#&. thread

The past always catches up with you. Always.

Kitty supposes he really should have expected it, having Eretreia as his welcome party to the crew. It bothered Kitty more than he would ever allow himself to let on, and as he lifts his hand to try and rub away the obvious signs of exhaustion that sit in the dark circles there. He rubs the heel of his hand over the darkness there as though that would be enough to wipe away days of pod travel, as though that would wipe away the weight of having a price put to your life.

Slowly but surely though, he opens his eyes and pushes through the door Eretreia had identified as the entrance to the bunks. He allowed the door to fully open before he stepped into the space there, immediately uncomfortable once again. Kitty was bristling with discomfort, and that fact only made him more uncomfortable. Kitty, after all, doesn’t get uncomfortable, never finds himself unsettled. “Fuck,” he mumbles to himself as he steps into the seemingly empty room. “I need to sleep for another 10 days.” The words are for himself and himself only, a verbal admission of weakness he ordinarily would never have given to the world. 

In a quick huff he exhales an exasperated sign and tilts his head backwards towards the ceiling for a fleeting moment before taking in the scene before him. It had been a long time since he’d ever had to share his quarters with anybody, and the thought of doing it now did not seem in any way appealing. None the less, his exhaustion won out over his captain-turned-crew sense of pride and he slumped down into one of the few bunks that did not appear to have a tenant. 

If there was one thing he was good at, it was settling in, after all. 

She feels desperately, incandescently human, and oh how she wished she did not.

Trapped, that’s how she had felt standing among her peers. Suffocated, as though she was being locked into yet another cage of propriety and manners. Inside the four walls of the club, Mackenzie was a Rothschild, try as she might to abandon that fact, the people in that room were not people she could lose herself among. There were very few things that could force Kenzie to restrain herself any longer, but the possibility of embarrassing her father (he who had unknowingly endured so much, he who would endure more still) was one of those things. But the darkness could only be harnessed for so long before she needed to run, before she had to escape, and escape out the front door for a quick breath of fresh air she did -- delighting in the way the starry night sky tasted like freedom, like a muted prayer answered ten-fold.

When she hears that familiar voice of his coming from behind her, she feels the weight of expectation, of suffocation suddenly lift from her shoulders. For too long now she has allowed herself to get lost in the world she had so purposefully tried to abandon, and in Theo she found her solace. In Theo she found a new alter to bow down to, found a new version of herself that was much more to her liking. Around him she felt like a hummingbird flitting from flower to flower, soft and divine, free and glowing. There was no weight behind her desire to be near him, only a reckless kind of abandon. 

“I was wondering when I’d get you to myself,” she says as she turns to him, a diamond smile on her face as the words pass her lips. Thank god you’re here, she thinks but does not say. Thank god you make me forget who I am.    

It comes on suddenly, the want. 

It’s familiar and it kills him, the way he can’t control it. It’s familiar and it kills him, how he knows he will hurt her again, how he knows that leaving her once wasn’t fair for women as fair as she deserved a heart that could love it -- and Anton had always known, from that very first unholy sigh, that he wouldn’t love her, that even if he wanted to he couldn’t; for Anton was a prince, a human one, and she was Grisha. There were some lines a royal couldn’t cross.  

He doesn’t have the right. He doesn’t have the right and he does it anyways, goes to her, because there are two things in this life that cannot be contained by reason: greed and kings, and Anton was nothing if not a greedy soon-to-be king. There was nothing reasonable about Anton’s sudden desire to return to the past, to the scene where blessed sins were committed for the sake of passing time. No, there was nothing reasonable about it and the Crown Prince knows this and yet cannot help it as his feet carry him on and on and on, further and further away from the safety of his bedroom and into the halls of the Little Palace. This is the original sin, the desire to destroy all soft things on this Earth, and Anton thinks of Rita and suddenly drowns in it. He thinks of her, out of the blue and for the first time in what feels like years, and he sees the spot at the nape of her neck, the spot that would send shivers down her spine every time his mouth brushes it. He thinks of her and he can’t help the primal want, wild and full of sharpened teeth that turns over in his stomach. He thinks of her and cannot help the chaste want that comes, the kind of desire ignited by the mere glimpse of an ankle, a collarbone bare. A twist of her mouth, a flick of her wrist, and he’d promise to rearrange the starry night’s sky for her; that was the kind of beauty Rita Jakov held, and those were the kind of promises a prince could make. 

His pulse thrums in his veins as he prays -- Saints does he pray -- that Rita will be the one to answer the crisp knock he gives the entrance to her dormitory, for there will be no masking the insatiable longing burning holes in his resolve tonight. He is staring at the ground when the doorway opens, faint light from the shining moon filtering in from the windows behind the shadowed figure. If he didn’t know her already, if he hadn’t spent many mornings admiring the curvature of her figure, he might not have recognized her in the dim light; as it was, he’d recognize her anywhere.

That was the problem with memory, he would suppose. Sometimes the memories keep you warm. Sometimes they ruin you.

It would have been easy enough to just let her walk by, to keep his eyes trained on the blinding white hair and black kefta from afar, but she was there, and she was making it so easy -- she flits from person to person, from conversation to dance with a particular kind of unease he knew well. She was as much an outsider here as he was, and that was an interesting evaluation indeed. 

Suddenly he’s rising from the seat as she flits by, and he actually acknowledges her presence as though she’s human, not beast. “Sun Summoner,” he says, the curve of his mouth warm, his words welcoming, not expectant. “Would you sit with me, a moment, perhaps?” Light dances in his eyes the same way he had seen it dancing along her fingertips earlier, and he bows his head slightly, not ashamed -- but bashful. (He was better at this than he thought.) “Two outsiders surrounded by people who’ve known each other for years. Tell me, am I wrong in thinking we could be friends?” 

Kitty had always had expensive taste. For now, he finally feels sated. 

It wasn’t strange, the way satisfaction felt in his chest, not exactly. If he’s being honest with himself, satisfaction had once been all he knew, had been the only thing he allowed to settle in his chest as constant. But now? Now it tastes not quite foreign, but a little bit like coming home, the sight of such extravagance feels like where he belongs. And he knows, better than he knows the fastest paths between the stars, better than he knows the many contours of the woman standing at his side, knows that this feeling will fade sooner rather than later. For now though, he forgo’s reason and flashes his canines. For a moment, he’s home.

A wolf’s appetite for vice and sin had wrapped it’s way through his veins long before he’d ever had the means to lead his life the way he pleased, and standing among this crowd of people, Kitty felt simultaneously that he’d found his holy home and wholly alone. For now, he revels in the former. A satisfied lion, glittering gold. 

So, for now he grins. For now, he lets the mice play. 

Cairo stands at his side, and with a devil’s grin on his face to match the horned mask he’d so carefully chosen, he offers out his elbow to her. 

“I’ve grown tired of being backed into a corner,” he says, grinning. He’d spent far too long on that ship already, among people he only barely cared for, a caged wolf grown weary. “Care to share a dance with me, amada? Or shall we get a drink first, loosen up those feet of yours?” 

Boys will be boys, or so Anton had always heard. 

As it was, there was nothing boy-like, nothing so childish or frivolous about his morning thus far. He’d awoken at some ungodly hour, too wound up by the situation with the Shu’s army to really get a decent nights sleep; though, to be fair, Anton had never much been one for sleeping. There were too many precious moments in day to fill, to many things to do to waste them on shut eyes. He’d always preferred to make use of dawn’s rays for reading paperwork, for moving pawns on a table to develop a potential strategy. 

At some point after the sun had broken over the distant horizon, sending gentle waves of sunlight through his bedroom, Anton had grown weary of the words and the work and left to seek out other, more entertaining forms of passing the time. Instead he found Viktor’s bedroom door left ajar, allowing full sight of the spectacle taking place: his brother on a platform, standing above all of the servants in the room ( one seemed to be making the bed, another arranging his morning meal out in some peculiarly pleasing design, and not one but two flitting about his person, taking measurements and adding pins where some flaw was detected ). 

Anton leans lightly against the doorframe, somehow seeming aloof and calm despise the chaos going on beyond palace walls, beyond the uncomfortable safety of Os Alta, and his chest rises and falls with the weight of an exaggerated sigh, as thought he is tired by the sight he now beholds: Viktor Lantsov, wearing his uniform. Or, well, not Anton’s exactly, but one custom fitted to his brothers shoulders. Still though, a uniform that Anton had been wearing for years, for what felt like decades. A uniform that had become as much a part of his soul as the Lantsov blood in his veins was. 

Boys would be boys, and boys were petty, hostile little things, made all the worse by the Lantsov brothers status not as mere boys, but gods -- children made divine.

“Little brother,” he says, using techniques he had long ago learned from repeated years of belittling by an elder brother. There’s an arrogant twist to his lips at the playful antagonism, his mouth somewhere caught between bored hunger and an immutable need to prove himself better than everyone -- including Viktor. “Trying to fill shoes bigger than your own again, I see.” 

Boys would be boys.  

He’s not particularly surprised by his urge to see Gemma on the first morning of the new year, but he is devastated that his first waking thought was of Darya. He’d been foolish to ever believe he could let his first love go without  second thought, to believe that he could go any period of time without speaking to her, without waking beside her, his eyes fluttering open long before hers ever would. (Anton had always been an early riser, his body on the same time table as the rising of a morning sun, but he’d never minded the moments of quiet this gifted him; moments where he could study the planes of his lover without a bashful shove away, moments where the sun turned a shade of purple he believe could never be replicated.) 

For so long he had been a hummingbird, flitting and floating from flower to pretty flower, basking in the beauty of each mouth he deigned to fall upon, but it hadn’t been until Darya that he dared to settle down, to dream of a future beyond waking the following morning. It makes his hands flex, the memories of Darya he had to fight so had to keep buried; just another war he would fight, just another war he would have to win. 

It’s juvenile, perhaps, the way he runs from the grasp of one woman and into the arms of another, childish even, but Anton is sure that he can make any decision regarding Gemma work in his favor. So it’s with a steady step that he carries himself from his own bed chamber to the doorway to hers, leaving the grand palace behind to walk the halls of the little. Anton gives a crisp rap, rap to the mahogany door he not stands before, and readies himself for the woman who will open it. He settles into it easily, the boy-man whose presence Gemma seems to enjoy: a casual smirk, an easy set to his shoulders, everything about him screaming arrogance and familiarity. Anton finds he quite likes the person he is when she is near, and that, in the very back of his mind, terrifies him.