[fic] A Parable of Talents (Graeme Gillespie, Isidore Walker)
Title: A Parable of Talents
Authors: mithrigil and lindensphinx
Fandom: Echo Bazaar / original
Characters: Isidore Walker, Graeme Gillespie, and, some might argue, the Neath.
Words: 7000
Rating: Hard R: Sex, drugs, and other Neathy activities, though Victorianly inexplicit.
Warnings: Isidore is not a good priest. Graeme, on the other hand, is a very good actor.
Summary: "Buy ALL the drinks!" "...Buy all the drinks?"
A Parable of Talents
some storylets
This particular apothecary's shop is over another store entirely, best reached by a winding iron alley-side staircase that drips rust down onto the awning every time Isidore takes a step. It's not the first one on Ladybones Road that Isidore has attempted to patronise, but it is the last one he's going to bother with today, given the assumed hour. Really, without sunlight, it is that much easier to think of time the way God presumably does. Isidore attempts to shoulder his purchases, withdraw the watch from his coat, and walk down the stairs at the same time.
One of these actions is about to fail.
It is not, Isidore thinks to himself in the moment between when he strikes the lowest steps of the staircase with his hip and the moment when he lands awkwardly and painfully and partially on the cobblestones of the street but mostly upon the stomach of the man who has run into him, entirely his fault. A man ought to watch where he is going, even if it is up stairs. Or down them.
Isidore removes himself from the vicinity of the man's person, and brushes off his pantlegs. The man himself makes an exploratorially pained noise, and regains his feet, if not his dignity, before Isidore can offer him assistance.
He offers his name, instead, and a handshake. "Isidore Ezekiel Walker. I'm sorry, did you have a hat? Or my purchases. I had purchases."
"A hat," the assailed man says, taking the handshake with a raggled smile and glancing about the ground for said hat until he spots it in the alley. The hat itself seems a bit large for him when he puts it on askew; a moment later he notices, and sets about looking for something else. "Your purchases, I dinnae follow down."
Ah. He has knocked over a Scotsman. Well. It is the Neath, there are unceasing wonders, and those may include the Scotch if they so choose. Isidore casts around for his packages -- they cost far too many Echoes to be abandoned to the alleyway -- and discovers them under the lowest steps. They do not, thank God, clink like broken glass when he retrieves them. "Don't trouble yourself, I have them."
"How much did ye pay for them?" the Scotsman asks, standing on the second-lowest step and stooping over Isidore.
Isidore blinks. "More than I'd like, less than I thought I'd need to."
The Scotsman winces and holds the frail banister tight in his glove. "Damn. Been to every shop on this street, and it's always an echo or more."
"I strongly suspect the apothecaries fix the prices between themselves." To Isidore's eyes, the Scotsman looks as if he hasn't slept in days, if not an entire week; that way he is clinging to the wrought-iron bannister suggests a certain inability to remain confidently upright much longer. "I could sell you some," he tells him offhandedly, discovering as he does that whatever instinctual kindness five years of service in the Church should have instilled in him still lingers, like a miasma, somewhere around where his sensible judgment ought to be.
"I'd be obliged to ye," the Scotsman says, and looks even more thankful than he sounds. He comes down to the next lower stair.
At this point Isidore believes he is supposed to offer a price. It takes him a moment to consider one; what he most desires for the evening is a substantial quantity of alcoholic oblivion.
That's a fair price, come to think of it. "Buy the drinks," he tells the Scotsman.
The Scotsman stares at him.
"All of the drinks," Isidore elaborates, helpfully.
After a moment, something apparently dawns on the Scotsman, something that makes him first shape his mouth into a mute "oh" and then smile, bright and congenial. Whether it's the correct something to dawn remains to be seen, and dawn, down here, doesn't come when it should.
---
If Hell has divisions, which Isidore cannot presume to know even if he has read his Dante, one of them might look something like Veilgarden. At least this particular -- is it a cafe? is it an alehouse? -- lacks immediately audible poets. This, Isidore genuinely believes, is a fundamental and necessary improvement on both its moral and its social state. He has informed the Scotsman so. He has also drunk, so far, a glass of mushroom wine, a mug of faintly greenish mulled mead, and a tankard of something that could only dubiously be referred to as beer.
The Scotsman, who has also drunk, so far, the equivalent wine, mead, and half of the beer, agrees with him. "Cannae tell ye I'fain the remainders that it's all toadstools we're feasting on."
"I have no idea what it is you just said," Isidore informs him.
"It's all mushrooms," the Scotsman says, and drinks.
"What, the poets?"
"No, what they're poeting about." The accent gets even thicker after a few drinks, it seems.
"Can't poet about roses or sunshine or -- whatever it is poets go on about aboveground. Were you well-acquainted with poets? Aboveground. I mean." Isidore, at least, is not slurring his words. As of yet. He thinks.
The Scotsman smiles. "Ye can call it acquainted. An actor gets to meet a fair amount of them, poets. Fewer good ones."
"An actor!" Isidore attempts to remember some pithily appropriate Shakespeare. All that comes to mind is the bit about Romans and countrymen and ears, and that will make him sound an idiot.
"Yea," the Scotsman says, "though it means nothing down here."
"Something, surely, I imagine the talent extends itself well enough, even if the Neath lacks a proper theater?" Isidore's tankard of quite-nearly-beer is empty. He looks at the bottom of it, which glistens unpleasantly, much like an oil-slick would.
"Couldnae build one even if I had a patron here." He slides his tankard forward on the table; it's still nearly half-full, but it's a decisive gesture.
"Do you fancy some of that blackish sort of brandy? For the next round," Isidore inquires. It's only polite to allow the man buying the drinks to buy whatsoever drinks he prefers.
"For the next round," the Scotsman repeats, with his eyebrows up almost to the shadow of his hat.
"I am not drunk enough to fall down as of yet. Any more than I've fallen down already, that is."
"And the rest of my due is to carry ye home?" The Scotsman laughs, but lifts a hand to signal a barmaid over. "My tab, your order."
---
Somewhere between round five of drinks and his current position, which involves bracing himself on the windowsill of his rented room while the Scotsman (whose name Isidore has either forgotten or neglected to acquire) sinks gracefully to his knees in front of him, Isidore seems to have misplaced many of his prior generalised qualms against the practice of sodomy.
It's quite enjoyable. Sodomy. If this is sodomy. He inquires as much, and follows that with an inquisitive, "And is this the usual conclusion of your expeditions to a pub?"
"Luck if I make it to the pub first," the Scotsman says, deftly seeing to Isidore's trousers and palming through his johns. "And as to the first--" There is a laugh, and an upward tilt to his voice, as if Isidore is speaking back to himself, "--it's somewhat inconclusive."
The combination is distracting, the warmth of that hand and the strangeness of having his own voice parroted back at him, and Isidore finds himself entirely speechless for a moment, as if the Scotsman had stolen his tongue in a more literal fashion. He manages a somewhat strangled noise.
The sound of his own laughter out of the Scotsman's -- is he a Scotsman after all? -- either way, after that, it is more than a bit disconcerting. "Do you mean to say you're unfamiliar with the practice?"
It is just barely possible that he has brought some sort of doppelganger-devil up to his rooms. Isidore reaches down, puts his hand on the man's shoulder, which is reassuringly un-amorphous. Probably not a doppelganger. Aren't those German, anyhow? "Not this practice," he says.
The Scotsman tilts his head as if to trap that hand between his shoulder and chin, and rolls his jaw. "I'll guide ye gently, then," he says, in the voice that isn't Isidore's.
"I've a considerable idea how this goes." That jaw fits neatly into Isidore's palm, and he grips it with his fingers, draws him closer to him. "Though the part where you're using my voice is a -- novel technique --"
That laugh is sweltering against Isidore's groin. "Who else would you rather hear?" he asks in blank Received pronunciation, smirking all through.
"-- what do they teach actors on the surface," Isidore breathes, and shifts his hand from jaw to tangled blond hair, arches his hips against the pressure of that voice. He ought to be more perturbed. There are many things he ought to be which seem inconsequential in Fallen London. His johns unsnap. The Scotsman is laughing into, around, Isidore's flesh.
"They teach us how to get by with what God gave us," he says.
God, Isidore distinctly recalls, has not given him much of anything, least of all proof that serving Him was anything more than an adviseable prospect for a career -- the heat of the Scotsman's mouth is drowningly wet -- he is thinking too much of seas, and tides, and cavernous rooves over them both. No, he is not thinking too much. There is not a too much to think, and his fingers pulling the strands of this man's hair so he is forced forward and open are proof enough of that --
His voice, when he finds it, is a gasp, and he wonders if that is harder or easier to steal. "God provides each man with talents. There's a parable --"
The Scotsman pulls back only enough to say, "Tell it. Let's see how far ye get," and plunge back down.
"There's a man -- ah -- and he has a son -- or several sons --" It is extremely hard to think just at this moment. "And a -- farm -- I -- Goddamnit it's Matthew 25:14 look it up yourself --!"
It is hard to discern what the Scotsman is trying to say through the laughter and the skill of his tongue, but the words when I'm done with ye don't seem out of place. If Isidore was a good priest --
Isidore isn't a priest at all, and hasn't been for some time. "I assume -- pastoral education can wait --" The back of his head hits the dirty glass of the windowpane and he rolls his hips up, up, easy, into the liquid heat.
He finishes in short order, fists and eyes tight, the Scotsman almost surging to take it down. When he relinquishes Isidore there's a thirst to his swollen lips that he didn't have at all over the alcohol, and a smirk that's more prideful than anything else, framed though it is. He doesn't wipe his jaw. "Your conclusion?"
It takes Isidore a long moment to catch his breath enough to answer. "On sodomy or on pastoral education?"
"Are ye a pastor?"
"Wrong tense."
The Scotsman laughs. "On sodomy, then."
"Surprisingly enjoyable," Isidore tells him, honestly. Honesty seems to be the friendliest thing. It is rather friendly of the Scotsman to have spent this time on his knees, isn't it? "Worth its time, and doing again."
"There's more to it, ye ken." He smiles, up and close. "I'll show ye in a bit. Just going to check that we didnae break aught."
"I am quite certain you didn't," Isidore says, excepting, perhaps, his mind, and only a little.
"I meant your purchases," the Scotsman clarifies, drawing himself up Isidore's body and leaning on him to stand.
---
Isidore wakes earlier than usual, naked, somewhat warmer than he would like, and sharing his bed with a fully clothed, if disarrayed, Scotsman. The Scotsman is asleep.
Isidore wakes him up with a sharp elbow-jab.
"What is your name?"
---
Graeme calls up the third round of drinks -- or rather the eighth, if this second outing is to be tabbed with the first. He is the one to flag the barmaid down, but indicates that Isidore should specify, and Isidore just waves for more of the same.
"And they defrocked ye?"
"I deflowered the viscount's daughter, what do you think they were going to do?" Isidore laughs. It's quite funny by now. "Also there was the part where we desecrated the church."
Never mind that Graeme's pint has nothing left in it to be drunk, he laughs, toasts, and slips his tongue along the inner wall of the glass. "They dinnae defrock her for it."
"No, I took care of that."
Graeme laughs, again -- Isidore would not describe the laugh as infectious, but inviting, as if Isidore's about to miss a cue if he doesn't join in. "And then ye came here? Or was that after?"
"After. I did some other business first -- really I came down here because of that, but I can't say the defrocking wasn't an impetus." He shrugs, grins a little more widely around the rim of his tankard. "And you? Surely there isn't all that much work for actors down here."
"Dinnae come here for the work," Graeme admits. The barmaid comes by with more mushroom beer. "But there's some to be had, if ye can stand it alane."
"Don't tell me you busk on street-corners in Spite, I won't believe it."
"Only the once. I cannae sing, ye ken."
Isidore snickers. "All of your voices, and not one of them can carry a tune?"
"Ye said it, I dinnae."
"So even if you pretend to be a -- hm." He casts about for the sort of man who would sing incessantly. There aren't that many in the Neath. Ones who sing in the King's English and not some underground babbling, at least -- oh! "An Italian! You've got to be musical if you're an Italian."
"Yes, yes, the Italians have the music in their rhythm," Graeme says, quickly and with a thick, exaggerated Italian accent that Isidore would readily ascribe to the old choir conductor when he was an altar boy. "But in the singing! Even among them, only a few can excel. And the most of them, they lack some other things."
"Which you do not," Isidore notes, with far less embarrassment than he probably ought to have, considering the means by which he has acquired this observation of Graeme's person.
He switches back to his own in the middle of a laugh. "Ye could check again."
Isidore is pleased with his failure to sputter into his beer in surprise. "I could!" he says. The prospect is quite pleasant, now that he's thinking about it. "Ah, I assume it's only polite to ask if you'd prefer your own lodgings this time?"
"If we drop by your place first," Graeme says, and downs the rest of his. "I dinnae think I can sleep without your generous provisions. Unless ye mean to wear me down."
Well, if that's what Graeme wants, it doesn't seem a very egregious task on Isidore's part. Besides, it's companionable to share whatever methods he has managed to acquire to stave off the nightmares that seem to plague the entirety of Fallen London. "I'm sure that can be arranged," he tells him. "Shall we pay the tab?"
---
"They're not the strangest objects I've ever gotten off the back of a carriage," Isidore concludes, gesturing at the mushroom-shaped, brilliantly-coloured, somewhat confectionarily-inspired hats clustered around his feet, as if the floor of his rented flat had suddenly turned into an exceedingly unusual mycological garden, "but they're the most ridiculous. And I haven't any idea what to do with them."
Graeme sniggers and elbows the mattress to put a better dent in it. "There's a fable about that."
"About ridiculous hats. Really."
"Nae, about stealing things ye cannae pawn off."
"Ah, one of those instructional fables," Isidore says. He prods one of the hats with his toe. It makes a noise which is far too close to a squeak for anyone's comfort. "I didn't steal them, I stole a perfectly normal box that happened to contain them."
"And did ye pawn off the perfectly normal box?" Graeme props himself up on an elbow and lets the other arm hang over the edge of the bed, swatting idly at another of the hats. That one doesn't squeak so much as chirr.
"If I'd done that what would I keep the hats in? I can't have them strewn about like this if the landlady comes in," Isidore protests, returning to the mattress himself and sitting on the edge. "So it was an entirely useless afternoon's work."
Graeme taps the small of Isidore's back with his knee. He tends to keep clothed during -- whatever it is they're doing together, so Isidore feels the increasingly familiar scrape of Graeme's increasingly better suiting on his skin. "How many are there, a dozen?"
He twists around, nodding. "No more, no less. Can you imagine a dozen people willing to wear these?"
"I ken a type."
Isidore really ought to have expected that. This is Graeme, after all, and Graeme keeps company with everyone in Veilgarden who will allow their company to be kept. "Do you," he says, leadingly.
Rather than repeat his answer, Graeme simply laughs. "How much do ye want for them?"
The pile of hats shifts, slightly, of its own accord. "-- five echoes each," Isidore says, quickly.
"Do I look like a man who has sixty echoes?"
"You might have hidden depths."
"Care to plumb them, do ye?"
That is some sort of rude invitation, which Isidore takes up by leaning down over Graeme with a hand on his shoulder. "Buy the hats piecemeal, then, won't you?"
"I'll start with the one," Graeme says, with the sort of expression he probably calls up for penny dreadful villains. "I'll have sold five more for ten within the week."
"That's agreeable enough," Isidore says cheerfully, and descends the rest of the way onto the bed and Graeme both, with a certain anticipatory satisfaction.
---
The victor of the current match hurls the loser out of the ring, knocking over Graeme and Isidore's table. Fortunately, the force with which the poor sod was thrown means that the mushroom beer spills about two meters away.
Graeme blinks, looks at his knees (which are only slightly spattered with sawdust), and waves over a replacement round of beer. In lieu of a table, he shoves his chair into the vacant space, turning it a quarter to face the ring. "Ye were saying?"
Isidore clears his throat. "I was going to explain that it just seemed easier to let the other fellow trip over his own feet, considering the momentum, but I think that the demonstration from my compatriot just now is more than adequate in proving the point." He rubs at the knuckles of his hand, which are somewhat bruised from encountering the jaws of several ring-fighting contestants a little earlier in the evening.
"There was a bit more than momentum behind that throw," Graeme says. Their beer has been replaced; the table, less so.
"-- it doesn't hurt to help momentum, either," Isidore shrugs.
Graeme makes an according hm sound around the rim of his glass. He hasn't fought at all tonight -- does he ever? -- but has made his admiration of the boxing ring evident enough. Perhaps next week they'll meet in Spite instead. "Doesnae seem quite godly of ye."
Isidore laughs. "I never said I was here on Crusade."
"Fair, since ye looked more the devil than that smear ye left in the dust."
That jibe ought to be much more insulting -- or at the very least, more troubling -- than Isidore finds himself taking it. Ah, well. "I never meant to be particularly skilled with knocking heads," he demurs. "This has all been rather unintentional."
"To your credit, then," Graeme says, and toasts before drinking.
Isidore realises that it wasn't an insult at all. He tips his mug Heavenward -- surfaceward, certainly -- and smiles. "There's a bit of satisfaction in striking a man when he doesn't expect the extent of your capability, I've found," he goes on. "Though the lack of expectation has been happening less of late."
"As happens when ye make a name for yourself."
"Getting sawdust in other men's teeth isn't at all what I thought I'd be remembered for, even down here," Isidore says, more amused than anything else.
Graeme considers that a moment, and rests the base of his tankard on his thigh. His survey of the room prompts Isidore to make one of his own; there are devils in their midst, and wights, and abominations of the deep. They two can't be the only ones here to have only lived once, but that the consideration has to be made at all speaks volumes. "There are worse reasons," Graeme says, "to be the talk of Hell."
Isidore turns from the panoply of the damned and damning and back to Graeme. "Quite a few. I'm sure you've your own list of those."
---
"Jesus, Mary, and goddamned Saint Andrew --!" Isidore gasps.
Graeme laughs into the space behind Isidore's bare knee. "Ye can call me either of the first two."
Isidore tries to squirm either away or toward the heat of Graeme's breath on his skin, and can't. The ropes around his wrists and ankles won't allow it. He shudders instead, twists inside the four-point stretch Graeme has tied him into -- he can't quite recall just this moment why he'd agreed to this, or possibly why it'd taken him this long to agree to it. "-- first two are definitely blasphemy," he manages.
"And what, the third's unworthy?" As if the ropes weren't enough, Graeme is holding Isidore down by the hips, presumably so that he can better steady his tongue on Isidore's admittedly unsteady inner thigh.
"The Acts of Andrew are apocryphal," Isidore protests. "Don't think you'd want -- that particular designation for your current activities --" If Graeme keeps moving the hot smear of his mouth upward, Isidore isn't going to be able to discuss saints or evangelists at all.
"You're the one on the cross, Izzy." That Graeme is smirking is more audible than visible, considering the edges of Isidore's eyes are going a very pleasant shade of hot white. "Worthy or nae."
The pool of heavy, liquid heat that blooms in his hips flutters terrifyingly, expands like tendrils of ink dripped into a glass of water. He has to bite down on the inside of his cheek to try to keep back the sharp sound that rises in his throat and doesn't manage to do anything but add the taste of bloody saliva to his next shuddering gasp. "Graeme," he says, trying and failing for censure.
"That'll do." Graeme, still clothed, is straddling Isidore's leg; he pulls himself up higher to address the growing concern where that leg meets the rest of Isidore. "Is there a saint for me somewhere?"
Everyone has a patron saint, Isidore recalls, dimly, would say it out loud if Graeme hadn't pressed down, if he wasn't writhing up against that pressure despite himself. "For actors or -- Scotsmen, I -- yes, but I can't remember --"
"Andrew's for Scotsmen, I ken that much," Graeme says, and it would be an utter taunt he he wasn't saying it right into the hollow of Isidore's neck. "I never liked him. Thought him a bit stiff."
He oughtn't laugh, either, laughing makes his skin feel attenuated, hot and cold at once wherever he touches Graeme. Where Graeme touches him, Isidore can't touch anything but the ropes where they rise from his wrists.
And as for where Graeme is attending himself, where he's undoing his trousers and spreading his legs over Isidore's hips -- Isidore can't touch that either. He can only look up and see a thoroughly smug man, more handsome for the sweat masking his skin, rocking back onto his own fingers just out of Isidore's reach.
He thinks the sound he makes is a whine. It isn't a sound he intended to make. There should have been words in it, he should ask what Graeme is planning to do, even though he already knows -- he can't bring any other image to mind but Graeme slicking himself open for him, of his sinking down around him, he ought to be recalling prescriptions against this and he does not in the slightest care what he ought to be doing, he wants it. He twists and arches up for it and Graeme doesn't let him get close enough for friction so he nods his head and tries to wet his dry lips with his tongue and says, "Yes," acquiescing.
Graeme leaves the now half-empty bottle on the windowsill, beside another of a different content, emptied a while ago. He smirks and cups his hand at Isidore's groin, still out of reach. "What was that, Izzy?"
Heat flares in his cheeks as fiercely as it does where Graeme grips him. He repeats himself even so, through grit teeth. "Yes. I want it. Do it."
"All yours, then," Graeme whispers, in a voice that could only be his own. And he lowers himself down, slow enough that Isidore can watch when his blood isn't blinding him.
He thinks he is going to drown. The air drags in his lungs, presses heavy on every inch of him Graeme hasn't surrounded, and those places burn, even as slick as they both are they burn and Isidore can't breathe through how good that burning is, how it makes him shake. He'd move up, into him, but he can't plant his feet on the mattress with how they're tied, he doesn't have any leverage at all. Which means it's all left to Graeme, and Graeme doesn't seem to be sparing Isidore anything, surging forward and down with the constancy of Isidore's swelling pulse. Graeme tightens his thighs, his fists, his jaw. The pin of his cravat shifts in and out of halo. He grabs Isidore under the torso and lifts him, pushes him in like he can't get enough on his own either.
"-- Christ," Isidore curses again, and he wants to be blaspheming right now, caught and pinned inside how Graeme moves, how Graeme is moving him, and he doesn't understand Graeme's reasons but he thinks he might -- somewhere inside the haze and the eagerness -- understand this desire, and that's more than he ever could when he wore a cassock and a collar, he was never any good at understanding desire that wasn't his.
"I thought ye said that name was blasphemy," Graeme breathes, staggered and thick and deep, broken with the creaking of the bed and the ropes.
"I don't care." He doesn't. He hasn't. He wants to lock his hands around Graeme's hips and pull him down hard, hold him there, he thinks he might die of being unable to reach.
Graeme twists so harshly that sweat from his jaw splatters on the windowpane. "You're -- ah, an awful priest, Izzy." The sweat leaves a track for his smile to shine through the glass.
"I'm --" Isidore tries. He can't get words through the thickness of sound that each of Graeme's downward strokes call up in him. "I'm not a priest at all --"
Graeme laughs.
---
If they can't mark their time down here by the sun, or even the contrivance of sun, then it seems drinks are more than sufficient. Isidore's lost count, both of the number of outings and number of drinks, though he suspects the count of the former to be about fifteen and the latter, by extension, in the arena of fifty. Never the same place twice, he recalls: there is no shortage of places to drown in Fallen London.
But fifteen outings, and fifty drinks, that's enough to mark at least a couple of months, and in those months Isidore has, for lack of a better term, settled in, as snugly as a coffin to the earth.
"Avoiding the chandlers, are ye?"
Isidore blinks, and looks around. His new flat, which is more of a cottage than a flat, and nestled up to the Observatory, has the dignity of heavily barred doors and reinforced lead-glass windows. "Avoiding the roving fungus bands, moreso," he says.
Graeme nods thoughtfully and traces an idle hand through the condensation on the side of his glass. "So you're gearing up to stay," he says.
"Not here. I think I'd like to be able to afford somewhere without so many mushrooms in the future."
"I meant here. In the Neath."
Isidore takes the time to think about it, out of both courtesy and genuine curiosity. "I might at that," he says, leaning his elbow on the table. "The prospects aren't half bad, comparatively. I mean, I couldn't afford even a place with mushrooms aboveground, with the state I'd gotten into."
That gets him a brief laugh from Graeme, the kind that's as much to the drink as to him. "It's a changed world up there," he says, looking at the bat-spackled crystal that approximates the stars. "Ye could find employ knocking heads together there so well as here."
It isn't that difficult to imagine, except for the feeling of sunlight on his shoulders while he does it. "I'd have to find a whole new clientele," he says, "to start with. Besides, it's not knocking heads that appeals about the job."
"What is it, then?"
"That it's a suitable occupation, I suppose. Without joining the Army or the East India Trading Company, or some other such thing."
"Like a duck to water, then," Graeme says. He could be smiling, but when Isidore checks, it's not so much that as a retreat of the corners of his lips deeper into his jaw.
"Not the same for you, I take it," he says. "Not enough acting down here for your tastes?"
"Nae enough of aught for my tastes." He drums his fingers on the wet glass in soft arpeggios. "I'm here so long as it concerns me, and out as soon as I can."
Isidore nods, watching the motion of Graeme's fingers, their repetitive nervous driving. "It's been concerning you a while."
"The lack of sunlight concerns me more."
"Everyone but devils and men from the colonies -- Her Majesty's colonies, I mean -- does get dreadfully pale, I'll give you that."
"Ye ken the sum of what I crave, Izzy," he says, softer than before. "I cannae stay."
It occurs to Isidore that Graeme has not, in all his unsettled tappings, moved his left hand at all.
He tries to summon up gentleness when he asks, though, for the sake of the man's dignity as well as for their friendship. "I've an idea. It's not enough for you, is it, what can be bought at apothecaries?"
"Nor what the Orient is willing to sell," Graeme answers. It's more clarification than Isidore required.
It also makes him rather uncomfortable. He sits back in his chair, glances up at the ceiling and out at the dark beyond the windows, and shrugs. "How do the traders from the Orient get down here, anyhow," he says.
"I dinnae ken. Is there a Company for the Hellish West End?"
Isidore laughs, somewhat relieved. "With our Traitor Empress? I wouldn't be a bit surprised."
Graeme, it seems, can also laugh at anything.
---
"That looks a sight."
"It's a hat. Made of iron."
"The cords of your neck must be having a time with that."
"It's not for my neck, it's for keeping my head from being bashed in. Besides, it's -- stylish. Just like a top hat, except, ah. Metallic."
"Ah, right. Do the number of rivets do anything for your fashionable standing?"
"I rather like the hatband part, actually. With the darker finish."
"I have to tell ye, Izzy, in ten years on the stage I havenae seen much more foolish-looking."
"Yes, a pantomime actor is telling me what looks foolish. I'm mortified. I won't ever be able to show my face in Veilgarden again." He pauses. "Wait. This is you, perhaps I genuinely won't, aren't you the toast of whatever poetry circle is popular this week, or something equally absurd?"
Graeme smirks. "And what's it to your reputation if I am?"
"Nothing this hat can't help me fix."
"So if ye come to hear doggerels about your head toppling clean off--"
"-- I'll take comfort in the toppling and not in it being struck," Isidore says, and seats the hat on his head at a more jaunty angle.
---
There are a great many things Isidore is enjoying about this bottle of brandy, the foremost of which is its entire lack of mycological content. A near second, however, is that he is engaged in passing it back and forth while pleasantly naked and sweat-streaked and reclining on sheets which are slick-smooth with threadcount. There are apparently benefits to making a name for oneself in Veilgarden as well as on Watchmaker's Hill, and Isidore would say as much except that he is sure Graeme is well-aware.
"When I think about it," he says instead, "this is almost palatial after New Newgate."
"They do say every free man's a king," Graeme says, and holds out his hand for the brandy. He's still mostly clothed, but his hands are certainly bare, and his fingers slip a little on Isidore's as he accepts the drink. "Bannocks are better nor nae kind of bread."
Isidore uses his other hand to prod Graeme in the shoulder. "What the hell are bannocks?"
"Scones."
"-- oh. I like scones." He snickers, and arches his shoulderblades more firmly into the pillows. "I wonder if anyone gets down here these days without a trip through gaol."
"I cannae imagine choosing to come, even if after ye choose to stay."
"I wouldn't think so, unless you're the Empress Herself." Isidore rolls, props himself up on an elbow. "But someone might come down if they knew they could get back up again, I've been thinking. For business or on errand."
Graeme nods, and props the bottle on his hips, just where his trousers are slumping and undone. The light that passes through the bottle darkens his bare skin. "I've seen the type -- tourists, if ye will, come to see Clathermont's and gowk at the Palace."
"Tourists, industrialists -- tourists are worse. Tourists are worse everywhere, though." He grins, a little, and then stops. He isn't touching Graeme anywhere; it's companionable, how they're lying, nothing else. "You've never said why you came down here."
"Ye couldnae see I never meant to?"
"Didn't mean it that way. You wouldn't want to get back so much if you meant to get stuck. More like what the accident was? In your getting here." He quite nearly feels ashamed for pushing the question. The emotion isn't unfamiliar, but it's rusted, flaking and almost unrecognisable.
Graeme accepts the clarification with a sort of sigh, and arches his chin and neck toward the ceiling. "Did ye ken they've a law up top, about exile, Izzy? That ye cannae be sent to prison in the Neath for a surface crime if ye arenae yet convicted?"
"I've an idea of it," Isidore says, slowly. He leaves enough space for Graeme to go on.
"I wasnae even tried," Graeme says.
Now he's blinking and confused as much as he's intrigued. "But wouldn't that be illegal? You could appeal."
"Well, I did commit a crime," he says, smile gleaming like the gilt label on the brandy. "Well, I might hae done. It depends on who my patron was working for. Though if I'm here, and he hasnae sprung me, well. It couldnae been so far above the law."
There is a great deal in that which Isidore is rather sure he doesn't even want explained. He sticks with the most pressing of his questions. "You've a patron and you don't know who he works for?"
"I can guess," he answers, "but I hope I'm wrong."
"You hope you're wrong," Isidore says, and flops back onto the mattress. "You're down here for a crime you may or may not have committed, on behalf of a man who is possibly working for someone you at the very least don't like, and you're -- waiting for your patron to get you out of this? What are you going to tell me next, you're secretly a player in the Great Game and some tribesmen once made you their emir?"
"Only a pawn." Graeme tilts his head into the pillow and grins. "And if I were aught more, would I tell ye true?"
"Only a pawn." If he was the theatrical kind, Isidore would press a palm to his forehead. "I'll regret asking this, I'm sure. Is your patron the sort of man I'd be acquainted with?"
"Only a pawn," Graeme repeats in Isidore's voice. "True or nae, the short of it is that I'm waiting him out. If I'm here, and he hasnae found me, then he's in straits, and I cannae abide that."
Honour's an odd thing to discover in someone else, especially in someone like Graeme, Isidore thinks. "Well. Of course not." He means it to be reassuring, but it comes out doubtful instead, though he's not sure what he's doubting, Graeme's truth or his ability.
Though it occurs to Isidore that, as far as Graeme is concerned, the truth matters much less than it ought.
-
"You're a whore?!"
The entire restaurant silences, except for the one waiter who drops what sounds like two silver-capped trays and a casserole. Someone screams in pain.
Graeme winces, but not at Isidore. "I think that man needs a doctor."
Isidore, for his part, could not care less about the health of his fellow dinner-goers. "You're a whore?!" he repeats, louder still. "I've been paying you for services?"
"Trading," Graeme corrects. "If I wanted your surface currency I'd have asked ye for it."
"That doesn't help!" Isidore sputters.
"Ye asked me to buy the drinks," Graeme says. "I thought that's what ye were after."
"I though I was being -- companionable! Friendly!" He searches frantically for another appropriate word, gesticulating. "Equitable! You never said you were a whore!"
"Ye offered me your laudanum if I took ye out. If ye dinnae ken I was a whore, you sure treated with me as one."
Isidore sits back down.
"Besides, it doesnae mean I dinnae fain it."
Having sat, the table affords Isidore the chance to put his elbows on it and his face in his palms. "I had been under the persistent impression that whores didn't like it," he says, somewhat snippily. "And that they didn't make nearly so much conversation before. Or after."
"It isnae a false impression." Graeme slides his drink across the table, raps it against Isidore's knuckles, and leaves it there for him to take. "I ken I'm in a class all my ain."
Isidore takes the drink and drains it dry. It is rather punitive of him, but he decides not to care. "Even so," he mutters. "Are you actually an actor, or is that just part of the come-on?"
"Nae, that's all true. Couldnae make enough at it when I was getting started, so I took to the other profession until I could get on my feet."
"And the accents, are those for the first profession or the second?"
Graeme just smiles, and motions for Isidore to drink.
Warily, Isidore obeys, from his own glass this time -- that one still has liquid in it.
"I did think it was fiddler's news to ye," Graeme says.
"Well it wasn't," Isidore retorts. "-- that is. Almost entirely it wasn't. I knew you were lying but I thought we were friends."
Graeme takes Isidore's glass and tilts it, lets the whiskey colour the sides before he raises it to drink. "I think we are."
"I won't ask if you're friends with all your clients," Isidore says, more lightly than he'd expected to.
"I'll answer anyway." He puts the empty glass down, gnaws on the walls of his mouth and grimaces. "Ach, Scotch. But it's a short list."
"I ordered it, not you," Isidore says, nearly fond, in an exhasperated and frustrated sort of fashion. "You needn't. I'm not all that interested in who else you fuck for favours."
Graeme laughs. "Then drink it yourself, and I won't tell ye aught."
Isidore takes the glass out of Graeme's hand. "Considering you've been spending your time in the Shuttered Palace lately, I think I'm better off not being told," he says.
Graeme watches him drink with a smile that charms and shines. "A'times it's more a favour to their lot."
"I can imagine," Isidore says, and considering what Graeme has done to -- with -- him, it's easy enough to do so. "I'm sure you do well enough."
"I get by," Graeme says. "The same as ye."
Statements that ought to slander his dignity and his good name seem to mean less and less in the Neath, Isidore considers, and quirks a smile at Graeme. "Not quite," he says. "Enough for you would take more sunlight than what I'd ever sell or buy." There's still a quarter-inch of whiskey in the tumbler, so Isidore drains it all.
"You're a ray of hope, Izzy."
"And you're buying all the drinks."
--
.
Authors: mithrigil and lindensphinx
Fandom: Echo Bazaar / original
Characters: Isidore Walker, Graeme Gillespie, and, some might argue, the Neath.
Words: 7000
Rating: Hard R: Sex, drugs, and other Neathy activities, though Victorianly inexplicit.
Warnings: Isidore is not a good priest. Graeme, on the other hand, is a very good actor.
Summary: "Buy ALL the drinks!" "...Buy all the drinks?"
A Parable of Talents
some storylets
This particular apothecary's shop is over another store entirely, best reached by a winding iron alley-side staircase that drips rust down onto the awning every time Isidore takes a step. It's not the first one on Ladybones Road that Isidore has attempted to patronise, but it is the last one he's going to bother with today, given the assumed hour. Really, without sunlight, it is that much easier to think of time the way God presumably does. Isidore attempts to shoulder his purchases, withdraw the watch from his coat, and walk down the stairs at the same time.
One of these actions is about to fail.
It is not, Isidore thinks to himself in the moment between when he strikes the lowest steps of the staircase with his hip and the moment when he lands awkwardly and painfully and partially on the cobblestones of the street but mostly upon the stomach of the man who has run into him, entirely his fault. A man ought to watch where he is going, even if it is up stairs. Or down them.
Isidore removes himself from the vicinity of the man's person, and brushes off his pantlegs. The man himself makes an exploratorially pained noise, and regains his feet, if not his dignity, before Isidore can offer him assistance.
He offers his name, instead, and a handshake. "Isidore Ezekiel Walker. I'm sorry, did you have a hat? Or my purchases. I had purchases."
"A hat," the assailed man says, taking the handshake with a raggled smile and glancing about the ground for said hat until he spots it in the alley. The hat itself seems a bit large for him when he puts it on askew; a moment later he notices, and sets about looking for something else. "Your purchases, I dinnae follow down."
Ah. He has knocked over a Scotsman. Well. It is the Neath, there are unceasing wonders, and those may include the Scotch if they so choose. Isidore casts around for his packages -- they cost far too many Echoes to be abandoned to the alleyway -- and discovers them under the lowest steps. They do not, thank God, clink like broken glass when he retrieves them. "Don't trouble yourself, I have them."
"How much did ye pay for them?" the Scotsman asks, standing on the second-lowest step and stooping over Isidore.
Isidore blinks. "More than I'd like, less than I thought I'd need to."
The Scotsman winces and holds the frail banister tight in his glove. "Damn. Been to every shop on this street, and it's always an echo or more."
"I strongly suspect the apothecaries fix the prices between themselves." To Isidore's eyes, the Scotsman looks as if he hasn't slept in days, if not an entire week; that way he is clinging to the wrought-iron bannister suggests a certain inability to remain confidently upright much longer. "I could sell you some," he tells him offhandedly, discovering as he does that whatever instinctual kindness five years of service in the Church should have instilled in him still lingers, like a miasma, somewhere around where his sensible judgment ought to be.
"I'd be obliged to ye," the Scotsman says, and looks even more thankful than he sounds. He comes down to the next lower stair.
At this point Isidore believes he is supposed to offer a price. It takes him a moment to consider one; what he most desires for the evening is a substantial quantity of alcoholic oblivion.
That's a fair price, come to think of it. "Buy the drinks," he tells the Scotsman.
The Scotsman stares at him.
"All of the drinks," Isidore elaborates, helpfully.
After a moment, something apparently dawns on the Scotsman, something that makes him first shape his mouth into a mute "oh" and then smile, bright and congenial. Whether it's the correct something to dawn remains to be seen, and dawn, down here, doesn't come when it should.
---
If Hell has divisions, which Isidore cannot presume to know even if he has read his Dante, one of them might look something like Veilgarden. At least this particular -- is it a cafe? is it an alehouse? -- lacks immediately audible poets. This, Isidore genuinely believes, is a fundamental and necessary improvement on both its moral and its social state. He has informed the Scotsman so. He has also drunk, so far, a glass of mushroom wine, a mug of faintly greenish mulled mead, and a tankard of something that could only dubiously be referred to as beer.
The Scotsman, who has also drunk, so far, the equivalent wine, mead, and half of the beer, agrees with him. "Cannae tell ye I'fain the remainders that it's all toadstools we're feasting on."
"I have no idea what it is you just said," Isidore informs him.
"It's all mushrooms," the Scotsman says, and drinks.
"What, the poets?"
"No, what they're poeting about." The accent gets even thicker after a few drinks, it seems.
"Can't poet about roses or sunshine or -- whatever it is poets go on about aboveground. Were you well-acquainted with poets? Aboveground. I mean." Isidore, at least, is not slurring his words. As of yet. He thinks.
The Scotsman smiles. "Ye can call it acquainted. An actor gets to meet a fair amount of them, poets. Fewer good ones."
"An actor!" Isidore attempts to remember some pithily appropriate Shakespeare. All that comes to mind is the bit about Romans and countrymen and ears, and that will make him sound an idiot.
"Yea," the Scotsman says, "though it means nothing down here."
"Something, surely, I imagine the talent extends itself well enough, even if the Neath lacks a proper theater?" Isidore's tankard of quite-nearly-beer is empty. He looks at the bottom of it, which glistens unpleasantly, much like an oil-slick would.
"Couldnae build one even if I had a patron here." He slides his tankard forward on the table; it's still nearly half-full, but it's a decisive gesture.
"Do you fancy some of that blackish sort of brandy? For the next round," Isidore inquires. It's only polite to allow the man buying the drinks to buy whatsoever drinks he prefers.
"For the next round," the Scotsman repeats, with his eyebrows up almost to the shadow of his hat.
"I am not drunk enough to fall down as of yet. Any more than I've fallen down already, that is."
"And the rest of my due is to carry ye home?" The Scotsman laughs, but lifts a hand to signal a barmaid over. "My tab, your order."
---
Somewhere between round five of drinks and his current position, which involves bracing himself on the windowsill of his rented room while the Scotsman (whose name Isidore has either forgotten or neglected to acquire) sinks gracefully to his knees in front of him, Isidore seems to have misplaced many of his prior generalised qualms against the practice of sodomy.
It's quite enjoyable. Sodomy. If this is sodomy. He inquires as much, and follows that with an inquisitive, "And is this the usual conclusion of your expeditions to a pub?"
"Luck if I make it to the pub first," the Scotsman says, deftly seeing to Isidore's trousers and palming through his johns. "And as to the first--" There is a laugh, and an upward tilt to his voice, as if Isidore is speaking back to himself, "--it's somewhat inconclusive."
The combination is distracting, the warmth of that hand and the strangeness of having his own voice parroted back at him, and Isidore finds himself entirely speechless for a moment, as if the Scotsman had stolen his tongue in a more literal fashion. He manages a somewhat strangled noise.
The sound of his own laughter out of the Scotsman's -- is he a Scotsman after all? -- either way, after that, it is more than a bit disconcerting. "Do you mean to say you're unfamiliar with the practice?"
It is just barely possible that he has brought some sort of doppelganger-devil up to his rooms. Isidore reaches down, puts his hand on the man's shoulder, which is reassuringly un-amorphous. Probably not a doppelganger. Aren't those German, anyhow? "Not this practice," he says.
The Scotsman tilts his head as if to trap that hand between his shoulder and chin, and rolls his jaw. "I'll guide ye gently, then," he says, in the voice that isn't Isidore's.
"I've a considerable idea how this goes." That jaw fits neatly into Isidore's palm, and he grips it with his fingers, draws him closer to him. "Though the part where you're using my voice is a -- novel technique --"
That laugh is sweltering against Isidore's groin. "Who else would you rather hear?" he asks in blank Received pronunciation, smirking all through.
"-- what do they teach actors on the surface," Isidore breathes, and shifts his hand from jaw to tangled blond hair, arches his hips against the pressure of that voice. He ought to be more perturbed. There are many things he ought to be which seem inconsequential in Fallen London. His johns unsnap. The Scotsman is laughing into, around, Isidore's flesh.
"They teach us how to get by with what God gave us," he says.
God, Isidore distinctly recalls, has not given him much of anything, least of all proof that serving Him was anything more than an adviseable prospect for a career -- the heat of the Scotsman's mouth is drowningly wet -- he is thinking too much of seas, and tides, and cavernous rooves over them both. No, he is not thinking too much. There is not a too much to think, and his fingers pulling the strands of this man's hair so he is forced forward and open are proof enough of that --
His voice, when he finds it, is a gasp, and he wonders if that is harder or easier to steal. "God provides each man with talents. There's a parable --"
The Scotsman pulls back only enough to say, "Tell it. Let's see how far ye get," and plunge back down.
"There's a man -- ah -- and he has a son -- or several sons --" It is extremely hard to think just at this moment. "And a -- farm -- I -- Goddamnit it's Matthew 25:14 look it up yourself --!"
It is hard to discern what the Scotsman is trying to say through the laughter and the skill of his tongue, but the words when I'm done with ye don't seem out of place. If Isidore was a good priest --
Isidore isn't a priest at all, and hasn't been for some time. "I assume -- pastoral education can wait --" The back of his head hits the dirty glass of the windowpane and he rolls his hips up, up, easy, into the liquid heat.
He finishes in short order, fists and eyes tight, the Scotsman almost surging to take it down. When he relinquishes Isidore there's a thirst to his swollen lips that he didn't have at all over the alcohol, and a smirk that's more prideful than anything else, framed though it is. He doesn't wipe his jaw. "Your conclusion?"
It takes Isidore a long moment to catch his breath enough to answer. "On sodomy or on pastoral education?"
"Are ye a pastor?"
"Wrong tense."
The Scotsman laughs. "On sodomy, then."
"Surprisingly enjoyable," Isidore tells him, honestly. Honesty seems to be the friendliest thing. It is rather friendly of the Scotsman to have spent this time on his knees, isn't it? "Worth its time, and doing again."
"There's more to it, ye ken." He smiles, up and close. "I'll show ye in a bit. Just going to check that we didnae break aught."
"I am quite certain you didn't," Isidore says, excepting, perhaps, his mind, and only a little.
"I meant your purchases," the Scotsman clarifies, drawing himself up Isidore's body and leaning on him to stand.
---
Isidore wakes earlier than usual, naked, somewhat warmer than he would like, and sharing his bed with a fully clothed, if disarrayed, Scotsman. The Scotsman is asleep.
Isidore wakes him up with a sharp elbow-jab.
"What is your name?"
---
Graeme calls up the third round of drinks -- or rather the eighth, if this second outing is to be tabbed with the first. He is the one to flag the barmaid down, but indicates that Isidore should specify, and Isidore just waves for more of the same.
"And they defrocked ye?"
"I deflowered the viscount's daughter, what do you think they were going to do?" Isidore laughs. It's quite funny by now. "Also there was the part where we desecrated the church."
Never mind that Graeme's pint has nothing left in it to be drunk, he laughs, toasts, and slips his tongue along the inner wall of the glass. "They dinnae defrock her for it."
"No, I took care of that."
Graeme laughs, again -- Isidore would not describe the laugh as infectious, but inviting, as if Isidore's about to miss a cue if he doesn't join in. "And then ye came here? Or was that after?"
"After. I did some other business first -- really I came down here because of that, but I can't say the defrocking wasn't an impetus." He shrugs, grins a little more widely around the rim of his tankard. "And you? Surely there isn't all that much work for actors down here."
"Dinnae come here for the work," Graeme admits. The barmaid comes by with more mushroom beer. "But there's some to be had, if ye can stand it alane."
"Don't tell me you busk on street-corners in Spite, I won't believe it."
"Only the once. I cannae sing, ye ken."
Isidore snickers. "All of your voices, and not one of them can carry a tune?"
"Ye said it, I dinnae."
"So even if you pretend to be a -- hm." He casts about for the sort of man who would sing incessantly. There aren't that many in the Neath. Ones who sing in the King's English and not some underground babbling, at least -- oh! "An Italian! You've got to be musical if you're an Italian."
"Yes, yes, the Italians have the music in their rhythm," Graeme says, quickly and with a thick, exaggerated Italian accent that Isidore would readily ascribe to the old choir conductor when he was an altar boy. "But in the singing! Even among them, only a few can excel. And the most of them, they lack some other things."
"Which you do not," Isidore notes, with far less embarrassment than he probably ought to have, considering the means by which he has acquired this observation of Graeme's person.
He switches back to his own in the middle of a laugh. "Ye could check again."
Isidore is pleased with his failure to sputter into his beer in surprise. "I could!" he says. The prospect is quite pleasant, now that he's thinking about it. "Ah, I assume it's only polite to ask if you'd prefer your own lodgings this time?"
"If we drop by your place first," Graeme says, and downs the rest of his. "I dinnae think I can sleep without your generous provisions. Unless ye mean to wear me down."
Well, if that's what Graeme wants, it doesn't seem a very egregious task on Isidore's part. Besides, it's companionable to share whatever methods he has managed to acquire to stave off the nightmares that seem to plague the entirety of Fallen London. "I'm sure that can be arranged," he tells him. "Shall we pay the tab?"
---
"They're not the strangest objects I've ever gotten off the back of a carriage," Isidore concludes, gesturing at the mushroom-shaped, brilliantly-coloured, somewhat confectionarily-inspired hats clustered around his feet, as if the floor of his rented flat had suddenly turned into an exceedingly unusual mycological garden, "but they're the most ridiculous. And I haven't any idea what to do with them."
Graeme sniggers and elbows the mattress to put a better dent in it. "There's a fable about that."
"About ridiculous hats. Really."
"Nae, about stealing things ye cannae pawn off."
"Ah, one of those instructional fables," Isidore says. He prods one of the hats with his toe. It makes a noise which is far too close to a squeak for anyone's comfort. "I didn't steal them, I stole a perfectly normal box that happened to contain them."
"And did ye pawn off the perfectly normal box?" Graeme props himself up on an elbow and lets the other arm hang over the edge of the bed, swatting idly at another of the hats. That one doesn't squeak so much as chirr.
"If I'd done that what would I keep the hats in? I can't have them strewn about like this if the landlady comes in," Isidore protests, returning to the mattress himself and sitting on the edge. "So it was an entirely useless afternoon's work."
Graeme taps the small of Isidore's back with his knee. He tends to keep clothed during -- whatever it is they're doing together, so Isidore feels the increasingly familiar scrape of Graeme's increasingly better suiting on his skin. "How many are there, a dozen?"
He twists around, nodding. "No more, no less. Can you imagine a dozen people willing to wear these?"
"I ken a type."
Isidore really ought to have expected that. This is Graeme, after all, and Graeme keeps company with everyone in Veilgarden who will allow their company to be kept. "Do you," he says, leadingly.
Rather than repeat his answer, Graeme simply laughs. "How much do ye want for them?"
The pile of hats shifts, slightly, of its own accord. "-- five echoes each," Isidore says, quickly.
"Do I look like a man who has sixty echoes?"
"You might have hidden depths."
"Care to plumb them, do ye?"
That is some sort of rude invitation, which Isidore takes up by leaning down over Graeme with a hand on his shoulder. "Buy the hats piecemeal, then, won't you?"
"I'll start with the one," Graeme says, with the sort of expression he probably calls up for penny dreadful villains. "I'll have sold five more for ten within the week."
"That's agreeable enough," Isidore says cheerfully, and descends the rest of the way onto the bed and Graeme both, with a certain anticipatory satisfaction.
---
The victor of the current match hurls the loser out of the ring, knocking over Graeme and Isidore's table. Fortunately, the force with which the poor sod was thrown means that the mushroom beer spills about two meters away.
Graeme blinks, looks at his knees (which are only slightly spattered with sawdust), and waves over a replacement round of beer. In lieu of a table, he shoves his chair into the vacant space, turning it a quarter to face the ring. "Ye were saying?"
Isidore clears his throat. "I was going to explain that it just seemed easier to let the other fellow trip over his own feet, considering the momentum, but I think that the demonstration from my compatriot just now is more than adequate in proving the point." He rubs at the knuckles of his hand, which are somewhat bruised from encountering the jaws of several ring-fighting contestants a little earlier in the evening.
"There was a bit more than momentum behind that throw," Graeme says. Their beer has been replaced; the table, less so.
"-- it doesn't hurt to help momentum, either," Isidore shrugs.
Graeme makes an according hm sound around the rim of his glass. He hasn't fought at all tonight -- does he ever? -- but has made his admiration of the boxing ring evident enough. Perhaps next week they'll meet in Spite instead. "Doesnae seem quite godly of ye."
Isidore laughs. "I never said I was here on Crusade."
"Fair, since ye looked more the devil than that smear ye left in the dust."
That jibe ought to be much more insulting -- or at the very least, more troubling -- than Isidore finds himself taking it. Ah, well. "I never meant to be particularly skilled with knocking heads," he demurs. "This has all been rather unintentional."
"To your credit, then," Graeme says, and toasts before drinking.
Isidore realises that it wasn't an insult at all. He tips his mug Heavenward -- surfaceward, certainly -- and smiles. "There's a bit of satisfaction in striking a man when he doesn't expect the extent of your capability, I've found," he goes on. "Though the lack of expectation has been happening less of late."
"As happens when ye make a name for yourself."
"Getting sawdust in other men's teeth isn't at all what I thought I'd be remembered for, even down here," Isidore says, more amused than anything else.
Graeme considers that a moment, and rests the base of his tankard on his thigh. His survey of the room prompts Isidore to make one of his own; there are devils in their midst, and wights, and abominations of the deep. They two can't be the only ones here to have only lived once, but that the consideration has to be made at all speaks volumes. "There are worse reasons," Graeme says, "to be the talk of Hell."
Isidore turns from the panoply of the damned and damning and back to Graeme. "Quite a few. I'm sure you've your own list of those."
---
"Jesus, Mary, and goddamned Saint Andrew --!" Isidore gasps.
Graeme laughs into the space behind Isidore's bare knee. "Ye can call me either of the first two."
Isidore tries to squirm either away or toward the heat of Graeme's breath on his skin, and can't. The ropes around his wrists and ankles won't allow it. He shudders instead, twists inside the four-point stretch Graeme has tied him into -- he can't quite recall just this moment why he'd agreed to this, or possibly why it'd taken him this long to agree to it. "-- first two are definitely blasphemy," he manages.
"And what, the third's unworthy?" As if the ropes weren't enough, Graeme is holding Isidore down by the hips, presumably so that he can better steady his tongue on Isidore's admittedly unsteady inner thigh.
"The Acts of Andrew are apocryphal," Isidore protests. "Don't think you'd want -- that particular designation for your current activities --" If Graeme keeps moving the hot smear of his mouth upward, Isidore isn't going to be able to discuss saints or evangelists at all.
"You're the one on the cross, Izzy." That Graeme is smirking is more audible than visible, considering the edges of Isidore's eyes are going a very pleasant shade of hot white. "Worthy or nae."
The pool of heavy, liquid heat that blooms in his hips flutters terrifyingly, expands like tendrils of ink dripped into a glass of water. He has to bite down on the inside of his cheek to try to keep back the sharp sound that rises in his throat and doesn't manage to do anything but add the taste of bloody saliva to his next shuddering gasp. "Graeme," he says, trying and failing for censure.
"That'll do." Graeme, still clothed, is straddling Isidore's leg; he pulls himself up higher to address the growing concern where that leg meets the rest of Isidore. "Is there a saint for me somewhere?"
Everyone has a patron saint, Isidore recalls, dimly, would say it out loud if Graeme hadn't pressed down, if he wasn't writhing up against that pressure despite himself. "For actors or -- Scotsmen, I -- yes, but I can't remember --"
"Andrew's for Scotsmen, I ken that much," Graeme says, and it would be an utter taunt he he wasn't saying it right into the hollow of Isidore's neck. "I never liked him. Thought him a bit stiff."
He oughtn't laugh, either, laughing makes his skin feel attenuated, hot and cold at once wherever he touches Graeme. Where Graeme touches him, Isidore can't touch anything but the ropes where they rise from his wrists.
And as for where Graeme is attending himself, where he's undoing his trousers and spreading his legs over Isidore's hips -- Isidore can't touch that either. He can only look up and see a thoroughly smug man, more handsome for the sweat masking his skin, rocking back onto his own fingers just out of Isidore's reach.
He thinks the sound he makes is a whine. It isn't a sound he intended to make. There should have been words in it, he should ask what Graeme is planning to do, even though he already knows -- he can't bring any other image to mind but Graeme slicking himself open for him, of his sinking down around him, he ought to be recalling prescriptions against this and he does not in the slightest care what he ought to be doing, he wants it. He twists and arches up for it and Graeme doesn't let him get close enough for friction so he nods his head and tries to wet his dry lips with his tongue and says, "Yes," acquiescing.
Graeme leaves the now half-empty bottle on the windowsill, beside another of a different content, emptied a while ago. He smirks and cups his hand at Isidore's groin, still out of reach. "What was that, Izzy?"
Heat flares in his cheeks as fiercely as it does where Graeme grips him. He repeats himself even so, through grit teeth. "Yes. I want it. Do it."
"All yours, then," Graeme whispers, in a voice that could only be his own. And he lowers himself down, slow enough that Isidore can watch when his blood isn't blinding him.
He thinks he is going to drown. The air drags in his lungs, presses heavy on every inch of him Graeme hasn't surrounded, and those places burn, even as slick as they both are they burn and Isidore can't breathe through how good that burning is, how it makes him shake. He'd move up, into him, but he can't plant his feet on the mattress with how they're tied, he doesn't have any leverage at all. Which means it's all left to Graeme, and Graeme doesn't seem to be sparing Isidore anything, surging forward and down with the constancy of Isidore's swelling pulse. Graeme tightens his thighs, his fists, his jaw. The pin of his cravat shifts in and out of halo. He grabs Isidore under the torso and lifts him, pushes him in like he can't get enough on his own either.
"-- Christ," Isidore curses again, and he wants to be blaspheming right now, caught and pinned inside how Graeme moves, how Graeme is moving him, and he doesn't understand Graeme's reasons but he thinks he might -- somewhere inside the haze and the eagerness -- understand this desire, and that's more than he ever could when he wore a cassock and a collar, he was never any good at understanding desire that wasn't his.
"I thought ye said that name was blasphemy," Graeme breathes, staggered and thick and deep, broken with the creaking of the bed and the ropes.
"I don't care." He doesn't. He hasn't. He wants to lock his hands around Graeme's hips and pull him down hard, hold him there, he thinks he might die of being unable to reach.
Graeme twists so harshly that sweat from his jaw splatters on the windowpane. "You're -- ah, an awful priest, Izzy." The sweat leaves a track for his smile to shine through the glass.
"I'm --" Isidore tries. He can't get words through the thickness of sound that each of Graeme's downward strokes call up in him. "I'm not a priest at all --"
Graeme laughs.
---
If they can't mark their time down here by the sun, or even the contrivance of sun, then it seems drinks are more than sufficient. Isidore's lost count, both of the number of outings and number of drinks, though he suspects the count of the former to be about fifteen and the latter, by extension, in the arena of fifty. Never the same place twice, he recalls: there is no shortage of places to drown in Fallen London.
But fifteen outings, and fifty drinks, that's enough to mark at least a couple of months, and in those months Isidore has, for lack of a better term, settled in, as snugly as a coffin to the earth.
"Avoiding the chandlers, are ye?"
Isidore blinks, and looks around. His new flat, which is more of a cottage than a flat, and nestled up to the Observatory, has the dignity of heavily barred doors and reinforced lead-glass windows. "Avoiding the roving fungus bands, moreso," he says.
Graeme nods thoughtfully and traces an idle hand through the condensation on the side of his glass. "So you're gearing up to stay," he says.
"Not here. I think I'd like to be able to afford somewhere without so many mushrooms in the future."
"I meant here. In the Neath."
Isidore takes the time to think about it, out of both courtesy and genuine curiosity. "I might at that," he says, leaning his elbow on the table. "The prospects aren't half bad, comparatively. I mean, I couldn't afford even a place with mushrooms aboveground, with the state I'd gotten into."
That gets him a brief laugh from Graeme, the kind that's as much to the drink as to him. "It's a changed world up there," he says, looking at the bat-spackled crystal that approximates the stars. "Ye could find employ knocking heads together there so well as here."
It isn't that difficult to imagine, except for the feeling of sunlight on his shoulders while he does it. "I'd have to find a whole new clientele," he says, "to start with. Besides, it's not knocking heads that appeals about the job."
"What is it, then?"
"That it's a suitable occupation, I suppose. Without joining the Army or the East India Trading Company, or some other such thing."
"Like a duck to water, then," Graeme says. He could be smiling, but when Isidore checks, it's not so much that as a retreat of the corners of his lips deeper into his jaw.
"Not the same for you, I take it," he says. "Not enough acting down here for your tastes?"
"Nae enough of aught for my tastes." He drums his fingers on the wet glass in soft arpeggios. "I'm here so long as it concerns me, and out as soon as I can."
Isidore nods, watching the motion of Graeme's fingers, their repetitive nervous driving. "It's been concerning you a while."
"The lack of sunlight concerns me more."
"Everyone but devils and men from the colonies -- Her Majesty's colonies, I mean -- does get dreadfully pale, I'll give you that."
"Ye ken the sum of what I crave, Izzy," he says, softer than before. "I cannae stay."
It occurs to Isidore that Graeme has not, in all his unsettled tappings, moved his left hand at all.
He tries to summon up gentleness when he asks, though, for the sake of the man's dignity as well as for their friendship. "I've an idea. It's not enough for you, is it, what can be bought at apothecaries?"
"Nor what the Orient is willing to sell," Graeme answers. It's more clarification than Isidore required.
It also makes him rather uncomfortable. He sits back in his chair, glances up at the ceiling and out at the dark beyond the windows, and shrugs. "How do the traders from the Orient get down here, anyhow," he says.
"I dinnae ken. Is there a Company for the Hellish West End?"
Isidore laughs, somewhat relieved. "With our Traitor Empress? I wouldn't be a bit surprised."
Graeme, it seems, can also laugh at anything.
---
"That looks a sight."
"It's a hat. Made of iron."
"The cords of your neck must be having a time with that."
"It's not for my neck, it's for keeping my head from being bashed in. Besides, it's -- stylish. Just like a top hat, except, ah. Metallic."
"Ah, right. Do the number of rivets do anything for your fashionable standing?"
"I rather like the hatband part, actually. With the darker finish."
"I have to tell ye, Izzy, in ten years on the stage I havenae seen much more foolish-looking."
"Yes, a pantomime actor is telling me what looks foolish. I'm mortified. I won't ever be able to show my face in Veilgarden again." He pauses. "Wait. This is you, perhaps I genuinely won't, aren't you the toast of whatever poetry circle is popular this week, or something equally absurd?"
Graeme smirks. "And what's it to your reputation if I am?"
"Nothing this hat can't help me fix."
"So if ye come to hear doggerels about your head toppling clean off--"
"-- I'll take comfort in the toppling and not in it being struck," Isidore says, and seats the hat on his head at a more jaunty angle.
---
There are a great many things Isidore is enjoying about this bottle of brandy, the foremost of which is its entire lack of mycological content. A near second, however, is that he is engaged in passing it back and forth while pleasantly naked and sweat-streaked and reclining on sheets which are slick-smooth with threadcount. There are apparently benefits to making a name for oneself in Veilgarden as well as on Watchmaker's Hill, and Isidore would say as much except that he is sure Graeme is well-aware.
"When I think about it," he says instead, "this is almost palatial after New Newgate."
"They do say every free man's a king," Graeme says, and holds out his hand for the brandy. He's still mostly clothed, but his hands are certainly bare, and his fingers slip a little on Isidore's as he accepts the drink. "Bannocks are better nor nae kind of bread."
Isidore uses his other hand to prod Graeme in the shoulder. "What the hell are bannocks?"
"Scones."
"-- oh. I like scones." He snickers, and arches his shoulderblades more firmly into the pillows. "I wonder if anyone gets down here these days without a trip through gaol."
"I cannae imagine choosing to come, even if after ye choose to stay."
"I wouldn't think so, unless you're the Empress Herself." Isidore rolls, props himself up on an elbow. "But someone might come down if they knew they could get back up again, I've been thinking. For business or on errand."
Graeme nods, and props the bottle on his hips, just where his trousers are slumping and undone. The light that passes through the bottle darkens his bare skin. "I've seen the type -- tourists, if ye will, come to see Clathermont's and gowk at the Palace."
"Tourists, industrialists -- tourists are worse. Tourists are worse everywhere, though." He grins, a little, and then stops. He isn't touching Graeme anywhere; it's companionable, how they're lying, nothing else. "You've never said why you came down here."
"Ye couldnae see I never meant to?"
"Didn't mean it that way. You wouldn't want to get back so much if you meant to get stuck. More like what the accident was? In your getting here." He quite nearly feels ashamed for pushing the question. The emotion isn't unfamiliar, but it's rusted, flaking and almost unrecognisable.
Graeme accepts the clarification with a sort of sigh, and arches his chin and neck toward the ceiling. "Did ye ken they've a law up top, about exile, Izzy? That ye cannae be sent to prison in the Neath for a surface crime if ye arenae yet convicted?"
"I've an idea of it," Isidore says, slowly. He leaves enough space for Graeme to go on.
"I wasnae even tried," Graeme says.
Now he's blinking and confused as much as he's intrigued. "But wouldn't that be illegal? You could appeal."
"Well, I did commit a crime," he says, smile gleaming like the gilt label on the brandy. "Well, I might hae done. It depends on who my patron was working for. Though if I'm here, and he hasnae sprung me, well. It couldnae been so far above the law."
There is a great deal in that which Isidore is rather sure he doesn't even want explained. He sticks with the most pressing of his questions. "You've a patron and you don't know who he works for?"
"I can guess," he answers, "but I hope I'm wrong."
"You hope you're wrong," Isidore says, and flops back onto the mattress. "You're down here for a crime you may or may not have committed, on behalf of a man who is possibly working for someone you at the very least don't like, and you're -- waiting for your patron to get you out of this? What are you going to tell me next, you're secretly a player in the Great Game and some tribesmen once made you their emir?"
"Only a pawn." Graeme tilts his head into the pillow and grins. "And if I were aught more, would I tell ye true?"
"Only a pawn." If he was the theatrical kind, Isidore would press a palm to his forehead. "I'll regret asking this, I'm sure. Is your patron the sort of man I'd be acquainted with?"
"Only a pawn," Graeme repeats in Isidore's voice. "True or nae, the short of it is that I'm waiting him out. If I'm here, and he hasnae found me, then he's in straits, and I cannae abide that."
Honour's an odd thing to discover in someone else, especially in someone like Graeme, Isidore thinks. "Well. Of course not." He means it to be reassuring, but it comes out doubtful instead, though he's not sure what he's doubting, Graeme's truth or his ability.
Though it occurs to Isidore that, as far as Graeme is concerned, the truth matters much less than it ought.
-
"You're a whore?!"
The entire restaurant silences, except for the one waiter who drops what sounds like two silver-capped trays and a casserole. Someone screams in pain.
Graeme winces, but not at Isidore. "I think that man needs a doctor."
Isidore, for his part, could not care less about the health of his fellow dinner-goers. "You're a whore?!" he repeats, louder still. "I've been paying you for services?"
"Trading," Graeme corrects. "If I wanted your surface currency I'd have asked ye for it."
"That doesn't help!" Isidore sputters.
"Ye asked me to buy the drinks," Graeme says. "I thought that's what ye were after."
"I though I was being -- companionable! Friendly!" He searches frantically for another appropriate word, gesticulating. "Equitable! You never said you were a whore!"
"Ye offered me your laudanum if I took ye out. If ye dinnae ken I was a whore, you sure treated with me as one."
Isidore sits back down.
"Besides, it doesnae mean I dinnae fain it."
Having sat, the table affords Isidore the chance to put his elbows on it and his face in his palms. "I had been under the persistent impression that whores didn't like it," he says, somewhat snippily. "And that they didn't make nearly so much conversation before. Or after."
"It isnae a false impression." Graeme slides his drink across the table, raps it against Isidore's knuckles, and leaves it there for him to take. "I ken I'm in a class all my ain."
Isidore takes the drink and drains it dry. It is rather punitive of him, but he decides not to care. "Even so," he mutters. "Are you actually an actor, or is that just part of the come-on?"
"Nae, that's all true. Couldnae make enough at it when I was getting started, so I took to the other profession until I could get on my feet."
"And the accents, are those for the first profession or the second?"
Graeme just smiles, and motions for Isidore to drink.
Warily, Isidore obeys, from his own glass this time -- that one still has liquid in it.
"I did think it was fiddler's news to ye," Graeme says.
"Well it wasn't," Isidore retorts. "-- that is. Almost entirely it wasn't. I knew you were lying but I thought we were friends."
Graeme takes Isidore's glass and tilts it, lets the whiskey colour the sides before he raises it to drink. "I think we are."
"I won't ask if you're friends with all your clients," Isidore says, more lightly than he'd expected to.
"I'll answer anyway." He puts the empty glass down, gnaws on the walls of his mouth and grimaces. "Ach, Scotch. But it's a short list."
"I ordered it, not you," Isidore says, nearly fond, in an exhasperated and frustrated sort of fashion. "You needn't. I'm not all that interested in who else you fuck for favours."
Graeme laughs. "Then drink it yourself, and I won't tell ye aught."
Isidore takes the glass out of Graeme's hand. "Considering you've been spending your time in the Shuttered Palace lately, I think I'm better off not being told," he says.
Graeme watches him drink with a smile that charms and shines. "A'times it's more a favour to their lot."
"I can imagine," Isidore says, and considering what Graeme has done to -- with -- him, it's easy enough to do so. "I'm sure you do well enough."
"I get by," Graeme says. "The same as ye."
Statements that ought to slander his dignity and his good name seem to mean less and less in the Neath, Isidore considers, and quirks a smile at Graeme. "Not quite," he says. "Enough for you would take more sunlight than what I'd ever sell or buy." There's still a quarter-inch of whiskey in the tumbler, so Isidore drains it all.
"You're a ray of hope, Izzy."
"And you're buying all the drinks."
--
.