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"Cyril, darling," said Aristide, splaying his fingers across the exposed waist in front of him. The faint moonlight streaming in through their window was just enough that he avoided the scar he knew he was dangerously close to; he was rewarded by only the barest flinch from Cyril, quickly absorbed and forgotten. One flinch was nothing. Sometimes he would fling himself out of Aristide's arms and turn up an hour later by the seaside, straight tucked firmly between shaking fingers, staring out as if Amberlough herself was about to emerge from the waters.
Cyril gave no hint of doing any of that now. He only shifted in Aristide's arms and said, "Yes?"
"I have a surprise for you."
There was a pause. Cyril shifted again, turning so that the two of them were facing each other. This close, and in this light, his blue eyes looked more like pools of black nothingness. Inscrutable. So was his voice, when he said, "What kind?"
"Well, nothing like what I'd have had for you if this was my dressing room at the Bee, if that's what you're worried about," said Aristide briskly. A corner of Cyril's mouth pulled up in a smile, probably remembering more than a few nights when a too-tipsy Ari had pinned Cyril down against a mirror and—well. Even if Aristide could cajole his aching joints into that same athleticism now, Cyril would probably not take kindly to being pinned down against anything for a while.
"I don't think 'worried' is the right word," said Cyril, wryly, disentangling himself from Aristide in order to sit up against the bedframe. "Worried about my performance, perhaps."
"Oh, hush," said Aristide dismissively. He stretched like a cat and felt a heady flicker of satisfaction at the way Cyril's eyes tracked his movement. "I've made less willing performers do better for less incentive."
"Incentive, hm?" Cyril leaned forward, just a little. "And that would be?"
Aristide raised one eyebrow, sliding out from the covers and rather regretting it when the cool seaside air met his bare skin. "Come with me," he said. "Maybe you'll find out."
The last time Cyril had been surprised, by Ari, it had involved breaking him out of prison and taking him away from everything he'd ever known. Rather hoping this would not be a repeat of that experience, he plucked his dressing gown from the settee and followed Aristide into the living room.
Ari was already there, and, with a flair that was all too reminiscent of the stage, handed Cyril a white envelope. He took it, frowning when he caught sight of the name on the back: Jinadh Addas. "Your surprise is a letter from Jinadh?"
"No," said Aristide, leaning back against the cushions. "My surprise is a letter to Lillian. You remember I told you it was too dangerous to attempt contact with Gedda? Especially when your sister's mail is, in all likelihood, still monitored rather regularly?"
"Yes," Cyril said. A strange knot had formed at the back of his throat at the mention of his sister.
Aristide pulled his lighter out of his pocket but didn't retrieve a straight to go with it. He only turned his golden lighter over and over, as if studying the way it reflected the lamplight. "As it happens, there are so many packages coming in and out of this town at Solstice that I..." He paused. "Persuaded someone to include an extra envelope in a package headed for Gedda."
"Ah," said Cyril. "I'm to pretend to be a foreign correspondent writing in for one of Jinadh's editorials."
"That's my Cyril," said Aristide approvingly, and gave him a tiny, sweet smile that had Cyril ducking his head in embarrassment despite being the only other person in the room. The motion made a lock of hair fall into his eyes, and he irritably jerked up his head to dispel it.
Aristide's breath caught in his throat. It did that, sometimes, when Cyril was doing the most ordinary things—he couldn't decide whether to be flattered, or wonder at the distance that still lurked between them, if Ari was still unused to these tiny things, or if he should be doing something saccharine like reassuring Aristide that he was going to be stuck with Cyril for the rest of his life.
In the end, as usual, Cyril did none of those things. He only reached across the desk for a pen and paper and started to write.
The space that followed was the kind that Aristide would usually have filled with a drink, or a straight, and though there were plenty of both to be found within easy reach, Aristide mostly just watched Cyril write. It was like watching the most maddening kind of striptease, where each removed layer only allowed you the barest flash of skin, the quickest glimmer of personality, before being covered back up again as though it had never been. Sometimes Aristide thought he knew Cyril, could recognize the way his fingers wrapped around his pen from the way those fingers used to, just as easily, wrap around Aristide. And sometimes looking at Cyril was like looking at a ghost, one that Ari thought might disappear if he looked too hard or too long.
He snuck glances when Cyril wasn't looking, and eventually felt the heat of Cyril's gaze focused on him in return. "Adam doesn't have a seal, does he?" Cyril asked into the silence. He'd transferred his stare to the envelope. "Most foreign correspondents would."
"He has a seal, of sorts," said Aristide, reaching into his pocket. His heart was beating double time. Cyril, oblivious, held out a hand for what he presumed would be his character's seal, and Aristide instead closed his fingers around something small and smooth, and tossed Cyril a ring.
It took Cyril a moment to register what he was holding. His expression didn't change, but he did go very still. "Aristide."
"Yes?"
"This is..." Cyril lifted the ring to the light, as if Aristide hadn't spent countless nights studying it himself, as if he hadn't engaged in a very amusing, hour-long haggling session with the woman who made them down at the fisherman's market. As if Aristide wasn't holding his breath as he waited for a response. "Are you serious?"
There were plenty of snide remarks Aristide could have made to that. But there was a naked vulnerability in Cyril's voice that pressed Ari's heart down and in with the ache of it, so, plague it all, what he ended up saying was "You know I am."
"You want me in marriage," Cyril said, his expression shuttering into a calm, cool mask.
A different man might have taken that look as a marker of Cyril's displeasure, or perhaps even dislike. Aristide, though, had spent enough time around DePauls to know what it really meant. "What are you so afraid of?"
"Afraid of?" Cyril did, finally, look up to meet his gaze. He looked like he had in the prison cell, asking if Ari would really have wanted him crawling back on his knees in disgrace. He looked as terrified as he had before pulling Ari into his arms, that night they'd spent stumbling away from Cyril's execution. And, just for a moment, the look on his face reminded Aristide of the one Cyril used to get after being asked one too many questions he wouldn't answer. Back then he would have answered with a near-perfect lie. Now, though...
"I thought we promised," said Aristide. "Small lies."
Cyril swallowed. "I'm not afraid."
"Well." Aristide raised an eyebrow. "Marry me, then."
"Why?" Cyril's hand twitched, like he was reaching for a bottle and then thought better of it. Neither of them were still young enough to drown out conversations they didn't want to have in sex and too much alcohol. "Why would you want me?"
"If you are seriously about to question my dedication to you, Cyril," said Aristide, tone as smooth as glass, "I'd suggest that you think better of it."
"I know," Cyril said. He reached up, dragged a hand through his hair, took a breath. “Queen's cunt, I know. I lie awake thinking about it. You threw your life away for me, Ari.”
“Yes,” said Aristide. “Multiple times.”
“You’ve never given me a straight answer as to why.”
A DePaul, asking for a straight answer? That was new. “I didn’t know you wanted one.” Then, at Cyril's expression: "Oh, alright." He paused. How did you explain love to the person who loved you? How did he delineate the mess of emotions that had made him slam Memmediv into the floor at Hadharati? How could he ever put it into words, those endless nights of drinking himself into a mindless stupor because he had thought Cyril was—
Well.
"Do you remember," said Aristide, looking down at the ring that Cyril still held, "the night we found that bar on Temple Street?"
"Oh," said Cyril, eyebrows lifting. "When that bartender made me such a terrible Enselmese drink that I promptly threw it up into the toilet?"
"And then we got tossed out of the bar," Aristide finished, a rather rakish grin spreading across his face. It was the one he'd once summoned to introduce particularly interesting acts, and, later, the one he'd thrown at red-carpet reporters when they asked about his personal life. Now, though, it wasn't an act. Just Cyril.
He looked interested now, at least. "What about it?"
"You were very, very drunk," Ari recalled, and for a moment the cabin walls dissolved around them, replaced by the familiar sights and sounds of Temple Street on a summer night. "I was attempting, and failing, to get you back to your flat before any of Culpepper's people saw us together. But all the trolleys had closed, so I had to drag you into a cab."
"I don't remember this part," said Cyril. He was watching Aristide very intently. "Did I throw up again?"
"No, as a matter of fact. First, you announced to the general public that I was wrong for you, and that our relationship could only end very, very badly. You might also have been about to tell me that I should find a different Foxhole worker to romance before your drink came back up onto the pavement."
"So?" said Cyril.
"So," said Aristide, looking him straight in the eye, "I knew I would have to spend the rest of my life proving that you were wrong."
"The rest of your life, is it?" At last, a tiny flicker of a smile crossed Cyril's face. "You're asking that we be enjoined in marriage, and you can't even be bothered to get down on your knees."
"Oh, darling," Ari said, "if you want me on my knees you have only to ask."
Cyril exhaled, visibly, the slope of his shoulders so achingly familiar in a situation that was anything but. "I'm asking."
Remembering a not-so-distant time when Aristide had knelt on a much less pleasant floor to plead for Cyril, Ari could not help but hope he wasn't going to make a habit of doing so, even as he settled himself on the carpet and looked up at his lover with as much vulnerability as he could hope to express. "Will you?" he said.
Cyril had always worn his heart on his sleeve, and Aristide saw the expressions chasing themselves across his face—disbelief, and adoration, and a million other little emotions Ari had not quite yet learned by heart. "Yes," said Cyril, finally. "Mother help me. Yes, Aristide, I'll marry you."
"As I thought," Ari teased. "Give me your hand?"
Cyril did so; Aristide used it to clamber, rather laboriously, to his feet. "Have you finished that letter?"
"Just about." Cyril, finally, slid the ring onto his finger, in a subtle sort of way that fooled absolutely no one. "I'll just seal this up, I suppose."
"Yes," said Aristide, watching him. The firelight played across Cyril's face, unable to hide his tiny smile. "I suppose you will."
«Moon-eyes,» said Jinadh a few weeks later, entering a completely different, but equally fire-lit, living room. He was frowning down at a cream-coloured envelope in his hands. Switching to Geddan, he said, "Have you told anyone to write to me lately?"
Lillian looked up from the paper in her hands, from where she sat in her favourite chair near the fire. Stephen was curled up at her feet like a cat, chin propped in his hands as he studied his latest comic book. "I don't believe I have," she said. "Why?"
"It's odd," Jinadh admitted, and crossed the length of the room to hand her the letter. "I haven't run a write-in piece in months—they fell out of favour with my higher-ups—but someone's written in about their life on the coast anyway. Interesting, but not exactly what I would've been looking for."
Lillian had stopped listening entirely, her heart slamming against her ribcage like it was trying to escape. She recognized the name on the envelope. "Jinadh," she said, and he quieted. "This isn't from a would-be correspondent. This is from Cyril."
Stephen looked up at that. "Did you say Uncle Cyril?"
Jinadh's eyebrows raised. "But—oh."
Unfolding the letter with trembling hands, Lillian scanned the familiar handwriting with an unidentifiable heartache. How long had it been since she'd thought about her brother? "He's fine," she said, very softly. "Doing well, even."
"Look," said Stephen, who had scrambled to his feet and was now peering over his mother's shoulder. He pointed at a line near the bottom. "I didn't know he liked Aristide that much."
It was a throwaway comment, really—my husband and I send our well-wishes—but it made even Jinadh whistle aloud. "Husband?" he said. "Who would have thought?"
Lillian traced her fingers over the letter, thinking of her wild, foolish, traitorous brother, and the steady light she had glimpsed in Aristide's eyes during those few times she'd caught him looking at Cyril. "People surprise you," she said.
(Later, Cyril would open a letter from Jinadh—congratulations and careful well-wishes penned in Lillian's looping cursive—and tell Aristide much the same thing.)