Logs:Glamour

Glamour
CN: references abuse, gaslighting
Dramatis Personae Lucien, Sera
In Absentia Desi, Elie, Flèche, Gaétan, Matt	2024-08-18 "I am quite excellent at pretending."
Location <NYC> Le Carrefour, Le Bonne Entente - Astoria, Queens
Above the bustle of the clerestory restaurant, tucked at the base of the bell tower, this indoor garden and library is out of the way and easily overlooked, sure to become a favored "hidden gem" of travel guides. Low bookshelves full of mythology, fairy tales, and folklore ring the central elevator shaft and the stairway spiraling around it like an easily navigable labyrinth. Beyond these are plants in a variety of tastefully whimsical containers, each with its own engraved plaque giving the common name, the scientific name, and their significance to various traditional stories and practices. The walls have been done away with so that the room extends beyond the doric columns into a surreal rooftop garden enclosed with glass stretching between the tower's massive buttresses. The arrangement of plantlife becomes less formal as one moves out into the four arms of the conservatory, visible containers giving way to beds and terraces and eventually landscapes carefully cultivated to look wild. There is plentiful seating scattered along the paths and just off of them, from proper benches to picturesque logs to surprisingly comfortable boulders. By day, myriad butterflies dance amongst the enchanted vegetation, and likewise moths by night. A shallow stream weaves throughout, feeding ponds that host plants of their own alongside fish, frogs, and turtles. Wandering the outer edges of the conservatory, one could almost feel lost in a mystical forest but for the stunning views of the cityscape beyond the glass. It's another quiet Sunday morning, the visitors to the conservatory few and sedate. An elderly man lounging on one of the actual benches, a colorful picture book in hand. A young woman shepherding a toddler who refuses to remain in the stroller she's pushing. Sera wends her way out of the labyrinth and into the westerly arm of the crossroads, her steps unhurried and nearly silent. The touch of her power is feather-light, too, though plainly sensible to the person she's searching for as she deftly navigates the gradients of the other lives around her, leaving the faintest trace of her own soft wonder. She's wearing an elegant old-fashioned empire dress in shimmery white chiffon with an emerald satin belt and black ballet flats. Her long hair has been colored a deep, deep black that makes her already light skin pale and her already vivid eyes luminous, gathered in two thin braids from her temples that weave together at the back, the rest left in loose waves. The silver sun and moon earrings she wears are definitely borrowed from Desi, likewise the celtic knot bracelet, but the seven-pointed star pendant is new. This entire ensemble somehow manages to makes her look simultaneously younger and older than her age. Perhaps it isn't the wisest of choices that the little table under the hawthorn has become Lucien's customary spot, now, but then, perhaps the danger is not quite now what it was. Lucien is here, this morning, in a fine white linen suit with green contrast buttonhole stitching, a forest green silk shirt with the top button undone to frame a purple and silver paisley cravat, and polished black hazel loafers. The tea he's just pouring out into two cups is fragrant, lively and full and some summer-court varietal not of this earth. The fruity buttery pastries were baked here in the cafe downstairs, though, but complement it well. Flèche has been off sniffing by the pond but frisks over when Sera draws near, trotting after her back to the table with tail flagging high. Lucien is just setting the second cup of tea in the empty place across from himself as his sister arrives, his mind quiet but not still, a glassy-calm surface under which perpetually deep currents run smooth and strong. Sera stoops down to greet Flèche before continuing on to Lucien's particular corner of the crossroads. She does not take a shortcut, this time, but neither does she seem fearful of the wildward-leaning plantlife. Her steps quicken slightly around the last bend and she breaks into a wide smile that she supplements with a whisper of joy and a whimsical curtsy -- shallow and bouncy and altogether unsuitable for a serious audience -- before dropping into the seat across from her brother. She pulls the tea closer and breathes it in, but studies Lucien for a long moment before she takes a sip, opening her delight and appreciation to him without spilling the rest of her very busy emotional processes. "Thank you." A faintly embarrassed flush that she almost certainly could have suppressed blooms on her cheeks. "I agonized for so long over what to say when we met again. I had a whole speech written and rehearsed. Now that we're here all I can think is to ask for an honest opinion on this." She indicates her hair with more flourish than is probably necessary. "Most of the colors I've tried are either heinous, impossible to coordinate, or both." "Alas. I would have listened so very attentively to your speech." Lucien's head tilts slight to one side, and he studies Sera quite a while with a very intent appraisal. After the length of his scrutiny it might sound curt coming from someone else that all he says is, " -- too dark," but for Sera there is nothing terse about his considered assessment. He sips at his tea slowly, and considers a while longer. "Does your own hair displease you, now?" Sera quirks a slightly lopsided smile. "I'll probably remember in about half a cup, if you can pretend I just arrived then." She takes another sip toward her speech and sets her tea back down to twirl a lock of hair around a finger, stark black against pallid skin. "I thought so. It displeases me," she admits, radiating unease, "for a foolish reason. But since I'm building a whole new wardrobe anyway, it seems a good time to experiment." She plucks at the hem of her dress. "I'm not sure about this 'fashionably dissipated ingénue' look, either. You look amazing, though." Her head tilts slightly in the other direction, and her grip on her power tightens to contain some surge of turmoil or other. "Are you planning to stay a while?" "I can pretend a good many things. I am quite excellent at pretending." Lucien's eyes circle a bit comically, tracking the twirl of Sera's hair around her finger, then lift towards his own hairline. "I was considering darkening mine, too. Blonde has always been such a fussy color." Sera's unease ripples up against an undemanding curiosity in him. "What do you consider foolish?" He lowers his tea, his fingertip running slow against the smooth curved lip of the saucer. There's a slow shiver in him, now, not quite unease, though near to it. "I am not planning to go." "You're kind of a fussy person," Sera points out, with little evident concern that this will be taken as an insult. "I think you'd look good with darker hair." She eyes his hair thoughtfully, then the lock of hair she's left hanging aesthetically over her shoulder. "Maybe not this dark, though I'm sure you could pull it off without looking quite so...dead? Consumptive?" She plucks up a flaky turnover but then just sets it down on her plate. "I'm foolish about a lot of things, and that's fine for the most part. But I don't even look that much like her. And if it were really about not looking like her, I'd change my eyes." Her fingers rotate the pastry (fussily) on the plate. "It still wouldn't undo the hurt I caused you by choosing her. Or protect you if you're still here when she gets to me again." "I am an exceptionally fussy person. I don't need my hair constraining my palette for me." Lucien glances down at his own hand, then to Sera's considerably paler one. His expression does not shift, but there's a quietly amused ripple that passes through him, soft and startlingly bright. It shivers in time with the small circles his finger draws against his saucer, his head shaking. "{It's odd that's not how stories go, isn't it? Time is capricious and meaningless and yet here we are just -- plodding along forward. Perhaps some other Sera is going back and doing it some other way. Oh but there's probably another one bungling it horribly, too, and some other where we simply traipsed off to have glorious fae revels for eternity.}" Though his voice is very serious there's a wicked glee in his eyes, even as his tone slips still more somber: "{Of course, a different us entirely simply got eaten by the singing lake first thing. Terrible tragedy.}" He shakes his head, and picks up his cup for another sip, his amusement shimmering into a more sedate contentment. "{Sometimes we hurt each other. We can't undo that. I can't even begin to imagine what difficulties you were going through adjusting to this world. Perhaps our next chapter will be better.}" The twitch of his lips is small. "Gods willing it will be somewhat more coherent." Sera snickers, her mirth washing over him -- and over Flèche, who looks up and wags her tail, pleased to be included. "{Sometimes I wish that I'd never come back. But probably most of the Seras who stayed did get eaten or turned into trees or accidentally pledged as someone's pet.}" She sips at her tea and peers into the cup after with incongruous seriousness. And she's more serious still when she raises her eyes again. "I'm not worried about --" She shakes her head, takes a slow breath, and tries again. "I'm not afraid of messing up again. I'm afraid it may not altogether be my choice." Her power tamps down her rising unease and reflexively attunes her to Lucien's calm. "{While we were lost, I kept thinking about just what you said. How much you endured to help me find my way in this world. How long it took me -- is still taking me -- to see past the siblings I had lost to the ones I might have. And how a stranger wearing my mother's face ambushed me at the rink, and not five minutes later I was sobbing in her arms and calling her maman.}" She leans forward and fixes her brother with an intent gaze. "{Literally five minutes. I was still in my skates. And I never even thought to question it until I was worlds away from her.}" "{One of my grandmothers is a tree. We should all only hope to age so gracefully,}" Lucien informs Sera, very primly. There is a very small pinch in his brow, a faint slip of self-doubt answering her unease and then tucking itself back away again. "{It was a touch precipitous,}" he admits, "{but I know I have never been as good at -- performing warmth as perhaps you needed, then.}" He curls his hands snug around his warm cup, and his lips compress, eyes lowering but then lifting again to meet Sera's gaze. "{She is very compelling, Sera, but she is just a woman. Parents always have more pull than they ought with their children and in our family that has been fraught in many ways. What are you afraid she will do?}" "{I am not even a little surprised that you're part tree.}" Sera looks up at the hawthorn. "{What kind of tree?}" She subsides a little, not much reassured by Lucien's reassurance. "{It wasn't that, and she's not the only one who's good at performing warmth. No matter how compelling she is, I didn't grow up with her. She doesn't know the ways my relationship with my mother was fraught, she doesn't even know me. She shouldn't be able to manipulate me as well as she does her own children, and none of us are that gullible but we all just bought her version of the story and never asked for yours.}" She adjusts her biokinetic link to smooth over the agitation trying to draw Lucien in, and when she continues her voice is quiet and level if no less urgent. "{Remember how she turned up at school last year and took Gaé away? She wasn't even on the visitor list, and one of his actual guardians was in the building. I know all the rationalizations, but there is something else, I'm not imagining it.}" Despite this insistence her doubt is growing along with her fear. "{I'm afraid no matter how determined I am, she'll somehow convince me you're crazy. Again. I feel crazy for thinking that. But I'd rather be crazy than lose you, or worse, be used to hurt you.}" "{Matthieu was never his guardian,}" Lucien objects, but it's very mild. His finger has returned to tracing against his saucer, slow and repetitive, and the quiet motion now sends soft meditative music humming thoughtfully along to assist the careful sorting of his thoughts. He sips his tea, sets it down with the quiet answer: "Rowan," though he's still slotting pieces into some other puzzle. "{I think we are all quite crazy, you know. In our various ways. I could ask the school explicitly to bar her from the grounds, if you are quite concerned. And she cannot come here, you know.}" Sera turns one hand up, then lowers it deliberately to the handle of her teacup. "I know. I told you it was foolish. {Powers or no, she's not some wicked queen and I'm not the brave princess who breaks her spell.}" She does quash the blush before it rises to her face, this time. "{But she is dangerous, she wants me back, and she has an uncanny knack for getting what she wants. I would feel safer if they turned her away at the gate, but they mustn't let anyone talk to her directly. I think she has to speak to do whatever she does -- like Naomi, only subtler.}" She twitches a thin, ironic smile. "{We're all quite subtle, too, in our various ways.}" She looks around them, trying to quiet her apprehension with Lucien's music and the softer backdrop of green and growing things. "{She can send others to do her dirty work. That's why she wants to get her claws back in me, and why I was afraid to visit you at first.}" The slow turn of her head stops more or less in the direction of the rowan sapling that had pointed them to Otherworld to begin with. "{Is that one your...cousin? Or is that like asking if we're related to Guy Lafleur because he was Québécois also?}" She takes another sip of her tea, and the pleasing sensory feedback is attended this time by a cascade of conflicting emotions that resolve into something like amused vindication when she looks down into her half-emptied cup. "I remember my speech now." "{L'Entente will not allow her in. However silvered her tongue, I doubt she can charm the hotel itself. It can be quite particular about its rules.}" Lucien shifts his hand off the smooth surface of his saucer and with it his artificial synaesthesia realigns itself. The music quieting in his mind, his busy puzzling quieting so that he can redirect his attention once more, intently. He's sitting up just a little straighter, his expression shifting smoothly into one of a muted but agreeable welcome. There's a faint brightening in his eyes and a warmer one across the surface of his mind, light and pleased. His head inclines, slight, as he plucks up the teapot to pour Sera's cup full, and then his own. "Oh! I'd half started to worry you'd been scared off from this place for good. I'd hardly have blamed you, but I am glad you saw fit to return." Sera watches this entire procedure with a keen, focused interest that only stops just shy of literally taking notes. She keeps her busy learning process assiduously contained, but lets through the riffle of her amusement and esteem. Her re-setting is not quite as dramatic -- her posture relaxes into her accustomed demurity, her biokinetic broadcasting shifts back to a similar joy and a somewhat different whimsy, though she dons almost exactly the same bright smile she'd worn when she arrived the first time. "Thank you." She gives a soft breath of laughter. "I agonized so long over what to say when we met again, and it wound up curiously like what you said." Amidst the acting, her spill of wonder and solace at this synchronicity does not feel affected. "I am so glad you came back. Some part of me was sure that you would, but the rest of me feared you wouldn't, and I'd've certainly understood if you stayed away." She lifts her cup with both hands and takes a dainty sip, radiating tranquil appreciation. "I'm not scared of this place -- or even the other place, in itself. If anything, it reminded me how terrifying this world can be. I stayed away because I was scared of putting you in danger again." She blushes deliberately, her smile self-deprecating. "Considering how much you've taught me about courage, I should have known better than that." "There are dangers everywhere. In some ways I think Otherworld is just more honest about theirs." Lucien sets a financier on his plate, picking up his fork to cut a small bite off. "It's strange. I'm not sure what I know about courage." There's another quiet ripple of amusement in his mind, soft and fond. "Really, I just fake it."