RPF Fic: those gold button mysteries
those gold button mysteries mélanie laurent/august diehl, r.
when they talk about a line, there is no line. and when things begin to happen, they forget everything else. this is an actor’s code. 4,432 words. apocalypse!AU.
notes: this is falseeeyelashes’ fault. it’s easy process, you see. she’ll go, “hey chrissy shiny!” and then i’ll go, “ooooo shiny!” and then she’ll somehow convince me to do anything. don’t ask me, i don’t even know. anyways. this happened sort of strangely as i started to think about well, what will happen if shit hits the proverbial fan. ANYWAYS. enjoy!
-
Know that there was a window of time.
Diane is drunk. Mélanie watches from the kitchen, sitting over the counter.
“Maybe I’m done with the city.”
This is New York, early into the summer. It will be nearly two years since the two of them have met. Diane invites her into the city as an odd and an end, as if they were the kind of friends, old friends that had the leisure of meeting every once in awhile.
“Done?” Mélanie asks and only to humor her. She looks away as Diane stumbles to the couch, cigarette in one hand and a bottle of wine in the other. Her nails are too red against the glass.
The other woman laughs and slides onto the couch, the bottle dropping against the floor. It skids and spills, and slides a large stain over the carpet. Mélanie watches as her fingers sink into the carpet.
“I see the same things everyday,” Diane says slowly. “Cameras and people and traffic and lives that don’t really stop. I wanted to do this, I know. Be an actor. Be a dancer. Be someone that thrives at the heart of things. It’s supposed to be nice and I just want - I want things to change.”
She scoffs and shakes her head. She stretches over the counter and reaches for her bag, digging out a pack of tissues. There was dinner earlier, a drink, and a phone call. Co-stars, Diane still tells her. It’s a bit of a joke.
“But you are tired,” she says finally, and tries to say it with some sort of kindness. Her English is still sharp and it makes her feel older.
There is a moan from the couch and Diane closes her eyes, her hand still dangling off the side.
“I am. Very tired, you know.”
Mélanie shakes her head. “I am tired of English,” she says.
Of course, this is about other people. This is how it almost ends.
The idea is to keep your memories normal.
In a few weeks, she misses a flight to Dublin. She stays home and watches the news, her eyes glued to the headlines. Virus totals climbing, mass panics, airports closing - it happens slowly or happens already, something she’s entirely sure she missed or fell into the middle of.
But she watches.
She watches from her window, in the corner of her sitting room. There is a small ledge and outside, people are starting to mull back and forth, in and out of the city. There rumors of a quarantine, une porte fermée the news tells them; she waits for her own sense of panic, but she continues to watch and wait and think.
Late afternoon, her door starts to shudder.
She stands sharply but nearly drops her glass. She turns and studies the door as it shakes, her fingers cocked in midair and her mouth pressing closed. She hears someone start to cry. There is yell, but it is outside and down under her window. She doesn’t know what to do.
She takes a step forward. She hears keys and her hand comes to rest against her chest, her fingers twisting in her sweater. She thinks of the places that she’s supposed to be in. There was something about music. She was supposed to call home for lunch tomorrow.
Her eyes close when the door stops. She listens to it open.
“Mélanie,” someone says.
Her mouth twists. She exhales and slowly, her eyes open. She catches the back of her landlord, scurrying away. She listens to the woman and her footsteps, the way they sound as they disappear.
Outside, she hears someone scream. The sirens start in the distance.
“They are letting no one into the city,” he says in greeting.
It is only then that she looks at August, standing in the frame of her door. He looks at her and she looks at him and tries to remember the last time she’s seen him, if it were relevant at all. It starts slowly though: the tightness in her throat, the odd memory of a friend, and then she sees herself with Diane, laughing and drinking and thinking co-stars.
“Oh.”
Her hand slides into her pocket. She pulls out her cigarettes, sliding her nail against the package. She’s thought about leaving and buying a few more.
But August doesn’t move.
“You were supposed to be in New York.”
They stare at each other quietly. He says it as if it were an accusation and she can remember the last time he looked at her like this, but that was because it was safe to be cruel and on cue. It is strange, she thinks, to have knots inside of her stomach instead of panicking.
“I was supposed to be in Ireland,” she corrects and smiles at the child by his side, studying the little girl with a critical eye. She lights a cigarette and the child flinches, tucking herself behind her father’s leg as she stays sitting on the floor. One or two, it seems, and she has never really seen anyone quite so small like this.
He has a daughter, she remembers. He has a wife too. He is happily married. Or was, she thinks. Mélanie steps closer and squats, if only to study the child by his side. Her eyes feel kind, but the little girl seems unable to look at her. Instead, her gaze is distant.
“Hungry?” she finds herself asking, and it’s something to say, something beyond why are you here - because that’s meant to matter at a different time.
The little girl coughs. August frowns.
“Oui,” he replies. “A little bit.”
Mélanie keeps quiet.
She remembers. There was almost that time.
There are too many of those, if this is about the truth, and she remains unable to reconcile one with the mess of the others. “It’s a fucking curse,” Diane would confess like she understands and understands well.
August is August and like all of them, they marry young. They marry young and love the wrong people. They call it a rite of passage. They call it a necessity. They call it the art.
They are sitting alone between takes. She is comfortable and quiet, head bowed and her hands wrapped around an extra script. There are no lines to remember, but there are things wrong with cameras and lights and the weather, where it is wet and cold.
His hand drops over her knee. She scoffs.
“Your French is odd,” she murmurs.
“Perhaps we should have lessons,” he leers.
It is something that makes them laugh, and laugh as an odd pair. There is her in greens and browns and grays, hidden and almost mysterious as she sits. Then there is August, sharp and almost quite cruel.
It might’ve made sense, Quentin tells them.
( - and of course, there is that other time where he kisses her open-mouth against her throat and she drags her fingers against his back, sharp as her nails curl into his skin as he hisses and pulls her up to straddle him; there is the sensation of him inside of her, the way she feels herself stretch and flush, the way her belly seems to spill into knots, and when he slides his teeth into her skin, she can feel him sigh his mine.)
They watch the outside from the window in her bedroom. She stands at the window and he sits on her bed. The child sleeps in another room, tucked between heavy blankets that she hasn’t used in ages.
Mélanie feels odd and embarrassed, slighted by the sense of misfortune. She presses her fingers against the glass, tracing the outline of people that she watches from inside. There seems to be more of them and her fingers seem to enjoy being able to write them into sight.
“It doesn’t feel real,” August says out loud. His daughter has name, but she forgets it. His wife has another name too, but Mélanie’s long forgotten that too. There are others, Julien and Damien, people that she has let herself forget instead of worrying about what the present might become.
Her brow furrows. “Real?”
He nods. She sees him in the reflection of the glass, watching her as traces a crack. The cigarette dangles from her mouth and she pulls it out, watching him as he stands and walks to her.
“Real,” she says again. Her eyes close. She thinks and stumbles through her English. “What is not real?”
“Lines of people.” He stops and looks at her, reaching for her cigarette. Their fingers brush and her hand doesn’t move, even as she watches him slide it back into his mouth. “This sickness,” he says. “We cannot come in or out. We cannot know if our families are all right. We don’t need to know, really.”
“Where are we to go then?”
She says it seriously without any sense of how he feels or how he wants to feel. This isn’t about him, she thinks. This isn’t about her either. Her gaze returns to the window and she watches the lines of people that begin to straighten again, eyeing the barricades that army has set up in different parts of the city. Both sides are waiting for panic.
“They,” she spits and points outside. “They,” she says, “are telling us to stay in and wait - wait for what exactly?”
“I don’t know.”
“These are the questions we should be asking.”
She means it in a way that she’s stopped trying to understand. Maybe it’s here, here where things start to piece themselves together. In the room upstairs, they stop and listen to her neighbors. Someone is pacing. Someone starts to yell. A dish drops. Outside, there is the soft chorus of a chant.
In the next room, his daughter wakes crying. Mélanie takes his hand.
There are three things that happen:
1. The day she missed her flight was because the airport was the first to close. She was one of the few that watched the lights go out and heard the echoes of a gunshot burn through the taxi line. She never saw who it was or heard why; there was a flash of blue, a cry, and somebody sobbing he’s one of them.
2. Her apartment is home to her for more then three weeks. This is after the airport, after the sheet music by her piano starts to gather dust. There is a point where she calls Damien and says things like, “my sweetheart, sweetheart,” and means it in a way that she should’ve meant it weeks ago. When there is no answer, she cries.
3. She ventures out once. She might’ve seen Julia. She will not tell August this.
This is not his idea but hers. She is ready to regret it. Paris isn’t really Paris, after all.
When they leave for the market, they ask a neighbor to watch Elsa. It’s simply bribery; Mélanie offers to bring groceries back in kind, as a sort of brave payment of reassurance. The little girl’s eyes are too wide and she wraps herself around the older woman with a small, almost passive plea as she glances at her father.
August says goodbye but it is in German. Mélanie had Diane for German for a small time.
But outside, life is completely still. She walks with her hands in her pocket and her fingers trying not to curl too tightly in her pockets. She had gloves once, but they followed her to New York. Or perhaps, it was Dublin where she left them once upon at time. She tries to rub her thumbs against the lining of her pockets, then her palms, but is startled when somebody starts to cry.
August coughs. He touches her shoulder.
“Cold?”
“Oui,” she murmurs, and slides her arm through his. She ducks close, her eyes half-closed under the cold and the wind. They begin to pass groups and groups of people, huddled into corners and doorways. There are lines of the army, men watching with nothing more than paranoia. She feels like someone is waiting for all of them to die.
But August keeps her hand tucked in the crook of his arm.
“The basics,” she tells him.
She tells him too because there is nothing else to say. There is no script, no gala, no events to go to; there is this idea that this isn’t really happening, but as they walk and as her eyes start to grow, she begins to see people.
Or what’s left of them, she thinks.
Her jaw locks. “Bread,” she says in English. “Water, if there is water left - I hope we find something for a week.”
She is starting to stumble. He looks at her briefly.
“Of course,” he says.
They are quiet until the market. This morning she watched the news while he was with his daughter, murmuring things about his wife and safety as she pretended not to listen. There was an interruption and some group ready to cry about la liberté.
There was a body. They all wore masks.
But she focuses on the market as it comes into view, trying not to start at the carts and baskets that are scattered and skewed into the dirt. There are a few that are broken, bits of metal sticking out as an odd display of a skeleton. There are people inside but she remembers what they promised each other.
This is about the necessities. She promised.
Inside they pass a couple that is pouring over old candy displays. Somebody is shaking because there are candy bars scattered all over the floor and into strange path, as if it were somehow a way of making this all normal.
But the city is already a ghost town, and the televisions are blaring others in kind - the same, almost empty string of pictures. There are people inside their homes and offices, fearing that it’s really the air that’s going to kill them all. She pulls herself closer to August and he pulls their hands into his pocket, tightening his over hers.
“Quickly,” he says. They find a cart. “I want to return.”
She nods and looks away, staring into a sea of open produce. The fruits are brown and dead. There are leaves of vegetables, pieces of green that have sort of faded into the floor. She almost steps over to sort through them, to scavenge and hope to find something for them.
August tugs her away. He pulls her hand over the cart and covers it with his. They move forward instead, into the dry goods. She has to think. They stand in the aisle and study what is left.
“Pour le bébé,” she tugs at his arm. She spots jars of baby food, some jars cracked and scarping the floor.
Somebody yells. She looks up sharply.
“We need to move.”
August yanks her back, and they turn into the aisle, ready to grab things as they go. But from the end of aisle, two men stumble to the floor. One hits the other in the face and there’s a sharp snap, and Mélanie gasps in horror. It brings a sick feeling to her, something that churns and pulls and makes her feel incredibly clumsy.
The man hits the other one again, then again, dropping to the floor over him and straddling hips. August keeps her still and her heart begins to race as they watch him. He pulls frantically at the man’s pockets, and she can only assume that he’s dead. There is blood over the floor and on the other man’s hands, still moving as he grabs at his wallets.
“We need to go,” August says again. The man stops.
It happens so fast. She is pushed into the shelves with a cry and she can hear August hit the floor, his boots scuffling against the floor. The man is talking, crying, saying something but she cannot understand. She tries to stand, but manages to skid forward.
The knife is a few feet away. Mélanie doesn’t think.
“Stop,” she snarls and her hand wraps around the hilt, just as she turns quickly. Her motions are too quick for her to understand what’s going on: she grabs the other man by the jacket, she hears August and her name mélanie, and shoves her hand forward.
Then she moves her hand again. And again.
It becomes a blur and she is a mess of sobs and hiccups, her hair spilling and spitting against her face. Her nails tear into the man’s jacket but she doesn’t stop. She doesn’t know how to stop.
“Mélanie.”
She is breathing heavily, her eyes wide as she holds the knife tightly. Her throat starts to dry and twist and the man looks at her, then August behind her. Slowly, his hands rise and he begins to back up. There is blood around his mouth and his jacket has split over his arm, opening over his wrist where the knife managed to hit.
She doesn’t move and stays watching, even as he disappears around another aisle. Outside, there is a scream. Her eyes close.
“Êtes vous - are -” her hand begins to shake and she tries to turn, her eyes still wide and alert. “We must go,” she tries to say, and it’s August who grabs her wrist. She jumps and a half-sob drops as he holds her tightly, pressing a hard kiss to her forehead.
His mouth is sticky. “A few more things,” he tells her.
The body finds them outside.
August pulls her away as she starts to cry.
When the phone rings, the baby is asleep. Elsa, she reminds herself.
“How are you?”
Mélanie shakes her head. Her fingers spin into the cord and she stares at an old bottle of wine, open and empty. They found it after the market, before she started to pour it into her mouth. She can taste the sharpness from drinking from the bottle, and Diane’s voice sounds like nothing more than old conversation. Maybe this is a memory.
It is not enough for her to put the phone down. She listens to the sounds from her bedroom instead.
“Not dead,” she finally says and says it like a promise. She listens to Diane laugh and the phone line crack, ruffle as if she were moving elsewhere. She wants to ask but there is no room this the kind of question. You are not here, she thinks.
But Diane’s voice is still kind. It is soft, too soft.
“Your English is better.”
“I am trying to forget.”
“We have the time,” Diane murmurs.
Mélanie frowns and tries to remember why she should know this, why she should know what they are talking about. She licks her lips and carries the phone into the bedroom, walking slowly.
“Do we?” she asks as she stops and leans into the frame.
August is standing at the window. Diane starts to laugh.
“I’m trying to leave,” she says.
When they leave New York, Damien starts to sing about ghosts.
“You have to be ready for them to stay with you, love,” he says.
Elsa is coughing. The sound is entirely too odd for either of them to really recognize.
The child stays in the spare room. August comes in and out. Mélanie knows only because she has stopped sleeping. They move around the apartment this way too, as if they understood they were merely meant to share this sense of transparency. Once in awhile, she will catches herself trying to remember what it was like to be an actor.
It’s somewhere early into the morning that she finds him outside the door. He stands and stares at it, his hand wrapped around the knob as if he were ready to open it. He just doesn’t move.
“Her mother is dead,” he says and his voice breaks, long and coarse. His eyes close too and she watches as his head drops against the door.
His eyes close. She tries to be kind.
“Je suis désolé.”
“They took her away. We were here for a small holiday. I have - had work that I wanted to look into. They came with me and I was only out for a few hours, just for the meeting, and then …”
She is quiet when he stops. For a moment, she stands with him and then reaches forward. Her hand presses against his back and is too small to fit against his spine. It moves slowly, without her thinking, as it drops against the line of his skin. She remembers his shirt in the room behind her, over her sheets as he is the one who sleeps most of these days.
She becomes bolder though and her mouth slides over his skin. Her tongue darts out lightly, only to brush over the flushed marks of her fingers. She stops and his hand reaches back to clutch her arm.
“I wanted them to come,” he tells her. His voice is empty. There is no rise or fall. “I needed them to come. Sometimes I forget where I should be.”
For the first time, she really thinks. Her forehead drops against his back.
“We should find somewhere else,” she says.
Know that there was a window of time.
The world is a different place for her, before it started and after - of course, she’ll tell you. Of course.
It could have been prevented.
Know that she is too selfish to remember this the right way.
“I know someone,” she blurts.
She sits in the kitchen, on the counter, and begins to rip a calendar over her lap. There are very few sounds in her building now.
“Someone?”
He rubs his eyes and walks to her, sliding between her legs and picking up the pieces from her lap. He starts to drop them to the floor. They continue like this though, continue as she rips through the months. There are holidays and dates with notes, birthdays of old friends and friends that were never really friends to begin with.
In her bedroom somewhere there is a film, in script about a boy and a girl and a chance and a ghost and very few things that make a sensible paycheck. There were times where she enjoyed making a mess of things.
Her hands still in her lap. August is watching her.
“Yes,” she says. “Louis,” she remembers. “He is outside these days. I have some money. Maybe there is a chance.”
He is too quiet. She waits for answer, but he says nothing. He stares at her and she waits, keeps waiting, even has his hands rise and frame her face. His thumbs run along her mouth and she catches one with her teeth, sucking lightly at the skin as he laughs bitterly.
“She is worse.”
Her eyes burn. “I know someone.”
“She is worse,” he says again. “She is a child - just a child. She is my child. I am supposed to be able to care for her and yet, here I am and know not a damn thing about caring for her. I should know.”
His lips press against her forehead and her hands rise to curl in over his chest. Her nails scrape against his skin and he laughs, almost desperately.
She hears it then, the way he keeps her close and she just seems to know; it’s like the way that Diane used to talk to her, the way she watched some songs come out of Damien, and how for her it was just easier to play certain characters more than others.
She knows she’s never been herself. He seems to laugh louder when she it hits her and she stares at him.
“Stop,” she snarls.
“Why?”
She grabs him by the face, her hands curling into fists in his hair. He gives her a strangled laugh as he holds her by the hips. His fingers dig into her sides, over her shirt as they start to pull at each other.
But she holds her mouth over his, wet and hot and desperate as her heart starts to pound and her head starts to spin. Her eyes are burning and all she can think is this: he knows.
“Don’t do this to me,” she breathes.
Elsa dies.
She isn’t in the room.
In Paris, they’ve begun to burn the bodies.
They watch people panic from her window. August finishes her cigarettes.
He stands naked next to her, his body arched into long bones and skin. She rests against the glass, backwards and tired of watching the city. Her fingers run against his skin and she sighs when he meets her gaze.
“We can’t stay here,” he says slowly. He smiles too, in that practiced, languid way that is meant to scare her just like before. Instead she just watches and waits, just as he brings himself forward and studies her. His fingers slide his cigarette back into her mouth.
Her laughter is choked. He stops smiling.
For the first time, she imagines themselves elsewhere. Perhaps they are in Cannes again, laughing and half-drunk - with the others, of course, wrapped in their own sordid stories and guilt. She can see herself too, standing against the corner with her champagne, between Diane and Michael and watching them try not to watch each other. She cannot remember if that was real too.
“There’s nowhere else to go,” she says softly.
She stops herself from continuing. Over their heads, she listens as the neighbors upstairs begin to march. Somebody starts to cry.
“We can’t stay here,” he repeats and he looks at her, his eyes heavy as the rest of the smoke disappears.
We smell guilty, she wants to tell him. He takes his cigarette back and slides into his mouth, pulling her into an embrace. She imagines she’s lost her mind by now, in the kind of way life and art begin to reconcile and imitate each other.
“We lost our chance,” she murmurs.
He sighs. Her eyes close. They will still watch the news, of course.
“Where will we go?”
They met last. She was standing alone by the theater set.
“Bonjour,” he greets and it is his French that is near perfect, even as they stand side by side and wait for their scene to start. He smiles too, nearly frightening in costumed-uniform with his eyes wide and ready to be cruel.
He offers her a cigarette. She scoffs.
“We are all the same,” she says.
when they talk about a line, there is no line. and when things begin to happen, they forget everything else. this is an actor’s code. 4,432 words. apocalypse!AU.
notes: this is falseeeyelashes’ fault. it’s easy process, you see. she’ll go, “hey chrissy shiny!” and then i’ll go, “ooooo shiny!” and then she’ll somehow convince me to do anything. don’t ask me, i don’t even know. anyways. this happened sort of strangely as i started to think about well, what will happen if shit hits the proverbial fan. ANYWAYS. enjoy!
-
Know that there was a window of time.
Diane is drunk. Mélanie watches from the kitchen, sitting over the counter.
“Maybe I’m done with the city.”
This is New York, early into the summer. It will be nearly two years since the two of them have met. Diane invites her into the city as an odd and an end, as if they were the kind of friends, old friends that had the leisure of meeting every once in awhile.
“Done?” Mélanie asks and only to humor her. She looks away as Diane stumbles to the couch, cigarette in one hand and a bottle of wine in the other. Her nails are too red against the glass.
The other woman laughs and slides onto the couch, the bottle dropping against the floor. It skids and spills, and slides a large stain over the carpet. Mélanie watches as her fingers sink into the carpet.
“I see the same things everyday,” Diane says slowly. “Cameras and people and traffic and lives that don’t really stop. I wanted to do this, I know. Be an actor. Be a dancer. Be someone that thrives at the heart of things. It’s supposed to be nice and I just want - I want things to change.”
She scoffs and shakes her head. She stretches over the counter and reaches for her bag, digging out a pack of tissues. There was dinner earlier, a drink, and a phone call. Co-stars, Diane still tells her. It’s a bit of a joke.
“But you are tired,” she says finally, and tries to say it with some sort of kindness. Her English is still sharp and it makes her feel older.
There is a moan from the couch and Diane closes her eyes, her hand still dangling off the side.
“I am. Very tired, you know.”
Mélanie shakes her head. “I am tired of English,” she says.
Of course, this is about other people. This is how it almost ends.
The idea is to keep your memories normal.
In a few weeks, she misses a flight to Dublin. She stays home and watches the news, her eyes glued to the headlines. Virus totals climbing, mass panics, airports closing - it happens slowly or happens already, something she’s entirely sure she missed or fell into the middle of.
But she watches.
She watches from her window, in the corner of her sitting room. There is a small ledge and outside, people are starting to mull back and forth, in and out of the city. There rumors of a quarantine, une porte fermée the news tells them; she waits for her own sense of panic, but she continues to watch and wait and think.
Late afternoon, her door starts to shudder.
She stands sharply but nearly drops her glass. She turns and studies the door as it shakes, her fingers cocked in midair and her mouth pressing closed. She hears someone start to cry. There is yell, but it is outside and down under her window. She doesn’t know what to do.
She takes a step forward. She hears keys and her hand comes to rest against her chest, her fingers twisting in her sweater. She thinks of the places that she’s supposed to be in. There was something about music. She was supposed to call home for lunch tomorrow.
Her eyes close when the door stops. She listens to it open.
“Mélanie,” someone says.
Her mouth twists. She exhales and slowly, her eyes open. She catches the back of her landlord, scurrying away. She listens to the woman and her footsteps, the way they sound as they disappear.
Outside, she hears someone scream. The sirens start in the distance.
“They are letting no one into the city,” he says in greeting.
It is only then that she looks at August, standing in the frame of her door. He looks at her and she looks at him and tries to remember the last time she’s seen him, if it were relevant at all. It starts slowly though: the tightness in her throat, the odd memory of a friend, and then she sees herself with Diane, laughing and drinking and thinking co-stars.
“Oh.”
Her hand slides into her pocket. She pulls out her cigarettes, sliding her nail against the package. She’s thought about leaving and buying a few more.
But August doesn’t move.
“You were supposed to be in New York.”
They stare at each other quietly. He says it as if it were an accusation and she can remember the last time he looked at her like this, but that was because it was safe to be cruel and on cue. It is strange, she thinks, to have knots inside of her stomach instead of panicking.
“I was supposed to be in Ireland,” she corrects and smiles at the child by his side, studying the little girl with a critical eye. She lights a cigarette and the child flinches, tucking herself behind her father’s leg as she stays sitting on the floor. One or two, it seems, and she has never really seen anyone quite so small like this.
He has a daughter, she remembers. He has a wife too. He is happily married. Or was, she thinks. Mélanie steps closer and squats, if only to study the child by his side. Her eyes feel kind, but the little girl seems unable to look at her. Instead, her gaze is distant.
“Hungry?” she finds herself asking, and it’s something to say, something beyond why are you here - because that’s meant to matter at a different time.
The little girl coughs. August frowns.
“Oui,” he replies. “A little bit.”
Mélanie keeps quiet.
She remembers. There was almost that time.
There are too many of those, if this is about the truth, and she remains unable to reconcile one with the mess of the others. “It’s a fucking curse,” Diane would confess like she understands and understands well.
August is August and like all of them, they marry young. They marry young and love the wrong people. They call it a rite of passage. They call it a necessity. They call it the art.
They are sitting alone between takes. She is comfortable and quiet, head bowed and her hands wrapped around an extra script. There are no lines to remember, but there are things wrong with cameras and lights and the weather, where it is wet and cold.
His hand drops over her knee. She scoffs.
“Your French is odd,” she murmurs.
“Perhaps we should have lessons,” he leers.
It is something that makes them laugh, and laugh as an odd pair. There is her in greens and browns and grays, hidden and almost mysterious as she sits. Then there is August, sharp and almost quite cruel.
It might’ve made sense, Quentin tells them.
( - and of course, there is that other time where he kisses her open-mouth against her throat and she drags her fingers against his back, sharp as her nails curl into his skin as he hisses and pulls her up to straddle him; there is the sensation of him inside of her, the way she feels herself stretch and flush, the way her belly seems to spill into knots, and when he slides his teeth into her skin, she can feel him sigh his mine.)
They watch the outside from the window in her bedroom. She stands at the window and he sits on her bed. The child sleeps in another room, tucked between heavy blankets that she hasn’t used in ages.
Mélanie feels odd and embarrassed, slighted by the sense of misfortune. She presses her fingers against the glass, tracing the outline of people that she watches from inside. There seems to be more of them and her fingers seem to enjoy being able to write them into sight.
“It doesn’t feel real,” August says out loud. His daughter has name, but she forgets it. His wife has another name too, but Mélanie’s long forgotten that too. There are others, Julien and Damien, people that she has let herself forget instead of worrying about what the present might become.
Her brow furrows. “Real?”
He nods. She sees him in the reflection of the glass, watching her as traces a crack. The cigarette dangles from her mouth and she pulls it out, watching him as he stands and walks to her.
“Real,” she says again. Her eyes close. She thinks and stumbles through her English. “What is not real?”
“Lines of people.” He stops and looks at her, reaching for her cigarette. Their fingers brush and her hand doesn’t move, even as she watches him slide it back into his mouth. “This sickness,” he says. “We cannot come in or out. We cannot know if our families are all right. We don’t need to know, really.”
“Where are we to go then?”
She says it seriously without any sense of how he feels or how he wants to feel. This isn’t about him, she thinks. This isn’t about her either. Her gaze returns to the window and she watches the lines of people that begin to straighten again, eyeing the barricades that army has set up in different parts of the city. Both sides are waiting for panic.
“They,” she spits and points outside. “They,” she says, “are telling us to stay in and wait - wait for what exactly?”
“I don’t know.”
“These are the questions we should be asking.”
She means it in a way that she’s stopped trying to understand. Maybe it’s here, here where things start to piece themselves together. In the room upstairs, they stop and listen to her neighbors. Someone is pacing. Someone starts to yell. A dish drops. Outside, there is the soft chorus of a chant.
In the next room, his daughter wakes crying. Mélanie takes his hand.
There are three things that happen:
1. The day she missed her flight was because the airport was the first to close. She was one of the few that watched the lights go out and heard the echoes of a gunshot burn through the taxi line. She never saw who it was or heard why; there was a flash of blue, a cry, and somebody sobbing he’s one of them.
2. Her apartment is home to her for more then three weeks. This is after the airport, after the sheet music by her piano starts to gather dust. There is a point where she calls Damien and says things like, “my sweetheart, sweetheart,” and means it in a way that she should’ve meant it weeks ago. When there is no answer, she cries.
3. She ventures out once. She might’ve seen Julia. She will not tell August this.
This is not his idea but hers. She is ready to regret it. Paris isn’t really Paris, after all.
When they leave for the market, they ask a neighbor to watch Elsa. It’s simply bribery; Mélanie offers to bring groceries back in kind, as a sort of brave payment of reassurance. The little girl’s eyes are too wide and she wraps herself around the older woman with a small, almost passive plea as she glances at her father.
August says goodbye but it is in German. Mélanie had Diane for German for a small time.
But outside, life is completely still. She walks with her hands in her pocket and her fingers trying not to curl too tightly in her pockets. She had gloves once, but they followed her to New York. Or perhaps, it was Dublin where she left them once upon at time. She tries to rub her thumbs against the lining of her pockets, then her palms, but is startled when somebody starts to cry.
August coughs. He touches her shoulder.
“Cold?”
“Oui,” she murmurs, and slides her arm through his. She ducks close, her eyes half-closed under the cold and the wind. They begin to pass groups and groups of people, huddled into corners and doorways. There are lines of the army, men watching with nothing more than paranoia. She feels like someone is waiting for all of them to die.
But August keeps her hand tucked in the crook of his arm.
“The basics,” she tells him.
She tells him too because there is nothing else to say. There is no script, no gala, no events to go to; there is this idea that this isn’t really happening, but as they walk and as her eyes start to grow, she begins to see people.
Or what’s left of them, she thinks.
Her jaw locks. “Bread,” she says in English. “Water, if there is water left - I hope we find something for a week.”
She is starting to stumble. He looks at her briefly.
“Of course,” he says.
They are quiet until the market. This morning she watched the news while he was with his daughter, murmuring things about his wife and safety as she pretended not to listen. There was an interruption and some group ready to cry about la liberté.
There was a body. They all wore masks.
But she focuses on the market as it comes into view, trying not to start at the carts and baskets that are scattered and skewed into the dirt. There are a few that are broken, bits of metal sticking out as an odd display of a skeleton. There are people inside but she remembers what they promised each other.
This is about the necessities. She promised.
Inside they pass a couple that is pouring over old candy displays. Somebody is shaking because there are candy bars scattered all over the floor and into strange path, as if it were somehow a way of making this all normal.
But the city is already a ghost town, and the televisions are blaring others in kind - the same, almost empty string of pictures. There are people inside their homes and offices, fearing that it’s really the air that’s going to kill them all. She pulls herself closer to August and he pulls their hands into his pocket, tightening his over hers.
“Quickly,” he says. They find a cart. “I want to return.”
She nods and looks away, staring into a sea of open produce. The fruits are brown and dead. There are leaves of vegetables, pieces of green that have sort of faded into the floor. She almost steps over to sort through them, to scavenge and hope to find something for them.
August tugs her away. He pulls her hand over the cart and covers it with his. They move forward instead, into the dry goods. She has to think. They stand in the aisle and study what is left.
“Pour le bébé,” she tugs at his arm. She spots jars of baby food, some jars cracked and scarping the floor.
Somebody yells. She looks up sharply.
“We need to move.”
August yanks her back, and they turn into the aisle, ready to grab things as they go. But from the end of aisle, two men stumble to the floor. One hits the other in the face and there’s a sharp snap, and Mélanie gasps in horror. It brings a sick feeling to her, something that churns and pulls and makes her feel incredibly clumsy.
The man hits the other one again, then again, dropping to the floor over him and straddling hips. August keeps her still and her heart begins to race as they watch him. He pulls frantically at the man’s pockets, and she can only assume that he’s dead. There is blood over the floor and on the other man’s hands, still moving as he grabs at his wallets.
“We need to go,” August says again. The man stops.
It happens so fast. She is pushed into the shelves with a cry and she can hear August hit the floor, his boots scuffling against the floor. The man is talking, crying, saying something but she cannot understand. She tries to stand, but manages to skid forward.
The knife is a few feet away. Mélanie doesn’t think.
“Stop,” she snarls and her hand wraps around the hilt, just as she turns quickly. Her motions are too quick for her to understand what’s going on: she grabs the other man by the jacket, she hears August and her name mélanie, and shoves her hand forward.
Then she moves her hand again. And again.
It becomes a blur and she is a mess of sobs and hiccups, her hair spilling and spitting against her face. Her nails tear into the man’s jacket but she doesn’t stop. She doesn’t know how to stop.
“Mélanie.”
She is breathing heavily, her eyes wide as she holds the knife tightly. Her throat starts to dry and twist and the man looks at her, then August behind her. Slowly, his hands rise and he begins to back up. There is blood around his mouth and his jacket has split over his arm, opening over his wrist where the knife managed to hit.
She doesn’t move and stays watching, even as he disappears around another aisle. Outside, there is a scream. Her eyes close.
“Êtes vous - are -” her hand begins to shake and she tries to turn, her eyes still wide and alert. “We must go,” she tries to say, and it’s August who grabs her wrist. She jumps and a half-sob drops as he holds her tightly, pressing a hard kiss to her forehead.
His mouth is sticky. “A few more things,” he tells her.
The body finds them outside.
August pulls her away as she starts to cry.
When the phone rings, the baby is asleep. Elsa, she reminds herself.
“How are you?”
Mélanie shakes her head. Her fingers spin into the cord and she stares at an old bottle of wine, open and empty. They found it after the market, before she started to pour it into her mouth. She can taste the sharpness from drinking from the bottle, and Diane’s voice sounds like nothing more than old conversation. Maybe this is a memory.
It is not enough for her to put the phone down. She listens to the sounds from her bedroom instead.
“Not dead,” she finally says and says it like a promise. She listens to Diane laugh and the phone line crack, ruffle as if she were moving elsewhere. She wants to ask but there is no room this the kind of question. You are not here, she thinks.
But Diane’s voice is still kind. It is soft, too soft.
“Your English is better.”
“I am trying to forget.”
“We have the time,” Diane murmurs.
Mélanie frowns and tries to remember why she should know this, why she should know what they are talking about. She licks her lips and carries the phone into the bedroom, walking slowly.
“Do we?” she asks as she stops and leans into the frame.
August is standing at the window. Diane starts to laugh.
“I’m trying to leave,” she says.
When they leave New York, Damien starts to sing about ghosts.
“You have to be ready for them to stay with you, love,” he says.
Elsa is coughing. The sound is entirely too odd for either of them to really recognize.
The child stays in the spare room. August comes in and out. Mélanie knows only because she has stopped sleeping. They move around the apartment this way too, as if they understood they were merely meant to share this sense of transparency. Once in awhile, she will catches herself trying to remember what it was like to be an actor.
It’s somewhere early into the morning that she finds him outside the door. He stands and stares at it, his hand wrapped around the knob as if he were ready to open it. He just doesn’t move.
“Her mother is dead,” he says and his voice breaks, long and coarse. His eyes close too and she watches as his head drops against the door.
His eyes close. She tries to be kind.
“Je suis désolé.”
“They took her away. We were here for a small holiday. I have - had work that I wanted to look into. They came with me and I was only out for a few hours, just for the meeting, and then …”
She is quiet when he stops. For a moment, she stands with him and then reaches forward. Her hand presses against his back and is too small to fit against his spine. It moves slowly, without her thinking, as it drops against the line of his skin. She remembers his shirt in the room behind her, over her sheets as he is the one who sleeps most of these days.
She becomes bolder though and her mouth slides over his skin. Her tongue darts out lightly, only to brush over the flushed marks of her fingers. She stops and his hand reaches back to clutch her arm.
“I wanted them to come,” he tells her. His voice is empty. There is no rise or fall. “I needed them to come. Sometimes I forget where I should be.”
For the first time, she really thinks. Her forehead drops against his back.
“We should find somewhere else,” she says.
Know that there was a window of time.
The world is a different place for her, before it started and after - of course, she’ll tell you. Of course.
It could have been prevented.
Know that she is too selfish to remember this the right way.
“I know someone,” she blurts.
She sits in the kitchen, on the counter, and begins to rip a calendar over her lap. There are very few sounds in her building now.
“Someone?”
He rubs his eyes and walks to her, sliding between her legs and picking up the pieces from her lap. He starts to drop them to the floor. They continue like this though, continue as she rips through the months. There are holidays and dates with notes, birthdays of old friends and friends that were never really friends to begin with.
In her bedroom somewhere there is a film, in script about a boy and a girl and a chance and a ghost and very few things that make a sensible paycheck. There were times where she enjoyed making a mess of things.
Her hands still in her lap. August is watching her.
“Yes,” she says. “Louis,” she remembers. “He is outside these days. I have some money. Maybe there is a chance.”
He is too quiet. She waits for answer, but he says nothing. He stares at her and she waits, keeps waiting, even has his hands rise and frame her face. His thumbs run along her mouth and she catches one with her teeth, sucking lightly at the skin as he laughs bitterly.
“She is worse.”
Her eyes burn. “I know someone.”
“She is worse,” he says again. “She is a child - just a child. She is my child. I am supposed to be able to care for her and yet, here I am and know not a damn thing about caring for her. I should know.”
His lips press against her forehead and her hands rise to curl in over his chest. Her nails scrape against his skin and he laughs, almost desperately.
She hears it then, the way he keeps her close and she just seems to know; it’s like the way that Diane used to talk to her, the way she watched some songs come out of Damien, and how for her it was just easier to play certain characters more than others.
She knows she’s never been herself. He seems to laugh louder when she it hits her and she stares at him.
“Stop,” she snarls.
“Why?”
She grabs him by the face, her hands curling into fists in his hair. He gives her a strangled laugh as he holds her by the hips. His fingers dig into her sides, over her shirt as they start to pull at each other.
But she holds her mouth over his, wet and hot and desperate as her heart starts to pound and her head starts to spin. Her eyes are burning and all she can think is this: he knows.
“Don’t do this to me,” she breathes.
Elsa dies.
She isn’t in the room.
In Paris, they’ve begun to burn the bodies.
They watch people panic from her window. August finishes her cigarettes.
He stands naked next to her, his body arched into long bones and skin. She rests against the glass, backwards and tired of watching the city. Her fingers run against his skin and she sighs when he meets her gaze.
“We can’t stay here,” he says slowly. He smiles too, in that practiced, languid way that is meant to scare her just like before. Instead she just watches and waits, just as he brings himself forward and studies her. His fingers slide his cigarette back into her mouth.
Her laughter is choked. He stops smiling.
For the first time, she imagines themselves elsewhere. Perhaps they are in Cannes again, laughing and half-drunk - with the others, of course, wrapped in their own sordid stories and guilt. She can see herself too, standing against the corner with her champagne, between Diane and Michael and watching them try not to watch each other. She cannot remember if that was real too.
“There’s nowhere else to go,” she says softly.
She stops herself from continuing. Over their heads, she listens as the neighbors upstairs begin to march. Somebody starts to cry.
“We can’t stay here,” he repeats and he looks at her, his eyes heavy as the rest of the smoke disappears.
We smell guilty, she wants to tell him. He takes his cigarette back and slides into his mouth, pulling her into an embrace. She imagines she’s lost her mind by now, in the kind of way life and art begin to reconcile and imitate each other.
“We lost our chance,” she murmurs.
He sighs. Her eyes close. They will still watch the news, of course.
“Where will we go?”
They met last. She was standing alone by the theater set.
“Bonjour,” he greets and it is his French that is near perfect, even as they stand side by side and wait for their scene to start. He smiles too, nearly frightening in costumed-uniform with his eyes wide and ready to be cruel.
He offers her a cigarette. She scoffs.
“We are all the same,” she says.