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“You smell like smoke, lately.”
“…that’s what they say, but I don’t really care.” Asra quips lightly, ornate pipe between his teeth drawing out whorls of smoke with every word. It stains the ground beneath his feet ashen, and Julian frowns against the chill of wind that sweeps the grains away.
He shifts restlessly in place. “It’s a dirty habit.” The hazy grey of his one good eye gleans off no reaction from Asra’s still face. “It’ll kill you one day.”
An intake of breath. A pause.
“Yeah? So will you.”
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“Want to know why I carry this pipe with me?”
“No. You’ll just turn it into some vague riddle I won’t be able to understand.”
“Then I’ll give you an exception this time. Go ahead. Humor me.”
“Why?” He asks unassured, swiveling his one-eyed gaze to meet the profile of the nacre haired witch. The sweeping amethyst orbs turned upwards to stare sullenly at the moon.
Asra’s reply is worse than his temporary silence. “To hide the scent of death.”
Julian’s breath hitches in his throat, straining and thin, and he swallows back the panic. Black leather fingers emerging deep from within the pockets of his coat to gesture anxiously at the other’s slackened form. “Death? Surely it cannot be you, Asra.”
The nacre haired witch’s posture straightens against the metal railing, bare elbows pointed against the oxidized metal. Thin eyebrows drawn into a furrowed line; edge of his lips – curling into a scowl the likes Julian has never seen – dancing across his face.
The mane of hair shakes messily into burdened eyes. “No, not me. Never me.” Thin hands snake up the rounded edges of the barrier, halting just for a moment against the cool metal before darting away towards Julian’s sleeve. Spider-like fingers crawling with deliberate movements to rest poised on his broad shoulder. Nails digging tightly into black fabric. Asra pulls himself forward, narrowed gaze piercing against Julian’s own grey one.
He cannot speak – cannot breathe – as the witch’s herb-infused voice slithers out between half-parted lips. Crippled and afflicted.
“Ilya… they’re dying.”
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“They’re a quick learner, Ilya. Almost impressive.” His voice cuts through the stagnant gloom of the cool evening air. Carried away on a dying breeze. Vivid yet hypnotizingly calm.
Julian’s one eye lazily settles onto the witch of bronze skin and white hair, mapping out the expression he produces against the curvature of his lips, before turning away for the sunset. Nacre locks and glittering amethyst eyes replaced by a decaying radiation of orange and red streams dripping against the horizon.
Bathing Vesuvia in the finest pigments of color.
He’s never heard Asra speak so fondly, even to him, and it leaves an almost acidic taste on the back of his sharp tongue. If one could call the very few words of praise fond, however.
“An apprentice?” The red-haired man muses quietly, momentarily lost to the cry of bird fowl harking in the distance of the port city. Stretching eerily over rooftops a garbling sound. It’s ominous; as if the crows were present. Already knelling out their mourning sounds. He snorts indignantly at the thought of Asra having a protégé, and turns to glance at the witch with haughty authority. Hazy grey of his eye smoldering beneath a heavy brow some unkind glint of malice. “Amusing, witch. I don’t believe you’re capable of permanency.”
“This one’s different.” Asra was never a man for commitment, but the convicting tone trickling from his lips arrests Julian from further creating a snarky comment. “I just know.”
“…Unlike me?”
The flicker under the witch’s visage displays a wealth of vague meanings.
“Yes.”
His answer is one of them Julian does not want to hear.
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Julian stares quietly at the hooded figure besides Asra – face concealed by robes and a hesitation in their posture – and is met with expectant amethyst eyes. Unblinking pair of jewels fitted graciously with an undistinguishable gleam.
The man’s lips are curled into a sly, thin smirk. It’s too early in the morning for a witch to be able to grin that wide.
“Ilya, I’d like you to meet my apprentice.”
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Asra was never his, and never will be.
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Ilya.
The word whispers into the shell of his ear. A lover’s caress. Hands on his facing stroking the edge of his cheekbone; down the curve of his jaw to the rim of his bottom lip. Nacre hair masking his vision.
He jolts awake in a tangle of bedsheets, the space empty beside him and with no sign of life.
It’s been that way for a long time.
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He’s unbent out of alignment from his usual lackadaisical ways. Hair messier than normal, and the red scarf missing from around his slender shoulders.
Julian breaches the distance between them with caution to see the lit ornate pipe of bone and engravings held tight between forefinger and thumb; smoking out the scent of thick herbs in a slender dancing cloud.
Asra’s voice is quiet; grim and refractured like the drifting storm clouds high above. “I couldn’t save them.”
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“Why are they dying?”
“…I don’t know.”
“You don’t know? You, Asra, of all your caliber doesn’t know?”
“…”
“Or are you just lying?”
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“They have to come back, Ilya. I can’t live without them!”
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“Anything… I’ll do anything to see them breathing again.”
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Asra’s lips easily meld into his own, slow and gratifying; a familiar sensation forgotten. Meticulous, slender fingers snake into the locks of his thick red hair, and he’s drowning in the taste of him again. All herbs and spices, but this time a bitter bile of smoke on the witch’s tongue.
Coughed up from his sickened lungs.
“I’m sorry.” Asra murmurs warily into Julian’s mouth, snaking his hand to the back of the doctor’s head and leaving it there. “It’s better this way.”
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A sharp flash behind his eyelids, and then a bone chilling numbness crawling up his spine.
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There is something he has forgotten, but he cannot remember.
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The morning sun is too bright against his one good eye, and he ducks into an alleyway to shield himself from the glare. Black gloved hand pressing against the stone wall as he takes a momentary pause to assert his eyesight and blink away the imprint burned into the back of his retina.
It only takes him a few seconds before he is back onto the market road.
Crashing straight into a hooded figure.
“My apologies.” He sneers out quickly, sidestepping the unbalanced person, and not sparing them another glance as he heads into the meandering crowd.
“Are you alright? I told you to not wander out of my sight.” Julian unconsciously halts in his pacing. A cold prickle jolting up his spine as he turns to catch a glimpse of the owner whose haunting voice reverberates in his ears. “Hold my hand. It’ll keep you from getting lost.”
The white hair; the flashy clothes. A cloaked figure observant at his side.
It’s the strange feeling that he recalls him from somewhere, deep within the pool of his memories, but attempting to draw out the recollections leaves him with a sharp pain behind his eye.
He watches the strange man until he is swallowed up by the shifting throng of civilians. Taking with him the robbed figure and the scent of strong herbs.
Like burning smoke.
Smoke.
Strangely familiar.
Julian can taste it on his tongue, in his mouth; the space where a body used to rest against his side.
Nacre hair and amethyst eyes.
But it is only of a memory of something he never had – or never can – and he turns away in a whirl of black and red.
The crowd consumes his retreating figure.
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“Ilya. I’d like you to meet my apprentice.”
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