Jan 9
damn dude at least give her a hand first
seen from Switzerland
seen from Russia
seen from United Kingdom
seen from China
seen from United States
seen from Russia
seen from Yemen
seen from United States
seen from Russia
seen from South Korea
seen from China
seen from Singapore
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from Belarus
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from Australia
seen from Germany
damn dude at least give her a hand first
somebody get archie out of here, he’s abt to drive chrysi to cause another inter-ark incident (kissing the ex-ambassador)
foretold consequences occur nonetheless
ALT TITLE: YOU FUCKED UP, ARCHIE
AUTHOR’S NOTE: yeah, archie, you fucked up.
———
Archibald arrived back at Chrysi’s apartments much sooner than he would’ve liked. The way back pulsed with a desperate run, run, run, and he still couldn’t figure out if his instincts wanted him to rush towards or away from Chrysi. As he’d left the Gynaceum, he’d figured that he would’ve come to a conclusion at some point on the way over.
But now that he stood at her door, he found the mixture of dread and guilt hadn’t given him a clear way out. Instead, it plastered his hair to the back of his neck with sweat both from his exertion with Madam Nadia and his flushed nervousness.
He wasn’t accustomed to nervousness. Not like this.
Archibald didn’t like it.
Too late. The choice was made.
He took a bolstering breath and, even though he thought the door handle would burn him when he touched it, it didn’t so much as blister.
It swung open to a familiar sitting room, dark in the Pole’s early sunset. And, Archibald noted, with a slight tightening in his throat, empty of Chrysi.
Not that the traces of her didn’t remain. A teacup on the desk in the corner paired with a missive she’d been writing. A silver pen listed down the desktop, forgotten. Blankets draped off the edge of her couch, from a meeting she’d probably dreamed with her contacts on Selene.
And on the delicate coffee table, a second teacup.
A visitor, long-since left. One that Chrysi hadn’t the energy to clean up after.
His stomach twisted.
He stepped in reluctantly and closed out the Pole’s cold as best he could. A draft still remained, cooling the sweat on his palms, making them clammy. Even with the best of insulation, the bitter, bitter cold couldn’t be fought off entirely.
Habit poked at him to call out for Chrysi. A reminder he was home, he was alive.
Archibald only had eyes for that forgotten teacup.
He glanced up to the doorway to the bedroom. A long, narrow apartment, Chrysi had only a sitting room, a thin series of tiling and a cramped countertop with a stove to count as a kitchen, a bedroom, and a postage-sized bathroom—half of which he could see from where he stood.
If he couldn’t find her here, he knew she’d be in the bedroom.
His breath came in a thin, dissatisfactory whistle that Archibald couldn’t blame on the cold.
Approaching the bedroom with the same excitement as a schoolboy called to the front of the classroom for public correction, his shoulders curved inward with each step. He ducked his head lower. The scrappy top hat jammed on his head wilted as much as he.
This time, he didn’t allow the door to loom over him—though the stoppered breath in his throat begged him to do otherwise. His heart itself ceased to beat.
Chrysi was right behind that door. If he didn’t open it now, he’d only end up turning tail and running back the way he came.
Flicking the door open, he found his suspicions confirmed: Chrysi sat at the edge of her divan bed in nothing but a short, white nightgown and a delicate robe meant more for the summers on Selene than the autumn on the Pole.
His entrance disturbed her sincere study of the floor, and she looked up at him with dreamwalker’s eyes. It had an unnerving effect of looking through him, rather than at him.
She stared at him through a lock of white hair. “Archibald.”
Not the warmest of greetings. Not the coldest of them, either.
Bones aching from the silent tension, he merely doffed his hat in greeting. It remained off his head in an awkward flop of sad fabric. The top dangled limply from the rest of the hat, moving like an anemic from one direction to the other—caught in a draft that Chrysi still hadn’t been able to find the source of, in all their time rooming together.
“Chryseis,” he said in a farce of warmth. He smiled a corpse’s rictus. “How has the day treated you?”
She eyed him for a moment. Then her gaze dropped back to the floor. Long white curls pooled around her hips in much the same way the waterfalls fogged into the Storm beneath the Arks.
“Well enough,” she answered mechanically. She traced a pattern into the edge of her divan. “What of you?”
Archibald didn’t say anything. He’d trap himself in an instant—not for his transparency, but for his need to throw himself at her feet and bury his face in the crook of her body as he used her as a chapel for his confessional.
“Hm.” Her mouth twisted in a tiny, bitter smile, where it stayed for only a second’s worth.
“My lady,” he began, then he found himself at a loss for what else he had to say. What point was there in dancing around the topic? They both knew what he’d done.
As if coming to this same realization, Chrysi looked back at the floor. Her hair fell into her face, one half anchored behind her ear. She didn’t lift a hand to tuck the rest back behind her other ear.
“Archibald,” she said softly to the ground, “I ask that you answer this one question honestly.”
His mouth dried. Panic instinctively grabbed for a smile and the corners of his mouth twitched up inanely in reply. “I can’t do anything but.”
Not so much as a twitch in acknowledgement. She stared resolutely at the floor.
His heart raced faster.
“Did you sleep with Madam Nadia?” she asked in a small voice.
In that moment came a rush of clarity. It washed over him like the springs at the hotel—a bit too sulfurous and warm with ramped nerves.
What he’d done with Madam Nadia had only been done in an attempt to hurt Chrysi. He’d wanted to drive her off—no, to bat away the rumors of the Pole’s provocative ex-Ambassador settling down with one person.
He’d succeeded.
And he regretted it the moment it was over, and he regretted it doubly now that he saw Chrysi’s fist clutching at the edge of her divan hard enough for her knuckles to bleach into whiteness.
But he’d promised her his honesty, even when he wanted nothing more than to keep his mouth shut.
“Yes,” he answered, quieter than Chrysi.
He could only see one of her eyes beneath the fall of her hair. It widened, unseeing, framed by minute flutters of silver eyelashes. Her knuckles whitened evermore, sure to be protesting.
For a moment, she sat there in the reverberation of his answer as a masterfully carved statue. Not a word dared breach the awful hush Archibald had called over them.
It broke only with the tiniest nod from Chrysi. White curls tumbled further over her face.
“Yes,” she repeated in that same small voice.
Not a breath tempted him. He wouldn’t dare inhale, exhale. His lungs protested, but it faded to a murmur in favor of his tight, anxious thoughts.
This wasn’t the reaction he’d expected. He’d undermined countless men—slept with their wives and boasted about it later. He knew the way most reacted. Loudly, angrily, sometimes with tears, and edged with hatred.
And yet, Chrysi held herself like a fragile glass sculpture. She hadn’t leapt from her seat to take his wrinkled lapels in furious fists. She hadn’t started on a tirade. She hadn’t burst into tears.
“Chrys,” he whispered, “I am—”
She lifted her head at the sound of his voice. The wide-eyed, pale look retreated behind a firm set jaw and half-lidded eyes. A tiny smile touched her lips, even though it hardly counted as one.
“No apologies,” she said.
He supposed she’d meant it to sound airy. All it sounded like was a choked breath.
He wanted to crawl into the floorboards.
Instead he grit his teeth. “But I—”
She stood then. Her nightgown barely reached past her knees, sleeveless in the cold. The gauzy robe pulled about her shoulders meant nothing in the Pole’s arctic temperatures. It was like a ghost of a girl stood in her place, with pale curls, pale face, pale dress.
Her smile grew more forced, but she didn’t look away from Archibald. “It wasn’t like we’d ever made it official—much less made it exclusive. Why should I ask for an apology for my own fault?”
Pain flickered gold in her eyes and it wrenched at Archibald.
No, they hadn’t put words to it. And her reasoning had been precisely the reason Archibald had panickedly taken up with Madam Nadia. He knew he’d have ground to stand on. Now he wished he didn’t.
The glassy overlay to her face twisted in his chest like a knife.
“I should’ve…”
She swept her hand out haphazardly, and her mouth hitched in a grimace meant to be charming. “Too late, Archibald. We make do.” With that, she gathered her robe about herself and she looked ghostlier than ever. “I’ll take the couch. You can take the bed—unless, of course, you’ll be finding yourself in another one tonight?”
He opened his mouth uselessly.
Chrysi brushed past him before he could utter a single syllable. The door’s gentle click punctuated her exit.
Archibald stared over the room sightlessly.
Alone.
His eyes sharpened on the bed. A pulse eddied through his body, wicked enough to stagger him into the vanity table chair.
He couldn’t sleep alone.
i just want him gone already
so happy chrysi’s happy with her loser boyfriend
chrysiarchie sketches that won’t see the light of day otherwise 🫶🏻
death and its afterlife
ALT TITLE: (what purpose is there?)
AUTHOR’S NOTE: late chrysiarchie anniversary fic,,, i’m only a couple days late, right?
———
Though Ophelia herself had not informed Chrysi of her inkling, Chrysi knew enough from the whispers of Ophelia diving through a mirror to know that awaiting Archibald’s arrival would be the best course of action. If he returned—when he returned—he would require attention. Injured as he may be, and with the shock of being cut off from the Web (she had to huff out a sigh and wipe her palms on her skirts as her throat closed at the reminder), the Pole’s Ambassador would need an immediate carting to the infirmary.
And so Chrysi paced, rather uselessly, the barren, grey stretch of Archibald’s room. Every so often, with her thumbnail between her teeth, Chrysi would cast a worried look to his iron-wrought bed, simultaneously praying that his messy-haired form would appear under the sheets, and that it would remain empty of his pale-faced, limp body.
The waiting, she surmised, was the greatest hell.
“Miss Chrysi,” a voice called from the entrance.
She paused in her pacing to flash a frown at Patience—the eldest of Archibald’s seven sisters, and one of the key people in deciding to cut him from the Web. It was a hard decision—one that had been forced by the upcoming Family States—but Chrysi still condemned his sisters for their choice. There had to be exceptions made. Surely there must be.
Patience lifted her chin, her eyes flashing as she detected Chrysi’s antipathy burning in her eyes.
Silence lingered uncomfortably thick, cold as the moisture freezing in the air outside. Her body weighed too heavy with her agitation.
“Yes?” she finally croaked, voice unused for too long in the midst of her pacing.
Patience cast an eye over the room, and her vision was now clear of whatever enchanted bleariness had overtaken Archibald. The golden gilt of the illusion in the antechamber made her fair hair glisten.
“If you would please,” she said in a voice ringing like a bell made of crystal, “vacate this room at the earliest opportunity.”
Chrysi froze.
No, her mind hissed.
Out loud, she opted for the much more polite, “Why?”
Her blood rushed too loudly in her ears to hear the exact note her voice had landed on, but the way Patience straightened told her it was a bit cruder than expected of Chrysi.
The line of Patience’s mouth grew harder. Her brows nearly touched the tattoo between her brows, making her all the more severe in the backlight.
Her eyes were clear.
Chrysi hated that most.
“We need to prepare for—”
She couldn’t bear to hear what it was the Web decided took precedence over Archibald—especially when it would be his own funeral. She blurted, “He’s going to return here. We need to be here when he does.”
The effervescent light in Patience’s winter-blue eyes died.
“My brother is dead,” she said flatly.
As if she had taken a hand to Chrysi’s face, Chrysi recoiled.
No, her mind hissed again—this time with teeth bared and hackles raised.
She said, “You don’t know that. You can’t know that.”
In fact, the one person that did was Ophelia.
Patience drew herself up—and in swift reply, her sisters drifted from their rooms down the long stretch of the hallway. They were quick to crowd in around the door at their sister’s agitation.
A united front, all seven fair-haired girls with the tattoo of the Web between their brows stared at her like a spider with one of its eyes poked out.
Archibald, supplied her mind. Their eighth eye—and the one they had poked out themselves.
With her sisters pulled tight around her, Patience replied, “He’s been steeped in the Web’s consciousness all his life. To be cut from it is the shock of a lifetime.” On cue, her breathing shuddered. Her eyelashes batted furiously.
Around her, her sisters pushed closer together. Their skirts looked as one. With the light shining from behind them, Chrysi couldn’t see the details of their faces. But in the remaining silhouette, her imagination created a many-limbed monster, worthy of a nightmare by her own hands.
Dulcie’s sweet voice overtook her eldest sister’s, finishing what Patience could not: “That final severing kills over half the time. Our brother is gone—we can no longer sense him.”
Her heart shuddered at the thought, hitting her rib cage hard enough to almost make her retch.
Her head swam. What sort of object impermanence was this? If Archibald returned, he would still hold form, still create thoughts and produce feelings and speak words.
“You were the ones to kill him,” she said before she could think of the consequences of her words.
The seven-eyed beast recoiled from her, but Chrysi felt no remorse. Rage gnawed at her from within instead, almost soothing in the face of her distress.
Their casual cutting of Archibald from them—their brother, the one to defend them after their parents’ death, the one that nurtured them—reminded her too much of a dark-haired woman with cold, dark eyes at another funeral that never should’ve taken place.
Crueler, reviled words urged at her tongue, but before she could rather unwisely utter them, a shift overtook the room.
Not a cold, breathless, unmissable sort of shift. Not a bolt of lightning, searing and bristling the tiny hairs along her arms on end. Nothing grand, showstopping, startling—but something unequivocal, all the same. Certain. Quiet.
A weak exhale behind her. Rustling of thin sheets. A new dreamscape, nudging at the edge of her awareness, as gifted by Morpheus.
There was a wide-eyed silence from the seven sisters in front of her.
Electrified, heart stumbling, Chrysi spun around her heel so quickly that she very nearly collapsed instead. The stiletto-thin prop of her heeled shoes wobbled in protest, but before it could properly snap, she crashed to her knees beside Archibald’s bed.
Atop those sheets, his heart-achingly familiar form sprawled, looking frightfully pale, his hair in disarray.
Hands shaking, Chrysi sought to assure herself of the reality of this situation. His face cradled in her hands, his body radiating heat where his blankets had been nothing but ice-cold before, the unmistakable solidity for that which Chrysi had already dreamt of before with a frustrating convincibility.
She almost didn’t want to believe it. It didn’t feel real.
But then his eyelashes fluttered weakly, his eyes moving under the delicate skin of his eyelids, and a cry built up in her chest. It choked her, until all she could do was let it out with tears beading in her eyes.
“Archie!”
His chest rose and fell, and his golden eyelashes fluttered again.
Just as quickly as relief filled her, a cold wash overcame her limbs.
The longer she held Archibald’s face in her hands, the more his skin scorched hers and the paler he looked.
Newly returned to her, he was but a boy made of paper and burning a flame within him. If left unattended, he would surely go up in smoke.
Her nails bit into his skin, despite herself. Her heart clambered into her throat.
She cast a wild look to his seven sisters, even as she clutched the insensible Archibald to her chest. The flame of his skin burned her, and Archibald let out a breathless gasp. Even his breath was too hot, too sickly.
“He’s burning up!” Panic threatened to beat her words into a frenzy. “He needs medical assistance!”
And quick—though she only had the weak pulls of his breath against her skin to go on, an innate part of her felt him slipping away.
She grit her teeth, shoving the power unordained of her Ark’s family spirit down, until it suffocated with the nightmares fashioned only of her Executions.
None of Archibald’s seven sisters moved. As she stared back at them, she realized their eyes had none of the summer-blue of Archibald’s—they were too cold for such a lighthearted color, by far.
A frisson of ice crept up her spine. Her hand left his cheek to slip her fingers against the pulse in his throat.
It struggled under her fingertips.
Chrysi’s mouth was far too dry, but still she said, “Call for a doctor.”
Her voice was small.
“A nurse,” she amended, when they didn’t move—voice smaller with the more inhuman they looked.
Still they stared at her with wide eyes. The teardrop tattoos were unblinking, accusatory.
“Anyone,” she concluded in a whisper.
Archibald’s breathing labored against her skin.
When his sisters finally broke their silence, it was Clarimond.
“Our brother is dead,” she said in a voice as clear as wind chimes.
“Gone,” agreed Relish, face white.
Grace added, “The shock…”
To finish it off, Patience lifted her head and peered down her nose at Chrysi, looking as though her frantic attempts to keep hold on the pale, limp Archibald were embarrassing to witness.
“And if the shock doesn’t kill him outright,” she whispered, with an unbearable, hateful sadness on her angelic face, “it is more humane to let him die quietly before he awakes as a husk.”
———
Chrysi supposed she would have to thank Archibald. If not for him to worry over, she would’ve caused a diplomatic incident far greater than that she had caused before her sister shipped her all the way to the Pole.
But that would have to come later. Much, much later—beyond the time he needed to burn off his fever and delirium. Beyond his waking. Beyond his aloneness.
Chrysi brushed his hair from his forehead, pensive. It burned to the touch still. The tattoo between his brows looked dull.
Sadness struck her, heavy and deep for him. She lowered her face to his, pressing her cool forehead to his too-hot one.
“Please don’t hate me,” she whispered to him. She nuzzled her nose against his, her heart tangling in her throat. “Please, please don’t hate me.”
For what, she didn’t know. For not letting him succumb to the shock? For not getting to him in time? Either way, she knew that it was easy to blame one after such a horrific incident. She was in the worst position as of now.
But she couldn’t tear herself away from him.
Archibald didn’t react, beyond a fever-weak exhale.
Still delirious. Chrysi didn’t know the ins and outs of illusions, but she imagined the prolonged contact with a Confusion Bubble didn’t help matters. Archibald was trapped for days in a faux-inebriated state, intoxicated with an illusion so deep that it sunk into his body. For a man with such a deep disdain for the Mirage illusions, it was the second-worst fate for him she could imagine—beyond being separated from his family.
She pulled away with a sad sigh. Perhaps all she was doing was smothering him, after all.
A weak tug on her blouse stopped her in her tracks. Her breath caught in her throat.
Dropping her eyes, she found his hand gripping her with as much strength his body could muster.
“Don’t leave me,” he breathed, eyes still closed.
Her heart surged into her rib cage. It knocked against it readily, cheered by his marginal lucidity, and bruised by the agony on his pale face.
“I would never—”
“Please,” he repeated, a sharp exhale. His brows knitted together. Anguish decorated his lovely face, until he looked like a sainted tragedy, sans stained glass. “Please, don’t leave me, even though I’m dead.”
Chrysi stopped.
“Archie,” she pleaded.
“I’m dead.” He stated it as a fact, in a breath barely heard. Something glinted in his closed eyelashes. “I’m dead, I’m dead, I’m” —he shuddered, and a tear slipped down his face— “dead.”
Leaning over him, Chrysi took his hands in hers and crushed them between their bodies. She could feel his pulse in his wrist, could feel it in his chest. She wished that she could make him feel the same proof of life that she felt pressed against her form.
“You’re not, Archie, I swear you’re not,” she assured him in a rush.
He laughed wretchedly. More tears spilled down his face, until his laugh shattered into a broken sob.
“I’m nothing but a ghost,” he said. “My family is gone. I can’t see myself.”
Chrysi shook her head. “I see you. I see you.”
But he turned his head away from her, and his hands stopped grasping at hers. They lay, useless, in her grip.
“I’m dead,” he repeated once more, and then said nothing else.
Chrysi hovered over him anxiously, staring at him with her heart pounding in her chest and an unquenchable desire to fix things.
But everything was too broken to put together.
And Archibald wept quietly as he fell back into sleep again.
———
When Archibald awoke proper, Chrysi was not in the room with him—and all for the better for it. His recollection of the past week was delirious, colored by fake memories and dreams so thick that he choked on them.
But he recalled the shameful display he’d put on for her just a few hours past his rescue.
Archibald didn’t allow his cheerful mask to crack—not even now, with the gaping, empty cavern he now found himself in. Not in front of anyone. For Chrysi to have seen him cry with such abandon…
It wasn’t the gentlemanly thing to do—especially not when Chrysi was the only reason his heart still beat—but he slipped from the infirmary before she returned anyway, under the pretense of putting the things to rights that had fallen apart in his absence.
Thorn, put on trial. Thorn’s little fiancée, aggrieved and combed over by the police, even when her testimonies were all buried in desk drawers. Archibald’s own funeral, mourned by the family of which he was no longer part of.
He had no time for Chrysi. He couldn’t spare a single minute for her.
Not when his own death suffocated him so.
It was the loneliness, he thought, that made it all so unbearable. The endless cacophony of his everyday life before was now an empty void. It was blackness. It was nothingness.
He fought as best he could, but the only true way to keep his head above the deep waters was to throw himself in the beds of women.
Fortunately, he had many favors he needed to obtain. It was quick work, with the double-pronged desire of obtaining them and to keep himself from sinking deep into his new singular existence.
Into the bed of Madam Nadia first, then Madam Anastasia, then Vera, Mila, Anya, Natasha—more and more and more, until he feared he might not escape the Gynaeceum unscathed.
It was a dangerous game, laying with Lord Farouk’s favorites, but perhaps Archibald didn’t care because it meant that Farouk might officially strike Archibald dead, rather than leave him trapped in this half-existence. He didn’t know. He tried not to linger too deep in his thoughts—he didn’t like the reminder that he would never peer from the eyes of Patience, Joy, Melody, Grace, Clarimond, Relish, or even little Dulcie, not to mention his aunts and uncles and second-cousins twice removed.
And so Archibald moved from bed to bed of woman to woman. He hadn’t yet returned to his barren room, for fear of its emptiness killing him on the spot.
It was reaching a point of absurdity. Nearly two weeks had passed, and he’d been in the Clairdelune embassy for a total of four hours.
Now, however, he couldn’t find any way to keep running from it.
Archibald kept his head bowed as he walked the long hallways of Clairdelune. Once, it had been deemed the safest place in the Pole. Now, because of his own foolishness, its crystal-clear reputation had been muddied.
He could not bear to look in anybody’s eyes.
The greetings that followed him were subdued and grew ever-quieter the closer he walked to his chambers. By the time he walked down the familiar hallway to his chambers, everyone had all but sewn their mouths shut.
Seven doors stood sentry in the walls—perhaps more, but Archibald only had eyes for them. They were familiar doors, in the way a knife lodged in the chest was familiar. Archibald had seen both sides of them times seven, from the eyes of all his sisters. He’d jealously protected them. They were all that mattered to him, in the end.
Now he was a walking, breathing corpse to them.
As he passed one door (Joy’s, he recalled sadly, but he’d never get to see from her cheerful vision ever again), it creaked open a fraction. Winter-blue eyes stopped on him, and the fair face there paled ever-fairer.
The door slammed shut.
Archibald tried not to flinch as though he’d been shot with a bullet.
His sisters were no longer his family. Ex-sisters, through and through—and they were making it very clear.
He’d never had his path avoid theirs so much. Not once, in his entire life.
He tried not to remember holding them after they had been born, an older brother thrilled by their tiny hands and their new eyes seeing more of the world in his stead.
Weariness nearly dragged him to the floor by the time he reached his own door. The nights spent with all of Farouk’s favorites had not lent to a restful sleep. The reminder of his new aloneness hadn’t helped matters.
But just as he was going to escape into his room, a voice stopped him.
“Mr. Ambassador,” the familiar steady voice called softly, “a moment, please?”
Archibald wanted to shatter into dust.
Out of all the people he’d frequented and called favors from, he’d avoided the Selenian Executioner for very good reason. For her to find him now…
He cursed silently in his head, though without much heat.
He didn’t turn when he replied, “Anything for you, Mademoiselle Executioner.”
He braced himself against the door, pressed his forehead hard against it. It still tingled with the Mirage’s Seal, back when he’d been trapped in the Imaginoir.
If that bothered Chrysi, it didn’t show in her voice. In fact, she seemed all the more resolute when she said, “I have a request of you.”
“I’m not sure how I can help,” he said tiredly. Without the backing of the Web, he’d lost much of influence over the Pole’s court. Only by his unending charm had he struggled to stay where he was.
When Chrysi didn’t say anything, he forced his shoulders back. He turned to her with a fragile smile that was attempting to be bright.
“But I shall attempt to assist in whatever way I can,” he concluded.
Chrysi stood not five feet away, looking pristine as a delicate vase. Her white curls had been swept up in a half-top knot, braided into it with precision. The remainder of her hair cascaded down her back. Her subdued-rose skirts did not have the full bell of a ball gown, but they were voluminous nonetheless. Her pale blouse clasped at her throat with a crescent moon, and her sleeves flowed until they were wrangled into a tight cuff that extended down the back of her hand. Delicate white lace gloves covered her fingers.
Archibald didn’t often—if ever—feel self-conscious about his appearance, but faced with the Executioner of Selene, he was all the more aware of the stubble prickling along his jaw, his bed-mussed hair, the darkness under his eyes.
Yet Chrysi didn’t seem to see any of that. She, instead, took a step forward, and said, “Please take care of yourself.”
He faltered. “I…”
But he had no words to say.
The request unmoored him.
Chrysi smiled sadly. “You’ve barely slept.”
Something strange stuttered in him then.
“No one else is asking this of you, and so I figured it may come down to me.” Chrysi shook out her hair, unknowing of Archibald’s inner turmoil. Her eyelashes tilted downward, as did her sweet mouth. “All eyes are on Ophelia, Thorn, Farouk—please let me have my eyes be on you, instead.”
He opened his mouth. He shut it.
What could he have to say? What was truthful? What had meaning?
Never had he been so stunned to silence.
“I… thank you,” he said slowly. “I shall take that into sincere consideration.” He leaned hard against his door, his hand fumbling for the handle. His heart clambered into his throat, higher and higher by the second.
He cracked it open without a second thought, and he took a short step backwards into his room.
Escape. He needed to… he needed to get out, before he lost his composure in the middle of the hallway, where he’d once lived his life with his many family members.
But Chrysi wasn’t leaving.
Archibald didn’t know how to handle the fact that she still wasn’t leaving—that she’d given him the blessing of her attention, her presence when he’d been abandoned by all else. Everyone else had—it was like the entire Pole knew that its ambassador wanted to hide from his mistake and all its hellish consequences, and the only ones that hadn’t left him only wanted him for his company in their sheets.
Archibald simply wished to be left alone to mourn his own death.
And Chrysi still wasn’t leaving.
He smiled at her with the barest thread of humor. Leaning heavily on his door, he inquired, “Is there anything else that I can help you with, Mademoiselle Executioner?”
Her mouth flipped into a deeper frown. Brows pulled together, she studied him.
Archibald resisted the urge to shudder. He knew he was one for transparency, but there was something about Chrysi’s eyes that saw much more than he allowed even his transparency to show. He didn’t quite like it.
Whatever she saw in him eased her frown, replacing it with something much softer, and that much more sadder.
“If ever you have the need for it, you can stay at my place,” she said softly. “Even if it’s unannounced.”
Archibald’s smile froze.
If ever he needed…
“I am the ambassador,” he replied mechanically. He felt his smile turn desperate, brittle. “I cannot leave the embassy for long.”
Chrysi didn’t say anything. She didn’t need to. The way her eyes flickered over the hallway, over the elaborate illusions, over him said it all.
It punched him in the sternum, right below his heart.
For how much longer do you think they’ll keep you as ambassador?
He was no longer part of the Web. Instead, he drifted, unmoored, and everything in his head so deathly silent. Sometimes he couldn’t be certain of his own body, his own existence—so foreign it was to not see himself in the periphery of his sisters or his cousins or his aunts and uncles.
He’d become a ghost. And Farouk couldn’t keep a ghost as the ambassador for long.
“The offer stands until I return to Selene,” Chrysi informed him. With stiff fingers, she adjusted her perfect white lace gloves. Her eyes bored into him with their hidden dagger. “I mean it, Archie.”
And the way she said his shortened name was half-cautious, quiet, and ever-so intimate paired with her rose-red and sunshine-golden eyes.
He wanted to laugh, even though he knew it would be a desperate, painful thing. How long had he tried to get her to call him that? A pyrrhic victory, but it was the only one he’d had in all this mess. With fumbling hands, he latched onto it.
“I thank you for your offer.” He was surprised to find that he meant it. A flush threatened to show itself along his cheeks.
Embarrassment flickered through him.
He was the ambassador of the Pole—for however incrementally longer that may be—and well acquainted with far more scandalous suggestions. Chrysi offering him a place to stay shouldn’t have even been a blip on his radar.
Dipping his head, he mumbled to his feet, “Now, if you’ll excuse me, Mademoiselle Executioner, I…”
He trailed off, uncertain with what to say.
It was so silent.
So. Silent.
A rustle of her skirts. The glossy toes of her shoes moved away from him.
When Archibald looked back up, she gave him a single, silent nod.
Chrysi didn’t say anything else—didn’t need to—as she left him to his own grave. Too much was understood between the two of them. Archibald wished it weren’t so, even while he ached for more of her understanding.
Instead, he walked back into his barren room, over the ice-cold floor. He stared sightlessly over the empty, cracked walls, and laid atop his bed, deathly alone for the first time in his entire life.
———
That night, Archibald could not sleep. The cracks in his ceiling looked deeper. The bed was colder. The night was longer.
He pulled his thin pillow from underneath his head and buried his face in it before a scream could escape him.
———
The next night, he could hear his sisters leave their rooms, laughing amongst themselves over a joke he could never understand. Never again.
Archibald buried himself deeper into his bed and he tried to ignore it.
———
The night after, he could barely stir, the heaviness of the darkness so great that he had no ability to. He’d slept already, all through the day, and now he wanted to sleep again, all through the night.
The time for frantic tumbles was gone, and Archibald could not move.
He did not want to, anyhow.
***
It was a week later that he finally moved from his room, and even then, it was more of a shuffle. The greyness crept in too closely, until everything Archibald could picture was tinged permanently with monochrome. He wouldn’t arrogate to being an expert on matters of depressive episodes or the like, but he presumed that an issue such as permanently-monochromed thoughts would benefit from leaving his room.
And so, with great reluctance, he dragged himself to his door, and with an even greater trepidation, he opened it to the realm of illusions so vivid and false that he almost slammed the door shut and returned to his room of stuffy grey. At least that was real.
Archibald swallowed down the desire, and as it went down, it ground up his throat as though it was edged with broken glass. His nose, incidentally, was also rather stuffed up.
Perhaps sitting in one room with no fresh air for over a week did not do wonders to one’s health.
Just as Archibald came to this conclusion, his spine pressed flat against the door, his sisters spilled from their rooms all as one.
The moment they spotted each other, they all froze.
Seven of them, one of him. The way that they peered at him was like he was nothing more than an odd animal—as if they had forgotten his existence altogether, in his time of unmoving solitude.
For his part, he viewed them similarly. He’d spent so much time locked up inside that his memories of his sisters had suffered from a monochrome grey. Seeing them now was like seeing a falsehood. He didn’t have the proof of their existence through the eyes of his family members, and he didn’t trust his own eyes as a result.
Archibald could scarcely breathe.
His decision to leave his room was at the wrong time.
All seven of his sisters seemed to agree with him.
Melody’s face twisted up. Relish gave a hiccough to swallow down emotion. Joy paled. Grace took a small step backwards, and Dulcie looped her arm in Grace’s. Clarimond batted her eyes, then looked away.
At the front of the pack, Patience stared at him for a long, uncomfortable moment. Her expression was a mask. A serious gravity made her face appear almost judicial in nature.
Then, with a command unheard by Archibald, all seven of his ex-sisters turned from him as one. Footsteps synced, they walked down the hallway away from him, all their shoulders pulled back, tension pulling them straight upright, their postures perfect.
In them, Archibald saw a camaraderie he would never join again. Already, his family had struck him from the record of the living. To them, he was dead—and thusly, no longer fit to be the ambassador of the Pole. The only reason he’d been allowed to stay in his room for this long was due to the fact that he had not left it.
As he watched the once-familiar figures of his sisters disappear down the hallway, something deep in his lungs tightened. His sternum crushed against his spine, and he had to hunch forward to choke out a breath.
Why, he wondered, would a ghost ever stay where they once lived?
Because, for him, it was nothing but another death ten times over.
He couldn’t stay there.
He was off and running before he was even aware he had the air to do that. And perhaps it was more of a stumble—from the blur of faces and the disgruntled noises turning into pleased cries of “Archie!” from women and stern greetings of “Mr. Ex-Ambassador” from their husbands, Archibald knew he was running into people more than he was making any headway.
It didn’t matter.
In the core of his being, all he knew was that he had to get away.
As he burst out of the front doors of Clairdelune, he realized he didn’t know precisely where to go. Away, yes—obviously. He had to get away, away, away—away from his childhood bedroom, away from the hallway lined with his ex-sisters’ doors, away from the Web and the reminder that they had struck him off the registry of the living.
But he didn’t want to go to the homes of any of previous affairs. They would never let him in the front door without the promise of his company.
He sucked in a lungful of air less tainted with illusions—but they would never be gone. Not completely. Not in this area of the Citaceleste.
As if bottled up for this very occasion, a familiar voice whispered, If ever you have the need for it, you can stay at my place. Even if it’s unannounced.
———
Chrysi woke up from her nap with blurry vision and the lasting impression of Jacks’s displeasure at her request that she stay at the Pole for longer. She looked about her narrow apartments groggily, but all she found was that her quilt had slipped onto the floor while she dreamed with the Executioner’s Officers. Her rooms looked the same: cracked caulking, neat to a fault, and uncomfortably cold no matter what she did.
She’d been awoken prematurely—but by what?
The answer repeated itself as if it had heard her silent confusion: knock, knock, knocking at her door, three staccato beats hurrying after the other. It begged attention, and immediately.
She sprang from her couch, and she tripped over herself getting to the door. Only once she’d closed her hand around the doorknob did she consider her messy hair and her sleepy eyes and her home clothes being unsuitable for a visitor eager to improve relations with Selene.
But by then it was too late. She’d flung the door open, and on the other side stood Archibald with his ratty top hat pressed to his chest in a half-remembered symbol of politeness.
Chrysi came up short.
In the time she hadn’t seen him, she thought Archibald would never worsen after his fever and delirium. Maybe he wouldn’t look much better, but at least he wouldn’t have deteriorated.
She had been wrong.
Circles darkened under his eyes, his skin had gone ashen, and his jaw was thoroughly unshaven in a manner unlike his normal defiance of social conventions. Everything about him weighed itself down, until he looked like a man half-dead.
The past couple weeks had treated him very, very poorly.
He smiled at her in a wobbly, apologetic way that was most certainly not meant to be wobbly and apologetic.
“Hello, Mademoiselle Executioner,” he said, or croaked, really. His smile fractured a millimeter wider, and his eyes looked like crushed glass. “I know I’m calling upon you unexpectedly, but would you mind letting me stay with you for the time being?”
She roused herself from her silent concern. Her eyes locked on his, the eyes once summer-blue. All she could think was that she missed the way they used to sparkle.
“Archie…” She pulled the door open wider and stepped back, a somber smile tilting her lips upward. “For however long you need—of course.”
chrysi on the pole versus selene :)