It’s hard to distinguish him when he’s no longer the only one in a starch white shirt and collar; but one spectacularly dressed boy among many. The jumbled masses, bodies pouring over bodies in their quest to be closest to the masterminds, to the whiteboards erected and the plans drawn; the midnight cacophony of a hundred voices rising and falling like dominoes - one idea after another, one con leading to the mention of a dozen more - this is what she lives for. Evangeline Villiers watches her home turn into a nest of thieves, liars, criminals with money in their pockets and diamonds against their heels, and she smiles. Her life is a dynamic one. It takes no distinct form now, but when it does, the beast they raise will tear down steel and surpass the most ingenious innovations of modern society.
That, my dear, is the marksmanship of true brilliance.
It’s hard to distinguish him, but she knows what to look for. That head of sun-kissed bronze, a posture that radiates affluence, the particular glow that surrounds all exclusive, coveted people. It was simple to locate Hale Rothschild - one only had to follow the gazes.
It amused her, how much emphasis the lot of them (commoners, thieves, competitors alike) placed upon aesthetics. It controlled them, it overpowered them; they were ruled by their eyes and not their hearts - and just has Paris had raged war against gods and men for his beloved Helen; human beings would tear one another apart, would transcend any height, overcome any obstacle to possess beauty.
She stops besides him, one golden figure sitting alone in a lounge branching off the third-floor balcony, and in that moment even she can see his appeal: he sits like a prince, long-limbed and sure even in his casual vacancy. Hale Rothschild - conman, Magpie, that inexorable other half to dear Ciro’s riotous jollity. Playboy, millionaire - her partner tonight and in the days to come.
“Alright mate,” Leaning down, she knocks his shoulder with the back of one hand, eyebrows furrowing half with perplexity, half with the attentiveness of the bright-eyed elite in the wake of something calamitous, thrilling. There’s a certain frivolity to the way they all move, but Evie in particular has always showcased her vivacity with an obvious gusto, and now it’s arrived in the constant movement of her body, the little quips and turns which create symphonies out of allegro’s and presto’s. “Let’s begin then.” She waits until he looks at her, and then studies those famous grey eyes with her own dark ones. “How drunk are you?” — and she laughs, delighted. “Actually, don’t bother.” She squeezes herself into the space besides him without warning, “I’m ordering us breakfast.”
If perhaps, he’d so had the trait of insight, Hale might have allowed ironic laughter forth for her thoughts --- the Grecian aftertaste of them. A theme to any myth of the sort, Artemis or Narcissus or the like: beauty and eternal life. Not that the silk laden figure, of a bronze headedness and Midas touch, could root out beauty in all the ugliness in which he found himself in. For a people who so admired aesthetic, they were particularly hideous --- in the opinion of the young god at least. Thieves, they were the very counterfeit jewels which they had so much history with ( the exchange of the genuine for something faux, an imitation ). It was true that they looked just as dazzling to the untrained eye, but any jeweler could find the flaw in them, the absence of truth in their supposed loveliness.
Hale sometimes wondered if he, himself, missed that in the tangle of an obsidian magpie, an untrained eye to her wickedness.
Still, he turns with an observable twist of attention to the very dark haired silhouette, almost an eagerness about him, but one can’t be sure ( except for her of course, she sees straight through him ). Indeed, Evie doesn’t need wait long for the shift and neither for the closure in proximity, two crooning bodies brought together. “Evangeline,” her name pirouettes off his lips in a way that her mother was made famous for, with a vivacity and gracefulness through the early morning air. A hand stays at the balcony which she’s found him at, caging the avian and brushing stone beneath his palm as he leans in close. “Breakfast, hm? I can easily think of a few ways to pass the time while we wait on your order. That is, if it seems an intriguing enough gamble for the Head Magpie.”
The Rothschild pulls back with the last breath of vocabulary, knowing full well how the other resents being cornered --- suffocated by the need, heavy on her like a humidity on the southern wind, of others. He knows because he remembers the impact of a fall after she’d shook him off an early morning in Vienna, descending like Icarus ( knowing better but testing the waters all the same ).
“Though I suspect it’ll be all business for you. Too much so to roll the dice on such a proposition,” he adds, albeit a bit bitterly as Hale tosses a quick glance into a crowd near. Does she entertain the such desires of her mutt, he wonders before resolving to bury the thought. Hale doesn’t want to know the answer.
