The Negative Confessions 2/9
Jun. 12th, 2009 09:30 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
serindranaTitle: The Negative Confessions, pt. 2/9
Authors:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
serindrana, also known as skepticallittledarling
Series: Last Exile
Characters: Alex, Vincent, Sophia
Words: 3526
Notes: Modern-day AU, focusing on Sophia’s relationships with the two men in her life against the backdrop of family drama. Currently PG.
I have not opposed my family and kinsfolk.
Vincent was raging.
He didn’t get angry like this very often; in fact, the last time he’d been this angry had been... well, Sophia wasn’t quite sure when. There had been times, though, that she had caught glimpses of seething fury, and now she wondered if every time had been because of him.
He had stormed into where they were staying, a little hotel room in the next city over, where the music had taken them, slammed the door shut behind him, begun to pace rapidly. He was every bit the proverbial caged tiger with a gaping wound in its shoulder and she didn’t really want to reach out and comfort him, lest he take a hand for payment. He was swearing under his breath, one hand in his hair turning strands into tangled knots, the other fisted at his side or slapping at his thigh as he walked the abbreviated length of the room. She thought to suggest going outside, but she didn’t want to lose him in the crowds that would swallow up a man in his state, turning him around and leaving him in an alien part of town. So she sat, watching, worrying, wondering why he had growled his name when he spun in like a hurricane, like a sort of curse, a sort of prayer, a sort of explanation.
The tiger came to the lady first, coming to stand mute before her, then drop to the dingy, carpeted floor at her feet, nearly putting his head in her lap but instead beating his fists (as gently as possible with how his teeth gritted and his brow furrowed) once against the mattress on either side of her.
She very gently reached out and touched not the top of his head, but his shoulder, frowning. “What about him?”
He couldn’t help but laugh, frustrated and exhausted. Sitting back on his heels, he allowed a few more inches of space between them. “Bastard managed to get into a bar fight.”
A very small part of her wanted to go back home, make sure he was okay, go lay offerings of care at the feet of that alcoholic, yellow, severe and charismatic man. She could see that same need in Vincent’s eyes, no matter how much fire sparked against it in them. She didn’t feel so bad after that. “Is he okay?”
“Depends on what you mean by ‘okay’.”
“Did he get hurt?”
“No. He won. Of course he won,” Vincent muttered, shaking his head and standing again, beginning to pace once more. This time, he’d lost momentum and spent a few lingering moments by the window, pushing aside the curtain with one finger, looking out into the nothingness of unknown city lights at night, before he came back towards her. “But he’s stuck with the police for it. Probably just until he sobers up, but- the fucking idiot.”
Sophia was quiet again, watching, only tilting her head a few degrees to the right to urge him on.
“He wants me to come and get him out. He’ll be lucky if the guy he beat up doesn’t press charges. He’s been lucky the last two times, but-” Here he was laughing again, that dry, sad little laugh- “but he can’t be that lucky. Fuck him, he can’t be that lucky.”
“Are you going to go?” Sophia asked, standing up, placing her hand on his arm again. That was the closest they came to some kind of intimate contact and she could tell, even through his anger, that he thrilled to it. She felt guilty.
He turned to her, searching her eyes, perhaps trying to get lost in them. But he shrugged, turned away again. “No. I had to do it twice already. I told him that if he wanted, I’d call Marius, but that I wasn’t driving all the way back there tonight and that he could just sleep it off for once. It’ll be good for him to really sober up for at least a night.”
She made a small assenting sound, sitting down on the edge of her bed again. slowly nodding. “Did he ask you to call Marius?”
“Of course not.”
“Too proud?”
“Too scared.”
She pursed her lips, thinking, turning that over in her head. From what Vincent had told her, when Alex had learned who she was, who her dearest cousin and almost-sister had been, he had gone quiet except to order vodka. Vincent said he never drank vodka. Sophia had felt guilty then, too - wished she had barely known Euris, wished she hadn’t looked at that broken, crying teenage boy and smiled at him, sadly. She wished she hadn’t given him that weird plush toy - had it been a goat? Or was it a sheep? - while her father dragged her out and that horrible pale woman laughed at her.
And then, Vincent said, Alex had gotten very drunk and very quiet. He’d sat there for the rest of the night, was still sitting there in his mind when Vincent dragged him back to his apartment, made sure he wasn’t going to end up where he was now. He’d been sitting on his couch, looking at the TV like he was looking at the back of the bar, looking far back at a time it was always dangerous for him to remember. Vincent had felt guilty then, too, as he closed the door behind him and heard it latch.
Of course he didn’t want Marius to know just how far he’d fallen.
“He’s going to be dead of liver failure in ten years,” Vincent was muttering, sitting now on his own bed, the TV on with the volume turned down to two or three of those little green bars on the screen, with Wild Kingdom playing. “I don’t know why I bother anymore. He hasn’t been like himself in years, now. Not in ten years. I’ve been there for ten years, tried to be, but-”
“He’s still there,” she found herself saying, remembering that boy with dark hair who had seemed so grand and so tall and so happy. Even she had seen the ghost of that in his eyes, in the twitch of his lips when he smiled that sardonic half-smile of his at dinner that night, at the dinners they’d shared for the last few weeks. They were awkward meetings but she had grown used to his jabs, his insults that came partially from affection.
“He’s using me,” Vincent said, shaking his head. “He’s using himself. He hasn’t written in years, has been drinking himself into a grave at forty, has been getting into these fights... I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s trying to kill himself.”
“He doesn’t seem suicidal,” Sophia said, shaking her head and getting up to take her turn at pacing. Hers was a more graceful movement, rather slow and languid, stately. She was watching Vincent out of the corner of her eye.
“Not actively. Passively suicidal. That’d be just like him - go out in some poetic way. He can’t have tuberculosis, so in comes alcoholism.”
“That’s not very poetic.”
Vincent grunted in response. Sophia went quiet again, now looking at her feet, arms crossed over her stomach. “Are you going to leave him?” she asked only after a good five minutes had passed and she had curled up in the armchair by the window with the curtain pulled back with one finger.
“Of course not,” Vincent said, softly, frowning and looking at his hands. Sophia thought the gesture was unnecessarily dramatic - there was no blood on them, metaphorical or otherwise. “He’s almost- almost addictive. He draws you in and you don’t want to let go and... and I’m all he has.”
Sophia watched him for a moment longer, then looked back out at the unfamiliar lights. “He’s all you have left, too.”
“That’s not true,” Vincent said, surprise in his voice, and he looked at her now with his eyes broken out of that congealing anger. He was looking at her, to her, now, focus shifting abruptly, leaving him reeling. “I have my job, my colleagues- the band- Sophia, I have you.”
Her stomach turned at that statement, so clear and so final, so fully believed. She didn’t respond for a beat, shaking her head. “But he’s all you have left of that part of your life.”
“I guess.” And then Vincent fell silent, looking at the TV where they were showing those conveniently symbolic birds who sat on the backs of giant beasts, cleaning them and gaining sustenance from it. He scowled and turned it off.
--
That horrible pale woman was sitting across the table from her. Sophia hated that woman’s name, hated how exotic it sounded, hated that it had been hanging around her like a strangling vine for ten years. She hated Delphine Eraclea with all the violent passion of a child and all the focused intensity of the twenty year old she’d grown up to be. And Delphine smiled at her with that sickeningly fake smile of hers, all the while touching Sophia’s father’s leg beneath the tablecloth with her long-nailed fingers.
It made her want to vomit.
Delphine was prattling on about some funny little news tidbit, trying to sound cultured, intelligent, just like when she had ordered her elaborate dinner. But Sophia knew a smattering of French, knew that what she’d ordered had been common catfish, breaded and fried just like mother would have made it. It was supposed to be Sophia’s birthday dinner. And now Delphine was talking about foreign affairs as if she understood every detail, and maybe she did. But by the way she spoke it was clear she didn’t care one bit if the rest of the world bombed itself to hell and back except that it might affect her bank balance and her investments. Sophia wouldn’t be surprised if Delphine wanted the world to go to hell just to benefit herself.
She found herself watching Delphine drum her finely-manicured, gold-painted nails on the white tablecloth. Her voice was so high and sickeningly sweet that Sophia had to fight to block it out completely. Her name, though, always drew her back, and now that woman was purring it out to get her attention. Sophia sat up and tried to look properly attentive and not quite as disgusted.
“So Mr. Forrester tells me you’re in a... band?” Delphine asked, speaking as if to a child. She always referred to Sophia’s father as ‘Mr. Forrester,’ as if Sophia didn’t know that they’d been fucking for the last ten years.
“Um, yes,” Sophia managed to get out, feeling her cheeks color. “It’s nothing very serious, though.”
“Oh, but he says you even get jobs outside of the city, sometimes?”
“Sometimes.” She shifted uncomfortably under Delphine’s unwavering, dissecting, mocking stare.
“I had wanted so much to have dinner with the two of you last weekend, but your father said you were out of town. Did you have a good show?”
What was she doing? Trying to play the role of parent, of interested adult, of intimate friend? Whatever it was, it made Sophia’s skin crawl. “I guess so.”
“Sophia, answer Ms. Eraclea’s question,” her father said, his voice low, commanding as always, cold.
“Oh, don’t worry about it. She’s at that age where she’d probably rather not be out to dinner with her father, after all. My young brother is getting to be like that, too - he’s nearly seventeen and already trying to prove that he doesn’t need me anymore. It’s a tricky time.”
I can hear you, Sophia thought, trying to keep her scowl on the inside only. It had nothing to do with age, her not wanting to be there. It had everything to do with Delphine, Delphine and her father, her father sitting across from her with this controlling look that he always had when he looked at her - like he wanted to keep her on a leash and dictate every part of her life. But his disappointment in her, his growing disinterest, kept the despot at bay.
Still, he could tighten her throat with a look like the one he was giving her. “I’m sorry,” she said, obediently. “What I meant was that it’s not something that I can judge objectively. I can say that we didn’t mess up in any of our songs and that the audience seemed to respond well. We also received a good fee from the club to book us in the first place. So yes, it was good.”
A normal person would have asked But did you have fun? but Delphine just nodded, making some pleased little agreeing sound that was so smug it choked Sophia from across the table. “That’s good to hear,” she purred, leaning slightly closer to her lover’s side, hand probably (Sophia could imagine it clearly, couldn’t get the image out of her head) wrapping more fully around his aged thigh. She was a succubus, had been sucking the life and the sanity out of him for ten years without stop, only going underground for the past nine. But now, more and more, she was stopping by the house for ‘business’ and staying until after Sophia fell asleep sitting up in bed, listening for any signs of her leaving.
Her father seemed to be thinking, seemed to be calculating. He cleared his throat, then, drawing her back to present realities instead of past contemplations. “Miss Eraclea and I just wanted to tell you that we are...” Here he trailed off, unable to find the adequate, proper way to express that he was going to be fucking her above-board from now on. Sophia was already biting her lip.
“We’re dating,” Delphine said, finally letting go of his thigh and instead winding her fingers into his where his hand sat motionless on the table.
Sophia tried not to gag, but it was hard. Still, she was able to smile thinly, to nod. “I understand,” she said.
“Your father didn’t want to tell you, but I felt I owed it to you, that we owed you a formal declaration and explanation.” She was still talking. Delphine still dared to speak to her, still dared to use that too-intimate tone, even while she twined herself around Sophia’s father, squeezing slowly. “After all, I’m sure it can’t be easy watching your father start seeing women again after your mother passed away, even though it was so long ago.”
Sophia wanted to say that she’d known about this for the last ten years, that she’d known even before she’d really understood what was going on. She wanted to call Delphine out on how miserable she’d made that little bit of her childhood, how miserable the ghost of her (lipstick on her father’s jawline, late nights at the office that had nothing to do with deadlines, calls to his line only at midnight that made him laugh like some horrible creature) had made all the years in between. And now this, this new declaration that this thirty-something Jezebel still had her sixty-eight-year-old father wrapped around her little finger, and Sophia couldn’t feel protectiveness for her father, couldn’t feel shame that he would do something this childish. No, all she felt was disgust.
But she kept her mouth shut, smiled and nodded, and didn’t dare let her father know how much she wanted to shake him, make him hear sense.
--
“I need you to do me a favor.” It could have been Vincent talking. She could imagine those exact words in this exact context coming out of his mouth as he paced or sat in front of her, looking into her eyes earnestly. But instead, it was Marius, looking out the window, down from his apartment out over the sprawl of the city. He was frowning, scowling almost - she caught the beginnings of deep furrows even though she could only see the back of his head and one ear.
“Sure,” Sophia replied after a moment’s observation. She owed it to him, after all, given how he had sat so patiently and listened to her rant about Delphine, about how sick she still felt at the thought of that woman kissing her father with dark red lips. He had listened the whole way through and offered comfort and lunch in return. Now it was her turn.
“Vincent and I were talking yesterday.” How often did they talk? She had never thought to ask, but she hoped it wasn’t as often as it seemed, the way he mentioned it so nonchalantly. “You’ve met... Alex, yes?”
“I have. We just had dinner with him about a week ago.”
“I need you to do me a favor,” Marius repeated, this time with more gravity, his head bowed ever so slightly. This was his almost-son-in-law he was talking about, this living relic of a past he’d have rather forgotten about. It brought up memories of Euris on the stretcher, in her coffin, beneath the ground.
“Name it.”
“I need you to look after him for me.” He was moving now, joints obviously beginning to grow stiffer with age. His hand trailed along the wall as if to guide him. He stopped at the small cherry wood side-table, fiddling with a few of the jade and bronze figurines.
“... Look after him?” she murmured, questioningly, trying to spark him to speech again when he had been silent for over a minute. He flinched at the sound of her voice, startled back to her. “You’d be better off asking Vincent.”
“Vincent suggested you.” He turned to her, finally, with a faint, somber smile. “He said you work for the same publishing company that Alex deals with?”
Sophia nodded, crossing her legs and setting her hands on her knee, fingers laced tightly. “I do. But I almost never see him - he mostly just walks past my desk and spends a quarter of an hour yelling at my boss.”
“We’re going to suggest you as a personal assistant for Alex, given your education and familiarity with him.”
There wasn’t any question in that, any suggestion. For all his asking for a favor, Marius had already decided what Sophia would do. She couldn’t help but close her eyes in a silent sigh at that, too used to it to let her irritation show. “I very much doubt they’ll let a part-time girl do anything like that, uncle.”
“There are strings I can pull, including Alex’s. We’re going to do our best to get you in a position where you can keep an eye on him and make sure he doesn’t kill himself or do anything else stupid. Vincent and I are both very concerned with where his drinking is headed. After his stay overnight with the police, we can’t be sure what else he might do.”
“I don’t have the time to do that on top of school and work and the band. You know that,” she said, glaring, annoyed. “He just needs somebody. Not me.” But the idea had a sort of allure when she thought back on his half-dead eyes, thought back on his novels, thought back on the glass of amber alcohol he’d had in his hand when she met him that night at the club. And besides, sacrifice was what she did, was what she was good at. Her father and uncle had given her enough practice, sadly, to allow herself to consider bearing the weight of Alex’s fall on her shoulders for a few weeks, a few months. It was ridiculous when she really thought about it, but the idea of fighting Marius’s decision was more ridiculous still.
“He’d be your work,” Marius was explaining, “and you would only be with him when you weren’t doing other things. But we think your being there will make him behave.”
‘We’ was getting on her nerves. “I don’t think it will make a difference. He’ll drink if he wants to drink.”
“He’d be ashamed.”
“I doubt that.” From what little she knew of him, she knew it wouldn’t be that easy. But her resolve was crumbling.
“Will you do this for us, at least?” He was actually coming to her now, sitting down on the coffee table in front of the couch she was sitting on, looking at her pleadingly with his dark-rimmed, deep-creased eyes.
Sophia rubbed at her temple. “I’m going to talk to Vincent first. I want to hear his part in this. But... fine. I’ll do it, as long as Vincent agrees it’s for the best.” There - another metal ring was added to her neck, pressing down her shoulders still further and making it just a tiny bit harder to draw in breath of her own. She could still handle it, though, could still bear up under it admirably.
“Thank you.” He took her hands, smiled that thin, weak smile of his again. “Euris would be glad.”
Authors:
serindrana, also known as skepticallittledarlingSeries: Last Exile
Characters: Alex, Vincent, Sophia
Words: 3526
Notes: Modern-day AU, focusing on Sophia’s relationships with the two men in her life against the backdrop of family drama. Currently PG.
I have not opposed my family and kinsfolk.
Vincent was raging.
He didn’t get angry like this very often; in fact, the last time he’d been this angry had been... well, Sophia wasn’t quite sure when. There had been times, though, that she had caught glimpses of seething fury, and now she wondered if every time had been because of him.
He had stormed into where they were staying, a little hotel room in the next city over, where the music had taken them, slammed the door shut behind him, begun to pace rapidly. He was every bit the proverbial caged tiger with a gaping wound in its shoulder and she didn’t really want to reach out and comfort him, lest he take a hand for payment. He was swearing under his breath, one hand in his hair turning strands into tangled knots, the other fisted at his side or slapping at his thigh as he walked the abbreviated length of the room. She thought to suggest going outside, but she didn’t want to lose him in the crowds that would swallow up a man in his state, turning him around and leaving him in an alien part of town. So she sat, watching, worrying, wondering why he had growled his name when he spun in like a hurricane, like a sort of curse, a sort of prayer, a sort of explanation.
The tiger came to the lady first, coming to stand mute before her, then drop to the dingy, carpeted floor at her feet, nearly putting his head in her lap but instead beating his fists (as gently as possible with how his teeth gritted and his brow furrowed) once against the mattress on either side of her.
She very gently reached out and touched not the top of his head, but his shoulder, frowning. “What about him?”
He couldn’t help but laugh, frustrated and exhausted. Sitting back on his heels, he allowed a few more inches of space between them. “Bastard managed to get into a bar fight.”
A very small part of her wanted to go back home, make sure he was okay, go lay offerings of care at the feet of that alcoholic, yellow, severe and charismatic man. She could see that same need in Vincent’s eyes, no matter how much fire sparked against it in them. She didn’t feel so bad after that. “Is he okay?”
“Depends on what you mean by ‘okay’.”
“Did he get hurt?”
“No. He won. Of course he won,” Vincent muttered, shaking his head and standing again, beginning to pace once more. This time, he’d lost momentum and spent a few lingering moments by the window, pushing aside the curtain with one finger, looking out into the nothingness of unknown city lights at night, before he came back towards her. “But he’s stuck with the police for it. Probably just until he sobers up, but- the fucking idiot.”
Sophia was quiet again, watching, only tilting her head a few degrees to the right to urge him on.
“He wants me to come and get him out. He’ll be lucky if the guy he beat up doesn’t press charges. He’s been lucky the last two times, but-” Here he was laughing again, that dry, sad little laugh- “but he can’t be that lucky. Fuck him, he can’t be that lucky.”
“Are you going to go?” Sophia asked, standing up, placing her hand on his arm again. That was the closest they came to some kind of intimate contact and she could tell, even through his anger, that he thrilled to it. She felt guilty.
He turned to her, searching her eyes, perhaps trying to get lost in them. But he shrugged, turned away again. “No. I had to do it twice already. I told him that if he wanted, I’d call Marius, but that I wasn’t driving all the way back there tonight and that he could just sleep it off for once. It’ll be good for him to really sober up for at least a night.”
She made a small assenting sound, sitting down on the edge of her bed again. slowly nodding. “Did he ask you to call Marius?”
“Of course not.”
“Too proud?”
“Too scared.”
She pursed her lips, thinking, turning that over in her head. From what Vincent had told her, when Alex had learned who she was, who her dearest cousin and almost-sister had been, he had gone quiet except to order vodka. Vincent said he never drank vodka. Sophia had felt guilty then, too - wished she had barely known Euris, wished she hadn’t looked at that broken, crying teenage boy and smiled at him, sadly. She wished she hadn’t given him that weird plush toy - had it been a goat? Or was it a sheep? - while her father dragged her out and that horrible pale woman laughed at her.
And then, Vincent said, Alex had gotten very drunk and very quiet. He’d sat there for the rest of the night, was still sitting there in his mind when Vincent dragged him back to his apartment, made sure he wasn’t going to end up where he was now. He’d been sitting on his couch, looking at the TV like he was looking at the back of the bar, looking far back at a time it was always dangerous for him to remember. Vincent had felt guilty then, too, as he closed the door behind him and heard it latch.
Of course he didn’t want Marius to know just how far he’d fallen.
“He’s going to be dead of liver failure in ten years,” Vincent was muttering, sitting now on his own bed, the TV on with the volume turned down to two or three of those little green bars on the screen, with Wild Kingdom playing. “I don’t know why I bother anymore. He hasn’t been like himself in years, now. Not in ten years. I’ve been there for ten years, tried to be, but-”
“He’s still there,” she found herself saying, remembering that boy with dark hair who had seemed so grand and so tall and so happy. Even she had seen the ghost of that in his eyes, in the twitch of his lips when he smiled that sardonic half-smile of his at dinner that night, at the dinners they’d shared for the last few weeks. They were awkward meetings but she had grown used to his jabs, his insults that came partially from affection.
“He’s using me,” Vincent said, shaking his head. “He’s using himself. He hasn’t written in years, has been drinking himself into a grave at forty, has been getting into these fights... I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s trying to kill himself.”
“He doesn’t seem suicidal,” Sophia said, shaking her head and getting up to take her turn at pacing. Hers was a more graceful movement, rather slow and languid, stately. She was watching Vincent out of the corner of her eye.
“Not actively. Passively suicidal. That’d be just like him - go out in some poetic way. He can’t have tuberculosis, so in comes alcoholism.”
“That’s not very poetic.”
Vincent grunted in response. Sophia went quiet again, now looking at her feet, arms crossed over her stomach. “Are you going to leave him?” she asked only after a good five minutes had passed and she had curled up in the armchair by the window with the curtain pulled back with one finger.
“Of course not,” Vincent said, softly, frowning and looking at his hands. Sophia thought the gesture was unnecessarily dramatic - there was no blood on them, metaphorical or otherwise. “He’s almost- almost addictive. He draws you in and you don’t want to let go and... and I’m all he has.”
Sophia watched him for a moment longer, then looked back out at the unfamiliar lights. “He’s all you have left, too.”
“That’s not true,” Vincent said, surprise in his voice, and he looked at her now with his eyes broken out of that congealing anger. He was looking at her, to her, now, focus shifting abruptly, leaving him reeling. “I have my job, my colleagues- the band- Sophia, I have you.”
Her stomach turned at that statement, so clear and so final, so fully believed. She didn’t respond for a beat, shaking her head. “But he’s all you have left of that part of your life.”
“I guess.” And then Vincent fell silent, looking at the TV where they were showing those conveniently symbolic birds who sat on the backs of giant beasts, cleaning them and gaining sustenance from it. He scowled and turned it off.
--
That horrible pale woman was sitting across the table from her. Sophia hated that woman’s name, hated how exotic it sounded, hated that it had been hanging around her like a strangling vine for ten years. She hated Delphine Eraclea with all the violent passion of a child and all the focused intensity of the twenty year old she’d grown up to be. And Delphine smiled at her with that sickeningly fake smile of hers, all the while touching Sophia’s father’s leg beneath the tablecloth with her long-nailed fingers.
It made her want to vomit.
Delphine was prattling on about some funny little news tidbit, trying to sound cultured, intelligent, just like when she had ordered her elaborate dinner. But Sophia knew a smattering of French, knew that what she’d ordered had been common catfish, breaded and fried just like mother would have made it. It was supposed to be Sophia’s birthday dinner. And now Delphine was talking about foreign affairs as if she understood every detail, and maybe she did. But by the way she spoke it was clear she didn’t care one bit if the rest of the world bombed itself to hell and back except that it might affect her bank balance and her investments. Sophia wouldn’t be surprised if Delphine wanted the world to go to hell just to benefit herself.
She found herself watching Delphine drum her finely-manicured, gold-painted nails on the white tablecloth. Her voice was so high and sickeningly sweet that Sophia had to fight to block it out completely. Her name, though, always drew her back, and now that woman was purring it out to get her attention. Sophia sat up and tried to look properly attentive and not quite as disgusted.
“So Mr. Forrester tells me you’re in a... band?” Delphine asked, speaking as if to a child. She always referred to Sophia’s father as ‘Mr. Forrester,’ as if Sophia didn’t know that they’d been fucking for the last ten years.
“Um, yes,” Sophia managed to get out, feeling her cheeks color. “It’s nothing very serious, though.”
“Oh, but he says you even get jobs outside of the city, sometimes?”
“Sometimes.” She shifted uncomfortably under Delphine’s unwavering, dissecting, mocking stare.
“I had wanted so much to have dinner with the two of you last weekend, but your father said you were out of town. Did you have a good show?”
What was she doing? Trying to play the role of parent, of interested adult, of intimate friend? Whatever it was, it made Sophia’s skin crawl. “I guess so.”
“Sophia, answer Ms. Eraclea’s question,” her father said, his voice low, commanding as always, cold.
“Oh, don’t worry about it. She’s at that age where she’d probably rather not be out to dinner with her father, after all. My young brother is getting to be like that, too - he’s nearly seventeen and already trying to prove that he doesn’t need me anymore. It’s a tricky time.”
I can hear you, Sophia thought, trying to keep her scowl on the inside only. It had nothing to do with age, her not wanting to be there. It had everything to do with Delphine, Delphine and her father, her father sitting across from her with this controlling look that he always had when he looked at her - like he wanted to keep her on a leash and dictate every part of her life. But his disappointment in her, his growing disinterest, kept the despot at bay.
Still, he could tighten her throat with a look like the one he was giving her. “I’m sorry,” she said, obediently. “What I meant was that it’s not something that I can judge objectively. I can say that we didn’t mess up in any of our songs and that the audience seemed to respond well. We also received a good fee from the club to book us in the first place. So yes, it was good.”
A normal person would have asked But did you have fun? but Delphine just nodded, making some pleased little agreeing sound that was so smug it choked Sophia from across the table. “That’s good to hear,” she purred, leaning slightly closer to her lover’s side, hand probably (Sophia could imagine it clearly, couldn’t get the image out of her head) wrapping more fully around his aged thigh. She was a succubus, had been sucking the life and the sanity out of him for ten years without stop, only going underground for the past nine. But now, more and more, she was stopping by the house for ‘business’ and staying until after Sophia fell asleep sitting up in bed, listening for any signs of her leaving.
Her father seemed to be thinking, seemed to be calculating. He cleared his throat, then, drawing her back to present realities instead of past contemplations. “Miss Eraclea and I just wanted to tell you that we are...” Here he trailed off, unable to find the adequate, proper way to express that he was going to be fucking her above-board from now on. Sophia was already biting her lip.
“We’re dating,” Delphine said, finally letting go of his thigh and instead winding her fingers into his where his hand sat motionless on the table.
Sophia tried not to gag, but it was hard. Still, she was able to smile thinly, to nod. “I understand,” she said.
“Your father didn’t want to tell you, but I felt I owed it to you, that we owed you a formal declaration and explanation.” She was still talking. Delphine still dared to speak to her, still dared to use that too-intimate tone, even while she twined herself around Sophia’s father, squeezing slowly. “After all, I’m sure it can’t be easy watching your father start seeing women again after your mother passed away, even though it was so long ago.”
Sophia wanted to say that she’d known about this for the last ten years, that she’d known even before she’d really understood what was going on. She wanted to call Delphine out on how miserable she’d made that little bit of her childhood, how miserable the ghost of her (lipstick on her father’s jawline, late nights at the office that had nothing to do with deadlines, calls to his line only at midnight that made him laugh like some horrible creature) had made all the years in between. And now this, this new declaration that this thirty-something Jezebel still had her sixty-eight-year-old father wrapped around her little finger, and Sophia couldn’t feel protectiveness for her father, couldn’t feel shame that he would do something this childish. No, all she felt was disgust.
But she kept her mouth shut, smiled and nodded, and didn’t dare let her father know how much she wanted to shake him, make him hear sense.
--
“I need you to do me a favor.” It could have been Vincent talking. She could imagine those exact words in this exact context coming out of his mouth as he paced or sat in front of her, looking into her eyes earnestly. But instead, it was Marius, looking out the window, down from his apartment out over the sprawl of the city. He was frowning, scowling almost - she caught the beginnings of deep furrows even though she could only see the back of his head and one ear.
“Sure,” Sophia replied after a moment’s observation. She owed it to him, after all, given how he had sat so patiently and listened to her rant about Delphine, about how sick she still felt at the thought of that woman kissing her father with dark red lips. He had listened the whole way through and offered comfort and lunch in return. Now it was her turn.
“Vincent and I were talking yesterday.” How often did they talk? She had never thought to ask, but she hoped it wasn’t as often as it seemed, the way he mentioned it so nonchalantly. “You’ve met... Alex, yes?”
“I have. We just had dinner with him about a week ago.”
“I need you to do me a favor,” Marius repeated, this time with more gravity, his head bowed ever so slightly. This was his almost-son-in-law he was talking about, this living relic of a past he’d have rather forgotten about. It brought up memories of Euris on the stretcher, in her coffin, beneath the ground.
“Name it.”
“I need you to look after him for me.” He was moving now, joints obviously beginning to grow stiffer with age. His hand trailed along the wall as if to guide him. He stopped at the small cherry wood side-table, fiddling with a few of the jade and bronze figurines.
“... Look after him?” she murmured, questioningly, trying to spark him to speech again when he had been silent for over a minute. He flinched at the sound of her voice, startled back to her. “You’d be better off asking Vincent.”
“Vincent suggested you.” He turned to her, finally, with a faint, somber smile. “He said you work for the same publishing company that Alex deals with?”
Sophia nodded, crossing her legs and setting her hands on her knee, fingers laced tightly. “I do. But I almost never see him - he mostly just walks past my desk and spends a quarter of an hour yelling at my boss.”
“We’re going to suggest you as a personal assistant for Alex, given your education and familiarity with him.”
There wasn’t any question in that, any suggestion. For all his asking for a favor, Marius had already decided what Sophia would do. She couldn’t help but close her eyes in a silent sigh at that, too used to it to let her irritation show. “I very much doubt they’ll let a part-time girl do anything like that, uncle.”
“There are strings I can pull, including Alex’s. We’re going to do our best to get you in a position where you can keep an eye on him and make sure he doesn’t kill himself or do anything else stupid. Vincent and I are both very concerned with where his drinking is headed. After his stay overnight with the police, we can’t be sure what else he might do.”
“I don’t have the time to do that on top of school and work and the band. You know that,” she said, glaring, annoyed. “He just needs somebody. Not me.” But the idea had a sort of allure when she thought back on his half-dead eyes, thought back on his novels, thought back on the glass of amber alcohol he’d had in his hand when she met him that night at the club. And besides, sacrifice was what she did, was what she was good at. Her father and uncle had given her enough practice, sadly, to allow herself to consider bearing the weight of Alex’s fall on her shoulders for a few weeks, a few months. It was ridiculous when she really thought about it, but the idea of fighting Marius’s decision was more ridiculous still.
“He’d be your work,” Marius was explaining, “and you would only be with him when you weren’t doing other things. But we think your being there will make him behave.”
‘We’ was getting on her nerves. “I don’t think it will make a difference. He’ll drink if he wants to drink.”
“He’d be ashamed.”
“I doubt that.” From what little she knew of him, she knew it wouldn’t be that easy. But her resolve was crumbling.
“Will you do this for us, at least?” He was actually coming to her now, sitting down on the coffee table in front of the couch she was sitting on, looking at her pleadingly with his dark-rimmed, deep-creased eyes.
Sophia rubbed at her temple. “I’m going to talk to Vincent first. I want to hear his part in this. But... fine. I’ll do it, as long as Vincent agrees it’s for the best.” There - another metal ring was added to her neck, pressing down her shoulders still further and making it just a tiny bit harder to draw in breath of her own. She could still handle it, though, could still bear up under it admirably.
“Thank you.” He took her hands, smiled that thin, weak smile of his again. “Euris would be glad.”
