Chapter Text
It was a simple moment, when he was eight.
He wasn’t much of anything yet but simultaneously not allowed to be nothing, so he was scented floral when children were to smell of dirt and he was much too pale as he was buried in books and new ink across his fingers like the breaking out of an allergic reaction when he should have had freckles scattering across his cheeks and the ridge of his nose and down his neck. A simulacrum of his grandfather who was so of his, his mother told him as soon as he was old enough to stand, and there are standards every generation must live up to. He naturally already knew the definition, and the implications, of what it meant to be another’s portrait.
But children no matter their effigy are always precocious in the same way a fish cannot breathe above water regardless of if it calls a river or the ocean its home, and even one such as him wishes for the darkened hallways of his estate to be something he sees when drenched in the third bell nightfall. Too scared is he to go further than just these halls, because the garden he walks in when the sun is high is looking too much like the very scary forest of the faeries the valiant knight got lost forevermore in when it’s low, let alone the windings further downtown into that too-dark maw like the dragon that then ate him.
It was simple, so simple. He couldn’t sleep despite the moon’s beckoning. He thought of going for a walk in its shade, because if it wasn’t the day there was nothing to do but sleep. Sweetly, he knocked on his door as he still held his teddy bear and the maid standing outside peered in. The candle she was holding lit her face from below and he very almost shied away from her before she smiled and accepted his very small hand into hers to accompany him. She didn’t speak, so there was nothing to listen to but the rough pounding of his heart in his chest. He would grow accustomed to this noise and the silence married to it, hand in hand, bells ringing.
The halls are the perfect roaming ground for lost souls, and Violet isn’t lost yet but they say places that hurt grow to be haunted, like how scars will ghost deep wounds. He has to waddle three steps for every wide stride of the maid, not even to her hips yet, and when he squeezes on her hand she squeezes back with a smile if not any words. He’s used to hearing words in actions, and from this he hears to follow quietly behind. He doesn’t know what it sounds like to be given affection - affirmation, positivity, compliments that would make even a poor man’s head grow to tumorous sizes he is dangerously familiar with - but not those simple three words. This is a failing that follows him for too long, but there is no way for him to know that yet when he has seen the pages of a textbook more than his father’s face.
He walks quietly, her even quieter, and the candle’s flame flickers to and fro with every bob of the bronze holder. Outside a wolf howls, its kin joining in song moments later, and Violet will look alarmed at the noise here even though he will come to know it as the most soothing noise the world can produce, second only to Pavel’s slow breathing as he rests curled up against the tree and a little too close to his leg. They ghost down the hallways, step down the staircase that winds like veins in the heart of this family, and then sweep briefly across the main hall.
And he knows what the main hall looks like, by the very fact that he’s lived here for his entire life, but - oh, it’s a coincidence , by definition, but fate has a way of looking so pedestrian in the moment until you trace it back like starlight veiling over that dark, peppered canvas overhead with your blotchy fingers, thirty-two and stuck in the honey pot of hearing ‘I love you’ but not knowing what that means. For they step into the hallway and briefly, the maid means well and the stars know this but little Violet does not and they sigh and cloud over as if to not see the freight train collision to his tiny carriage veering him off course. She takes him to the mantle place and holds the candle out and he has seen his mother of course of course but he has never seen her like this.
A portrait, you see. Hung by its neck, and the blaze of the candle dancing underneath like the burning of a stake.
The maid says, “you’ll be up there one day, too, young master.” There is a smile on her face, and she is only excited to see him there for she has served this family for years. Violet only hears a threat, or maybe something closer to a warning.
Well, the child’s mind is quick to be tormented by absurdism. He is 39 now. Still tormented, but that isn’t relevant at the present moment. Not as he sweeps through the streets, frost of the baby winter be damned.
His cape is a stretch of the night behind him and if he’s frank, so too are the lines across his face. He’s older now - as people are wont to grow so, when time passes by them - but his eyes still glimmer brightly like stars in the darkness that shrouds his features, hood pulled over his head and a non-descript broach keeping it tight across his shoulders lest the wind tug it off him seductively, wishing for him to stay a little longer than his scurrying down Perland’s concrete leaves it behind. He isn’t in the business of being recognised but it appears Perland herself has missed him greatly. Bright with familiar scents in the air despite the blustering winds coaxing him here to a valiant stall that remains open even as the snow begins making its descent known via the bridges of red forming across their cheeks and noses; there to a tavern he recalls spending more than a few nights at back when the Raiders were more than just a memory he could catch himself thinking about when his eyes have spent more time looking at the ceiling than her next to him. Slush on the ground, and noise in the air.
As it is, Perland is different ten years later in the same way a tree is different ten years later, which is to mean maybe it's grown a few more branches as its concrete roads wind deeper into its busy, ever-crowded centre and some more leaves with its blooming buildings that he doesn’t recognise but is still easily recognisable as what it is if only because you know the very shape of it. But every tree will be pruned, or will have a new set of leaves, and in this descriptor the leaves are the bricks that make up the city. The walls themselves are similar to what he remembers, astoundingly large grey that towers right up taller than the biggest peaks in the city. They grant the same sort of awe when you walk through that any good mountain lining the horizon of your glare would do. Yet when he walks in, there is the tell-tale scaffolding attached to buildings around the area like beige-coloured webbing by impossibly large spiders creeping up their proud lengths. Some buildings have already had their transformation complete - bricks swapped out for clear panels, large windows and electricity that beams bright colours down to the concrete of the footpath he walks along.
As he does there’s activity rushing down it. Plenty of people, all of whom give him nothing more than a passing glance. He doesn’t get lost exactly while he wanders through the streets, but Violet’s eyes catch on more things than he remembers, and he recalls knowing Perland’s streets like the behind of his eyelids. But then time marches on, regardless of personal misgivings of how you’ve spent it, and ten years is a mighty duration to be absent from so much as the lifespan of milk, let alone an entire city. In ten long, long years, milk can be taken from the udder, bottled up, pasteurised, further heated into yoghurt, and go off to be nothing but a sour bit of mess no one wants anything to do with. Violet snorts just as tart, as soon as he thinks it, bringing his cloak to wrap tighter as it falls askew from his shoulder as a bluster rolls in from his right - nay, a synonym should not so succinctly describe the truth of the matter, lest it simply be a retelling.
The location, neither, is of any particular concern to him. Violet ambles down the roads that will be buried in snow within the hour with a relaxation that could fascinate a frenzied man who has only heard his mind’s voice speak in his caffeinated high of the past day, because he’s simultaneously in no rush and also desperate to return home. Home itself is a strange word, lackadaisical - perhaps, incoherent - in its definition, because Perland is home in that wider understanding of it but he will, absolutely, freeze to death if he remains outside in it, so he needs to think of it as something a little smaller.
Just a little bit smaller. Relatively worthless though his family name is, it’s still nobility, and the space his estate is built on is a constant reminder of that. He pauses for only a second when he knows where to find the warmth of a fireplace that need not be accessible after he passes his coin purse along to the proprietor. He has none, after all.
So he walks and he walks and he walks and he is uninterrupted in his walking despite the large volume of people he passes by, which strikes him as almost liminal considering how boisterous his walks down these roads would usually be, until he turns a much quieter corner into a deserted alleyway that he remembers and hopes still leads closer to the road he has to take to get to his estate. Then there is a very rough bump into his shoulder and he thinks to himself yes, yes, this is much more like it.
Only to look down at whoever has rushed him down and sees, well. He sees the black boots sharp against the white-speckled grey concrete. The faint lime-green glimmer that rests on his chest. The piercing red eyes that always caught a bit of the sun, settling gold at the bottom of his irises, like the sun lowering and leaving behind a gradient.
“Oh,” says Violet, somehow stunned. “Pavel.”
Pavel looks up at him, blinks, and then his narrowed eyes blow wide open and he pales. “... Violet?”
“You- you recognise me? Pavel. Pavel, it is you, isn’t it?” and the first thing Violet really notices is that his eyes have lost their glint, because he is shamelessly staring at him like a thirsty traveller drinks from the water of an oasis.
Silence lies between them, like that little empty space of a mattress that they leave in the absence of letting the pits of their backs touch. “Yes,” Pavel says eventually, eyes electing to settle into a scowl that matches the thinness of his lips. “Of course I recognise you, Violet.” He has a hood on himself - dark raven and melty in the overhead night that the lights from the main streets on either end don’t seem to reach, and one that makes him look all the more severe by casting a shadow across the sculpt of his nose and up.
The relief he feels almost sets his knees shaking. “Oh, oh,” he nearly sobs. “Thank goodness! Thank God! You have no idea how surreal it’s been, returning to Perland and finding absolutely no one recalls me! I stepped into a pub and no one challenged me to a duel - no one even looked up! It was a welcome change of pace initially, but now I frankly just find it eerie, and- oh, Pavel! Pavel, it’s such a joy to see you again!”
To his surprise, Pavel sighs. “Right, sure,” is all he says.
“I,” Violet starts, only to never get where he means to go - he jumps out of his wet boots when there is a bang, and then another bang followed by crashing and yelling from past the corner Pavel came from.
Noises that are far from unique nor abnormal in Perland, but Pavel glances behind him with eyes the size of the moon creeping into the sky anyway. “Shit,” he says, and then, spitting, “ shit .”
“Trouble?” Violet asks him, casual enough to pass for a Saturday morning.
In reply, Pavel pushes past and runs.
“Hey!” Violet yells after him, and there’s something to be said about privacy here and there about the act of promptly following after someone who is clearly looking to get away, but when that person got away with skin paling and a grimace you’d give a misbehaving welp, he thinks privacy can get fucked for the moment.
The crashing and bashing is not confined to the alleyway they run out of - it bares chase, clearly, grumbling past and into the street. Pavel skids around the corner by the side of his heavy-duty boots and Violet follows and then, just when he’s hoping the four-pronged roundabout will give them at least a brief chance, he hears, “ that way!” and the hoard of rumbling feet approach.
“What happened?” Violet asks as they run. “Who’re these jokers?” He’s got his hand on the hilt of his sword and he’s not unwilling to use it - he’s just got to get the clarity to know exactly who he’s pointing it at, because justice hasn’t died until he has or something just as diabolically cheesy along those lines.
He knows Pavel’s heard him when his pupils swivel in their sockets to look at him, which is then how he subsequently knows he’s ignored him when he doesn’t reply.
“You can tell me if you’re in deep!” Violet tries, as pleasantly as he can when he’s using most of his energy to book it. “I won’t be mad! Everyone gets deep over something at some point!”
“Left,” says Pavel, and then, unsurprisingly, turns left.
That brings them to an empty road that offers nothing by way of people and even less by way of light. He follows Pavel’s footsteps as he forges on ahead but bumbles blindly like a mole as he does, hands outstretched and legs unsteady like he’s taking his first damn steps in the world. Then light, as exploding from a single bright bulb that bores into his eyes. He’s quick to wince, hand instantly over his eyes in the hopes thin skin can prove an effective barrier from the sort of intensity that could evaporate light, but his eyes adjust soon and he can shuffle his way to the side to see what manner of beast has attempted to rid him of his ability to see.
Pavel’s got his leg slung across it already, and it’s a sleek-looking thing that looks like what the paper boy would usually ride around on at the break of dawn as he delivered the morning papers chirping at the top of his voice, but if it had been taken over by the same scaffolding that were attached up the length of the buildings and turned them from brick to something shinier. A bulb at the peak of it, two handlebars on either side, and a fluid motion of dark metal that leads into a plush-looking black seat and wheels bigger than his head.
Violet would personally best describe it as a mechanical horse, and he’s thinking that as he politely gestures towards it. “This is?”
“None of your business,” Pavel tells him. He plasters his ass atop it, quick to place his palms on the handles, and when he twists them a loud howling noise emanates from it, or maybe it really is a whinny from an exceptionally-strange looking colt. From the sides where the exhaust pipes are, a cloud of smoke floats upwards to disappear into the night’s air.
“Fine.” He knows he won’t be getting anywhere if Pavel’s feeling particularly stubborn. His best virtue, that (or a flaw, depending on who you asked - maybe the day you asked Violet himself). “Can two people get on it?”
“I didn’t ask for you to come with me,” Pavel replies, colder than the falling snow.
He huffs loudly, brow creasing and throwing his hands out. “Please. You wouldn’t so much as ask for a cup of coffee, let alone for me to follow you when you’ve clearly got a case of shit on your heel.”
“What do you know about what I’d ask for?” he snaps back, mouth crooked down and brows hardly contrary. “You've been checking in? Peeping on how I’ve been doing?”
“Is now the time to do this?” Violet points out, really trying to be helpful and throwing his hands out behind him. Do you remember? You were running, and I was following?
“Is it the time to come back ?” Pavel asks, enraged, before both of them sweep around at a barked, “ there !”
The engine roars with a twist of its handlebars. Pavel looks past Violet and onto the road. Something glints amongst the chasers - silver, metallic. The second seat of the bike isn’t quite as safe as the leather seat Pavel gets nor as easy on his ass, but Violet hops on without another word and has just enough time to grab Pavel’s shoulders before the tires skid and they ride off out the alleyway. A straight, bullet-clean path leading onto the main road.
And then, bang. Screaming in his arm.
Perhaps, had he offered more time to the thought that this humming, bright technological revolution had given more convenience to Perland, it would have occurred to him to realise that one of the most convenient things any fighter can have is an immediate and lethal long ranged weapon. One that, perhaps, was coloured a handy silver, and could catch the remnant light of a motorcycle’s light.
“Son of a bitch! ” he yells, hand flying to where his arm sobs. “Aim like shit!”
“Louder than the fucking engine. Typical,” Pavel mutters under his breath.
There’s too much pain rippling across him to really take substantial note of the ride, but he does notice the way the technicolour lights whizz past, the relative emptiness of the streets, the way the stars seem to be a little shy and aren’t out, as if they’re afraid that the bright lamp posts and glitzy signs that seem to head every shop or establishment they go past will outshine them. Sometimes it goes bump underneath them and he’s afraid he’ll fly off. The bike glides a little too low at one point, catching on ice, and he damn near does marry the pavement.
Pavel barely moves, under his palm. Shoulders hopping sometimes, as the road’s uneven nature finds and meets them, and wind whipping his hair in the same way a curtain would when you’ve left the window open during a hurricane. It tickles his cheek and he says that’s why they’re warm in the falling snow. The wind meets him, too, curling through his insatiably messy hair like vexed fingers - it’s nice, he thinks, to be able to think of Perland as worrisome, still. A similar skeleton despite the change in skin. He hopes that isn’t unique to it, either.
“How bad did he get you?” Pavel finally asks, voice loud.
“Hurts,” Violet replies, though he doesn't really know how to assess it while he’s on the back of an insanely fast ride.
“God damn,” says Pavel simply, before bringing them to a stop.
They’re still in Perland - nowhere close to the gates, even, unless it’s changed that fundamentally since he left. Violet peeks over at him, and kind of obnoxiously focuses on how his bangs are long enough now to almost hide his eyes if you look at him from the side. He asks, “is it safe to stay in Perland? They seemed rather… intent.”
Pavel just shrugs. “If they’re that intent, it won’t matter. Show it to me.”
He doesn’t so much as show it to him as Pavel grabs him by the wrist and twists him to make sure he can see it, but it achieves the end goal of getting his eyes on the hole in his arm handily enough that he would only complain if he were a shitlord with no sense of decorum, and he happens to only be one of those things. Pavel inspects it quietly, eyes jumping around the entirety of the wound, and when he presses his finger around the wound with the delicacy kittens would thank him for Violet groans deep in his belly, wincing his eyes shut so hard if he did it for too long he’d trigger a migraine and then he’d be fucked two ways over. He’s quick to remove his fingers, as soon as Violet voices his discomfort.
“Not lodged,” he concludes. “Can’t see an entry wound. Nasty grazing, though.”
“Ah,” says Violet carefully, rolling his sleeves down. “Sorry for the false alarm, then. Can’t say I’ve much experience getting shot with anything quite this delicate.”
“Mhm,” is all Pavel says, as he moves to drape his leg back over and get his rump on his bike.
Like a barely held-back waterfall only blocked by the same dam a pack of beavers have been nibbling on the past decade, though such a description fails to account for the sheer heat in the way Pavel frowns if he so much as looks at him.
It’s silly to think he so much as deserves his time, really. He can acknowledge that. He isn’t the same barely-socialised kid who joined the Raider’s half because he was terrified his entire life would be one house and ten people - he’s older, maybe not wiser, or maybe more of it because he can say he’s not the smartest person this side of the planet anymore.
He tells himself that. Repeats it, over and over again. He’s not the same. No, he isn’t. He isn’t the same.
He’s different, he thinks, exactly as he says, “can I ask now? How you’ve been doing?” A bit of concern for what is really a very concentrated attempt to keep him hanging about a little longer. A child asking for a bedtime story despite his eyelids being heavy, because he doesn’t want to see his mother’s back yet.
Pavel scoffs, twisting his bike’s handles. It roars with adoring enthusiasm, as if it can’t wait to bare him away from here on its back, and Violet can’t help but feel a little put out by that idea. “Why care now?”
“Perhaps because I’m worried about the fact that you have violent people after you.”
“It’s nothing,” Pavel tells him calmly. “I intervened with them mugging an old man, so they turned their sights on me.”
Violet balks at him. “That’s insane. No petty thief could have a gun like that, surely.”
“Gun’s have been in the hands of criminals for approximately seven years now. Smuggled in from Ritania,” Pavel proceeds to explain, and remind him in just as many words that the creases across his face are indeed more numerous than he remembers there being.
He isn’t sure how to reply to that - to be cheeky about it and laugh feels as though he diminishes it, to apologise profusely for his distance in Perland’s criminal upheaval will only achieve the counter of what he’s aiming and set that engine blazing, taking him away from him - so all he does is blink slowly, lips pulled more taut than the fucking screeching fibres in his shot arm, which is maybe a little telling on what axis he feels more painfully. “You have to understand,” he starts, maybe babbling a little. “I- when I left, it wasn’t- there wasn’t much I could do, so-”
“I don’t,” Pavel tells him slowly, firmly. “I just don’t want to talk about it.”
“Then we don’t have to,” Violet insists. He inches closer, rests his hand on the handle Pavel isn’t holding, and tries to ignore the way his eyes glare at his curled fingers from behind his dark bangs. “I am perfectly happy to not talk about it. We can talk about something else, anything else.”
“Desperation doesn’t look good on you, Violet,” Pavel mumbles, flattened.
With his best grin, Violet leans forward. “But that new hairstyle does on you . Always thought long hair would look nice on you, and the pony-tail look is very chic.”
“It’s just easy to do in the morning,” says Pavel, only to realise he’s immediately getting caught up in his funny little and inescapable rhythm. He straightens his back, pushes him off his handle to rev the engine like it’s a threat and Violet certainly feels like it is one, his heart immediately making itself at home in his throat.
So, when threatened, you test it. At least, that’s what Violet does, what he always has. “I’ll sit on the back again, I swear I will.”
Another sigh. “What do you want, Violet?”
“I want my best friend to look me in the eye without me getting the sense he wants to dash my brains against the nearest brick wall,” Violet replies, shoving a hand on his hip and trying to make himself look just big enough that he will not fall over if he does elect to drive into him, even though he definitely will and they absolutely both know that.
“And if I don’t want to give you that?” Pavel asks, frowning.
“Then I’ll be really sad,” Violet says. “Because I like my brain in my skull. It’s sort of where it belongs. And also, I like you, so it’s a win-win for me.”
“It’s always about you,” Pavel mutters under his breath. “Always, always.”
“It’s about us, ” Violet insists, his brow curled. “And I don’t think it’s wrong to say that.”
The following silence sits between them like a wide emerald meadow. The sort pepped with little flowers of every colour imaginable and matched by large oak trees who tickled one another by the leaves over their heads, that offered plenty of dark bushes to hide in during stakeouts, but were just the wrong sort of shade to hide him properly when he always preferred colours of the more purple variety and always get found with a gentle fist to the head and a coffee. The sort that would give way to dark nights that didn’t feel so dark when a campfire burned and there were two rather than one.
“One dinner,” Pavel says to his handlebars, and Violet almost misses it. “One dinner, and then you leave, and I leave, and this is over.”
Violet bites his lip. “Okay. I’m fine with that,” he lies.
Immediately after, he is left to feel a little like how he thinks it would feel to knowingly walk to a room wherein a guillotine awaits you. The snow proves only a temporary annoyance as it hasn’t quite built up yet, and it looks perfectly fine, a sheet of white covering what would be the grey of the concrete.
With the walk being of relative ease, Violet attempts to do the thing he knows best passes the time when travelling by foot, and that’s flapping his mouth. Normally an incredibly easy task for him, because he could talk about the consistency of cotton and find a way to make that in a conversation that lasts a few hours. It’s a skill of his, to view the idea of shutting up ever as entirely anathemic to what it means to be himself.
He tries many topics. such as: “It’s so typical of you to go charging in to rescue someone and not think about the consequences. I mean that endearingly, honestly - it’s good of you to not change. I feel like I observed far too much changing on my way here.”
Or: “I always did wonder where you got that gun of yours from, you know! You never did tell me properly. Is it time? Do you think it’s really Ritanian in origin? Do you know ?”
Or: “You know, one of the places we went had a green sky during the morning. A green sky! It still boggles the mind when I think about it, but somehow the fact that the lights are green here too is surprising me just as much. I’d have thought I’d be used to strange colours in places by now!”
Or even: “Pavel, please. It’s just going to make us both miserable. You can at least say something, can’t you?”
All of it is met with a silent, sharp angle of the side of his face and the edge of his hood that hides his cheeks. He doesn’t wear plasters anymore, not the little white squares that set across his cheek and his jaw nor the one bandage that always seemed perpetually tucked under his fringe, only visible when the wind blew a little too hard and ruffled his essential fur; apparently, he’s content to bare his scars outwardly now.
Cautious and vigilant that he is, his eyes scan the city around them, the ground beneath them. One would be tempted to presume this means his attention is wholly caught on being alert to any attackers and in fairness, Violet himself thinks this at first - but it’s upon his second attempt when even the wind whispers through the streets of what he’s hoping isn’t going to be a full-on blizzard that he notices when he speaks, Pavel very clearly listens.
His eyes go round in his head to look at him. His brows slide downwards just a little. His lips pull tighter together. Not the features of a man who wishes much to be disturbed by prattling but then, he never did seem to appreciate the sound of his voice.
Mentally he loiters, here, on this point, relatively bemused. Maybe reuniting shone more in his mind than it was to be in reality. He always had a penchant of looking to the shadows and hoping it would all be a little brighter than what he saw. That’s what the chandeliers did, on noble nights - made the dark run right into the corners, and made it so the cynicism of the evening could be dispelled. For there was alcohol flowing, women and men visible, and quiet parts of the locale that you could presume you would not be sighted if you happened to be bent over.
Chandeliers seem awfully rustic for the new Perland, though. Perhaps even those nights are gone.
He hated them. That should be a good thing, he thinks. He does not feel it. A pain dispelled without him; surgery conducted away from his chest; cauterising another’s arm and beaming at you as if to wonder why you seemed unsure. Hollow, or maybe never there at all.
“This is,” he mumbles, aware this is more to himself in the face of Pavel’s insistence on remaining silent, as they walk down those blinding streets. “Ritania’s influence as well, isn’t it? After the war.” He didn’t even know lights could shine green before this - indeed, the sky was as far as he thought it would go, somehow - but the emerald hue is sharp as it glares at him atop the nearby bar’s roof, and behind it are three other colours from other beckoning signs. Perland’s sky, settled above it, glimmers with the lights as though it has taken them in to create a brand new colour, but he notes no white peppering its night canvas as he used to. It makes it feel oddly uncomfortable; a little unwelcoming, if you happened to think green looked bad on you, or didn’t much like how blue would look washed across your forearms and back.
Pavel merely grunts. Clearly, being strong-armed into this has not done wonders for his sociability. “There’s a place. Kind of old. Three streets down,” he says in place of a reply to his nostalgia-slash-melancholy.
“Sounds good,” he replies, maybe a little too quickly. “Your pick.” It’s the least he can do.
He gets a glance backwards. “... Your arm?”
“Later,” Violet says with a wave of his other hand. “Pain’s already fading. Totally forgot about it until just now, actually.”
He is, of course, lying through his teeth again, but there’s a pretty substantial part of him that’s afraid if he asks for a raincheck on dinner, he’ll not ever get it. He’s sat through worse injuries for longer than however long it’s going to take for Pavel to decimate a meal - he’ll be more than fine. Fine enough to put a meal into his own mouth and chew slowly enough to stop him from saying dumb shit when Pavel decides he’s had enough.
The diner is a comfortable-looking place - he doesn’t wince, at least, when he passes through the doors, unlike the vague headache he’s been gifted by the streets when everywhere he turns to is lit up a new colour with the intensity of a small sun a metre away from his face. It’s empty when they walk in, betraying the time of day - or, rather, night - with no one more than who stands behind the counter. It's headed by an ageing man who looks similarly uninterested in human contact as Pavel is as he walks into the rather small space, picking a table towards the front despite how veritably cosy Violet can't help but think it might be to squeeze themselves right into the corner. Under the burning white light of the lamp ahead and the decorative glow across the skirting board in the otherwise grey and drab room, it has a way of washing out his dark colours to a strange bleached look.
I hope my shades look better than that in this light, Violet thinks. He pulls a chair out, sits directly opposite from Pavel, and it makes a harsh screeching sound from metal leg against vaguely-polished flooring.
He settles into his chair - resting his elbows on the table, chin in his hands - to silence. Pavel crosses his arms over his chest and dips his head, shutting his eyes as though he means to go to sleep. Quiet and distant, even though if Violet reached out he could graze his fingers against his arm exerting very little effort. Leaving scratch marks as though he had claws there, maybe.
“It’s cheap,” says Pavel, eventually, nodding over at the person behind the counter. He rolls his eyes as he picks up what Violet’s going to guess is the menu, and then throws it in front of the two of them like he’s tossing playing cards.
This time, it's Violet's time to look like a ghost merely haunting some delectable man-meat. Pavel glances up at him, and then curls a brow when Violet kind of opens his mouth and brings his hand there, horrified.
“I,” says Violet, quiet as rain on a sunny day, but decidedly not as pretty. “I forgot. I don’t have any money.”
There’s the sort of pause one only gets when the person in front of them thinks they’ve achieved stupidity that would find them written into history books, recognised for it across the grey of their tombstone. Pavel’s eyes have gone narrow from barely-restrained resentment (because of course, what else would it possibly be?) to about as wide as a stunned audience member would wear, and mouth curled in the way it would be when that stunning is coloured surprised.
“Nothing?” Pavel tries, vaguely in awe.
Cheeky as he is Violet shoves a hand into one jacket pocket, and then the other - he’s not got a bag with him, so he just gestures oddly when he produces nothing.
His jaw falls open, now the kind of stunned you’d get when you apply a taser directly to bare skin. “What was your plan for dinner this evening if I’d turned you down, exactly? Or even breakfast tomorrow?”
Violet shrugs. “I didn’t really have one. I was hoping the nice chaps at the pub would accept something besides money in exchange for purchasing me something.”
“How did you even think to go on holiday without any money?”
“Oh,” says Violet, and then he smiles as he says, “ohh! Oh, there’s been a misunderstanding. I’m not on holiday; I’ve moved back.”
A quirk of his brow. Pavel’s jaw has gone so loose he could probably swallow a lemon whole and not feel the acid until it starts bubbling away in his stomach. “... As in, permanently?”
“Presumably,” says Violet with a nod. “Assuming, of course, there’s yet space for me. If not, well - I’ve always wanted to visit Cidonia at my own pace.”
Pavel scoffs like a dragon, all heat and bared teeth. As if it's his maw, he snaps the menu open. “I don’t see the concern. She’ll be back, then.”
“Oh, well,” he says sheepishly, palm against the back of his neck. “I don’t think that’ll be happening, actually. She’s the one who dropped me here.”
A pause. “Pardon?”
“We’ve separated.” Violet narrows his eyes, chin resting on the back of his hand in thought. “At least, is the narrative I’ve been left to conclude. She didn’t say it in as many words, but she certainly said something of dissatisfaction, and the novelty of it has led me to believe I’m unlikely to ever see her again. Ah, well.”
Pavel fumbles with his words, blubbers as though he's had his head dunked underwater, but manages to slowly say to the space between them, “so… you’re alone?”
“I confess, I didn’t expect this reaction.”
A grunt, as Pavel throws his hand to the side and glares at him. “I’ve been expecting her to show up this entire time.”
Violet merely cocks his brows. “Don’t tell me that’s why you’ve been so frosty?” he mumbles, his finger on his chin. “I suppose you always were a bit aloof with her, but I’d have thought you would have put it aside for our reunion. Didn’t think you were this petty; honestly, it’s rather funny.”
“Mhm." His eyes go askew to where the light of vanilla lines run along the panelling at the foot of the wall as he rests his cheek on his curled palm.
Carefully, Violet slants his shoulders; angles to the side. He wrinkles his pretty face, nose-centric like it's the treasure trove to a kraken's whirlwind of shipwreckery, and asks, “I can’t tell if that’s agreement or not. And I suppose you won’t be telling me, will you?”
He, predictably, does not tell him. But he does grant him the mercy of dinner paid by his coin, so he’s willing to let that particular frustration get gutted like the fish he passes over, drawing his finger down the menu’s various categories.
They order one thing or another - some rabbit food for Pavel, and some rabbit food of the soup variety for Violet because he is nothing if not careful about food poisoning nowadays having been convinced he lived with a chronic case of it during his time with the Raider’s - and drinks arrive not a moment later. Simple water for him lest his stomach grow too slosh-sloshy when the soup is dunked down his gullet, and a coffee for Pavel. He wants to say something about it not being the best hour for coffee, but he looks at his face and sees the bags under his eyes that are deep enough to be reminiscent of melting wax down the stick of a candle and thinks if anything, the coffee might help him, visibly rattled that he seems to be.
In the ensuing silence (naturally, because it would not be an awkward night without the awkward silences), Violet is left to his own devices. Scrambles for a topic or two or three and comes up short of anything that might not lead down a path ending with Pavel’s foot on the table as he angles a finger down at him and yells a decade’s worth of obscenities at him, and he’s doing such a good job keeping himself civil that Violet kind of wants to meet him halfway here. That, and also, he’d really rather not get shouted at when there's the sort of person behind the counter who will most definitely start laughing at the scene.
Absent of any conversation to anchor himself to, he drifts to what he’s currently decked out in. He’s familiar in an oddly unrecognisable way, he thinks - shaped similar, but detailed different. Hardly the most graceful of designs is he now- his hair has always been terminally uncontrollable, but it appears extra dishevelled now after the impromptu riding of the winds earlier. Though, that it’s to his shoulders now helps a little by making it look more like a trunk of a tree rather than the nest atop one’s branches. A few loose strands here and a cowlick there go a long way to making it feel a lot like time hasn’t passed, so long as he doesn’t let his eyes stray too low.
Yet even then, he looks about what he would recognise had he worn them before. Strict, uniform, marshal and clearly diligent; entirely in various shades of dark grey or black, broken up only by belts slashed across him and the reflective shiny metal that come with their buckles and ribs and edges. Perhaps it might literally be a uniform of sorts.
To some ends, it’s relieving - the exact clothes he’s selected may be different, but the underlying intent is the same. This isn’t an outfit, but something selected purely as they were conducive to his two simple criteria that anything he picks must fulfil. The first, of course, being that they must be existent and can cover his unmentionables, and the second prioritising comfort over any aesthetic purpose.
“You look good. Aged well for someone who I had to force to put moisturising cream on every other night,” Violet tells him, tapping his fingers on the table. Awkward motions for an awkward night. Awkward tone of voice for an awkward person.
Pavel peers at him from behind his bangs - a tired shade of red that tinges dissatisfaction. I could be doing anything else but be here in the way his brows are curled, and yet the acknowledgement that he’s here and not simply getting up and leaving anyway in the way his shoulders are slumped and there’s more tension in the air between them than in his body. “Thanks.” And then, “you look like shit.”
He thinks he’d at least give it some more grace, but then if he were looking for grace in Pavel he’d be a madman. He tries mining for it anyway, if only because he finds it easier to talk like this than whatever's been passing for conversation between them until now. “No flattery at all? Nothing about ageing like fine wine? I worked hard for a graceful twilight!”
Rock proves to not split under a fork when Pavel mumbles, “I don’t really pay attention to that sort of thing," to his hands resting in his lap.
It’s less of a funny thought that he kind of assumed it would be, when he thinks about how it would almost never be so empty previously in any sort of establishment that provides alcohol, and feels an incredible pit open up in the bottom of his stomach as if he’d just stepped on clear air. Even though it sucks to acknowledge, what it does do is give him a topic to chase, and he is nothing if not blessed with a maw that can grip onto any poor ankle he wants and refuse to be shaken off.
This particular nibble is worded as, “how’s Cerise?”
Pavel promptly swallows what Violet thinks might be half his entire fucking body and starts coughing like he’d inhaled smoke into his hands. Apparently, with relatively little effort, he has stumbled upon one that can be thought of as a reckoning to the chin via a clenched fist.
“What, is she off-limits too?” Violet pouts. “Bit selfish. I was friends with her as well.”
He falters, hesitating with a wince, patting his chest roughly. “I would,” Pavel drawls in veritable surrender. “Notion the idea of explaining my history with her as something on the lines of a personal hellscape that I wake up in cold sweats over and reject you outright, but if I say nothing you’ll just ask her, won’t you?”
Violet regards him like how you’d concern yourself with a lamp post on the side of the street, which is to say not especially so. “Not in such a malicious way as if dripping with contempt for your privacy, but you are a fool if you think I have no intention of visiting the woman. The topic of how she has fared these past few years will, sorry to say, absolutely be coming up, if nothing else as a politeness to show interest in her. Not because I intend to torment you, you understand,” he adds in a mutter.
“Blasted small talk,” Pavel grumbles. “Fine. I wouldn’t know. I haven’t spoken to her in a while.”
Not that they were especially known for their, uh, communication, but it still makes Violet cease his incessant tapping to tuck his hand demurely under his chin. I’m listening. “No letters?”
“Bit awkward to continue exchanging letters after separating,” says Pavel, his brown knitted in a frown.
Judging him for a failed relationship would be terribly uppity of him, even if he was of the opinion that they had not only a Thing, but a Good Thing. “I’m sorry,” he says cooly, instead of drilling for details like they were clay being found for the biggest fucking pottery class in the world (even though he really, really wants to). “How long was it?”
“A few years. Tried to make things work.” He pauses here, even though there’s only one other way something can go if it doesn't go well. “It didn’t, really.”
He’s so curious but he doesn’t really want Pavel to bolt now that they’re getting somewhere (even if that somewhere is sort of the topical equal of taking him by the arm, pulling it behind him, and then slamming him to the ground chest-first). So instead he goes, “I see. What are you doing now, then?”
“Working,” Pavel says, listless, fingers indenting the skin of his forearm.
Violet puts two and two together. “Something to do with those guys?” he asks, jerking his head to the doors that lead outside.
He gets seven when Pavel shakes his head. “No. Not in as many words, at least.” A hand of his rises to the back of his neck to rub at it. “I joined the military.”
“You went back to the Raiders, then?”
“No, no,” says Pavel quietly. “The Raiders - they don’t exist anymore. Never refunded after…” he trails off, looking right at Violet, or maybe - hopefully - a little past him. To his vague direction, knowing he does not stand there. “Just normal soldiers and lieutenants, now.”
“Ah,” says Violet, and somehow that’s what makes him feel the most lonely yet.
He looked up to them. Maybe only so much as they were the only way out for a kid who needed to be something but wanted to be anything else, but still. You don’t devote a large portion of your life to something without feeling even a little sad that it’s not around anymore. More intense than when you go to your favourite café and find out they don’t sell your favourite panini with flank steak anymore, but not by much.
Burned and razed away, nothing more than a footnote in history now. There will be a section within the books that seek to report objectively (or however objective one can be when they are only one person and the world is full of millions) about the Raider’s, and then once that is over they won’t be brought up again unless necessary, when they were something that would tirelessly act as a presence of safety for the difficult streets of Perland. Now, pages in a book.
That section would probably be a longer section than the one about his house, he thinks quietly. Fifteen years upon his taking up of the title of patriarch, Sir Violet Harrison disappeared without a trace, leaving his house in a state of flux and abandonment…
And then he, too. Between pages. Mere words to be cited once, if even that.
It was never for him, he thinks, and yet here he is - suddenly exhausted. Suddenly saddened by the exorability of meaning. He had been asked what it was all for and he didn’t even bother to give it an answer before it rotted away to be turned into papyrus and black ink, hastily typed away by a tired intern who struggles with the words and even more with the waking up at six in the morning.
He can only hope the shaking he feels in his hands does not make it into his voice as he says, “A soldier, hm? That sounds nice.”
“Not as nice as exploring the worlds,” Pavel replies easily, sipping his coffee (finally. It must be lukewarm at this point, or maybe time really does fly when you’re having fun, meaning it stands utterly still when you’re decidedly not). “But it was easier. The structure and orders of military life helped.”
Like how a deer freezes when a spotlight is suddenly shone on you. There’s an inherent loss of individuality when you become something as formless as a soldier, and Violet knows that well if only because he rather appreciated the break from being the reviver of his family when they all looked the same and thought the same and did the same things.
“Cerise’d ask about you sometimes. Asked if I’d heard from you. She missed you a lot.” He sounds especially tired and wartorn when discussing the abject domesticity of life.
“Did she now?” Violet smiles. “I’ve missed her too. I’ll be sure to see her one day. Is she still in Aakhen?”
Pavel nods. “She took over as Citylord. Sir Klaut stepped down a few years back.”
“Too old?”
He snorts, shaking his head fondly. “He certainly didn’t feel or look it. The man looks better than me despite being double my age, I swear.” His lips curl into a brilliant smile and, despite the slowly falling snow and time outside, for a moment Violet thinks the sun has peeked out from the clouds lying across the sky and through the windows.
A horribly nostalgic feeling comes over him. Utter warmth, or the soothing of balm to wounds he didn’t know he’d sustained. Like the defrosting of snow before spring. No, like the rejuvenation of flowers that have been battered overhead so long by rain that weighed down their petals they could not enjoy the dampening of their dirt. No, no, like the first break of the sun’s rays upon the new year no no, no, like the breaking open of the chrysalis and he is taking flight though he does not know for what reason he has been clipped until now. Evolution, he thinks, the rebirth into something new, for he has always been so optimistic a person - retrogression, Pavel knows, the slipping back into old simplicities, for he has always been so realistic a person. Though this isn’t a bad thing, for when you are lost, it is said to be best to retrace your steps.
Ah, is all Violet thinks of this experience. The blood rises to his cheeks and colours them a fine pink, and his heart is in his throat. He has missed this feeling of absolute bliss, and is smiling into his forearm as he watches after him, and then misses it dearly when Pavel stops that little curl of his lips to sip again.
He joins him in unison to let the moment pass as silence rushes them down like a pack of feral hounds storming the butchers for the flesh he has denied them, finding it across his bones and digging their rimmed teeth into him. But then, it’s not quite as visceral a feeling as that, Violet muses - more like the silence of the night’s song when wrapped up in a blanket. The silence in your head, when your heart isn’t thumping in your ears and your thoughts aren’t running. Something nice, that he could let himself dip into even though quiet is what let the monsters draw near when he was younger.
Gently, Violet says, “regardless of the circumstance, it’s nice to see you again.” If he’s honest, it didn’t even occur to him that Pavel might not even be in Perland anymore, but, well - coincidences are powerful, and perhaps just another word for a miracle.
“I,” says Pavel, before pausing. His voice sounds terribly dry when he says, “mhm,” and then he doesn’t speak again.
When the food comes it’s best summed up as, ‘appropriate for the price’. The soup is slightly mushy, not at all the smoothness he’d expect from something with lentil, and the bread is that telling sort of chewy that implies it’s been hot before, and then cooled down, and now brought to them just vaguely heated up again. The rocket that it comes with is at least nice to chew on, and the cherry tomatoes that accompany the rocket like how hair will, fingers crossed, always come with the scalp are juicy, if a little uninteresting in flavour.
Dinner is dinner, though, and Violet isn’t one to turn any kind of free down and especially not when his stomach is probably the loudest thing in the diner, maybe the whole bloody city at this rate, so he pulls the bread apart and dunks it into the soup before scoring a goal with it into his mouth. All quite happily, because at some point you reach a kind of hungry that you could eat bush leaves off a twig you just saw a deer piss onto and find yourself thinking that it actually adds a bit of spice to the impromptu dish-slash-attempt at staving off starvation. Maybe a bit gourmet of you as you get a taste for the bitter ammonia.
Pavel, for his part, just swirls and swirls and swirls his coffee in his cup. He fails to reply when Violet tries to ask again about the Klaut’s seeing how that had got him the most chatty so far, instead putting the cup down and then busying himself with pushing around a piece of boiled carrot. Upon finally speaking it has nothing to do with them, but instead asking, “how are you so sure she isn’t coming back?”
“She’d said as much, I think,” Violet replies with another hapless dunking of his bread. Drowning it like a torture victim sentenced to waterboarding, for all its gracefulness. “Said I’d changed too much. Not as loud; too pliant. Never felt like she was talking to me anymore, only at me. I almost thought she was joking when she plopped me back here in the middle of winter, but then she threw the hood at me and I elected to consider that clear indication of her intention for any further meeting.”
“There’s still a chance,” Pavel tries.
This is maybe the indication that one of them has spent infinitely more time with her than the other, Violet thinks with a bitter grin. “I’d be a fool to trust her whimsy.”
Pavel has nothing to say to that, returning instead pushing around a clove of broccoli. “I suppose it’s natural, though,” Violet says. “For me to have changed in whatever way she noticed. Perland certainly has. And I think you have, as well.”
“You seem the same as always to me,” Pavel says blithely. “Main difference is you’re not bouncing off the walls.”
Violet peers at him. Curiosity killed the cat but he is no feline, and asks, “is that a good or a bad thing?”
“It’s all bad ,” says Pavel. He stabs the word with his fork and splits the broccoli clove in two. “The way you look and the way you talk.”
“Harsh,” Violet mumbles, swirling his own soup. “I’m already feeling self-conscious.”
Pavel reaches for his coffee, frowning. “She’s right, then,” he says simply. “You have changed.”
He doesn’t doubt that. Actually, he thinks he has, too. “As we are usually to after a decade,” Violet reminds him, and maybe himself too.
“Eleven,” Pavel says suddenly.
Violet pauses there, watching his lips hide behind the cup he has suspended to his mouth, in the way a man looking for solitude goes very small in dark corners. “Pardon?” he asks.
“It’s been eleven years, Violet,” Pavel says, bitter as the frost cloaking outside. “Not ten.”
Colder than ice, but his heart still pounds in his ears and his throat and his chest and his fingers all at once and gives him the feeling of much rather wanting to be ill of it and spit it up onto the floor. A hollow chest might do him good now, considering all the good it’s done him until now.
“I wanted to,” he offers. “To visit. I really did.”
Pavel’s eyes snap up like the maw of a crocodile sensing movement over the bog sweeping across its scales. “But you didn’t,” he reminds him. “You didn’t so much as tell me you were leaving again. Violet, I thought you were dead.”
“Come on, now,” he tries on a nervous chuckle. “If I didn’t die during the war, there’s no way I would have died afterwards.”
“How was I supposed to know that?” Pavel hisses. “That you were fine? That you were having a brilliant time, until I just happened to hear you two had been sighted in Ritania safe and sound and happy? You didn’t so much as tell me you were leaving - I assumed you had fallen into another Gate and gotten lost and this time couldn’t find your way back.”
“I,” says Violet, before sinking miserably into his seat.
“Eleven years,” he breathes, aflame and shaking from it. “And you never thought to say goodbye. Now here you are.” He curls his lip sourly, like he might be sick. “Here you bloody are.”
Violet sucks his cheeks in, finding interest in a crumb of his reheated bread he’s abandoned on the table. “It was difficult to find the opportunity,” Violet tries to explain, but Pavel’s already shaking his head with a tired expression on his face. “There was always so much to do, and so much to see, and- and you know what she’s like, so enthusiastic and- she was never really one for listening to me, you know that.”
“Violet,” Pavel sighs. “I don’t care anymore.”
“You clearly do, or you wouldn’t still be here,” he insists. Pavel looks back up at him, brows catastrophic across his face and expression darker than the night outside. “And I care, too. Otherwise I would never have bothered! It’s not hard to get a free meal, you’re not special here. I’d have done it with anyone.”
He snorts a laugh, waving his hand at him and rolling his eyes. “Oh, I know I’m not special. You’ve made that plenty clear.”
“That isn’t,” Violet says firmly. “What I meant, and you know it.” He sounds every word out slowly, tries to ensure it can’t be mistaken for another.
“It’s what you said,” Pavel replies, and Violet’s looking right into his eyes as he fixes them on his and he sees red, he does.
“How interesting that you should note that,” says Violet, sounding more than just a little spiteful. “Someone who can’t say a damn word is getting on my back for at least trying. ”
Pavel raises his brows. The skin of his forearms go dark around where his nails now press inwards. “I didn’t ask you to try.”
“There’s a bloody lot you don’t ask me to do, and yet seem plenty happy that I did,” Violet sneers. “Unless you’re going to start complaining now that it was a bad thing I bought groceries for you? When I took your bloody clothes to be repaired because you’d spend all night doing them yourself and not get any sleep? When I paid to get the Goddamn hole in your roof fixed three days before a summer storm?”
“Oh, please,” he grumbles under his breath, rolling his eyes so hard they might as well have slipped inwards for a moment. Louder, he says, “so I should just forgive you?”
“No, no,” Violet tells him, shaking his head like a dog. “You don’t have to do anything. You never have before, so there’s no reason to now, is there? You don’t so much as tell me when you’re happy or sad or sick, Saints help me, I have to stare at you and figure you out from every single pore across your face and then you go and fucking look at her and how, Pavel, tell me - how am I supposed to know what you’re thinking if you’re not saying anything to me and you’re not looking at me? ”
“Oh, of course, how simple it was, this whole time,” Pavel snaps. Defensively, maybe; furiously, definitely. “I spent eleven years wondering what I did to deserve you not even showing me your back before you leave, and it’s because I didn’t suck you off enough.”
“That’s not my point,” Violet hisses.
“Then what is it, Violet?” he says, and it’s with narrowed eyes but a wide mouth and red cheeks and he’s on the verge of sobbing it out, he thinks, and has gone too far but… but. “What is your point? What are you doing here?”
Idolatry and peaceful sublimation in life’s joys, ironically, appears to tire one out if there’s nothing to the side of it. Plain rice with no yoghurt; a smile that has not known sadness, perhaps, though this might be a particular flight of mental fancy that betrays his own personal need to suffer.
Because that’s what it is, isn’t it? An attraction to suffering, solipsism manifesting only when the heart aches terribly. Another bout of irony, brought on by countless eves wondering if Mother will be paying a visit to your room to ensure the corner of your duvet are tucked in well because you had done very, very well at training today and scored a perfect score on your homeschooling test, only to fall asleep and still be waiting in the dreamscape; feeling alive only when you wish not to.
Or maybe this is just what it means to grow up thinking vast affection is best earned through equivalent agony. Mother, Mother, she taught him well. She had smiled when she died, so he’d been told. He thinks it was meant to reassure him. He hadn’t seen her smile in years, and he knew then what the candle fire had been telling him. That you won't, either.
“I just,” breathes Violet, wide-eyed, and heart in his throat like it means desperately to leap out and escape away.
Coming face to face with him again is… there is no difficult way to put this - he is scared like how a dog will be when his owner screams at him in that unknown language. He is scared like how he was when he was seven and his father took the belt out. He is scared like how he thinks Lilias must have been as she plummeted off the cliff into its canyon to melt in the beating Cidonian sun, as if she were nothing more than the ice they’d crunch together on the warm Perland summers (and she would laugh at him when he’d squeeze his eyes together and cup his cheek struggling to get ‘bwainfweeze’ out only for him to laugh when she took too long to eat hers and had nothing more than lukewarm water to ward away the heat). He is scared like he thinks Luluca was. He is scared like he thinks Pavel isn’t. Not anymore. Not after eleven years of nothing.
Pavel crosses his legs and glares at him, frustrated and angry and long-since tired out. He’s using energy buried deep with his aching muscles, energy reserved for a reunion he never thought was coming. Burning low, words kindling for charcoal that forever ago rolled down the mountain and away from him.
“I didn’t have anywhere else to go,” Violet admits to him. “Is it so wrong? To come home?”
His shoulders slack. Pavel shuts his eyes like he just wants to go to sleep. “Then keep going,” he says, voice like a lullaby that helps you to sleep and then encourages the nightmare. “It’s not here anymore. You have to keep going.” When he throws his fork on his plate and it makes its loud clash, hunger abated by his fury more than it has been by his salad, it’s louder than he’s spoken all night.
He asks if he’ll be safe driving through the streets. Pavel nods silently as he seats himself atop his motorcycle, placing his hands carefully on the handles. Violet is simply freezing, standing in the middle of the street in the now-dead night, but he means to at least watch him go. Give him the dignity he didn’t offer Pavel, for whatever that can possibly be worth now. So he stands there, pulling his cape over his chest and covering his hands and shivering right down into his boots, and regrets ordering the soup he didn’t even wind up finish because it went from boiling like he was cooking it in him to now being something he’s a little worried might solidify from the cold within him. His stomach feels chilled enough to imply that very thing might happen if he stands out here much longer. It’s best to leave, he’s thinking. Please don’t stay.
“One dinner,” Pavel reminds him as he twists his handles and the engine grumbles loud as Violet’s breaths.
“I know,” he replies quietly. “Thank you for indulging me.”
He looks over at him, barely shifting his head as he does. Violet means it earnestly and looks at him head-long in the absence of knowing what to say - there isn’t much to say, he thinks to himself. There’s never been much to say to someone who doesn’t much reply, or maybe this is just him trying to make himself feel better for sins he'd happily commit to without thinking.
The engine revs again - the tell-tale sign of leaving, the way a rabbit will twitch its ears or a deer bolts upright or a wolf dips while tensing its back legs - and suddenly he steps forward, a hand held aloft. “If you- if you would,” Violet stammers, and not entirely due to the shivers he is feeling. “I just wanted to… I wanted to say I meant it. It was nice seeing you again.”
For a long moment, Pavel looks at him. At his eyes, coloured dim like crude amethyst and down the sharp of his aged cheeks; at the space between the bottom of his lips and the start of his chin; at everything that connects his features, ending on his lips. He would not dare humiliate him with further thought into what that could mean, and instead bites them; makes him turn away, looking back to the road.
“And,” Violet continues, maybe a little emboldened as he takes a shuffle forwards. “Even if you don’t believe me, I did. I really did miss you.”
Pavel firmly keeps his gaze before him, eyes unintelligibly steely as the light from the diner flickers. It casts harsh shapes across his face that outline his frown, and Violet can only let himself hope he will find out what shapes the loud yellow will make when he opens his mouth to reply.
But he doesn’t. Noises rumble instead from around his feet. An overly-sweet pup fidgeting to indicate its patience is up; he has started the engine again with a smooth winding of his wrists, and it growls at him in that frightfully protective way.
And then he speeds off. A cloud of disturbed snow and grumpy slush from the road kicked up behind him, howling down the road and soon, around the corner. Some of it jumps in fear away from under the tire and lands on the flared hem of his trousers like diving for cover.
The stains of the slurry will last longer than Pavel did, he is left to think.