Work Text:
The moon shines insultingly bright in a sky so speckled by the stars that it almost reminds Figaro of Northern nights. Only almost, because this night is not bitterly cold; because the view is of a city, not the wild desolation overlooking a castle he and Oz had conquered.
He thinks of Oz and sees his face as perfectly as if he stood beside him: Figaro has admired him for indescribable time; he can faithfully depict the sharpness of Oz’s profile, the paleness of his skin, the eerie brightness of his eyes. The moon is far more beautiful in the North, and there had been a time or a dozen or more that Figaro had told this to Oz, who’d not once hummed his assent.
Figaro groans, pressing his palms to his eyes, focusing on the pinpricks lighting up behind them instead of the ghost from many yesterdays ago who lives—changed in every way but how Figaro wants him to—within this very manor. He needs a drink. No, several. And—
Well. It has never been an inconvenience that the man who barkeeps for the manor has an unrequited love of his own.
Figaro shutters the window and turns his back on the night, heading down to the bar.
He is not to be Shylock’s only patron tonight, it seems. Murr is floating by the chandelier, fussing with it, to Shylock’s dismay. Murr swings it around. Its crystals clatter, scattering their light over the ground. In that pattern of dark-light-dark Figaro realizes Oz, a mere outline in black, is here, too.
Of all times, Figaro thinks as he slides on a meaningless smile that almost gives when Arthur, Mitile, and Riquet peek their heads from behind Oz, seated behind him.
“Good evening, Lo—Doctor Figaro!” Arthur chirps, despite obvious drowsiness.
Mitile, resting his head on folded arms, is not as kind. “If he’s here this late, it means he thought I’d be asleep and wouldn’t scold him for drinking…”
“Murr, please come down,” Shylock says in the background. “You’re bothering our other guests.”
“Perhaps he will have simple grape juice, such as Oz is,” Riquet says, stifling a yawn.
Murr spins in the air, ignoring Shylock. He gnaws on a crystal, its light stippled over those on the ground.
“Perhaps I will,” Figaro says, taking the empty seat beside Oz.
“Murr,” Shylock says again, a warning veneered under his politeness. Figaro does not miss the furtive, anxious glance he casts at Oz. “Please. For me.”
One last crystalline clatter, and then Murr is soaring down to settle on the seat next to Figaro with an oomph. “Now I’m bored, though!”
Figaro strengthens his paltry smile and asks Oz, “But why are you here with the kids, especially this late?”
“For our successful practice, Oz told us he would let us stay up and drink what we wanted. I invited Mitile,” Riquet says before Oz has even opened his mouth. “Shylock, I would like another mug of cocoa, please.”
Shylock has given Murr an exquisite wine glass, studded with crystals, and how it refracts the chandelier light has appeased Murr. Shylock’s back slackens with a tiny, relieved sigh before he addresses Riquet, again in perfect posture. “Certainly,” he says. “And for you, Figaro?”
“Nothing right now.” He pauses, letting his choice of words sink. “Thanks.”
They hold one another’s gazes.
If Figaro has mastered putting on a smile that could be read for anything, Shylock has mastered the art of saying everything but with a quirk of his lip. Here, as it twitches, he says: You don’t want to let the children see you as I know you to be. Not when you’re here to forget in drink and in me.
Figaro raises a shoulder, noncommittal.
The moment, private as it can be with an audience, is through when Shylock dips his head in acknowledgment of Riquet’s request.
Is there a more inopportune time for these two contrasting, unsavory parts of Figaro’s life to dangle in front of the children, themselves irrevocably tied to him? There, the boy who Oz found and was bettered by; further on, the boy who came into Figaro’s life as surely as he will end it.
Figaro claps a hand on Oz’s shoulder. Oz briefly looks down at it. “So your teaching is good now, huh? No more show-and-copy?” Figaro says, teasing. “Or is it your students who are the talented ones?”
“There is no”—Arthur interrupts himself with a yawn—“no better teacher than Lord Oz.”
Riquet pouts behind his mug. “I think we have plenty of promise.”
“Isn’t it both, then?” Mitile says.
Figaro chuckles, and there is nothing forced in it. “Both it is.” His hand had remained on Oz’s shoulder—he’d not been shrugged off, and though it wasn’t a welcome invitation, neither was it refusal—but now he removes it, resting on the counter, lest he overstay Oz’s indifference. “How long are you going to let them stay up? Sleep is important, especially for those still growing.”
Oz turns to the windows, at the night staved away by the sky’s brilliance. He looks at the children. “Figaro is right. It is time for you to sleep.”
They do not protest. Partly it is their tiredness; partly it is that Oz inspires people to follow with but a look. Though for them, it is not of fear. The three drowsy, young wizards that Oz ushers from the bar are as distant from the Oz in history as they are to the moon.
Better that way. A person’s past, who he might have been once—it’s not for anyone to know but he who lived through it. Oz, however, is stalwart as Figaro knows he always has been, his pride etched onto the very lines on his back.
Figaro glimpses the seat beside him, now unoccupied, from the corner of his eye. His chest twinges. “Oz, wait,” he blurts out.
Oz stops. Raises an eyebrow.
“Will you come back?” Figaro tries on a smile, smoothing over whatever desperation anyone might have heard. “Join me for a drink?”
Oz does not hesitate before shaking his head.
“Don’t drink too much, Doctor Figaro!” Mitile calls over his shoulder.
Figaro watches them leave, feeling his mouth twist to—something.
Murr puts down his wine glass and props his chin on his hands. “Fate threads itself so curiously!” he says. “All of us in one room, brought together by the moon, but bound by each other!”
“Murr,” Shylock says, lowly, a warning given to a cat eyeing a porcelain rarity on a shelf.
“Two former emperors: one who we now share our laughter with,” Murr continues, gesturing grandly toward the empty door, “and one history has conveniently forgotten!” He points to Figaro. “Two emperors who ravaged and murdered, who would have my blood on their hands if it weren’t for a barkeep in love with me, awful as I was!” His grin. Figaro can’t tell if the innocence is false or true. Or which is worse.
“Murr, stop talking,” Shylock says again, gripping the counter. The look he gives Figaro he has seen before. Fearful and apologetic and pleading, donned because of the same man. “Figaro, I truly apologize—”
Figaro waves his hand. “It’s fine, Shylock. He’s not lying.” He flits his gaze back to Murr, and he does not let it soften, despite what he has said. “I’d like to hear him finish.”
Murr hops on the counter, spreading his arms wide. “Two former emperors, changed by those too young and too naive to know who they were, united with those catalysts—and the ones who they could have killed—in a big, warm house! But,” he adds, leaning down to meet Figaro, unafraid, “are the feelings they all share really warm, too, when there are many, many lies they’ve told?”
There is one parallel Murr does not know. Oz may have rewritten fate, but Figaro denies it. Fate rewritten to keep the lily mark from marring a prince; fate denied to keep a young Southern boy from wielding power that will kill a man who might deserve it.
Figaro hums behind a smile as stale as standing water. “Who could say?”
“You could, if you stopped being a coward and confronted your own heart!”
Figaro can feel Shylock—gone pale as the moon, yet unloved by Murr—helplessly watch him and Murr lock eyes. Both predators, both prey, both smiling. It is Figaro who breaks the silence with a calm, “It’s a full moon tonight, Murr.”
“I know!” He cranes his head to the windows. In the distance, shrunk by the moon’s growing fury, it floats whole over a spire; from the bar’s windows, etched in dainty grilles, it appears divided. “She’s resplendent!”
“But it’ll be overcast later. Instead of loitering here, you should gaze at it while you can.”
“Oh! Now that I didn’t know.” Murr spirits himself from the bar.
Shylock presses more of his weight onto his palms, resting on the counter, than he realizes. “You two gave me quite the fright,” he says.
“There’s no need for you to worry. I know how much your bar means to you. I won’t ruin it by fighting here.”
“Then you would fight Murr elsewhere?”
He stretches his arms on the counter, leaning his head onto them. Still smiling. “I’m just a kind ol’ doctor. I heal people; I don’t inflict the wounds.”
Shylock’s lip quirks, dry as his most prized wines, in a silent, Do you?
And Figaro abides it. It’s from Shylock; it is the mirror reflecting itself.
“Well,” Shylock says, fixing his shawl, “what will you have tonight? Something light, I assume, since Mitile kindly asked for your alcoholic restraint?”
Shylock’s hair, always purposefully artless, is messier, following the stress from mere moments ago. The color is returning to his face, flirting with androgyny, beautiful in anything and everything he might call himself.
Shylock leans down. “Figaro?” he says, in that voice like chimed glass.
Had Figaro never met Oz, he surely would have given Shylock his heart in all its attempts at truth.
Would I have really?
Figaro drums the counter. “Please give me the bottle for whatever whiskey you’re alright with parting with forever.”
“The bottle?”
“Please.”
A delicate line furrows Shylock’s brow. Figaro reaches over and smooths it with his thumb.
“There really is no need for you to worry, Shylock,” he murmurs. He lazily lifts the corner of his mouth. “But that’s considerate of you. It’s almost like you’re sweet on me.”
That gets another fleeting smile out of Shylock. “As you like. It is only the two of us tonight, and I can keep a secret.” He studies his liquor shelves as a scholar might his texts. He selects a bottle, satisfied, and also grabs a glass. He quietly places it all in front of Figaro, and he doesn’t bid him a customary, Enjoy. Shylock knows it is futile. A drink can be for pleasure, or it can be for pain.
Figaro sits up, unscrewing the bottle. He forgoes the glass as he takes a swig from the bottle. When he sets it down, with far less grace than Shylock had, he says, “I don’t think I’ll be needing the glass, but thank you.”
“Oh,” Shylock says, pulling the bottle and glass toward him, “we can still put it to use.” He pours himself a shot and downs it.
“Did you plan that?” Figaro asks, amused.
Shylock hums, pushing the bottle back to Figaro.
“If you want a kiss, you don’t have to settle for it being indirect, you know.” His wink is obnoxious, flagrant in his acknowledgment of his propositioning, but beneath it all is the request.
They’ve played this game long enough. Shylock knows what Figaro means. It leads to the second game: feigned ignorance, strewn with a touch here or there, a duplicitous word.
“We’re alone,” Figaro says. “I can keep a secret, too.”
“You’ve drunk far too little to already be flirting with the bartender,” Shylock says, tucking a loose lock of hair behind his ear.
“Then maybe the bartender should step on the other side of the counter and be a patron tonight.”
“And your company?”
Figaro chuckles. “That was my plan, yes.”
Shylock steps out from behind the counter, sitting beside Figaro, pipe materializing in his waiting hand and set between his parted lips. He exhales the spiced smoke, so loved by him it’s his own perfume, and mutters his spell. The smoke curls around the bottle, pouring of its own accord into the glass, sliding itself to Shylock. “Will it truly be overcast tonight?”
“Hmm?”
“What you told Murr. Was it true?”
“Oh.” Figaro grabs the bottle, placing the rim to his mouth without yet drinking. “It could be true, if we get the Sage to lend Oz their strength so he can make it overcast.”
Shylock’s laugh is light. “It’s breathtaking how easily you lie.”
“You’re hard to get a hold of alone. I had to say what I had to say.” Now Figaro drinks. And Shylock opens his mouth, witticism cut short by Figaro’s petulant, “Did you see how he rebuffed me? All the magic in the world, and rocks for brains.”
Shylock doesn’t say anything. He may coexist with Oz, he may serve him drinks without batting an eye, but talking nonchalantly about him as Figaro does is something he cannot do. Not all these centuries later and not ever, Figaro thinks. For that, he doesn’t expect Shylock to reply; merely to place a hand on Figaro’s shoulder, some inconsequential touch.
It startles Figaro when Shylock says, “Would you rather it was his heart that was made of stone?”
“What do you mean?”
“It might not be my place,” Shylock slowly says, shifting in his seat, “but I think it’s preferable for him to be oblivious of your feelings rather than cognizant but uncaring. Taunting, even.”
Figaro makes a sound, fermenting to a laugh. “We have terrible luck in romance, don’t we?”
Shylock inhales from his pipe, exhales. The smoke takes the shape of a hand and raises the bottle in a faux toast, pouring whiskey into the glass. “And so we’re drawn to other vices.”
“Cheers to that!” Figaro says, swiping Shylock’s glass to drink it. He licks his bottom lip. “But you have it worse than me. Oz isn’t great at understanding people, especially if you’re not direct about what you want. I’ve never told him how I—feel.” He stumbles on the word, not out of drunkenness—that is far, far off—but its impropriety on his tongue. “But you…”
Shylock’s magic refills the glass. “I didn’t intend to uphold myself as worthier of pity,” he says, one long finger tracing its rim, drawing out a high note that quivers Figaro’s bones. “We each have our reasons for what we’ve done, or haven’t. It does us no good to compare our plights.” He drinks.
Though Figaro watches Shylock’s exposed throat work the whiskey, and though it’s terribly attractive, heightened by the decadence of his pervasive smoke, there is another thought in Figaro’s periphery. One of someone with a preference for stouter mugs and the snowy evergreen forests of the North fragrant in his long hair. “Oz did have a stone heart once,” he says, more to himself. “It’s all thanks to Arthur that he’s softened. All those centuries I spent with him, and I couldn’t do what Arthur did in a blink.”
Jealousy of a child is unbecoming, but if Shylock thinks the same, he is mum about it. Perhaps because his loss was to the moon they have been fated to fight. Pathetic all around, the two of them. Figaro laughs again, mirthlessly.
They take turns with the bottle, and it’s gone sooner than Figaro likes.
“Another?” Shylock asks, perfectly sober.
Figaro shakes his head. The motion dizzies him.
“How briefly I kept you company,” Shylock says, brushing imaginary lint from Figaro’s shoulder.
“Because I want your company in a different way tonight, and you know that.”
“As soon as you walked in,” Shylock admits with a sly smile.
Figaro leans on Shylock and tilts his head back, seeing him upside down. His smile could be mistaken for a frown. Maybe that’s what he thinks of their arrangement, deep down. There is no integrity in it; the solace it offers is just a semblance of it. What it is is a toxic salve. “So? Will you?”
It isn’t a frown, it is only a matter of perspective; but the resignation is unmistakably etched onto the corners of Shylock’s eyes. “What reason do I have to say no?”
Without magic to break through space-time, they must rely on their own feet to take them to Shylock’s room. They do not bother to obfuscate themselves with magic. It isn’t unusual for Shylock, well-liked among all in the manor, to host visitors in his room. Those visitors are never Figaro’s sort, but no one else has to know it isn’t merely wine and conversation they will share.
So in the hallway, when Oz sees Figaro walk beside Shylock, he would think nothing of it. He even gives them a curt nod in silent goodnight.
Were Figaro any weaker, he would scream. But as it is—as he is—he waves at Oz before dipping after Shylock into his room. He wonders what expression Shylock wore, but the thought disappears like salt in the ocean when he closes the door, quietly, met with the private space Shylock has nestled for himself in the sprawling manor, and then forcefully meeting Shylock’s mouth with his.
Shylock makes a small, surprised noise that Figaro swallows, that Shylock himself lets go of, accepting the moment for what it is. He twines his hands at the back of Figaro’s neck; Figaro tugs Shylock as close to him as their clothed bodies will allow.
Figaro only stops for air. In that breadth of space, Shylock murmurs, “You didn’t even let us get comfortable.” Though he doesn’t sound very aggrieved.
“Sorry.” He isn’t. Desperation, a desire—to forget, to remember something else—make him weak. And he lets himself succumb when the one deliciously dragging him to the worst of himself is Shylock.
Shylock’s laugh is throaty. Disbelieving. Figaro’s laughing, too, letting himself be led by Shylock, tiptoeing backwards, to the bed. But it’s Figaro who shoves Shylock down; a mercy the bed is soft, or else he would have broken bones. There is a flicker of genuine consternation on his face that Figaro pretends he didn’t see as he lowers himself over Shylock, eyes already closed as he kisses him, tasting so wonderful but so wrong, pretending that it’s who is right.
Blindly, Figaro loosens Shylock’s necktie, fluttering it to the floor where the shawl had fallen on its own, lost in their swiftness. Next are the buttons in Shylock’s vest, and Figaro is more practiced with undoing them on someone else than doing them up on himself. Magic could have gotten that done faster yet to let Figaro press his mouth with everything he won’t say to Shylock’s lily mark, in near mirror of where Oz’s is. But magic would have taken the power out of it—the power of your hands, intimate and tangible, to make someone yours.
The vest is unbuttoned and then the shirt, their halves folding on either side of Shylock’s skin. Figaro kisses his way down Shylock: mouth, jawline, neck, collarbone. Lily mark. On Shylock’s left, Figaro’s right, wholly wrong. He presses the edge of his teeth against it, not quite biting. Not quite meaning to tear it out and put it on Shylock’s other side. Beneath him, Shylock shivers—the touch, the wicked possibilities in Figaro’s taut body and in every past night they’ve shared.
Instead of violence, of sinking into a delusion of his own worsening, Figaro flings out an arm, keeping his lips to Shylock’s skin in pretense of ownership, and he mumbles, “Possideo.” A bottle from the cabinet of alcohol, stocked even in Shylock’s room, zips into his waiting hand.
“I thought you said no more drinking,” Shylock says as Figaro flicks his eyes up, the cork popping off of the wine with wordless magic.
Figaro poses the bottle over Shylock. “I can always make an exception,” he says, pouring wine on the dip in Shylock’s collarbone. It greedily takes it in. A glass made of warm skin, pure bones, and from it Figaro drinks. It doesn’t take long at all, and he raises his spinning head.
Under the dim lights, influenced by the alcohol, Shylock’s hair takes on the blue-black of night. Of Oz’s hair. Despite their desperate movements, Shylock’s hair has not been mussed from its updo. Figaro places a hand at the back of Shylock’s head, fingers weaving his hair free. It elegantly falls to frame his face, to spill on the pillow. Figaro pulls away as high up as his arms will allow.
“You should grow your hair out,” he says, looking at Shylock’s hair, long but not enough.
“No, thank you,” Shylock says. “I like it at this length.” He wraps his hands around Figaro’s neck, easing him down. “You should pour some more—”
“It would look better. You’re all about achieving the highest aesthetics, aren’t you?”
Shylock is silent. “Figaro,” he says, so gently that it gets Figaro’s eyes on him, properly; for who, aware of who Figaro has been, would dare to utter his name with good intent? “I am a replacement for Lord Oz. Not of him.” He drops his hands by his sides, a curl of his fingers summoning his hair into its updo. “I can indulge in certain things your heart longs for, but I cannot be anyone but myself.”
Heart? Longing? A laugh—probably—makes its way out of Figaro’s mouth. “Forget I said anything,” he says, pressing his mouth to Shylock’s collarbone. Phrased as a suggestion, omitting the reality he could make it with a spell. Instead, he uses his magic to pool more wine into the dip of Shylock’s neck, kissing it away to Shylock’s little sighs.
It’s not all giving. Shylock, deft as Figaro, doesn’t need to see where to put his hands between Figaro’s legs to stroke, to remove his clothing. Figaro helps; his hands are idle, with the wine bottle held aloft by magic, but they are as needy as the rest of him. He touches, is touched, he drinks, and the only meaning in any of their motions is in each drop of lapped wine numbing him. It’s good not to care. It’s what is best.
Centuries to his name, half the world once in his palm, revolutions he had spurred and abandoned and been dragged to by fate—he is a forger of history from the shadows he’s flitted between with every changing angle of the sun. All that, and for what? He has cast his back upon those who pushed too far in knowing him, and it has left him alone, chest near bursting with everything he has repressed in his long life, soon to end.
I’m going to die, Shylock, he thinks. He never says as much, but he thinks of his dying as incessantly as a prayer; of the futility of what he’s done, and, overwhelmingly, what he hasn’t and can’t and won’t. He thinks it while biting too hard, gliding in too deeply, and all Shylock does is breathe out his pleasure, unaware it is Figaro’s pain.
The wine is bled, the prayer unspoken, their bodies spent. Sweat, salt, and alcohol are all Figaro tastes, and they are what shape his dreams: the Northern sea, reached after the inland’s full conquest, the victory extolled by drinks with someone, long hair streaming in the mighty wind that would have stolen what anyone tried to say.
Figaro blinks, and the sun glows on hair too devoid of night for it to be whom he’d just abandoned, even in his dreams. It will never be Oz. Blame the disorienting thoughts first creeping in after slumber, exacerbated by last night’s alcohol throbbing in his head. He sits up carefully and looks at Shylock. He’s still asleep and will be for hours; not an early riser, that one. His hair remains done up, though stray locks fan out on his cheek. The bed sheet is draped over his body just-so, exposing all one needs to imagine how beautiful the rest of him, hidden away, is.
Figaro exhales wearily. It’s no wonder why many people fall for Shylock. If he’d never met Oz, he would have been among them. And how would that have ended, with Shylock as unapproachable as Oz for how his own heart was already claimed?
He gets out of bed, not dwelling on a past that never was. Here is the life he’s been given; here is what he must do: flee, always flee.
After dressing and fixing his hair, Figaro casts a spell to render himself invisible and slips out from Shylock’s room. He knows how to step on the manor’s floors to avoid a telltale creak, and he knows Oz’s room is not nearby, but he does not know why Oz walks from the direction opposite that he should. Nor why his eyes drift in Figaro’s direction.
Figaro stills, the stutter of his breath the only thing that would give him away; but that is after Oz pins him in place. Surely his spell is not weak enough that Oz would sense its mistakes, or who it conceals?
But of course it’s not. Oz raises the arm not stiffly hidden at his side and has his magic fix a crooked painting behind Figaro.
Figaro’s teeth sink painfully deep into his bottom lip as he keeps a bark of a laugh in, bitter with the blood drops he’s welled up. He hurries to his room, not seeing Oz turn to worriedly look after him, not seeing the bottle of whiskey at Oz’s side.