artemy “tocka” amelin
25 years old
dancer & courtesan
played by em. 21+. she/her. est.
love was unyielding. artemy learned this first. it served no one, as any feral thing wouldn’t, only yielding to instinct and will.
he had loved his mother in the only way a young child could, wholly and without rhyme, and she him. he could only remember she was a woman of frost, silken ink hair whipping in the winds as they traveled from wagon to train, crossing mountains and dirt and fields with nothing but a handful of clothes to their name. she was an earthen goddess paving paths where there were none, a sprite shining a light through dense snow-covered forests with only an oil lantern. she was only comfortable when the cold froze her tears before they could fall, so she took them past mongolia, to lands of old lifting up byzantine cathedrals and umber palaces.
when she became ill, betrayed by her beloved chill, she left him in st petersburg. he’d wailed and wailed, but her figure only kept fading in the snow, into the forest; she was intent on dying alone. now, he understood.
he was taken in by a brothel of blood mothers, warm and unapologetic and cutting with their tongues, lithe, older women who swept by in silk robes but ate stew at the same table, elbows resting on knees, taking bites straight from the bread loaf and talking loudly and crudely. they’d all learned to survive long ago, orphans in some shape or another, be it countries or mothers who had abandoned them to the cold.
they all raised him in fractions, forming something of a whole. one mother would bring home an apple for him for dinner. another brought home a couple of dumplings. another brought home a cup of cabbage soup. it was all the effort they could put in individually, but together it was enough.
he was tasked with changing and washing the sheets each night and sweeping the leaves around the building. ‘you would be useless here otherwise. the men who come want something in between a mother and a fuck. they want you to drain them and then sing them a lullaby.”
officials, they meant. men with badges and ribbons, men with wives and children who demanded as much as their duties did. men who slinked in like shadows, their illegalities written like scars on their faces. they eyed artemy strangely as they brushed past, pale boy sweeping leaves to the light of a cheshire moon. he listened to their noises, guttural first, and then childish - asking for a nursery song, for a kiss, for ‘i love you’. the mothers always obliged, their voices the softest he’d ever heard when they were muffled by thin wood. but after the men were gone, they emerged, cigarette smoke filling the cobalt night, cackling about what their patron asked them to do, relaying stories over the last bit of vodka in chipped glasses as he gathered their sheets together. he learned love smelled like cigarettes and used blankets. he learned love was humiliating.
even as he grew, as he became tall and lithe like his new mothers but windswept and lovely like his true mother, lovely like a crane floating in winter winds, he did not desire to follow them in their line of work. not that he looked down upon their work at all, but he found he hardly had the stomach to even imagine it, being underneath a ruddy old man. even as the patrons’ gazes lingered for too long, even when he began to see himself beautiful, as they did, with doe eyes and sweet lips and a faraway look, he wanted none of it. what he did want were the lullabies and the nursery rhymes - the power in that moment, singing to ministers and diplomats as if they were children with their thumb in their mouth, looking into their eyes and knowing they’d give anything to you if asked.
he first realized this when an ambassador’s wife came by asking for her husband, suspecting him of having grown restless. artemy had been instructed to protect each patron’s confidentiality (‘we would not survive if we could not keep secrets’), and he told her he did not know. rather than leave, the woman took a seat beside him in the courtyard, her face sinking with exhaustion, her pearls and diamonds weighing down her thin shoulders. ‘can’t say I’d blame him if he wanted to,’ she sighed. ‘this city is too somber, too cold. what else can you do but find warmth when one is not enough?’
she was speaking freely, perhaps assumed a slight orphan in a brothel was the very same as speaking to the wind. artemy tucked his legs under himself, brushed a strand of hair behind his ear, his smile inviting. he held himself like a muse. made himself a blank slate, invited her to pour herself onto him, her worn and weary ash violets and greys. ‘do you find yourself cold often?’ he asked, slender fingers toying with the tassels of his newly gifted silk robe. a hand me down. it slid along his skin with every movement, like fire licking snow. ‘sometimes I think we’re too much for ourselves. one body isn’t enough, so we try to try and split ourselves, parcel bits of us into our lovers and children.’
she sighed, looking guilty. ‘i try not to. but one of his colleagues, he understands. his wife is always late coming home. he has no children, doesn’t know how to cope. he’s kind to me.’
‘it would be wrong of us to neglect the good that is offered.’ he spoke sagely, mimicking the softness of his mothers when they sang their lullabies. he allowed her to stare, her gaze curious and shy. ‘the world is already cruel enough.’
she left not long after, stopping to kiss him long on the lips and to tuck a pearl earring into his hand. ‘for listening.’
his first treasure. he did not tell his mothers, they would want him to split the cut. he sold it and bought pastila, the first dessert he’d ever had.
his second treasure was given by a minister, forced to wait by his favorite being otherwise occupied by a particularly vigorous patron. he had no illusions of his own exclusivity, and artemy liked him for it. he waited in the courtyard where artemy arranged dried leaves and wilted petals into pictures and shapes, skin fair and soft against cracked pavement. the minister watched for a while, artemy could feel his eyes on every part of him he chose to expose.
‘a picture. my mother was murdered by her country, pistol to the back - i’m trying to remember what it looked like. the leaves aren’t red enough.’ he liked to lie. next time he would say he was abandoned by a traveling theater troupe, that he’d once been an aerialist before he sprained his ankle. but this minister looked like he’d watched many families suffer at the hands of their country, all lined face and hands scarred from war and tobacco scented even in his mid-forties, and artemy chose his lies and stories accordingly. ‘i think it will be a blue twilight tonight.’
(his mothers had unknowingly taught him how to glean people like art. ‘look at the red of his cheeks. he indulges in sirloin and whiskey a little too often, no?’ ‘a foreign watch, tailored pants, alligator wallet, walking around these parts? an heir turned oligarch, sheltered, soft as a baby. hope he doesn’t get mugged.’ the world was a gallery, each person a moving exhibit.)
perhaps it was guilt. perhaps it was sympathy. the minister knelt down beside artemy on the ground, rough fingers arranging the leaves like oils on a canvas. ‘blood turns dark, brown and black. battlefields look like oil had been spilled. i hated the smell. my best friend died and i didn’t have the heart to tell his wife he’d begged for his mother in his last moments. the minister of internal affairs’s son.’
artemy shuddered a little, as if the sight was too much for his delicacy, his robe shrugging off a shoulder, exposing a long expanse, and the minister continued, voice faltering.
‘his father is already mad enough, his aides just hide it well. i couldn’t bear to make it worse. i’m not usually known for being merciful’
the minister was only with his mother for five minutes, but there were no noises. couldn’t get it up, artemy realized with a faint smile. when the minister left, he pressed a worn and tattered medal into artemy’s hand. artemy kissed his cheek goodbye, left traces of moondust on his skin.
he never hung on to his treasures for long, he knew they were liable to be stolen, forgotten, and he sold them quickly for desserts, bought himself english books to teach himself the language and discarded them before he got home. the real prize, he would realize, was the intangible. it was learning a noble ambassador frequented brothels, it was learning his wife was having an affair. that the minister of internal affairs was more vulnerable than the public imagined.
then came the day a traveler arrived, english and french spilling from his lips in an attempt to communicate. the mothers made artemy greet him - they knew how adept at conversation he’d become. english speakers rarely found their way to the brothel, and they treated it as an omen.
artemy draped himself over his stone bench, tassels spilling over the side. years of spoiling himself in secret had made him a stark image of rosy health and luxurious beauty amid a landscape of gritty survival. his accent colored his voice - he liked sounding far away to someone. ‘can i get you a drink, mr. suit?’
‘i suppose. and another to pour on the street.’ the stranger’s smile was friendly, melancholy. ‘i’m here to mourn.’
‘and what headstones do you see here, mr. suit? listen closely and you’ll hear the sounds of the living, inflamed and guttural.’ he poured the stranger and himself a glass of vodka. ‘or are you here to pour someone’s ashes into our vases?’
‘my friend, he was in love with one of the women here. or maybe you, he didn’t say.’ he lifted his eyes, perhaps expecting artemy to be flattered. artemy smiled, sipped his glass as nonchalantly as he would if the man had said the weather was pleasant. ‘he died not even a month ago, in a fire in paris. in his favorite cabaret. his love was here, though, even if they didn’t love him back.’
‘a cabaret? how glamorous.’ it was in artemy’s nature to skip over tragedy in his mind, to ignore sentiment. grief, mourning, love, they all served to make one soft and slow for the wolves. he leaned in closer, tried to imagine jewels and velvet and lights and costumes, tried to place himself in a distant painting resplendent with reds and golds. ‘was it beautiful?’
‘it was the center of the universe. it will be again soon, i’m sure - they’re reopening it after they’ve cleaned up all the ashes. you should go see it, write your name on their walls.’
‘how sweet.’ he tilted his head, dark hair falling in front of dark eyes. ‘but it’s a cruel world out there, mr. suit. we are happy being impartial, the moirai. we have our treasure, our drink, and our men and women would do anything for us. their secrets. i’m afraid if i leave i’ll never come back and this place will forget me.’
the stranger almost looked impressed, taking out a cigarette and lighting it. ‘you are happy simply using your charm to collect trinkets and secrets? what do you even do with what you know? you tuck them away to rot?’ he leaned forward, placed a course hand over artemy’s. ‘what a waste.’
‘there’s nothing wrong with rot.’ he could not help his intrigue, how he leaned closer, the elegant curve of his smile. ‘you may tell me more about this club, mr. suit. but get your hand off me. i will be the one to seduce.’
the wild thing was lured back into civilization with the promise of better food, something succulent to sink his teeth into, and it offended his pride far less than he thought it would. he was less like his blood mothers, who were staunchly in one spot until the sand wore them down, and more like his true mother - moving, swaying, leaving one land for another when opportunity presented itself before her roots could take hold. she had known complacency was the most dangerous thing of all, that to depend on one thing was worse. it was why she wanted to die alone rather than watch her child grieve, to remember her as immobile and pale and decrepit.
‘what if it happens again? the fire?’ his mothers. ‘say you rub someone the wrong way? say they drop another match?’
he hears the whispers, can feel the apprehension at his decision, but there was not even a shadow of a doubt. new life was born from the ashes, and so he sprinkled cinder into his hair, planted what treasures he had left in soot, a gold button, a cufflink, an ancient coin, a hair clip, and prayed to his dead mother that from the ashes wealth and wonder would sprout.
he wanted to find his lullabies and nursery rhymes here, in this viper’s nest teeming with glitter and venom. he wanted to leave his signature with a neat flourish and move on as soon as he was bored again, before the past caught up with him again. the stranger had been right. he was wasted with his mothers, keeping secrets with him until he died, spending all his treasures on desserts because he was afraid anything with more permanence would be stolen.
now, he spoke in half truths and spun tales like silk through a loom. there was no use in dwelling in his past, no matter how unusual it was - told more than once, it would become boring to him. one night he was the bastard of royalty, cast aside like a mutt. another night he was born of sea foam, wandering, and had stumbled upon the moulin rouge during a storm. ‘i would be swept away with the rain, you see,’ he’d said once to a crowd of mr. suits. ‘ it’s why i bathe in rosewater. nothing bad can happen to you in the bath.’
he was a fine dancer, not as skillful as those who had been classically trained, but he was more method than skill, more sensuality than precision. but a lover he was, and potential customers had a taste when they caught him alone by the bar in a generous mood, generous enough to sit by them, to conversate and ruminate, perhaps a kiss if he was especially merciful. anything more was as good as myth, and he made it a point to paint his exclusivity in mist and shrouds, made what few who had taken him to bed speak nothing of their night to anyone else with a promise that it would be even better the next time.
mystery. intrigue. it built value, made him expensive, made him beyond mortal.
could anyone blame him for enjoying it?
