(Bringing this back up for the @arcana-echoes prompt: Freebies)
A year before his famous drunken proposal to Nadia, Lucio pops the question, sober, younger, a lot less desperate, and a lot more ill-advised.
Relationship: Lucio x Sybilla
Warnings: Mentions of sex, alcohol, food
*
“Lillie-“
Finger-combing through the freshly dyed streaks of bright blue in her shiny silver hair, reclining lazily on one side of the Count’s bed, Sybilla hummed noncommittally, reaching into his bedside cabinet for the silver bottle of fine whiskey that he’d always kept stocked for her.
“D’you wanna get married?”
Her first instinct was to laugh, and she did, picking up the bottle in one hand and flicking a velvet cushion at him with the other. “Does good sex turn you into the marrying sort?” She teased, uncorking the whiskey and pouring it into a tall crystal glass. “I’ll take that as a compliment, Your Excellency.”
“Ugh.” Lucio rolled over, to lay a hand on her bare waist. She could feel his eyes trail up her spine, and hear the whine in his voice as he inched even closer. “Don’t call me that.” He grumbled. “And think about it.”
There was far too little humor in his tone for her comfort.
Even so, cradling the cool glass in her hand, she kept her voice light. “D’you want another party that badly?” She threw a sly glance over her shoulder. “You’d think-“
“I can hold another party whenever I fucking want.” He snapped. “I’m serious.”
Sybilla took a long, steadying sip of whiskey, letting the burn wash through the trepidation in her chest. Then, slowly, she turned around. “You’re serious.”
Lucio had propped himself up on his elbow, claw-less golden fingers still gently stroking her waist. She looked into his inexplicably guarded silver eyes, took in his slight frown, the absence of the lazy smile that she’d grown accustomed to seeing on these occasions, and frowned. “Lucio-“
“You don’t have to.” He drew his hand away, and plopped back down to the mattress, on to his back. “It’s just a thought. It’d be fun, y’know.”
“It’d be fun.” She echoed, deadpan.
Lucio sat up, crossing his legs beneath the covers and leaning back against the headboard, silver eyes sweeping over her as she stared at him. “Uh-huh.” From a silver platter laid at the foot of his bed, he picked up a slice of rich chocolate cake. “You can live at the Palace. It’s taken care of, so you won’t have the hassle of keeping a house- and you won’t have to wear yourself out on the road.” When Sybilla stayed silent, still incredulous, he added, with a grin, “I can name you Countess, if you want.”
Sybilla let out a breath, and a short, nervous laugh, her throat closing around her anxious, fluttering heart. “Don’t be ridiculous.” She leaned towards him to take a bite from the slice of chocolate cake. When he wiped away a smear of chocolate from the corner of her lips, she met his eyes with a small smile.
“It’s sweet of you to worry, but-“ she pulled away, “I like the road. You know I do.” He nodded, sweeping strands of her hair away from his face. “And besides,” She glanced at the curtained windows, as though she was looking through them to Vesuvia beyond, drenched in broad, sunny daylight. “Your city needs a real Countess. Or a Viscount.”
“I’m a real Count.” He scowled at her, pouring out a glass of red wine.
“Someone who knows their way around Court and politics” She went on, pointedly. “Or at least, someone who can get through it without gagging, you know?”
“Ew. Why?” Lucio made a face, rolling his eyes. “I hate ‘em too. And I’m doing fine.”
“You’ll have to do less of it with a partner in all of this who doesn’t.” She reminded him, tossing back her drink and pushing herself up off the bed. “I can’t help you there.”
To her surprise, he caught her hand just as she moved away from the bed. “You help me plenty, anyway.” His tone was still the same- grounded and bordering on grouchy, but she averted her gaze anyway, afraid of what she’d find if she took the chance to meet his eyes. “It’s-“ She cast around, schooling her voice back into the cordial teasing that she liked to default into. “I cast sigils and shield- spells for you, Lucio. I’m your abjurer. I can’t help you run a city.”
Lucio let her go, watching her slip back into her clothes, the semi-precious chips on her high-waisted pants matching the buttons of her silk shirt, lilac printed with tiny white flowers. Tossing a chocolate coated almond into his mouth, he scoffed. “I’m doing fine with the city. I don’t need help.”
Neither inclined to agree nor to disagree, Sybilla hummed as she ran an ivory comb through her hair, teasing out the blue-dyed strands to the front. “Maybe not, but they’ll expect me to.” She argued. “Why should I go to all that trouble just for a title and a room at the Palace that I already have, anyway?” She pinned on her brand new, ruby-studded hair ornament. Behind her, she heard a rustle of sheets as Lucio rolled out of bed.
“Never mind.” He sounded odd, and she busied herself with buttoning up her shirt in a futile attempt to cover up the pink and purple hickeys splotching her pale skin in a trail beginning from her throat. Lucio began to buckle the sharp armor pieces back on to his arm, and the clang of metal on metal would have drowned out his words had it not been for the brassiness of his voice. “Figured you like being here, so-“
She caught his gaze from the vanity’s mirror, feline green eyes softening. “I do like being here.”
“’Course you do.” Lucio agreed, easily. But she did not miss the way that the tension in his shoulders seemed to lift, instantly.
All at once, her words felt heavy in her mouth, as though pulling a weight that they weren’t meant to hold. As her heart picked up it’s pace again, she brushed a coat of fuschia gloss over her lips. “Which is why,” she said, finally, slipping into their shared, native tongue, always at odds with this city, Lucio’s city of eternal summers. “I don’t want to change anything about it.”
Lucio clasped on his golden claws, one by one. “What’ll change?” He switched languages too, opening and closing his palm. “We’ll still be the same.”
Sybilla stepped into her tall, heeled boots with a wince. “I mean,” she clicked on her bright yellow earrings, “Being here is fun. I get solid work, I make good coin, I get-“
“You get me,” he added on, matter-of-factly.
She laughed, nodding. “And you, sure.” She folded up a silk handkerchief, and daubed perfume on to the insides of her wrists. Lucio pulled his blood-red jacket back on, and swept his golden hair back with an easy, self-satisfied grin.
“I don’t want to ruin it with contracts and paperwork and titles and obligations and ugh-“ She grimaced, flinching away from the word. “And responsibilities.”
Lucio barked out a laugh. “Right.”
It hung in the air, softly, too close to the bubble of warmth and wanting in Sybilla’s heart. At any other time, she would have welcomed it. But now, it knocked at thin ice, and she wanted to draw back the thick black lines that seperated this- easy friendship and hazy nights, cozy, sunlit carefree rendezvous in his bedchambers, from anything else.
And so, she did.
“You should be careful, you know, dishing out these proposals.” She said briskly, pulling on her gloves. “What if you find someone you- you know- love?”
Lucio snorted. “I don’t dish ‘em out, gorgeous.” He pulled her velvet hat down from the hat-stand, coming up behind her to place it on her head. With a gentle finger, she brushed a strand of hair away from her forehead.
“And what does it matter if I do?” He slipped a tiny, ornate tin into her pocket. The chocolate almonds, she realized. For when she’d inevitably get bored and peckish at Court.
Her stomach swooped with an emotion that she couldn’t ever bring herself to name.
And then he shrugged, stepping away. “I’ll just marry ‘em too.”
“In that case,” Caught between leaning in and pulling back, Sybilla masked the conflict with another teasing smile. More distance. “When you do get married, however many times you do,” she arched an eyebrow. “I’ll expect a special invitation. And a handsome commission.”
Lucio puffed up, offering her his arm. “And you’ll get it.” He promised her. “ Only the best. I’ve never skimped out your payment.”
Rolling her eyes, she took his arm, mollified and relieved.
As they walked down the hallway, shutting the chamber’s door behind them, Sybilla attempted to stamp out the lingering question in time with the sound of their high heels tapping against the polished marble floor.
What brought this on?
She wondered if he’d expected her to ask.
He didn’t seem unsettled at all, laughing and poking fun at the more obnoxious members of his Court, his touch firm against her, even the metal warm with alchemy.
For a brief moment, she considered trying to muster up the courage to ask, and then the courage to look up and search his face, before it grated at something far too heavy beneath her skin, for far too long.
By the time they passed the wide oak doors into his Court, hours after the appointed time, lined-up aristocrats sweating in their frock coats and silk robes, their eyes narrowing, as always, when they landed on her, Sybilla had already let it go.
She muffled a yawn with the back of her hand, already bored out of her mind as she settled down on the plush velvet cushioned chair.
And then, letting Lucio pour her a drink, she began to count the minutes, wondering how much of Court she had to get through before she could pull him back into his bedchambers with a reasonably clear conscience.
Helping with the plague should not have been such an issue. And yet.... Here we are.
Lucio was bored. So bored, in fact, he got tired of looking at the sad faces of his precious Mercedes and Melchior as they were yet again, escorted out by Jules's new apprentice, when he used to feign tears to show solidarity to his pups. Their whines of protest make them coo with sympathy every time.
"I know, you two. We're gonna make him better so you can play all you want." Then, he sees it. Their ass. Maybe what they say about short people is true- they have bigger butts.
"-Count Lucio! Did you hear the question?" Lucio looked back up at them, red rimmed eyed from more that Plague-induced tears and busted blood vessels in his eyes. "How is your cough?" He has half a mind to cough on them, maybe let them take a look at more of his bloody mucus in a more personal way. But he doesn't have the energy for petty. Not today.
"It's the same," he grouses halfheartedly. "Maybe some wine with you will help?" He hoped it would make them laugh, but he can't tell behind the Plague mask.
“I don’t drink,” and somehow, Lucio finds they sound less human with that answer. “Did the tea help your throat?” To which he groans dramatically.
“I can’t stand that leaf water. Can’t you make me something that tastes better?"
"The leaf water is called tea. I can add honey and lemon for taste." Lucio huffed, but looked at them with his most winning smile.
"Only the best for me, right?" For whatever time he had left, no one had the heart to tell him that adding lemon juice and honey in tea wasn't as big of a deal as he seemed to think it was. "Can't add some red wine to that?"
"No sir. We want you well, not drunk."
In the next couple of weeks, they come and go, often with Julian. And while he wastes away in bed, the only things that seem in well working condition are his mouth and voice box.
"Hey Jules. Hey. Hey. Jules."
"Yes, Count Lucio?"
"I wanna talk to you."
"You already are."
“Sooo, while you’re working on the Plague, you gonna cure my boredom too?” Julian lifts his head in a way his apprentice realizes is one that would give the look of a man far too done with this shit if his face were visible.
"You can read, Lucio."
"Boring. Unless you wanna read in between the lines," to which Lucio made a very lewd gesture suggesting... oral activities.
"I'd rather not."
"Pfft, you're missing out. Unless you wanna watch me and your assistant with the sweet, sweet ass go at it."
"No thank you." Perhaps if they felt suicidal. But not today. Not yet.
Pairing: Nadia x Lucio, with mentions of Lucio x OC and Asra x Nadia
Title Taken from “To an Athlete Dying Young” by AE Housman
Word Count: 3391 AO3
Summary: On the night of that fateful Masquerade, Nadia ponders over the turbulent history of her marriage, and her complicated feelings towards her utter mess of a husband.
Warnings: Angst, Red Plague and it’s associated symptoms, Thoughts of Death, Depictions of Illness, References to Unhappy Marriage and Complicated Relationships, Canon-Divergence
*
She much preferred the Count’s wing dimly lit just so, the sole chandelier burning low, most of the garish colours of her husband’s preference kept mercifully shadowed and out of her view. And yet, the Countess could not suppress her own trepidation as she sat at the edge of his bed, her hands neatly clasped upon her lap, watching him take one labored breath after another. Not long, now, she thought. His paper-pale skin was webbed with red veins, and the fever has been taking him far, far away into delirium these days- absently, she wished she had kept Sybilla from leaving on her mission. It seemed unlikely, now, that he may last until she returns.
Nadia shifted, uncertain, as he murmured a few words in a strange language in his uneasy sleep. Why was she here? There was nothing to do here, nothing in particular to be fixed. Perhaps she only wanted a few blissful moments of quiet before the Masquerade began, and ironically, with the library crowded with medics and magicians, with her contemplation tower far too close to the open ashy sky, and everywhere else thrumming with panicked Masquerade energy, Lucio’s darkened bedside had proved to be that place of quiet. She suppressed an unseemly burst of laughter- who would have thought that he could have given her quiet? What was she to do now? Nadia fidgeted with the emeralds around her fingers. He whined in his sleep, and then coughed deep and harsh, struggling to draw breath. He groaned, and a tear made its way down his emaciated face. Nadia cast around, anxious to find something. She took the neatly folded towel from its tray, dampened it from the bowl’s medicinal water (she remembered the Apprentice who had concocted it- “it helps with the nightmares, milady,” he’d said, his voice scratchy and exhausted- he’d died shortly after, that gentle young man with his tinctures and poultices), and laid it against his forehead, pressing out it’s creases.
The water seeped into Lucio’s skin, and suddenly, he sputtered awake. He coughed once more, wincing at the spray of blood that hit the covers, whimpering, until his red eyes fell on Nadia. His lips quirked up in a smile. “Missed me, Noddy?” he asked, raising an eyebrow.
The action was not nearly as infuriating as it had once been- what with his brows unpainted and his face wasted and dull with fever-sweat. Even his nasal, obnoxious voice was not what it used to be- it was rough, scratchy and strained with effort. Nadia evaded his question, “Happy Birthday, Lucio,” she said, smiling faintly. He frowned. “Birthday?” he asked, uncomprehending for a few moments. Then, as though only just remembering it, he grinned, the action making him look a little more alive. “Oh yeah!” He raised his voice, then winced and coughed again. “Do not strain your voice so, dear.” Nadia said flatly.
In the same hoarse, scratchy tone, he went on, “It’s my birthday! Are they all lining up downstairs? Is everything gold-” She tuned out his ramblings, inconsequential as they were, as it dawned on her that never, in the six years they had spent wed to each other, had Lucio ever forgotten his own birthday. His excitement would be palpable at least several months in advance, and it would mount to a crescendo at the Masquerade when he descended from the staircase to the ballroom, popping open a bottle of cloudberry liqueur and spraying it carelessly onto the revelers. She had found that behavior touching and sweet in those initial, happier years. The sentiment would later be replaced by a bitterness that had come to cloud everything she felt for the man- then the excitement became distasteful to her, irritating and juvenile as everything else he does. But now, as she watched him rasp out his eagerness for a Masquerade that he would, very likely, be too weak to attend, Nadia felt another, cold-warm emotion settle upon her heart. He was going to die. What was this, this still, queer emptiness? She had imagined his passing often before, often in jest, and often in earnest. Imagined stripping these walls of their bright red drapings, taking down his portraits one by one by one, sending his weapons to the armoire, burying him and his misdeeds, and then, slowly, cleaning up Vesuvia on her own terms without his bulldozing and sabotage, sending away those dreadful, dead eyed courtiers. She had thought it through with great determination as she tinkered away in her tower, often toasted to it with a full glass of Golden Goose late into the night, often whispered it onto Asra’s sweaty skin as they lay side by side. He could not die soon enough. And yet, as she came eye to eye with that bald faced reality, contemplating that very soon that she would have to strip down these chambers and send away his dogs to the menagerie- she found herself overcome by this- this peculiar reluctance.
“Noddy, are you listening?” Lucio’s insistence snapped her out of her thoughts. “What was that, my dear?” she asked, still distant. “I said you have to wait till the sprinklers begin to send out the peacocks.” He repeated. “Indeed.” She said, turning her gaze to him. He fell silent, likely out of breath. He could not speak now for long stretches of time. At any other time, she might have considered it a blessing. But he was suffering, Nadia knew, suffering this long, drawn out agony that was his illness. Who knew he would meet his end this way, in this form, stripped of everything he was, confined to his bed, at the mercy of someone as vile as Valdemar? He reached out, put his hand on her arm. His touch was papery. She did not shake it away. “I don’t think I can go out there today,” he said quietly. She forced herself to meet his tired, tearful eyes. “It’s not fair, Noddy.”
She scoffed. Of course- a city burns and this should be his priority. But then again, Nadia had never teetered that close to confronting her own mortality. She would have excused him for his selfishness, had he not been just as self-absorbed, just as hard headed in his better days. “Unless..” he waggled his eyebrows again. “Unless you carry me downstairs,” he smiled then, utterly shameless, even while hovering an inch over the grave.
Nadia rolled her eyes. “No.” She said firmly. “That would be quite unbecoming.” To her astonishment, he did not put up a fight. “Yeah,” he agreed, quite reasonably. “That would ruin your outfit, and we can’t have that.” Nadia held her tongue, and he fell silent again. He looked away from her, longingly, at the portrait mounted on the wall, and he sighed. It does not befit him, she decided. The genuine morosity in his countenance unsettled her. A thought crept unbidden- that she had rather preferred his unbearable whining and unreasonable, petty bickering, over this- this silence. What was it that squeezed her heart so vice tight that her very breath came fractured from her throat? The man before her was a shadow of himself, and soon, he would fade away too. He would be gone, like everything else that was slowly draining away from her, from this city. Suddenly, breathlessly, she missed her family. Why, she wondered. What was it about Lucio’s impending passing that made her want to rush to Prakra, bury her face in Nasmira’s shoulder or against Baba’s chest and hide, hide, hide. She dispelled it with a quick, dismissive wave of her hand, as though the thought were a beetle scuttling overhead. It made her feel weak, juvenile. She wondered if she should leave. She has yet to get dressed for the Masquerade, and this unfamiliar feeling was the wrong sort of puzzling. (She could fix up ancient clocks, invent pocket watches that chimed tunes in twelve different languages, and hovering trinkets that soared towards the sky when keyed in- matters of the heart, however.) As she was about to rise, Lucio spoke.
“Don’t worry, Noddy,” he said, turning to look at her with an uncharacteristically soft smile. “It’s going to be over soon.” For you. She wanted to cry. For you, and we would be left living, and alone. Alone. What was it about the thought of not having him that made her feel as though she would be alone? He was overcome by another fit of coughing, and she patted his arm lightly, waiting for it to pass. “I don’t like you seeing me this way.” He said, when he was done. “But you won’t have to, not for long.” Nadia raised her eyebrows. He must feel the end settling, then. She thought of family again.
When she had accepted Lucio’s proposal, and woken up the following morning with a terrible hangover and not an ounce of regret, Nafizah had deigned to cast him a curious gaze. In her peculiar, grating self-possession, she pronounced her vague impression of Nadia’s fiancé. “He is beautiful, I don’t doubt, Nadia.” She ran a hand through her long pink tresses thoughtfully. “There is passion, and yet-“ She frowned. “Something so incomplete, that unsettles me. He is young however, younger than you, and completion is after all, a distant dream to the best of us.”
“’Fizah!” Natiqa piped, laughing. “Is that your way of calling him young and hot? No wonder you’re still single.”
Nafizah paid her no mind, as the Crown Princess rarely paid anything any mind- Nadia, the least of all. “I would assume he struggles with the ending of things, and solitude.”
Nadia had shrugged it off- she only remembered the look in his eyes and the wine flush on his cheeks when he held her hand and spoke with a sincerity that felt like a punch to the gut. “You’re smart, Your Highness, and you’re not like the rest of them, and I don’t know how to rule a city, but I think you’ll be the best Countess the world has ever seen.”
Faith. Faith in her. Faith in her independence. When she leaned in to kiss him at the Temple District Square as the wedding harps chimed loud, for a brief, short-lived, glorious moment, Nadia knew the taste of freedom.
What would Nafizah say now? What would Nasmira do? Would Nazali tell her to not resign herself to a man’s passing lest sheer resignation hastened it? Would they stay by his side to ease his pain? Would they tell her what she was feeling, and what to make of it? “Dearest,” would Navra ask, “do you want to know at all?”
Abruptly, she asked her husband, “Are you quite certain that I should not send for anyone else, Lucio?” Now that he seemed to have accepted his impending death, she deemed it fit to repeat the question. “Family, friends, anyone?” There was Sybilla, she knew, who was tight lipped about their shared history. “I knew him by another name,” she had said, “We grew up together, but a lot of it isn’t story to tell.” and nothing more. Perhaps she should have asked Sybilla before she had left. “No,” Lucio answered, just as he did the first time she had asked him. “There’s only Lillie, and she’ll come back soon.” His hand slipped into hers, and he laced their fingers together. “When I get better, and when the plague is over, I’m leaving.”
Nadia stared at him. He must be delirious again. “Will you now, my dear?”
“Yeah,” he nodded, still resolutely looking into her eyes. “You were born to rule, I- I’m not. I’ll leave Vesuvia, I told Lillie we’ll go together.” He gave her a shaky, dreamy smile. Nadia was alarmed. His hand was white-hot in hers, his face flushed and his eyes unfocused. “Lucio, shall I call for Doctor Devorak?”
“Huh?” he shook his head, and ignored her. “Noddy, I just need to stay alive until- till Lillie gets back. Everything’s gonna be fine, you’ll see.” His voice crept up an octave. Nadia reached for the summoning bell by the bed. “Noddy,” why, he looked as though he would cry. Nadia gave his hand a squeeze, and gave the bell a ring. A chamberlain popped his befeathered head. “Doctor Devorak, please.” She snapped at him. His eyes wide as saucers, he darted away. She gripped his hand with both of hers. Is this what you do for a dying man? Do you hold his hand? Do you stamp out the strange urge to weep? Do you feel Death wrapping their ice cold arms around you and stay, as though they were an old friend? He coughed again, and cried out with so much pain that Nadia winced.
“I just have to stay till Lillie gets here. It’ll be over soon.” He told her, his voice frantic, almost pleading. Nadia felt quite ill. “Alright, Lucio, calm yourself.”
Winded, he struggled for a few breaths, and then he could draw one in, and another. Still breathing harshly, he said, “You can repurpose my wing, and release my menagerie. Don’t take down the paintings though, just switch places. I’ll take my dogs, and I’ll leave.” Even in delirium, his eyes were bright and admiring, as they so often were towards her when they weren’t head to head, even after he was no longer the man whom she married. “You’ll do a great job, Noddy, you’re smart and you know how to handle these courtier types.” His face twisted in distaste, and she could not suppress a small laugh. “We had a good run, didn’t we, Countess?”
Nadia inhaled sharply, and then she looked away. No. They had a terrible run- a broken, desolate, tawdry history of failed communication and apathy, of irreconcilable differences and resentment, of his heartlessness and incompetence and her attempts at papering over those ever widening cracks. The fire still raged, and the ash had not since cleared from the sky. Everything had fallen apart under them. How tragic it was, how pathetically ironic, that he should be the only person remaining with faith in her. It took Nadia every drop of her painstakingly cultivated, carefully trained restraint to not just- scream of frustration, then and there.
We had a good run, didn’t we, Countess?
He was dying.
She remembered how he had watched her with that same admiring fondness as she stumbled through a basic, hasty speech at the commissioning of a residential project at the Heart District. “You were amazing, Noddy!” he’d exclaimed, thumping her on the back with his golden arm, looking as though he would explode from the excitement. “I know I’m good with words, but you’re almost as good with words, everyone loved it, you’re the best Countess ever!”
Another time, after another dreary, unproductive diplomatic tiff, he had grabbed an Atapran emissary by the collar of his robes, gauntlet inches away from ripping a gash on their face, already to the detriment of undoing years of mutual political allyship, and shattered the wine glass in their unfortunate hands. “Talk to Noddy like that one more time, and I’ll have you hung, alright?”
His confidence in her had never wavered. How horribly, how utterly she has failed if she has failed even by his standards.
He struggles with solitude, and the end of things. Who, in this tired world, didn’t?
And then she knew what to name that vice around her heart.
Grief. This is what had led her here today, then.
Soon, his eyes would shut for the last time, and she would never see his admiration for her, his blind, foolhardy optimism and adoration reflected in them. He would never again growl at anyone who spoke to her with impudence (despite her distaste for unnecessary heroics), never bid his dogs to hush if she were sleeping. He would never again drunk-stumble along with his accomplices at the Masquerade asking them gleefully- “Haven’t met my Countess, have you? She’s the best.”
His pride in her and her accomplishments had once, for a brief and far more hopeful time, been a warm, sharp blaze, spurring her onward, urging her to outdo herself. And yet, as Nafizah had said, it was incomplete. It had fallen apart as quick as a candle snuffed out with a heavy hand, mired in his deviance and underhandedness, and his obstinate, pointless, selfish cruelty. Everything unfinished, as Nafizah had said, everything undone- terms unmet, a partnership broken into dust. Nothing to be fixed here anymore, only to be moved away, only to be cleaned up and disposed off. A corpse of potential. Everything they could have been together has come to nothing. Perhaps grief is the yearning for another day.
Unbidden, she felt a memory rise like vapour.
A long, sleepless night, the faint sound of someone absolutely massacring a waltz on the ballroom piano, and Nadia had followed the cacophony, fully prepared to demand an explanation from the offender. Tracking her quarry, she found a terribly nervous chamberlain plucking at the keys with trembling hands, and then the sound of boisterous laughter. Lucio was in the middle of the ballroom with his dogs. He had both of Mercedes’ paws in his hands, and he was swaying gracelessly, attempting to twirl the hound, and only cackling when he fell short. “We’ll make a ballroom star of you, old girl.” His grin was boyish and charming, a glimpse of the man he had been when he had asked her, begged her, to marry him.
We had a good run, didn’t we, Countess?
We could have. How I wish we did. And here we are, you and I, out of time.
Hastily, Nadia pinched the bridge of her nose. This was no time for tears. She opened her mouth to speak, and was interrupted by the door opening. It was not Julian Devorak who rushed in, but Asra, already dressed for the Masquerade, his gown swirling behind him in a storm of many colours. “Ilya isn’t-“ He paused beside her, his fingers clenching around his fox-mask, lips pulled into a questioning frown. “Nadi?”
“He is quite ill, Asra.” She said briskly. As if on cue, Lucio started to strain for breath again, scrabbling at his throat, mumbling again in that strange language. “Oh, alright,” Slowly, gingerly, he made over to Lucio’s side. Nadia rose. “I shall have to get dressed, it is already quite late.”
“I’ll be here,” Asra assured her. “Go.”
As she turned to leave, she heard Lucio call out to her.
“Noddy,” he asked, panting, the ghost of a smile in his still impudent voice. “Where’s my birthday kiss?”
Without sparing it a single thought, a sudden wave of emotion made her sweep back to his side, nearly knocking the unsuspecting magician out of the way as she dove down to press her lips against Lucio’s. He reciprocated, as though surprised by her enthusiasm, tangling his arm in her hair, bringing her closer. She could feel his ribs as she pressed against him, could feel the slow pulse in his throat. If she ran her hands down his arm and back she knew she could feel the ridges and dents of old battle scars, testaments to the burning, blistering, desperate resilience that had brought him thus far only to have him squandered so, only to have him die so young, to have him succumb to this. She could feel how his fevered body strained to hold her, as though for the first time, as though for the last time.
(When had Lucio not clung to her, to everyone with this desperation, as though everyone within his reach would vanish if he loosened his grip?)
When they parted, he slumped back, even while trying to lean toward her to kiss her again, once again. But he could not, and so he fell back on to his covers, his eyes terrified and watery and far too young to die. Asra’s amethyst eyes met hers, briefly with a look she did not yet know the meaning of- a jumble of hope and exhaustion and confusion, and a sliver of short-lived guilt. He laid a palm on Nadia’s back, only for a moment, before she left. If Lucio had tasted the salty dampness of her tears against his lips, for once, he held his tongue.
