Archive of Our Own

The only problem as of five o’clock on a chilly winter Perland evening: Pavel lives in a fucking dump.

Well, truth be told, if he doesn’t think about the fact that he lives in a fucking dump , while he has a brief breakdown over his current reality that his boss and also the most powerful person in Perland is en route a few stalks behind him to his house that he’s leading her to, his house is a little nicer than a dump, but the quantifying amount of ‘a little’, is absolutely to be held to its definition here. 

It doesn’t smell of trash, but in the same way that if you’re brave enough you can still call decomposing flesh dinner. It’s got all its walls in place and a functioning door, but the draft is chilly and he has a hand-woven wolf pelt blanket from his childhood that he continues to use and plenty of high quality socks Violet has not only abandoned to him out of pity but also insisted on gifting him as a belated house-warming gift (again and again and again, for, and imagine this is said in an utterly jubilant voice that is simply delighted with the intelligence he has displayed in finding this little loophole, “it can still count, because your house is so cold, so how can you call it sufficiently warmed yet?”). He’s vaguely certain grass grows in the corners, and it’s close enough to Perland’s barricading walls that you can hear all the noises of the outside world including the more beasty ones that would leave a lesser man with his whites open and pupils staring in horror at the moving shadow of a tree branch outside blustering in the wind on his wall.

“It’s just,” Pavel tries to insist. “It’s not especially comfortable where I live. I can just carry him to his estate - or yours, if you’d prefer - and we’ll all have a much better time.”

“Move him?” Lilias sounds aghast. “Not if he’s ill! What he needs is peace and quiet, and also some honey tea. Do you have honey? Shall we get some on the way?”

“I always keep a bottle of honey in my cupboard.”

“It hasn’t crystallised, has it?”

“No, ma’am. I used it just last night.”

“Was it good?”

“Yes, ma’am. It was perfectly serviceable.”

Lilias proceeds to stop dead in her tracks in the busy afternoon rush of Perland central, making a few individuals swerve to avoid colliding with her. Someone throws a swear at her but she remains unhindered, her hands on her hips. Pavel almost wishes he had this level of confidence - or disinterest in caring for others. He hasn't quite decided what to chalk this up as yet. “Oh, but that isn’t good enough! He should have good things, like Fairy Rose honey. Do you have any of that?”

“No, ma’am,” he says wearily. “It’s just regular bee honey, straight from the hives.”

“Then we must be sure to get him some of that,” she announces as she trots past him. Apparently a straight line is decent enough for her to travel on her lonesome, though she pauses at the crossroad and stares at the sign as if trying to pretend it’s a mathematical equation that if she spends enough time working on, will eventually be imparted upon the correct route to Pavel’s house.

Half an hour later - it would have been an hour considering the size of the city, but Lilias had insisted on a brisk jog instead of a leisurely walk, and Pavel is far from unwilling to decrease the amount of time he has to spend alone with her - he is fishing out his keys from his pocket as Lilias looks downright stupefied at the outside of what can generously be called his house. At least the ivy that grows up the side of it is precious, he has always thought, but it isn’t as though it’s a particularly controlled bit of growth that he doesn’t have to dedicate time to cleaning up out of his chimney every month.

“Oh, but it’s cute,” Lilias says cheerfully, as if she can sense he’s growing steadily more mortified at the rather blatant ‘damn bitch, you live like this?’ vibe pouring out of every hole in her body and weighing on Pavel’s shoulders like a backpack full of rocks. “I don’t have an issue with it. I have rooms back at the estate I simply have nothing I can do with! You can’t say you don’t make the best of the space you get given in a state like this. It shows your resourcefulness!”

He’d really prefer it just to show his appreciation for warm feet, but he can’t exactly blame her for being an optimist. “I like that in the summer I don’t have to open any windows, I suppose,” he tries.

“Atta boy!” she laughs. “That’s the positivity I like to see.”

He brings his key to the keyhole, only to be met with an inability to get it all the way in. Then the door clicks from the other side. The intent would preferably have been to not rouse him as they approached, but Lilias is a magnanimous woman and speaks like she is announcing to a crowd - it’s perhaps to be expected that the sound of their voices could travel the three steps it takes for you to get from Pavel’s front door to his sofa where he’d left Violet to attempt to sleep some of his shivers off.

“Sorry,” Pavel asks apologetically, keeping his voice low as Violet opens the door cringing and a hand resting against his forehead. “Did we wake you?”

He had been hoping this would be a case of spontaneous recovery, but poor Violet appears to have only gotten worse in the hours he’s left him. Where his cheeks were merely flushed his entire face has broken out into a horrible crimson, and his eyes can barely appear to stay open in the afternoon light. He carries himself with a bend to his back and a weakness to his knees, and when he groans his voice sounds as though he’s gone and chugged sand all these hours instead of keeping himself hydrated like Pavel had told him. The sickness has him right in its nasty grips and toys with him like he's nothing more than a very stretchy piece of rubber and those grips belong to a bored child in their morning classes, Pavel thinks ruefully.

“No, I was up anyway,” he sighs. “My feet are cold but I go under a blanket and then they’re hot but then my head gets cold, so I shuffle around every other minute. Sleep is like,” he clicks his fingers once or twice, before swivelling his eyes upwards like he’s thinking only to promptly regret it as he winces and brings them back to look at Pavel. “Dust. Persistently flowing through the gaps in my fingers, but ever present across me because my eyelids are so heavy as though I just brought my tips against a box left in my attic for a decade.”

This guy and his fucking theatrics that he insists upon, as though he isn’t currently melting across his doorframe trying to hold himself up like the way you lick a melting ice cream to stop it from toppling over. “You can’t be feeling that bad if you’re managing to speak like this.”

Violet huffs, throwing his arms over his chest. His fingers wrap around the little tassels of the shawl and begin their fiddling, because the man is powered entirely by kinetic energy and if he isn’t moving every other second his heart will bloody stop, apparently. “But I have to put it like this. Otherwise you don’t understand the sheer amount I’m suffering. Because I am suffering,” Violet says, very firmly. “I’m suffering like- okay, picture the summer festival, and those ever so small booths that they put those poor little goldfish in, and-”

“Alright, alright, I get it. You’ve a guest, you realise,” he says, exactly as Lilias coos and croons and moves to bundle him up.

For a moment he balks, eyes widening, and then he squeaks through the rasp in his voice when Lilias pulls him in for a hug. “Oh my silly little idiot,” she sighs into the ruffled hair on top of his head as he puts up the weakest fight Pavel thinks he’s ever seen from anyone, let alone someone as vibrant as him. “You’re burning up!"

“Lilias?” His voice comes out muffled, face buried into the collar of her shirt. “What are you doing here?”

“Why, you’re sick,” she chirps. “And what kind of big sister would I be if I didn’t come to help you, hm?”

“A pretty average one? It’s just a bit of a nasty cold, I’m not dying.”

She scoffs loudly, says, “we always aspire to be better than average - I thought you knew that, dear brother!” and then before Pavel can do anything she puts an arm behind Violet’s legs to swing him onto his back and into her arms.

Not that the carry comes easy. Violet is fidgeting and fussing already as she embraces him and the second he’s on his back like a swaddled kitten headache be damned he’s thrown his hands out and flailing them like he hopes to connect to her head and knock her senseless onto Pavel’s floorboards.

“Whoa, hello? ” he manages to squeak. Through the graininess of his voice, it sounds like scratching nails down a chalkboard. “Put me down! Lilias! Cut it out! ”

More waggling and rambunctious fury, energy he’s stored up across the day gathered from every part of his body to be put into one vicious attempt at flinging himself out of her arms with his own strength. Unfortunately that amounts to about as strong as a tower of cards attempting to support itself when the wind so much as sneezes, so for the sake of his dignity, Pavel pretends to busy himself putting his coat on the rake and forgetting he wasn’t wearing a hat but miming the act of tucking one away anyway.

“Come on, now,” Lilias chastises. “You’ll never get better if you spend all your time throwing a tantrum.”

“I’m not throwing a tantrum,” he insists sharply, and even Pavel can’t help but snicker because yeah, he kind of is. “And even if I was, I feel perfectly within my right to complain when you always treat me like a doll!”

“You’re as cute as one,” she says (and this time Pavel outright laughs, because a flash of pride darts across Violet’s features before he remembers he’s supposed to be mad at her and pouts wide enough it looks like he’s just come up from bobbing for apples). “It’s just to the sofa. Is that right, Pavel?”

“Oh, yes, the sofa’s better than the bed,” he replies, though he can’t help but feel he’s immediately drowned out by the way Violet snaps, “that makes it even worse! I can walk three steps on my own!”

He’s masterfully ignored when Lilias gently places him onto the sofa as she murmurs, “If anything I treat you more like a pet. I can’t think of when I’ve treated you like a doll - I don’t much care for dress-up.”

Frowning, Violet grumbles, “what about the time you saw me on patrol with another Raider and insisted I come to you because you had a very important mission only I could handle only to ruffle my hair and make my scalp go blue in front of him? I didn’t live that down for days ,” as he starts wriggling again, this time into the pillows to settle down.

In his tottering haste to get to the door, he’d abandoned the blanket to live a sad, crumpled life on the floor - Lilias begins to resurrect it, bundling it into her hands and then slowly tugging it across him. “Again, more like when you pat a hound on the head,” says Lilias, as she leans across him to tuck the corners of the pillow underneath the sofa’s pillows like she’s fucking tying him up in a straitjacket. Violet, obviously, rolls his eyes. “Don’t you agree, Pavel?”

He snaps up straight at the sudden address and almost falls out of the cupboard he was sneaking around in - a new blanket, he had thought, would be prudent considering the amount of sweat he recalls Violet absolutely refusing to let him verbally acknowledge, and he’d found a perfectly satisfactory one buried under three sweats he’d left behind and then forgotten about. Said blanket now has been stepped on with muddy boots in his surprise. Oops.

“Yes,” says Pavel with a cringe as he tries to wean it off. “He is pretty cute, I guess.”

He looks back in time to see Lilias straighten her back, and begin not-subtly checking his place out. Delightfully this means Violet happens to be vacant at the moment, so that’s where he scampers over, blanket in hand.

The first thing Violet rasps as he hovers into view is, “you think I’m cute?” as he hopefully peers up at him with wide eyes and fluttering lashes.

“In a pet sort of way,” says Pavel, and Violet couldn’t keep the horror off his face if there was a gun to his head. “Here.”

He quietly holds out the extra blanket for Violet to drape over himself, which he accepts with a grin and kicks the sweaty blanket off him to a pile on the floor. 

“How are you feeling?” Pave asks as he watches him get all nice and snug.

“Worse, now that she’s here,” Violet replies, but the roll of his eyes are playful and he can’t seem to stop grinning now that she’s turned away. He’s exuberant enough even despite the flush of his forehead that Pavel can’t help but smile lightly, too. “Don’t mind her, okay? She’s just a bit enthusiastic whenever she can get out of the estate and I fear she’s getting carried away with you. Don’t speak if you don’t feel like it. She’s not twelve, she’ll get over it.”

“Is she always like this over you?”

Violet’s features turn quizzical as he stops fiddling with the blanket. “Like what?” 

“Like, you know.” Pavel opens his arms to the fucking heavens. “Fussy?”

“Oh, yes,” he chuckles. “Ever since I’ve known her! She was very quick to accept me as her little brother, you know, and she’s always been such a bother ever since.”

“I suppose it’s rather to be expected that one is a bother if they’re related,” Pavel mumbles.

“But it’s not all bad. Whenever I was grounded, she’d sneak around and scale the large tree that was just outside my room and deliver me a bit of dinner, either swiped from the kitchen or from the bakery. She’d stay, too. Rain or shine, she’d keep me company, for I’d always be wanting it after a day of being locked in my room.”

The nostalgia is palpable in his voice, if one couldn’t gather it from the relaxed smile across his face. “A bother indeed.”

“I could have stood to learn some consequences with an empty stomach, I’ll admit,” Violet chuckles weakly. “Was Ralph ever a pain?”

He makes a totally non-committal noise. “I mean, I don’t call him a pet, but he is still a wolf. So it sort of annoys me when he eats pennies off the ground and then I have to make sure he passes them or take him to an animal expert to make him pass them.”

“Hm,” Violet says nonchalantly. “I can’t say I ever did that for Lilias. Or her for me. We were a stomach issue-free family for the most part.”

“A blessing, that. I wish a life free of peering through fecal matter for digestion issues upon you.”

A cringe, and then he sticks his tongue out. When Ralph yips from the bathroom and trots out having bored of the locale in that funny puppy-like no reasoning sort of way, Violet says, “I’ll simply live my life in blissful delusion that my sister does not shit and leave it at that,” as the wolf cocks his head curiously at them.

“Oh, but this simply won’t do,” Lilias announces loudly a short bit later.

Pavel is still curled up quietly beside Violet as he tries again to nap, Ralph having rested his muzzle on the bit of the sofa free of Violet’s blob-like consistency, and so has absolutely no fucking idea what she’s referring to. 

Helpfully, Violet shrugs at him, so he gets onto his knees instead of his ass and sets Ralph’s tail a-blazing. Likely hoping he’ll be getting a walk, the sweet thing. “Pardon, ma’am?”

“We have to get supplies,” Lilias says firmly, before a sudden alarming crash makes Violet damn near jump high enough to make a distinctly idiot-shaped hole in his ceiling. “Hm. My apologies. I hope you weren’t especially attached to the purple mug.”

“My mug,” Violet whines in his sad little rasp. Pavel glances apologetically at Violet as he steals his hand back (Violet sadly makes grabby hands at it, but gives up after Ralph brings his paws up as paw beans are an incredibly solid upgrade from regular boring human hands) and begin making his way over to where Lilias disappeared off to. But not before Violet whines again, “my Pavel.”

“Supplies, ma’am?” he tries as he turns the corner, and sees her stalking through his pantry like an ant who’ll be executed if she doesn’t bring food back to the hill. A half-finished carton of eggs seems to have passed the assessment, placed now on his counter; a loaf of bread has not, thrown onto the floor.

When she replies, she barely sounds as though she’s heard him. “No, no, this just won’t do. Pavel, you live like this? I’m inviting you and Violet to dinner when he recovers, you need a good meal in you. Hearty! Do you like bread? Good bread, not whatever shite this is.”

She says that last bit while delivering a ferocious kick to the sad loaf on the ground. “I think I could survive on it fairly happily if you left me stranded with a few loaves,” he replies, watching her get onto her tiptoes to sweep the back of his cupboard with her fingers. He has to admit this isn’t what he was expecting to get assessed on, though, and rather bemusedly adds, “I’m sorry my supplies aren’t to your standards.”

“It’s got nothing to do with standards,” she insists with a frown. “It’s to do with what is good and tasty in this world and these, I fear, are not so, especially for one in so dire straits as the purple one over there.”

“I’m not dying,” Violet croaks from the sofa.

“We needed Fairy Rose anyway,” she muses, sweeping her hand again to the back of another cupboard and producing some bean sprouts that she squints at and then make the quality cut when they’re put on the counter next to the eggs. “

“Ma’am, I respect your opinion,” says Pavel very patiently, though he can’t help but personally feel as though the gritting of his teeth on ‘respect’ was a little obvious. “But - and I don’t mean this to be rude - it’s the end of the month and I haven’t been paid yet, so I can’t exactly afford to go shopping for anything high quality.”

She shakes her head and waggles her finger, her hips jutting out to the side. “Silly Pavel. You’re one of our best Raiders, but your brains are clearly not all there!”

He makes a bit of a garbled noise here as he goes through saying about three different things at once, before giving up and shutting his mouth closed and instead settling for simply feeling a little bit hurt.

“I’m well aware this is my own preference, so you won't be paying.”

“What?” Pavel’s expression falters into shock. “No, ma’am, I couldn’t accept that.”

“Perhaps you couldn’t, but I must insist,” Lilias tells him with a grand flourish, already stepping past him to return her feet into her boots and tug her hood over her head. “I would simply hate it if my poor little idiot passed with nothing more than half-stale rye and below-average honey in his stomach, to say nothing of the medicinal properties of some of what I intend to purchase.”

“Again,” Violet rasps. “Not dying.”

“But,” says Pavel but alas, it’s too late, for he’s already speaking to her back, bathed in the dark indigo of Perland’s winter evening.

“I should mention, Lilias doesn’t exactly make it much of a habit to go wander around the Downtown market,” Violet tells him blearily. “I wonder if she’ll get lost.” A gasp. “Oh, bloody hell - I wonder if she’ll get seen and then shaken down for her money. She only has a hood, after all. How malicious. Why would the brilliant city of Perland do this?”

“Bollocks,” Pavel grumbles under his breath, before stomping into his own boots.

“Oh, don’t worry about me,” Violet had said with a lazy waggle of his hand. “I have little Ralph to keep me company, so take as long as you’d need. Oh, and use my coffers! I'm well-aware you'll perish if the Citylord does a good deed for you personally, so put it in my name.”

By his count, she has already purchased what he thinks could stand to feed half a continent, putting aside that they’re all meant for simply a sickly man - a bag of tomatoes from the largest stall in the market, all of which were handpicked by her through being held in her eyes and glared at until something only known to her helped her decide if it were worth it. No less than three different types of loose tea leaves that she makes Pavel promise he will strain over the evenings, including some chamomile to aid Violet’s sleep that is so fresh the dirt it’s been plucked from still holds onto the bottom of the plant like a veil of lace the bride refuses to take off until their marriage has been consummated. Her bloody Fairy Rose honey, which is almost a strange pink colour in the glass jar when they pass under a streetlight and the illuminating gold strikes what he’d thought was typical honey yellow but is instead beginning to make him think of the rather unappealing remnants of pears that have gone and fallen off the tree and then splattered on the ground only for someone to promptly dump some rotting strawberries in the middle of that pile of compost to-be. 

This part of the market is more fancy than the one he goes to, and it’s beginning to feel a little bit strenuous as he trudges through the cold winter evening and the busy estate workers as they go to and from each stall searching for items to line their sir or madam’s pantry. Plenty more brighter colours than the lower end of the market line the banners, and some have lights right on their banners in the same way trees during the holiday season may be adorned by fairy lights. 

“I happen to note he has a key,” Lilias says, as she places a loaf of bread in Pavel’s arms. Tamed pup no more is he, and instead valiant mule who is to be rewarded with - bread that is seeded with sunflower, pumpkin and flax seeds, apparently. (In all fairness, he has to admit, he could do worse.)

“Fat lot of good it does,” Pavel sighs. “With how wimpy my door is if you really needed to get in, you could just break it down. Putting it up on the hinge without repairing it would probably offer the same level of security it offers now.”

“You are such a simple one! So delightful.” His brow creases - has he just, in a very roundabout way, been insulted? It feels like it. “I was more asking after the… symbolism of the matter. He opened the door when you had a key already in your hand.”

“Oh, that.” Pavel shrugs nonchalantly. “He spends a lot of time at my place. At some point it got annoying trying to make sure he was always at home if I wasn’t so he could let me in so I started thinking about it, and then one day I returned from a long meeting while it was raining only to find him perched on my doorstep drenched to his boots and hair flat like a pancake. Saddest thing I’ve ever seen, I think, so I got him a key.”

She leans into his ear. “Are you certain that’s all?”

“Yes, ma’am,” he replies, and the discomfort he expresses is far from feigned or exaggerated. “It was only because of his needless habit of spending all his time at my house, instead of his very large and very fancy estate.”

She pulls away and puffs her chest out with a grin. “Well, he’s never done very well being on his own, so I’m not surprised. Poor thing had nightmares until he was twelve! I always checked on him when it was time to go to bed and the poor darling would always, without fail, have those big purple eyes peeking out from under the covers and peering over at me.”

This is the sort of thing to hear that he thinks Violet, in all his unending love for Perland and its people, would immediately make like a vengeful god, pick up his sword, and go a-massacring in peak hours under the assumption that if there is no one alive in Perland there will be no one to hear that he needed Big Sis to bat away the spooky monsters under his bed and hand his teddy bear to him before patting his head until he could drift away. If he’s honest, it’s a little too much information for Pavel too, so perhaps he will make like trauma to the head and simply forget it all happened by falling to the concrete and turning his firm skull into the cracked shell of a soon-to-be-cooked raw egg. 

“But that is always the thankless effort of the older sibling, is it not,” she says. “Never once said thank you, the scamp! Ah, well. What is your family like, Pavel?”

“Is there an issue, ma’am?”

She’s quiet for a moment, the evening market noises being all that can be heard for a moment. When she speaks it’s preceded with a sigh, right from her chest, and Pavel feels a little twinge of badness at his heart strings. Well, a fiddle to be played and a soldier to be ordered aren’t especially different if you think about it.

She says, “there’s no issue at all, Pavel. I was simply curious, but it has just occurred to me that this must be rather awkward for you.”

“Um, well, it is most definitely a little strange,” Pavel feels he is right to admit. “You are my boss and all."

"Try not to worry about it. At the moment, we're just two concerned friends ensuring the health of our mutual one. 

“I would hardly call us friends.”

She blinks in surprise at him. “You and Violet? Truly ?”

“No, he and I are-” he stops dead, and Lilias immediately laughs at him as though she were expecting it. “Please don’t tease me, ma’am.”

“Fine,” she sings. “I apologise if I was prying. I admittedly had hoped you’d viewed me less like your boss and more like your friend's-” he pouts and she pauses, before purposefully continuing with, “Partner’s elder sister.”

Pavel blinks. “Um. For what reason?”

“Come, now. Was there a reason you and Violet became partners?”

He thinks back on this with a drawn-out hum. Perhaps in an undignified matter for Violet - though nothing about any of this has had particular grace for the poor man - he settles on, “actually, not really. He just wouldn’t leave me alone.”

"Well, much as I'd like to point to a so-romantic conclusion of there needing no reason for the stars to bring the two of you together," she taps her chin thoughtfully here, some momentous court's pause before bringing her investigation's conclusions to the head of the room. "Perhaps he's also just a bit stupid."

“That was my conclusion as well,” Pavel tells her. And it’s at this moment he’s beginning to think that perhaps he’s a bit too empathetic for his own good in the end, much as he postulates himself as a man who values survival above all else, because Lilias nods and drops the conversation as she turns away and he realises, they have exactly the same sad face, all gentle smile that doesn’t reach their eyes and resignation so taut across their features you could snap them back and feel the pain ripple across your own face like the way a rubber band would stretch and then make you regret it.

So he sighs; with a strange and perplexing affection muses to himself that this family will see the far side crack of his ass if they continue along this road; starts from the illness his mother contracted when he was young, still wore his hair long and the flowers of the ruins had yet to bloom for spring was yet a month away right up to when he obtained the belt he proudly wears around his waist when he was sixteen and still barely knew the language.

They continue through the market as he regales her with a tale of nomadic existence and how you can miss certain flowers and their bloom even though the grocery store always seems to have them in stock no matter the season. She listens and nods at the right times, asks questions at even better times, and purchases an ever more expanding set of items to stuff Violet like a turkey for the holidays, apparently. 

Soon indigo darkens further to black, and Pavel has to put his foot down about staying out much longer without their weapons. This, his charge mercifully agrees with, and with both their arms full of ingredients, they set off down the winding paths of Perland to return with their heads held high, arms rather sore of it all, and coffers significantly emptier than when they’d arrived.  

Pavel has to knock on his own door very awkwardly with his elbow lest the apples he has balancing on a box of crackers that are very shakily resting atop a bag of walnuts go toppling onto the ground. There’s a click, and Violet opens up looking no better than they’d left him as he folds across the doorframe wincing, with Ralph weaving excitedly between his legs and yapping in the sort of joy you regrettably grow out of when you cease being an innocent babe who gets to not have to worry about or even recognise the horrors of the world, such as murder and illness and stepping on a kitten’s tail by mistake. 

“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” he bleats as he sees the absolute state of them post their shopping trip. “What, did you buy out the whole bloody market?”

“Don’t exaggerate,” Lilias orders. Violet simply rolls his eyes belligerently at her tone, stepping aside to let them through. “We only got what was necessary for your recovery.”

“Sister beloved, I did not need ten kilograms of oranges. What do you think I’m sick with, scurvy?”

She shrugs and then dumps what’s in her arms onto the kitchen counter with no regard for whether some things fall out of their boxes or bags. It makes the same sort of noise he recalls when they were at the Raiders’s Initiative camp and the lieutenants had brought them all around to get them to practise not growing weak at the knees or fleeing when a cannon goes off. The training does not appear to have been worth the landmass its gunpowder fell upon, however, because Pavel gets out of his boots by leaping right out of them like a skittering deer darting into the bushes.

“I am so sorry,” Violet whispers again as Pavel collects himself and then passes, and he sounds so frantic about it and that maybe mixes a little with the adrenaline of the banging and bashing of groceries that Pavel can’t help but laugh this time, even as a mushroom cap manages to burst free of its bag and rolls onto the floor to be snapped up in Ralph’s maw and promptly gnawed on.

She insists on being the cook - “to make up for the fact that it’s your house, of course! It would only be the polite thing to do.” - so as Lilias is in the kitchen sharpening knives and taking his pot out Pavel takes his first real seat of the evening on the floor at the base of his sofa, where Violet lies splayed like a kitten who’s just found the perfect sunny corner to nap in.

Slowly, he hears him rustle about, and then feels his hands move to rest on Pavel’s shoulders, his chin making its presence clear on the top of Pavel’s head. “How’d the meeting go?” Violet asks, as he nuzzles into his stringy mess of a bird’s nest he calls his hair.

Pavel says, “the usual. I just gave her the report. All the more indication we don’t both have to be there to give it to her.”

“I know,” Violet mumbles into his hair. “But it’s nicer, not being apart. Are you working tomorrow?”

“I’m scheduled for an evening patrol,” Pavel murmurs back, as he bumps his head gently into Violet’s nuzzling. He hears him snort, feels his lips curl into a smile, and Pavel smiles a little, too. 

Then he asks, “do you have to…?” and Pavel’s face falls again.

Nibbling on his lips he returns, “you feel that bad?”

Violet pauses with a sigh. “It’s… no, it’s fine. I’ll be okay on my own,” he says, shaking his head into his hair. “Sorry. I shouldn’t have said anything.”

The quietness that collects between them is tinted with an uncomfortable edge, like the way the night is utterly still right after hearing a twig snap some distance behind you. “Tell me,” says Pavel, disturbing it. “It’s weirder if you start and then stop.”

In the way the moon is yet quiet when the clouds pass over it but everything feels a hint more energised. In the way a room with only you is quiet, but only because you have been studying for so long the words have begun floating off the page in incomprehensible patterns so your quill has stopped scratching against the page. 

“You actually want me to talk?” Violet asks, his brows raised to his hairline.

He flushes, bringing his gaze to a bit tuft of fur Ralph appears to have shed. “Want is a strong word. I just think if you have something to say you should say it.

“Because?” Violet fishes with another nuzzle into his head.

“Because,” Pavel says slowly. “Because you’re not actually alone right now, so there’s no reason to act like it.”

In the silence that follows, Pavel grows very interested in that stray bit of fluff and begins fiddling with it like it’s really what he wants to be doing while sitting on his floorboards and his ass steadily growing to ache from its very bones. Violet doesn’t move to say much, but his fingers remain clasped around his shoulders like the lips of a shell around a pearl, and his nose is buried yet in Pavel’s hair.

“Too much?” he ventures with a wince. “Sorry, just- Lilias told me, and I figured-”

“No,” he whispers. “No, definitely not. It was nice. I- can you stay with me tomorrow? I almost fell off the bloody lid of the toilet this afternoon while you were gone and would’ve knocked myself clean out if I hadn’t forgotten to put the towels away a few days ago and they weren’t in a massive stack to fall on top of.”

Pavel balks, before swivelling his head around to stare at Violet with the speed of a fire rupturing through a sleeping forest. “You only think to tell me this now ?”

“It’s awfully unbecoming, and I’d rather forget it ever happened,” Violet chuckles, before adding, “I’m fine, don’t worry,” when (apparently surprisingly) that does little to comfort Pavel.

“I’ll stay,” Pavel tells him with a frown. “If only because I’d really rather you not die because you shattered your skull on my tiling.”

“That would be great! Survival is appearing rather tenuous at the moment on my own, and there is safety in numbers and all.”

“I’ll stay the day after too,” he continues, not without faltering midway through. A little twitch in his voice, a glancing down of his eyes, like the way your heart stops when that twig snaps. And then, like the way it resumes again a moment later beating from the adrenaline rushing down your veins, “and like, the next few weeks after. Maybe a month or so. Next year? Suppose I can say the year after, too.”

Violet laughs out and out, this time. “God, but she’s put some strange ideas in your head, hasn’t she? I’m alright. I only need some help because I’m woozy on my feet. There’s no need to marry yourself to your home to stay by my side otherwise. I’m more than used to handling myself.” 

“But it’s okay if you aren’t,” Pavel says. “We’re partners, so…”

“We are,” Violet agrees quietly. “But I shan’t let you down. It’s an equivalency, to be partners, and I don’t like the idea of weighing on you. You are a valiant pup, you know! And pups such as yourself ought to run free without shackles that leave you stumbling.”

He notices, suddenly, the bristling tension across his shoulders, whitening his knuckles. His eyes remain their exquisite deep indigo, but in his sickness and exhaustion they are without the mischievous cat-like sheen so perpetual in their reflection it feels almost strange to see him without. 

Pavel raises a hand past his hands, dithers on his chin to poke him lightly. He splutters, but isn’t especially heated about it. “It isn’t a moral failing to be sick,” he says firmly. “I’m not mad at you because you’re ill.”

“Oh, I know that,” Violet sighs. “I’m not a wistful teen anymore. But I struggle remaining this idle for so long.”

Pavel cocks his head intelligently, before saying, “but you’re not being idle. You’re recovering.”

A pause, which wasn’t wholly what he was expecting considering his pride in his announcement. He thought it was helpful to think of it like that - that for every second he spends sitting there is a second being spent in the biomes of his body working frantically and lovingly to heal him.

“You’re,” Violet eventually says in awe as he wrinkles his brow to a prune-like state. “Utterly adorable, do you know that?”

He damn near punches him in the face, sick or not.

Tips of his ears red he scrambles verbally, and it has a way of making him sound like he’s choking on his own spit. When he finally manages to recall the ability to speak is a natural gift most humans are born with and it was only in his previous life that he was a grandiose wolf who ran through the fields and could only bark and whimper and so has access to this beautiful power, all he can say say is an incredibly frustrated, “you and her really are cut from the same cloth,” is all he grumbles, as Violet snorts.

“There’s one large difference between myself and her,” Violet grins, waggling a finger. “I’m the most honest person you’ll find this side of Cidonia. I mean every word I say!”

Pavel narrows his eyes and lightly slaps him on the cheek. He gets a pout for his efforts. “A week into knowing you, you lied to me about working late when you actually went to the pub to spend the night with a lady you’d spent half our patrol flirting with.”

He rolls his eyes like it’s obvious and Pavel’s stupid for asking. “Forgive me for not wanting to immediately out myself as a purveyor of the lustful side of life. I had a friend I simply had to make.”

His fingers travel down, briefly, slipping from his shoulders. Not too far past them, and instead just below his collarbones they meet amongst one another and lace into a half-hug, half-sitting position as if he’s too afraid to lean totally into it.

“It’s occurred to me that I’ve never asked for your opinion on skinship of the ‘arm wrapping around you’ variety,” he mumbles quietly. His usual confidence in that stability of his voice despite the clear rough quality it has from illness, he would be tempted to think, if he couldn’t feel his hands quivering weakly when Pavel’s own hands rise up to touch his knuckles in return, and the way his heart thumps right into his back like a hammer banging against his ore deposit of a body.

“This is fine,” Pavel mumbles.

“Just fine?”

“Do it properly and maybe I’ll change my assessment,” Pavel pouts, and when he glances briefly there is a glitter in Violet’s eye that he thinks might have briefly dazzled him, like when you look at the sun and have to squint because it is simply too bright, much too bright.

So he gives him a hug. Wraps those big, strong swordsman arms of his around his chest from behind and gently resting his forehead on his shoulder like a doe, and Pavel freezes initially only to melt entirely the next second, as if the heat radiating off Violet’s sickly forehead and cheeks were enough to get through his icey layer. But it’s less to do with that and more to do with the little way he still, as if on instinct, nuzzles into Pavel’s shoulder, and hums with that scratchy voice of his that sounds as though someone has brought their nails to a clay pot and dragged them right down. It’s much like-

Well. He feels a little like he’s being sat on by a cat, albeit one who smokes a couple cigars throughout the day: warm and soft and complete with purring, though the last part is delivered on a voice that sounds like it’s one sentence away from cutting out entirely as though the one-too-many failed payments of a light bill finally coming to make you sit in the dark with nothing more than a simple click . And you might cry there no warning, but the notices were sent and such harbingers remain at the base of your door slid through the post box, much like how Violet could go mute entirely from his sore throat and complain about how there was nothing indicating it was that bad even though he winces every time he swallows and has to hold the base of his throat in some patchwork attempt at heat therapy whenever he talks.

But, Pavel should think, there’s no reason for him to do that right now - the back of his nape must be warm enough as is, and he can feel Violet’s throat bump against it. Indeed, like how a cat will never be satisfied simply bonking you once in the cheek and leaving you.

“Thank you,” he mumbles, amidst his affectionate bumping with his cheek. “I will… take the extra day to relax and recover, strange as it feels to say. Will you let me do next week’s report on your behalf?”

Pavel nods, feeling his hair brushing up against Violet’s face. “Seems plenty fair to me.”

“Brilliant,” he whispers. “Now, I feel like I should tell you something else, while we’re on the topic of sharing happenings and so on.”

“Yes,” Pavel finds his voice alarmingly throaty and low, to Violet’s delight as he snickers. “Okay, go on. And stop laughing at me.”

He waves off the last bit, to Pavel’s dismay, but says, “you know how I couldn’t cook when you first met me?”

“Right.”

“And,” he ventures, starting up his nuzzling again. “You know how I’m the second coming of the Guardian Star itself when it comes to cooking now because I got training in the Raider’s, lest I faint because I didn’t know how to boil herbs for a nutritional snack in the absence of food?”

“You still burn fried eggs and manage to turn toast into something I can patch up the holes in my wall with, but alright, we can go with that.”

“Lilias, you see,” he tells him with a smirk bringing the tip of his lips heavensward. “Never received such training.”

He's up on his feet to check the state of the cooking immediately, and finds her looking entirely neutrally down at a pot utterly billowing with dark black clouds, yet stirring as though this is still not only salvageable but, perhaps, promising. 

"I thought that it would give it some extra taste. You know, like when the crust of a piece of bread is a little bit burnt so it tastes a little bit smoky through the dough."

Lilias insists this sadly over the grave of the soup, killed like a fish when you take it out of water for too long by fucking flinging it with your best arm into the sky, as he opens a window to let the smoke out and then fusses her away from the pot that he miserably has to toss out.

This does not come without him offering a bit to Ralph, because if they can’t eat it it might as well go to someone who can, only for Lilias to gasp in horror and Violet to laugh himself into another coughing fit when the pup takes a curious sniff, and then a lick, and then flips the bowl over with his paw without any further attempt at torturing himself. He hops onto the sofa to rest again in Violet’s lap as Pavel is forced to clean it up and, well, he supposes that’s a fairly older sibling-esque need in itself too, isn’t it? To be constantly cleaning up while the younger dodges the consequences of their actions.

When he’s done, he begins preparing an edible pot and laying out the ingredients for chicken noodle soup. The old elixir of life, panacea to all colds, Caduceus liquified - with some added carrots to really bolster the immune response. 

“May I,” Lilias offers with a nibble of her lips. “At least cut the carrots and the chicken?”

He breathes like a bull out his nose. “Fine,” he says. “But only those. It’s not exactly good to keep a sick man hungry.”

“Don’t worry about me. My appetite is in the same place as that poor balloon I accidentally let go of last festival,” Violet says loudly from the sofa. His voice cracks like glass as he does and not even a second after he finishes his sentence his voice falters into another vicious cough. “Is it too late to take back my assessment of my living status by tomorrow’s eve, by any chance,” he asks weakly between coughs, which is honestly incredible enough dedication to the need to never fucking shut up that Pavel mentally commends him. 

The carrots are chopped in a way that can only be described as Euclidean. One of them could function as a bullet, so sharp on one end, but then so chunky on the other that you could never hope to fit it in the barrel of any gun. The chicken she handles a lot better and cuts them into appropriate sizes, only he happens to glance over just as she frowns and casually wipes the hand she’s been holding the raw breast with on her waist which alarms him so much - the Citylord, sick with salmonella in his house! One sick individual is enough, he thinks - that he elects to take over by scootching over and bumping her lightly with his elbow.

“You can stir,” he says quickly, before that confusion on her features morphs into the pout she’ll wear when she retracts his pay check for the month. “That’s important, too. It can’t burn.”

“I know the basics, Pavel,” she scoffs, and then flings an unchopped carrot at Violet when he loudly says, “no, you don’t, don’t lie to the poor man.” It bonks him straight on, and they know this without turning back to look because he squawks, “well, I’m not going to get better if you keep flinging shite at my poor head!”

“Don’t require me to throw things at you and perhaps I won’t,” she mumbles. 

“I’m trying to tell Pavel that he should continue being as wary around you as he should be, because you’re a filthy liar and you have been all your bloody life !”

An outraged, scandalous gasp, as Lilias throws a hand over her mouth (the hand she had been holding the raw chicken with - Pavel, at the mere proximity of this act, thinks he’s going to throw up). “I am not a liar! I’m just- it’s confidence, you know, to be able to say things and then live up to them!”

Unconvinced, Violet throws the carrot back at her. It connects with her shoulder, and she growls like a fucking beast, right in the bottom of her throat. “Confidence is what I have, not you, you liar! ”

“‘ Confidence’,” she says in air quotes before tossing the carrot right back at Violet. He catches it handily this time, but it doesn’t stop him from flipping her off. “ Wouldn’t have wet the bed until he was fifteen! ”

As they bucker Pavel gingerly lets the dastardly chopped chicken fall into the pan to fry them off, and soon their throwing back and forth of terrible secrets that should never have left the Harrison estate becomes a backdrop to a fine sizzling, and then boiling once he mixes all the ingredients together to simmer and the noodles steadily grow soggier as the carrots as if are dancing between the boiling bubbles that rise to the top to meet the tasty concoction. 

“Ralph, do you want a snack?” Pavel soon hears, and he feels a brow quirk as he shoves the pot lid onto the soon-to-be dinner.

“Don’t feed him anymore!” Pavel immediately turns to say, brandishing the knife he’d cut the chicken with. Indeed, draped in fucking poison, this thing is, and he’s very afraid to use it. “He’s already chubby enough with all the table scraps you give him.”

Violet is unabashed by this clearly terrifying choice in weapon that could leave him sicker than a backflip pirouette off a cliff only to land perfectly on your index finger and stay upright and steady like an elderly tree, as he pouts at him from over the back cushion of the sofa with large, rounded cheeks and straight brows. “But he won’t be getting any tonight, so it’s fine. Here you go, boy. Thanks for keeping me company all day.”

Without a single second’s delay, chomp. And then again, chomp, chomp, chomp. Violet coos so thoroughly he sounds like he’s purring, if purring could sound as if delivered through a smoker’s voice.

She stays for dinner, despite her best attempts at weaselling out of it. “I’m satisfied enough knowing you’ll be eating something proper, and I think I can trust Pavel with the act of ensuring it goes down your gullet,” is met with Violet wrinkling his ever-flushed nose and fussing, “since when has being satisfied ever stopped you from leaving me alone?”, is subsequently met with, “perhaps the answer to that is that you spend so often bouncing from one mess to another that I simply am never satisfied,” is then met with Pavel trotting out of the kitchen with a bowl for her, which she knows because she had brought Violet’s bowl and Pavel had already brought his.

“Violet’s sister deserves to eat what she cooked,” is all he says as he holds it out gently to her, and her eyes go from his ruby eyes to his hands wrapped right around the plate underneath it so he doesn’t have to touch the hot bowl, right to the steam that slowly rising from the soup like the incredible vapour of a nice bubble bath.

“I’m not your boss?” she muses with a grin.

“Oh, you definitely are,” Pavel admits, more than a little bashful. “But you can be both, I guess?”

“I’ll take it,” she laughs as she daintily accepts both the sentiment and the plate from Pavel’s hands and moves to the table where the other two bowls and a Violet who looks as though he’s about to pass away wait.

“No, no, please, don’t make me rush you. I’m only sick as a griffon over here,” he grumbles, sounding about as rough as the way their chairs screech against the floorboards when they pull them out from under the table.

Pavel gives him a disdainful look as he tucks his knuckles under his chin. “As if you’re going to eat that without me fighting you to.”

Violet crosses his arms, petulant as a child. “Well, now I most certainly won’t, if that’s how you’re going to treat me,” he sniffs, and then immediately coughs with the same energy as an unconscious bird.

“A tea party in exchange for drinking the soup,” Lilias offers as she stirs her soup, and then leans over to begin stirring his for him.

“God, I truly am on my deathbed,” he moans. “I don’t even care about the tea party. I just want to go back to lying down. This sitting up business is making my head feel as if I went and knocked it against three grand oaks in quick succession.”

“All the more reason to delight yourself in a bit of a romantic rendezvous before you pass, no?”

“What, while hacking and spluttering all over some lovely ladies?” He gives her a disgusted look. “You have the strangest sense of romance one could imagine. Pray, where did you get that from? The vampire fantasy books you read as a child never implied this.”

Somehow Lilias manages to go more red than the person with a fever. “Y-you found those? When? I donated them to charity moons ago, before I even left for the Citylord’s estate!”

“Lilias, as a piece of helpful advice from your elusive whore of a brother: next time,” Violet preens. “If you want someone to not realise something is yours, don’t leave a page that has your signed name in the front cover.”

Bang. He imagines her forehead will be equally as crimson once she dares bring it back up to look at them. “Ohh,” Pavel says slowly. “Is that the stack of books you were organising that one time I visited your estate?”

“It was,” he beams. “I don’t want people to know I’m related to someone with such basic taste, so I took all the books as soon as I found them. Oh, in exchange I donated some spare books from my own personal library, of course. Wouldn’t do to take without giving, no?”

“How giving,” bleats Pavel, as Lilias pulls herself up to weaponize the spoon in Violet’s bowl and gets some soup droplets that weren’t quite lucky enough to stay in the bowl across the table between them.

“ Basic?!” She fumes, waggling it like she means to attempt hypnotism with it. “Vampires are the cornerstone of our literature! Do you know what they represent? Have you even read ‘A Welcome in Crimson’?” 

“Pavel, have you?” Violet asks instead of just answering the question like a basic human being. “Is it good?”

The address is sudden, and finds Pavel with his own spoon in his mouth, mid-slurp. He shakes his head gingerly, and the iron bonks uncomfortably against his teeth.

“Eh,” Violet valiantly announces in the face of his sibling’s reddening welt of a pair of cheeks. “Then I don’t give a damn.”

She looks like she could throw the spoon at him but manages to control herself with the elegance of an ostrich flying, probably upon realising the beating of a sick man, no matter how much he deserves it, will not reflect well on her. A prudent assessment, Pavel thinks, as he resumes his interrupted slorping. “Well, then,” she murmurs with a smirk, entirely fondly, before spooning up a bit of the soup with an eldritch orange object he is forced to define as a 'carrot' in it and holding it up. “If you’re going to be all childish about it, then I suppose I ought to treat you like one, hm?” 

He sniffs, crossing his arms over his chest. “Try as you might, there’s nothing you can do that will embarrass me in front of Pavel, if that’s what you’re attempting. We’re partners! We’re best friends. There are no sides to him I haven’t seen and none to him I haven’t seen.”

Without another word he opens his mouth and takes the spoon into it with a loud and triumphant slurp. Then he chokes on the carrot.

“That was pretty embarrassing, actually. She kind of got me,” he mumbles, ten minutes into his face buried in a sofa pillow.

“It’s okay,” Pavel tells him. “I looked away after I got it out of you. Look on the bright side: now that I’ve seen you almost asphyxiate on boiled carrot, it’s safe to say I really have seen all sides of you.”

It takes another fifteen minutes before he comes out from under the pillow and the blanket, and it’s while Pavel is washing up to request if Pavel will also choke on a carrot for him. He says no, and Violet sulks his way through stomping back onto the sofa before falling asleep so heavily Lilias briefly thinks he’s gone and passed out on them.

They make him a cup of the fresh jasmine tea for his throat, and even though he whines and moans and weeps about it not being in the right mug because she broke it like she breaks everything, Lilias , the malice exerted by a sibling who is not shitting around overcomes even his complaining and he sips on it slowly as Ralph rests his head on his lap.

She leaves, shortly after that. As she does she uses one of Violet’s scarves to wrap up, as snow has begun falling in a light curtain. Already it settles across some of the concrete, and if it sticks then perhaps he might look out of his window in the morn and see a fine blanket of it stretching through the streets, with a few footprints of workers already up and getting ready for the day despite the less-than-fortuitous conditions.

“But I am glad,” she mumbles as she does the scarf up. “That Violet has someone like you. Regardless of what you consider your relationship as, your presence has been a boon to him.”

He winces; the sentiment is a little too sweet for him to take with no tea to dilute it. “I’m, ah, glad. Truth be told, it was unintentional that I went and befriended a nobleman, but the consequences haven’t been entirely regrettable.”

“That’s embarrassed-speak for, ‘I appreciate him, too’, I presume,” she teases, and he flushes as red as the apples he’s got resting in a bowl on the table. “The nobility can be difficult to deal with - Perland has always been in two minds regarding their sheer influence.”

“Yes, well,” says Pavel quietly. “They’re a bit-”

“Selfish?”

“Egotistical.”

“Dehumanising?”

He shakes his head, lips drawn thin. “Were that we were even thought of to be considered lesser than. The only time the nobles think of us is when they hoo hum and think that they need more of us to throw at the border walls and bleed lest conflict break out and they’re forced to have their afternoon tea with gunshots in the background.”

Lilias smiles ruefully. “You don’t imagine they’d pick up their weapons to join you?”

“Have they ever?” Pavel says bitterly. “I don’t see why they would. They’d sooner scurry away like rain to the gutter than join us - a carriage waiting for them to duck into soon as their gardens get shrapnel within their pretty bushes.”

“I believe I agree with you,” she mumbles. “The lifestyle nobility currently leads brings us only weakness. How difficult it is to break stagnation,” she adds on in a quiet voice, that perhaps he could not have heard were it not for the silence of the night.

“But Violet isn’t like that,” says Pavel as he takes his own coat and pulls his arms through, settles the collar comfortably across his shoulders and neck. “He’s- he’s quicker to let himself get hurt for us than some of my own fellow plebeians.”

"I think he's overcompensating, frankly." She's smiling, despite her harsh choice of words. "But perhaps, considering the state of things, overcompensation is a shrew thing to employ." 

"I don't think it's anything like that," Pavel says. "He's simply good, is all." 

The pause that follows is full of things any family member would be joyful to feel - pride, love, a hint of whimsical melancholy at the realisation that you are no longer the only person who can see what you see about someone you love so dearly.

"He is," she says at last, fiddling with the loose tassels attached to the end of the scarf and grinning widely. "He's grown into a fine young man despite - well, everything.”

“Lilias, not to be rude,” Violet yells from the sofa. “But do you mind fucking off? I want to sleep and I need both pups to be here when I do. If I don’t overdose on oxytocin how do you expect me to fall asleep through my body feeling like it's eating away at its own fibres and then screaming about it like a child whining about how terrible dirt tastes?”

“Crass, but, you know,” she snickers as Pavel rolls his eyes. “Thank you for indulging me, Pavel.”

Pavel shakes his head, stepping forward as he fishes his keys out his jacket pocket. “Not an indulgence, ma’am. I can recognise the worry family can put us through.”

As he unlocks the door and wild whorl of the snowstorm soon to begin its blustering she says, "You’re a good man, too,” and Pavel looks over to see her expression a simple one, and one he wouldn’t imagine a boss be too easy to part with. Too soft to imply gazing at a mere worker, he thinks, more than just a tilt of her lips and that more making it into her eyes as a glitter. “Were that more men in Perland were like you.”

“They are,” he replies. “They just have to find the right person to let them be as such.”

She chuckles and buttons up her coat, throwing her hood up for the walk through downtown. “Then I pray more shall. I hope one day I shall,” she adds in a whisper, and Pavel cannot hear her despite witnessing her mouth moving because the winds are loud in their fussing and bitterly cold in their temperament. 

Louder, she taps her chin, and says, “before I leave - allow us to start anew, hm?” tapping her chin, before throwing her palm out to him. Pavel jumps like a skittering doe, and only remains visible because there’s only a coat rack behind him and his house, despite its tendency to house an innumerable amount of living things within the shitty walls, has not quite progressed to having full grown bushes growing in it just yet. 

Lilias proceeds to announce with a grin: “I am Lilias Perlutia, Violet’s older sister. I’ve been just desperate to meet you - I don’t think I’ve ever known Violet to talk about someone else as much as he does you, but as it turns out, all rules of the world do have their exceptions and he cannot shut up about you.”

“He can’t?” He frowns with a curl of his lips. “I hope he hasn’t said anything embarrassing.”

“Regretfully, I feel as though it’s my sworn duty as one seeking the title of, ‘friend-hopeful’ to tell you I am aware of the time you misidentified a set of mushrooms for benign - even healthy - ones and sent your entire subunit, yourself included, to the hospital from poisoning and fears of dehydration because you spent most of the subsequent day on, er,” she clicks her fingers once, twice, a rhythm one might tap one’s foot to if it weren’t the harbinger of Pavel’s lost dignity. “Less… prestigious sort of chairs made of porcelain than the one I might sit on.”

He picks up the washing rag hanging off the nearby counter, and chucks it directly at Violet’s head. It hits him flat on from behind and he blubbers like the incendiary midnight yowling of a tomcat having met another denizen of the night and knowing nothing more to defend himself with besides yelling.

"Stop throwing things at me!" he whines, and then flattens himself on the sofa with a pout to protect himself from further ammunition.

“I’m, uh,” says Pavel, more than a little awkward, the verbal equivalent of a baby toddling its first few steps before crash landing on its face. “Pavel. Pavel- just Pavel. No last name. Violet, er- only told me you two were legally related about three months into knowing him and I almost choked on a chip when he did.”

“A joy, Pavel,” she smiles. “My invitation to dinner remains, pray recall. And don’t worry - this one, I’ll be paying for in totality.”

There’s a sudden wet slap behind them. Violet’s gone and thrown the washing rag back over his shoulder, and missed Pavel’s back terrifically to instead water some grass through the floorboards with it. Perhaps a dandelion might grow, he thinks, absent of the snow that already encroaches past the boundary of inside and outside for how much it is beginning to pile up at the edge of the open door.

As he pulls the duvet for his bed down, Pavel says, “I’m pretty sure I remember you reading that book Lilias mentioned.”

“Of course I have,” says Violet with a hum, snug as the bug as he is all wrapped up and resting on the sofa as Ralph dozes at the foot of it. His eyes are already shut, and have been since Pavel walked out of the bathroom having brushed his teeth. “I studied virtually every mythos in Cidonia and then what few Ritanian ones we know of back at home.”

“Then why’d you lie?”

He peels an eye open, giving him a sleepy wink with a toothy, lopsided smile. “It’s my job to piss her off, frankly. If I’m not, I’m not living up to what I can be.”

It falls back shut, and he burrows his head into his pillow with a sigh. A brow raised, Pavel asks, “and that is?”

“Why,” Violet chuckles feebly. “The most loving brother I can be, I should think.”

Ralph’s tail thumps in his sleep. Right behind where he sits is a large lash through the nice fabric of the sofa’s sitting cloth, that he had rent asunder with his claws one day of particularly rambunctious zoomies after Pavel had offered him a treat for guarding their home while he was off on patrol. He’d sown it back up, only for Ralph to do the same thing a week after while trying to get up on the sofa to sit with him like his itty bitty puppy life was counting on it.

“Right,” Pavel snorts, before collapsing into his own bed so heavy he swears it cracks. Outside, the snow begins falling, and it’s cold enough that Pavel tucks his toes into his blanket, but not before verifying Violet has already done so himself. 

A week later, the ferocious cold is defeated and Violet trades in his baggy sweatpants and t-shirt for his preferred tight silk suits that tell lovely stories of the exact geometry of his body underneath with every dramatic stretch of his lithe body, and the thin sheen of sweat across his face has been washed away and replaced with a coat of pale foundation that smoothes over the yet-dark circles under his eyes from his lack of comfortable sleep.

His due diligence of next week’s report paid, he strides out of Lilias’s office with the blowing open of her double doors that would indicate something more like a cannonball being shot through them than a single man. Pavel loiters outside and does the polite thing in standing to the wall so as not to be in the way - this means the doors almost smack him in the face, though his fleet feet and even swifter mind see him able to dodge this particular inane attempt on his consciousness with a ducking to the side and then a rolling of his eyes.

Violet meets him like that with so ordinary an expression it is almost incomprehensible to him, an anodyne right to his heart but somehow it being specifically on Violet’s expression means it only concerns him because what an outlier it is, for his features to ever be quite this bland.

“What,” Pavel asks with a tap of his foot, already a little bit peeved at the whole, ‘almost opening a door into his face’ thing.

"Simply good, am I?" he asks, instantly breaking into such a wide beaming smile it's like having to hold it back had been causing him great duress. Perhaps, the source of the exceptionally boring expression, like trying to swallow down a laugh and look like you’re as dead as the coffin in front of you so you’re not giggling at a funeral even though you just saw a guy eat shit on the pavement. 

The heat that Pavel has built up in him thanks to his very warm coat and scarf combo is quickly and viciously syphoned away from his words and instead travels to his cheeks, like the giving away of flowers to a valentine. Thus instead of being able to come up with anything clever that could shut down this particular branch of Violet’s bullshit, Pavel is more like a lurching marathon runner doing his absolute best to cross the finish line when he snaps, “adorable, am I?” like he really thinks he had a point.

Only for Violet to - and to be entirely clear, he was in motion ‘till now, meaning he actively and intentionally stopped in his strides to ensure the two of them were standing still and also able to look right into each other’s eyes, because Pavel has cottoned onto a sensation that he would not much like to pull his gaze away while Violet thinks that he would utterly delight for there to be a little Pavel-shaped floater in his retina so there is always some visualisation of him to laud upon - deliver a truly scathing, thoroughly insurmountable, utterly debilitating, “yes, actually,” because he is a Sphinx’s dilemma given physical lanky-ass form and to presume he was telling the truth would necessitate there was some sort of catch to the real answer of it all. 

This is incredibly distressing, because it can’t be as simple as him thinking he’s cute. Not least for Pavel, who has been left to recognise that there was genuine truth in this sentiment.

“I,” Pavel says slowly. “Don’t think I know what to say to that.”

“Neither did I,” Violet snickers. “When Lilias told me I almost fell off my chair. You, complimenting me? I suppose I should have expected it in your own way, with my incredible charms and innate magnetism. Never could lose you, you know! Always roaming around me, everywhere I was looking.”

“You followed me  need I remind you,” Pavel points out with a very grumpy duck lip.

Violet delights in resizing his chest to three tits larger with a jubilant puff outwards. “Nay, we followed each other. How else do you think I could find you with the ease of finding a corpse in snow?”

A morbid way of putting it, he thinks. “Besides the fact that we work together?”

“Aha, that’s the same trap I fell into. After all, I still saw you plenty when we weren’t scheduled to work together, you naughty thing you,” Violet sings, waggling his finger at him like he’s telling a child off. Pavel almost bites the thing off, but must admit unlike his face he does need his fingers to work properly lest he immediately have his combat abilities neutered like a dog who goes from humping everything to staring wistfully out the window at his beau, so he instead settles for flaying it with a glare.

They begin the walk away from Lilias’s office, down the fine marble steps of the Citylord’s estate. “Do you want to ignore it ever happened?” Pavel offers as they walk out the iron gates that glitter from freshly-melted snow.

“Oh, no,” says Violet with a smile and a tilt upwards of his head. “I’ll be dreaming of it, I assure you. And to have you in my dreams will be a delight in its own right, I’ll have you know.”

Pavel almost gags. “Aren’t you over-doing it a bit?”

“If anything, I think I’m under-doing it,” he winks, and Pavel continues locking his eyes with his but only because he feels like he’ll be saying something in it’s own way if he glances away now. “Anyway - lunch? I’m so Goddamn sick of soup and need some solids in my stomach or I’ll be pissing cream of chicken pot a feu.”

“You’d rather be teasing me with a full belly, I suppose.”

“Pavel, honestly,” Violet insists. “It’s not teasing if it’s the truth.”

And perhaps, he muses as they walk into the winter sun - perhaps he’s coming down with something himself, cheeks red and the bridge of his nose hot. He makes sure to order soup in part to kill it before it lives, though mostly to watch and smirk as Violet pulls faces at every slurp, as if single-handedly collecting enough evidence to offer unto scholars that the idea of sympathy drinking is, indeed, a thing.