HSeeker1000

[focuriousity25-blog]

fin. ... 6/6 ab5042qjq ... Welp, it's finally here. The sixth and final? entry of the main 'I Remember' limited comics. It's been a long and expensive journey since the release of Part 1, but I'm honestly happy to have seen it through to the end ^^ I realize, in many ways, this whole thing's just a glorified OC-insert and crossover, but, at the end of the day this just goes to show how much a series like Tales of Arcadia can mean to a person, how a good story and characters can inspire you and what you can take away from them upon reaching the end. Case in point, when TOA's saga ended with the "Rise of the Titans" movie, I think it's safe to say the majority, uh... wasn't too happy with how it all concluded, and I'll admit, the desire to create Luke stemmed from a desire to...okay, not exactly "fix" that frown-inducing ending, but, expand upon it in a way so it's at least a little bit less hair-pullingly frustrating; thanks a lot, Guillermo del Toro. xD Speaking of which, Luke's story and this little AU of mine will continue in other formats, but it may be quite some time before he appears in any more comics; hope that's understandable. x}

I want to also give a huge thank you to @muku-gc . When @undeadchestnut disappeared, they really did me a solid by stepping in to draw part six, thank you so SO much, friend ^^ One more, thank you to @roesavalonsigma for allowing me to cameo her special roleplay character, Roes Sigma, who was also something of a cornerstone for Luke, but that's another story ;) I may make a master post providing a link to each comic in order, we'll see. Until then...thanks for sticking with me, means a lot :) ~HSeeker

[alxnxllix]

Reblog if you're grateful for your internet friends

[welcome-to-mazes-circus]

The circus announced itself the way these places always did — with the smell of burnt sugar and sawdust, and music pitched a half-step too bright. The kind of cheer that worked very hard at being cheer. Valeyar Koschei stopped where the grass gave out to trodden dirt and rested the umbrella's tip against the ground. He didn't lean on it. He only held it, the way some people hold a railing on a bridge they're not sure about.

He had known two kinds of circus, and it had been a long life, so that was saying something.

There were the good ones, with tallow-smoke and a girl on a high wire who didn't need a net and didn't want one, and a clown who had once made him laugh so hard that for one whole and holy minute he forgot every terrible thing he knew. He still had the ticket stub from that night, somewhere.

And then there were the other kind.

He wondered which this was. He then fixed his collar, slung the umbrella over one shoulder, and walked in under the banner wearing the loose, ambling ease of someone thoroughly lost and not the least bit bothered about it.

"Hello. Lovely evening for a show, don't you think?" He said warmly to the first figure the light handed him. "I wonder if you could point me toward whoever handles lost property. Only I've mislaid something fairly large. Goes by Roak — about so high, scowls like it's a competition, hasn't been seen in longer than I care to count." He smiled a Cheshire grin. "I've been ever so patient about finding him. Oh yes."

Candice looks at him. Her body muscles made it look like she was a strong woman, where she was supposed to be able lift over a thousand pounds.

“Uh we don’t have proper lost and found everything goes to the owners and they keep it till the owners come back for it” She pointed to a large yet smaller tent with the word ringmasters

She stared at him for a while before whispering “be careful, they don’t like giving people up” With that she walks away and back into the tent to preform

[muscleandmaw]

Word soon spread fairly quickly through the circus about the newcomer, nothing stayed secret for long amongst the outcast performers.

Roak was only mildly interested when he heard of the newcomer, he had enough to deal with, maintaining his friendship with Candice and making sure Grim got at least one meal a day.

He was helping restring one of the tents, his muscles bunching as he swung a hammer into the spikes that held the tent in place, he hardly even looked up as the newcomer approached him.

"If your looking for the mess tent, it's over there." Roak stated, swinging the hammer into the stakes once more.

There was no flicker of recognition in his eyes.

[focuriousity25-blog]

The face turned his way, gave him a signpost's worth of notice, and went back to the work.

Koschei knew that face. Knew it in every light there was, every weather it kept — and just now it held not one grain of him.

Everything that had been running easy in him all afternoon — the loose shoulders, the mouth already half into its next pleasantry — stopped. It settled behind his ribs instead, small and cold, like swallowing something that hadn't warmed on the way down. For once he had nothing he wanted to say.

And there it was, laid within reach: the old thing. He could give it back. He knew the way of it without thinking — reach in, set the pieces where they belonged, watch Roak look up and find him again. The wanting moved before he could name it, quick and warm and shaped exactly like every kindness he had ever pressed on someone who never asked for one.

His hand had started to lift. He drew it behind his back, to where the umbrella waited, and held on to that instead.

"Ta for that." He said lightly and mannerly. "I'd have wandered in circles otherwise. It's a talent of mine."

He turned back to the half-strung canvas and looked it over with plain, unhurried interest. "That's a fair lot of tent for one set of hands." The umbrella came off his shoulder; its point settled in the dirt. "If I am to learn the place, I'd sooner learn it holding the far end of a rope than wandering off after my supper."

[muscleandmaw]

Roak blinked at that, "I don't need help." He said, a bit defensively, "But if you wanna learn the ropes, be my guest."

Roak didn't like this stranger. Something in his voice made him feel....hollow? Empty? Like he'd once held something very precious in his hands only to drop it and see it shatter.

But the impression was fleeting, and Roak brushed it off as depression due to his lack of anything to drink.

"You got a name?" Roak asked, "Call me Roak."

[focuriousity25-blog]

Permission, of a sort — grudging, but he'd built plans on less.

He came round to the slack side of the canvas and took up the guy-line Roak's hands had left alone, setting his weight against it: the first pull clumsy, the next one truer, the rope telling him haul by haul how it wanted to be held.

Roak had asked his name. Plainly, and put his own down first to trade for it — nothing simpler in all the world. He'd given his out a thousand times over a thousand years and never once felt the heft of it.

It wouldn't come now.

Behind his teeth sat the one word that might carry past whatever they'd put in this man — down to wherever the rest of him had gone. He didn't dare spend it here: not on a tent-line, not with the wrong ears a shout away, not while that face kept looking straight at him and finding no one home. So he kept it. A theft so small no one alive would miss it, and it cost him more than the needle had.

"I've had a fair few of those," he said instead, untroubled, as though the question mildly amused him. "Most of them other people's notion, not mine." He drew the rope another handspan and frowned up the canvas, giving that the appearance of his whole mind. "Ambrose will do. It fits about as well as any of the others ever did."

He fell to the work in earnest then, fitting himself to the shape of it — the strain of the line, the slow give of the canvas overhead — beside someone he'd known for years and, this one evening, was not permitted to know at all. The cloth hauled taut between the two of them. It was a poor kind of nearness. It was, even so, a nearness.

"So." He let the quiet run first, until it sat easier than a silence between strangers ought to. "How long have they had you driving stakes for their amusement?"

[muscleandmaw]

"Couple of weeks now."

To Roak's utter amazement, he found himself answering the question honestly.

The truth was, it wasn't really any of this fuzzbucket's business, but Roak found himself offering up the information.

"Huh. Yeah, anyway..." He sighed deeply, dusting his hands off on his pants. "Thanks for the help, Ambrose. This would've taken me all afternoon. I'd buy you a drink, but we aren't fuckin' allowed any. You want a root beer? The circus makes it from scratch."

[focuriousity25-blog]

That was the thing that got under, in the end — not the bulk of him, not the borrowed name, not the fluid still cold in his own arm. A root beer, offered easy.

For more years than he'd own to it had run the other way round: Koschei the one offering, saying the small daft thing to someone who couldn't find the way through. Here. The world's kinder than it looks just now. And here was a strongman offering it back to him like he'd done it all his life. Perhaps he had. Perhaps some groove of the habit had outlasted whatever they'd scoured out of him — or perhaps they only brewed the stuff close to hand, and it meant nothing at all. Koschei couldn't tell, and the not-knowing was its own small cruelty. He turned it over once and kept his face easy across the whole of it.

"I'll not turn that down." The pause ahead of it had run a shade long; he covered it with the words themselves, unhurried, and let none of the rest show. "You lot are wasted on tent-pegs, if you're brewing on the side."

He ought to have left it there. He didn't, quite.

"I've a weakness for it, as it happens." He said more lightly. "Always have." He let that fall where it landed and didn't go after it — didn't glance across to see whether a true thing, said plainly, had reached anything in someone no longer built to catch it.

"Go on and point me to it, then." Nothing leaned on the ask. "I could do with knowing my way to the one decent thing you've got in this place."

[muscleandmaw]

"The ice cream concession stand." Roak explained, "This way."

He lead him passed Candice Underwater Trip, a haunted house log ride named for one of the Circus' contortionists.

"Don't go on that ride. It's got a fuckin' disclaimer about future therapy costs. Lotta body horror. Lady it's named after is decent enough." Roak said to Ambrose, "I know her pretty well. Her brother's a braincase though. Really possessive, y'know?"

Roak sighed.

"Got a couple of braincases around here, to be honest."

They made their way to the concession stand.

"What can I getcha boys?" asked the older lady manning the stand. She'd given up trying to get people to pronounce her species name, she let them call her catgirl. It was close enough. Her slight muzzle tilted in a mischevious smile, "Talk about new meat! Roak, where'd you dig up this tall dark and hairy, and is he single?"

She was dressed in an old timey maid's outfit, the skirt just a bit shorter than it should be.

"Two Rootbeers, Janice." said Roak, holding up two fingers, folding in his thumbs. Then, "This is Ambrose."

[focuriousity25-blog]

The cup came over the counter cold and sweating, and he took it up without dwelling on it.

The question had sailed past him to Roak, as though he weren't stood right there with a mouth of his own — so he fielded it before Roak could. He'd never much liked being discussed in the third person while near enough to speak for himself.

And the honest answer was one he'd have given a great deal to say plainly. He could own to being taken. He could not say by whom — could not put a name to what the two of them were to each other, or had been, because the man at his elbow had been robbed of ever knowing it.

"Spoken for, I'm afraid." He said warmly and ruefully to Janice — a no done up kindly enough to pass for thanks. "There's someone. Has been a fair while. The sort of thing I carry about with me wherever I land, so you'll pardon me keeping the particulars to myself." He drank, and let the sweet of it settle before he went on. "Flattered all the same, mind. It's a fine welcome that meets a newcomer with a drink in one hand and a proposal in the other. I've had far worse."

He set the cup down and turned back to Roak.

"You've steered me off one ride already. Suppose you tell me what's worth walking toward instead. I'd hear about the half I'm allowed to enjoy."

[muscleandmaw]

Roak watched the guy parry Janice' flirtations. The cat girl winked at Koschei and turned her attention to a new customer, welcoming them with artificial, trying-to-upsell you warmth.

"The swings are safe." Roak said, "Ferris wheel's supposedly haunted, but it's sound enough. The mirror maze is trippy, if you're into that sorta thing."

Roak paused, then, letting out a low curse.

"Fuck this planet can get hot." he complained, peeling off his shirt.

The incision scar hadn't quite faded completely yet.

[focuriousity25-blog]

For the space of a breath, Koschei forgot to be a stranger.

Oohh, he knew that back — the dark sweep of it, the pelt gone damp and clinging where the heat had got at him, all that muscle moving easy underneath from his work. How he wanted to test the give of it~

Then the light caught the line under the ribs.

A cut. Not a large one, but not a puncture. Not the tidy pinhole he'd taken in a tent not two hours ago; it was a long, clean line, the kind nothing comes through by bad luck, then closed up again and left to fade on its own.

Someone had opened Roak.

He hadn't a notion what for. Or rather, he did have a notion — a few, in fact — and he could've stood there turning them all over 'till the show came down, and each was worse than not knowing, and the only one who could have told him had been scrubbed of it and was standing there complaining about the goddamn weather.

The cup stopped moving in his hand. His tail went rigid underneath his coat. Somewhere well beneath all that, in a room he kept locked, something took light.

"Mm," he said. "It does, rather."

He drank, and set his gaze out where it would do no harm: to the wheel and its slow, bright turning.

"That one, then. I've an interest in things that carry on being where they oughtn't. Please, take me by it, when you've a mind."

[muscleandmaw]

Roak stared at Ambrose, looking puzzled.

Was this guy checking him out?

He opened his mouth to rebuff him.

But instead, he turned his face away, flushing slightly.

"Yeah, sure." he grunted, quickly making his way toward the Strongman's Tent. he needed to get into his uniform.

The show came and went, went and came, Roak would lift a truck onto his back, have a volunteer examine a bowling ball before he crushed it, and at the finale of the show, he lifted a handful of performers onto his shoulders, holding them aloft.

The cheers and applause did something to Roak. Filled him with a deep satisfaction that warmed him to the very core. He'd stopped blushing by now, he'd performed enough that he didn't get anxious in front of the crowd's anymore.

Afterward, he'd sign autographs, charge people five dollars to feel his bicep, and flex his maw in several impressive snarls, posing for pictures with his fans. Some of whom slipped him flasks and spiked soda's

Roak pocketed these drinks, and started to head toward the trailer before remembering.

Huh.

Usually, he felt kind of down after these performances, kind of empty and despairing.

But he had a....

A date?

No, that was absurd. He was just showing Ambrose around, sussing him out.

Still, Roak will pull on his favorite leather jacket, the one with patches, zipping it shut over a wifebeater. Then he'll fish out a toothpick and chew on the end as he headed toward the Ferris Wheel.

[focuriousity25-blog]

Roak went off toward his tent, and the newcomer's ease went with him — not all at once, but the way colour leaves a thing as the light shifts, so that anyone glancing over would have found only a stranger loose in a strange place with nowhere he needed to be.

He wandered it thoroughly.

He bought nothing and looked at everything. Where the guy-lines were pegged and how deep. Which tents had a back to them and which sat flush against something they leaned on. The routes the crowd took, and the narrower ones they didn't — worn by people who lived here, running between the bright places to the parts with no lights strung at all. He let the noise of the midway carry him and gave it no more mind than his own footsteps, while some quieter faculty went on setting things in their places, patient as a clock.

Twice he stopped. Once by a tent he'd passed before, where a broad shape moved behind the canvas about some small evening task, and he paused as though caught by the music, and went on with a thing or two he hadn't had going in. Once at the ragged edge of it all, where the strung bulbs gave out and the field went to weeds and black, and he looked into that nothing as if it owed him an answer. What he did there, if he did anything, the dark kept to itself.

His own head, he'd marked some hours back, was exactly where he'd left it. Whatever they brewed for these people had gone into his arm and found nothing to hold to — either it wanted longer than he meant to give it, or he simply wasn't built to take it. Better they went on thinking otherwise. A man they believed was leashed could walk a good deal further than one they watched.

By the time the bulbs came up against the dusk he'd made himself a newcomer again, agreeable and half-lost, and turned toward the wheel.

It stood at the far end, going round slow and empty, throwing light across the churned grass. And there was the shape he'd have picked out of any crowd on any world — leather and patches, a toothpick working at one corner, lit and dark and lit again as the wheel came round. Waiting on him, and not the first idea why it should matter.

'Ambrose' let himself look, the once, while there was still distance to lose it in. Then he went to close it.

[welcome-to-mazes-circus]

The circus announced itself the way these places always did — with the smell of burnt sugar and sawdust, and music pitched a half-step too bright. The kind of cheer that worked very hard at being cheer. Valeyar Koschei stopped where the grass gave out to trodden dirt and rested the umbrella's tip against the ground. He didn't lean on it. He only held it, the way some people hold a railing on a bridge they're not sure about.

He had known two kinds of circus, and it had been a long life, so that was saying something.

There were the good ones, with tallow-smoke and a girl on a high wire who didn't need a net and didn't want one, and a clown who had once made him laugh so hard that for one whole and holy minute he forgot every terrible thing he knew. He still had the ticket stub from that night, somewhere.

And then there were the other kind.

He wondered which this was. He then fixed his collar, slung the umbrella over one shoulder, and walked in under the banner wearing the loose, ambling ease of someone thoroughly lost and not the least bit bothered about it.

"Hello. Lovely evening for a show, don't you think?" He said warmly to the first figure the light handed him. "I wonder if you could point me toward whoever handles lost property. Only I've mislaid something fairly large. Goes by Roak — about so high, scowls like it's a competition, hasn't been seen in longer than I care to count." He smiled a Cheshire grin. "I've been ever so patient about finding him. Oh yes."

Candice looks at him. Her body muscles made it look like she was a strong woman, where she was supposed to be able lift over a thousand pounds.

“Uh we don’t have proper lost and found everything goes to the owners and they keep it till the owners come back for it” She pointed to a large yet smaller tent with the word ringmasters

She stared at him for a while before whispering “be careful, they don’t like giving people up” With that she walks away and back into the tent to preform

[muscleandmaw]

Word soon spread fairly quickly through the circus about the newcomer, nothing stayed secret for long amongst the outcast performers.

Roak was only mildly interested when he heard of the newcomer, he had enough to deal with, maintaining his friendship with Candice and making sure Grim got at least one meal a day.

He was helping restring one of the tents, his muscles bunching as he swung a hammer into the spikes that held the tent in place, he hardly even looked up as the newcomer approached him.

"If your looking for the mess tent, it's over there." Roak stated, swinging the hammer into the stakes once more.

There was no flicker of recognition in his eyes.

[focuriousity25-blog]

The face turned his way, gave him a signpost's worth of notice, and went back to the work.

Koschei knew that face. Knew it in every light there was, every weather it kept — and just now it held not one grain of him.

Everything that had been running easy in him all afternoon — the loose shoulders, the mouth already half into its next pleasantry — stopped. It settled behind his ribs instead, small and cold, like swallowing something that hadn't warmed on the way down. For once he had nothing he wanted to say.

And there it was, laid within reach: the old thing. He could give it back. He knew the way of it without thinking — reach in, set the pieces where they belonged, watch Roak look up and find him again. The wanting moved before he could name it, quick and warm and shaped exactly like every kindness he had ever pressed on someone who never asked for one.

His hand had started to lift. He drew it behind his back, to where the umbrella waited, and held on to that instead.

"Ta for that." He said lightly and mannerly. "I'd have wandered in circles otherwise. It's a talent of mine."

He turned back to the half-strung canvas and looked it over with plain, unhurried interest. "That's a fair lot of tent for one set of hands." The umbrella came off his shoulder; its point settled in the dirt. "If I am to learn the place, I'd sooner learn it holding the far end of a rope than wandering off after my supper."

[muscleandmaw]

Roak blinked at that, "I don't need help." He said, a bit defensively, "But if you wanna learn the ropes, be my guest."

Roak didn't like this stranger. Something in his voice made him feel....hollow? Empty? Like he'd once held something very precious in his hands only to drop it and see it shatter.

But the impression was fleeting, and Roak brushed it off as depression due to his lack of anything to drink.

"You got a name?" Roak asked, "Call me Roak."

[focuriousity25-blog]

Permission, of a sort — grudging, but he'd built plans on less.

He came round to the slack side of the canvas and took up the guy-line Roak's hands had left alone, setting his weight against it: the first pull clumsy, the next one truer, the rope telling him haul by haul how it wanted to be held.

Roak had asked his name. Plainly, and put his own down first to trade for it — nothing simpler in all the world. He'd given his out a thousand times over a thousand years and never once felt the heft of it.

It wouldn't come now.

Behind his teeth sat the one word that might carry past whatever they'd put in this man — down to wherever the rest of him had gone. He didn't dare spend it here: not on a tent-line, not with the wrong ears a shout away, not while that face kept looking straight at him and finding no one home. So he kept it. A theft so small no one alive would miss it, and it cost him more than the needle had.

"I've had a fair few of those," he said instead, untroubled, as though the question mildly amused him. "Most of them other people's notion, not mine." He drew the rope another handspan and frowned up the canvas, giving that the appearance of his whole mind. "Ambrose will do. It fits about as well as any of the others ever did."

He fell to the work in earnest then, fitting himself to the shape of it — the strain of the line, the slow give of the canvas overhead — beside someone he'd known for years and, this one evening, was not permitted to know at all. The cloth hauled taut between the two of them. It was a poor kind of nearness. It was, even so, a nearness.

"So." He let the quiet run first, until it sat easier than a silence between strangers ought to. "How long have they had you driving stakes for their amusement?"

[muscleandmaw]

"Couple of weeks now."

To Roak's utter amazement, he found himself answering the question honestly.

The truth was, it wasn't really any of this fuzzbucket's business, but Roak found himself offering up the information.

"Huh. Yeah, anyway..." He sighed deeply, dusting his hands off on his pants. "Thanks for the help, Ambrose. This would've taken me all afternoon. I'd buy you a drink, but we aren't fuckin' allowed any. You want a root beer? The circus makes it from scratch."

[focuriousity25-blog]

That was the thing that got under, in the end — not the bulk of him, not the borrowed name, not the fluid still cold in his own arm. A root beer, offered easy.

For more years than he'd own to it had run the other way round: Koschei the one offering, saying the small daft thing to someone who couldn't find the way through. Here. The world's kinder than it looks just now. And here was a strongman offering it back to him like he'd done it all his life. Perhaps he had. Perhaps some groove of the habit had outlasted whatever they'd scoured out of him — or perhaps they only brewed the stuff close to hand, and it meant nothing at all. Koschei couldn't tell, and the not-knowing was its own small cruelty. He turned it over once and kept his face easy across the whole of it.

"I'll not turn that down." The pause ahead of it had run a shade long; he covered it with the words themselves, unhurried, and let none of the rest show. "You lot are wasted on tent-pegs, if you're brewing on the side."

He ought to have left it there. He didn't, quite.

"I've a weakness for it, as it happens." He said more lightly. "Always have." He let that fall where it landed and didn't go after it — didn't glance across to see whether a true thing, said plainly, had reached anything in someone no longer built to catch it.

"Go on and point me to it, then." Nothing leaned on the ask. "I could do with knowing my way to the one decent thing you've got in this place."

[muscleandmaw]

"The ice cream concession stand." Roak explained, "This way."

He lead him passed Candice Underwater Trip, a haunted house log ride named for one of the Circus' contortionists.

"Don't go on that ride. It's got a fuckin' disclaimer about future therapy costs. Lotta body horror. Lady it's named after is decent enough." Roak said to Ambrose, "I know her pretty well. Her brother's a braincase though. Really possessive, y'know?"

Roak sighed.

"Got a couple of braincases around here, to be honest."

They made their way to the concession stand.

"What can I getcha boys?" asked the older lady manning the stand. She'd given up trying to get people to pronounce her species name, she let them call her catgirl. It was close enough. Her slight muzzle tilted in a mischevious smile, "Talk about new meat! Roak, where'd you dig up this tall dark and hairy, and is he single?"

She was dressed in an old timey maid's outfit, the skirt just a bit shorter than it should be.

"Two Rootbeers, Janice." said Roak, holding up two fingers, folding in his thumbs. Then, "This is Ambrose."

[focuriousity25-blog]

The cup came over the counter cold and sweating, and he took it up without dwelling on it.

The question had sailed past him to Roak, as though he weren't stood right there with a mouth of his own — so he fielded it before Roak could. He'd never much liked being discussed in the third person while near enough to speak for himself.

And the honest answer was one he'd have given a great deal to say plainly. He could own to being taken. He could not say by whom — could not put a name to what the two of them were to each other, or had been, because the man at his elbow had been robbed of ever knowing it.

"Spoken for, I'm afraid." He said warmly and ruefully to Janice — a no done up kindly enough to pass for thanks. "There's someone. Has been a fair while. The sort of thing I carry about with me wherever I land, so you'll pardon me keeping the particulars to myself." He drank, and let the sweet of it settle before he went on. "Flattered all the same, mind. It's a fine welcome that meets a newcomer with a drink in one hand and a proposal in the other. I've had far worse."

He set the cup down and turned back to Roak.

"You've steered me off one ride already. Suppose you tell me what's worth walking toward instead. I'd hear about the half I'm allowed to enjoy."

[muscleandmaw]

Roak watched the guy parry Janice' flirtations. The cat girl winked at Koschei and turned her attention to a new customer, welcoming them with artificial, trying-to-upsell you warmth.

"The swings are safe." Roak said, "Ferris wheel's supposedly haunted, but it's sound enough. The mirror maze is trippy, if you're into that sorta thing."

Roak paused, then, letting out a low curse.

"Fuck this planet can get hot." he complained, peeling off his shirt.

The incision scar hadn't quite faded completely yet.

[focuriousity25-blog]

For the space of a breath, Koschei forgot to be a stranger.

Oohh, he knew that back — the dark sweep of it, the pelt gone damp and clinging where the heat had got at him, all that muscle moving easy underneath from his work. How he wanted to test the give of it~

Then the light caught the line under the ribs.

A cut. Not a large one, but not a puncture. Not the tidy pinhole he'd taken in a tent not two hours ago; it was a long, clean line, the kind nothing comes through by bad luck, then closed up again and left to fade on its own.

Someone had opened Roak.

He hadn't a notion what for. Or rather, he did have a notion — a few, in fact — and he could've stood there turning them all over 'till the show came down, and each was worse than not knowing, and the only one who could have told him had been scrubbed of it and was standing there complaining about the goddamn weather.

The cup stopped moving in his hand. His tail went rigid underneath his coat. Somewhere well beneath all that, in a room he kept locked, something took light.

"Mm," he said. "It does, rather."

He drank, and set his gaze out where it would do no harm: to the wheel and its slow, bright turning.

"That one, then. I've an interest in things that carry on being where they oughtn't. Please, take me by it, when you've a mind."

[muscleandmaw]

"Me?"

Roak couldn't quite hide his surprise at Ambrose asking him to take him to the ferris wheel.

"Oh, you don't wanna go alone cause its haunted. Hm. I've got a show in a little while, but maybe tonight I can take you there?"

He rubbed the back of his neck, his maw shifting to readjust itself.

Roak lifted his rootbeer glass and downed it in a few gulps.

[focuriousity25-blog]

Everything he'd spent the afternoon learning this place pushed against the answer he ought to give. It didn't want later. It wanted now — Roak in reach, upright, not led off behind canvas to be opened a second time while Koschei stood somewhere else being pleasant. The pull was physical, low and stubborn: cancel the show, keep him near, don't let him out of sight in a place that did that to people.

He knew the shape of that wanting. He'd had it out of his own mouth a hundred times, turned on people who'd never asked to be kept, and it had never once sounded to him like anything but love.

So he left the show where Roak had set it, and didn't reach after him.

"Tonight suits me well enough," he said, light, as though it cost nothing to hand over. "You've somewhere to be — go and be there. I'll not stand between you and your work." He lifted what was left of the root beer, a loose half-toast. "Earn your keep. I'll be about when you're through; there's a deal of circus left, and I mean to see it."

He held the cup a moment past the toast.

"Do mind how you go, though. I mean that." Lighter still, almost the shape of a joke. "Odd sort of place, this one. I'd hate to come looking tonight and find they'd mislaid you."

[welcome-to-mazes-circus]

The circus announced itself the way these places always did — with the smell of burnt sugar and sawdust, and music pitched a half-step too bright. The kind of cheer that worked very hard at being cheer. Valeyar Koschei stopped where the grass gave out to trodden dirt and rested the umbrella's tip against the ground. He didn't lean on it. He only held it, the way some people hold a railing on a bridge they're not sure about.

He had known two kinds of circus, and it had been a long life, so that was saying something.

There were the good ones, with tallow-smoke and a girl on a high wire who didn't need a net and didn't want one, and a clown who had once made him laugh so hard that for one whole and holy minute he forgot every terrible thing he knew. He still had the ticket stub from that night, somewhere.

And then there were the other kind.

He wondered which this was. He then fixed his collar, slung the umbrella over one shoulder, and walked in under the banner wearing the loose, ambling ease of someone thoroughly lost and not the least bit bothered about it.

"Hello. Lovely evening for a show, don't you think?" He said warmly to the first figure the light handed him. "I wonder if you could point me toward whoever handles lost property. Only I've mislaid something fairly large. Goes by Roak — about so high, scowls like it's a competition, hasn't been seen in longer than I care to count." He smiled a Cheshire grin. "I've been ever so patient about finding him. Oh yes."

Candice looks at him. Her body muscles made it look like she was a strong woman, where she was supposed to be able lift over a thousand pounds.

“Uh we don’t have proper lost and found everything goes to the owners and they keep it till the owners come back for it” She pointed to a large yet smaller tent with the word ringmasters

She stared at him for a while before whispering “be careful, they don’t like giving people up” With that she walks away and back into the tent to preform

[muscleandmaw]

Word soon spread fairly quickly through the circus about the newcomer, nothing stayed secret for long amongst the outcast performers.

Roak was only mildly interested when he heard of the newcomer, he had enough to deal with, maintaining his friendship with Candice and making sure Grim got at least one meal a day.

He was helping restring one of the tents, his muscles bunching as he swung a hammer into the spikes that held the tent in place, he hardly even looked up as the newcomer approached him.

"If your looking for the mess tent, it's over there." Roak stated, swinging the hammer into the stakes once more.

There was no flicker of recognition in his eyes.

[focuriousity25-blog]

The face turned his way, gave him a signpost's worth of notice, and went back to the work.

Koschei knew that face. Knew it in every light there was, every weather it kept — and just now it held not one grain of him.

Everything that had been running easy in him all afternoon — the loose shoulders, the mouth already half into its next pleasantry — stopped. It settled behind his ribs instead, small and cold, like swallowing something that hadn't warmed on the way down. For once he had nothing he wanted to say.

And there it was, laid within reach: the old thing. He could give it back. He knew the way of it without thinking — reach in, set the pieces where they belonged, watch Roak look up and find him again. The wanting moved before he could name it, quick and warm and shaped exactly like every kindness he had ever pressed on someone who never asked for one.

His hand had started to lift. He drew it behind his back, to where the umbrella waited, and held on to that instead.

"Ta for that." He said lightly and mannerly. "I'd have wandered in circles otherwise. It's a talent of mine."

He turned back to the half-strung canvas and looked it over with plain, unhurried interest. "That's a fair lot of tent for one set of hands." The umbrella came off his shoulder; its point settled in the dirt. "If I am to learn the place, I'd sooner learn it holding the far end of a rope than wandering off after my supper."

[muscleandmaw]

Roak blinked at that, "I don't need help." He said, a bit defensively, "But if you wanna learn the ropes, be my guest."

Roak didn't like this stranger. Something in his voice made him feel....hollow? Empty? Like he'd once held something very precious in his hands only to drop it and see it shatter.

But the impression was fleeting, and Roak brushed it off as depression due to his lack of anything to drink.

"You got a name?" Roak asked, "Call me Roak."

[focuriousity25-blog]

Permission, of a sort — grudging, but he'd built plans on less.

He came round to the slack side of the canvas and took up the guy-line Roak's hands had left alone, setting his weight against it: the first pull clumsy, the next one truer, the rope telling him haul by haul how it wanted to be held.

Roak had asked his name. Plainly, and put his own down first to trade for it — nothing simpler in all the world. He'd given his out a thousand times over a thousand years and never once felt the heft of it.

It wouldn't come now.

Behind his teeth sat the one word that might carry past whatever they'd put in this man — down to wherever the rest of him had gone. He didn't dare spend it here: not on a tent-line, not with the wrong ears a shout away, not while that face kept looking straight at him and finding no one home. So he kept it. A theft so small no one alive would miss it, and it cost him more than the needle had.

"I've had a fair few of those," he said instead, untroubled, as though the question mildly amused him. "Most of them other people's notion, not mine." He drew the rope another handspan and frowned up the canvas, giving that the appearance of his whole mind. "Ambrose will do. It fits about as well as any of the others ever did."

He fell to the work in earnest then, fitting himself to the shape of it — the strain of the line, the slow give of the canvas overhead — beside someone he'd known for years and, this one evening, was not permitted to know at all. The cloth hauled taut between the two of them. It was a poor kind of nearness. It was, even so, a nearness.

"So." He let the quiet run first, until it sat easier than a silence between strangers ought to. "How long have they had you driving stakes for their amusement?"

[muscleandmaw]

"Couple of weeks now."

To Roak's utter amazement, he found himself answering the question honestly.

The truth was, it wasn't really any of this fuzzbucket's business, but Roak found himself offering up the information.

"Huh. Yeah, anyway..." He sighed deeply, dusting his hands off on his pants. "Thanks for the help, Ambrose. This would've taken me all afternoon. I'd buy you a drink, but we aren't fuckin' allowed any. You want a root beer? The circus makes it from scratch."

[focuriousity25-blog]

That was the thing that got under, in the end — not the bulk of him, not the borrowed name, not the fluid still cold in his own arm. A root beer, offered easy.

For more years than he'd own to it had run the other way round: Koschei the one offering, saying the small daft thing to someone who couldn't find the way through. Here. The world's kinder than it looks just now. And here was a strongman offering it back to him like he'd done it all his life. Perhaps he had. Perhaps some groove of the habit had outlasted whatever they'd scoured out of him — or perhaps they only brewed the stuff close to hand, and it meant nothing at all. Koschei couldn't tell, and the not-knowing was its own small cruelty. He turned it over once and kept his face easy across the whole of it.

"I'll not turn that down." The pause ahead of it had run a shade long; he covered it with the words themselves, unhurried, and let none of the rest show. "You lot are wasted on tent-pegs, if you're brewing on the side."

He ought to have left it there. He didn't, quite.

"I've a weakness for it, as it happens." He said more lightly. "Always have." He let that fall where it landed and didn't go after it — didn't glance across to see whether a true thing, said plainly, had reached anything in someone no longer built to catch it.

"Go on and point me to it, then." Nothing leaned on the ask. "I could do with knowing my way to the one decent thing you've got in this place."

[muscleandmaw]

"The ice cream concession stand." Roak explained, "This way."

He lead him passed Candice Underwater Trip, a haunted house log ride named for one of the Circus' contortionists.

"Don't go on that ride. It's got a fuckin' disclaimer about future therapy costs. Lotta body horror. Lady it's named after is decent enough." Roak said to Ambrose, "I know her pretty well. Her brother's a braincase though. Really possessive, y'know?"

Roak sighed.

"Got a couple of braincases around here, to be honest."

They made their way to the concession stand.

"What can I getcha boys?" asked the older lady manning the stand. She'd given up trying to get people to pronounce her species name, she let them call her catgirl. It was close enough. Her slight muzzle tilted in a mischevious smile, "Talk about new meat! Roak, where'd you dig up this tall dark and hairy, and is he single?"

She was dressed in an old timey maid's outfit, the skirt just a bit shorter than it should be.

"Two Rootbeers, Janice." said Roak, holding up two fingers, folding in his thumbs. Then, "This is Ambrose."

[focuriousity25-blog]

The cup came over the counter cold and sweating, and he took it up without dwelling on it.

The question had sailed past him to Roak, as though he weren't stood right there with a mouth of his own — so he fielded it before Roak could. He'd never much liked being discussed in the third person while near enough to speak for himself.

And the honest answer was one he'd have given a great deal to say plainly. He could own to being taken. He could not say by whom — could not put a name to what the two of them were to each other, or had been, because the man at his elbow had been robbed of ever knowing it.

"Spoken for, I'm afraid." He said warmly and ruefully to Janice — a no done up kindly enough to pass for thanks. "There's someone. Has been a fair while. The sort of thing I carry about with me wherever I land, so you'll pardon me keeping the particulars to myself." He drank, and let the sweet of it settle before he went on. "Flattered all the same, mind. It's a fine welcome that meets a newcomer with a drink in one hand and a proposal in the other. I've had far worse."

He set the cup down and turned back to Roak.

"You've steered me off one ride already. Suppose you tell me what's worth walking toward instead. I'd hear about the half I'm allowed to enjoy."

[muscleandmaw]

Roak watched the guy parry Janice' flirtations. The cat girl winked at Koschei and turned her attention to a new customer, welcoming them with artificial, trying-to-upsell you warmth.

"The swings are safe." Roak said, "Ferris wheel's supposedly haunted, but it's sound enough. The mirror maze is trippy, if you're into that sorta thing."

Roak paused, then, letting out a low curse.

"Fuck this planet can get hot." he complained, peeling off his shirt.

The incision scar hadn't quite faded completely yet.

[focuriousity25-blog]

For the space of a breath, Koschei forgot to be a stranger.

Oohh, he knew that back — the dark sweep of it, the pelt gone damp and clinging where the heat had got at him, all that muscle moving easy underneath from his work. How he wanted to test the give of it~

Then the light caught the line under the ribs.

A cut. Not a large one, but not a puncture. Not the tidy pinhole he'd taken in a tent not two hours ago; it was a long, clean line, the kind nothing comes through by bad luck, then closed up again and left to fade on its own.

Someone had opened Roak.

He hadn't a notion what for. Or rather, he did have a notion — a few, in fact — and he could've stood there turning them all over 'till the show came down, and each was worse than not knowing, and the only one who could have told him had been scrubbed of it and was standing there complaining about the goddamn weather.

The cup stopped moving in his hand. His tail went rigid underneath his coat. Somewhere well beneath all that, in a room he kept locked, something took light.

"Mm," he said. "It does, rather."

He drank, and set his gaze out where it would do no harm: to the wheel and its slow, bright turning.

"That one, then. I've an interest in things that carry on being where they oughtn't. Please, take me by it, when you've a mind."

[welcome-to-mazes-circus]

The circus announced itself the way these places always did — with the smell of burnt sugar and sawdust, and music pitched a half-step too bright. The kind of cheer that worked very hard at being cheer. Valeyar Koschei stopped where the grass gave out to trodden dirt and rested the umbrella's tip against the ground. He didn't lean on it. He only held it, the way some people hold a railing on a bridge they're not sure about.

He had known two kinds of circus, and it had been a long life, so that was saying something.

There were the good ones, with tallow-smoke and a girl on a high wire who didn't need a net and didn't want one, and a clown who had once made him laugh so hard that for one whole and holy minute he forgot every terrible thing he knew. He still had the ticket stub from that night, somewhere.

And then there were the other kind.

He wondered which this was. He then fixed his collar, slung the umbrella over one shoulder, and walked in under the banner wearing the loose, ambling ease of someone thoroughly lost and not the least bit bothered about it.

"Hello. Lovely evening for a show, don't you think?" He said warmly to the first figure the light handed him. "I wonder if you could point me toward whoever handles lost property. Only I've mislaid something fairly large. Goes by Roak — about so high, scowls like it's a competition, hasn't been seen in longer than I care to count." He smiled a Cheshire grin. "I've been ever so patient about finding him. Oh yes."

Candice looks at him. Her body muscles made it look like she was a strong woman, where she was supposed to be able lift over a thousand pounds.

“Uh we don’t have proper lost and found everything goes to the owners and they keep it till the owners come back for it” She pointed to a large yet smaller tent with the word ringmasters

She stared at him for a while before whispering “be careful, they don’t like giving people up” With that she walks away and back into the tent to preform

[muscleandmaw]

Word soon spread fairly quickly through the circus about the newcomer, nothing stayed secret for long amongst the outcast performers.

Roak was only mildly interested when he heard of the newcomer, he had enough to deal with, maintaining his friendship with Candice and making sure Grim got at least one meal a day.

He was helping restring one of the tents, his muscles bunching as he swung a hammer into the spikes that held the tent in place, he hardly even looked up as the newcomer approached him.

"If your looking for the mess tent, it's over there." Roak stated, swinging the hammer into the stakes once more.

There was no flicker of recognition in his eyes.

[focuriousity25-blog]

The face turned his way, gave him a signpost's worth of notice, and went back to the work.

Koschei knew that face. Knew it in every light there was, every weather it kept — and just now it held not one grain of him.

Everything that had been running easy in him all afternoon — the loose shoulders, the mouth already half into its next pleasantry — stopped. It settled behind his ribs instead, small and cold, like swallowing something that hadn't warmed on the way down. For once he had nothing he wanted to say.

And there it was, laid within reach: the old thing. He could give it back. He knew the way of it without thinking — reach in, set the pieces where they belonged, watch Roak look up and find him again. The wanting moved before he could name it, quick and warm and shaped exactly like every kindness he had ever pressed on someone who never asked for one.

His hand had started to lift. He drew it behind his back, to where the umbrella waited, and held on to that instead.

"Ta for that." He said lightly and mannerly. "I'd have wandered in circles otherwise. It's a talent of mine."

He turned back to the half-strung canvas and looked it over with plain, unhurried interest. "That's a fair lot of tent for one set of hands." The umbrella came off his shoulder; its point settled in the dirt. "If I am to learn the place, I'd sooner learn it holding the far end of a rope than wandering off after my supper."

[muscleandmaw]

Roak blinked at that, "I don't need help." He said, a bit defensively, "But if you wanna learn the ropes, be my guest."

Roak didn't like this stranger. Something in his voice made him feel....hollow? Empty? Like he'd once held something very precious in his hands only to drop it and see it shatter.

But the impression was fleeting, and Roak brushed it off as depression due to his lack of anything to drink.

"You got a name?" Roak asked, "Call me Roak."

[focuriousity25-blog]

Permission, of a sort — grudging, but he'd built plans on less.

He came round to the slack side of the canvas and took up the guy-line Roak's hands had left alone, setting his weight against it: the first pull clumsy, the next one truer, the rope telling him haul by haul how it wanted to be held.

Roak had asked his name. Plainly, and put his own down first to trade for it — nothing simpler in all the world. He'd given his out a thousand times over a thousand years and never once felt the heft of it.

It wouldn't come now.

Behind his teeth sat the one word that might carry past whatever they'd put in this man — down to wherever the rest of him had gone. He didn't dare spend it here: not on a tent-line, not with the wrong ears a shout away, not while that face kept looking straight at him and finding no one home. So he kept it. A theft so small no one alive would miss it, and it cost him more than the needle had.

"I've had a fair few of those," he said instead, untroubled, as though the question mildly amused him. "Most of them other people's notion, not mine." He drew the rope another handspan and frowned up the canvas, giving that the appearance of his whole mind. "Ambrose will do. It fits about as well as any of the others ever did."

He fell to the work in earnest then, fitting himself to the shape of it — the strain of the line, the slow give of the canvas overhead — beside someone he'd known for years and, this one evening, was not permitted to know at all. The cloth hauled taut between the two of them. It was a poor kind of nearness. It was, even so, a nearness.

"So." He let the quiet run first, until it sat easier than a silence between strangers ought to. "How long have they had you driving stakes for their amusement?"

[muscleandmaw]

"Couple of weeks now."

To Roak's utter amazement, he found himself answering the question honestly.

The truth was, it wasn't really any of this fuzzbucket's business, but Roak found himself offering up the information.

"Huh. Yeah, anyway..." He sighed deeply, dusting his hands off on his pants. "Thanks for the help, Ambrose. This would've taken me all afternoon. I'd buy you a drink, but we aren't fuckin' allowed any. You want a root beer? The circus makes it from scratch."

[focuriousity25-blog]

That was the thing that got under, in the end — not the bulk of him, not the borrowed name, not the fluid still cold in his own arm. A root beer, offered easy.

For more years than he'd own to it had run the other way round: Koschei the one offering, saying the small daft thing to someone who couldn't find the way through. Here. The world's kinder than it looks just now. And here was a strongman offering it back to him like he'd done it all his life. Perhaps he had. Perhaps some groove of the habit had outlasted whatever they'd scoured out of him — or perhaps they only brewed the stuff close to hand, and it meant nothing at all. Koschei couldn't tell, and the not-knowing was its own small cruelty. He turned it over once and kept his face easy across the whole of it.

"I'll not turn that down." The pause ahead of it had run a shade long; he covered it with the words themselves, unhurried, and let none of the rest show. "You lot are wasted on tent-pegs, if you're brewing on the side."

He ought to have left it there. He didn't, quite.

"I've a weakness for it, as it happens." He said more lightly. "Always have." He let that fall where it landed and didn't go after it — didn't glance across to see whether a true thing, said plainly, had reached anything in someone no longer built to catch it.

"Go on and point me to it, then." Nothing leaned on the ask. "I could do with knowing my way to the one decent thing you've got in this place."

[muscleandmaw]

"The ice cream concession stand." Roak explained, "This way."

He lead him passed Candice Underwater Trip, a haunted house log ride named for one of the Circus' contortionists.

"Don't go on that ride. It's got a fuckin' disclaimer about future therapy costs. Lotta body horror. Lady it's named after is decent enough." Roak said to Ambrose, "I know her pretty well. Her brother's a braincase though. Really possessive, y'know?"

Roak sighed.

"Got a couple of braincases around here, to be honest."

They made their way to the concession stand.

"What can I getcha boys?" asked the older lady manning the stand. She'd given up trying to get people to pronounce her species name, she let them call her catgirl. It was close enough. Her slight muzzle tilted in a mischevious smile, "Talk about new meat! Roak, where'd you dig up this tall dark and hairy, and is he single?"

She was dressed in an old timey maid's outfit, the skirt just a bit shorter than it should be.

"Two Rootbeers, Janice." said Roak, holding up two fingers, folding in his thumbs. Then, "This is Ambrose."

[focuriousity25-blog]

The cup came over the counter cold and sweating, and he took it up without dwelling on it.

The question had sailed past him to Roak, as though he weren't stood right there with a mouth of his own — so he fielded it before Roak could. He'd never much liked being discussed in the third person while near enough to speak for himself.

And the honest answer was one he'd have given a great deal to say plainly. He could own to being taken. He could not say by whom — could not put a name to what the two of them were to each other, or had been, because the man at his elbow had been robbed of ever knowing it.

"Spoken for, I'm afraid." He said warmly and ruefully to Janice — a no done up kindly enough to pass for thanks. "There's someone. Has been a fair while. The sort of thing I carry about with me wherever I land, so you'll pardon me keeping the particulars to myself." He drank, and let the sweet of it settle before he went on. "Flattered all the same, mind. It's a fine welcome that meets a newcomer with a drink in one hand and a proposal in the other. I've had far worse."

He set the cup down and turned back to Roak.

"You've steered me off one ride already. Suppose you tell me what's worth walking toward instead. I'd hear about the half I'm allowed to enjoy."

[welcome-to-mazes-circus]

The circus announced itself the way these places always did — with the smell of burnt sugar and sawdust, and music pitched a half-step too bright. The kind of cheer that worked very hard at being cheer. Valeyar Koschei stopped where the grass gave out to trodden dirt and rested the umbrella's tip against the ground. He didn't lean on it. He only held it, the way some people hold a railing on a bridge they're not sure about.

He had known two kinds of circus, and it had been a long life, so that was saying something.

There were the good ones, with tallow-smoke and a girl on a high wire who didn't need a net and didn't want one, and a clown who had once made him laugh so hard that for one whole and holy minute he forgot every terrible thing he knew. He still had the ticket stub from that night, somewhere.

And then there were the other kind.

He wondered which this was. He then fixed his collar, slung the umbrella over one shoulder, and walked in under the banner wearing the loose, ambling ease of someone thoroughly lost and not the least bit bothered about it.

"Hello. Lovely evening for a show, don't you think?" He said warmly to the first figure the light handed him. "I wonder if you could point me toward whoever handles lost property. Only I've mislaid something fairly large. Goes by Roak — about so high, scowls like it's a competition, hasn't been seen in longer than I care to count." He smiled a Cheshire grin. "I've been ever so patient about finding him. Oh yes."

Candice looks at him. Her body muscles made it look like she was a strong woman, where she was supposed to be able lift over a thousand pounds.

“Uh we don’t have proper lost and found everything goes to the owners and they keep it till the owners come back for it” She pointed to a large yet smaller tent with the word ringmasters

She stared at him for a while before whispering “be careful, they don’t like giving people up” With that she walks away and back into the tent to preform

[muscleandmaw]

Word soon spread fairly quickly through the circus about the newcomer, nothing stayed secret for long amongst the outcast performers.

Roak was only mildly interested when he heard of the newcomer, he had enough to deal with, maintaining his friendship with Candice and making sure Grim got at least one meal a day.

He was helping restring one of the tents, his muscles bunching as he swung a hammer into the spikes that held the tent in place, he hardly even looked up as the newcomer approached him.

"If your looking for the mess tent, it's over there." Roak stated, swinging the hammer into the stakes once more.

There was no flicker of recognition in his eyes.

[focuriousity25-blog]

The face turned his way, gave him a signpost's worth of notice, and went back to the work.

Koschei knew that face. Knew it in every light there was, every weather it kept — and just now it held not one grain of him.

Everything that had been running easy in him all afternoon — the loose shoulders, the mouth already half into its next pleasantry — stopped. It settled behind his ribs instead, small and cold, like swallowing something that hadn't warmed on the way down. For once he had nothing he wanted to say.

And there it was, laid within reach: the old thing. He could give it back. He knew the way of it without thinking — reach in, set the pieces where they belonged, watch Roak look up and find him again. The wanting moved before he could name it, quick and warm and shaped exactly like every kindness he had ever pressed on someone who never asked for one.

His hand had started to lift. He drew it behind his back, to where the umbrella waited, and held on to that instead.

"Ta for that." He said lightly and mannerly. "I'd have wandered in circles otherwise. It's a talent of mine."

He turned back to the half-strung canvas and looked it over with plain, unhurried interest. "That's a fair lot of tent for one set of hands." The umbrella came off his shoulder; its point settled in the dirt. "If I am to learn the place, I'd sooner learn it holding the far end of a rope than wandering off after my supper."

[muscleandmaw]

Roak blinked at that, "I don't need help." He said, a bit defensively, "But if you wanna learn the ropes, be my guest."

Roak didn't like this stranger. Something in his voice made him feel....hollow? Empty? Like he'd once held something very precious in his hands only to drop it and see it shatter.

But the impression was fleeting, and Roak brushed it off as depression due to his lack of anything to drink.

"You got a name?" Roak asked, "Call me Roak."

[focuriousity25-blog]

Permission, of a sort — grudging, but he'd built plans on less.

He came round to the slack side of the canvas and took up the guy-line Roak's hands had left alone, setting his weight against it: the first pull clumsy, the next one truer, the rope telling him haul by haul how it wanted to be held.

Roak had asked his name. Plainly, and put his own down first to trade for it — nothing simpler in all the world. He'd given his out a thousand times over a thousand years and never once felt the heft of it.

It wouldn't come now.

Behind his teeth sat the one word that might carry past whatever they'd put in this man — down to wherever the rest of him had gone. He didn't dare spend it here: not on a tent-line, not with the wrong ears a shout away, not while that face kept looking straight at him and finding no one home. So he kept it. A theft so small no one alive would miss it, and it cost him more than the needle had.

"I've had a fair few of those," he said instead, untroubled, as though the question mildly amused him. "Most of them other people's notion, not mine." He drew the rope another handspan and frowned up the canvas, giving that the appearance of his whole mind. "Ambrose will do. It fits about as well as any of the others ever did."

He fell to the work in earnest then, fitting himself to the shape of it — the strain of the line, the slow give of the canvas overhead — beside someone he'd known for years and, this one evening, was not permitted to know at all. The cloth hauled taut between the two of them. It was a poor kind of nearness. It was, even so, a nearness.

"So." He let the quiet run first, until it sat easier than a silence between strangers ought to. "How long have they had you driving stakes for their amusement?"

[muscleandmaw]

"Couple of weeks now."

To Roak's utter amazement, he found himself answering the question honestly.

The truth was, it wasn't really any of this fuzzbucket's business, but Roak found himself offering up the information.

"Huh. Yeah, anyway..." He sighed deeply, dusting his hands off on his pants. "Thanks for the help, Ambrose. This would've taken me all afternoon. I'd buy you a drink, but we aren't fuckin' allowed any. You want a root beer? The circus makes it from scratch."

[focuriousity25-blog]

That was the thing that got under, in the end — not the bulk of him, not the borrowed name, not the fluid still cold in his own arm. A root beer, offered easy.

For more years than he'd own to it had run the other way round: Koschei the one offering, saying the small daft thing to someone who couldn't find the way through. Here. The world's kinder than it looks just now. And here was a strongman offering it back to him like he'd done it all his life. Perhaps he had. Perhaps some groove of the habit had outlasted whatever they'd scoured out of him — or perhaps they only brewed the stuff close to hand, and it meant nothing at all. Koschei couldn't tell, and the not-knowing was its own small cruelty. He turned it over once and kept his face easy across the whole of it.

"I'll not turn that down." The pause ahead of it had run a shade long; he covered it with the words themselves, unhurried, and let none of the rest show. "You lot are wasted on tent-pegs, if you're brewing on the side."

He ought to have left it there. He didn't, quite.

"I've a weakness for it, as it happens." He said more lightly. "Always have." He let that fall where it landed and didn't go after it — didn't glance across to see whether a true thing, said plainly, had reached anything in someone no longer built to catch it.

"Go on and point me to it, then." Nothing leaned on the ask. "I could do with knowing my way to the one decent thing you've got in this place."

[mildeleef]

Past/teen aaarrrgghh compilatoion feat. Bular because i CAN

[welcome-to-mazes-circus]

The circus announced itself the way these places always did — with the smell of burnt sugar and sawdust, and music pitched a half-step too bright. The kind of cheer that worked very hard at being cheer. Valeyar Koschei stopped where the grass gave out to trodden dirt and rested the umbrella's tip against the ground. He didn't lean on it. He only held it, the way some people hold a railing on a bridge they're not sure about.

He had known two kinds of circus, and it had been a long life, so that was saying something.

There were the good ones, with tallow-smoke and a girl on a high wire who didn't need a net and didn't want one, and a clown who had once made him laugh so hard that for one whole and holy minute he forgot every terrible thing he knew. He still had the ticket stub from that night, somewhere.

And then there were the other kind.

He wondered which this was. He then fixed his collar, slung the umbrella over one shoulder, and walked in under the banner wearing the loose, ambling ease of someone thoroughly lost and not the least bit bothered about it.

"Hello. Lovely evening for a show, don't you think?" He said warmly to the first figure the light handed him. "I wonder if you could point me toward whoever handles lost property. Only I've mislaid something fairly large. Goes by Roak — about so high, scowls like it's a competition, hasn't been seen in longer than I care to count." He smiled a Cheshire grin. "I've been ever so patient about finding him. Oh yes."

Candice looks at him. Her body muscles made it look like she was a strong woman, where she was supposed to be able lift over a thousand pounds.

“Uh we don’t have proper lost and found everything goes to the owners and they keep it till the owners come back for it” She pointed to a large yet smaller tent with the word ringmasters

She stared at him for a while before whispering “be careful, they don’t like giving people up” With that she walks away and back into the tent to preform

[muscleandmaw]

Word soon spread fairly quickly through the circus about the newcomer, nothing stayed secret for long amongst the outcast performers.

Roak was only mildly interested when he heard of the newcomer, he had enough to deal with, maintaining his friendship with Candice and making sure Grim got at least one meal a day.

He was helping restring one of the tents, his muscles bunching as he swung a hammer into the spikes that held the tent in place, he hardly even looked up as the newcomer approached him.

"If your looking for the mess tent, it's over there." Roak stated, swinging the hammer into the stakes once more.

There was no flicker of recognition in his eyes.

[focuriousity25-blog]

The face turned his way, gave him a signpost's worth of notice, and went back to the work.

Koschei knew that face. Knew it in every light there was, every weather it kept — and just now it held not one grain of him.

Everything that had been running easy in him all afternoon — the loose shoulders, the mouth already half into its next pleasantry — stopped. It settled behind his ribs instead, small and cold, like swallowing something that hadn't warmed on the way down. For once he had nothing he wanted to say.

And there it was, laid within reach: the old thing. He could give it back. He knew the way of it without thinking — reach in, set the pieces where they belonged, watch Roak look up and find him again. The wanting moved before he could name it, quick and warm and shaped exactly like every kindness he had ever pressed on someone who never asked for one.

His hand had started to lift. He drew it behind his back, to where the umbrella waited, and held on to that instead.

"Ta for that." He said lightly and mannerly. "I'd have wandered in circles otherwise. It's a talent of mine."

He turned back to the half-strung canvas and looked it over with plain, unhurried interest. "That's a fair lot of tent for one set of hands." The umbrella came off his shoulder; its point settled in the dirt. "If I am to learn the place, I'd sooner learn it holding the far end of a rope than wandering off after my supper."

[muscleandmaw]

Roak blinked at that, "I don't need help." He said, a bit defensively, "But if you wanna learn the ropes, be my guest."

Roak didn't like this stranger. Something in his voice made him feel....hollow? Empty? Like he'd once held something very precious in his hands only to drop it and see it shatter.

But the impression was fleeting, and Roak brushed it off as depression due to his lack of anything to drink.

"You got a name?" Roak asked, "Call me Roak."

[focuriousity25-blog]

Permission, of a sort — grudging, but he'd built plans on less.

He came round to the slack side of the canvas and took up the guy-line Roak's hands had left alone, setting his weight against it: the first pull clumsy, the next one truer, the rope telling him haul by haul how it wanted to be held.

Roak had asked his name. Plainly, and put his own down first to trade for it — nothing simpler in all the world. He'd given his out a thousand times over a thousand years and never once felt the heft of it.

It wouldn't come now.

Behind his teeth sat the one word that might carry past whatever they'd put in this man — down to wherever the rest of him had gone. He didn't dare spend it here: not on a tent-line, not with the wrong ears a shout away, not while that face kept looking straight at him and finding no one home. So he kept it. A theft so small no one alive would miss it, and it cost him more than the needle had.

"I've had a fair few of those," he said instead, untroubled, as though the question mildly amused him. "Most of them other people's notion, not mine." He drew the rope another handspan and frowned up the canvas, giving that the appearance of his whole mind. "Ambrose will do. It fits about as well as any of the others ever did."

He fell to the work in earnest then, fitting himself to the shape of it — the strain of the line, the slow give of the canvas overhead — beside someone he'd known for years and, this one evening, was not permitted to know at all. The cloth hauled taut between the two of them. It was a poor kind of nearness. It was, even so, a nearness.

"So." He let the quiet run first, until it sat easier than a silence between strangers ought to. "How long have they had you driving stakes for their amusement?"

[welcome-to-mazes-circus]

The circus announced itself the way these places always did — with the smell of burnt sugar and sawdust, and music pitched a half-step too bright. The kind of cheer that worked very hard at being cheer. Valeyar Koschei stopped where the grass gave out to trodden dirt and rested the umbrella's tip against the ground. He didn't lean on it. He only held it, the way some people hold a railing on a bridge they're not sure about.

He had known two kinds of circus, and it had been a long life, so that was saying something.

There were the good ones, with tallow-smoke and a girl on a high wire who didn't need a net and didn't want one, and a clown who had once made him laugh so hard that for one whole and holy minute he forgot every terrible thing he knew. He still had the ticket stub from that night, somewhere.

And then there were the other kind.

He wondered which this was. He then fixed his collar, slung the umbrella over one shoulder, and walked in under the banner wearing the loose, ambling ease of someone thoroughly lost and not the least bit bothered about it.

"Hello. Lovely evening for a show, don't you think?" He said warmly to the first figure the light handed him. "I wonder if you could point me toward whoever handles lost property. Only I've mislaid something fairly large. Goes by Roak — about so high, scowls like it's a competition, hasn't been seen in longer than I care to count." He smiled a Cheshire grin. "I've been ever so patient about finding him. Oh yes."

Candice looks at him. Her body muscles made it look like she was a strong woman, where she was supposed to be able lift over a thousand pounds.

“Uh we don’t have proper lost and found everything goes to the owners and they keep it till the owners come back for it” She pointed to a large yet smaller tent with the word ringmasters

She stared at him for a while before whispering “be careful, they don’t like giving people up” With that she walks away and back into the tent to preform

[muscleandmaw]

Word soon spread fairly quickly through the circus about the newcomer, nothing stayed secret for long amongst the outcast performers.

Roak was only mildly interested when he heard of the newcomer, he had enough to deal with, maintaining his friendship with Candice and making sure Grim got at least one meal a day.

He was helping restring one of the tents, his muscles bunching as he swung a hammer into the spikes that held the tent in place, he hardly even looked up as the newcomer approached him.

"If your looking for the mess tent, it's over there." Roak stated, swinging the hammer into the stakes once more.

There was no flicker of recognition in his eyes.

[focuriousity25-blog]

The face turned his way, gave him a signpost's worth of notice, and went back to the work.

Koschei knew that face. Knew it in every light there was, every weather it kept — and just now it held not one grain of him.

Everything that had been running easy in him all afternoon — the loose shoulders, the mouth already half into its next pleasantry — stopped. It settled behind his ribs instead, small and cold, like swallowing something that hadn't warmed on the way down. For once he had nothing he wanted to say.

And there it was, laid within reach: the old thing. He could give it back. He knew the way of it without thinking — reach in, set the pieces where they belonged, watch Roak look up and find him again. The wanting moved before he could name it, quick and warm and shaped exactly like every kindness he had ever pressed on someone who never asked for one.

His hand had started to lift. He drew it behind his back, to where the umbrella waited, and held on to that instead.

"Ta for that." He said lightly and mannerly. "I'd have wandered in circles otherwise. It's a talent of mine."

He turned back to the half-strung canvas and looked it over with plain, unhurried interest. "That's a fair lot of tent for one set of hands." The umbrella came off his shoulder; its point settled in the dirt. "If I am to learn the place, I'd sooner learn it holding the far end of a rope than wandering off after my supper."

[welcome-to-mazes-circus]

The circus announced itself the way these places always did — with the smell of burnt sugar and sawdust, and music pitched a half-step too bright. The kind of cheer that worked very hard at being cheer. Valeyar Koschei stopped where the grass gave out to trodden dirt and rested the umbrella's tip against the ground. He didn't lean on it. He only held it, the way some people hold a railing on a bridge they're not sure about.

He had known two kinds of circus, and it had been a long life, so that was saying something.

There were the good ones, with tallow-smoke and a girl on a high wire who didn't need a net and didn't want one, and a clown who had once made him laugh so hard that for one whole and holy minute he forgot every terrible thing he knew. He still had the ticket stub from that night, somewhere.

And then there were the other kind.

He wondered which this was. He then fixed his collar, slung the umbrella over one shoulder, and walked in under the banner wearing the loose, ambling ease of someone thoroughly lost and not the least bit bothered about it.

"Hello. Lovely evening for a show, don't you think?" He said warmly to the first figure the light handed him. "I wonder if you could point me toward whoever handles lost property. Only I've mislaid something fairly large. Goes by Roak — about so high, scowls like it's a competition, hasn't been seen in longer than I care to count." He smiled a Cheshire grin. "I've been ever so patient about finding him. Oh yes."

Candice looks at him. Her body muscles made it look like she was a strong woman, where she was supposed to be able lift over a thousand pounds.

“Uh we don’t have proper lost and found everything goes to the owners and they keep it till the owners come back for it” She pointed to a large yet smaller tent with the word ringmasters

She stared at him for a while before whispering “be careful, they don’t like giving people up” With that she walks away and back into the tent to preform

[focuriousity25-blog]

She was clearly built like something meant to lift half a tonne, and still she'd dropped to a whisper to tell him to be careful. How unpromising.

He gave the warning the only acknowledgment it could safely take — none, out loud — and let his gaze travel to where she'd pointed. The tent wore its title across the front like a name stitched into a collar. He considered it for a moment, then started toward it, unhurried. Behind him the music swelled, and the crowd did what crowds do. He didn't look back.

A pace short of the canvas, he stopped and pitched his voice to carry with the tone of a guest arriving precisely on time.

"Knock knock. I'm given to understand this is where things end up when they've gone astray." A small, pleasant pause. "I've come to collect one of mine. I'd be ever so grateful for a hand. I've been looking such a long while, and I do start to fret."

[welcome-to-mazes-circus]

Inside was 2 people, the colors of their clothes were just one color but it was different shades. The man was wearing a mostly hot pink outfit that looked to be of a punk rock era.

The woman was in jester like attire, the colors she wore was mainly blue, she had an actual smile on her face while her partner was more serious like.

The man looks up at them before sitting up straight, “and what would you be looking for sir. We have baskets full of different items. So you will have to be specific”

The Women walked up next to him, she stared at him, studying his body and how looked. Like she was trying to find out what he could do just by his looks. “Marcy not now” the man spoke to stop his partner.

Marcy looked at him before skipping her way back to desk. “Come on now mace be a bit more fun” she made a dramatic dip pose over the desk before using her leg to bring maces face closer to hers. They seem to be lovers.

[focuriousity25-blog]

He ducked in through the flap and let it fall shut behind him.

The serious one had asked the only sensible question in the place. The other had come round the desk to take his measure — reading his shoulders, his hands, the set of him, the way a buyer reads a horse before the bidding. She was working very hard at a sum that wasn't going to come out, though she'd no way of knowing that yet.

He gave the baskets a glance and a small, regretful turn of one hand, the way you'd wave off a tray of canapés. "Oh — nothing from those, kind as it is to offer. What I've misplaced runs a good deal bigger than a basket. Harder to lose, too, which is the part I keep worrying at, if I'm honest. Things that size don't simply wander off on their own." A pleasant pause. "Somebody has to go to the trouble."

Then, to the one still measuring him, gently, almost kindly —

"You can stop squinting, by the way. It doesn't show what I'm for. It never does." He smiled, all warmth. "People find me very good company. Right up until they find out. After that, it's rather anyone's guess."

[welcome-to-mazes-circus]

Mace squints for a moment, he chuckles, understanding what the person was talking about. “Non of the employees are allowed leave. If you have a problem with that I suggest you don’t” mace stood up from the chair he was in before going to file cabinet.

“But I will entertain your idea of that you might be able to get someone. All I need is a name” the man took out 5 different files and dropped them on the desk. Marcy had already moved to be on the top of the chair, swinging her legs.

“Here is few members I can think of that you might be talking about” inside were the names listed. Candice, Camden, Werti, Esi and the last Roak.

[focuriousity25-blog]

He looked at the files laid out between them and didn't reach for them — the way you'd look at a hand of cards dealt face-up by a stranger who'd called it a kindness.

"You're quick," he said, and meant it. He'd watched her lose interest somewhere back around the threshold. This one hadn't lost a thing. "That many, straight off the top of your head. Tidy memory, for a place that keeps people who aren't allowed near the door."

He let it sit a moment — not a threat, nothing so crude. An observation set down on the desk beside the files, there for whoever cared to pick it up.

"But here's my difficulty with naming." His hands came up in a small, helpless spread, as though the whole business genuinely pained him. "What's mine doesn't always know it's mine anymore. You'll see the bind that puts me in. Point at a file, and I might be pointing at some stranger who only happens to share a shape — and then we've both lost an afternoon. You've sold me the wrong man, I've paid for him, nobody walks away happy." He smiled, sorry to be difficult. "No. I'd rather understand the shop before I spend in it. What does a name cost, in a lost-and-found that won't let its own contents leave? You did say none of them go. So either you mean to make an exception for me — or you're enjoying watching me ask for one. I can't for the life of me tell which." A beat. "And I do like to know who I'm dealing with."

[welcome-to-mazes-circus]

“Well that depends on what you want them for. If it’s an actual item then you get your stuff back, like phone or a bracelet. It will be returned without damage to it.” As Mace spoke he made a motion with his hand and 2 of the lost and found baskets floated towards them.

“But if it’s a person, that when things get difficult. You see we are limited on members, not that people don’t sign up, we a get a lot that sign up for the job. It’s just that no one fits the roles”

Marcy was grabbing at papers, more specifically the papers that were made to sign up and get hired. She was making a new file. “So we have to find them on our own. The people you see on the show are hand picked, and specific”

As Marcy finished the file, she took out missing persons posters. It was a stack but she took only five and laid them down. It was the same five people that were in the files mace took out.

“We understand that you miss your friends, family, colleagues and such but they have no way of leaving, unless you wanna try” Marcy’s voice got high, as her neck snapped to the side at an impossible angle for a human.

They didn’t hide the fact the circus members are kidnapped people, they actually pride in it. “Say how flexible or strong are you? What your abilities?”

[focuriousity25-blog]

That stopped him. Whatever he'd had ready didn't fit anymore, and he let it go rather than force it.

The quiet ran on a little. When the warmth came back into his face it had thinned, the way a lamp thins seen through fog — and he didn't hurry to fill the gap, because some things deserve to be looked at squarely before a man says anything at all.

"How resourceful," he said at last. Mild. The kindest word he could reach, and nowhere near kind.

His eyes went to the posters — all five faces, unhurried, the same mild weight given to each, the way you'd glance down a shelf or a row, and not one of them held him a beat longer than the rest. Then back up, as though the paper had told him nothing he wasn't already carrying.

"You'll forgive me if I don't hand you a list." The smile returned, nearly whole. "A hole in your roster, a stranger blown in off the grass — of course you're already measuring me for a costume. I'd do the same in your shoes." His head tipped. "Only here's the snag. The moment I tell you what I can do, I stop being a someone you'd like to have and start being a thing you'd like to keep. And you've been admirably honest about how this place treats the things it keeps."

He let it settle. Then, lighter — almost confiding, almost a kindness:

"But you're short of the right sort, by your own telling, and I happen to be... between things. So take it for what it's worth." A pause, pleasant as a held breath. "I'm very good at getting into places that would rather I didn't. I'm better at getting things back out again. You may find I'm the very thing you've been failing to catch." The hands spread, all helpfulness. "Or you may find I'm a great deal more trouble than I'm worth. I'd give some thought to which you'd sooner have wandering your grounds."

[welcome-to-mazes-circus]

They both looked at each other for a while before looking back at him. “You are speaking in riddles! I hate riddles!” Marcy was grabbing at her pigtails and tugging it, she hated when words sounded like riddles.

Mace rolled his eyes before he picked up all the files and posters but one. He left the ones with the name roak on it. “I know you are looking for Roak. I was trying to see if you would tell me”

Marcy was still pulling her hair side to side as she tried to think of what he was saying. “The thing is, the fluid that we put into them are dormant for a while, that why they can’t really leave unless we allow them to”

[focuriousity25-blog]

He turned, then, to Marcy, and his voice gentled.

"Then it isn't really yours, is it," he said. Soft, almost sorry for her. "What you've got holds for a while and then asks to be held again. That's not a thing you own. That's a thing you're running to keep up with." A beat. "How often, before it slips? Weekly? Less? Must be such a chore, all that forgetting to tend, and only the two of you to carry the bottle round." He tilted his head. "Golly, you must lose a lot of sleep over it. After all, so much could go wrong in the gap."

He spread his hands, the picture of one offering to help with the dishes.

"You did say you were short-staffed."

[welcome-to-mazes-circus]

“Yes we did, but it’s what we have and such. Are offering to work here?” Mace raised his eyebrow as he looked at the man. He didn’t know what to say to him nor what to replied with if he said no.

Marcy finally stopped pulling at her hair and her foot was tapping on the ground fast as she tried to figure out what to say. “There are three total owners. Me, mace and Mac. Tho he works in the circus its self”

[focuriousity25-blog]

The eyebrow had gone up, and nothing had come after it. As someone who lived on always having his answer ready, that empty beat was worth more to Koschei than whatever he'd eventually fill it with.

"I am," he said, easy, as though the idea had only just caught him up and turned out to please him. "Offering. You needn't look so ambushed by it — it's the sensible end of this, and you'd have got there yourself in a breath or two."

He shrugged.

"You can't fill the show; you've told me as much. You spend your nights chasing the ones who slip and fretting over the ones who might. And here's a certain cryptid blown in off the grass who happens to be very good indeed at fetching back what would sooner stay lost." A modest tilt of the head. "It'd be a poor sort of commander who put that back out the door without so much as trying it. And whatever else you are, I don't think you're a poor sort of commander. You'd not have lasted as one."

He let it rest there, the offer set down on the desk between them, theirs to take up or leave.

"So. Take me on, or turn me out. Only do decide something. I'd hate to have come all this way just to stand about in a doorway."

[welcome-to-mazes-circus]

“Huh well then.” Mace took the empty file that Marcy had set up and held it out to the him. “You fill this out, but you fill it out in here, there are too many people out there including circus members”

Mace looked unfazed before walking back to the desk, he opened a drawer and took out a syringe it was filled with a black liquid, “if you join, you’ll have to join fully, no halfways” he toyed with the syringe for a while before setting it on the desk.

[focuriousity25-blog]

Mace had brought the needle out to watch him flinch. Koschei could read that much in the little ceremony of it — the way it was turned over and the pause sat, a threat with a rehearsed beat built in, waiting to land.

So he reached across and took it off the desk himself.

He turned it once toward the light — unlabelled, the whole of their leash gone to liquid in a glass tube — and somewhere under the easy face a quieter part of him went still and careful, the way it did at the lip of a drop with no bottom in sight. He'd no real notion whether the stuff would hold on a thing built like him. He found he rather meant to find out.

"You'll get no argument from me," he said, agreeable as one settling on a wine, and pushed his sleeve back to the elbow. "An outfit that let just anyone wander in and out as they pleased wouldn't be worth the joining. Best I come in all the way — then none of us has to stand about wondering where I keep my loyalties." He set the tip to the soft of his arm, and the smile never moved. "I do like to be thorough."

And — unhurried, watching the both of them the whole while, so they could see for themselves there wasn't a tremor in it — he pressed it home.

[welcome-to-mazes-circus]

Mace and Marcy looked on with surprise and but with a bit of joy, they watched carefully as the liquid entered into the arm. Soon someone comes in. “Hey boss I have a question” a Hydruga that was dressed in a clown costume had a paper in his hand. He looked up at the three before speaking again.

“Was this a bad time? Should I leave and come back later?” The Hydruga had a heavy Jamaican accent. “No Werti it’s fine, what did you need?” Mace looked at him with his hands crossed. Werti held up a paper in his hand as it has mentions of his son husma.

“I was wondering what exactly you wanted me to sign for when it comes to husma.” Werti handed the paper to mace, who read it quickly “oh this for hearing aid for husma. As you know your son is deaf but he is able to get hearing aids, we just need your signature as you are his parent”

Werti nodded in agreement before signing the paper, he pushed to mace who placed it in a drawer. “Was that all Werti” the Hydruga nodded before walking out of the tent.

[focuriousity25-blog]

He handed the spent syringe back as though returning a borrowed pen, and rolled his sleeve down over the mark.

"There. One of yours now, for good and all." A look went from one of them to the other, unbothered, near enough companionable. "And no sense idling on the first day. I'll go and get acquainted — learn the place, who does what, where a thing's kept when it's wanted. You'll get more out of me knowing my way about than stood here underfoot."

Beneath all that, he was waiting for it to do something — for the tent to tilt, or his own name to come loose from wherever such things were moored. Braced. Ready to give the pair of them nothing worth the watching.

If anything moved in him, he didn't let it reach his face.

He stepped out past the clown who'd come and gone with his bit of paper. Koschei marked him and said nothing. Another of Roak's people, kept here and walking about like it was a living. It told him more than the two behind him had meant to sell.

The flap fell shut, and the circus closed over him instead: calliope, a barker working a thin crowd, the far bright shriek of someone paying good money to be frightened. The whole loud sprawl of it lay open to him now in a way it hadn't an hour past. That was the thing about being trusted. You could go anywhere you liked.

So he went looking.

[geckoodles]

Reunion.

[welcome-to-mazes-circus]

The circus announced itself the way these places always did — with the smell of burnt sugar and sawdust, and music pitched a half-step too bright. The kind of cheer that worked very hard at being cheer. Valeyar Koschei stopped where the grass gave out to trodden dirt and rested the umbrella's tip against the ground. He didn't lean on it. He only held it, the way some people hold a railing on a bridge they're not sure about.

He had known two kinds of circus, and it had been a long life, so that was saying something.

There were the good ones, with tallow-smoke and a girl on a high wire who didn't need a net and didn't want one, and a clown who had once made him laugh so hard that for one whole and holy minute he forgot every terrible thing he knew. He still had the ticket stub from that night, somewhere.

And then there were the other kind.

He wondered which this was. He then fixed his collar, slung the umbrella over one shoulder, and walked in under the banner wearing the loose, ambling ease of someone thoroughly lost and not the least bit bothered about it.

"Hello. Lovely evening for a show, don't you think?" He said warmly to the first figure the light handed him. "I wonder if you could point me toward whoever handles lost property. Only I've mislaid something fairly large. Goes by Roak — about so high, scowls like it's a competition, hasn't been seen in longer than I care to count." He smiled a Cheshire grin. "I've been ever so patient about finding him. Oh yes."

Candice looks at him. Her body muscles made it look like she was a strong woman, where she was supposed to be able lift over a thousand pounds.

“Uh we don’t have proper lost and found everything goes to the owners and they keep it till the owners come back for it” She pointed to a large yet smaller tent with the word ringmasters

She stared at him for a while before whispering “be careful, they don’t like giving people up” With that she walks away and back into the tent to preform

[focuriousity25-blog]

She was clearly built like something meant to lift half a tonne, and still she'd dropped to a whisper to tell him to be careful. How unpromising.

He gave the warning the only acknowledgment it could safely take — none, out loud — and let his gaze travel to where she'd pointed. The tent wore its title across the front like a name stitched into a collar. He considered it for a moment, then started toward it, unhurried. Behind him the music swelled, and the crowd did what crowds do. He didn't look back.

A pace short of the canvas, he stopped and pitched his voice to carry with the tone of a guest arriving precisely on time.

"Knock knock. I'm given to understand this is where things end up when they've gone astray." A small, pleasant pause. "I've come to collect one of mine. I'd be ever so grateful for a hand. I've been looking such a long while, and I do start to fret."

[welcome-to-mazes-circus]

Inside was 2 people, the colors of their clothes were just one color but it was different shades. The man was wearing a mostly hot pink outfit that looked to be of a punk rock era.

The woman was in jester like attire, the colors she wore was mainly blue, she had an actual smile on her face while her partner was more serious like.

The man looks up at them before sitting up straight, “and what would you be looking for sir. We have baskets full of different items. So you will have to be specific”

The Women walked up next to him, she stared at him, studying his body and how looked. Like she was trying to find out what he could do just by his looks. “Marcy not now” the man spoke to stop his partner.

Marcy looked at him before skipping her way back to desk. “Come on now mace be a bit more fun” she made a dramatic dip pose over the desk before using her leg to bring maces face closer to hers. They seem to be lovers.

[focuriousity25-blog]

He ducked in through the flap and let it fall shut behind him.

The serious one had asked the only sensible question in the place. The other had come round the desk to take his measure — reading his shoulders, his hands, the set of him, the way a buyer reads a horse before the bidding. She was working very hard at a sum that wasn't going to come out, though she'd no way of knowing that yet.

He gave the baskets a glance and a small, regretful turn of one hand, the way you'd wave off a tray of canapés. "Oh — nothing from those, kind as it is to offer. What I've misplaced runs a good deal bigger than a basket. Harder to lose, too, which is the part I keep worrying at, if I'm honest. Things that size don't simply wander off on their own." A pleasant pause. "Somebody has to go to the trouble."

Then, to the one still measuring him, gently, almost kindly —

"You can stop squinting, by the way. It doesn't show what I'm for. It never does." He smiled, all warmth. "People find me very good company. Right up until they find out. After that, it's rather anyone's guess."

[welcome-to-mazes-circus]

Mace squints for a moment, he chuckles, understanding what the person was talking about. “Non of the employees are allowed leave. If you have a problem with that I suggest you don’t” mace stood up from the chair he was in before going to file cabinet.

“But I will entertain your idea of that you might be able to get someone. All I need is a name” the man took out 5 different files and dropped them on the desk. Marcy had already moved to be on the top of the chair, swinging her legs.

“Here is few members I can think of that you might be talking about” inside were the names listed. Candice, Camden, Werti, Esi and the last Roak.

[focuriousity25-blog]

He looked at the files laid out between them and didn't reach for them — the way you'd look at a hand of cards dealt face-up by a stranger who'd called it a kindness.

"You're quick," he said, and meant it. He'd watched her lose interest somewhere back around the threshold. This one hadn't lost a thing. "That many, straight off the top of your head. Tidy memory, for a place that keeps people who aren't allowed near the door."

He let it sit a moment — not a threat, nothing so crude. An observation set down on the desk beside the files, there for whoever cared to pick it up.

"But here's my difficulty with naming." His hands came up in a small, helpless spread, as though the whole business genuinely pained him. "What's mine doesn't always know it's mine anymore. You'll see the bind that puts me in. Point at a file, and I might be pointing at some stranger who only happens to share a shape — and then we've both lost an afternoon. You've sold me the wrong man, I've paid for him, nobody walks away happy." He smiled, sorry to be difficult. "No. I'd rather understand the shop before I spend in it. What does a name cost, in a lost-and-found that won't let its own contents leave? You did say none of them go. So either you mean to make an exception for me — or you're enjoying watching me ask for one. I can't for the life of me tell which." A beat. "And I do like to know who I'm dealing with."

[welcome-to-mazes-circus]

“Well that depends on what you want them for. If it’s an actual item then you get your stuff back, like phone or a bracelet. It will be returned without damage to it.” As Mace spoke he made a motion with his hand and 2 of the lost and found baskets floated towards them.

“But if it’s a person, that when things get difficult. You see we are limited on members, not that people don’t sign up, we a get a lot that sign up for the job. It’s just that no one fits the roles”

Marcy was grabbing at papers, more specifically the papers that were made to sign up and get hired. She was making a new file. “So we have to find them on our own. The people you see on the show are hand picked, and specific”

As Marcy finished the file, she took out missing persons posters. It was a stack but she took only five and laid them down. It was the same five people that were in the files mace took out.

“We understand that you miss your friends, family, colleagues and such but they have no way of leaving, unless you wanna try” Marcy’s voice got high, as her neck snapped to the side at an impossible angle for a human.

They didn’t hide the fact the circus members are kidnapped people, they actually pride in it. “Say how flexible or strong are you? What your abilities?”

[focuriousity25-blog]

That stopped him. Whatever he'd had ready didn't fit anymore, and he let it go rather than force it.

The quiet ran on a little. When the warmth came back into his face it had thinned, the way a lamp thins seen through fog — and he didn't hurry to fill the gap, because some things deserve to be looked at squarely before a man says anything at all.

"How resourceful," he said at last. Mild. The kindest word he could reach, and nowhere near kind.

His eyes went to the posters — all five faces, unhurried, the same mild weight given to each, the way you'd glance down a shelf or a row, and not one of them held him a beat longer than the rest. Then back up, as though the paper had told him nothing he wasn't already carrying.

"You'll forgive me if I don't hand you a list." The smile returned, nearly whole. "A hole in your roster, a stranger blown in off the grass — of course you're already measuring me for a costume. I'd do the same in your shoes." His head tipped. "Only here's the snag. The moment I tell you what I can do, I stop being a someone you'd like to have and start being a thing you'd like to keep. And you've been admirably honest about how this place treats the things it keeps."

He let it settle. Then, lighter — almost confiding, almost a kindness:

"But you're short of the right sort, by your own telling, and I happen to be... between things. So take it for what it's worth." A pause, pleasant as a held breath. "I'm very good at getting into places that would rather I didn't. I'm better at getting things back out again. You may find I'm the very thing you've been failing to catch." The hands spread, all helpfulness. "Or you may find I'm a great deal more trouble than I'm worth. I'd give some thought to which you'd sooner have wandering your grounds."

[welcome-to-mazes-circus]

They both looked at each other for a while before looking back at him. “You are speaking in riddles! I hate riddles!” Marcy was grabbing at her pigtails and tugging it, she hated when words sounded like riddles.

Mace rolled his eyes before he picked up all the files and posters but one. He left the ones with the name roak on it. “I know you are looking for Roak. I was trying to see if you would tell me”

Marcy was still pulling her hair side to side as she tried to think of what he was saying. “The thing is, the fluid that we put into them are dormant for a while, that why they can’t really leave unless we allow them to”

[focuriousity25-blog]

He turned, then, to Marcy, and his voice gentled.

"Then it isn't really yours, is it," he said. Soft, almost sorry for her. "What you've got holds for a while and then asks to be held again. That's not a thing you own. That's a thing you're running to keep up with." A beat. "How often, before it slips? Weekly? Less? Must be such a chore, all that forgetting to tend, and only the two of you to carry the bottle round." He tilted his head. "Golly, you must lose a lot of sleep over it. After all, so much could go wrong in the gap."

He spread his hands, the picture of one offering to help with the dishes.

"You did say you were short-staffed."

[welcome-to-mazes-circus]

“Yes we did, but it’s what we have and such. Are offering to work here?” Mace raised his eyebrow as he looked at the man. He didn’t know what to say to him nor what to replied with if he said no.

Marcy finally stopped pulling at her hair and her foot was tapping on the ground fast as she tried to figure out what to say. “There are three total owners. Me, mace and Mac. Tho he works in the circus its self”

[focuriousity25-blog]

The eyebrow had gone up, and nothing had come after it. As someone who lived on always having his answer ready, that empty beat was worth more to Koschei than whatever he'd eventually fill it with.

"I am," he said, easy, as though the idea had only just caught him up and turned out to please him. "Offering. You needn't look so ambushed by it — it's the sensible end of this, and you'd have got there yourself in a breath or two."

He shrugged.

"You can't fill the show; you've told me as much. You spend your nights chasing the ones who slip and fretting over the ones who might. And here's a certain cryptid blown in off the grass who happens to be very good indeed at fetching back what would sooner stay lost." A modest tilt of the head. "It'd be a poor sort of commander who put that back out the door without so much as trying it. And whatever else you are, I don't think you're a poor sort of commander. You'd not have lasted as one."

He let it rest there, the offer set down on the desk between them, theirs to take up or leave.

"So. Take me on, or turn me out. Only do decide something. I'd hate to have come all this way just to stand about in a doorway."

[welcome-to-mazes-circus]

“Huh well then.” Mace took the empty file that Marcy had set up and held it out to the him. “You fill this out, but you fill it out in here, there are too many people out there including circus members”

Mace looked unfazed before walking back to the desk, he opened a drawer and took out a syringe it was filled with a black liquid, “if you join, you’ll have to join fully, no halfways” he toyed with the syringe for a while before setting it on the desk.

[focuriousity25-blog]

Mace had brought the needle out to watch him flinch. Koschei could read that much in the little ceremony of it — the way it was turned over and the pause sat, a threat with a rehearsed beat built in, waiting to land.

So he reached across and took it off the desk himself.

He turned it once toward the light — unlabelled, the whole of their leash gone to liquid in a glass tube — and somewhere under the easy face a quieter part of him went still and careful, the way it did at the lip of a drop with no bottom in sight. He'd no real notion whether the stuff would hold on a thing built like him. He found he rather meant to find out.

"You'll get no argument from me," he said, agreeable as one settling on a wine, and pushed his sleeve back to the elbow. "An outfit that let just anyone wander in and out as they pleased wouldn't be worth the joining. Best I come in all the way — then none of us has to stand about wondering where I keep my loyalties." He set the tip to the soft of his arm, and the smile never moved. "I do like to be thorough."

And — unhurried, watching the both of them the whole while, so they could see for themselves there wasn't a tremor in it — he pressed it home.

[welcome-to-mazes-circus]

The circus announced itself the way these places always did — with the smell of burnt sugar and sawdust, and music pitched a half-step too bright. The kind of cheer that worked very hard at being cheer. Valeyar Koschei stopped where the grass gave out to trodden dirt and rested the umbrella's tip against the ground. He didn't lean on it. He only held it, the way some people hold a railing on a bridge they're not sure about.

He had known two kinds of circus, and it had been a long life, so that was saying something.

There were the good ones, with tallow-smoke and a girl on a high wire who didn't need a net and didn't want one, and a clown who had once made him laugh so hard that for one whole and holy minute he forgot every terrible thing he knew. He still had the ticket stub from that night, somewhere.

And then there were the other kind.

He wondered which this was. He then fixed his collar, slung the umbrella over one shoulder, and walked in under the banner wearing the loose, ambling ease of someone thoroughly lost and not the least bit bothered about it.

"Hello. Lovely evening for a show, don't you think?" He said warmly to the first figure the light handed him. "I wonder if you could point me toward whoever handles lost property. Only I've mislaid something fairly large. Goes by Roak — about so high, scowls like it's a competition, hasn't been seen in longer than I care to count." He smiled a Cheshire grin. "I've been ever so patient about finding him. Oh yes."

Candice looks at him. Her body muscles made it look like she was a strong woman, where she was supposed to be able lift over a thousand pounds.

“Uh we don’t have proper lost and found everything goes to the owners and they keep it till the owners come back for it” She pointed to a large yet smaller tent with the word ringmasters

She stared at him for a while before whispering “be careful, they don’t like giving people up” With that she walks away and back into the tent to preform

[focuriousity25-blog]

She was clearly built like something meant to lift half a tonne, and still she'd dropped to a whisper to tell him to be careful. How unpromising.

He gave the warning the only acknowledgment it could safely take — none, out loud — and let his gaze travel to where she'd pointed. The tent wore its title across the front like a name stitched into a collar. He considered it for a moment, then started toward it, unhurried. Behind him the music swelled, and the crowd did what crowds do. He didn't look back.

A pace short of the canvas, he stopped and pitched his voice to carry with the tone of a guest arriving precisely on time.

"Knock knock. I'm given to understand this is where things end up when they've gone astray." A small, pleasant pause. "I've come to collect one of mine. I'd be ever so grateful for a hand. I've been looking such a long while, and I do start to fret."

[welcome-to-mazes-circus]

Inside was 2 people, the colors of their clothes were just one color but it was different shades. The man was wearing a mostly hot pink outfit that looked to be of a punk rock era.

The woman was in jester like attire, the colors she wore was mainly blue, she had an actual smile on her face while her partner was more serious like.

The man looks up at them before sitting up straight, “and what would you be looking for sir. We have baskets full of different items. So you will have to be specific”

The Women walked up next to him, she stared at him, studying his body and how looked. Like she was trying to find out what he could do just by his looks. “Marcy not now” the man spoke to stop his partner.

Marcy looked at him before skipping her way back to desk. “Come on now mace be a bit more fun” she made a dramatic dip pose over the desk before using her leg to bring maces face closer to hers. They seem to be lovers.

[focuriousity25-blog]

He ducked in through the flap and let it fall shut behind him.

The serious one had asked the only sensible question in the place. The other had come round the desk to take his measure — reading his shoulders, his hands, the set of him, the way a buyer reads a horse before the bidding. She was working very hard at a sum that wasn't going to come out, though she'd no way of knowing that yet.

He gave the baskets a glance and a small, regretful turn of one hand, the way you'd wave off a tray of canapés. "Oh — nothing from those, kind as it is to offer. What I've misplaced runs a good deal bigger than a basket. Harder to lose, too, which is the part I keep worrying at, if I'm honest. Things that size don't simply wander off on their own." A pleasant pause. "Somebody has to go to the trouble."

Then, to the one still measuring him, gently, almost kindly —

"You can stop squinting, by the way. It doesn't show what I'm for. It never does." He smiled, all warmth. "People find me very good company. Right up until they find out. After that, it's rather anyone's guess."

[welcome-to-mazes-circus]

Mace squints for a moment, he chuckles, understanding what the person was talking about. “Non of the employees are allowed leave. If you have a problem with that I suggest you don’t” mace stood up from the chair he was in before going to file cabinet.

“But I will entertain your idea of that you might be able to get someone. All I need is a name” the man took out 5 different files and dropped them on the desk. Marcy had already moved to be on the top of the chair, swinging her legs.

“Here is few members I can think of that you might be talking about” inside were the names listed. Candice, Camden, Werti, Esi and the last Roak.

[focuriousity25-blog]

He looked at the files laid out between them and didn't reach for them — the way you'd look at a hand of cards dealt face-up by a stranger who'd called it a kindness.

"You're quick," he said, and meant it. He'd watched her lose interest somewhere back around the threshold. This one hadn't lost a thing. "That many, straight off the top of your head. Tidy memory, for a place that keeps people who aren't allowed near the door."

He let it sit a moment — not a threat, nothing so crude. An observation set down on the desk beside the files, there for whoever cared to pick it up.

"But here's my difficulty with naming." His hands came up in a small, helpless spread, as though the whole business genuinely pained him. "What's mine doesn't always know it's mine anymore. You'll see the bind that puts me in. Point at a file, and I might be pointing at some stranger who only happens to share a shape — and then we've both lost an afternoon. You've sold me the wrong man, I've paid for him, nobody walks away happy." He smiled, sorry to be difficult. "No. I'd rather understand the shop before I spend in it. What does a name cost, in a lost-and-found that won't let its own contents leave? You did say none of them go. So either you mean to make an exception for me — or you're enjoying watching me ask for one. I can't for the life of me tell which." A beat. "And I do like to know who I'm dealing with."

[welcome-to-mazes-circus]

“Well that depends on what you want them for. If it’s an actual item then you get your stuff back, like phone or a bracelet. It will be returned without damage to it.” As Mace spoke he made a motion with his hand and 2 of the lost and found baskets floated towards them.

“But if it’s a person, that when things get difficult. You see we are limited on members, not that people don’t sign up, we a get a lot that sign up for the job. It’s just that no one fits the roles”

Marcy was grabbing at papers, more specifically the papers that were made to sign up and get hired. She was making a new file. “So we have to find them on our own. The people you see on the show are hand picked, and specific”

As Marcy finished the file, she took out missing persons posters. It was a stack but she took only five and laid them down. It was the same five people that were in the files mace took out.

“We understand that you miss your friends, family, colleagues and such but they have no way of leaving, unless you wanna try” Marcy’s voice got high, as her neck snapped to the side at an impossible angle for a human.

They didn’t hide the fact the circus members are kidnapped people, they actually pride in it. “Say how flexible or strong are you? What your abilities?”

[focuriousity25-blog]

That stopped him. Whatever he'd had ready didn't fit anymore, and he let it go rather than force it.

The quiet ran on a little. When the warmth came back into his face it had thinned, the way a lamp thins seen through fog — and he didn't hurry to fill the gap, because some things deserve to be looked at squarely before a man says anything at all.

"How resourceful," he said at last. Mild. The kindest word he could reach, and nowhere near kind.

His eyes went to the posters — all five faces, unhurried, the same mild weight given to each, the way you'd glance down a shelf or a row, and not one of them held him a beat longer than the rest. Then back up, as though the paper had told him nothing he wasn't already carrying.

"You'll forgive me if I don't hand you a list." The smile returned, nearly whole. "A hole in your roster, a stranger blown in off the grass — of course you're already measuring me for a costume. I'd do the same in your shoes." His head tipped. "Only here's the snag. The moment I tell you what I can do, I stop being a someone you'd like to have and start being a thing you'd like to keep. And you've been admirably honest about how this place treats the things it keeps."

He let it settle. Then, lighter — almost confiding, almost a kindness:

"But you're short of the right sort, by your own telling, and I happen to be... between things. So take it for what it's worth." A pause, pleasant as a held breath. "I'm very good at getting into places that would rather I didn't. I'm better at getting things back out again. You may find I'm the very thing you've been failing to catch." The hands spread, all helpfulness. "Or you may find I'm a great deal more trouble than I'm worth. I'd give some thought to which you'd sooner have wandering your grounds."

[welcome-to-mazes-circus]

They both looked at each other for a while before looking back at him. “You are speaking in riddles! I hate riddles!” Marcy was grabbing at her pigtails and tugging it, she hated when words sounded like riddles.

Mace rolled his eyes before he picked up all the files and posters but one. He left the ones with the name roak on it. “I know you are looking for Roak. I was trying to see if you would tell me”

Marcy was still pulling her hair side to side as she tried to think of what he was saying. “The thing is, the fluid that we put into them are dormant for a while, that why they can’t really leave unless we allow them to”

[focuriousity25-blog]

He turned, then, to Marcy, and his voice gentled.

"Then it isn't really yours, is it," he said. Soft, almost sorry for her. "What you've got holds for a while and then asks to be held again. That's not a thing you own. That's a thing you're running to keep up with." A beat. "How often, before it slips? Weekly? Less? Must be such a chore, all that forgetting to tend, and only the two of you to carry the bottle round." He tilted his head. "Golly, you must lose a lot of sleep over it. After all, so much could go wrong in the gap."

He spread his hands, the picture of one offering to help with the dishes.

"You did say you were short-staffed."

[welcome-to-mazes-circus]

“Yes we did, but it’s what we have and such. Are offering to work here?” Mace raised his eyebrow as he looked at the man. He didn’t know what to say to him nor what to replied with if he said no.

Marcy finally stopped pulling at her hair and her foot was tapping on the ground fast as she tried to figure out what to say. “There are three total owners. Me, mace and Mac. Tho he works in the circus its self”

[focuriousity25-blog]

The eyebrow had gone up, and nothing had come after it. As someone who lived on always having his answer ready, that empty beat was worth more to Koschei than whatever he'd eventually fill it with.

"I am," he said, easy, as though the idea had only just caught him up and turned out to please him. "Offering. You needn't look so ambushed by it — it's the sensible end of this, and you'd have got there yourself in a breath or two."

He shrugged.

"You can't fill the show; you've told me as much. You spend your nights chasing the ones who slip and fretting over the ones who might. And here's a certain cryptid blown in off the grass who happens to be very good indeed at fetching back what would sooner stay lost." A modest tilt of the head. "It'd be a poor sort of commander who put that back out the door without so much as trying it. And whatever else you are, I don't think you're a poor sort of commander. You'd not have lasted as one."

He let it rest there, the offer set down on the desk between them, theirs to take up or leave.

"So. Take me on, or turn me out. Only do decide something. I'd hate to have come all this way just to stand about in a doorway."

[welcome-to-mazes-circus]

The circus announced itself the way these places always did — with the smell of burnt sugar and sawdust, and music pitched a half-step too bright. The kind of cheer that worked very hard at being cheer. Valeyar Koschei stopped where the grass gave out to trodden dirt and rested the umbrella's tip against the ground. He didn't lean on it. He only held it, the way some people hold a railing on a bridge they're not sure about.

He had known two kinds of circus, and it had been a long life, so that was saying something.

There were the good ones, with tallow-smoke and a girl on a high wire who didn't need a net and didn't want one, and a clown who had once made him laugh so hard that for one whole and holy minute he forgot every terrible thing he knew. He still had the ticket stub from that night, somewhere.

And then there were the other kind.

He wondered which this was. He then fixed his collar, slung the umbrella over one shoulder, and walked in under the banner wearing the loose, ambling ease of someone thoroughly lost and not the least bit bothered about it.

"Hello. Lovely evening for a show, don't you think?" He said warmly to the first figure the light handed him. "I wonder if you could point me toward whoever handles lost property. Only I've mislaid something fairly large. Goes by Roak — about so high, scowls like it's a competition, hasn't been seen in longer than I care to count." He smiled a Cheshire grin. "I've been ever so patient about finding him. Oh yes."

Candice looks at him. Her body muscles made it look like she was a strong woman, where she was supposed to be able lift over a thousand pounds.

“Uh we don’t have proper lost and found everything goes to the owners and they keep it till the owners come back for it” She pointed to a large yet smaller tent with the word ringmasters

She stared at him for a while before whispering “be careful, they don’t like giving people up” With that she walks away and back into the tent to preform

[focuriousity25-blog]

She was clearly built like something meant to lift half a tonne, and still she'd dropped to a whisper to tell him to be careful. How unpromising.

He gave the warning the only acknowledgment it could safely take — none, out loud — and let his gaze travel to where she'd pointed. The tent wore its title across the front like a name stitched into a collar. He considered it for a moment, then started toward it, unhurried. Behind him the music swelled, and the crowd did what crowds do. He didn't look back.

A pace short of the canvas, he stopped and pitched his voice to carry with the tone of a guest arriving precisely on time.

"Knock knock. I'm given to understand this is where things end up when they've gone astray." A small, pleasant pause. "I've come to collect one of mine. I'd be ever so grateful for a hand. I've been looking such a long while, and I do start to fret."

[welcome-to-mazes-circus]

Inside was 2 people, the colors of their clothes were just one color but it was different shades. The man was wearing a mostly hot pink outfit that looked to be of a punk rock era.

The woman was in jester like attire, the colors she wore was mainly blue, she had an actual smile on her face while her partner was more serious like.

The man looks up at them before sitting up straight, “and what would you be looking for sir. We have baskets full of different items. So you will have to be specific”

The Women walked up next to him, she stared at him, studying his body and how looked. Like she was trying to find out what he could do just by his looks. “Marcy not now” the man spoke to stop his partner.

Marcy looked at him before skipping her way back to desk. “Come on now mace be a bit more fun” she made a dramatic dip pose over the desk before using her leg to bring maces face closer to hers. They seem to be lovers.

[focuriousity25-blog]

He ducked in through the flap and let it fall shut behind him.

The serious one had asked the only sensible question in the place. The other had come round the desk to take his measure — reading his shoulders, his hands, the set of him, the way a buyer reads a horse before the bidding. She was working very hard at a sum that wasn't going to come out, though she'd no way of knowing that yet.

He gave the baskets a glance and a small, regretful turn of one hand, the way you'd wave off a tray of canapés. "Oh — nothing from those, kind as it is to offer. What I've misplaced runs a good deal bigger than a basket. Harder to lose, too, which is the part I keep worrying at, if I'm honest. Things that size don't simply wander off on their own." A pleasant pause. "Somebody has to go to the trouble."

Then, to the one still measuring him, gently, almost kindly —

"You can stop squinting, by the way. It doesn't show what I'm for. It never does." He smiled, all warmth. "People find me very good company. Right up until they find out. After that, it's rather anyone's guess."

[welcome-to-mazes-circus]

Mace squints for a moment, he chuckles, understanding what the person was talking about. “Non of the employees are allowed leave. If you have a problem with that I suggest you don’t” mace stood up from the chair he was in before going to file cabinet.

“But I will entertain your idea of that you might be able to get someone. All I need is a name” the man took out 5 different files and dropped them on the desk. Marcy had already moved to be on the top of the chair, swinging her legs.

“Here is few members I can think of that you might be talking about” inside were the names listed. Candice, Camden, Werti, Esi and the last Roak.

[focuriousity25-blog]

He looked at the files laid out between them and didn't reach for them — the way you'd look at a hand of cards dealt face-up by a stranger who'd called it a kindness.

"You're quick," he said, and meant it. He'd watched her lose interest somewhere back around the threshold. This one hadn't lost a thing. "That many, straight off the top of your head. Tidy memory, for a place that keeps people who aren't allowed near the door."

He let it sit a moment — not a threat, nothing so crude. An observation set down on the desk beside the files, there for whoever cared to pick it up.

"But here's my difficulty with naming." His hands came up in a small, helpless spread, as though the whole business genuinely pained him. "What's mine doesn't always know it's mine anymore. You'll see the bind that puts me in. Point at a file, and I might be pointing at some stranger who only happens to share a shape — and then we've both lost an afternoon. You've sold me the wrong man, I've paid for him, nobody walks away happy." He smiled, sorry to be difficult. "No. I'd rather understand the shop before I spend in it. What does a name cost, in a lost-and-found that won't let its own contents leave? You did say none of them go. So either you mean to make an exception for me — or you're enjoying watching me ask for one. I can't for the life of me tell which." A beat. "And I do like to know who I'm dealing with."

[welcome-to-mazes-circus]

“Well that depends on what you want them for. If it’s an actual item then you get your stuff back, like phone or a bracelet. It will be returned without damage to it.” As Mace spoke he made a motion with his hand and 2 of the lost and found baskets floated towards them.

“But if it’s a person, that when things get difficult. You see we are limited on members, not that people don’t sign up, we a get a lot that sign up for the job. It’s just that no one fits the roles”

Marcy was grabbing at papers, more specifically the papers that were made to sign up and get hired. She was making a new file. “So we have to find them on our own. The people you see on the show are hand picked, and specific”

As Marcy finished the file, she took out missing persons posters. It was a stack but she took only five and laid them down. It was the same five people that were in the files mace took out.

“We understand that you miss your friends, family, colleagues and such but they have no way of leaving, unless you wanna try” Marcy’s voice got high, as her neck snapped to the side at an impossible angle for a human.

They didn’t hide the fact the circus members are kidnapped people, they actually pride in it. “Say how flexible or strong are you? What your abilities?”

[focuriousity25-blog]

That stopped him. Whatever he'd had ready didn't fit anymore, and he let it go rather than force it.

The quiet ran on a little. When the warmth came back into his face it had thinned, the way a lamp thins seen through fog — and he didn't hurry to fill the gap, because some things deserve to be looked at squarely before a man says anything at all.

"How resourceful," he said at last. Mild. The kindest word he could reach, and nowhere near kind.

His eyes went to the posters — all five faces, unhurried, the same mild weight given to each, the way you'd glance down a shelf or a row, and not one of them held him a beat longer than the rest. Then back up, as though the paper had told him nothing he wasn't already carrying.

"You'll forgive me if I don't hand you a list." The smile returned, nearly whole. "A hole in your roster, a stranger blown in off the grass — of course you're already measuring me for a costume. I'd do the same in your shoes." His head tipped. "Only here's the snag. The moment I tell you what I can do, I stop being a someone you'd like to have and start being a thing you'd like to keep. And you've been admirably honest about how this place treats the things it keeps."

He let it settle. Then, lighter — almost confiding, almost a kindness:

"But you're short of the right sort, by your own telling, and I happen to be... between things. So take it for what it's worth." A pause, pleasant as a held breath. "I'm very good at getting into places that would rather I didn't. I'm better at getting things back out again. You may find I'm the very thing you've been failing to catch." The hands spread, all helpfulness. "Or you may find I'm a great deal more trouble than I'm worth. I'd give some thought to which you'd sooner have wandering your grounds."

[welcome-to-mazes-circus]

They both looked at each other for a while before looking back at him. “You are speaking in riddles! I hate riddles!” Marcy was grabbing at her pigtails and tugging it, she hated when words sounded like riddles.

Mace rolled his eyes before he picked up all the files and posters but one. He left the ones with the name roak on it. “I know you are looking for Roak. I was trying to see if you would tell me”

Marcy was still pulling her hair side to side as she tried to think of what he was saying. “The thing is, the fluid that we put into them are dormant for a while, that why they can’t really leave unless we allow them to”

[focuriousity25-blog]

He turned, then, to Marcy, and his voice gentled.

"Then it isn't really yours, is it," he said. Soft, almost sorry for her. "What you've got holds for a while and then asks to be held again. That's not a thing you own. That's a thing you're running to keep up with." A beat. "How often, before it slips? Weekly? Less? Must be such a chore, all that forgetting to tend, and only the two of you to carry the bottle round." He tilted his head. "Golly, you must lose a lot of sleep over it. After all, so much could go wrong in the gap."

He spread his hands, the picture of one offering to help with the dishes.

"You did say you were short-staffed."

[welcome-to-mazes-circus]

The circus announced itself the way these places always did — with the smell of burnt sugar and sawdust, and music pitched a half-step too bright. The kind of cheer that worked very hard at being cheer. Valeyar Koschei stopped where the grass gave out to trodden dirt and rested the umbrella's tip against the ground. He didn't lean on it. He only held it, the way some people hold a railing on a bridge they're not sure about.

He had known two kinds of circus, and it had been a long life, so that was saying something.

There were the good ones, with tallow-smoke and a girl on a high wire who didn't need a net and didn't want one, and a clown who had once made him laugh so hard that for one whole and holy minute he forgot every terrible thing he knew. He still had the ticket stub from that night, somewhere.

And then there were the other kind.

He wondered which this was. He then fixed his collar, slung the umbrella over one shoulder, and walked in under the banner wearing the loose, ambling ease of someone thoroughly lost and not the least bit bothered about it.

"Hello. Lovely evening for a show, don't you think?" He said warmly to the first figure the light handed him. "I wonder if you could point me toward whoever handles lost property. Only I've mislaid something fairly large. Goes by Roak — about so high, scowls like it's a competition, hasn't been seen in longer than I care to count." He smiled a Cheshire grin. "I've been ever so patient about finding him. Oh yes."

Candice looks at him. Her body muscles made it look like she was a strong woman, where she was supposed to be able lift over a thousand pounds.

“Uh we don’t have proper lost and found everything goes to the owners and they keep it till the owners come back for it” She pointed to a large yet smaller tent with the word ringmasters

She stared at him for a while before whispering “be careful, they don’t like giving people up” With that she walks away and back into the tent to preform

[focuriousity25-blog]

She was clearly built like something meant to lift half a tonne, and still she'd dropped to a whisper to tell him to be careful. How unpromising.

He gave the warning the only acknowledgment it could safely take — none, out loud — and let his gaze travel to where she'd pointed. The tent wore its title across the front like a name stitched into a collar. He considered it for a moment, then started toward it, unhurried. Behind him the music swelled, and the crowd did what crowds do. He didn't look back.

A pace short of the canvas, he stopped and pitched his voice to carry with the tone of a guest arriving precisely on time.

"Knock knock. I'm given to understand this is where things end up when they've gone astray." A small, pleasant pause. "I've come to collect one of mine. I'd be ever so grateful for a hand. I've been looking such a long while, and I do start to fret."

[welcome-to-mazes-circus]

Inside was 2 people, the colors of their clothes were just one color but it was different shades. The man was wearing a mostly hot pink outfit that looked to be of a punk rock era.

The woman was in jester like attire, the colors she wore was mainly blue, she had an actual smile on her face while her partner was more serious like.

The man looks up at them before sitting up straight, “and what would you be looking for sir. We have baskets full of different items. So you will have to be specific”

The Women walked up next to him, she stared at him, studying his body and how looked. Like she was trying to find out what he could do just by his looks. “Marcy not now” the man spoke to stop his partner.

Marcy looked at him before skipping her way back to desk. “Come on now mace be a bit more fun” she made a dramatic dip pose over the desk before using her leg to bring maces face closer to hers. They seem to be lovers.

[focuriousity25-blog]

He ducked in through the flap and let it fall shut behind him.

The serious one had asked the only sensible question in the place. The other had come round the desk to take his measure — reading his shoulders, his hands, the set of him, the way a buyer reads a horse before the bidding. She was working very hard at a sum that wasn't going to come out, though she'd no way of knowing that yet.

He gave the baskets a glance and a small, regretful turn of one hand, the way you'd wave off a tray of canapés. "Oh — nothing from those, kind as it is to offer. What I've misplaced runs a good deal bigger than a basket. Harder to lose, too, which is the part I keep worrying at, if I'm honest. Things that size don't simply wander off on their own." A pleasant pause. "Somebody has to go to the trouble."

Then, to the one still measuring him, gently, almost kindly —

"You can stop squinting, by the way. It doesn't show what I'm for. It never does." He smiled, all warmth. "People find me very good company. Right up until they find out. After that, it's rather anyone's guess."

[welcome-to-mazes-circus]

Mace squints for a moment, he chuckles, understanding what the person was talking about. “Non of the employees are allowed leave. If you have a problem with that I suggest you don’t” mace stood up from the chair he was in before going to file cabinet.

“But I will entertain your idea of that you might be able to get someone. All I need is a name” the man took out 5 different files and dropped them on the desk. Marcy had already moved to be on the top of the chair, swinging her legs.

“Here is few members I can think of that you might be talking about” inside were the names listed. Candice, Camden, Werti, Esi and the last Roak.

[focuriousity25-blog]

He looked at the files laid out between them and didn't reach for them — the way you'd look at a hand of cards dealt face-up by a stranger who'd called it a kindness.

"You're quick," he said, and meant it. He'd watched her lose interest somewhere back around the threshold. This one hadn't lost a thing. "That many, straight off the top of your head. Tidy memory, for a place that keeps people who aren't allowed near the door."

He let it sit a moment — not a threat, nothing so crude. An observation set down on the desk beside the files, there for whoever cared to pick it up.

"But here's my difficulty with naming." His hands came up in a small, helpless spread, as though the whole business genuinely pained him. "What's mine doesn't always know it's mine anymore. You'll see the bind that puts me in. Point at a file, and I might be pointing at some stranger who only happens to share a shape — and then we've both lost an afternoon. You've sold me the wrong man, I've paid for him, nobody walks away happy." He smiled, sorry to be difficult. "No. I'd rather understand the shop before I spend in it. What does a name cost, in a lost-and-found that won't let its own contents leave? You did say none of them go. So either you mean to make an exception for me — or you're enjoying watching me ask for one. I can't for the life of me tell which." A beat. "And I do like to know who I'm dealing with."

[welcome-to-mazes-circus]

“Well that depends on what you want them for. If it’s an actual item then you get your stuff back, like phone or a bracelet. It will be returned without damage to it.” As Mace spoke he made a motion with his hand and 2 of the lost and found baskets floated towards them.

“But if it’s a person, that when things get difficult. You see we are limited on members, not that people don’t sign up, we a get a lot that sign up for the job. It’s just that no one fits the roles”

Marcy was grabbing at papers, more specifically the papers that were made to sign up and get hired. She was making a new file. “So we have to find them on our own. The people you see on the show are hand picked, and specific”

As Marcy finished the file, she took out missing persons posters. It was a stack but she took only five and laid them down. It was the same five people that were in the files mace took out.

“We understand that you miss your friends, family, colleagues and such but they have no way of leaving, unless you wanna try” Marcy’s voice got high, as her neck snapped to the side at an impossible angle for a human.

They didn’t hide the fact the circus members are kidnapped people, they actually pride in it. “Say how flexible or strong are you? What your abilities?”

[focuriousity25-blog]

That stopped him. Whatever he'd had ready didn't fit anymore, and he let it go rather than force it.

The quiet ran on a little. When the warmth came back into his face it had thinned, the way a lamp thins seen through fog — and he didn't hurry to fill the gap, because some things deserve to be looked at squarely before a man says anything at all.

"How resourceful," he said at last. Mild. The kindest word he could reach, and nowhere near kind.

His eyes went to the posters — all five faces, unhurried, the same mild weight given to each, the way you'd glance down a shelf or a row, and not one of them held him a beat longer than the rest. Then back up, as though the paper had told him nothing he wasn't already carrying.

"You'll forgive me if I don't hand you a list." The smile returned, nearly whole. "A hole in your roster, a stranger blown in off the grass — of course you're already measuring me for a costume. I'd do the same in your shoes." His head tipped. "Only here's the snag. The moment I tell you what I can do, I stop being a someone you'd like to have and start being a thing you'd like to keep. And you've been admirably honest about how this place treats the things it keeps."

He let it settle. Then, lighter — almost confiding, almost a kindness:

"But you're short of the right sort, by your own telling, and I happen to be... between things. So take it for what it's worth." A pause, pleasant as a held breath. "I'm very good at getting into places that would rather I didn't. I'm better at getting things back out again. You may find I'm the very thing you've been failing to catch." The hands spread, all helpfulness. "Or you may find I'm a great deal more trouble than I'm worth. I'd give some thought to which you'd sooner have wandering your grounds."

[welcome-to-mazes-circus]

The circus announced itself the way these places always did — with the smell of burnt sugar and sawdust, and music pitched a half-step too bright. The kind of cheer that worked very hard at being cheer. Valeyar Koschei stopped where the grass gave out to trodden dirt and rested the umbrella's tip against the ground. He didn't lean on it. He only held it, the way some people hold a railing on a bridge they're not sure about.

He had known two kinds of circus, and it had been a long life, so that was saying something.

There were the good ones, with tallow-smoke and a girl on a high wire who didn't need a net and didn't want one, and a clown who had once made him laugh so hard that for one whole and holy minute he forgot every terrible thing he knew. He still had the ticket stub from that night, somewhere.

And then there were the other kind.

He wondered which this was. He then fixed his collar, slung the umbrella over one shoulder, and walked in under the banner wearing the loose, ambling ease of someone thoroughly lost and not the least bit bothered about it.

"Hello. Lovely evening for a show, don't you think?" He said warmly to the first figure the light handed him. "I wonder if you could point me toward whoever handles lost property. Only I've mislaid something fairly large. Goes by Roak — about so high, scowls like it's a competition, hasn't been seen in longer than I care to count." He smiled a Cheshire grin. "I've been ever so patient about finding him. Oh yes."

Candice looks at him. Her body muscles made it look like she was a strong woman, where she was supposed to be able lift over a thousand pounds.

“Uh we don’t have proper lost and found everything goes to the owners and they keep it till the owners come back for it” She pointed to a large yet smaller tent with the word ringmasters

She stared at him for a while before whispering “be careful, they don’t like giving people up” With that she walks away and back into the tent to preform

[focuriousity25-blog]

She was clearly built like something meant to lift half a tonne, and still she'd dropped to a whisper to tell him to be careful. How unpromising.

He gave the warning the only acknowledgment it could safely take — none, out loud — and let his gaze travel to where she'd pointed. The tent wore its title across the front like a name stitched into a collar. He considered it for a moment, then started toward it, unhurried. Behind him the music swelled, and the crowd did what crowds do. He didn't look back.

A pace short of the canvas, he stopped and pitched his voice to carry with the tone of a guest arriving precisely on time.

"Knock knock. I'm given to understand this is where things end up when they've gone astray." A small, pleasant pause. "I've come to collect one of mine. I'd be ever so grateful for a hand. I've been looking such a long while, and I do start to fret."

[welcome-to-mazes-circus]

Inside was 2 people, the colors of their clothes were just one color but it was different shades. The man was wearing a mostly hot pink outfit that looked to be of a punk rock era.

The woman was in jester like attire, the colors she wore was mainly blue, she had an actual smile on her face while her partner was more serious like.

The man looks up at them before sitting up straight, “and what would you be looking for sir. We have baskets full of different items. So you will have to be specific”

The Women walked up next to him, she stared at him, studying his body and how looked. Like she was trying to find out what he could do just by his looks. “Marcy not now” the man spoke to stop his partner.

Marcy looked at him before skipping her way back to desk. “Come on now mace be a bit more fun” she made a dramatic dip pose over the desk before using her leg to bring maces face closer to hers. They seem to be lovers.

[focuriousity25-blog]

He ducked in through the flap and let it fall shut behind him.

The serious one had asked the only sensible question in the place. The other had come round the desk to take his measure — reading his shoulders, his hands, the set of him, the way a buyer reads a horse before the bidding. She was working very hard at a sum that wasn't going to come out, though she'd no way of knowing that yet.

He gave the baskets a glance and a small, regretful turn of one hand, the way you'd wave off a tray of canapés. "Oh — nothing from those, kind as it is to offer. What I've misplaced runs a good deal bigger than a basket. Harder to lose, too, which is the part I keep worrying at, if I'm honest. Things that size don't simply wander off on their own." A pleasant pause. "Somebody has to go to the trouble."

Then, to the one still measuring him, gently, almost kindly —

"You can stop squinting, by the way. It doesn't show what I'm for. It never does." He smiled, all warmth. "People find me very good company. Right up until they find out. After that, it's rather anyone's guess."

[welcome-to-mazes-circus]

Mace squints for a moment, he chuckles, understanding what the person was talking about. “Non of the employees are allowed leave. If you have a problem with that I suggest you don’t” mace stood up from the chair he was in before going to file cabinet.

“But I will entertain your idea of that you might be able to get someone. All I need is a name” the man took out 5 different files and dropped them on the desk. Marcy had already moved to be on the top of the chair, swinging her legs.

“Here is few members I can think of that you might be talking about” inside were the names listed. Candice, Camden, Werti, Esi and the last Roak.

[focuriousity25-blog]

He looked at the files laid out between them and didn't reach for them — the way you'd look at a hand of cards dealt face-up by a stranger who'd called it a kindness.

"You're quick," he said, and meant it. He'd watched her lose interest somewhere back around the threshold. This one hadn't lost a thing. "That many, straight off the top of your head. Tidy memory, for a place that keeps people who aren't allowed near the door."

He let it sit a moment — not a threat, nothing so crude. An observation set down on the desk beside the files, there for whoever cared to pick it up.

"But here's my difficulty with naming." His hands came up in a small, helpless spread, as though the whole business genuinely pained him. "What's mine doesn't always know it's mine anymore. You'll see the bind that puts me in. Point at a file, and I might be pointing at some stranger who only happens to share a shape — and then we've both lost an afternoon. You've sold me the wrong man, I've paid for him, nobody walks away happy." He smiled, sorry to be difficult. "No. I'd rather understand the shop before I spend in it. What does a name cost, in a lost-and-found that won't let its own contents leave? You did say none of them go. So either you mean to make an exception for me — or you're enjoying watching me ask for one. I can't for the life of me tell which." A beat. "And I do like to know who I'm dealing with."