Archive of Our Own

[Prologue]

In another world, I would have studied Classics. In this one, in fact, I had mostly solidified the intent to do so by the end of my first year in medical school, though I had no pre-existing talent for languages beyond the mediocre level of Spanish I’d managed in high school and the passable French I'd mastered in college. But med school, I had come to realize, was not the place for me, and since my two main options seemed to be changing my major or killing myself, classics appealed to me: I have always been drawn to the old and elusive, perhaps in protest of being forced to come of age in Plano, California, where the old dates back to the 1950s and the biggest mystery is whatever B-plot occupying the soaps on television.

In that other world, I might have been aware that my college didn’t offer Classics, though Ancient Greek was on offer; in this one, through some twist of fate, I only found this out when, in my search for the Classics taster class, I sat down amidst a scattering of students and looked up to find the board reading Classical Arts. 

I should have turned and ran, because art students and I did not tend to get along, but I was mesmerized by the display on the desk, where the professor had laid out a selection of the graduating class’ final projects: beautifully rendered oil paintings, painstakingly photorealistic portraits, and above all a Greek marble, fabric as perfectly draped as I’d ever seen it in photos of the real deal. I was then as I am now always at the mercy of my morbid longing for the picturesque, and in that finely sculpted marble I found the same ancient whispers as I’d flirted with in-text, and was filled with a sudden desperate want to be taught the ways of whoever had carved this out of a slab of stone. Meaning out of modernity. My raison d’être.

I switched majors, and for the remainder of my time in college my parents were none the wiser. I took my classes, made few friends, and was a diligent student of the arts- in fact, though I would never have considered myself particularly artistic prior, I revealed myself to be quite the prodigy when it came to mastering method. I suspect my medical training gave me a slight advantage when it came to technique, used as I was to following strict protocols- mixing paints was like chemistry, sculpting rested on geometry; all of it was formulaic. What I lacked was vision, creativity, originality: I was persistently more interested in replicating the masters of old than contributing to the artistic œuvre on my own merits, to many a teacher’s despair. Other students outshined me, but my grades were consistently good, and more importantly I emerged from teaching with the skills I’d coveted. 

There was no question of remaining at home after this all came out, and while I might have considered doing another degree had I chosen another field of study, I was quite certain art school would put a hole in my pocket I couldn’t justify, especially since I held no real interest for any artistic movement I hadn’t already been introduced to. I don’t know what I would have done if, by coincidence, I hadn’t found myself accidentally handed a brochure for a position opening in Vermont of all places at some job fair- since it was as far from California as I could go, I was immediately interested. The job was every art student’s nightmare: restoration primarily, and replica work for the more talented apprentices, not an ounce of personal input involved. For me, it was a dream- lodging available, and I’d be paid to do what I wanted to do anyhow. I was on the plane with a meager bag of my worldly possessions as soon as I got the offer.

Primarily, I worked at and for a museum, though my employer was a Broughton Coburn who owned his own studio, and it was in this studio- or rather, the apartment above it- that I lived. Coburn had spent a good fifteen years living in the flat I now inhabited, but he was fairly rich and married now, so he lived off in the countryside in some country home or other and drove into work in the mid-mornings. He was slightly taciturn and more than slightly pretentious, but serious about the craft and lax about my hours. I found him easy to get along with, all things considered.

I had never had many friends in art school, despite the Classical Arts crowd being more tolerable to me than the usual gang of anti-establishment wannabes, since I lacked the background or the flair to fit in with either subset of students. As such, I’d headed into this position expecting solitude, but I hadn’t counted on the museum being so close to the nearest campus- Hampden College was about a half hour’s drive away, and as a result, the museum’s halls were regularly packed with people, art students or otherwise. In my lunch hour I was often able to make small talk with any variety of people my age.

I would have stuck to vague mingling or else maybe worked up the courage to approach the dark-haired girl I always saw walking through the Antiquities wing with a book in hand, but a few weeks into term I found myself accosted by a loudly West Coast girl by the name of Judy Poovey, who I’d seen traipsing through the halls a few times with a sketchbook clasped between her lacquered nails. As it turned out she was in costuming, and given the persistent lack of originality of theater departments world-wide she was seeking historical inspiration from the paintings gallery, though (she confessed, loudly enough for a nearby gaggle of girls to giggle amongst themselves) she’d been coming back more often since she’d spotted me around, since I looked more interesting than the other guy.

Judy had a car, and campus access, and a never-ending supply of drugs; by mid-term, she was the closest thing I had to a best friend, which is to say that I followed her through a haze of college parties (and girls) in exchange for late nights wandering the museum in the dark and a never-kept promise of inviting her up to the studio. I spent as much time trying to shake her off as trying to see her, but since she was better than nothing I never complained too much to her face.

None of this really matters, except in that it led me to where I was one cold night late fall when the patchwork of fire-light leaves had settled firmly on the streets and I was using the majority of my pay-check to make significant upgrades to my wardrobe, having very much underestimated the difference in temperatures between California and Vermont. I remember it all very clearly, as you would- I’d worked a late shift at the museum, but one of the girls I knew through Judy had spotted me starting the walk home and dropped me off, so I was lightly buzzed and in good spirits by the time I headed upstairs. 

Coburn had stripped the attic loft of all its nicer furniture when he’d moved out, but for my purposes it was still luxurious living, not so much because of its questionable comforts but because I appreciated the aesthetic value of the stripped-down apartment, old wooden floors and a great big semi-stained glass window spanning most of the kitchen and the living-room. Before entering my rooms it was necessary from the top of the creaky spiraling staircase to first cross through a sort of attic gallery where Coburn had once worked on his lesser passion projects, dried paint-splatters and charcoal smudges still lining the floors and walls. This was my most treasured haunt- in my free time I regularly sat myself in some corner of the place alongside the abandoned busts and splintered pillars I left standing out of appreciation for the atmosphere they lent the room. A particularly winsome quirk of the room was that the light switch stood inexplicably on the side of my bedroom, so that every night when I made my way upstairs I was first obliged to trek across the room, dimly lit only by whatever moonlight shone through the sky panel above, to grasp blindly for light, an experience that made me feel the epitome of the Renaissance artist in his cramped Italian apartments every time I made my way across in the dark. 

This attic studio was, quite logically, where I was permitted to work on my own pieces in what free time I had, with whatever surplus materials we gathered from commissioned jobs, and where I found myself on that particular night, wrapped in a thick wool sweater and nursing a scalding coffee as I sat on my unsteady wooden stool staring at my newest work in progress.

I had, in college, demonstrated a particular affinity for sculpting, maybe because of some banal mechanical aptitude, or maybe because the sense of finding beauty beneath the surface appealed to my sensitivities. Nevertheless I had not yet managed to do any sculpting in my free time, for the simple reason that most of the restoration work I’d been doing for the museum had been sculpting, so that I was driven instead to paint or sketch when I was free of those obligations. But a client had canceled an order that left the studio with a surplus of unusable marble and a decent amount of clay to spare, and having it stood in the attic re-awoke the itch in me to put my teaching to use. 

I was wary of wasting the marble on rusty technique; it was the clay I turned to first, starting with the safe refuge of vases, though of course the color was off, given that few people commissioned fake Greek vases from us. Since these were still drying from the paint-job, I’d turned to messing around with the remaining slabs of clay to remember my proportions, anatomy lessons coming in useful once more. With sculptures I went invariably classic, never interested in replicating a Saint Phalle or god forbid Duchamp, though I could tolerate Rodin when he wasn’t so haggard in his realism. Still, on practice pieces I was less bothered with convention; my newest man, though generally built to purpose, reeked of lazy modernity. I had abandoned the task of curling his hair, leaving it in uneven tufts, and his face was too square to be Roman, because I’d been too focused on fixing the lack of symmetry in his jaw to pay attention to my shapes; his build was more that of a rugby player than an Olympian, and his features were smudged by my constant corrections, leaving him with less of a noble gaze than a sort of lopsided smirk, eyes caught in a constant squint and nose slightly too upturned. 

I have a tendency to name my statues, though usually only by reference to the classical inspiration I draw from; for this sloppy creation, I could not especially find an apt patron, and so he remained nameless even as he gained personality and neared completion. But that night, as I sat tapering off my high and adding unnecessary finishing touches because I couldn’t yet be bothered to decide what to do with him, I decided something in the kind of quizzical set to his features reminded me of the accursed portrait of Edmund Burke I’d had to replicate for my portfolio, and at the thought I found myself entertained enough to silently bestow the name upon him, inappropriate as it was for any rushed lump of clay to be named Edmund.

It was well into the witching hour by the time the day caught up with me and I shook myself out of my half-aware focus, registering with unpleasant urgency the clay clinging to my fingers and forearms and how cold I’d gotten sitting semi-immobile on a stool for a good four hours. I remember vividly that I set down my scraper, picked up my ice-cold mug, stood, stretched, and squinted briefly upwards at the moon, invisible behind the clouds; it was as I looked back down, gaze flitting unconsciously to the statue, that it wrinkled its nose. 

I stared. The statute blinked, then frowned, scrunching its chin reflexively before it spoke. 

“That took you long enough.”

I dropped the mug, which shattered across the floor with a resounding fracas. The statue snorted. 

“Steady on, Richard. A little too much of the good stuff tonight, eh?”

At this point, I managed to stop gaping like a fish long enough to produce sound, though with little confidence.

“I’m dreaming.”

“Hope you’re not suggesting I’m what you dream of,” the statute said, with a leer I did not appreciate. “Well, man, are we going to get somewhere interesting anytime soon?”

“What are you?” I managed, when my hallucination showed no sign of stopping, instead stepping off the pedestal to squint around me. In the half-light I couldn’t tell exactly, but his coloring had changed, and when he brushed past me I heard fabric rustle. 

“Shouldn’t you be telling me? Though I’ll say you’re nil for two so far on the choices, Dickie. Why on earth am I in a dress? Greeks wore armor too, you know. Could have at least had a military skirt. And Edmund- do I strike you as an Edmund? I defer to your creative wisdom, of course, but I can’t say I’d have gone for that myself.”

“Jesus Christ,” I said, and very nearly passed out there and then, only the statue that came to be known to me as Bunny had set off for my room and I felt obliged to follow lest he wreak havoc there.

[Chapter I: Gepetto’s Atelier]

Bunny’s arrival, inevitably, changed the course of the year somewhat for me. Once I’d spent enough days checking and rechecking that he was still wandering around my apartment appropriating my belongings and complaining about the lack of anything interesting to do long enough to get over my very real suspicion that I had completely lost my mind, I had to get through the initial assault of emotions that come with the territory of your inanimate creations coming to life. Denial, awe, terror, ecstasy, disbelief, anxiety; I cycled through them with regularity, mostly wracked with incredulity: surely, it was impossible that through some divine intervention I had been granted with every artist’s deep-down wish, a literal magic touch. Yet Bunny was definitively a living breathing thing, or at least behaved himself like one, though without great depth, and through exposure alone I was forced to come to terms with his continuous existence. 

(At work, Coburn remarked suspiciously that I seemed a mess, and questioned the wisdom of my ‘cavorting with college students at all hours of the night’. I did not bother attempting to dispel his assumptions.)

Looking back on those days with any sense of objectivity is difficult for me, colored as my perception is by the events that would follow, but even so I enjoyed my time with Bunny in those days. Beyond the wonder of his existence he was entertaining company, and certainly not like anyone I’d ever met, brash and permissive and convinced of his own wisdom in the way that only those used to a certain way of life are. A biographer would have called him ‘colorful’, or maybe ‘divisive’; he radiated an aggressive and not entirely sincere bonhomie that I both enjoyed and resented.

Bunny was not entirely a person, though he certainly looked like one. Close scrutiny and his habit of invading personal space had assured me of the following: he was, somehow, flesh and bone, or a convincing facsimile of it; he ate and drank at his leisure; he slept (and snored) a healthy amount, and did not melt in the shower, where he regularly ran up the water bill warbling some jazz number. But he was never warmer than room temperature to the touch, and to my knowledge didn’t have a pulse; more significantly, he was not an entirely finished person. I would have likened him rather to a cartoon character than a complete human being. He had his quirks, but for the most part Bunny was a fairly straightforward individual, and his world was very small. Though people like that undoubtedly walk the earth in great numbers, I had the distinct sense that in Bunny this was an innate defect, born of my lack of attention to detail- just as he was rough around the edges in his design, he might have been less Bunny if I’d set out to make him so.

The greatest thing about Bunny’s existence, it follows, was the underlying idea that I might replicate the act of creation with intent. This thought had come to me almost immediately after I recovered from the initial hysterics, though I’d countered it with the more rational part of my brain: I had made my share of sculptures for class, and none of those had ever seen fit to come to life. Yet there was something about Bunny’s creation that felt different: where I was, maybe. I spent my days fixing up ancient masterpieces, my nights alone with half-finished statues and their watchful eyes; I was reading Homer for the first time. There was something charged about it all, electric, and though by nature I am not much of a believer I had faith then. The air in the studio was ripe with possibility.

I was not entirely sure how Bunny would take my decision to try again. He was of a somewhat envious disposition, taking offense when I happened to be waylaid by Hampdenites at the museum or refused to let him come with me to the store, never mind that he was himself very reluctant to leave the shop- I was not yet sure if he was physically incapable of it or simply resistant to the idea, a doubt which niggled at me in that seeing Bunny out and about would certainly have made me less worried that I was in the grips of an extremely elaborate hallucination. In any event I worried he might be resentful of the implication that I wanted to improve upon him- he seemed oddly knowledgeable of my thought process when I’d been working on him, though he rarely referred outright to the act of creation except when it suited him to play that card. 

As it turned out, I needn’t have worried: the instant Bunny saw me eyeing the marble blocks he started going on about how it was about time we got some other people around the place, and the rest was history.

I was supremely careful with the second statue: meticulous to the point of obsessiveness, according to Bunny, but I was crawling out of my skin with excitement at the thought of managing to bring a real Greek marble to life, and didn’t want to chance getting even the smallest of details wrong. I dug up all of my old notes, practiced on scraps; I remember my hands shook when I first tacked the raw block. For this attempt I wanted to stay perfectly classic- perfect, clean lines, the stern nose, the heavy brow, the well-laid hair. Though the face came last: I was too nervous to start with it, and so it was the body I worked on first, impeccably proportioned: he was taller than me by a margin, and huge- I was working with an imposing figure in mind, an Ares or a Herakles, warrior men with impossibly broad shoulders and predatory stances. 

With this Vitruvian Man I had little sense of what to expect, save this appeal to the classical; if Bunny had been a study in my own laissez-faire, every inch of this attempt was modeled carefully after masters of old. The process was as such far more halting and lengthier than the first go around, not least because nerves made me take a break far more often. It sounds laughable to say I was intimidated by my own statue, but I was: the more he grew from the stone, the more imposing he seemed, and the more fatal any mistakes on my part. I wanted very badly not to make any such mistakes.

Even with these delays, I was distinctly aware that I was working faster than I should have been able to. It was true that I spent endless sleepless nights burning the midnight oil and giving myself terrible cramps all over sweating over the marble, but full-body marbles took the Greeks a good year to make- the busts I’d made for class had taken months. Even with a vast array of modern tools at my disposal there was no explaining the way I sped through the stages- I went from hammer and point work to carving in a week, and the sculpting proper took me less than a month. I often spent what felt like hours in a trance-like focus only to look up and realize mere minutes had passed, and for this I still have no explanation save that whatever supernatural influence had granted me the gift of life must have clung to the walls in more ways than one.

All of this being said, winter had arrived by the time I got to the statue's face, a fact I might not entirely have registered were winter in Vermont not so aggressively hard to miss. I spent my days at work half-attentive at best, and my transit to work and back even less aware of the world outside the studio, but the cold demanded my full focus- snow had started coating the streets, temperatures sub-arctic to my ill-adjusted body, and it was only as I rushed back to the apartment that I thought of anything but the attic long enough to plan my meals for the week or invest in the purchase of an electric radiator. Judy and her friends were heading home for the holidays, and Coburn was taking them off; I was happy to do dirty work at the gallery so long as I was spared museum duty, since it left me more time to work upstairs. 

I could probably have finished the statue for a good few days. I had most of his face completed: the strong jaw and the pronounced, pensive frown, heavier brows than I’d intended, a severe nose. But cowardice restrained my hands when it came to the finishing touches, which had wound up being the eyes: I knew somehow that once I finished them it would be those eyes that would alight first, and conversely I worried they wouldn’t. 

“He’s getting impatient, you know,” Bunny informed me, as I sat scalpel in hand staring sightlessly at the statue. When I cast him a look he raised his hands in a dramatically innocent gesture and turned whistling out of the room, off-key all the while.

Since I’d started working on the second statue, Bunny had developed a habit of installing himself back in his original position on his pedestal while I worked, usually at night. Then, somehow, and never with my witnessing the change, I would look up and find him gone, replaced by the clay man I’d first made. The first time I’d seen it I’d jumped violently and left the other statue with a far more pronounced brow than I’d wanted to give him, but at my panic Bunny had stirred and finally emerged once more, and explained in highly confusing terms that this back and forth was apparently something he could do, returning to his original form. More disturbingly, when he did, he gained some form of hive-mind awareness of the statue I was working on. 

I was, obviously, highly doubtful of his claims, but I had little ground to stand on, considering he was very literally a statue I’d made come to life, so I was forced to trust him for the time being, and thus trust his comments about the statue I was making, to my dismay. Bunny seemed to like him, but he also liked to rub it in my face that he’d established rapport before I had, so I had little idea of what to expect.

Still, his taunting struck a nerve. I stared unseeingly at the heavy snowfall above before not-entirely steadily raising my hand a last time, tracing the corners of the eyes with my breath caught in my lungs.

I brushed off the debris, retracted my hand. For a long second the statue was unmoving stone, and my heart stopped.

Then the marble shifted, and I was met with an assessing stare- brown, I thought, distantly, as color filtered into the face slowly, pale-skinned and dark-haired. Human he seemed abruptly ugly to me, too imposing for reality, and I was struck with a Frankenstein-like regret, but then his expression shifted and he wasn’t ugly at all, gaze keen and considering as I swallowed.

“Cat got your tongue again?” Bunny called, from the doorframe, but the statue looked up sternly and nodded him away.

“That’s enough, Bunny.”

“Bunny?” I uttered, immediately embarrassed at how dumb-struck I sounded, but the statue ignored my embarrassment, nodding once to himself.

“It’s a long story. I feel you might agree it suits him better than Edmund.”

And it did, I thought; not to harp on the Frankenstein point, but I had avoided renaming Bunny since I’d met him. As we only spoke to one another, not calling him by name had been easy. In the face of my new masterpiece, this failing felt grave.

“Do you- is there a name you’d prefer, then?” I asked, and was met by a quirk of the brow.

“I wouldn’t presume to overstep like that.”

So the onus was on me: my mind jumped through the classics, but those felt foolish; the statue, even toga-clad as he still was (Bunny, for his part, had claimed half of my wardrobe within hours of arrival), had the aura of Antiquity but too much individuality to be named in reference to someone else. My mind went old money instead, the dark-suited young men I’d caught flashes of in Vermont and envied their self-assurance: Andrew, Charles, Theodore. Henry.

“That I can work with,” said Henry, suddenly more of a student scholar than a relic of times long past, and nodded gravely at me. “Thank you, Richard.”

Faintly dizzy with emotion and gone mute as a result, I could muster no more than a nod in response.

Henry was, in all ways, Bunny’s foil. Oddly enough, they got along, for reasons I never quite understood, but beyond giving the impression of belonging to the same old boys’ club there was nothing shared between them. In every way that Bunny was fallible, Henry was not; in every way that Bunny was lax, Henry was rigid. To my eyes Henry was an unbelievable success, a Greek hero to at least my skewed perceptions, and not just in the face. There was something in the way he held himself that felt god-given, a sort of unspoken self-assurance that quieted conversations and imbued his speech with weight. He had his passions, as Greek heroes do, and a temper, which he kept under very tight control; he was also funny, through droll wit rather than guffawing mockery, and improbably knowledgeable. 

Bunny had known things I didn’t, high society quirks and slang, but this had never quite convinced me of his reality, since I could easily have picked them up unconsciously elsewhere. Henry was different. Henry spoke Ancient Greek and Latin and Coptic and languages I didn’t even know existed, with a fluency that no modern man could have imitated. I made the trek to the public library by foot in the snow to pore over tomes of linguistics, verifying his sayings, and the realization of their accuracy had me overcome with a belated tremor of shock so violent I had to fumble to catch the book before I dropped it to the floor. Henry was realer than real, the product of my most self-indulgent daydreams, and in his creation I had outdone myself, the act filling me with a blend of ecstatic awe and existential terror that never quite left me afterwards. 

Life, I thought, with renewed emphasis. My god! Life! I had brought stone to life. Some divine influence had guided my hands, and now I was surrounded by walking, talking proof of the otherworldly. For all my traditionalism I am not by nature superstitious- the necessary acknowledgment of the unscientific was overwhelming. If I hadn’t been so distracted by the constant presence of my newfound companions I don’t know that I would ever have emerged from my spiraling thoughts. As it was they were so present a divertissement I could do nothing but try to keep up with the daily routine and leave my internal crises for restless nights. There was something profoundly embarrassing about the idea of displaying weakness in front of Henry and Bunny, who both seemed profoundly unfazed by their conception- only on nights where the statues reverted to form did I dare stand watching them as I often longed to do, wondering with inevitable jealousy what took place in the shadowy hours where I could not reach them.

With Bunny, the creative relationship had been oddly familial- Bunny, by nature, was the indolent son, irreverent but dependent, and I the indulgent parent too blinded by paternal pride to put up a fight. Henry, however, treated the ordeal with severe formality, and yet was subconsciously agreed by all parties to hold the authority in our relationship, like a great spirit invoked by a fumbling occultist. He frowned upon and rebuked Bunny’s familiarity, and on paper was always obliging in my regard, but he never thought twice about doing as he liked in my absence, and seemed more informed than I was as to where my hypothetical limits laid. 

Those early days in Henry’s company were, nonetheless, golden to me, dumbstruck though I felt. We conversed endlessly- he was knowledgeable of every bit of ancient culture that had ever caught my curiosity, and had a professor’s understanding of every related subject, fielding both Bunny’s dumb remarks and my halting questions with ease. We shared tastes, through some creative influence perhaps, and Bunny provided some comic relief to what might otherwise have been an overwhelmingly intense tête-à-tête. There was a sense of new beginnings in the cold air of the apartment- what Henry referred to off-handedly as ‘Richard’s project’, taking shape. For the first time in my life I felt I had found my place in the world, and relished in it.

I had started the groundwork for the next piece early on in the Henry days, since Henry (unlike Bunny, who found sculpting extremely boring and preferred to lounge around reading whatever pulp nonsense I brought him from the store) was intensely interested by the process and in any event didn’t mind keeping me company as I worked, sat reading across the room. With every statue I felt as though the task was taking less and less time, impossibly but surely; it wasn’t long into Henry’s completion that I had moved onto carving.

I was, perhaps, pushing myself too hard; though I have come to admit to myself that I am in many ways more modern than I would like to be, I share that classic obsessiveness that defines the heroes of the Antiquity. In making Henry I had cast aside all other concerns, and this had involved some level of personal neglect; being as I was physiologically unprepared for the winters up North, it wasn’t far from Christmas when I found myself working with unsteady hands and heavy arms. Automatically, I assumed fatigue, and ignored the issue; I worked a good while more before I lost track of my senses and found myself blinking groggily awake on the floor with two statues looming over me.

“Told you he wasn’t dead,” Bunny said, rubbing at his nose and looking more amused than anything. “Weak disposition, eh, Dickie?”

“It’s the cold,” Henry said, kneeling pragmatically by my side. His hand on my forehead was glacial. “You have a terrible fever. Can you stand?”

Woozy but horribly embarrassed, I nodded, and managed to stumble to my feet, room blurring as I stood. Henry braced me as soon as I was upright, the cool pressure of his grip making me shiver as he guided me to my room. 

I don’t remember much of my convalescence save that Henry kept watch over me throughout, and neither he nor Bunny ate in the long days where I was being force fed reserves of soup. In my delirium I sometimes saw them as moving statues even when they weren’t, their faces losing their familiarity until I was tossing and turning in the grips of some half-awake nightmare, pieced together from fragments of myth. In my confused reverie I found concrete thought difficult; I remember with some clarity that I was fixated on the words of William Blake: What immortal hand or eye could frame thy fearful symmetry?

My fever broke; when I returned to my senses late one afternoon, the apartment was still frigid but Henry had managed to get the antique fireplace working, and he and Bunny were nursing drinks in front of it, washed flickering orange by the firelight, looking more human than I felt.

“You shouldn’t push yourself so hard,” Henry said, later, pushing his glasses up his nose. I had made both him and Bunny in traditional garb, but they had rapidly divested themselves of their accoutrements in favor of claiming Coburn’s left-over clothes from the heap in the side-room he was forever putting off taking to a charity shop. The glasses Henry had made himself, using glass and metal, and they fit Bunny better than they did him, forever slipping off his nose and leaving him with a permanent headache. “The human body can only take so much.”

“It’s not like I was doing it on purpose,” I said, reasonably enough, I felt. “I’m not exactly used to creating life in my off hours.”

“Of course,” Henry conceded, and met my eyes steadily. “Doing so is a worthy pursuit. Hence you not dying on us any time soon. ἰατρέ, θεράπευσον σεαυτόν.” 

Physician, heal thyself. Bunny guffawed; I didn’t laugh. I hadn’t thought he was joking.

Regardless of circumstance, it would be dishonest to pretend my next work was not heavily influenced by the events preceding its inception. I mean this both consciously and subconsciously- I was guided by caution (and Henry) not to obsess over whether or not what I was making was a meticulously rendered masterpiece, and furthermore I was subtly reluctant for the next creation to be another perfect replica. I was softer in my lines, and less driven by the masters of old, allowing my chisel a degree of self-indulgence. 

The result was a sort of in-between of Henry and Bunny which to my eye exceeded them both in pure aesthetic value. I was refining my technique- stone turned malleable under my hands, and so the statue’s hair fell in the loosest of waves just past his ears, and his drowsy eyes carried fine lashes, and there was a boyish elegance to his neck. Bunny was ruddy and Henry was striking, but this third piece was pretty in its own rights, the Apollonic breed of sleek marbles. To abuse the comparison I spent over-long on his fingers, crafting a musician’s hands, and then took great pains with his expression, reduced to scattered sketches as I avoided committing his face to stone. Now I had proof precedent of my abilities I wanted- different, more, though I never paused to put it in words. There was in me an unquenched hunger for creation, and subsumed within it another wanting I found harder to label, directionless save that it kept my hands in motion and my eyes raptly focused.

The statue was close to completion by the time I took the time to sit back and take him in. Unlike the process behind Henry, I was not being interrupted constantly by Bunny’s witticisms, though these were inevitable- he was even more disinterested in my work now that Henry was around, and content to do his nightly inspections out of sight. Henry, on the other hand, remained deeply interested by the process, but his was a tolerable companionship- he sat quietly nearby, usually reading or sketching, and only occasionally chimed in to ask me some kind of technical question or point out a minor mistake. As a result I had failed to second guess as I had with Henry, and only when the statue was all-but finished, lacking only the details of his expression, did I really become cognisant of what I’d made. 

The statue’s languid eyes seemed to me abruptly too knowing; I glanced surreptitiously at Henry and shifted uncomfortably, hands stilled with reluctance. Henry was handsome in a referential manner; this was not quite the same. I had had complete creative control over its making- was aware of its impending personhood, sculpting with pure self-indulgence- and yet I had made this, a sort of preraphaelite saint with none of Bunny’s shrewdness or Henry’s hard lines. All at once I was irritated with myself, and obscurely anxious. No, this could not be my next work- and yet I could of course not destroy him. Apollo, I had thought, in passing- and so it could be, still, if only he was one of a pair. 

Yes, I thought, standing down with relief. My unease was understandable- the piece was incomplete, alone. To the Apollo I would add an Artemis, perfected from her twin. I could not have made her first, nor without him. I’d leave him standing as I worked on her, finish them in tandem. It was hard to imagine that I’d ever set out to do any different. 

Making the girl was from the start a wholly different animal. I had sculpted women before, but only rarely, not so much by choice per se as because male was the default model in most of our classes. In paintings women were my study of choice, but that was an entirely different process, and in any event not until the face would I have the chance to apply any of those gentle strokes. I dug out my anatomy notes, wasted more days than I would have liked on the early stages of work, ensuring I’d spotted the stone right. Her brother had been thoughtlessly intuitive to bring to life; with the girl I was halting, self-doubting at every turn.

My difficulties were somewhat alleviated by the near-completed twin; it was this similarity that I depended upon to regain my faltering nerve. Artemis, after all, is not Aphrodite- in build, the siblings could be similar enough. I pushed onwards: she grew as tall as he, then as slender; the rock gave way to boyish ankles and broad shoulders, then her brother’s heart-shaped face, rounded for effect into something more feminine. When the outline began to take shape I grew heartened, carried onwards into something like exhilaration. Her hair I left down, a Waterhouse girl to match her brother, perfect waves to run my fingers down. 

It was at this point that Bunny appeared in the atelier with renewed interest, loitering with narrowed eyes until he seemed satisfied in his investigation.

“I’ll be damned if that isn’t a woman.”

I didn’t want to explain myself aloud, and I was protective of the girl besides, so I settled for nonchalance. “She’s not done yet.”

“I was wondering what was taking so long,” Bunny noted, peering critically between the twins. “Is that his missus, then?”

“No,” I protested, hotly, though the instinctive reply- that they were sun and moon- fell short, and I could not quite bring myself to brand her virgin goddess. “How should I know, anyways? Wait until they’re finished.”

“Well, usually you’ve usually got a head full of stories when you’re working,” Bunny sniffed, doing one last round of the room. When I peered at him with mingled alarm and curiosity, he only stared at the girl contemplatively, then shrugged. “She could stand to have a bit more meat on her. You can barely tell she has tits.”

“Jesus, Bunny,” I said, and promptly chased him out of the room, mortified.

Henry, for his part, spared me the crass comments or loud speculation, though even he was far more interested in the twins now there were two of them; before the girl he had been intrigued by the creative act and cared little for the work itself. 

In keeping with my track record, my process was accelerating still; I repeatedly spent what should have been weeks on the rough sculpting to find less than a day had passed. By the week’s end I was moving onto detail-work, despite my aching body protesting what felt like months’ worth of painstaking manual labor. I was making some effort to pace myself, not eager to collapse under the watchful eyes of all four of my creations, but with the holidays approaching their end I felt spurred on by a sense of urgency, and besides the girl was my most gripping project yet. I practiced her face a good six times before I committed it to stone, breathing shaky with concentration, and at the electrifying sensation of meeting her all-seeing eyes I was overcome by retroactive shame that I had not yet clad her. I knew well enough she was not yet more than smooth alabaster, but I found it intensely difficult to grip her arm or hold her legs as I had her brother’s; with sudden prudishness I set aside her face and set to crafting her finely draped chiton, which left nothing bare but her arms and ankles. Even these affected me more than I liked to think about, if only with the dizzying knowledge that sooner than I dared think of they would belong to a woman of flesh and bone.

I finished the girl in the early hours of the morning one snowy day, cooling coffee abandoned by my feet as I labored her nose; when I stood back I realized she paralleled her brother exactly, missing only the brow. 

“So soon,” Henry commented, from his usual perch; he was an early riser by default. I inclined my head mutely, eyes flitting between the two of them. 

This was it, I felt, imbued with a dual sense of significance and exhaustion. The apex of my abilities. I had streamlined construction into this strange in-between window of time, and the result was my magnum opus. Never would I so perfectly recreate the lovely curls on her neck or the slanting curve of his lips. Completed they could have been museum pieces- alive I could not imagine them. If Henry and Bunny hadn’t been around I don’t know that I could have brought myself to finish them at all, not so soon. 

Still, as I stood there contemplating the pair of them I felt for the first time I could not let my creations step unnamed into the world. It was the girl that concerned me- it felt wrong to let her awaken anonymously after everything I’d put into her. That she might breathe life and be branded Kaylee or Jessica filled me with deep despair. 

“ὕστερον πρότερον,” said Henry, standing to move closer. “The latter one first.”

“I feel like she should have a name,” I admitted, casting him a look and expecting a droll comment. He only nodded and looked thoughtfully at his book- a second-hand Livy I’d found at the museum.

“Does she strike you as a Camilla?”

Camilla, I repeated internally. The name sang of old European royalty, mid-century romanticism. Camilla, Virgil’s virgin queen. She was Camilla, immediately. No other name would do.

Aloud, I asked: “Was she a twin?”

Henry shook his head. “She had triplet brothers. Though only one worth remembering.”

“And his name?”

“Publius,” Henry said, eyes amused. “So perhaps not.”

No. Perhaps not. But she was Camilla from then, even as her chest rose and fell the first time, fabric shivering light and airy beneath my hand and tendrils of loose hair brushing my fingers. As she breathed her first breath she took careful stock of us all before turning to her brother, brow quirking at the sight of him. 

“Effectivement, ça change.”

“Lingua franca,” Henry reproached, mildly; Camilla gazed his way and he inclined his head in our direction. “You’re not amongst francophones.”

I didn’t have the time to start panicking about language barriers; Camilla blinked and then laughed quietly at herself. “My mistake, gentlemen. It’s good to see you, Richard.”

I managed a reserved nod, though her eyes on mine made me forget to breathe. “Likewise.”

“I’ll let you get back to Charles,” Camilla added, gesturing to her brother even as she named him, and placed a hand atop my stool. “May I?”

She was flaxen blonde, and epicene, and sat leaning with her scrawny elbows on her knees as I picked up my scalpel. My ears rang as I finished working, blood rushing to my head. Camilla. Charles. Live. Real. Picture-perfect.

With each of them the awakening had started somewhere different; the first thing of his that moved was his hand, curling and relaxing. Then his faraway gaze melted into an easy smile, and the same hand was extended my way with casual grace.

“Hello, maker. Fine morning for it.”

“Charles,” I greeted, trying it out, and was rewarded with an amiable nod of the head.

“Hullo, Henry. Millie.”

“Good to have you among us,” Camilla said, curling her toes before slanting a glance my way. “I don’t suppose you have a change of clothes on hand?”

So we were five then, and for the last days of that Christmas break I let myself bask in their company, suddenly shaky-tired but bolstered enough by success to forget it. We were all of us content to do nothing more than sit around and talk, and unlike myself my companions demonstrated need for neither sustenance nor sleep. All of them drank at leisure, mostly caffeine or alcohol, but Henry never ate, and Camilla only sporadically; Charles had a sweet tooth, and Bunny was the biggest contributor to my dwindling stock. As for sleep, the twins shared Henry and Bunny’s tendency to seek reprieve by turning to stone in the night hours, though none kept a firm schedule. If sleep was the word for it, Bunny was the most regular sleeper, and the twins followed; Henry was unpredictable, going days without and yet sometimes remaining immovable for the better part of the day. When asked he said it helped him think. 

The burden on my hospitality, all-together, was thus a light one- no guest beds, no extra cooking, not even laundry, since beyond their initial change it never appeared to occur to any of them to trade outfits. Even space wasn’t such a problem- Henry had built himself a sort of study in my atelier, and the twins haunted the living room while Bunny usually dwelled the kitchen, leaving my bedroom unperturbed. The hard wooden chairs and dilapidated couches clearly posed none of them the problem they posed me. In a way the space was more tailored to them than to me- Coburn’s abandoned French classics or Latin history volumes were of no use to me, but my polyglot creations pored over them at leisure. 

Those last days of the winter holiday were amongst the happier ones of my life. As a group we were fairly balanced, the twins forming the milder middle ground to my two firstborns, so that conversation between us came easily and lasted long. Though I remained the outsider by simple virtue of my role in the group I was far more at ease now the twins were present, despite the effect they had on me individually. As an ensemble we had complementary temperaments- I thought of us seasonally, Bunny and Henry as summer and winter, the twins the spring to my fall. It seemed to me both impossible and not that I was responsible for the existence of these people- impossible to claim such a triumph, and yet they could not have sprung more evidently from the recesses of my mind. Judy and her friends seemed lifetimes ago- these were the people I had always dreamt of rubbing shoulders with, detached from the realities of my generation, nothing like the people I’d spent the best part of my life surrounded by. 

That they were not entirely people was not lost on me, of course. I had, after all, carved them all into existence. In certain light their bodies still looked like stone or clay; they never bruised nor blemished nor blushed, and for the most part they were cold to the touch even when walking and talking. It was hard not to notice, thus, the myriad little inhumanities that marked them of a different making- Charles’ too-long smiles, Henry’s unblinking stare, their collective aversion to the outdoors, but also other things, less physical. Sometimes when they spoke I found myself wanting to change the subject, pierced with a sudden sense of the other, the suppressed knowledge that what I had made was not quite man. But this unnatural feeling, I felt, was to be expected; their distinction made sense to me. Henry had passed me a translated copy of a Simone Weil essay, and her words had seemed to me à propos: ‘What is sacred in science is truth; what is sacred in art is beauty. Truth and beauty are impersonal. Perfection is impersonal.’ This, to me, was right: in gazing at the works of masters, it is never a sense of relatability but rather awe that dominates the spirit, and likewise for these statues of mine to be what they were complete humanity was impossible. In effect they had transcended it. For my part I would far rather have had Henry’s impassioned Greek and Camilla’s implausibly nimble footsteps filling the room than the meaningless chatter of real people- it was their very difference that rendered them so dear to me, beyond the creative connection. 

And dear to me they were- not just as a collective, but individually, on their own merits, never more so than when I felt they regarded me as one of their own. I treasured their touches for the sense of reality they imbued into their miraculous presence- Bunny’s tousling, Henry’s brief brushes, Charles’ reliable shoulder-grip, Camilla’s consoling hand on mine. But in their irregularity these moments of contact did nothing but create a deeper wanting- my staggering sense of luck was matched only by my crippling fear of the whole event coming to an end somehow, and I craved some kind of proof of my definite belonging in their midst. When I found myself alone at night, pacing the rooms to gaze at their unmoving faces, the wanting was at its most desperate; whenever I awoke to the sound of voices or the sight of Charles lounging with the newspaper in hand the relief was so severe it made my stomach hurt. 

New Year’s Eve was approaching; I wanted desperately to kiss Camilla.

[Chapter II: Pygmalion]

New Year’s was the last day I had off. I had put off thinking of work- of leaving, of going from my current state of existence to a nine-to-five that left me only nights in my statues’ company, of what I would do if anyone decided to pay the upstairs a visit- until then; I will confess that I am more passion-driven than hardworking, and my previous liking for the work had all but vanished in the face of my extracurricular accomplishments. In any event my earlier sense of urgency had ramped up by the night in question: I felt firmly that I must make my move before the bell tolled or risk never making it. 

Though I was firmly convinced of my own feelings, as I had been from the first, the question of Camilla’s reaction filled me with great uncertainty. Certainly she seemed to me to float above such things, scorning Bunny’s half-serious jabs and seductive only in that careless, unmoved manner that lesser women try so desperately to imitate. In her untouchable perfection she had never let on that she was conscious of my yearning one way or the other. Yet from her earliest construction I had known on some deep instinctual level she was the one, in whatever melodramatic sense of the word mattered- and, since I had made her so, I dared to hope.

New Years’ Eve, as it happened, was an uncommonly pleasant night. Henry, who was constantly taking it upon himself to master new forms of knowledge, had managed to get the ancient chimney operational during my convalescence, and I had braved the snow to obtain drinks and the like; the atmosphere was as such one of revelry, more festive than Christmas had been, since I’d spent the former in a sculpting fugue state. Bunny sang, Charles played percussion on a set of empty paint cans; we all drank more than was entirely wise. Though by nature alcohol had no reason to affect the rest of the group it had an at least psychological impact on all of them, save sometimes Henry; by the time midnight neared everything had become quite giddy, and Dutch courage sat hot and heavy in the pit of my stomach. 

We sobered down a little as the clock crept upwards, though spirits remained high. Henry recited a hymn for the dying year in some obscure language none of us could even place; Bunny started off on Auld Lang Syne for the umpteenth time, and Charles and Camilla applauded raucously as I managed to force the key to the intensely precarious balcony, allowing us to stumble outside in time to watch the fireworks, all breathless laughter and clumsy limbs. 

“We haven’t got much to work with here,” Bunny complained, as we listened to the distant countdown from the nearest apartments. “You couldn’t have found some time to make us another girl, Richard?”

“I’m not in the business of mail-order brides, Bun,” I said, though this problem had occurred to me as well. Camilla smiled furtively before smoothing her expression.

“I’ll spare you the pains of turning me down.”

“Yes, yes, laugh it up,” Bunny complained, peevish, as we laughed. “Already saved your kiss for brother dearest, I bet.”

“Really, Bunny, it’s all very Freudian with you,” Charles said, unfazed. “Could you save it for after the countdown? At this rate we’ll be off.”

“Make it a new year’s resolution,” Henry offered, from his perch in the doorframe. “I’m sure we could all do without this vein of commentary.”

Bunny’s retort was lost in the ruckus of the first firework and the cheers of the neighborhood; Charles whistled, red and gold filling the night sky, and I was hyper aware of Camilla’s sleeve brushing my bare arm where we stood side-by-side on the edge of the balcony. I turned her way to find her already looking at me, eyes alabaster-pale against the crackling colors, and in slow motion I felt myself move, one hot burst of courage propelling me forwards. 

Our lips met; she tasted of gin and peppermint, and her lips curved in a perfect smile against mine, marble-smooth and cold as the wintery air. When I pulled back seconds later there was not a hint of color in her cheeks.

“Happy New Year, Richard.”

“Happy New Year,” I repeated, and wondered at the ache in my chest.

Work started anew. Coburn wondered aloud if I’d not eaten enough over the break, or partied too hard; I was distracted at the museum, lacking the finesse I’d once brought to my work, though my technique was faultless through sheer practice. I spent my working days numb to the outside world, watching the hours crawl by, and rushed back home at the earliest opportunity. Judy and her friends returned to Hampden, and I fielded off their invitations though not the odd ride home; by Judy’s slightly sour disposition I sensed she had some inkling that I was preoccupied by someone rather than something. Which I was, naturally- several someones, and a hypothetical extra to boot.

I had never intended to make another statue. When the thought of Camilla had first occurred to me, I had thought her the final puzzle piece, and the twins neatly completed the group- even my supplies were by this point limited, barely enough stone remaining for a final piece. Yet the urge niggled at me sporadically throughout my working days- not so much another piece, but another girl. 

I can’t explain this fixation of mine. It was not that I hoped to supplant Camilla, or offer her competition- only, I don’t know, some feeling that creating a point of comparison would work to my advantage, or perhaps detract attention from my feelings for her. These, to my dismay, were somewhat of an open secret. I had long since gathered that the statues gained some level of consciousness while I was making them, and furthermore that during this state of slumber they managed somehow to tap into my thoughts. The extent to which this went I didn’t know, and besides Bunny none of them made overt reference to it, but it resulted in several unspoken truths being known amongst the group to my extreme discomfort, one of which I was convinced was my attraction to Camilla. Another girl, or even the fact I was purporting to make one, would be defense enough to free me from the raw exposure of the status quo. Bringing in a real girl would not have sufficed- beyond myself the group tended to regard other people with disinterest, and though Bunny at least might have demonstrated interest in my bringing a Judy home, the complications far outweighed the advantages.

Still, I was reluctant to commit to the task, conscious more than ever that whatever I completed would remain among us for good. I got through the initial stages in bursts of motivation, dodging questions from the group under the pretence of practicing my handiwork, and when time came to design the figure I stalled.

Moreso than any of the others, this next statue came gradually, one detail at a time. The slender build surpassed even the Camilla mold out of necessity, since I had little stone to spare; I changed directions and went to the face, finer and sharper than the twins’. There was no concerted effort this time, working with a goal in sight: only very sporadically did I take chisel to the stone, driven by the urge to define a single feature. The collarbone, then the arched brow, inquisitive. The cheekbones, aristocratic. The wrists, fine-boned. The chiton, finally, I replicated on auto-pilot, one long rainy night when no one else was awake; that same night, still in the working headspace, I labored the eyes, which took on a life of their own, heavy-lidded and mournful. It was only as I scrambled off to work the next morning on too little sleep that I registered with a cold flash of panic that in my focus I had completely forgotten to give it curves; there was an angular sharpness to the thing that matched neither the straight lines nor the gentle dips of my prior attempts, but the body beneath the dress struck me as definitively masculine.

I had, up until then, thought more than once about stopping short and taking a hammer to the half-finished piece, but never with any real feeling- since my motives were hazy to even myself and the piece was by design experimental, its increasing wrongness felt fitting. This latest turn, however, sat worse with me than any of my previous mistakes- I was very aware that the whole endeavor had objectively gone south, and that I might as well destroy it before I wasted any more sleep on the thing. There was nothing about it that had come out right- nothing of Aphrodite or some nymph in even the prettiest parts of it, and the whole was for that matter deplorably Roman, for some ungodly reason. But I had shot myself in the foot by giving it eyes, and on the one occasion that I was nebulously angry enough to raise a hammer to it the feeling of its bony wrist under my bracing hand brought me up short. I like to think I am fairly practical, but I am well-aware of how sentiment governs me- there was too much of a person in the half-made stone for me to destroy then, and though the task was unpleasant I knew instinctively I was bound to finish it.

Having won the battle, the statue gained a nose, which refused to bend to my will, and restless hands, which did not fall obediently by its sides; when I returned to its hair, completing the loose locks I’d contemplated seemed absurd, and so the intended tresses were cut short at the jaw, spitefully modern. I cut myself on the jagged edges, and while I nursed my wound and sat glowering tiredly at the thing I felt the weight of its gaze potently, all offence. 

“I should leave you like this,” I declared, half-hearted. As a token of my continuous insanity I had taken to muttering to it as I worked it, though only if I was sure no one else could bear witness to it. It felt necessary to voice some active thought in its company, since my inner monologue was so obscurely damning.

The statue, of course, did not reply, and despite all resistance continued to prove the fastest build yet, for which I resented it more. 

“Some practice,” was Bunny’s wry comment, as I stumbled yawning from my room over the weekend, drained beyond belief. I had no reply: despite the clear confusion this latest endeavor was causing amongst the group, I could not bring myself to confirm that I would finish it. 

“I like it,” Charles shrugged, chewing at a pencil. “What’s a four-letter word for discord?”

“Eris,” called Henry, from the kitchen. “Richard, are these pots being put to use? I think I can transplant the Christmas roses.”

Later, however, he stopped by as I worked in the atelier, fine-tuning details to put off working on the mouth, whose expression I did not want to affix; when I realized he was there, turning with a start, I found his gaze curious and his manner assessing.

“If you want my opinion- I say finish it, then break it.”

Whatever I’d expected, it hadn’t quite been this. “Why?”

His brows raised in mild surprise. “Don’t you want to find out what happens if you do?”

I put off completion by another week.

With every other statue, the moment of truth had come at the end of a long stretch of work, aching muscles and straining eyes, a bona fide labor of love. With this one, it came after a week’s avoidance, with no ceremony, in the middle of the day at that. I was back from the store, bags still on my arm, when I was struck by sudden impatience at the sight of the statue looming wilfully unfinished in the atelier; I didn’t even take off my coat before grabbing my toolkit and attacking the mouth, reckless with determination. My fingers should have been clumsy from the cold, or my lines ghastly from my shifting foot to foot, but the crooked lilt came off as intentional, and the downturned corners gave the whole piece a sudden air of lofty contempt. 

The adrenaline left me as I worked; when it was done I felt my reluctance return, the chisel rising to rework some unnecessary detail. With every other statue it had taken my mentally judging the task finished for the awakening to begin; if I stretched this out a little I would buy myself the time to think about next steps. I had to confront the reality of its existence, and the fact I was bringing it into being- what I would do with it once it awoke I was less sure of.

The scalpel was inches from the statue’s mouth when breath skimmed my fingers, the air hot against my thawing skin; I jolted so hard I nearly stabbed it in the jaw, and stood gaping as it colored in waves, skin almost sickly pale, wide eyes an uncanny green as it pulled back hastily.

“Christ! Lower your weapons, will you!”

“Sorry,” I sputtered, reeling still, though I wasn’t really, first too shocked then too distracted for repentance. The voice was distinctly male, a cool nasal sort of accent I’d never heard before, and the statue- a he, after all, cementing my uncomfortable suspicions- had hair of a flaming, surreal shade of red, a shock of color that unsettled me profoundly. “I wasn’t done.”

“That’s hardly a reason to skewer me,” the statue said, tugging fussily at his collar. I was vaguely engrossed by the fluttering motion of his hands. “Though sleeves might’ve been nice, considering the weather.”

“You’re welcome to a change of clothes,” I replied, trying to recall the usual script to follow. Decidedly with this one nothing was to go according to plan. “I don’t- I hadn’t found you a name either.”

“I’ll strive not to take it personally,” the statue said, somewhat archly, thought the tone was offset by the way he was scrutinizing me like he wasn’t entirely sure what to make of me either. I could hear Henry and Camilla talking from the living-room, disorienting me further: somehow they hadn’t noticed anything amiss yet. But they would, I knew: whatever half-baked plans I’d had to follow Henry’s advice had dissipated entirely at the first sight of his startled expression.

This time, I had no external guidance to rely on for names, nor much to go on- I had spent most of the sculpting process trying to convince myself to break him into pieces, so points of reference were lacking. But he needed a name- it felt like an especially glaring faux pas that he not have one, less out of authorial intent than polite convention, the way it might have felt had he been a distant acquaintance whose name I’d forgotten rather than a slab of rock brought to life.  

Something old, I thought, casting around for inspiration. All I could think of, inexplicably, were Sunday school figures- the various long-suffering saints lining the walls whose names littered casual conversation back home. But I’d been an early skeptic of those teachings, and only few of their names came to me, most of them off-base. Sebastian wasn’t right- the reference would have suited Charles better. This required something else, slanted more Gallic to match the blue-blood appearance.

“Francis,” I said, half a question. I could not shake the sense that there was something more familiar about the discomfort of our interaction than I was used to with the others. He had a surprisingly reactive face.

“I could be that,” Francis said, after a second’s worth of thought, and seemed mollified by the name, though he had not relinquished his hold on his arms, still firmly crossed. “In different clothes, though.”

It occurred to me that he might not have been unserious about the cold. 

“I’ll show you to my room,” I said then, remembering myself a little, but for whatever reason this made his gaze shift into something evaluative again, cutting my relief short. 

“Ah. Cubitum eamus?”

“What?” I asked, blindsided. He spoke Latin, my mind supplied, which did nothing to assuage my nerves. 

“Nothing,” Francis said, in casual tones, and then followed me obediently to my room before we were accosted by the rest of the group, upon which the foreign phrase slipped my mind entirely. Somehow I felt I wouldn’t have asked the others to translate regardless.

When I folded the chiton away with the rest it was lukewarm to the touch.

οὐκ ἂν λάβοις παρὰ τοῦ μὴ ἔχοντος

Ouk àn labois parà toû mē ekhontos.

"You can’t get blood out of a stone." (Literally, "You can't take from one who doesn't have.")