[Flashback] The Demon of the Crossroads [Arvalyn]

[Aurin]

"Well," he said grudgingly, cracking a grudging smile, "if you're garbage then so am I."

He glanced over his shoulder, noticed the bar wench returning.

"Ask him about dessert if you want. Might as well take me all I'm worth while I'm feeling penitent and nostalgic." His smile turned into a smirk, which seemed to fit his face better. "Just don't go porking to the point where you hork up my peace offering. That's just fucking rude."

And then bar wench was there asking after things. Maybe it was also fucking rude to think of him as bar wench, but he wasn't going to ask him his name like one of those customers who wanted to form a personal connection like that made them nobler than customers who were polite and paid them for doing their job. And he was somewhere between realizing the stupidity of offering the thief his alias and not quite wanting to share his real name.

"How was everything, sirs?"

"Obviously disgusting," he said, indicating his empty bowl and the remains of the bread that the thief hadn't quite finished. "I'll have another ale, though. As for him..." He nodded toward the one he might have called my friend for politeness' sake, but didn't say because it would have been a lie and possibly been upsetting. "We both have to get back to work, but it's up to you." That said, he drank more of his dwindling ale, leaving him to order another if he thought best and ask about dessert if he wanted it. He was a young man, but Aurin didn't know if he was too young to drink here in Antiris. The way he figured it, if the city wasn't going to afford people a childhood, then they ought to leave them alone to drink adult beverages and drown the sorrows inflicted by an uncaring city.

[Arvælyn]

"Nostalgic?" Arry asked, unsure what that might betoken. He didn't know this 'Darus' a whit. He didn't know his real name, let alone what element of his past this bizarre scenario might be stirring fond memories of. He tipped his face downward and lowered his eyes again, when the serving boy returned.

The thief went silent, but nodded slightly in response to being asked about the quality of their experience. He ventured to glance up at his former-mark, if only to roll his eyes at the foreigner's tired, old pub joke about hating the food that he'd clearly savoured enough to clear the plate. Even foreigners made that joke? His gaze danced back down to his ebbing tankard of ale, and he nodded and tapped the vessel with his index finger to indicate he'd take another as well. As the boy turned away, Arvine canted his head sharply toward him- eyes darting to his shoddy shoes.

"Wait." There was a pause, as he watched the shoes pivot back to point in his direction.

"I want cake." He announced softly, and flatly. When asked for clarification as to what specific type of cake might suit his blithely-stated whim, he added: "Lemon butter cake." The boy started to step away. "Is there icing?" The boy confirmed that there was a drizzle of honey glaze, and Arry nodded sagely. "Good, good." And he turned his full attention back to the man seated across from him.

"So." He began, as he peered into the stranger's eyes. It felt weird doing so. He typically avoided eye-contact when he wasn't amongst his motley little family of lost boys and girls, grifting their way through the days. It was strange to examine a new pair of eyes. His gaze couldn't bore as deeply as Darus' had when he first gripped his wrist and siphoned out the object of Arry's existential dread, but the thief examined to the best of his ability, albeit bereft of eldritch aid.

"Did you just want to make a peace offering with someone who wronged you and dole out unsolicited advice today, or...?" He trailed off, cocking one of his prominent eyebrows.

[Aurin]

When the bar wench turned his gaze to Aurin, the grifter shook his head no. He wasn't a growing boy any longer. Perhaps the thief wasn't either; he had put so much effort into hiding who he was that it was difficult for Aurin to tell for all his practice at reading people—and that for much the same purpose: marks.

"Nostalgic," he clarified, "because I don't know the details of your life, but I remember when mine relied on stealing from other people and it not seeming like the world would ever give me a break." He smiled, but it was sad. Not maudlin, not regretful, just sad.

"A ragged urchin, aimless and alone,
Loitered about that vacancy; a bird
Flew up to safety from his well-aimed stone:
That girls are raped, that two boys knife a third,
Were axioms to him, who'd never heard
Of any world where promises were kept,
Or one could weep because another wept."

He wasn't a performer, but he spent most of his time with them. Perhaps he had picked up a cadence or a flourish by association.

"Not asking you to weep with me..." Normally words tumbled out of him like a spell. Not today, it seemed. He couldn't quite articulate anything around this kid whose Hytori eyes looked back on him like mirrors. "I guess I don't actually know what I wanted. Maybe when I pulled my trick, I saw someone like myself in you. Or maybe I wanted to. You're a mouthy little shit, so maybe I wasn't wrong." He smirked. "Don't worry about it. I'm not buttering you up for a fuck even if you do have pretty eyes. Have your cake, finish your ale, and we can part ways, go back to our separate grifts."

He heard footsteps across the room and he turned his head so he could confirm it was bar wench with the ale. In fact, it was bar wench with two tankards held in one hand by the handles and a rather enormous serving of lemon cake on a plate in the other. He smiled slightly, finished his ale. But he didn't embarrass himself, bar wench, or the thief with another dad joke. It didn't make him think of his father, but he wondered whether fathers started making those jokes because they didn't know what else to say in any given moment, lame humor to cover nerves and nothingness.

[Arvælyn]

"Well, you look like you've done all right for yourself." Arry observed, before the other man launched into verse, causing the thief to blink in bemusement.

"M'not an urchin." He muttered under his breath, after the first line, but he settled into listening and knitted his brow... affected. There was a long, thoughtful pause before he replied with words.

"I don't usually like poems. They're typically either confusing and meaningless or they're about flowers in meadows and love and a bunch of other shit I don't care about, but..." He pursed his lips and nodded, "That's a real one." He wrapped his knuckle lightly against the tabletop and used the other hand to grab the tankard by the handle and down the rest of his ale as Darus began to answer Arry's question.

"If I took you for a perv, I wouldn't have asked your angle. So." He began shifting gears, scanning the other man's face and searching for candour thence. If that was the brand of nostalgia at work here, and this man whom he took for a mark was of a similar background, then maybe Darus' advice needn't be unsolicited after all...

"If I'm your past, what do I have to do to make sure you're my future?" His lips parted slightly and hung there, teeth were clenched behind them and his breathing was shallow. He was anxious. A shadow of the way he'd felt when Darus had practiced his 'dirty trick'.

"Did the world give you a break, or did you break the patterns on your own?" He paused a beat, and arched an eyebrow, "Maybe some foreigner came to your town and caught your hand at his purse?" He cracked a smirk, but it was short-lived and soon replaced by relaxed lips that spoke without spilling words, and begged 'help me'. Those vulnerable eyes hardened and shot back tableward, when the next round and the cake arrived.

"Ca'I have honey?" The request sounded more like a statement than a question, and it was quiet enough to elicit a 'Come again?' from the server. "Honey." He said, more loudly and more sharply.

[Aurin]

"I wish," he said quietly, absently rubbing at his wrist as if he would have preferred that to whatever else had transpired. He was quiet, watching and waiting as the thief asserted himself for a pot of honey. When they were alone again, tried to put things forth simply and truthfully, perhaps with more context than he had had when it was happening.

"No one saved me. At least, not directly. When I outgrew my place... someone tried to take me out, but I took them out instead. But they had friends and things were changing. People can be worse than the weather, and groups are only more stable until they aren't. I suppose it was an opportunity. If that hadn't happened, I might still be there, jockeying for position. Maybe I would've come to enjoy the killing and the hurting. I killed enough. Hurt more. I'm not bragging. It was awful. Hopefully, they think I'm dead. Just to be sure, though, I ran. From place to place, fucking up because I was fucked up." He took a sip of ale, grew quiet as the honey was delivered and the bar wench left them be again.

"Now, I think I was running from myself, too. Didn't know how I fit into the world because now it was up to me, at least more than it ever had been before. Running from yourself isn't something you worry about when you're running for your life. It catches up to you, though. Eventually. And I guess some opportunities look like someone trying to kill you. Or someone picking your pocket." He chuckled darkly.

"Like I said, keep your eyes open. Be adaptable. Be this." He indicated the thief's costume, especially his hat. "But be ready to pull that hat off and be what else you can pass for. Keep them guessing. "If a constable's chasing a human thief one way and crosses paths with a Hytori calmly walking the way he came, he's probably going to ignore the Hytori. Standing out can be camouflage too. You just have to know which tool to use for which problem."

He sighed. "I wouldn't even discount the odd prayer to the god of luck. I don't even know how to say trust me, just don't trust anyone without... I mean, contradicting myself. Maybe I was just too stubborn to lay down and die."

Today was not a good day. A touch made him think he was about to be murdered. An attempt to be kind made him bring down the mood not just for himself, but for some alternate past version of himself. "Hope is a demon bitch, but I guess she keeps us alive. I hope that cake is sweet enough to counter my bitter."

[Arvælyn]

As broody and dark as Darus' tone had become, it didn't dip Arry's mood as it had his own. This past into which the man was delving was a remote thing to Arry. Maybe it was his future, but if so he hadn't lived it yet. He could sympathise with the anguish he saw, casting its umbral curtain across Darus' eyes, but he didn't properly feel it himself. And his takeaway from their fateful meeting, at this point, was that there really was hope for him. And maybe it wouldn't require a Hytori ex Machina in the form of his absent mother, this time. Maybe he could stop believing the fantasy that she'd swoop in and save him in some lasting meaningful way, rather than just popping in and scrawling a symbol on his wrist that would supposedly benefit him at some point in some as-yet-undisclosed fashion.

He did glance up at the confession that this man had, "Killed enough." That wasn't something Arry could say he'd done. Oh, he'd seen his share of death. Ever since he'd been a child growing up in that slum, where bodies wound up on the street for any number of reasons, he'd been aware of death. But he'd never directly caused it. Nor even indirectly, that he was aware of. The honey was placed down, and he nodded acknowledgment, before lifting the pot to drizzle the sweet syrup over his lemon butter cake. He dug into the piece with his fingers, and stuffed his mouth, chewing heedlessly and actually freezing with his mouth slightly agape- still full of cake- at the first verbatim mention of the Hytori. Darus would even see the faint outline of the long ears, shifted slightly under the slack wool of the beanie, as if to listen more closely to his advice.

"Can I ask you a question, mister?" Arvine inquired, pausing for assent before posing it.

"How're you gonna pay for all this without your coin purse?" He took a gulp of ale, and followed it with another mouthful of cake. "You've got to try some of this! It's soooo good." Those were the words he attempted to phonate, but the muffled mess of what came out with a mouthful of spongey cake, was another matter altogether.

[Aurin]

Watching the kid enjoy his cake tempered his descent into old madnesses. It was unlikely he could save this kid, but he could give him a fully belly and enough coin his master wouldn't likely beat him tonight. Maybe that was enough and he would figure out the rest on his own.

He felt a faint flare of pure delight, compersion for the lad's simple pleasure, but it twisted into something more like a smirk because, well, this was Aurin Kavafis. He couldn't be himself if he tried. In fact, he wasn't sure he knew himself. For all his protestations when people lumped him in with the courtesans he managed, he was also adept at playing roles and giving people what they wanted so he could get what he wanted. It was a life.

"Don't keep all your eggs in one basket," he said. "You only got one of my coin purses." He had already paid for the first round of drinks and the lunch so he could sneak the bar wench a bit of the tip early and ensure good service. He could still afford the rest of the drinks and the cake. He would have made a joke about going halvsies on the date, but he wanted the kid to hold onto the coin he had stolen. And anyway, he had more coin hidden where he was staying. He wasn't an amateur.

Reaching out slowly, he picked up a morsel of cake and popped it into his mouth. It was good—sweet honey, sour lemon, moist cake. If he had been the thief, he would have been flirting with the bar wench. Go on a few dates. Secure some good food. But he seemed content with his employment for the moment. Aurin only hoped he kept his eyes and ears open and would be ready to adapt when the time violently came. It always did. It was always violent. Such was the nature of the world.

"I'm glad you like it."

[Arvælyn]

"I'm getting full, but I don't want to staaaahhhp..." Arry whined, before licking some honey from his fingers as Darus answered his question. He listened attentively, wide-eyed now and unabashed about their Hytori hue. He'd somehow grown comfortable with this man he'd wronged. A little bit of kindness went a long way with Arry, which said a lot about the frequency at which he received it.

"Well, good. I was afraid you were gonna slip out and stick me with the bill." He still didn't really understand why the man was letting him just keep the money. Darus had explained, but not really to Arry's satisfaction insofar as the thief just couldn't imagine willingly parting with money. This perceived frivolity with coin led Arvine to the belief that he'd been correct when he initially marked this man as a rich person, which is why he went after him in the first place. And here they were.

"Good, right?!" The youth beamed, pleased to see Darus indulging in at least a taste of the rich dessert. "It's not even stale! Do you think it was just baked today?" After one more bite, he finally sat back- placing a hand, sticky with honey, on his concave belly. He groaned:

"Do you eat like that every day?" It sounded unfathomable to him. "I feel like I'm gonna get the gout." Arry didn't sound like he knew what gout was, but he certainly looked like he was on the verge of a food coma. Beads of sweat appeared at the edge of his beanie- it was too warm for a woolen hat and those baggy clothes anyway, but he was keen to hide both his ill-gotten gains and elements of himself, so he just dealt with the heat.

"So." He began, sitting up a bit a peering across the table. "I can tell you're a foreigner, but... Do you live in Antiris, now? Do you need a houseboy for your mansion? I'll bet I can hold a tray real steady. I've got real steady hands..."

[Aurin]

The benevolent smirk persisted. He couldn't remember ever enjoying anything as simply as the young thief did.

"Tastes like it was baked just today. Maybe yesterday if they're storing it under glass so it doesn't dry out." He paused, smirk intensifying. "Well, I don't eat like that. But thankfully I don't often miss a meal anymore." He had only had his bowl of stew and a bite of the cake, forgoing his bread to fill the lad's belly. So many questions, and then what might have been a plea passed off as a joke... He considered the kid, calculated the risks. He dropped the Haqs dialect for the Kalzasi one that was, for the most part, how he spoke anymore.

"I have a little cottage behind the building where I work," he admitted. "Back in Kalzasi. I'm only in Antiris for a week, most likely. I've had a number of jobs. Now I'm a manager at a cabaret. Keep the clients drinking, smoking, and gambling away their money. Keep them from getting overly friendly with the courtesans and performers. I got lucky, I guess." He blew air through his lips, not sure why he was going out on a limb, sure the lad wouldn't take him up on it—trust took more than a little kindness. "You could come back with me, if you want. You've got a knack for the artful. They'll feed and house you, teach you to sing and dance, or deal cards and mix drinks. Not all the workers do the sex work, although there's nothing wrong with that as long as it's your choice and not chosen for you. Besides, you're probably too young to make that choice, at least by the Madame's standards."

Aurin didn't really want him to make that choice at whatever age he was, not until he had options and that was just one of them. He wasn't trying to steal anyone's agency, but he had seen a few young things choose sex, thinking it would be a lark, only to find it wasn't always.

"You'll say no. That's okay. Maybe when things fall apart here, though, if you can get yourself to Kalzasi, find the Velvet Cabaret and ask for Aurin. That's me. Just don't... spread it around here. Darus has some things to take care of while Aurin's on holiday."

[Arvælyn]

"I don't eat like this either!" Arvine protested, "But I also don't get caught nicking purses, so you'll forgive me if I indulge myself a bit to overcome the blow to my ego!" He stuck his tongue out slightly, and stretched his arm out to claim his tankard, without moving his torso from its slump against the nearest wall. He took in a swallow of the ale, but so rich a draft didn't go down as easy on this full a stomach. His eyes danced up to study Darus' face, as his tone shifted and his voice lowered to a volume that verged on the conspiratorial. Candour. He recognised it first in the accent, and then in the words couched therein.

"A cabaret?" He repeated, eyes full of wonder, as if that was the most glamorous thing the boy had ever heard. With that interjection having escaped gaping lips, he listened on as Darus continued. He didn't pay much mind to the cautionary side-notes about sex work. That had never been his game, and he was practiced enough at deflecting attention that he'd successfully evaded any unwanted attention cast his way. At this point, his entire primary of reference for sex was within his little gang of misfits and criminals. There were a few kids who'd coupled off, and a few more who fooled around liberally, whilst Arvine saved himself for a single-mindedly pining, unrequited crush on one of the older boys.

"Are you in jest?" Arry furrowed his brow, and gaped incredulously at Darus. "Of course I want to go with you! Working at a cabaret? I'll bet people wear feathers dyed bright colours and sparkly stuff, to boot!" His smile softened at hearing Darus' real name. That admission permitted Arry to introduce himself without feeling compromised.

"Pleased to meet you, Mr. Aurin." He offered his delicate hand with those slender, nimble fingers that had untied his purse from his belt not long hence. Very quietly he introduced himself in kind, "My name's Arvine. Now when and where should I meet you so you can get me out of this cesspit?"