Chapter Text
Pim was inconsolable the next several days, locking herself upstairs; and while Faland owned this realm and everything (thus everyone) within it, he’d been living amongst mortals for long enough to know that you ought to give an angry woman her space.
He thought about that strange evening in the hotel. Pim had heard something in his music that scared her. This was not unusual. Everyone felt the same when the music reflected their souls back to them in stark relief. But that was the problem: it reflected nothing of her. She should not have heard anything except some doleful violin notes–played masterfully, of course, but doleful and ordinary nonetheless.
She wasn’t afraid of him, and she wasn’t afraid of relinquishing her soul piece-by-piece, or so she claimed. Penelope Shaw was a fearless thing, so what in Hell did she hear that evening that shook her to her core, that even Faland himself was unable to hear?
The questions burned on his tongue, and eventually he was able to stifle his curiosity no longer, not to mention that Pim had still not been seen in days, and boarders at a hotel had to pay for their stay. So he went upstairs and opened the door to her room.
It was her room, but it was her room. She had decorated, and she had spared no expense. There were paintings on the walls, canvases torn but still hanging in their frames; there were potted plants at the window, struggling in the faint light; there was a set of folding screens in the corner beside the bed, pilfered from some Belgian noble who had probably pilfered it from some Chinese noble who may have pilfered it from some Japanese noble. Mortals put so much stock into their fancy baubles, though he could appreciate why they fought over that one so much.
Pim was lying in bed, gazing up at the ceiling with her hands folded neatly over her belly, as though she were lying in a coffin. “A gentleman knocks before entering,” she said flatly.
Faland drummed his fingers on the wood. “Satisfied?”
“I’m in no mood to talk, Monsieur. Please go away.”
“That wasn’t the deal,” said Faland. As he drew closer, she did not move or even turn her head to acknowledge him. “I was promised stories.”
“Stories to turn into music,” she said with a strange note in her voice. “But my stories don’t make for good music, I’m afraid. I’m rather boring.”
“You are too harsh on yourself, dear Pim. Everything has a story. Like these,” he said, gesturing about the room. “Where did you even find these?”
“Here,” she replied. “You’ve collected a lot of junk.”
“Is it junk if you wanted them?”
“Yes. I love junk. I had so much of it back home. My family moved into larger and larger houses just to fill them with more pretty, useless things. Pretty and useless and empty.”
Pim spat the words like a snake spitting venom, but her face was eerily unaffected. Faland crossed his arms. “The woman who comforted that American boy—was she useless and empty? Or the one who swore revenge for her son?”
Pim slowly rolled her head to look at him. Her eyes were red and puffy, but she was out of tears, it seemed. “Why are you trying to comfort me?” she asked. “What does it matter to you? You can always find someone else to listen to. Someone who has stories worth listening to.”
“I could,” Faland agreed. “But they are not here right now. And they have not made a deal with me. Come on. Up you go.” Pim sulked. “I won’t suffer a freeloader in my hotel.”
“A freeloader?” she repeated indignantly, sitting up and swinging her legs off the bed. She stood to her full height before him (he still looked down at the top of her head), smoothing her wrinkled dress with aggressive swipes of her hands. “Well, perhaps I ought to go and make myself useful, then. Lord only knows what other junk you’ve piled up in the other rooms.”
“He doesn’t,” said Faland.
Pim paused, brow furrowing and eyes narrowing as she tried to parse the meaning of his words. She was reading his eyes, those mismatched damned things that were nothing but a reminder that he did not belong anywhere—not in Heaven, not in Hell, and not in this world full of mortals who did such odd things like blow up millions of their own kind to claim a strip of land, already razed to useless rubble by their own hands.
One eye of pale peridot green, as shining and as bright as the grass of Eden. One eye of pure, inscrutable black, for Hell was not fire and sadistic demons like mortals preached; Hell was darkness incarnate. Hell was a cage utterly devoid of light and sound, and you were sent there to be forgotten by everyone for the simple crime of daring to exist.
But mortals found it attractive. Heterochromia, they called it. It made him rare and exotic. Ah, Faland loved mortals. They only saw what they wanted to see.
Faland wondered what Pim saw. But before he could ask, she turned away and stormed off like a woman on a mission.
//
And goodness, what a mission she chose to embark on.
She wanted this hotel to be her damned Victorian manor. She wanted a parlor (“To read in. I have a lot of work to do in regards to my French skills.”); she wanted guest bedrooms (“This is a hotel. Act like a gracious host for once.”); she wanted a dressing room for herself (“And where, dearest Pim, would you go shopping to fill said dressing room?” he asked, and she just laughed). He managed to hold his tongue before he said something rather cruel about her deceased husband dealing with her excitable moods. Some lines were not to be crossed, at least not without a lot of wine and the music to defend himself.
“I seem to have unintentionally hired a housekeeper,” Faland remarked, watching her scurry back and forth with various pieces of furniture in her arms.
“I prefer ‘interior designer,’ thank you,” Pim huffed, trying her best not to sound winded. “And you didn’t–oof–hire me, because I’m not working for you. I’m working for us. You know, you could help instead of lurking by the door.”
“Mm, no.”
“No?! That’s it?”
“I’ve barely gotten anything out of this deal of ours as it is,” Faland said shortly. “What you choose to do to waste time is your business and yours alone. Besides, after you’re gone, the mess will inevitably sort itself back into its organized chaos.”
Pim set a dining chair down hard and pushed stray strands of hair out of her sweaty face. “That won’t be for a while, Monsieur Faland,” she declared.
He wasn’t impressed. “Really? Just the other day you said I ought to find someone else for stories.”
“Ah, but you haven’t replaced me yet,” said Pim, now with a small smile on her face. “And I’ve no intention of dying now. Call it, hmm, a second wind.”
“I can see that,” said Faland. “Considering you’ve made it your personal crusade to rummage through my things.”
“Then it’s decided,” she said, throwing up her hands animatedly. “I am not leaving. You are not kicking me out. Therefore, we should make our lodgings at least the tiniest bit hospitable, if not for our guests then for ourselves.”
“Ha–still a ‘no’ from me. I commend your efforts, though.”
“What if I were to ask nicely?”
Faland pretended to mull it over. “No.”
Pim put her hands on her hips. “How about a deal, then? A story for every piece of furniture you help me move.”
“Ah, no, you don’t make the deals around here,” he said, waggling a finger at her. “And I, for one, am not interested in being swindled again.”
“What?” Pim cried. “I haven’t swindled you at all!”
“I never got a story.”
“Yes, you did. I told you about Jimmy.”
“You,” Faland said slowly, “waxed poetic about how angelic your son was, and then near-drowned in your self-pity. That is not a story.”
Pim opened her mouth, then closed it, pursing her lips. “Fine,” she sniffed. “But I won’t sit at that bar until you clean it. The wine has probably done irreparable damage to the wood. In the meantime, though, if you want a story now, an actual story, we are going to sit at a proper table and have a proper conversation like proper adults.”
Well, he’d done far more than setting up furniture to weasel a story out of someone. He sighed and unbuttoned his cuffs to roll up his sleeves. “Fine,” he repeated. “At least tell me where you want these things to go. I refuse to wait around while you agonize over every little decision like a granny with her little trinkets.”
“I’m the one with little trinkets?” Pim crossed her arms. “Is that your observation, Monsieur, that women are indecisive and self-pitying? You have a poor opinion of us indeed.”
“Indeed I do,” Faland said cheerfully. “And for every second of time you continue to waste, my opinion worsens. Please, my dear Pim, for the good of all womenkind–get a move on.”
//
The story was not important.
After setting up their makeshift drawing room, Pim told him about the day that she found out her son’s fate. She was not the most eloquent storyteller, but she had an excellent memory, and she described in detail the general’s face; his sad smile as he told her she ought to be grateful that he saved Jimmy’s reputation; and the tremors in her hands as she was escorted out of the library.
What was important was that Pim remembered it the next day.
“Oh, but I’ve already told you about Gage,” she said with a slight pout. “I guess there’s not much left to say, is there? I can go on and on and on about how I felt after I shot him, or about that evening in the library.”
Faland said nothing, distracted by the simple fact that Pim remembered what she told him. She eventually decided on Laura Iven as a topic. “She was everything I was brought up to hate: brash, ill-bred, outspoken, independent. I found her fascinating.”
She laughed as she described Iven’s terrible manners. “Like a bull in a china shop, as they say. When you tell someone to take as much as she wants, there is an expectation that she will insist on only accepting one. Then the hostess and the guest play this little game–unstoppable hospitality versus immovable humility. Do you know what she did? She took four sandwiches! I’d never seen anything like it. Why, I was so shocked that I simply couldn’t be upset.”
As she spoke on, her countenance shifted completely. Her shoulders fell and her gaze softened. She even sighed like she was Romeo describing Juliet.
“Oh, Laura,” she said sadly. “What a life we could have shared, were it not for this horrible war. But there’s no point lamenting about what-ifs, right, Monsieur Faland? What’s done is done. I can only hope that she has found peace. Nobody deserves it more than her.”
The next day, Faland asked Pim to tell him about her first meeting with Laura Iven. She peered at him, confused and suspicious. “The story about the sandwiches? Why would you want a repeat story?”
“Composing music is a bit like sculpting a statue,” Faland said with practiced ease. “One has to look back at his reference every now and then.”
But as she recounted her first meeting with Iven, he took stock of what, exactly, she remembered. All of it, it turned out. A mortal was here, under his spell, and maintaining themselves. He didn’t think it was possible.
Pim was an enigma. She lost none of her soul to the war, and she gave none of her soul to his music. It was fascinating. It was infuriating.
It was a curiosity, and Faland was more than happy, if vexed at the moment, to accept a new, mysterious toy.