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

Comments

[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."