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Looking in the mirror Lucien Marlowe felt a severe cosmetic dysmorphia. It wasn’t the dysmorphia of old, however. Lucy didn’t feel like they were seeing a dude in the mirror. Quite the opposite, Lucy felt genuinely pretty and that seemed to be the unfortunate problem. Lucy felt like trash, and dressed up to the nines as they were, not being able to see it on their own body just invoked feelings they hadn’t felt for ages.
Every other time they had felt like trash their entire life Lucy had played dress up to escape those feelings. They supposed it only made sense they’d become so talented at the cosmetic arts simply by the sheer time they had spent feeling awful. But dress up had always helped, so why now did it all just feel so wrong?
“Love can make everything feel wonky, you know.” Ivy commented, curled up on a pile of discarded dresses and accessories. The word love being used to describe… this, made Lucy genuinely nauseous. The nausea mixed with the anxiety and gave way into panic. Lucy was hyperventilating now. Lucy needed air. They didn’t have time to change their outfit again for the thousandth time, they just needed to get out.
As Lucy shakily slinked out the front door, they spared a glance back at Rothart, in his high backed chair staring into the fire like the ominous Bond villain he was. He was either apathetic or unaware or asleep. Or dead, the thought crept into Lucy’s mind like the agent provocateur that it was. Another piece of kindling for the anxiety bonfire that was Lucy’s mental state.
Luckily the cold night air help subdue the flames somewhat. Here on the veranda things begun winding down. It was actually good Lucy was taken by the panic in a way, it had forced their hand, and kept them from stalling in their bedroom all night until they had thoroughly stood up their date. Lucy started walking into town, taking brisk long strides as the sea breeze tussled their hair.
The nice things about the cold night air quickly gave way to the less nice things. It was actually really cold out, and while this dress really showed off their shoulders, it also unfortunately really showed off their shoulders. Almost out of thin air Ivy appeared with a matching shawl in between her teeth. Lucy quickly took it out of the cat’s mouth and put it around themself reveling in the warmth. Ivy looked up to them with an empathetic gaze. She probably still felt bad about inducing the bizarre panic back at the house. Lucy replied with a brave smile.
The path to the club was one Lucy had tread a couple times before but it was still difficult to pinpoint. Some of the twisting back alleyways in this part of town would stack vertically or bend into themselves. It was almost as though they didn’t want people to find the place. There was no sign proclaiming the establishment's ostentatiousness, nor velvet rope to keep the rabble out, certainly not the place one would expect the find the son of the guard captain, but it was his choice of venue not theirs. Just an uncomfortably narrow staircase down from the street and a tough looking metal door served as its exterior design.
Lucy knocked on the door. Almost a minute passed before the little eye window thing that all proper speakeasies have slid open. The bouncer on the other side eyed Lucy carefully.
“What do you want, kid?” he roughly inquired. Lucy replied by brushing the hair off of the left side of their face, showing their eyepatch. “Ahh right, come on in.” The eye window shut and Lucy was serenaded by the sound of a dozen deadbolts flipping open in succession. The doorman took Lucy’s shawl while not so subtly patting them down for weapons. Not like they had any place to hide anything in their current attire but Lucy was too nervous to be taken aback.
Inside the bar proper wasn’t nearly as raucous or as lively as one would hope from an underground nightclub, not to say it wasn’t packed. This place was less for the young to live up their lives and more for the old to forget about theirs. The air was opaque with cigar smoke and stagnant, a man at a stand up piano in the corner barely made a effort to pierce the din of mutterings and murmurings of the literal minagarie of patrons.
Lucy spotted him before he spotted them. Lucy was no expert in the art of romantic warfare but was somewhat certain that this lended them a distinct advantage in the first bought that was soon to come. His hyena familiar curled by his feet, he was in a dress shirt, vest, and tie, looking like a million bucks and three bucks all at the same time. Exactly what Lucy desired and failed to capture in their own attire. His thick sideburns trailed down from behind his glasses and tapered off around his pretty jaw. His eyes would impatiently dart around the room, then settle in the middle distance for a few moments before beginning to scan through the smoke again. His face was hard to read just because of the sheer complexity of the emotions behind his gaze, but Lucy might have detected a bit of anxiety behind the superiority complex that articulated his posture.
Just then his eyes fell on them, his eyebrow twitched and his mouth curled up into a smirk. No no no! Lucy had been caught staring, what little advantage they had went straight out the window.
Lucy approached and his hands immediately began worming their way around their hips and sides and shoulders. Seiji was handsy, he liked physical reminders of the things that he had. It was how the two communicated, more or less, in their previous meetings. The things they tended to say in words to one another prior were typically bloated with artifice. But physically they communicated more than just words passed between peers. Physically together, they were an idea, an idea that was an environment all unto itself.
It was just so nice being touched. Not a condescending pat on the head, but an attentive intertwining of equals. Lucy would forgive themself if it had been the only reason they were interested in the boy. His hands were calloused in places. Not the calluses of a blue collar man in an iron mill, but of a boy who’s spent too many long days playing in the mud in his front yard. Not many people touched Lucy. No friends, no family. They sort of had a cat to pet, but it really wasn’t the same as being held. Lucy was touch starved as it were, and Seiji was the only oasis in the center of the desert that was the emotional and physical isolation they had come to derive from their transition.
He was drinking a whisky. A straight whisky. And, well, drinking was a generous term. The glass sat bestilled and serene on the bar as the hazy night moved around it.
“I see you haven’t touched your liquor.”
Seiji paused and eyed Lucy up and down to plot the perfect rebuke.
“I figured I should save it for when you finally arrived. That I would need it.”
“You’ve been waiting long for me. And in a place like this I’m surprised you haven't already run off with someone else.”
What the fuck was this, what were they doing? They sounded like two kids playing at courtly politic. These slights were hardly slight, nor subtle. There was nothing to this, no reputation to uphold nor wits to be won. This wasn’t them. They weren’t aristocrats nor the children of aristocrats, at least not here. Not while they were with one another. They shouldn’t be, musn’t be. The older generation would die out hiding their emotions and subtly guarding every feeling, but Lucy would not abide the same fate. Lucy felt stupid.
Seiji was silent as they were taken aback, and appeared to read Lucy’s face correctly. He sheepishly turned his head to the side as his smirk took on one of its many subtle variations. Unfortunately Lucy hadn’t the exact emotional literacy to know what it meant. He quickly took a sip of the whisky on the table, and almost immediately made a face Lucy could read perfectly. He shuddered at the bitter transgressive flavor and nearly wretched.
He slammed the drink back down onto the counter and ever so slowly and stiffly returned to face the ridicule Lucy would certainly revel in.
Lucy made a decision. A decision Lucy had made before but had never not regretted making. Lucy smiled. Smiled with their whole body. Lucy put a lot into that smile, a conscious physicality to confess one diminutively complicated truth to their partner in this place. That it was okay, that this place and environment they had established together, established within another, was safe.
It worked.
Seiji visibly shook, his aloofness falling to the floor around them like dandruff. He giggled and took another sip of the whisky and didn’t try to hide the face he made.
Lucy ordered the most colorful glowiest fruity drink they could think of off the top of their head. It was expensive, but Seiji had a inordinate amount of spare change in his loose pockets. Lucy figured he tapped into his own small coin savings to fund their nights together, a thought which Lucy found incredibly endearing, which Lucy chose to be quick in pointing out. The drink itself was as fruity and colorful as it was intoxicating. It was as incredibly out of place in this bar as Lucy was themself, and Seiji was quick to point that out.
And then they started talking, really talking. About everything at first; and then, as the night and drinks went on, nothing. About the competition and the Representative. About magic and the lack thereof. About Philomena and January and Sylas and every other piece of shit teen in this piece of shit city.
Lucy finally figured out what they really liked about Seiji. Something that they had noticed in him all this time but never truly acknowledged. Seiji saw Lucy for what they truly were. Not some childish cur. Not some kind of insidious male infiltrator. Not a drag queen or crossdresser here for entertainment. Not some pitiable helpless nomag. Not a duplicitous charlatan. Not some unfulfilled trans woman. Not just another silly bubbly member of the queer community. Not someone who’s problems could be in any way related to or quantified or circumvented. He saw Lucy for what they really were, just a violated and abject teen trying their best. He wasn’t turned off by Lucy’s cold exterior, or mean streak. Quite the opposite, he seemed engaged by it, like he could always see right through it.
“...Anyway that’s how I learned just how much pain I could endure before passing out.” Seiji’s face was white as a ghost by the end of the story. Gosh, maybe Lucy was a having a little bit too much to drink, otherwise why would they tell this story? But the drink made the hurt quiet down. Honestly Lucy could get used to this. Rothart had quite the wine cellar, if there was one thing Lucy was great at, it was spiriting away small items. So what’s a little self medication in the face of all of Lucy’s anguish? But right now Lucy was feeling anything but anguish. Maybe it wasn’t the drink that was burning away their pain, but the company. Maybe both in equal parts; this certainly necessitated more experimentation, which necessitated more alcohol and more Seiji.
They talked till the bar shut down and booted the both of them onto the street. The surly doorman locking the steel aperture, cutting off their present supply of alcohol. “You don’t have to go home but you can’t stay here.” The typical faire.
It was nearly four o’clock and it was utterly freezing as they both climbed the steep stone staircase to the street. Seiji didn’t seem to mind the cold that much, but Lucy felt like they were dying as the haze of the icy sea wind hit them, the shawl unable to keep up this late into the night. He gave them his suit jacket, which kept Lucy warm far more than it would have if it had been just anyone’s. The booze flowing through their veins was helping with the cold too, although it slowed down their mind pretty heavily. And in light shafts projected by the street lights into the fog, time seemed to start skipping around, back and forward and back again. The ground began dancing beneath them, like the bow of a swaying sailing ship.
Things had been fairly tense between their familiars the whole evening so they had both sent them home earlier. They were all alone, in a misty morning alleyway. Seiji caught Lucy as they stumbled again and again. Looking up into his pretty face, after fumbling over for the fifth time, Lucy took in the great details of his visage. It was, in this moment, one of the most sublime experience a mortal had ever received. His head lightly haloed by the ambience of a street lamp, his sinewy and small body wrapped up tight above them. Lucy could feel the toughness of his flesh beneath his dress shirt, his toned arms and boozy breath washing over them in equal spades. But the relic at the center of this altarpiece was his expression. As with all of his looks, it was in its own way a puzzle. But plain as day was the concern one has for a loved one. Not pity, nor reticence, but the face one makes when they are worried about a person who is precious to them. It was sublime, and Lucy was utterly humbled. Lucy wondered how many times Seiji had made this expression in his life, how many people had had the honor of seeing it made for them. Lucy knew that they had never seen it before on anyone else, so to see it here and now meant the absolute world.
He pulled Lucy back up and started walking them to his motorcycle. Lucy had seen it once before. He had arrived on the thing the first day of the competition, although it had a sidecar then.
“Here let me, uh… let me get you home, Lucy,” Seiji said, while still hefting the weight of the taller person in his arms. Lucy whined like the little kid they never had the chance to be.
“Seiji! Let’s not. Let’s go do something else! Let’s do something fun! I’m not done, it’s not fun till I’m… till I’m done.” Lucy knew they were drunk, but that didn’t change things. They knew they weren’t ready to go home and sleep this off.
“Okay, I have an idea,” Seiji replied after some hesitation.
Riding on the back of Seiji’s motorcycle was unlike any experience Lucy had ever felt. Arms wrapped tightly around his middle, face pressed into the warm crook of his neck. The cold air blew past Lucy at what felt like incredible speeds, their hair whipping around behind them. The air bit into their eye which forced it shut and them to press even closer into Seiji’s neck. They stopped a few blocks away, not wanting the rumble of the motorcycles engine to disturb their quarry.
“Yeah, she basically spends every day tending to the thing, it’s like her pride and joy,” Seiji whispered as they approached the gates to the mansion. Lucy had butterflies in their stomach and couldn’t stop giggling. Lucy had never thought to do anything like this before. Lucy had broken the law many times before to get by but never anything that they didn’t need to do to survive. Gosh it was just such a fun night! “We’ll have to creep our way around to the side of the mansion, the part that’s mostly under the stone statue.” Before they passed through the threshold to the grounds, Seiji turned back and magically summoned a large red fire axe, and held it out to Lucy. “I know you can’t merc a garden empty handed.” It had a heavy satisfying weight to it, and they felt confident even if Lucy barely knew the first thing in mercing a garden.
Around the side of the mansion the garden came into view. The thing was more massive than Lucy had anticipated, more manicured and decadent than any ordinary girl’s hobby should ever be. The sight of the endless rows of rare imported flowers killed any doubts in Lucy’s mind that what they were doing was a bad thing.
Lucy channelled all their bitterness and sorrow as they stuck the pick end of the axe into the soil and began running along the tulip bed rending root, stem, and flower alike. Seiji taking Lucy’s cue began ripping shrubbery up by the roots, the rubies in his ensemble glowing as he snapped their trunks with his hands wreathed in magic. At the end of the tulip row lucy lifted the axe and plunged it down into the hydrangea bed, then the dahlia bed, then the daisies, and so on. Neither of them were sober enough to take the necessary caution to stay silent in their work, and Seiji had begun setting fire to rose bushes, which cast the garden and the old stone house in a beautiful dim light.
Lucy got to a row of pansies, and decided to spare it, feeling a strange affinity for the plants. They looked over to Seiji who was beckoning them over to a large tree in the corner of the garden. Lucy drunkenly sprinted over nearly falling onto the sharp implement, but rather managed to use their own momentum to slam the axe deep into the tree’s trunk. The tree gave a shutter and shed a torrent of apples which clattered to the ground around them both. Seiji casually grabbed one and took a bite as Lucy struggled to pull the axe back out of its place in the tree. It took some effort but finally Lucy was able to swing again, and again, and again, eventually getting the axe so deeply lodged in the base of the tree that they were certain neither of them would be able to take it out. Even though the tree creaked and groaned it still stood erect like a defiant middle finger in Lucy’s face. They bum-rushed it, jumping into the branches and pushing their weight down as hard as they could. The tree bent under their weight but still refused to give up the ghost. Lucy looked back at Seiji who had backed up and was already running full pelt to add his weight to the takedown. At the last moment boosting his jump with a little magic he plummeted in amongst the branches with Lucy, and with cacophonous snaps the tree fell backwards into the shrubbery that lined the property and the two of them with it. They rolled and laughed together in amongst the nest created by its decimated form.
Finally standing and surveying their handiwork, Lucy had the suspicion that they might have actually improved the garden, the disarray bringing them immense satisfaction. It was really quite a thing of beauty, the horrible mess they had made. As the fire Seiji had set spread it flowed and weaved along the paths of upturned roots Lucy had carved. It was like an artistic collaboration and their shared media was the theatre of cruelty.
Lights in the mansion were on now and they quickly heard the swift pops of city guard manifesting outside the estate, likely to not be merciful on the ne’er-do-wells that ended their otherwise peaceful nightshift. Neither of them had discussed an exit strategy, nor even privately considered this as a possibility. They both began running.
“Dude, my mom’s gonna kill me,” Seiji shouted over the crackle of the fire and growing barks from pursuing guard dogs. A magical blast pierced the smoke and mist from behind them, barely missing them and striking a nearby poplar bursting cleanly through it’s, causing the top to shuffle backwards over the fence. “My mom is going to kill me,” he repeated in a somber tone.
They waded through the underbrush until they finally made it to the fence. Lucy, no stranger to fences managed to clumsily vault up the thing, and pull up the majority of their weight to rest prone the top. Seiji, whether because of his smaller stature or sheltered upbringing had a lot more trouble, needing to pull himself up bodily with Lucy’s arm. Finally the two of them spilled over the edge and awkwardly fell to the ground.
Lucy got up, and could see guard searchlights piercing through the fog closing in on where they landed. What Lucy couldn’t see was Seiji. The boy had somehow vanished, teleported away without a trace as soon as he passed the threshold out of the Vasillia Compound. Lucy was alone, and the all too familiar barking and shouting of guards surrounding them reminded them of the story they had told earlier this night. Lucy wished they didn’t know just how much pain they could withstand before they passed out. What’s more, Lucy wished they didn’t know that it was over for them. They had thrown away their life in one petty act. The only magician willing to teach Lucy would disown them. They’d be put on trial, and hated as they were Lucy knew there would be no mercy in the sentencing. Justice would be swift and brutal.
Worse than the beating they knew they were soon to receive, and worse than the fact that their life was over, was the feeling of betrayal. That after the connections they had shared that evening, Seiji had left them. Left them alone.
Suddenly Seiji was there again, and then neither of them were. They were together, tightly embraced, standing on the opposite hill. The sun was barely beginning to peek over the rolling sea below. Lucy could see the dim blaze of the garden fire they had set and the lights of seeker stones as the mist began to dissipate in the bright warmth that the sun brought.
“I’msorryIforgotyoucouldn’tteleport,” an exhausted Seiji managed to stammer out. Lucy longed to press their head against Seiji’s chest, but settled for looking down at his face. It was that look again. That perfectly concerned infinitely loving empathetic look that would mark the second time Lucy had ever seen it in their life. Lucy giggled and Seiji’s face returned to its natural smirk.
Lucy’s lips curled into one of their own before lowering their head to press their smirks together.