seemingly incurable sadness | ciara & ephram, gangster au
It took an entirety of twelve minutes -- the time it took for them to have their coats hung up, for them to go to the main parlour, for Ephram to pour himself and Ciara two healthy slugs of gin -- before he murmured, “...I hope I’m not taking you away from any time you’d rather be spending with your husband, Mrs. Woodman.”
His niece’s birthday party earlier at the Zoological Gardens had Ephram feeling a strange, spiky cocktail of at-ease and on-alert; he hadn’t expected to find Ciara there, business overlapping unexpectedly with family matters. Although to be fair: when it came to the Kingfishers, business involved family as a matter of fact.
But despite wanting Ciara here, available to talk with more privacy than they’d had out at the shed with Dr. Miguel hovering and staring and eavesdropping, Ephram wasn’t of a mind to make the meeting an easy one for the woman. Not considering who she was, who he was. He sipped his gin.
Shopping was becoming one of the very few therapeutic activities that actually caught Essies attention. Pushing a small cart around the store was calming, arguing with herself over prices and trying to curve Finns comments equally distracting and mundane. That was until the little terror hopped right over the edge of the cart in pursuit of a new scent. The only thing running through the small familiars mind was a curious mess of all sorts of observations about the scents he was picking up. Alessa calls out to him but he’s running off quickly down the isle and she has no choice but to follow, smart as he was he was still too small for a lot of people to see over a cart and he might get run over.
Finn scuttles all the way to the meat counter and stops by a womans feet standing on his hind legs and chittering loudly at her. Asking her what the smell is, as if she could understand him at all. Essie steering her cart around the corner after him and spotting him bothering someone with an annoyed grumble.
. ☌ : Would/does your muse have any special piercings anywhere? Would they get some?
ooc: Tuah does have one piercing! His daylight charm is a small black earing on his right earlobe, which was given to him by one of his lovers in the past. He does not have any other piercing, however, nor does he want to have another in the near future.
the picture of his earing can be found here. Purely functional and not at all kinky cause he’s vanilla as hell :(
Join avant-garde atronach artist T’rocks as zie takes over the deli section of the Faeway Grocery to present an exclusive selection of zir work. Just $35 (or trade equivalent) gets you access to T’rocks’ newest and most audacious works, cubes of cheese and rustic bread, and a fermented tea that’s sort of like wine, close enough anyhow to give you a buzz.
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“Where’s that dude’s other hand?” - @rydenbolt
“This tea tastes like that one time I boiled grape juice and peanut butter” - @lilo-el-lobo
“Brow game on point” - @mayaparker
“I don’t think that animal should be smiling like that” - @thatwhichbindsus
Things you said I wouldn’t understandGrey’s Anatomy AU
@thatwhichbindsus
“No, Miguel stop babbling just,” she put her hand over his mouth and glared at him for a moment. For someone who was supposed to be smart, he was an incredibly big idiot sometimes. “Now, you just said the L word. When we started this we agreed it wasn’t about feelings. So which is it?” Ciara slowly pulled her hand away and stared hard into his panicked brown eyes.
They were in an unused x-ray room, pressed against each other and also into shelves of junk. The room had been slowly turning into storage space. It was also where the two of them went when they wanted to smooch or talk without anyone seeing or hearing.
“Well, it wasn’t about feelings at first but I didn’t mean to say it. I’m sorry. I know we can’t date so I don’t know why I said it. Can you just forget it? Erase it completely from your mind.” His face was red and he was still babbling but it made Ciara smile. She liked it when Miguel babbled, it meant there was so much in his heart it could barely get out of his mouth.
“I don’t tend to forget when people tell me they love me,” she said, the smile turning into a smirk. “Why can’t we date? There’s no rule against it at this hospital. I know for a fact that Natalie and Bombajon met while they were working here, and they’re married now.”
“You’re an EMT, and I’m a doctor.” That definitely wasn’t the right thing to say. Ciara’s smirk was vaporized, her eyes turned from amused to icy in lightning speed, and she pulled away from him and crossed her arms.
“So that’s it,” the words dropped from her like icicles from a gutter. “Let me see if I can bring my little EMT brain to understand this. I’m only good enough for doctor Ojeda to fuck, not to date?”
“No! No, Ciara that’s not it, you don’t understand -”
“No. I don’t.” She didn’t have anymore words for him, she didn’t want to look at him any longer. She didn’t want to be near him. So instead of letting him talk (he was only digging the hole deeper anyway), she turned on her heel and left the storage space. “Goodbye, doctor Ojeda.” She threw the title at him like a rotten pieces of fruit, at the same time she washed her hands of him.
It had been a long time since Ephram had been out to his trailer.
After what Anaxis had done there, it was hard not to think about all the blood and death. They’d only been birds, sure, but Ephram had loved and treasured them, and the demon had known that he’d carry the memory of his own hands on the gun as they were all messily dispatched.
But that was a long time ago. And Ephram, plus the blessed Cinquefoil, had Anaxis locked up deep and tight, not the way it used to be. Hell, the very reason he and Ciara were going out there was a symbol that things weren’t what they used to be.
“Thanks for doing this with me.” Ephram pulled his pickup into the faint traces of gravel road that remained, barely visible through the weeds, and parked in front of the trailer home. “I’d of never figured out what to do with these if you didn’t offer.” The sealed jar with his dismembered eyeballs was sitting on the truck seat between them, its covering moleskin bag and all twisted inside a wrinkled, nondescript brown paper sack. That helped with the discomfort, a little; took some of the drama out of the whole affair.
“I don’t understand what I’m saying,” you sigh, and Ciara gives you that slanted look she does sometimes, from behind her curtain of hair. Her mouth is quirked and you haven’t figured out yet what exactly that exact configuration means. You’re thinking of starting a running list, only you’re only right half the time so that might be premature.
“Sometimes you don’t need to understand it right away, Ephram,” she says, lifting her head to look at something rustling in the trees. “There’s a power in words, put together in a certain order, repeated by other witches down through the years. It’s a legacy, it’s not ... reinvention.”
You chew on the corner of your thumbnail and taste sap and syrup -- from working with trees all morning and before that, the waffles you shared with your husband -- two kinds of sap, when you think about it. “I ain’t never had no legacy when it comes to magic.”
Ciara tilts her head again (maybe you could map out the angles and what they mean? give up on the translations of her mouth-quirks?) and says as she rubs the thin fingers of one hand over the bony wrist of the other, “...sound out the syllables. That’s how Latin works. There’s no tricks to it.”
She pauses, for a moment, to let the irony settle between you. There’s always tricks, in Ciara’s view of the world. But she’s trying, and you can see it, so you nod and push the sounds out: luctor et emergo.
You still don’t know what it means but you don’t ask. She’ll tell you, when you need to know.
