rorschach ink blots, moth eaten mink, the smoke and wax smell of cathedrals, a sailboat burning over choppy waters, chipped gilding, chrysanthemums in full bloom, a reflection multiplying infinitely between two opposite mirrors, white noise, a hand of cards with five aces, the watery mint of first-growth clover, outdated atlases, the gaping eyes of deep sea creatures, silenced gunshots.
name. xi fei
age. twenty-seven
pronouns. she / her
birthplace. verum, novae terum
family. none left
relationship status. unattached
employment. radio disk jockey of some nameless station
𝐇𝐄𝐀𝐃𝐂𝐀𝐍𝐎𝐍𝐒.
— For years on end now, Fei has seldom left The Temple of Very Short Prayers without being explicitly called or explicitly plotting something. She takes up residence in a broom closet apartment on the upper floors of the bar and thereabouts works out of a similarly smokey and red-lit booth as a disk jockey. In the mornings, her station plays crooning jazz that conjures nostalgia for a time before you were born and in the evenings she’ll line up radio plays– tragedies and noires and murder mysteries, so often centered on beautiful young women who’ve lost everything. She only acts as host on nights the whim strikes her, whispering fondly of art and culture and luxuries only the ultra wealthy have the time and access to experience to her audience of chronic insomniacs, all struck love-sick by the smokey scratch of her voice and the melancholy therein. The station nets her a modicum of both money and influence, though of course not nearly enough to even begin compared to that she lost.
— Idk if they’re ever allowed to keep stuff from heists so if not I guess Fei went rogue on this one, but I love the idea that she’s stolen this once incredibly famous necklace of extreme value, fabled to be the necklace of Eriphyle itself. Given her power carries a correlation with luck, Fei wears it almost as a taunt. Of course, never on mission themselves (more for practicality than sentiment), but besides that, any gamble great or small is seen less as testing fate and more as pitting her misfortune against her fortune. In fact, gambling at all ties neatly into her issues with herself, to the point where she cannot refuse herself a bet, even a bad one. It’s also where a lot of her money goes, which helps keep her continuously broke.
— The weapon she insists upon keeping with her - even when it’s objectively a bad choice for the task at hand - is a tiny, two-chamber peashooter, named ‘The Vittoria’ after a storied (so storied that her having existed at all is questionable) member of the OND. It’s gilded and carved with brutally intricate Sectatore religious imagery, too gaudy to be practical and likely worth a small fortune. For all it’s glamour, it’s not terribly useful: The godawful thing is clearly an antique, and quite possibly a historically significant one at that, but Fei wouldn’t know. She won it in a bet near a decade ago, and has kept it on hand ever since.
— Born with a harmless condition called situs inversus-- her entire anatomy is flipped. If you vivisected her, you could watch her cryovelate heart beat unsteadily on the right side of her chest.
— There is a stray cat that can seemingly magic it’s way into her apartment. She’s tried boarding up windows, stuffing the cracks in doors, hunting for anyway in at all to block up. The half-feral cat still gets in. By now, they live in a kind of perpetual armistice. When money is good, she buys it treats. When times are bad, it brings her dead things she very much does not want.
a drabble about one character killing another for @eristeia
Every so often nature and nurture reach a consensus and render the whole debate moot.
Nature: One has to take Nihliumdom as a comment on the kind of person you inherently are. Scripturally speaking, it’s difficult to interpret the sin staining every one of you to the marrow as anything but a forecast into what you, growing unchecked, will become: A monster. You’re guilty of the most significant murder concievable before you are even concieved. You killed God. You’re a bad person by default.
Nurture: One has to take the murder of one’s entire family as a comment on the kind of person you inherantly are, too. No matter how terrible those people are, they are not just family, but people. A whole group of people, who, no matter their sins, are not yours to decide the fates of. Nobody in your whole life has ever questioned the morality of your decision to slaughter a whole group of people out of hand, just taken for granted that the thing you did was unquestionably good, and this has undeniably twisted your conscience in ways that are as horrid as they are permanent. The premise of all your virtues is murder, the premise of all your sins compassion. Something there isn’t right, and though it’s hard for you to say what exactly, it’s clear that, once again, you’re a bad person.
So here we are. You’re a bad person. This is not always a bad thing. Every so often it comes in handy.
Killing isn’t all that remarkable a skill, actually. If you had to describe it, maybe you’d liken it to tweezing your eyebrows: You only flinch the first few times you do it; Afterwards, either the nerves sort themselves out or habit acts an anaesthetic, and it becomes so painless it never occurs to you why anyone else might be so endlessly anxious about such a quick little chore. In this case, you press a trigger, a consciousness is snuffed out on the other end, and that’s all there is to it. There’s no emotional Odyssey left to go on with it– you know the way by heart by now, you can sail on home to Penelope without detour.
That day, you meet Lars, you get coffee, you laugh about something Zhang said. You pass a convenient alley. You extract your gun. You put it to the back of his head, pull the trigger, and leave. You stop to pick up cigarettes on the way back to the hotel.
Your internal weather remains unchangingly overcast the whole time.
And let it not be said this is a failure of sentiment for Lars. By a wide margin he is your closest friend as of late, a person that seems to trespass past the lines of friendship into what you find is more like the siblinghood you dreamed of in your loneliest moments. It would be a lie to deny how quickly you’d embraced the existence of another consciousness with whom to exchange observations and experiences. It wouldn’t be inaccurate to say you love him. Loved him, rather. Neither would it be inaccurate to say his absence from your life will cripple you irreparably.
But it was anticlimactic, in the end, because he was so abject, lying there, so small, so inert, and you, you changed the whole world.
To put a long story short, Fei makes it out the other side. She dodges one bullet after the next, literal and metaphorical, and finally finds herself uncollared, unclipped, uncaged. After a decade-long fight, her life becomes her own. But it only stays that way for a moment.
In the end, there was no blaze of glory, no glittering fury, no terrible eyes shining. Just an animal creep towards survival. No divine madness - not prophetic, initiatory, poetic, erotic - and no menial madness either. Just the quiet sanity of endurance. No once upon a times or happily ever afters. Worse yet, no Didos on the pyre, no Ophelias in the pond, but brute, simplistic deaths, of meat reduced to carrion, hot blood to cold. But you’d never guess that from the film.
Emran delivers everything he ever promised her.
The silver screens burn gold with her inglory, with the moments of her realest grief, her unacted pain, her personal tragedy publically projected into a cleanly cut story. All the senseless chaos and violence she really suffered is artificially arranged into a thing with concrete meanings, which lights up every foggy consciousness in the audience with patterns and symbols and motivations and lessons. To Fei, it feels like something very essential has been taken from her to be cast up onto the screen– The personhood suffering’s messiness bought her, maybe, or the bulk of her soul, taken piece by piece in every frame ever shot, just like the old superstitions. She’s been reduced to a character in a story, encased in a long series of shots and storyboards, lines in a script, to be dissected and analysed and applied. Educed, not produced. Her existence, a tool to be used to draw a picture. A lovely picture, but a comprehensively flat one, that now belongs to everyone but her. Permanently. Forever.
Fei is put up in posters on dorm room walls and discussed in small talk and written about in op-eds; Fei is an icon; Fei is as convenient and disposable as a plastic cup.
Emran delivers everything she ever wished for. And now, again, she must live with the consequences of her wishing.
there’s a wound running through you and you keep gnawing at it
“ask polly: help! i’m the loneliest person in the world!” heather havrilesky // daughter // juansen dizon // valzhyna mort “a song for a raised voice and a screwdriver” // sue zhao @blossomfully // @malewifegirlboss on tiktok // margaret atwood // also amparán “glossary for what you left unsaid” // georges bataille “ecstasy” // sophocles
a drabble about one character saving another (or whatever, close enough, for some reason i never write the prompt i’m given) for @kasimirfrei
That night (the liminal space between night and morning really, with a clear black sky encrusted with stars, as beautiful as she could ever ask for), as has become habit by now, she does not so much approach as simply appear at Magpie’s side, the way a chained spectre materialises before an unrepentant sinner. The tricks of her new trade suit her beautifully.
“You know, for someone who's supposedly all about brotherhood, you're sure on your own a lot." You don't have to see her arrogant smile, canine-sharp, to hear it in the harsh cadences of her voice. "How lonely. Do you ever think maybe you’re so doggedly devoted to communism because you hope it’ll magically buy you the belonging you’re after? The love?”
He glares at her. Every time she appears, they all glare at her. They ask for help and then despise her for giving it, as if they're entitled to nice, conciliatory aid. Of course she takes liberties with them. In her current state, she takes what little she can get.
"Come on, comrade, it’s just a theory of mine. No need to look so cross. Besides, I come bearing gifts."
With a flourish, she produces a neatly folded note from the powers that be and holds it out to him, only to teasingly retract it as soon as he reaches out.
"Patience." A brief bark of unkind laughter. "I’m not done yet. I know you hate wordplay, but I think you'll like this one.” Her eyes glitter with– amusement? Antagonism? Hard to tell the difference anymore. “An antinomy: There's a flock of birds, and one of them, a magpie, saves all the birds that can't save themselves and only those birds. If this is true, does the magpie save himself? If he does, he doesn't and if he doesn't, he does. What do you think?”
No reply. Not unexpected. The birds do so hate to play her games by now. She lets the silence linger, her teeth biting her tongue, her thoughts circling the present conundrum: Which names to jot on the death warrant.
When she speaks again, her tone has dropped and flattened. The letter is once again offered, for real this time. "You've forgotten just how closely you're being watched.” A pause, a check to confirm Magpie is listening. She can’t afford to waste these words. “And how little we'll tolerate having our toys taken away."
"And what does that mean?"
"It means I've been sent to kill you, of course, and put down your little insurrection with you," she answers a touch too casually, coloured with boredom, and tosses him her gun, the same gilded pistol that once upon a time she used to carry, "But I suppose something went wrong along the way. Someone tipped you off, perhaps, or maybe you were just too clever for me. You defended yourself, killing me before I could complete my task."
Below the jackal mask fused to her skin, her smile twists briefly, bitter, hopeful. Patiently, she waits for the click of the gun, the mercy of being spared the Faceless’ punishment for her betrayal. Their fault, really, for using so many archetypal trickster creatures for their pawns. The kind of creature that takes any way out it can get.
"Despite what we might want to think, the Faceless aren't infallible, after all. Do go prove that for us."
a drabble about one character asking for another (or like close enough) for @infelicits
It seems entirely unfair that someone should have to both live and die alone.
Perhaps as Fei has become more at peace with the inevitability of the former, her terror of the latter has balooned in response, to the point where every spike of pain skewers a needle of fear up through her cortex. But panic can be every bit as useful as it is disorienting– We all know the story of the mother lifting a car wreck off her trapped child. Hysterical strength, they call it. Maybe that’s how shatter-spined Fei, broken to bits by a four story fall, manages to drag herself to a phone booth glowing on a solitary corner.
(If there is supposed to be some heist procedure for what to do when you’ve slipped up and fallen to what is effectively your death, it might be stored in the bit of Fei’s brain dashed across the moon-stabbed pavement or trickling out her ringing ears. The rest of the team will simply have to adapt.)
And now the question of the antidote to Fei’s final fear, who to call with her lone quarter: Lars would ask too many questions, catch on too quickly, try offering solutions Fei didn’t have the time left to consider; Anezka would find the whole thing frightfully fascinating, probably romantic, and Fei can’t find it in her to play right now; Ward wouldn’t pick up and anyway his track record of caring when terrible things happen to her leaves something to be desired.
What she wants right now isn’t help or fantasy or nostalgia. What she wants is someone that understands. That’s always understood.
Three rings and then comes the sleep-stained “Hello?”
“Rachel, I need you to do me a favour.” Fei counts on the slur of her voice sounding close enough to drunkenness not to seem out of character. “Tell me a story. Please.”
In her peripheral vision, which darkens into deeper black by the minute, hover all manner of unpleasant things. Her head is propped uncomfortably against the phone booth’s corner, bleeding her pulse against the grimy glass, her body arranged so even having gone slack she can keep the receiver dangling near her ear. There isn’t long left.
“Maybe about the strangest gamblers you’ve ever encountered. Bar me, of course.”
This earns her a short laugh from the other end. Fei’s rapidly fading consciousness lights up with gratitude. She tries to express as much, desperately attempting to arrange her lips into the shapes of the proper words, meaningful words, but her voice fails her utterly.
“A story, huh?” There’s some evident hesitation from the other end, probably debating whether to ask why Fei’s calling at this hour for bedtime stories or just give in. Ultimately, thankfully, Rachel relents. “Did I ever tell you about the woman who kept trying to sneak her ‘psychic’ dog in to the roulette wheels? One day we actually let her get away with it just to see what would happen and once she sat down at the table, the dog sta
ㅤ
a funny drabble about one character trying to cheer another up for @devxtions
"I said no."
"Fei. I live here too. You can't refuse to let me in."
"You just can't come in right now."
"Why not?"
"Because you can't."
"That's not a reason, Fei, and you know that. I'm coming in."
"...Fine. Don’t say I didn’t warn you."
"..."
"..."
"...What happened here?"
"You've never told me when your birthday is. So here we are."
"And that supposed to explain the… whatever that is dripping from the ceiling, how?"
"That's the cat's fault."
"The cat?"
"Sure, the stray cat that keeps getting in. You've never seen it?"
"No."
"I've named it Vlad the Impaler. Seems an appropriate name right about now."
"Okay then. Walk me through how Vlad painted our ceiling with what I'm almost sure is blood."
"Like I said, I don't know when your birthday is."
"Uh huh."
"And we've lived together for a while and I thought probably it's passed and you just haven't told me."
"Okay? You could have just asked."
"Easy enough to say, but you're so cagey. Maybe you're hiding from people hunting you down to celebrate your birthday against your will. Not my place to pry."
"That's the reason you’re going with?"
"You’ve seemed down lately. I thought it would be a nice surprise. Who doesn’t like birthdays?"
"I'm starting to get the picture. This was supposed to be cake?"
"The batter."
"And it was supposed to be that shade of red?"
"Not quite, no. But the boxed stuff seemed so cheap, I added a bottle of Merlot to make it more upscale."
"And you didn't think that would mess the cake up?"
"No?"
"..."
"..."
"It looks like you murdered someone in here."
"It's not that bad."
"Fei, the wall is covered. How did you even manage that?"
"Well, once I made the batter, I poured it into the pan there, but because we've got no counter space, I put it on the table while the oven heated. And then the cat got in."
"And?"
"And it brought a dead bird with it. Or at least I thought it was dead and evidently so did Vlad. The only one that wasn't so sure about the deadness was the bird, which waited until Vlad the Impaler dropped it to start flying again, full speed straight at the window. It hits the glass, and Vlad goes wild, springing after it, and the disoriented bird freaks out and flies directly at me, so of course I dodge, and Vlad springs across the table at me, landing on the edge of the pan, which flips and splatters the batter across the room and Vlad and me and the bird. And the chase scene continued for a few minutes with a lot more splattering. Hence the paw prints on the wall."
"And where are Tweety and Sylvester now?"
"I don't know."
"You look like Carrie."
"I know."
"You could have just talked to me.”
"I know "
"Do you need help cleaning up?"
"On your fake birthday? Perish the thought."
"Come on, I'll get a mop or something."
"...Thanks, Thea. I don't know what I'd do without you."
Florence Welch, from Useless Magic: Lyrics and Poetry; “Song Continued”
[Text ID: “Not beautiful enough, too / bloody and ragged… / I needed it to dredge me out. / Drain my lungs, / Massage my heart till I’d / coughed it up.”]
a drabble about one character killing another for @kasimirfrei
Kasimir is, as usual, talking.
He does an awful lot of that, has been for days now, retracing the steps of the plan in excruciating colour. Used to be that Fei couldn’t tune him out at the best of times, but now, when his voice reaches her, it sounds warped and distant, as if rippling towards her through open water. Until she actually snaps out of her reveries enough to turn and look, she doesn’t even realise he’s beside her and not across the house suite’s garden, his expression grave, still dressed in his waiter’s uniform. His is still neat, smartly pressed, in sharp contrast to her own which is creased by action and flecked with blood, all lost buttons and torn sleeves.
Thoughtlessly, she offers him a cigarette and Mateo’s lighter, waves it away when he tries to hand it back.
She blinks, gathers herself. “Repeat that last part for me.”
"I asked if you did it on purpose."
Again she lapses into contemplative quiet. Fei isn't looking at him, gaze instead turned back to the cityscape’s jagged, dentate horizon, but she can imagine his expression well enough as is.
"I take it you haven't told the others it was my fault yet."
"I wanted to ask you first."
She takes a long, resolute drag from her Menthol, cool and medicinal in a way she’s never found wholly pleasant, and smiles dryly into the dark. Between the regular 'family dinners' and the night's exertion, her face has regained its colour, and she must for once look well and truly alive even in the dimness.
"You're always playing the saint, Red."
Idly, she taps her cigarette’s spent ashes over the roof’s railing, which tumble like snowflakes towards the street below.
The question of the hour: did she doom them all on purpose? Divert from the plan and thereby deposit their team neatly into place on the Faceless' gallows? Until her, it had all gone off without a hitch, the logical dominos toppling in exactly Kas' spiraling arrangements, all until they reached her and she... Well. It didn't much matter now. Intentional or not, she’d effectively already killed Kasimir, killed the team, killed herself.
She almost sounds amused when she speaks again. "Getting us all killed just to prove myself right about you does sound like something I'd do."
Nevermind that she'd proved nothing, save for maybe the contrary, that Kasimir wanted to live, wanted them all to live. Even her. Nevermind any of it, really.
If you were to confirm every delusion a paranoid schizophrenic has ever had, gave them proof of shadowy organisations stalking them and plotting their demise, they wouldn't actually be any more afraid. The terror has already been experienced in advance, thoroughly exorcised, burnt up like a lantern's kerosene. A person is only allotted a finite amount of fear in this life— Her’s has all been spent in steady increments, at the townhouse, during preparation, at the gala, the awards show. Maybe every emotion she will ever get to feel is now fading in the rearview mirror, except, conversely to the metaphor, further than they may appear. At some point you do everything for the last time, even feel, and very rarely do you get to know that in advance. She supposes she’s lucky, in a way.
Fei turns her head, looks at Kasimir, and tries to listen to him.
"That isn’t an answer,” he is saying, among other things, things that might surely be anywhere from inspiring to incriminating but skate cleanly off her mind despite her best efforts.
She blinks emptily at him. "And yet it's all you're going to get."
In a clean motion, she flicks her still-lit cigarette (her final one?) over the balcony, gives Kasimir a companionable clap on the shoulder. Neither of them know when the Faceless’ guillotine blade will drop, but there’s no need to spend their waiting time like this, not when she suspects they won’t see morning light. There are goodbyes to say, arrangements to make, ceilings to stare blankly at, wondering why why why.
What was the expression again? Oh yes. Get busy living or get busy dying.
"Goodnight, Red," she says, oddly cheerful. Maybe all her hate’s been used up alongside the fear. "And for what it's worth, thank you."
a drabble about one character killing another for @gcdhoods @nvghtingale
Perhaps the least dignified thought possible to have pass through your head post cold blooded murder is “Oops.”
And yet that's what Fei is thinking, staring down the sights of her rifle, watching as Isabele's lips spill sweet nothings at the same rate as her wound leaks blood, as Pasi kittenishly strokes her hair and holds her hand and remains totally bullet-free.
Damn. Damn, damn, damn.
What was she thinking anyway, having this occur at the opera? How very John Wilkes Booth of her. Terribly classless. It's embarrassing. She's embarrassed.
It occurs to her, as Pasi's head bobs down to Isa's chest and therefore very much into her line of fire, that Fei should just finish it out right here. Collateral damage didn't necessarily have to translate to abject failure, now did it? But as she watches them collapse in on themselves in grief, the same way dying stars are said to fall into black holes, she's forced to pull back, relax her finger off the trigger.
Maybe letting this play out is better revenge than a bullet through the brain? Maybe she could keep playing the sympathetic friend to Pasi from here on out, twist the knife? The curtain falls and no one knows she did it. She's been careful, completely and utterly sneaky, purely devious. Someone - her family? Tara? - would be proud of her for the sheer artistry.
The applause rings out and Fei fancies it's not for the puppets on stage, but the sole actor among them. The one enforcing change instead of succumbing to it. Displaying some agency. Her. Finally.
a drabble about one character giving another a gift for @gcdhoods
“What’s this?"
Even though, all things considered, this is a perfectly fair question to ask her, Fei's eyes nonetheless glimmer with contemptuous impatience behind her incongruously large sunglasses.
Out of the blue she has arrived at Pasi’s doorstep, buried under a massive black greatcoat (too hot for full furs, these Mediterranean Julys, and so she’s limited herself to mink collars and cuffs), shifting uneasily in the lazy morning light, the weighty summer heat. It makes her seem a little like a horror actor who has dragged herself out of wardrobe and onto the wrong set, only realising her mismatched scenery mid-performance, her practised menace admirably clung to but melting under a startled self-consciousness like a salted slug. Startled– that’s the word. Despite having shown up of her own volition, Fei seems to be stifling shock and dismay at her own presence here, every ounce as surprised as Pasi.
"A winning lottery ticket," she answers dryly, "What does it look like?"
For the first time they really inspect the glassy trinket that she’d pushed into their hands before she’d so much as offered a hello and recognition lights up behind their eyes. The compact twinkles and glints in their many-ringed hands.
"This is mine. I thought I lost it?"
In return for the gift, they flash her a dubious look. The implication there being clear: Did you steal this? If so, why are you drawing so much attention to its return? It wouldn’t be the first time she’s ‘happened upon’ something meant to be safely tucked in another’s pocket, but never has she made any great effort at releasing her successful steals, at least not without some ulterior motive simmering under the harsh edge of her words.
"You did lose it.” She’s trying to sound bored, mostly succeeding. “You dropped it last time you came to check in. I found it snapped open and crushed under a barstool's chair leg after close.”
"Really?"
A lapse into silence. Fei shifts under her coat again, looking like she’s trying to hide in it, dissolve into the fluttering swathe of dark fabric.
"I was under the impression it had sentimental value.” Another pause. Belatedly, as if it has only occurred to her, she adds: “I expected there would be some kind of reward for its safe return.”
The trinket clicks open easily, familiarly in their hands. The mirrors within are spiderwebbed with cracks running the gamut from massive and miniscule, but Pasi’s reflection on the whole is more or less clear and complete. Each shard has been carefully arranged back into place and dexterously glued down, reconstructed without any reference but the pieces’ own fault lines, laid out like a picture-less puzzle liable to slice your fingers (and, indeed, from a glance at her hands, the finger tips are speckled with pin prick wounds). It must have taken ages.
“Did you-”
But their question is cut off with a strained flurry of Fei’s plans for an upcoming visit to ‘their mutual friend,’ myriad complaints about a cloudy emerald fitted on a recently gifted earring, a sally of sarcastic pleasantries, conversational static, verbal white noise, punctuated just as suddenly with a clipped goodbye and a hasty retreat. No more mention of rewards for safe return, no harried insistence on payment upfront. Enmity is as precarious as any goodwill, as wiltingly fragile– Fei keeps her hackles up long after she’s disappeared.
What came over her? Temporary insanity. A bout of foul morality. A horrifying fit of decency.
