Location: Wilde [MOSTLY FOR PETRANA] [All around me are familiar faces...]

[deadmanbrucolac]

He stays out of Wilde, more or less, but not completely: he considers no district in this city closed to him, unwelcome though he may be in certain specific locations. Every now and then, in the hours before dawn when it is too late to begin a new enterprise, he would walk in and around the Hedge Maze, thinking. (The false sun didn't burn him, but

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[herquietude]

If wishes were horses- no, that doesn't work at all.

Though Petra would dearly wish to be back in Riva, in the citadel, where the nerves that are beginning to fray at the edges in this city could be properly soothed, the early morning finds her in that same maze and the sight of the Brucolac is particularly arresting for reasons numerous and complex. She stops, a small figure plain to see in a simple white gown, and tilts her head to the side as she examines him frankly, taking in the familiarity and everything that isn't the same after.

(She never truly mistakes him; it may have been a decade or more since his death, but Petra will never lose the familiar sense of his mind and it isn't here.)

"Well, that is interesting."

[deadmanbrucolac]

No, there is a dry deadness instead of any sort of familiar mind there. He himself is deceived for a moment by the familiar taste of her on the air - possibly imperceptably, but his lips had begun to twitch in a sardonic smile before the difference in her posture and, godspit!, her face registered.

"Yesss," he rasps. "It is. You are not at all the woman I thought to take you for." It is a fact, and stated as such.

[herquietude]

Any wistfulness at the reminder of her late husband is only briefly indulged and then locked away; she's honest enough with herself not to pretend that such a reunion would be a happy one. This is interesting, and therefore better. At the very least it gives her something to think about that has nothing to do with the second heartbeat she's carrying around.

"Davidias's Countess," she says, with a little mocking laugh threaded through her voice; it's not unkind, but she imagines living that life and...no. No, she could never. "No, we're not at all the same. Quite right. I assume you know my name, then; may I have yours?"

[deadmanbrucolac]

"You may have the Brucolac, which is all I've needed for many years." It's not the heartbeat - he can hear well, but they'd have to be in a quiet room, or closer, for that - but the taste that a growing child adds to a woman that rivets his attention all the more.

"I know a woman with an excellent guardsman and a respectable castle. I do not know you, though. She was exceptional, but not like you." He walks forward, examining her eyes, her reactions. "You have very little fear, even of me. I do wonder why that is."

[herquietude]

"Do you think that I should be afraid of you?" Note: not should she be afraid, but does he think so? Petra observes his advance with a thoughtful air, a flicker of a smile crossing her face as she observes the height difference (she hadn't noticed at that distance, but now she does). "It's been my feeling for many years that a healthy dose of realism is truly enough to get one by."

Her eyes are large and dark and she meets his gaze with interest and an amiable sort of removed friendliness; she may look younger than the Countess, but she's truthfully older, and her eyes are the quickest place to find it.

[deadmanbrucolac]

"Oh, that very much depends on what sort of creature you take me for." Snake-in-man's-clothes. Oupyre. Lamia. "And what you want to be, to me. Not a countess, you say. Someone who wanders in the deep-blue hours before dawn, alone in a fucking hedge maze, while wearing a white dress. You've packaged yourself so nicely, for a last, indulgent misdeed before the sun opens his judgmental eye. What a scene we could make, staining that pure, lovely gown!"

He does not say how it could be stained, and he does not stop smiling. He doesn't stop walking, either.

[herquietude]

The little laugh here is genuine - genuinely amused and not unfriendly - but while she isn't afraid, she's not unwary, either. She watches him with her head tilted to one side, setting her hands on her hips and not backing down. "I wonder if it's some rule of reality that all men who wear your face are insufferably arrogant," she suggests cheerfully, gathering her will and releasing it in the form of a barrier between them, her hands raising palm up and the clear wall forming on the word, "Enough. There, now; let's us be polite to one another."

Petra might take risks with herself - and she does, constantly - but she's a touch less reckless when there's a child to think of, too.

"Vampire," she adds, after a more scrutinizing look, but she attaches nothing to the word other than the satisfaction of being certain she's right. "I believe the polite word for me is 'witch'."

[deadmanbrucolac]

He pulls up short, tongue uncurling, and even leans forward to flick it against the barrier. "A useful hex. Thank you for not tripping me, at least. Arrogant men react poorly to slapstick, even if we deserve it. Who am I then, to you? Your less-skillful-self recognized me as well."

[herquietude]

"A dead man, aptly." The barrier shimmers when his tongue flicks against it, tastes like sorcery cobbled together from multiple sources. Effective, powerful, and patchwork. "Martel's hair was already losing its colour when he was as young as you appear, but there are pictures in her castle I believe you'd recognize."

Petra pauses, tilts her head, and glances quickly over him, head to foot and back again. "Well, the face, at least, I can't speak to all your similarities."

Madam.

[deadmanbrucolac]

"I aged slower than most, when I did. Growing up with the Tuath has that effect." It's an odd thing to say, and he feels odd saying it - hundreds of years pass without him thinking about the elves, and more hundreds since he spoke of them, but here he is, drinking manufactured elf blood with Godric and dropping the old names to this ab-Petrana as naturally as a tree drops leaves. Her recklessness was infectious. "I'd like to see these portraits, I think."

He looks at her, and runs his hand down the barrier. "I like you, like this. I liked you before, inasmuch as I like anyone who hates me, but she fights me at every step. As well she should - sheer determination is not enough to save anyone without the power to back it up. Are you sure that she was not the glitch, and so we might keep you?" He was significantly less broad in the shoulder than Martel - his frame had a youthful wiriness, not the sort upon which anyone would think to hang armor on, but the unshakable confidence in his smile was anything but young, and certainly not

[herquietude]

"Imagine, for a moment, that you love someone," Petra says casually, lightly, her fingertips touching the barrier opposite his and her smile equal parts whimsy and knife-edge. "Imagine that you love this someone so deeply and so loyally that you will turn a blind eye to their distance and pledge yourself over, and over, and over again. You will accept a place by their side and pretend it means you live in their heart. You know that they are fond of you- perhaps you know that they think themselves in love. You know that they aren't and you let yourself forget

[deadmanbrucolac]

He remains still in the way that dead things can, that utter stillness, eyes open so that the living can peer into them, praying in vain for a spark of consciousness. Only, awfully, that spark is still there in his eyes, burning on where it should not, by the gods' own laws, be.

He nods without emotion, saving his smile for when she has turned to lead him back to the castle her other-self had personally banned him from. This was worth staying up for.

[herquietude]

While she isn't her counterpart, the castle wards recognize her as Petrana and it's an easy thing for her to guide the Brucolac through them; the hollow staff register no surprise, accepting it as they accept everything that doesn't run directly counter to her orders. (It was Doul charged with keeping the Brucolac out if necessary.)

At the bottom of the grand staircase - over which a portrait of Petra and her knight hangs - she abandons her shoes to continue barefoot. "I suspect these have all been burned in my own reality. I'd certainly be surprised if anyone in my family had been interested in keeping them."