With every step he took down the street, Equius felt self-loathing penetrate every pore of his body and pour out of him like a waterfall, thick and awful and sickening to a great number of his organs. It tasted like bile in his mouth and he was certain he could drown in it if he acknowledged it even once, because if he did he’d never be able to lie to himself and continue to say he was strolling through this part of town by chance. He was not, in fact, here by chance; the only people who lived down here were lowbloods and humans, who stained the area with their very existence, and he would never have accidentally made his way there.
No, if anyone asked him, he was here to check on the clock he’d asked to get repaired, and had chosen to walk for the sake of exercise. That was not an entirely untrue statement, and silently he applauded himself on being able to even delude himself.
He was most certainly there to pay the shop a visit, perhaps just to glance through the window and catch a glimpse of his either repaired or unrepaired keepsake. But there was another motivation he hated to even think about, a powerful one that told him against all his judgments to skip his class for the first time in his life and walk down through the parts of Los Angeles he usually preferred to pretend did not exist. Its name was Aradia Megido, and he was loathe to admit that she was quite possibly the most stunning and entrancing creature he’d ever had the misfortune to meet. At first Equius had brushed the strikingly elegant lines of her face aside, dismissed it as an uncontrollable reaction to the undeniably exquisite symmetry of her features. But no, they had followed him back to his apartment and he had spent an entire night doing nothing but staring into the fireplace, letting the flames dance and trying desperately not to see red-tinged lips or raven hair in them, searching for the inexplicably familiar switch in his head she had hit so that he could turn it back off.
It had been a lost effort, though, and so here he was.
The moonlight was more than enough to see by, and the windows were not tinted like he had feared they would be. The lights within the shop were on and it brought him some small flicker of hope, and he feigned interest in one of the window displays, some kind of antique clock. The dark lenses over his eyes hid his true intentions, the almost frantic dart of his vividly blue eyes over the inside of the shop. No, there was no ‘almost’ about it; he was searching for her, that vile rustblooded girl who had called him back here like some twisted siren. He could hardly help himself, and he drank in every corner of the barely serviceable shack of a shop and its practically ancient wares, things that harkened back to an older time, a better time if you asked him – as did her craft, her almost laughably outdated craft, and that alone could make his mouth a little dry and his palms a little damp.
He hardly even knew her name.
Perhaps, he reasoned to himself as he searched between the shelves and clocks and dim lights, if he saw her again he could pinpoint just what had entranced him so. Some resemblance to someone far her better, or maybe some mannerism, some style of her hair or some way she laughed that reminded him of someone else. Maybe he had just developed some depraved fascination for her trade, falsely attributed it to some yearning for the old days when things were still in their proper order because there was no way a rustblood gave a good gosh darn about any of that.
A flurry of skirts and fabric within seemed timed well enough as to be laughing at him, and he darted away from the window as quick and quiet as though he’d never been there at all. Equius shoved his sweaty hands into his pockets and when was the last time he’d perspired like that, that was a horrifying and embarrassing realization to make, and he practically raced down the street with heavy steps in his haste to get away. His chin had gone low low, horns tipped downwards in an unspoken bodily threat; no one got in his way. He was grateful for that. His shoes dragged against the pavement and his horns, one broken but the other no less impressive for it, led his strides, all the way back to where he’d parked his car several blocks away.
The drive home was excruciating. No, the traffic was no worse than usual, the car was in perfectly wonderful shape because he very much liked his car and took excellent care of each part of it, so it could not have been the drive. It was his own mind, his treacherous fucking thinkpan that wrung his beatpump in multiple directions at once and taunted him to explain himself now, to find another excuse for his unspeakably poor behavior. And oh, what would Darkleer think of his taste, of how he somehow remembered the graceful lines of her unworthy rust-tinted mouth from the one glimpse he’d gotten, how exactly it had looked when it repeated his name?
It was not until he returned to Ocean Avenue, dropped the key twice on his way in and stumbled over his own carpeting, and threw an exceedingly heavy chunk of metal off of his balcony that he realized quite how badly his hands were shaking.
