the lonely hearts hotel,

[sparklingdiamant]

* KNOT.

these hands will hold the world  but it will never be enough.

babette merlo on the loss of charlie darling.

She lays in her bed in a pool of red and gold silk that had once been grand, wine and ichor spilled over from the cup of Aphrodite. Now, as the knocking increases and wakes her from her slumber, the staff member rushes inside with wild eyes and a rapidly moving mouth, it’s as if she’s been slit from bow to sternum and left to bleed out. Suddenly, those colours around her seem to be a puddle of blood and broken halcyon bones. Babette’s irritation folds at the waist. It bends over, topples, reshapes into something awful. She is a gaping wound in the middle of the Moulin Rouge.

The police -- they’re here -- they’re taking Charlie.

Her movements are made with a raw swiftness that has no eloquence. She is only a flower now if she is the tulip ripped from the garden bed and scattered in the storm. She leaves petals in her wake, the scent of her snagging on corners in her hurried pace, feathers from her robe falling like sad birds. Her sprint is so sudden and haphazard that she does not hear the next sentence that leaves the staff-girl’s mouth, careening as she is down the stairs with so little control that at one turn of corner her shoulder smashes into a wall, leaving a purple bruise that will bloom for days. The door to his quarters is open.

“Charlie!” She calls his name as an inverting star does. Hopeless. Clinging to a universe that has no more care for her. The room is empty. It takes only a few blinking moments to understand this, and in the race down to the entry of the Moulin Rouge, Babette begins to understand what has happened. The part in the dark, knowing part of her beats on: he is gone. She refuses to listen, to stop moving. 

She is a pale blur in the entryway, salt water and silk and the blood loss of a girl who has lost something dear.

“Char--” 

There is a weight against her abdomen, a strong-arm to the bullet of her waist. A tall, unfamiliar man catches her as a car door at the foot of the entrance. He has the soothing tone and the apathetic face of a man of law. She moves forward and he pulls her back, and she screams his name again, this time with the break of her heart cracked into the middle of it, and she swears she sees the automobile shake. She thinks maybe it’s Charlie trying to come back to her, rattling against restraints the way Athena had in the head of her father before she sprang loose. 

Mademoiselle Please is what the police call her, repeating again and again as she strains against them with further hysteria: Mademoiselle, please -- 

Mademoiselle Please, calm down. Mademoiselle Please, stop. Mademoiselle Please, step back. Mademoiselle Please, go inside.

The staff come for her shortly, and they keep her newly annointed surname.

Darling Please, Cherie Please, My-Love Please, Flower Please.

Blood and honey fills Babette’s ears as she is coaxed into the arm of the den madame, the officer explaining the charges and planned action to the woman holding her. The detainee will be returned to London to face trial for his crimes. The world’s colour drains, circling her before falling into the middle as if into a giant drain. Something hot and white moves rises from her stomach up her throat, and she has to cover her mouth to stop it from burning off her tongue and into the atmosphere. It takes her some time to recognize she is choking on the sound of a sob.

It falls out of her mouth nonetheless.

She hears, as she stumbles away from the woman and into the club with wavering step, someone call to get Evangette. Another yells for Vivienne. Neither will help, she wants to tell them. The one that can has been taken away, I am wounded, she wants to scream. I am bleeding and I cannot make it stop.

The vertigo numbs her as she takes to the stares once more, scenes from a life she had lived playing across the backs of her eyelids as she took the flights in dizzied haze. Her eyes, glassy and sweet-looking, see as little as a doll’s does as she climbs flights. Spilled champagne, sitting on his knee. The smoke of the fire and her body burning hours later. Cigarettes in his button-up shirt. Burned chicken and two bottles of wine. Wet thighs and soap on her palms as she runs a blade over his jaw. Drunk on the couch, fingers over mouths. Spinning around in a restaurant. Yellow sunlight and a knocking boat. Dark closeness and the weight of him. 

Babette is outside the Red Room when she feels the mean, cold stone of loss slide down her throat and into her stomach, a reverse of the white star that had bitten up her lungs earlier. it rests in her stomach like a dreg from the bottom of the ocean, weighing her down and making her immobile. She cries then, in the moment before she can get to the door, collapsing as she turns the knob, and it is awful. There is no fancifulness to her sorrow, no beauty in the misery that can be visibly seen across her scrunched face. She is bent at the middle as she staggers into the room, the tears come hot and fast and relentless, until they burn her cheeks and eyes, turn her vision blurry until she can see nothing at all. Her pale hand covers her delicate mouth, trying to mask the sounds of pain escaping her as she wracks. Tiny noises of suffering escape her in spastic hiccups, her shoulders jolting up and down with the power of her weeping. 

For the first time, she cries like a girl with something to lose.

She says something as she falls at the foot of the couch, trembling butterfly-wrists twitching for a cushion to grasp, and it might be No or Please or God Have Mercy Return Him To Me, or perhaps another rendition of his name. She has no recollection. 

She tremors there for long moments, left on her knees as if begging forgiveness off a higher power, and there is no enlightenment that comes as she stands on weak legs and takes to a dark chestnut drawer. It takes three tries to open the wood box with her trembling hands, an effort made to look at the ring they had made of a costume piece, an attempt to soothe her choking heart with nostalgia. Instead, it only serves to panic her more. The sight of it sets her into even greater erraticism, storm clouds pouring down upon the angry sea, inciting it into madness. She clutches the ring suddenly and with enough tightness to bite into her palm, and where she grasps it, a red mark will be left where the carved sides chew at her soft flesh. 

Give it back to me when you’re ready to return to what we were.

Babette clutches at her mouth again as a silent noise of loss wracks through her. She wishes in the way of a child -- hopelessly and with erratic repetition -- that he had never taken it off. She wishes he still had it resting over his heart, thumping into his ribs, as a reminder of her. She wants so desperately for him to go to sleep tonight holding a piece of her.

The walk to her bed has never felt lengthier, and by the time she arrives in her bed she feels as though she has lived through a week without sleep. The tears continue, steadily albeit quietly, as she changes. Here and now, she makes no change from silk to silk, velvet to velvet. Instead, she only strips everything off until she is nothing - only slim body and erratic heart - and turns off all the lights, blows out the candles, stifles the incense. She slides into her bed and pulls the covers around herself, hiding into the fabric. There, alone and stripped of all her beautiful things and wonderful comforts, she cries again. This time with soft, heartbroken noises, kissed into the velour of her pillows while she clutches at the ring between her breasts.

Here is the truth of the matter: there are not always exceptions for those that were meant to have a grand story. In our tale now, we know with certainty from our vantage point atop the velvet balcony that these two souls which we gaze upon loved one another. We can be sure that in due time, our players would have recognized the sapphire-desperate hunger of their matching hearts, and confessed to one another in ways most assuredly romantic and poetic. We can disconcert in the way of fact that they were meant for a life intertwined. As certainly as we ascribe that meat loves salt and midnight loves tragedy, we can ascertain that Babette Merlo and Charles Darling were knotted in a way that could have never untangled.

We can know all these things, and know it means nothing at all.

He loved her. She loved him. It should be said that in their last moments inhabiting the same space, they thought of one another at the exact same moment. And while this is a plot device found very lovely by permanent observers such as celestial bodies and other firmament hitchhikers, that is of no great help to us (or them) here.

They loved one another. And in the finale, when that end-of-act curtain came down heavy like the hand of god, it did nothing. While he craned his neck to find one last glance of her and she called his name to make her throat bleed, there was simply nothing else. It would not matter how voraciously he turned or she yelled. The timing was off -- they had missed it. The chance to see one another, perhaps, or potentially the ability to fulfill what a more truthful would call destiny.

The greatest thing you will ever learn is that not every show ends in applause. Sometimes there is only silence.

[psych-facts]

The mouth is made for communication, and nothing is more articulate than a kiss.

 Jarod Kintz, It Occurred to Me (via lo-writes)

[voulezvous-rpg]

to get a context of what an important client constitutes, how often is the red room utilized by someone that isn't the diamond for those patrons? it seems like as its the permanent residence of the diamond it would be rare, so i want to get it right

It’s definitely rare, for those big high rollers that the club is dying to impress. I’d say you could probably count on one hand the number of times it happens in a year.

[inboxmemethings-deactivated2015]

Send me ಠ_ಠ to know an inappropriate thought my muse has had about yours.

[sparklingdiamant]

just a note that I am on hiatus on babs and @galateareborn until the 17th! i may still respond or be online as i’m staying with em ( aka @ofulysse / @ofartemyisms ) and who doesn’t love an rp party. anyway ily and be back soon!!

[lolzsapphire-blog-deactivated20]

[sparklingdiamant]

charlesdarling:

BABETTE. { @sparklingdiamant }

                                                           - F L A S H B A C K -

He hadn’t known what to expect, but this was certainly more. Even the driveway alone was impressive, a long stretch of road that seemed to wind endlessly through the woods, nothing but the sound of wheels on the track and birds singing in the canopy above them, passing a set of sentinel statues before the foliage either side gave way to sprawling lawns and gardens that he could only assume were tended to daily. Babette stirs at his side but he leaves her to her silence, watching out the window thoughtfully. Whether a different sort of ghost haunted her at this location remained to be seen, but at least they were escaping the ones that tormented them back in the city.

Charlie whistles a low sound under his breath as everyone bundles out, descending upon the house as though it were always their home. His eyes seek out the one person who knows its architecture more intricately, the one who could find her way around its interior in the pitch dark. “Show me around,” he requests, but her hand is already in his, stepping over the threshold out of the summer sun that’s beginning to stretch out their shadows across the ground as it grazes over the tops of the trees. His gaze snags on everything inside – the staircase, the paintings, the intricate rugs – and he finds himself wondering what it must have been like to run through a place like this as a child. To bruise your knees on polished wooden floors rather than cut them open on brick walls and glass. “So this place is your father’s?”

She slept, like the girl she had been in transit to this place so many years ago. Just as in childhood, her excitement was an overwhelming thing that bubbled over the edges at the start of it all, the contents within her slowly depleting as she spilled over the sides during the journey until she had no energy left. The raucous laughter and ice-bucket chilled bottles of wine on the train had declined and melted as she pivoted to rest on Charlie’s side, a familiar platform for sleep. She is like honey dripping from a spoon as they rise, sticky-slow in the beginning, building into something fast. There is general sweet instruction for the crowd from Babette dictating the lack of rules before she pivots to and snags onto him, turning and slotting her fingers into the carved out spaces of his larger ones.

“You have to see everything.” They have days to cover the indistinct ground of all of it, but her eagerness determines that it must be now. Her remaining free hand crosses over the horizontal of her body to hold his forearm as well as she pulls him away from the curious crowd, moving towards shutter doors to the right. “Yes,” she nods. “When I was very young, there was another place that belonged to Louise’s family.” Louise, because there is no name in the French-English-global language for the woman rightfully married to your father while your mother is the mistress and you are the bastard. “I was never allowed at that house.” There is something telling in the easy-blink way she says this with only twist of her lips. “But he bought this one later. He liked it because it was older. -- This is the parlour.” She releases the hold of his arm enough to open the delicate glass entrance, pushing open the door to a circular room awash with natural light and flowing sheer curtains. “Oh,” There is an audible coo of adoration. She’s so happy she feels lit-up. “Mamá and I used to open all those windows when a breeze came through so that all the curtains flew up and . We’d lay down on the couch or on the floor and I’d pretend they were angels.”

[sparklingdiamant]

GIRLS JUST WANNA HAVE FUN * EV & BABS.

@thewhitcswan

She carries Berlioz in one hand and a bottle of fine rosé and small package in another, and she is the third lovely thing among them, wrapped up as she is in the sheer pink robe, fur lining dusting the hallway as she sweeps down the stairs from her room. A trio of walking gifts, all three make noise: the cat purring softly, the wine sloshing inside its sleek bottle, and the girl humming in excitement as she walks too quickly towards Evangeline’s door. Like the girl that had begged her mother to allow a tulle-clad younger version of the swan to stay overnight, she became overeager at the nearness of the other, turning into a girl once more that knew nothing about being a graceful Diamond.

“Evie!” She calls through the entryway, lifting one foot to tap at the door in absence of a free hand. “It’s me!” There is a moment in the pause of this night that Babette can feel how little has changed, and how much she wishes for it to stay like this. Her life had altered drastically since childhood, but stood at the centre of this world-spinning was the same girl unlocking the door and sharing the stage with her each night. “Which would you like first: a prince, or a gift?”

[sparklingdiamant]

ARTURO.

     As one would expect, there were many days when Arturo felt he was the luckiest man alive to be surrounded by such beauty and inspiration on a daily basis. He loved his girls, every last one of them in their lace, silk, chiffon, and glitter. Some days he loves ones more than others—though he would never admit to bias—today was Babette’s day. Arturo leaned into her touch. Somehow, hearing her purrs in his mother tongue made him feel more tired than he did before. She’d put a spell on him, and he would not have had it any other way. 

     “Eres muy amable conmigo, bomboncita.” His shoulders never tired of being perches for these little birds to rest their heads. Arturo believed her when she said things would get better, because that little voice could tell him anything and it would sound like heaven in his ears. He smiled, and lifted his hand to pat her cheek. “If you sit on my bench you must play me something. You know the rules.” 

They had their secrets, the two of them, and in the times when they did not they made new ones. It felt right to keep something from the others, to barn up words and dreams and false facts behind the wood and flesh of their shared skin. His return to her in their tongue made her smile. She wanted to have things with him that no one else could bite from, wanted to be a part of herself that nobody else might want or understand. It was strange, to be selfish in the name of another individual. But they were strange, in that witch-magick way.

After all, it was one of Babette’s favourites games to name Arturo her brother to passing strangers and waiters on their nights away from the club, then to kiss him full on the mouth in view of all as they left dinner. And perhaps he was her brother in some way; moreso than the pale-skinned half-sibling that had lived in the towering house before her own.

“What shall I play? Something like this -- ” Her fingers move against the black and ivory without waiting, as the spring-like girls are ought to do, playing something purposefully too fast and jaunting for his mood. Babette cants her head to look at him and raises her eyebrows with the turn of the notes, teasing. She laughs as the crescendo, her sound usurping the piano’s. It floats gently to the ceiling as the notes loosen their hold and return with grace. She has the hands of a girl who learned this at the hour before dawn, her father rousing her from slumber with red-eyes and slanted-mouth, keeping her from school and playing off his hangover as he corrects her movements. She still feels like a girl-child wishing to impress something greater than herself. Babette slows, creates an intermission of her own. “Tell me only what you would like to hear,” Her hand curves to the thigh above his knee, neither sister nor whore. “I will give it to you.”

[apolloblanc]

Visit Original Link

Cendrillon | C'est ca l'Amour

[violentwavesofemotion-deactivat]

The rose among the roses / Doesn’t resemble another rose.

Robert Desnos, tr. by Amy Levin, from “Mobius Strip,” (via okayodysseus)

[sparklingdiamant]

CHARLIE.

“Greater taste?” he echoes incredulously, the words swimming with laughter that is neither warm nor amused. He almost asks her what she knows of his tastes but the truth is that Babette has always known what he likes better than he does himself. And maybe that was because he only had a fondness for the things she pointed out, like the fancy watch slipped from a drunk bachelor’s wrist, or an abandoned coat that he’d never be able to afford plucked up before its owner returns; maybe it was the look on her face when he confirmed that he did indeed want the treasure she spied that he liked the most. Charlie runs a hand through his hair, the presence of reality beginning to feel far too close and hot. Choking on its humidity when he exhales, a single scoff, he wonders how the things that had once bound the two of them together managed to simultaneously rip them apart. “Oh please, you ain’t caviar, sweetheart.” The rest of his statement claws its way up his throat, burning. “There’s nothing refined about a plate that’s had half of Paris eatin’ off it.”

Anger twists, ugly inside him. He doesn’t know what’s worse – her hypocrisy or the fact that he’s insulting her over something that has never bothered him. Somewhere in the back of his skull, a quiet thing begs him to stop with all the gentle delicacy they had both once possessed, lazy in the morning rays with adoring smiles, but he ignores it stubbornly. “I wasn’t aware that you were trying to improve me, Babette. Go on, tell me more. Was I just a pet for you to take home to daddy and piss ‘im off? To show the world what a generous soul you are and cover up the fact that you’re just another deprived rich girl desperate to fuck her way back into money?” His fingers curl into fists, his shoulders tight. He doesn’t believe his words, yet now that he’s planted the seed of an idea it’s beginning to take root and dislodge the lovely things that had laid between them before. He watches the destruction unfold, blinking passively. Is this hurting you as much as it’s hurting me?

The worst of it is that had anyone else dared to speak to her like this, to suggest even for a second that she was anything less than perfect, Charlie would have been smashing his fist into their face until blood ran sticky and warm from a broken nose. All he could do instead was inflict the same pain on his heart.

“Why the fuck does it matter?” This is what he doesn’t understand, this is what will keep him awake at night. He has no idea what he and Babette are anymore but it’s safe to say that it isn’t friends and it isn’t lovers and it isn’t really anything in between those, so why did she concern herself with what he was doing, who he was doing? The truth lies upon his tongue, ready to be offered. He hesitates, uncertain as to whether the silent connotations that would come with it are worth admitting. “It’s– maybe she manages to–” Charlie’s eyes are elsewhere, unable to look at her. He inhales. “She helps to fill the gap that you made.” His lips press together, sealing off any further admissions in the fear that the one he doesn’t want to say aloud will slip out. I miss you.

Her stare sinks through him, her silence collecting in the pit of his stomach. The lack of denial or protest is noted and scratched into his bones, marrow-deep, to keep him from forgetting that, somehow, Babette Merlo has moved on. That there would be no mourning for this particular death. 

Charlie turns his attention to the stage, to the safety of that warm, golden glow. He steps out and lets the grin tug at his lips until everything else has dissolved away, speaking words that he’s barely listening to yet spill, licked in silver, from his tongue. He pauses for a reaction, winks for effect. It’s easy and thoughtless and when he flourishes a hand in the direction of the wings, he reminds himself that the person who emerges is not Babette but instead The Diamond. “The loveliest creature you’ll find in all of France, Ladies and Gentlemen.” 

He carves out another chunk from between her ribs with digging hands, messy scraping fingernails. These are all things she’s heard before, from the high-collared men in the streets outside Montmartre or protesting outside the club, from scorned clients and would-be never-was lovers. It plays across her face just how hurt and angered she is by Charlie saying it. Her heart stutters inside that rack of porcelain bones. “Don’t be bitter,” She hisses, vicious and heartbroken. “Just because you cannot afford it.”

And what’s the implication there, she thinks too late -- that she had something he might want to buy? That the singular night they’d shared and that ruinous kiss in a pantry meant they were not by some account (had never been) just friends? Babette can’t be sure of the truth in these ideas, but she knows the validity in what he says next -- none at all. Don’t you know that isn’t it, she wants to scream at him, because surely he has to know how real it had all been for her. That she had left her apartment to see him and invited him back to it because of the ever-surging need to be by him. What might have been a fierce Of course not turns into Why are you so hateful? in her eyes, inhaling with a wounded sound at the brace of impact of his slight. He was using such intimate knowledge of her to hit where, whether he knew it or not, was most vulnerable. Tears prick at her shining eyes. “Well, if you were, what a poor job I did.” It’s not as cutting as she could be, but she is scrambling in this will not to cry. It takes another moment to swallow the blood and pain. She will spit out bile next: “What could anyone ever make of you?”

Deprived rich girl and the street rat. What an awful tragedy they made, staring at each other like that.

He asks her why it matters, and she answers on the heel of his question, tacking her answer onto the very punctuation of his sentence: “Because it does.” It’s emboldened and demanding, insisting he acknowledge the weight of her power here. Babette doesn’t have another answer, or a lengthier one, because she doesn’t know herself. What she knows is that it makes her wretch to think of him pitching himself beneath the sheets of Netty’s bed, touching her like he cares. She watches as he fumbles towards his answer, her own eyes flicking quickly between his before he is looking away. Then all she has is the image of a hollow space beneath Charlie’s chest, wondering what a her-sized space looks like in him. Was it the shape of her curled up in his bed hollowed out beneath his ribs, or a blank chunk of him missing where her silhouette had melted into his when walking in the twilight? The implications are heady and dangerous and she is far too frightened to look at them. It was a point-blank stare that they had made an impact on one another large enough to leave rickety pieces when they were forcedly taken apart. Babette couldn’t quite bare to shoulder that acknowledgement, as selfish and small a creature as she was. She was too fearful. So she says something she doesn’t quite believe, but forces herself too: “Than if you are trying to forget me, why shouldn’t I do the same to you?”

Maybe it should be an irony that Babette is aware of, that Charlie introduces with such booming vocal charm while she prances on stage with only the voice of her hips, her legs, the come-hither-and-fuck-me stare of her green eyes. Only she as the Diamond is given a few choice moments to speak from her throat, and all the rest of the girls remain silent. Even when the upstairs girls leave the stage to warm the laps of men whose pockets lay beneath their thighs filled with francs, they have no true sound emitting from their lips. It’s only ever giggles, gasps, variations of don’t you know how I like you and don’t you know how I would love you to fuck me. She doesn’t have the opportunity to think about the voice Charlie gave her, the blockage he freed from inside her neck when he let her spill over each day with thoughts and opinions and fears she could not rightfully grasp in the arms of other men. She doesn’t have a chance to think about how much sound he gave to her red-scraped throat, teaching her with his kind pauses and warm hands (on her hips, her shoulders, her knee -- almost never the places the others reached for) that he wanted her inflection. There had been nights she had told Charlie everything in the world, babbling like unspooling gold thread after too many glasses of wine about childhood secrets and crying on his knee when she felt frightened of the future. Now, she had a voice, but nothing to say.

She is brilliant on the stage as she’s meant to be, taught -- as diamonds are -- which angles cause the spotlight to shine and refract. She takes Charlie’s extended hand to enter the stage, turning about his body to make a showcase of herself. Babette coos with pouted lips and paws for the imagined audience, playing in time with the MC -- not Charlie, not her Charlie -- and his quips. Her grin says she has never been licked by the heaving jaw of tragedy or loss. When she dances, a slow start of hip movements that picks up when she turns to look over her shoulder, her gaze blinks in morse code: i have never felt anything other than love for you. It’s magic, the transformation they take on stage. And when it comes to them returning together  centre stage as Babette pretends to tease Charlie for his attention, put off by the attention he gives those in their velvet seats, there is no hesitation in how she grips his collar. She puts her hands on her hips and sways them with a pout, a girl creating a distraction. She tugs at his jacket like she’s never worn it in the growing-cold evening.

And now it becomes a tease as she rounds behind him, pretty delicate hands coming like unexpected silence from behind him. While the height and whole of her is hidden, Babette’s arms rope from behind his torso, running up his abdomen and chest with investigative want. What a wanton and coy thing she is, see all? She simply can’t keep to herself. She can feel the solidness of Charlie’s build from beneath his shirt, the muscle of a man who worked in ways none of the genteel creatures paying for her ever have. She unsuccessfully does not think about what the image of him is without the shirt. He leg comes up next, the grand lead up, a move reminiscent of a sensual tango play as she drags her foot lightly over his own, teasing up his shin and moving higher -- higher. It’s meant to elicit a reaction in those watching, hooting forecasted as she makes a show of that leg’s flexibility, her thigh dragging up with slow precision over his until she hooks with ease over his waist. Her breath is warm, she’s warm, the cheeks that almost took her salt-tears are warm. The spotlight is hot.

[sparklingdiamant]

ANTHONY.

Babette was every bit the perfect girl to have on one’s arm, or in this instance, one’s lap. She was darling little nymph and whilst he gently reprimanded her for being a little too playful at times, it was nothing he didn’t take in his stride; especially when the reprimanding mostly happened in the privacy of her boudoir.

With another squeeze, he ensured the pretty little blonde knew what she was in for. He surely wouldn’t be satisfied that evening until her bottom became bright red and that honeyed smile wiped off her face. A low chuckle came from deep within his chest as he finished off his cigarette and put the stub out in the ashtray, fingertips brushing across the fine stockings, sliding up to her inner thigh. “You are brave, mon petit agneau. Most are afraid of my bite.” He purred, leaning into curve of her neck and nipping just gently as his nose bumped at her jaw to open her up to him.

Humming once more, he lifted his head from the sweet, dizzying scent of her perfume, brushing his face against hers with a nod, a grin coming to his face. “You say properly, my dear, but I’ve a feeling your thoughts are not that proper at all, hm?” A grin tugged at his lips as he looked upon the wily girl with a knowing face.

“Wicked things are right in the mind of the creatures of the night, are they not?” She leans closer to brush her nose against the Romanesque curve of Anthony’s own, rephrasing to him a thing they already know: that which is wrong becomes right in the upside down, and the Moulin Rouge was a suspension of reality. “I’ll be back

She saunters in a quick way, hips moving in a way that not suggests but makes clear that Babette knows his eyes, and the rest of those in the club, watch as she glitters across the dance floor unaccompanied. It’s rare to see a diamond floating free without a ring or lap to set her in.

“Bonsoir, Grace.”

Her approach and taking of Grace’s arm, spinning her so that they begin a talk back towards the table, is swift and soft without pause for apprehension on the dark-haired girl’s part -- perhaps an omen for things to come. 

“You know of Monsieur Holst, yes?” She intones under her breath, canting her head towards the girl while keeping her gaze forward as if conspiring to steal something golden and elusive in plain sight of policemen. “He’s a very important patron to the club. One of Mademoiselle’s favourites, and part of the reason we were even able to rebuild.” They are facts whispered between smiles, as women know the value of secrets. “And he has certain -- tastes which could make you quite a lot of money tonight. You do understand what I mean, don’t you?” 

She looks over, eyes sweeping skin so pale and fine it seems paper-thin. You are new, but you know, don’t you?

“My wolf,” she greets again as they appear at the threshold of Anthony’s shadow, releasing her arm in the link of Grace’s as she moves to fold like silk back into his lap. “This is our little Mademoiselle Grace. I’ve brought her to you for proper introduction.” She sits now peering from atop his knee like a fine king’s trusted advisor, blinking down at the new girl with a raise of her chin to encourage her to speak up. Babette leans in to Tony’s ear to whisper, one soft hand moving under the collar of his shirt to rub idly at the skin beneath. “Quite... kittenish, don’t you think?” She pauses, running her nails now over him. “-- Would you let me have her to play with?”

[sparklingdiamant]

* TRACKER.

owed: @rcdrighthxnd, @rcdrighthxnd / @agracefulmasquerade, @veraxestelle, @charlesdarling, @thewhitcswan, @titanesque, @arturodemarin, @thesterlingmoran.

waiting on: @avrelies (starter). @romanceruled (starter).

writing starters for: @ofulysse, @kingpinseo, @thewhitcswan.

plotting with: @viviennemoreau, @esmeledard, @adoubleentendre, @ellaesmeralda, @diva-valentina-cocteau, @ofartemyisms, @mcdwxrld, @the-claudianoire, @saphirlapierre, EVERYBODY ELSE PLEASE.

[sparklingdiamant]

b a b s   m e r l o   --  the rebuild.

dancing barefoot in the kitchen, crying on the floor, holding the hand of a tall man, reading naked in an armchair, dark sunglasses reflecting the seine, silk scarves in paper bags, stretching like a cat over the top of a piano, drinking champagne in the garden at blue dawn.

[dreamydreamerdreams]

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