✧ a thing for @revienso
SIMON had noticed verso before he understood why. the bar was dim in the way lumière preferred its indulgences, low light softened by stained glass, pooling in the bottoms of bottles like sedimented dusk. music drifted without urgency, a piano somewhere near the back worrying at a melody that never quite resolved. the swordsmaster had entered with the quiet reluctance of habit, broad shoulders and muscular limbs still carrying the memory of work, faintly sore from stone and steel.
the boy (--no, not a boy; that was part of the trouble) sat at the counter with a glass cupped loosely in one hand, sleeves pushed back, raven-dark hair gleaming in the lamplight. there appeared to be colour in his cheeks, a hue softened by something more inward, a melancholy subtle as a minor chord that clung even here, amid laughter and drink. it pulled at simon's attention without asking permission; it did not look like sorrow exactly, more the sense of a secret carefully carried, pressed close to the chest. he'd noted how verso's bright eyes lingered a moment too long on things most would pass without thought. when he smiled, it came readily, almost generously, yet it never quite reached the places behind his gaze. he looked too ... luminous for the room, as though the bar had failed to dull him properly.
simon paused in his tracks, and the world narrowed to etiquette and consequence. builder. instructor. employee of his father. each role stacked neatly, defensively, like scaffolding erected to keep something from collapsing. he had rules for all of them, and he had learned, long ago, how to behave when power ran unevenly, how to keep his hands clean of things that could not be touched without cost.
the moment stretched, awkward and undeniable. recognition flickered, followed by something more uncertain and softer; simon met verso's disarming blue gaze long enough to acknowledge him, then inclined his head in a small, precise gesture that could pass for courtesy or dismissal depending on what the other man chose to make of it. he felt it register in his body before his mind allowed it language: the keen awareness of the simple fact of seeing and being seen outside the clean geometry of the training yard, and the controlled finery of dessendre manor. so he carefully and deliberately took a seat two stools away, posture settling into studied neutrality, leaving a clean silence in his wake: an offered distance, an exit left unobstructed. if verso wished to ignore him and remain a bright, solitary figure at the bar untroubled by titles or implications, simon would not intrude; the choice was quietly and respectfully placed in verso's hands.
the bar kept buzzing around them, unknowing; as he watched the condensation slip down his own glass he thought, unhelpfully, about thresholds: how easily one crossed them without realising, how impossible it was to return once named. he told himself the tension during sparring was imagined, a misreading born of fatigue and the peculiar intimacy lumière fostered between its people. (he told himself many things.) still, in the space between their glasses, a question pressed at him, insistent: what are we allowed to be, here? (mentor and student. stranger and acquaintance. two men sharing a room thick with smoke and restraint and all the things left unspoken.) lumière's best sword kept his hands neatly folded, his posture correct.
