(Untitled)

[mdidiusfalco]

The provincial life was beginning to agree with me. Almost. No matter how much the heat tricked my mind into thinking the wine tolerable or the living conditions adequate, I remained a city boy. Not a day went by that I didn't bemoan my fate to Cicero, who, in a birdish sort of way, seemed to be getting annoyed by my complaints. After all, it

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[luke_castellan]

[mdidiusfalco]

"Does it do this often?" I gestured vaguely to the statue, not bothering to answer his question. The situation seemed fairly obvious as it was. "Does everyone here get a statue of their significant other or am I just lucky like that?"

[luke_castellan]

[mdidiusfalco]

"No gosling-minding on the island," I corrected absentmindedly. The kid annoyed me to a certain extent, but I just had to remind myself that I too had once been an annoying teenager with daddy issues and a chip on my shoulder. Though I never had a sword like that, something for which the world (and the family flat) is probably still grateful for. "And yes, this is the wife. Someone up there has a sense of humour."

[whoneedsadream]

The statue was beautiful, Anatoly had to admit. He didn't have much of an eye for art, it was true, but even he could see there was something special about this piece. Whoever the sitter had been, she must have been someone of immense personality.

"A gift from the island?" Anatoly asked softly. "Or did you make this?"

[mdidiusfalco]

I laughed, unconsciously reaching out to touch the bronze before drawing my hand back. It was just a statue of my wife, that was all. Just a statue. "Are you joking? I couldn't make something like that if my life depended on it."

[whoneedsadream]

"It is breath-taking," Anatoly murmured. "I don't think I have seen anything like this before. Did you commission it?"

[mdidiusfalco]

A short laugh escaped before I could stop it. "Juno, no! I couldn't afford something like that even if I saved all my earnings for the next half-decade or so."

[patriotqueen]

For someone who drank and smoked as Guy drank and smoked (to oblivion and to excess), he was in a rather good shape. No doubt in England he would have, by now, lost the urge, desire and time to go running and swimming. Here, however, he found it a very suitable way to pass time.

He emerged from the sea after having swum quite a distance and found himself opposed to a statue only a few feet away from him on the shore. Next to it, Falco, the Roman drinkard (or so Guy had dubbed him).

"Yours?" He asked, amused as he stepped onto drier sand and ruffled his hair to get some sea-weed out of it.

[mdidiusfalco]

If there had been one thing I had not been counting on doing today it was discovering a portrait of my absent wife while a wine producing Briton rose from the sea like some sort of grinning parody of a water nymph, aquatic plant life and all. "It is now. I'm not about to let someone else cart it home instead."

[patriotqueen]

"Fan of bronzes?" Guy asked, amused. He looked a bit shaken by the thing, but people had the oddest reactions to art.

[mdidiusfalco]

"Not particularly, but I am rather fond of the subject," I replied, still looking more at the statue than the other man. I could see him any time I wanted to, but my eyes had been starved of Helena for far too long.

[goingtodorking]

Karen's playing on the beach today and, when she sees him, she shades her eyes and watches him for a long moment. He's a little bit odd but she's started to feel like she understands him. Or she likes him. He's not the same as Dieter, he's nowhere near as good as Dieter, but he's something.

"Hello," she says, wandering closer. "Are you okay?"

[mdidiusfalco]

As the youngest blonde of my acquaintance came over I did my best to pull myself together. The last thing I needed was for a little girl to see me getting overly emotional over a piece of art, but if she was anything like my niece and nephews the act wouldn't work. Uncle Marcus was a notoriously bad actor. "I'm all right. No birds were killed recently, I promise."

[goingtodorking]

"You're making it sound like I think that you don't do anything but kill birds," says Karen, reproachfully. She studies him for a long moment, her head tilted on one side. She needs a haircut and blond curls spill everywhere.

"Are you okay?"

[mdidiusfalco]

"I'm fine. It's just..." I pointed to the statue and gave up. If I couldn't hide my feelings from an eight year old girl then there really was no hope for me. "This is the mother of my two little girls. I never told you about them, did I?"

[theboywhowaited]

"Wow," Rory said once he had wandered close enough to get a good look of the statue Falco was getting a good look of. He was struck first by how pretty she was, whoever she was. Then he noticed, on a slightly disconcerting note, how he could see that look on Amy's face.

Then he remembered that they were two men looking at a bronze statue in the middle of a beach. "Is that... yours?" he asked uncertainly. "Or did someone just... leave it?" Not the sort of thing that fell out of a person's pocket, but stranger things had happened.

Let me know if Late Tag is Too Late. I can delete.

[mdidiusfalco]

I shrugged, looking at the statue more than at the man next to me, but I was fairly certain I could be excused under the circumstances. "It's my wife. ...not that she is a statue, just that it's a portrait. It used to belong to her first husband."

Late Tag is never Too Late. Ever.

[theboywhowaited]

"Wow," Rory repeated, eyebrows climbing a bit. He remembered meeting Falco that first day, the thought that he's an old Roman never far from his mind, so the concept of having a statue of one's wife didn't strike Rory as being all that grandiose. Just slightly grandiose.

"She looks like quite a woman," he said, meaning that in every positive way.

[mdidiusfalco]

"She is," I replied with a grin on my face, still ridiculously proud of Helena, even if the closest I could come to her was the bronze. "You'll never meet a girl like her no matter how hard you tried. Smart as a Greek secretary, sharp as a knife, and she looks..." Well, he could see how she looked, or at least how she looked as a fresh young bride. Personally, I thought she had definitely improved with age. "One thing's for certain, she's far too good for a scoundrel like me."