CEDERE NESCIO

AJ Astor Executive @ Astorgold Enterprise Ltd.

[ajastor]

𝚜𝚑𝚘𝚛𝚝𝚌𝚞𝚝𝚜 ; 𝚊𝚋𝚘𝚞𝚝・ 𝚠𝚌𝚜・ 𝚏𝚊𝚖𝚒𝚕𝚢・𝚖𝚞𝚜𝚎・

[autumnshowell]

The Autumn that met AJ maddned on psychadelics and liquor in the October chill, ready to rip apart some tasteless Corporate asshole and the one that stands before him now are two different animals. One, the former, was uninhibited, uncaring, and in pursuit of little other than the high - a high that a presence injected into her mind by wolf fangs had long been ailing to tell her was okay to seek out. That to rip and tear things to the bone was simply in her nature now.

It's a familiar note - one she and Aria have had arguments about time and again.

That Autumn is always there, always lurking underneath her, clawing and scratching at the underside of her skin. It was there when she'd walked in here, close enough to the surface that she wouldn't have been surprised if Atlas Jay Astor could see the imprint of it's claws scraping under her skin.

But the advent of a third party has dragged the mask back on. The ordeal of being known. Her attempts to play flippant fall flat; AJ demonstrates that he has no real intentions of dismissing the girl. She feels suddenly on the spot, that harried look of a rare wolf licking it's chops from the fringes replaced by a deer staring at the headlights of its oncoming end.

You reckon you're any good at kneecapping is a load-bearing thesis in this moment. The wolf affords a loss of control and in that arrest, freedom from culpability. It's easy to feel like she doesn't deserve what's happened to her when it's just not her fault. It's even easier to say she doesn't care about caring.

Is AJ asking her to confess to this stranger? To kill her? Trying to call a bluff?

Fortney, the hunter, he has it coming. She's killed people for being in the wrong place at the wrong time before, but she's never done it while she could stop herself. She isn't a vampire. She doesn't need to hurt things to live. But she doesn't need to go off half-cocked to a hunter who's already gotten the best of her once before. Every bullshit-strongman growl she's puffed up since getting her flies in her face. The sad sink of the busser's features dwell on her, as if she's wordlessly pleading for help.

What does she have to confess? What secrets does she have to tell? They all sound absurd. Even now, she can't bring herself to say what she is - what any of them are - without feeling like somebody lurks nearby to haul her off into an asylum. Even with all she's seen, and all she's done, it feels unreal. Like any minute now, she'll wake up in the wreck of that car and return to a normal, boring, miserable life. One where there is no AJ Astor in a hot tub, where she isn't going to marry Aria, where Jude isn't dead, where she hasn't become a murdering creature reveling in the liberating feeling of the violence she fights tooth and claw to convince herself doesn't make her feel strong and confident and fucking mighty. It dawns on her that for all the safety that would offer, she'd rather be the person it's made her than the person she'd been, once upon a time.

So her stomach drops when she makes the choice to whisper all that into the other girl's ear, taking the busser's hand in her own and resting her forehead against the side of her face as she spills it. Autumn's voice is a whisper that's wracked with the threat of guilty sobs and incredulous laughter - neither of which quite manage to pierce through her shakey, hushed tone, even as she leans back, the weight of the moment feeling like it's rolling off her back. The unexpected catharsis makes her feel strangely uneasy.

[ajastor]

For a heartbeat, AJ thinks he's found the limits of Autumn Howell. That he's cornered her against an impenetrable wall — not with threat, just a challenge. A proposal like they'd had in New York, when they'd hypothetically plotted how they'd rid a suit from the fashion tower. It had been a game with no consequences, then. She'd been allowed to speak dirty, fantastical desires with nothing but a peek into her psyche. It had nothing on Astor's calculations and he likes to believe she'd known it then, and if not, she does by now. With new attachments, impulsivity infects the madness of meticulousness.

Maybe it's why he'd tossed her into the deep end whilst they're in the hot tub. Sink or swim, babe. He's held her over the edge of a cliff and dared her to go tombstoning with him. Every game has risk, and the rocks below were the sharpest.

He had known the limitations of alchemy, before. Bent the rules of it, since. Now, he's rewriting the legislation, and the laws of it entirely. Waterborne, airborne, prickles of every element that makes up every carbon-founded thing on the planet. Even the ones not of the earth. AJ dares to dip his fingers in it, with the aid of a ghostly hand he guides with his endless battery well. Aut's right in his orbit.

And when she gets the balls to move, cheek against flesh, mouth whispering in an ear that'll never repeat what it hears. AJ smiles, offering her the key to lock the box entirely.

Not offer. Give.

It starts when Aut pulls back. The branches of gold that spread across the busser's cheek where she'd brushed skin. Melted gold burrowing towards her skull and spreading like a disease, solidifying and transforming biology into metallurgy. Whatever Aut's said and whatever relief he assumes it gives her, Astor assumes it's a freedom she'll like — she'd spoken her darkest thoughts and then sealed the secrets away.

Not even AJ heard her confessions, and she hadn't been quick with it.

"I guess you do have it in you." Look at that. Far cry from the girl desperate to hand an envelope of a paid tuition back to him in a Porsche she'll later crash. (Not just once)

The busser's sudden splashing of realised agony slices through the moment. It must have dawned on her — the unforgiving end , as she tries to scramble for the edge of the tub. Autumn had wanted a sword to swing in her murder of a hunter; he'd given her the weapon to test and she'd used it, the same way he would. Gold is heavy, and it's quick to slow down a woman made silent in the water when it pools down her shoulders molten and sticky, and wraps around arms that can no longer move. One knee hits the marble with a clang. A half-flesh hand reaches out of the water as she is swiftly sealed in a tomb shaped like her. A frozen scream, with their reflections misshapen on every gilded edge of her.

Aut had picked the catalyst. Not him.

He'd have chosen a foot, not a cheek, and let it work its way north instead of south. But it's her first, and he's not judging. Just smiling.

AJ remembers a time too, where he wished he'd known sooner how to reverse the power.

Blinking the thought away, he stares at the wolf pup in the hot tub with him. "Have you ever had a box of secrets so pretty, love?" He's mostly joking about the backside pointed in their direction, where a busser hasn't managed to claw out of the tub, and has left herself in a compromising position half-in the pool of water. A victim of Medusa, if Autumn and he were as boring as to metamorphose stone.

He doesn't have to ask her whether she feels powerful, or if she's afraid. Scared? Howell, with the sweat between them, and the steam of a tub refusing to cool. She'll say it in her own time, whilst he fishes for the champagne in the floating bucket, and refills his own glass. Tipping his head, he sips the bubbles, with a new, devious gleam aimed at Aut, "Not quite Emo's arse though, is it?"

[viktorialomidze]

"Both more and less than you might think." Viktoria laughs - her heart has belong to very few, but her bed has been as open as one could imagine. She was no stranger to grief, and certainly wouldn't be going forward, either. "Only if you think human experience is shit." He might. She wouldn't judge him if he did - witches can have quite large egos. Such is the way of having that amount of power at the tips of their fingers.

There's a flash of a moment where her gaze tints AJ in a green light, and she turns her head away to shake away the jealousy. He's having his own... issues, it seems. The way his head shifts, the way his gaze locks on nothing, the sway in his step.

The invitation comes, and she steps over the threshold with a smile. She follows him towards the kitchen, light on her feet, to watch the way he moves. Perhaps not just the liquor in his system. Perhaps something more. She wants to carve his mind out and study it.

"No, dear. I have my own samples waiting for me at home." Blue, piercing eyes seem amused at the realization he'd come to. "If you offer later under the influence, then far be it from me to refuse." More studying, then: "What is it you're seeing?"

[ajastor]

AJ doesn't let his mind wander to the vastness that is vampiric lifetimes. An immortality unique to them, clouded and plagued by costs that would be too much to pay, for most. Astor has wondered if the mind changes to protect itself from the never ending knowledge of time gone by; that the wealth of a dead, cold thing is simply the power to endure. He'd never speak to his father about the nuances of immortality, but his uncle too shared the same devout cause of immortalising the Astor name. An impossible feat, unachieved by every generation.

He'd thought that forging Gods from intangibility had been an impossibility too, until recently. The cost of that, is the thing AJ's avoiding looking at, standing in the corner of the room, at Vicky's back whilst they talk about liquor, and humanity.

"What would you remember of human experience, Vicky? Give me the poetry of that." Drunken philosophy is a horrible hole to drop into. But he's got half a bloody mind to ask her if she thinks she can speak for it; to step into shoes she hasn't, for a while, to understand the gravitas of mortality, bed and hearts and the like. AJ considers power to be a subjective quality, in most. He's got it, beyond magic; he's got it in the telephone, and the status. He's got it in the banks, and the airlines. A name that he's inherited, not earned.

He laughs then, sudden and shocking. A world that spins around him, in his stupor.

There's no plans for him to offer samples, so he draws the line quietly as he drops back a mouthful of brown. There's no polite cheers, because they aren't polite and AJ's not planning to start with her.

He has to brush off her question, because he doesn't need to vocalise the degrees of what he doesn't quite know yet. "Hm?" Her eyes are far more honed than his, even without the blurred vision. He glances around, and leans deeper against the counter, tipping the drink in his hand towards the one waiting for her, "You and me, Vicky. What the hell else do you saying?" a beat, "Now I didn't pop this bottle for no reason."

[lcveyearned]

Footsteps approaching give way to a sense of relief even with the flashes of light playing behind her eyelids. Eyeballs feeling the pressure of his thumbs, running back and forth as if it will alleviate that pressure. She really hadn't meant to set off this chain of events. Aria's voice sounds over the ringing and cotton ball static in her ears, but it's not relief that blooms further, because Aria is offering different places and Ashlyn knows it is her own fault for having fumbled something that should have been a normal interaction.

"Please…I wasn't trying anything at first." She groans out, though she is feeling limp against the shelves that dig into her back. And then they are gone, instead a warm, broad chest replaced. It doesn't soothe anything. His hand is wrapped around her jaw now, still strong, still terrifying.

He really is going to kill her, she can feel the constricting feeling of slow numbness around her throat, the weird burning warmth that dulls into nothingness creeping into her skin. She blinks, trying to regain her vision now that his thumbs aren't digging into her sockets. She's going to die, and Aria is just going to stand there and let it happen.

"I wasn't trying to do anything. I was just here to see Autumn." She strains out against the numbness that coats her throat, voice rough and breathy with the struggle to get anything out. She squirms again, but there is an undercurrent of a lack of air that is starting to make her head feel like it's floating.

@photoaria

[photoaria]

Aria watches AJ manhandle the younger witch, and watches the gold fleck into her skin. Her nose wrinkles - magic makes her feel uneasy even on a good day. "Ish." She answers AJ, still looking at Ashlyn and watching the gold creep. No, she doesn't want Ashlyn to die, she just has an odd inkling feeling in the back of her mind about her that she just can't quite shake.

A worse person would let AJ just do it. Maybe she's not worse today. "She's Autumn's friend, more than mine. College buddy, I think."

This time she does look up to AJ, her hands in her pockets. He'll let go of her - but there is something that looks different in his eyes. Was he always this trigger happy with his magic? There's always been a chaos to him, but not a maliciousness that she could find. Was it his mind or was it the witch in between them poking where she shouldn't?

Her own apprehensions about Ashlyn and her relationship with Autumn slightly color this interaction, but ultimately she just twitches her head towards the door. "Let her go, it's all good." And then to Ashlyn, "Right? You just made a mistake, yeah? Total accident?"

@ajastor

[ajastor]

Astor doesn't reckon the girl set to bleed in his grasp knows a bloody thing about how Emo's just saved her pathetic little life. Nor how she's given her parlour tricks the benefit of the doubt. She's got Aut's name on her lips, and a someone decent vouching for a weak-willed apology. AJ's used to the kind that involve knees, and begging.

But he releases her with an eyeroll, the heat in his gaze and the burning in his chest dulls at the intrusion, and the violence dims. Friends in high places might apply here. Because it isn't Astor mercy that lets the witch free, even already marred with gold.

"Piss off then." AJ follows Aria's gaze briefly to the door, and back again. A man accustomed to instant service has never learned patience in every circumstance. A new surge of Godhood does nothing for humility. Black eyes flecked with gold, have no pity left to show. Just irritation for a witch who dared walk her power along his arms, and try to penetrate his mind as if she could peel away the layers.

Even if she could, he doubts she'd like what she might find.

AJ gives Emo his attention back; better for the stranger that she doesn't earn his ire a second time. His smile curves into a smirk, "Get better company, love." He doesn't see how Aut has a college buddy so tasteless. Yet the jibe rolls, as he pokes a book hanging off the shelf beside him. It's devoured by metal vines, and gleams under lowlights. "Aut's had enough accidents in her life, eh? Least I'd have made this one pretty at your front door." Or a coatrack.

He lazily hands Aria the newly gilded book, like it's some trophy.

@lcveyearned

[viktorialomidze]

Her face remains quietly amused when he keeps talking - immune to the ways of the heart. She thinks perhaps that is heart does not beat in his chest like a normal witch would. The vampyr hears it just as steadily as she hears any other, but she swears if she were to slice her fingers through his ribcage, she'd instead find solid gold.

But they continue their frigid trek down to the rental, Viktoria's hands in her pockets as she remembers winters of old, of what it would have been like when she'd traveled to northern wastes to hide and feed, when the sun finally penetrated through the clouds and she'd had to hide from it. An old tune sits on her breath, lowly humming as he goes about his drunken explanation.

"Twelve? Dear boy, you don't know how many of us long for a love to grieve." She laughs, though, "But I'll concede your point." It's been a long time since she's been out just to be out. The stars above feel like a calling card - telling her to shift her direction and instead find her way to Sadie's home. She does not, and when they arrive at AJ's abode, she bows and gestures towards it. "You'll have to invite me in, of course."

[ajastor]

If he didn't know who he were talking to, he might've bit back about being called boy. Like a parent chiding a son. Those aren't thoughts a drunk mind can handle, warring with the darkness. But he lets her have it, because she's dead and she's been long dead a while. Long enough to dally with the Scots, so she claims. Moons and stars and all that shite. She should be less than wrinkles, and botox and more bones and gristle if she's as ancient as implied. AJ thinks she's prettier this way; skin attached, and crested with snow.

"Sure you've had a lot in your bed and your heart, love, eh? Grieved plenty." Depressing. Mood killer. Vicky didn't give him the impression when they'd looked at grisly paintings in Nouveau that she pined for a partner to hold her unbeating heart. AJ's convinced that every vamp he knows is either pining, or brooding. Fucking tragic. So he laughs, too, despite the subject. "Sounds shit."

What might be shittier, in his stupor, is the pause he makes every so often to assess if a shadow is real or a falsity. Movements that aren't human-like, nor beast like. Graceful, but damning in their suddenness. A spider that's too fast to track. Gone beneath the furniture; the snow; the streetlights.

She draws him back, standing in the threshold of the house.

Ah. Invitation. What a nuisance that bloody is.

He bets he could fabricate a spell to fix that problem for her, sometime. He's done grander things than that.

"In you come, Vick." Jacket thrown over the lounger, as he rolls up the sleeves of a dark shirt and hunts for the liquor in the kitchen. For a moment, he pauses, steadies himself on his feet when the ground looks too close, and then goes back to emptying bottles from the cupboards and onto the island. "Whatever takes your fancy, love."

He's got the Springbank out, and he's popping the cap. Then, as if realising in his brief moment of faux sobriety what he's said. He points a finger at her, smirking. "Throats ain't on the table for at least another bottle or two, little nightstalker."

[autumnshowell]

Autumn, as if a spell's broken, sinks her nakedness under the water, down to the neck. She eyes the newcomer, and when she supposes herself to be imposing, Autumn shakes her head, stammering. "Oh-we're not-" AJ interjects though, and cuts her off, beckoning the other woman in. Autumn sits idle as the busgirl sets her things aside and steps down and into the pool, and she can scent the nerves drifting off of her; lycanthropy has landed her with a new sort of perception in this way. When she passes by, Autumn traces her wake through the water until she's looking at both her and Atlas Jay Astor.

It's like it's become impossible to speak, as if her tongue's swollen inside of her mouth. Her eyes flit between AJ and this intruder. This puts her off guard - this is dark talk, meant for her and AJ, not... other people. It's that familiar compulsion - to perform normalcy. It's something that's sparked countless tiffs between her and Aria, this innate desire for things to not be the way they are.

But then she remembers where she is. What's she's done here. Her gaze has shifted into the roiling water, and she shakes her head and swallows her apprehension. "I'm just tired of looking over my shoulder, AJ." She says. "He kneecapped me, I want to kneecap him." A million other things, too. Mean, violent things. The kind of eye-for-eye justice that gets lectured about. Maybe she will - she certainly wants to.

[ajastor]

AJ isn't blind to Aut's shift, nor the tone he's disrupted by inviting a third inside their vicious little circle. Energy pulsates inside him — around him, eager and relentless. If she knew that the busser doesn't get to spread the plans they make here, or even see the outside of these four walls, maybe she'd feel differently.

"You reckon you're any bloody good at kneecapping, babe?" He's toying, because they've got something to play with between them. And power says that it wants to transform matter to something else. It wants to see how many elements it can know before it fabricates the same gleaming gild that it always favours. Most of all, AJ would like to see how much Aut means in her verbal affront. It's one thing to say she would stain her hands red, and it's another to know the taste of it; the scent; the smell of copper and iron clinging to clothes, and to skin.

Where's that fire gone in all her unease about a third player in their vault?

Suddenly, AJ wades forwards through the water, and it laps against the woman's trembling chest. He slides up beside her, grinning, because he'll make the first move. He's the King on the chessboard, Aut can be the queen if she wants; she can make every move thereafter. Astor hushes the busser quiet, when an uneasy bout of nerves passes her mouth. "You can keep a secret can't you, love?" And before he even lets her nod her promise, he's beside her ear, whispering dark truths of a life lived.

She pales, wide eyed and half a breath from running. AJ rears back chuckling. She's their treasure box, and when they're done talking secrets, they'll lock them away, for good. Nobody else will know them.

It's Aut's turn. "You can skip to kneecaps if you like, Aut. Touch one. See how it goes."

A dare. Because in the mist of his gaze, he has a new funnel for the source of magic. Endless, and all consuming. There's power in teasing the taste of it; if Autumn's brave enough to know. Madness does not look calm, but AJ's smile is devilish charm, despite the woman they've made victim to the Throwaway game.

[lcveyearned]

He doesn't back away, he doesn't hold his head or cry out, her last lifeline and it is too weak. She is too weak. And isn't this fitting? Being taken out for a fight she hadn't even instigated. For an unruly curse that plagues her life, a taint that weaves it's way through her fingers and mind. She reaches up blindly as his hands grasp her head and his thumbs eclipse her eyes. Hands useless around strong biceps. Squeezing, pushing, fighting. For her life.

Because she wants to live. She really fucking wants to live. A gasp and a whine leave her as he presses deeper, light bursting behind eyelids at the pressure, leg kicking out still trying to dislodge him. The feeling of pinpricks starting to prod through her skin. She pushes deeper at him, tries harder, magic grasping harder at the parts of him that would hurt most normal men. She won't just die, she won't just be prey. Her nails dig into his arms, squirming through the pain he is inflicting.

Think, think, think. The words run through her like a mantra finally something tangible bubbling to the surface. Where she is. Why she's here. She worries, would he hurt them too? Autumn's hearing is heightened, but there should be someone here that'd be able to hear even the breathiest of whispers.

"Aria!" She gasps out, trying futilely to shove him even as her hold gets weaker. "Aria, help, please." She manages, magic already retreating as she starts to feel light headed hoping the vampire is actually here.

@photoaria

[photoaria]

She'd been upstairs the entire time - Thoreau occupying her thoughts while she flipped through a few older shots she'd taken during the road trip last year. Time has changed things since then. They'd lost a fair amount of people to death or time or judgement, but that didn't really matter to her. She had Autumn. Will have her forever.

Her thoughts are interrupted, though, as she strokes down the fur on Thoreau's back while she sleeps, by a voice that makes her eye twitch. There is nothing to Ashlyn that should bother her, there's just an inkling there that something else is going on. It sets her on edge.

She'd heard the conversation between the two of them, and had silently hoped they would take it outside, but now -- now she's being brought into it. Setting her things down, she walks a human pace out of their apartment and into the bookstore. "AJ." She calls, looking down at them from the lofted area. "We have a strict no killing policy near the shelves." Her fault, really.

She makes her way down the stairs, and rests a hand on his shoulder to get his attention, a bright smile on her face as she jokes: "We have a perfectly good basement for that."

@ajastor

[ajastor]

It’s addictive; the impulsivity of carelessness. Behind closed doors, there is no media to blast his name across an article, smearing Astor for foul play amongst civilians. Just him, and whoever wants to try their luck thinking they belong in the big leagues. This daring witch does not matter. Just a runt, trying her luck by invading his insides and searching for a weak spot. Cracking walls of gold, that run too hot for her power. Whatever she coerces him to feel, it gets lost on its delivery. Astor only kills threats.

He's a breadth away from taking her eyes, and making golden balls of them when she cries out for Aria.

Emo.

"Scream, proper." Maybe she'd hear her with those sensitive ears of hers.

The plans to make golden bloody eggs of her sockets becomes even less amusing, because Emo's actually rocked up and she's either going to wreck the vibe, or chew on it. And his name quick of a bloodied tongue indicates she knows all about their brutish game downstairs. Darkness pulsates under his fingertips, sparks of gold flash and leave bright embers on untainted flesh. A threat, as much as it's the power escaping him.

"I'll get you new shelves, love. Don't you fret."

Better yet, he'll buy out all the books that might get ruined if she's going to get pedantic about it. What does he bloody care?

Aria's hand on his shoulder gives him pause. Eyes slide across to meet hers, gold-fleked and dark honey. He notices the retracting of the other's power, in the hesitation; Emo's important to Aut, and Aut's important to AJ. There's a chain that unsettles the one leashing his ego.

It doesn't take much effort to wrench the witch off the bookshelves, and have her pressed flush against his front. Stranger with invasive fingers is facing Emo, now. One warm hand tight on her jaw, he feels the first layer of skin metamorphose, transforming the sulfur in the keratin, first. Slow, but thin strips of gold beginning to crawl down her throat, to dance on her collar. "Why don't you try your little tricks on this one, eh? See how it goes down."

He'd consider the basement, if only to play a nice for Bookends' sake.

Astor looks past to catch Aria's gaze again, because the stranger had called out specifically for help. "You know her?"

@lcveyearned

[autumnshowell]

There seems to bloom between them a sudden competition, like he wants to push her, and she him, even if she can't fathom what they'd be competing for.

But it's not competition, moreso study, at least from AJ's end - and she looks down to the stripes across her belly. She doesn't think often, about how the worst she'd suffered before all this was a skinned knee, a paper cut.

Now she's a canvas of violent strokes, but she shakes her head at his question; "No. Not those."

Along her arms, her gut, her ribs, her fingers, those are from animals, from her own temper, from her moonlight travails.

But she does lift her chin, where a strip of marred skin, light enough that it seems like a shadow in passing, lingers underneath the choker that rings her neck. "This one though,"

She remembers the silver and wolfsbane-laced wip, choking her into quiet while she watched her friend die.

Autumn nods again. The implications of her own mark - some inky thing that makes her more than she is. It's a thought that doesn't stick, not now at least, and she's about to gently prod about it more before her head whips back to the door.

She doesn't say anything, standing there a half turn between AJ and his new visitor. A part of her feels caught and put on the spot, though she doesn't know why.

She glares at her, then back at AJ. The suddenly arrived, alien eyes creeping over her makes her skin crawl for some reason, but Autumn refuses to shrink like she usually might - her eyes question if it's still safe to talk about this or not.

[ajastor]

AJ's gaze traces the curve of the scar beneath her chin. Faint, and thin under the artificial lighting. Lounging in the tub, the soft rumble of bubbles volcanoes around them. But he will not forget the route along her throat, where her dead hunter walking, struck her clean. What it sounds like, is that they drove something sharper inside Aut than just whatever made those wounds. They left a mangled piece behind, and she's turned it into an arrow with their name on it.

They say no more, before interruption. Astor lolls his head to look beyond the wolf's shoulder and eye the busser, holding a black suede tray as if she might dilly dally tidying up the room. She only has to catch the burning gold of AJ's gaze, to know she's chosen a bad time to play clean-up.

Swarming heat, roiling between his stomach and his gaze wants to erupt.

"'Ello love," With a hand still stretched along the back of the hot tub, he beckons her over with his index finger. Gloveless, and eager. Something tighter has woven itself to Astor's spine, blackened and charred. It has laced itself through the gaps in his ribcage and made a home; the centre of a power most will never understand. Anticipation hums in his throat, his encouragement a degree less charming. "Join us. I promise it's warm."

He paves her a golden path to follow, in case she mistakes having a choice. Unrestricted by touch, a God-like entity that moves as him, carries his power; a golden carpet, as if she's to walk towards the tub and win a BAFTA.

"I didn't realise anyone was... in here. I can come back —"

AJ smirks. "No. You've got outstanding timing, love. Got a job for you, eh?"

He used to play a version of this with Cal. Instead, it's Aut, standing where he used to.

Only when sweat and nerves begin to get the better of the woman with trembling knees, does she start traipsing towards them. Autumn's looking at him, expectantly, as if he's supposed to rid her like a King disposing of peseants in his kingdom. His smile says she's dead bloody wrong — but only about the dispatching. Three's a party, baby. But she'll learn how to have a good time; she's wet in the water already; she's halfway there. Aut's come by, teasing vengeful murder of some cunt who wronged her. AJ's keen to know exactly how far that passion runs and she'll see that his is soul deep.

He's excited to show her how fickle life really is.

The tray is put aside, as the busser wades into the water beside them. She's sharing air, and a tub with a God; an honour.

AJ calls it the Throwaway, but Cal used to call it The Box.

With darkening eyes, he shutters away that memory. He just wonders if Aut'll give it a name, as a new player. His smile gleams, as he instructs the stranger to relax, as if she's interrupted nothing. He resumes their conversation, as easy as breathing, "Aut, baby. You were saying?"

[viktorialomidze]

Oh, she's an errand girl, now. This is amusing. She owns most homes in this neighborhood - rentals or mortgage, she collects the money all the same. She hadn't known of other creatures in the neighborhood, but witches like to lurk in plain sight. Her head tilts as she regards him again. No, this man doesn't lurk. He commands attention, even when embarrassingly intoxicated from head to foot.

He shows her the number on the phone, and she leans forward to meet him, lest he lose his balance again. "It's not far." She says, simply, and wonders if he'll let her sample some of the other delicacies he might have hidden away.

It's not his home, she doesn't think - one of the vacation rentals of some sort. But still, she wonders if the invitation will extend. A night of drunken stupor sounds fun, in a way.

"So, Mr. Astor, flirtatious as you are - Who has driven you to the bottom of this oh-so-expensive bottle? Surely it isn't love that's penetrated your golden core."

[ajastor]

He isn't exactly sure what he'd have done had the house been an Uber ride away.

Probably got Vicky to call him one of those, too. But AJ had known he'd been right — thinking the Airbnb is on this street. Port Shitly's got a hold on him, now. So much so, he's got the roads mapped. (Shocking, actually) He's not unpacked that just yet. Part of the reason it'd been so bloody easy dropping back bevy after bevy.

His hand smacks her shoulders, "Atta girl." with a drunken chuckle-slur he hop-skips over a storm drain. If he maintains contact with her, then he's reminded that she's not one of the periphery shadows he's got talking bollocks in his ear. Moving between the snow, as if it isn't there at all. Bloody creeps don't know who they're taunting.

Astor's charm's so potent, that he didn't even realise he'd said a penny to her.

"Bold, Vicky." He teases, trying to match her step (and failing) "Isn't no who."

A what, maybe.

He's a man whose made a killing with secrets. So airing them to the dead-still-walking isn't going to do him favours. AJ doesn't live in regret, he burns the scripture that gave it a name. And the hearty laugh that spills like liquid gold, is not mockery, but amusement to the audacity. Love would have been less complicated than the real thing he's drowning. "I'm not twelve, Vick. Love. Fuck." he's going to choke on his drink, if she keeps coming at him with comedy gold.

Opening a well of shit, following a massacre he'd written the equation for. That might've started the indulgence to get lit, tonight. It's not the part that most would be haunted by, that's crawling under his skin. "Only thing I love, is that bottle I've got waiting for us, back at the house, eh?"

[lcveyearned]

His words are mocking, she doesn't need to hear it in his tone, the sight of him is enough to show as much. He's playing with her and she wants to shrink further away, to call out either of the owners names. Get away from whoever this man is. Her heart is thundering, shivering a bit when he begins to trace her ear. It's warm, tingling, and then there is a slight change in weight. Numbness. It throws her, she can still tell he is touching her, but she can't exactly feel it, just more tingling. More warmth and then nothing. He's going to kill her and she has done nothing to intentionally warrant it. But he doesn't seem to care. No, he won't listen.

Fleeing doesn't seem to be an option. He has her caged in. Trapped with his body and proximity. So the only thing left is to push back. To make him feel what it is like when she actually means to cause a shift. Her eyes bore into his covered ones. Still scared, but hoping her abilities don't fail her. She weaves and searches. Invisible tendrils snaking their way into any opening they can find. Deeper. Deeper. Burrowing and clinging at the root of their cravings. Wrapping, tightening around amygdala, deep into the temporal lobe. Fear and anger stored, ready to strike a person at any moment.

Fear, she thinks. Make him feel what she is. All encompassing. A never ending wave. She shifts her head away from his touch. More. She needs him to back off.

Doubt, in his abilities, in himself. They are things she is used to feeling. In experiencing and she wants him to feel them too. Her hand moves up and pushes him away at his chest as best she can.

"Stop." She says as firmly as she can. Her hold on that receptor in his brain digging deeper. "I can make it worse if you don't."

[ajastor]

It is a rope meant to snare him. AJ can feel it knotting through his muscles, like a piano cord pulled taut. It'd slice through flesh and tissue, if it wasn't the power that it's chasing. He understands that draw more than most. Always wanting the one thing it cannot have; he'd wanted more, despite the world crumbling beneath his touch; every avenue's open to him. She's in the path taken, and he's a reckoning. She only had to step aside, and reign in her parlour tricks, and he might have let her be.

But instead, she tries to pluck chords long wrecked from his mind. So he laughs. Astor's sacrifice to a patron had been plentiful; memories that weren't his own, actions that were intangible, and blood that had decorated the floor of the penthouse like a new paintjob. He'd driven his might through the only thing he'd ever been truly afraid of and it had left him free of trivial worries.

And she wants to try and resurrect that dead part of him? To threaten him, like she forgets what a man might do, when pushed to the edge. Fear evokes violence. AJ would always wear a mask in his vulnerabilities — he's given them all over to J'ao, in exchange for what he's become. And it's not a fearful thing; it's angry, and half-cocked like a revolver. If she desires to play a beat on his emotions, then she'll get the consequence of a man so afraid, he'd do anything to survive. Astor's do not cower to the lesser, and AJ won't shed a tear for whoever thinks they stand a chance. Strength alone couldn't save her, and neither can her magic.

A spark, where he thinks for a moment that what he might do, could backfire; that he'll go too far in Aut's little bookstore and shatter something other. But it's not about her, just the glimmer of doubt that has AJ suddenly concerned that this woman's actually broken through, to poke at him.

"So can I." he murmurs, dragging harsh hands up her face to hold each side of her head; thumbs that linger over eyes, with a certainty that he'll rip them out of her. That childish scowl, with hardened eyes rattles him, and he has to coil his own magic around it and squeeze. "I only have to breath, love, to erase you." A fact. He'll scratch out whoever she is; her entire bloodline from history, just to say he could. A challenge, as he presses his thumbs to her browbone, threatening to pop goop from her sockets, "Make it worse." She's ignited a decayed version of him, to enact his perversions as flecks of gold stain her skin, and burrow thin, needle-like metal deeper, "See what I do."

[autumnshowell]

He admits it, the fact he doesn't care and she shrugs, clothes soaking up hot water. She looks at herself standing there, and slakes her clothes off in slow order, sweater, shirt, pants, socks shoes, they all slop in a wet heap at the edge of the tub. It's not sexy - not meant to be, nor does she think she fits the sort she usually sees AJ palling around with.

She turns back to him, something other than what had greeted him that first night - the well-kept, neurotic, people pleasing creature she'd been, untethered from every pretense she's ever put up, including, finally, being a decent human being.

She's neither decent nor human anymore - a point of illusion AJ and Aria, and others have had a hand in dispelling in the past year.

Decent humans don't eat people, and they certainly don't enjoy doing it.

Decent humans don't plot a murder, and they certainly don't ask friends for help doing it.

Decent humans don't disappoint every other decent human they've eer known, and arrive at the decision that it was worth it to feel big for once.

Autumn feels big. Even while AJ does his standard tactic of taking the piss out of everything, she feels big. For the first time in her life, she feels like she might know what AJ feels like, like she enjoys the fact that she's a cut above so many people in terms of power. A werewolf is the runt of the supernatural web, she's felt like this for a long time. She's done agreeing with that.

She wades through the water towards him, and takes a swig of his stupid floating bottle before she shoves it into his chest, damn if he's already got a glass or not.

"They did," she agrees. Get under her skin. They've lived under her skin like mites for months now. The episode at Tideview had put it in her head though, and Veronica's death had sealed it. She'll answer murder with murder. He snarks further, and she shakes her head - not in annoyance, but in resignation that this is AJ, no matter what new scent of magical power rolls off of him into her monstrous perceptions. "If it is, I'm sure you'll find another one."

"I just want help making sure they're as helpless as they made us. All's fair, right?" Even when it isn't. There's no joy in her tone, no mirth on her face - it's more a sort of sad anger. "They've got tattoos that have magic in them. make them stronger. Can you take that away, somehow? I don't get to steer the car when I'm a wolf. So I need to do this while I'm awake."

It helps, though, that she wants to remember the look in the Hunter's eyes when she plucks the life out of them.

[ajastor]

With the absence of her cheap, wet clothes, there's even less lingering between them. These aren't the secrets they're hiding; physical, intimate pieces of who they are were worth more than the sight of near naked bodies in bubbling water. AJ just enjoys that by her shedding her layers, she's either comfortable, or careless; neither were qualities Aut ever possessed, back in that Uber. A mortal who knew little about beasts and what made them. Now, she's become one.

A hum reverberates out of his chest, as fingers clasp the bottle she'd wedged between his ribs. Touchy. Playful. Eyes that glimmer gold, as he releases the flute in his grasp; it sits on the side of the tub. Instead, he swigs from the bottle before returning it to its floating ice bucket. A dramatic ahh, as he appreciates the champagne on a conniving tongue. His hand reaches out, to follow the streaks by her stomach, obscured by the water; they don't touch when the back of his finger dares to map out the paths. Angering a God, seems like a terrible move from a hunter. "They leave one of these on you?" AJ isn't sure he's seen the myriad of damage underneath Autumn's clothes before; the scars that are the same pinkish as the ones harder to hide. A uglier reflection of the ones lined in gold on his own flesh. But there is a new edge to his intention; the whetstone that sharpens the sword that he'll be for her.

His chuckle, and her comment, brings him back to the moment. Eyes snap back up to hers. A hand retracts. Whatever they did to piss Aut off, it's lethal.

AJ relaxes back into the tub again, calculating what she's asking of him.

She does want to dirty her hands, and not her paws. That's transcendent. Astor knows the marks of the hunters, he's poked enough of them before taking them to his bed, or sturdy tables in nightclubs —

He could negate the fickle magic, sure. There were a thousand things he could do between sending them to oblivion, and having the skin peel from their muscle. Magic made the hunters stand a decent chance to enact their crappy cause; Aut's put together well enough that the same kind of power can rip it away from them, too. Excitement, and innovation roared to the surface of his chest. It made him wonder how much he could influence; Aut cannot steer the car (multiple of them, actually) transformed. He wonders if that's physiology, or the influence of the moon. Imagination ran giddy.

He knows the moon does not synthesise elements, or expel them like a beam that metamorphoses wolves. It is just a rock made up of elements they know. Silver and gaudy. He could create the same conditions in any lab; he could magnify them, even. Is the moon, is it magic, what else is it? AJ doesn't know enough about the reigns of a bloody wolf, but his mind running hundreds of miles an hour, wants to. Hunter magic is the gateway drug, to seeing how far he could push the order of things.

AJ's grin says just as much as his words do: "Baby, I can do anything." a beat, to nudge her leg with his own, "I can even make a wolfen one of your own, draw it up across your chest." Half truth. Because his confidence is louder than ever knowing where capability ends.

Then, from behind Autumn, the door on the other side of the room opens.

[ajastor]

*14 (Autumn)

SMS TO CAR CRASH AUT AJ: since we've been talking favours. i need to do something. but you've got to be willing to get on a flight with me, babe [unsent]

@autumnshowell

[lcveyearned]

She looks away as the book in his hands snaps shut, ready to move further into the stacks, a wilting flower from having clearly upset him in some way. But she hears the sound of boots crossing closer, her eyes dragging back upwards when she feels a radiating warmth closer. Feels a body just inches from her own. Her eyes glance back up, his own seem to be hidden and his voice comes out like honey, accented and sure.

Dip into his heart? She's just standing here, did he think the smile meant something more? That she was trying to pick him up or something? Eyebrows furrow "I — wasn't…" She says in slight confusion, a slight swirling of anxiety fumbling in her chest, his proximity and open threat causing her heart to race a bit. She glances to the side, hoping somebody comes. That whatever this tension is breaks.

Her magic pushes out without her realizing exactly what she is doing, she tries to pull back when she does realize, invisible tendrils rushing eagerly, trying to grip and as they do she feels the rage that pushes against it. That manages to stave it off as it moves to flex his mind. To let the feeling of danger warp the frontal lobe.

She glances to the side again. God, why was it so quiet in here? And why did he call her for what she was? "I'm not trying to do anything." She murmurs, not looking into his face, at that too bright smile that makes him look like a beast ready to sink its teeth in.

[ajastor]

"I — I, I —" It's mocking, as he fakes a stammer to mirror hers with a laugh. A predator sensing prey. Run little rabbit. Does she have the gall to bolt or hop away, crawl at the very least to safety? "You weren't what?"

She's a fucking liar, because she's still bleeding influence. Pumping bursts of power that unsettle him; that fear earlier; he'd never felt that. The rage that had surfaced so fast it's a submarine blown from its depths. His ears are ringing, he notices. As if the room has compressed, and the pressure in his body is too much for his surroundings. He moves his head from side to side as if able to shake it off; a snake weaving to the notes of a melody he hates. A bomb of poison, and chemical, and he thinks she's loaded it to her liking. AJ hasn't encountered this kind of whirlwind; a side effect of new power unrestrained, or a woman daring to wander into realms she has no business stepping. He can't tell. But he does tell her, what they both already know: "You're doing something, love." a beat, to let the madness free, "And it's about to get you dead."

A finger reaches from where his hand is perched on the shelf, beside her head. It ghosts at her ear, as he begins to penetrate her magic, gold infecting the surface of the curve of her helix. Skin and nerves at the mercy of his mind.

And suddenly, it strikes him that he's at risk, an overwhelming urge to retreat —

No. AJ doesn't bend, not to whatever or whoever she is. He gnashes his teeth, reacting to danger with violence; he is a God who never bows. And when threatened, he roars. His nails digs into the flesh turned gold, metamorphosing her ear, in long rivered branches. Easily torn away, if she doesn't care for her ear then she can save herself the loss of more than that.

It'd be poetic though, when she could hear herself scream.

Astor calls her out on her bullshit, voice slow, as he navigates emotions that he's not in control of, "Now if that were true," He wouldn't feel it; a witch — something he used to be, before an ascension, reeked of magic. He's close enough to the stranger, to kill: "— I think you'd have got some wit about you, and got yourself packing out of here, eh?"

[autumnshowell]

Autumn stands there, looking down at him, a rare sort of staging between the two of them. She's so accustomed to looking up to Atlas Jay Astor, that it feels weird to crane her neck so. The strange tangle in his other hands catches her eyes, and it becomes apparent that the strange kenning she feels around people like AJ - people with magic, like her sister, like Ashlyn, it all feels different here. More heavy and oppressive. Like it's trying to set an alarm off in the back of her mind that danger's here - something she's never felt in this man's presence, even for all his needling and rough-play friendship.

It's almost enough to shift her expression, to start the corners of her mouth upwards - but it's not enough, because he hasn't answered her yet.

"Do you actually want to know?" She finally asks, when he inquires as to who has her feeling this way. There's a lot of answers, but only one correct one.

"Does it actually matter?"

She steps into his stupid hot tub, because there's a sudden need here, to push against whatever magical tripwire she's tripped, whatever inkling of weird, supernatural fuckery that has changed the air around AJ.

This isn't her tendency or her typicality. She's afraid of AJ right now, for reasons she can't even understand, and there's a violent urge in her chest that screams at her to make sure he doesn't know that. She's afraid that she's going too far with this, and his gleefully dismissive tone, which she can't even really fault him for, makes her want to let him know that she is so serious about this. She's too in the moment to know if he's teasing, and can't help but be irritated, and she scoffs at his doubt.

"I killed somebody last full moon. Aria fed her to me, while I was a wolf." She says, water wicking up the threads of her woolwear in the tub. Autumn stands right in front of him now, in roiling water - it's so fucking absurd, she's sure - he's probably going to laugh.

But even though she's sunk to his level she's still looking down, where he sits. "I'm tired of people stabbing me in the back and then telling me it's to build character, AJ. That's all."

[ajastor]

Does he? He supposes he doesn't. A name is more forgettable than a face, and AJ's notorious for forgetting both when there's no interest in it for him. His finger taps on the flute, gold branches still warm, and malleable beneath his touch. Aut knows him better than he thinks, because there's nothing that holds him back from making an enemy of a guild of hunters; he's a God. If she didn't already float the plot to bring death to one, he'd have probably executed the cunt himself, for whatever they did to piss her off.

It's as if he's looking at a new, fresh-faced graduate of Astor Academy. She's gone and got herself a masters in the bloody art of being a deity. Look at you. She's planning murder of the first degree, now.

"No." He eventually answers, with a smile.

The water ripples as she wades into it, the bucket of bubbles floating past her like an invisible hand encouraging her to drink. Gilded, because AJ's got a thing about metals and their aesthetic. She's a living battery, pulsing against his magic, all the same. The water is heavier, like the words that come tumbling out of her, entertaining him as she soaks herself and everything she's wearing. Astor cares very little for the outside dirt that she's bringing into the tub, because he's got that look that says he's a breath away from laughing. "It's free to know that it's better with your clothes off, love."

AJ's always thought himself the one with a bigger bite, but she's grown into her teeth, here. It's in everything she's saying, and the way she's watching him as if one of them might lose the reigns of control. That Gods might rise, and the wolfish kind might claw them from the sky.

He's drunk on the idea that she's reaching at all. Power hums with every excuse to be used, abused. She's almost there — so close to diving over the cliff and making him believe that her moral compass has shattered, and she's got no means to repair it. The hot tub is their boardroom, and he's hearing the presentation as to why he should invest, rescue, some middle tier from bankruptcy. Difference is — he's ready to invest fortunes into her (and he has), because she's got the potential he's seeing with even more clarity; it's with eyes channelled from something more ancient; a gaze that shares the vision that has been the evolution of Autumn Howell; from uneasy Uber driver, to something with new determination.

AJ leans forward in the water, and the air around him shifts too, curling away as if it's threatened, the laugh finally cracks, "And they say romance is dead."

What a vision it is that emo is feeding limbs to a feral wolf.

That provokes a new stream of questions; he's suddenly vicious curiosity personified. And she's not afraid to get close to talk to him like there's a thousand secrets she's about to confess. His eyes wander painfully to the jumper that has no business in his tub — he's not sure why it's quite so amusing to think that she's come to ask him to aid her reaper-fantasy in cheap knitwear. But he chalks that down to local girl's work-in-progress, taste.

Clearly, it's for flesh and bone.

Does that alleviate her guilt, if she's able to excuse the killing because it's paws, instead of fingers, and canines instead of blunter, less abled ones? He wonders if she's ever killed a fucker with the same eyes she's looking at him now with. Can she bloody the hands she has here, now? It makes him tip his head at her, bemused, because he wonders if she could tell him what it feels like to know remorse. Can you pull a trigger, or do you need something more?

If she's so adept in her wolfen form, to chase prey, then what does she need him for?

It gets him eager, to think that she does.

He sips on the champagne, and a mouthful is probably worth the price of her bookstore. AJ titters afterwards, "They've gotten right beneath your bloody skin, haven't they?" Whoever it is that's got her treading water with him in his realm of chaos. "Have a drink." And he nods his head towards the bubbles, as he determines whether she's holding onto that tiredness as a weapon, or if by tomorrow, she'll regret everything she's just said to him. Astor offers her to sit next to him, too. Even in that outfit she's drenched through. Eyes glittering with mischief far darker than his soul. "Hit me with it then, love. This twat you want dead." He winks at her, because he knows what backstabbers are. And they are only good buried. "'Cause woo-woo'ing still doesn't cut it. You know I'm a busy guy." It's a tease. One only has to look around the room, to see exactly how busy he is. His mind's far more rampant than she'll ever see; there's a death of his own, he might ask her for, yet.

But AJ's never had a sister, just a negligent brother who sits on the throne meant for him. Jokes on that wet wipe. AJ's going to rip down the castle, and stand in the ashes of a legacy gone. He wouldn't mind if Aut's the one that stays, at the end of it all. Astor doesn't let his mind sap into found families, but if she's as serious as she wants him to believe. Then he'll be her sword, and her shield in whatever war she's about to provoke.

"Be nice if this hunter isn't one I like shagging though, Aut."

[autumnshowell]

@ajastor khaos

She hasn't been around in a while; picking up the pieces she'd let flounder in the aftermath of what had happened to her on the edges of Cerberus territory had taken a while; Academics in a nose dive, friends neglected, Autumn had made a brief but innocuous appearance at a Halloween Party before once again receding. It's obvious that a change has come over her, not just in the tired etching of her face, but in the way she carries herself. It's not sunken or shrunken anymore, it's something more determined.

Ashlyn's magic wasn't helping, the drugs weren't either. Instead she'd settled into a strange mode, focusing on herself, on the bookstore she ran with her lover, now her fiancé. Then came the snow, snow that hasn't left them for weeks - instead it seems to endlessly replenish itself. It's gone from unlikely to unseasonable to unprecedented. In all this time she has transformed into something a little different, however indescribably so.

But weather is hardly a consideration for the things that make the world turn, no matter how nasty, and while it may have locked the city down, it hasn't locked down her thoughts. Kersey had implored her to stay in the pack, for her own good, and she'd abided, but his refusal to back her up for their losses to the Hunters makes all his talks about treaties and etiquette feel stupid and feckless. Aria had unlocked something in her in that last full moon. Something hungry, something that made her feel real and sated.

So she's in Khaos, where AJ Astor and his vampire friend Frankie help their clientele indulge their appetites, hoping her old friend will help her again. It began with a simple enough statement, framed in the aftermath of a share drink. "I have a friend who is going to help me... but I could use a bit of extra insurance... the kind people like you can... Idonno, woo-woo up."

She turns back to him, and the question curls in her stomach the same way it had with Liam, even though it sits peaceful on her tongue. This isn't a brash action. This isn't an emotional whipstrike, unguided. This is revenge. Cold, calculated, premeditated. It's mean.

Not Hunting. Sport.

"Will you help me kill a member of the Brotherhood?"

[ajastor]

Autumn's got the silent, but known approval to wander in without passwords, or knocking — it's on her head if she wants to see who he's deep into when she dares to prop a door open. He doesn't care to ask if it's scent, or whatever that lets her find him in his gilded castle, but he's alight with new power, recently procured. He's already grinning ear to ear at her arrival. He's yet to come down from the skies of it all.

It's amusing that she's actually caught him alone, in a heated tub with a floating bottle of bubbles by his side. Arms rested wide along the back of the tub, a flute in his hand, curled with a golden tree he's been crafting; a living entity he's been toying with. It's a bottomless well he keeps feeding from, and even the glittering spark in his gaze wants to encourage Aut to jump in, and indulge in the simple delights.

He almost quips that he's shocked she has friends at all; a tease that never comes, because there's something in the way she stands by the door. Attentive, determined, ready for something. A kind of laughable bravery he hasn't really seen; it's as if she's about to ask him for the world, and he's about to give it to her on a platter.

Maybe he would. AJ's generous, when in a good mood.

"Oh, I'd love to know what woo-woo'ing means to you, local girl." It's met with a chuckle, because it sounds like she's asking for anything between a free sausage roll, and for him to fund some crazy run for office. How's he to know what the fuck that means?

But, she elaborates, and it's not curiosity that sets the match. They're not playing a game in New York, and they're not talking in potential for death on a dockside. She asks him like he would be a sword in her hand, and she wants to wield it. And who is this I'm looking at, eh? He's not the executioner, just the hand in it. (That's ever so familiar) It quietens him, as he sinks lower into the tub, hooded eyes stare at her, in prolonged silence whilst he picks apart the joke, from the severity.

You being real? Not her version of their fun word games. He half expects her to tell him she's concocted some nefarious plan, half-cooked that he's not supposed to laugh at.

Autumn wants to kill someone.

He's almost proud she's come to make him an accomplice in it.

AJ has no interest one way or another in the brotherhood. He's made a pretzel of one in a club, which had been fun. Same one that he has on his roster, for call-ups when he's bored. Killing one doesn't faze him, but he's never had Autumn asking him for aid in it. Her mother — the one he'd cleaned up for her —had been whatever wolves get off to in their throes of beasting. This isn't gunsmoke he's looking at. This is loading the chamber and being willing to fire.

He still doesn't know if she can.

Funny he'd thought about asking if she wanted to tag along for a murder, too, sometime. Seems like hers can't wait for the snow to clear, though.

Finally, he casually asks — as if they were discussing going for breakfast, "Who pissed you off, love?" Mild interest, as his smile broadens. You sure you mean it? It's not mockery, but it's something that he'd not imagined she's interrupt him to ask for: "Seems kind of extreme for you." then he glances down to the other side of the tub, where steam rises between them, "You wanna get in, chat about it, babe." He licks his lips, "Or is it a now or never kind of deal."

[viktorialomidze]

Her eyebrows raise up - it's the AJ she remembers meeting that night, to be sure. Only this one seems to be drowning in an ocean of liquor, "Viktoria." She corrects him, but doesn't linger on it. Her gaze does dip down to the nearly empty bottle, as if assessing what, exactly, might he find at the bottom of it.

She follows him, hands clasped behind her back, in a casual stroll. Anyone viewing them might think them two unlikely friends trudging through barely salted sidewalks, ice and snow crunching beneath their feet. Her heel slips slightly with a step, but she continues walking unphased.

He looks not at her, but behind her. Her head tilts, and she turns her head to see what it is he might be focusing on it, but Viktoria sees nothing there but a snowy neighborhood landscape. "Oh, you don't know how old I am? I'd love to sample."

[ajastor]

He's briefly shocked that he's remembered correctly. Vicky, eh? Or, Viktoria. Same difference. AJ likes to believe he remembers notable faces, she'd evidently had one that stuck somewhere in the depths to be anything at all. Not as he'd first thought though; no bed, and no memory of heat and desire.

Just bloodied paintings and shit champagne.

Astor's more kicking at the snow, than he is stepping through it. Balenciaga's are soaked through to his socks, and ringed fingers rattle against the glass bottle with every near slip between iced hands; the gloves are off. Yet, he's still eying the movements of limbs that aren't there, made more blurry in the intoxication.

She's observant, in the way she turns back and forth to follow his wandering gaze. If heightened senses can't detect the gestures from something other, AJ's settling on ignorance for the rest of the evening; he's drowned enough of the voices, that he's only a few more shots away from silencing the shadows too.

"Is that a question, love?" Rhetorical. The dead could lie for all he cares, he'll be able to tell if she's got enough of wealthy pallet to understand what he does. He just needs to find the house he's paying for, first.

It's on this road, he's certain.

It's about now that he could do with local girl driving up beside him, and taking them to the driveway. But she's not a callout, now, and he's yet to trust another with the bloody job. He pulls out his phone, squinting through the light of it: "I'm gonna write a number down, and you with your good eyes can find the right postbox, aight?"

[lcveyearned]

Where : Bookends For : closed starter for @ajastor

Things with Autumn are going well enough, even with the snow and ice, for once Ashlyn feels like she and her curse are useful. Feels like she is truly helping someone, she's thankful for the reprieve she can give the wolf, even if it is fleeting and not always exactly stable. She does blame herself a bit for that, for not having better control of herself. Of not having discipline over something because of the fear and caution she feels from it. She's scared of herself, has been since her powers bloomed. Self isolating and pulling away from friendships, most social situations. Even being friends with Autumn when they first met and now, she waits for something to happen. For an invisible shoe to drop. For her and the poison that runs through her veins to destroy. But this was going alright so far, and maybe it was all her mother's words of her being a danger and something to fear just messing with her head in the end.

Normally the wolf would pick her up because honestly her vehicle was much more suitable than Ashlyn's beat up Honda, with its bumper she is too embarrassed to admit is attached by zip ties and pure luck. And maybe it had rattled a little extra on the way over, and she had lost traction a few times, but she was here. She was safe. That had to account for something.

Entering into bookends she isn't expecting another person to be there, but it is a store, so it would make sense. He is taller than her, dripped in what looks like expense. Untouchable some how. She bites her bottom lip and then releases it, not sure if Autumn or Aria are currently getting the man something so she just kind of makes use of looking around, catching sight of orange fur disappearing between stacks probably headed back upstairs now that there is more than one person in the store. She slips a book off the shelf, cracking it open to seem busy, glancing over to the man again and offering a tentative smile.

[ajastor]

AJ is not a fan or snow, nor ice. He occasionally tolerates it when it's on a mountain and he's beelining down a summit. He's usually better dressed for the climate. He's packed for rain, and gloom. He's got recurring orders with Jordan, and Vuitton. Astor's thinking he needs to call up Moncler and get them to do a collaboration with Jacquemus for new age winterwear. Bloody snow. He rips the natural world into pieces; and breaks the dimensions of possibility for the first time in history.

And it's lost beneath the layers of snowflakes and frostbite.

Even new warmth in his veins isn't enough to keep the chill out, new power seems to be challenged by snowfall. Money cannot buy a weatherman to piss all over the white and melt it yellow.

AJ's spent two days recovering from the collapse of limitations, whilst he sacrificed his independence for a pact with a God, in order to become a bigger one. His power has stretched beyond former capability; metamorphosing objects, and channelling the elements on a periodic table are not where he stops; he can manifest them from shapes in his mind, like coating a shadow he's made into a real, tangible thing. No longer restrained to the natural order of alchemy turning one thing into another.

He is the ultimate conduit for change. Even if he looks dressed for a walk along Miami's boardwalk, the sunglasses hid the burning gold enflamed in the flecks of his gaze. Newly alive, and swimming with potential.

Visiting his favourite wolf, following his own transformation, feels like she might indulge him in some games of madness. Maybe she'd want to kill someone with him. It's a powerful thought in the front of his mind; Want to go to London, local girl? Ever been? What a sight that'd be, to watch the Astor tower of gold reforged into something dark, and twisty in AJ's mind. The ashes of a legacy birthing a newly born Phoenix of gold. He'd sour over the river Gods, and their power, spit in the faces of them, too.

Inside Bookends, he's acutely aware that there is something wandering the aisles with a thrum that is no mere lull of a spellbook misplaced, or some grimoire Aut's foolishly left laying on the counter. He's been to Ink & Antiquity and seen the more elusive editions within the city, he doesn't think Aut knows to spot a jewel when she sees one. Same way she doesn't know a good taco, from a shitty one. He likes her for other qualities.

It's the stranger who keeps looking at him. A power that runs a hand down his spine, as if she could penetrate, and puncture his heart. Does she know how quickly he could drive a needle point through hers? Her smile is almost a goad, he decides. And the book he's purveying slams shut, shoved back on the shelf with disdain. The smile is a threat, and there's no Autumn to save a rogue customer, if he were to redecorate, or carve a new statue for the shop. AJ's driven by hands that aren't just his own, anymore.

But it is his own that grips the shelf beside the stranger's head.

"'Ello love," A smile, drawn wide. But his eyes dip, because it's stronger the closer he is, whatever she's trying to penetrate him with, it's cracking the invisible walls of his armour. "You know the last person who tried to dip their fingers into my heart, drowned —" he leaves off the provocation of exactly what she'd been doing beneath the water, and for how his hands had kept her there. She lived, but the stranger won't, if whatever influence she plucks at him continues. It's a half truth; he's never had a problem spinning lies, long before he's signed a bloodied agreement with something other.

It's odd, too. The swift call to anger — no fury, and the impatience that unravels him. How dare she try — The shadow of the man he'd always wanted dead; he's stepped into his shoes, ever so briefly. And he's fast to step out of them, terrified. But it's not of her.