canted to one side, looking as much as Zazh looks in most given moments. Most...because there have been times, where the flash of that regal, viciously entitled anger has dawned some oddities. The fleck of green eyes, the hint of grey marbled flesh. Something of a 'Hyde' beneath the tone of this monster, dawned and profoundly warped. The memory is hazy to recall such things but the images, like after-ghosts when staring into bright lights, haunt the locations of him where spawned such nightmare features.

But Zazh is Zazh. Same double-breasted suit. Same shoes and hidden under-shirt of crimson arteries. Same reflexive smile haunting the edges of his mouth. His eyes are malleable again. Pools rather than shards, his hands behind him in clasped unity. Iilda, off to the side, is standing, her mouth this tiny thing as if seeking to be invisible and remove all possibility of response to a query directed at her. A statue, trembling.

"What is it to be then, dear? Will you accompany me then? The perfect date and trophy on my arm? Shall I give you a taste of what collecting you right here and now would feel like? Be like? Before you've matured properly? Shall I make you the doll I pull out and play with on sunday mornings? Shall you prove how little a thing you are for all the pomp of Revolutions clinging to your pupils and smile on my crooked arm?" A pause. Allowing it to settle in.

"...Or do you be the rebel against your rules...the true poet of resistance... and tell me everything?" A heartbeat. That grin. That grin. "...I'll even let you grin and scream defiantly if that will make it a pleasure for you."

Luce

There's a frisson of something dark, visceral in her features; a half-swallowed snarl that peels her red mouth back from her white teeth. Would make her nearly as terrible as she is lovely, in just that moment, were it not for the chains of his command settled around her spirit. It flares around her irises like the corona of a dying star. Has her staring at him, her eyes huge, her crimson mouth just parted, her breath in stutter steps.

Then, that grin. That grin. Her smile is a quick, viscious response. Tight and closed mouthed. She drops the cigar on the floor; grinds the cherry out beneath the heel of her boot and cuts the distance between them again, reaching for his arm as she attaches herself to his side.

"And deprive you of the pleasure of learning them one by one? Of earning that knowledge?" This, with a flash of teeth close to his ear, craning her neck so that her cool breath tickles his skin, so that he can her the sharp clack of her teeth with each bitten off consonant, like a threat. Or a promise for the night to come. "I don't think so."

She has drawn back then, tucked herself against his body, companionably close. Closer, her chin high, her pale gaze gleaming, cheek slanting toward him, eyes above, bright as razors, above that steady, sidelong, hungry mouth. Shoulders taut inside the frame of the blouse.

"After all, it was my mystery that made you want to fuck me," a brief, wintry smile. "And we haven't gotten that far, yet."

Zazh

Delight.

The only true word for Zazh's presence in the face of Luce's bridled lashing. She stands still and battles something carefully hidden and it would be a lie to say that Zazh is not arrested by it, even lustful as his gaze wanders her tremoring frame with an abandon usually reserved for college girls in dark corners. His jaw slips shut around the safe comforts of such thoughts, entertaining them in the background of his mind even as she moves forward to take the arm he offers with no small amount of reflex (habit-forming she is).

He entertains her clacking teeth. Her verbal undertones. Her threatening proximity, close-knit and precise. He reaches out his free hand to pat the top of the one she's linked into the crook of his arm, turning to stare into the curve of her neck and up past her ear and hair. A casual perusal.

"Marvelous." That grin makes an appearance. It would not leave for the rest of the night.

"Iilda?" He offers, without glancing at the girl. "Point the Dame in the young woman in Violet's direction. I believe she will be quite satisfied with the distraction this evening."

And then Zazh is peeling back the curtain, Iilda nodding quickly and moving to catch the black cape and hold it open for the pair of them to push through and on into the crowd beyond, some of which glance their way in curiosity.

"...Should you want one of these simians for yourself tonight, Dear Luce...I'll gladly provide as well..." He says as they make their way into the territorial bubbles of the waiting elite. "...I would hate to leave you unfulfilled, afterall."

Laughter tonight. Laughter and glee.

Luce

"I want the businessman," she returns, without thought, without hesitation. Quite nearly imperious at his side. Bending her mouth to his ear without entirely turning toward him, as her pale eyes scan the crowd. Searching, remote, hungry. A sense of her smile, the beast stark in it, riding her translucent skin.

"He had a hungry look about him. And I told you already, I liked the way he undid his tie."