Ruin Maketh Me

55 - Smoke and mirrors

I gently coax Ralphus back towards the bed, but he veers off and tries to dress into a clean shirt, "I'll take you back to the dorm." He insists gruffly.
Folding my arms, I lean back against the wall and watch him bite back his hobble, "Lie down, you haven't recovered your magic and I doubt you're in the condition to walk halfway across the academy."
He fires me a hard look and continues to button up his shirt slowly but surely.
I shake my head, stroll towards him and give him a strong push without warning. He stands absolutely still for a moment before a tremendous shake travels up both his legs and he sits back onto the bed with a muffled umph.
"You're just straining yourself." I tell him unsmilingly, "Rest up, recover your strength, nothing's going to happen to me."
Ralphus stares up at me, and seeing the determination of my expression, settles back into the pillows with heavy grace, "Call for me if you're in danger, I'll come wherever you are."
I squeeze out a smile, "Do you need anything else before I go?"
He cocks his head to one side and studies the ceiling as if there's something beautiful etched within the plaster, a childishness passes over his masculine features, and a beauty created out of antithesis shines from his face, "A kiss perhaps."
My face can't help but scrunch up momentarily. Truly, was he listening to a word I said? "Ralphus."
His eyes carve into my face and my mouth, and a small smile lifts his lips ruefully. A helplessness arrests my heart in its ruthless grip, and all that's left to do is sigh softly and expel the turbid air in my chest. I lean forwards, cup his face solidly within my hands and press my lips to the spot between his brows where furrows often haunted.
"There."
Sweetness washes over his face; I can almost taste the honey dripping off his smile and curved eyes. This face of innocent joy, is it one only meant for my eyes? I have never seen something so endearingly astounding. My heart can only resound with a warmth of similar quantity if not quality, but now, the bitterness. It attaches to the muscle, gorges into it, a byproduct of the happiness.
"I can stay if you'd like." I place a hand on the sheets.
The shocking childish joy sparks away, and a gentleness like the serene ripple of a lake in the sun is left in its trail, "Once Lutra sets his mind on something, he won't stop. It'd be safer for you to stay away from the Mansion."
I nod and peel away from the bed and the crisp scent of Ralphus's skin, "Well then, I'll see you tomorrow morning." My feet halt before the door, and I turn, meet his eyes on me, "Sweet dreams."
     He nods, light and shadow merging and scattering over the valleys of his face, "You too Cynder."
     Ralphus's burning visage lingers in my face like the imprint of a kiss, and I hear from some strange distance, a whisper carried on the wind, "I'll find a way." A way where? To what end? A question without an answer. The door clicks shut behind me, and another face appears from within the waltz of yellow and indigo. Long black hair, sharp blue eyes, hard cut figure clothed in a black suit leaning against the speckled front of the corridor wall. Set, so like the first time I met her, and yet this time, it's not the shadow of indifference in her eyes.
Uneasiness. A lack of her usual severe cool.
"Set."
She does not stir against the white wallpaper, does not even cast me a glance.
"Do you have something to say to me?"
Pushing off from the wall, she stands straight up, "No. I'll take you back."
She grasps my arm, and immediately we're seeped in the waves of nothingness and hideous colour. We spin and flip and fly through the pulsing mass of space and thin air with seemingly no direction. Though there must be, just one that I cannot glean from the rivers of neon purple and pink and orange cutting above my head and beneath my feet. The ribbons of defeat and victory stream away from my watery vision, hard concrete radiating heat rises towards me, and I'm back on the solid earth, shedding perpetual heat.
Emptiness swings through my stomach, and I cough drily through the rising sweat. Her fingers linger on my arm like a constant reminder of something amiss. I watch her under the glare of the sun, and finally she opens her mouth like she had meant to but didn't before Ralphus's room.
"I gave you a warning when we were first acquainted." She starts, staring at the blinding point of the sun above us without shielding her eyes, "I'll give you another warning now. Stay away from Ralphus, don't let him say he loves you."
The hearth in my chest colds bitterly against the outside burn. And now again, I'm cold but hot, freezing but burning like a skewered pig on the spit.
"No, don't look at me like that," Set catches my eyes with the ice sea of hers, "I couldn't care less for your little romance. But if this carries on, Ralphus is going to end up killing Lutra or," she stares out into the distance, the wavering image of the squat dorm building, the glow of greenness in the sun, and further into some imminent future, "every single one of them. He might end up killing every single one of the young masters, I can't say for certain."
I watch the bleached blueness of the sky, the hazy blur of the swelter, the cracked brick of the dorm wall, the flicker and flare of the darkness stretching from my feet, but I cannot see the destiny that Set glimpses at the horizon.
"You have no obligation to the House of Kade." Her eyes crackle and fizz, "You do not care whether they live or die, but I'll let you know, Sir Ralphus will die too if he kills any one of the young masters. And if he falls in love, he will surely kill them for you."
     My mind curls like a drying sponge, and everything around me, the whole world, blurs into a cloud of frustrated colour in fever, "He wouldn't do that; I'm not the right reason for doing a thing like that."
      Set grinds a heel into the dry ground, "He's a Caesluphius, they're fanatics for love. If he truly loves you, and everything came to that point, he'd do it." Her eyes scan me up and down, "He has the ability to do that, don't think he doesn't."
     My lips feel numb, the words come out slurred, disordered, "I'm afraid." The sky blooms back into focus, "I'm afraid it's too late."
Her eyelashes flitter like a dying butterfly, "Fuck!" All her collected edge snaps from her body and face, and she yanks at her hair like it's the only thing holding her together, "Why did you have to go and get the attention of both Julius and Ralphus? Now that Lutra's put his mind to killing you, he'll do it if that's the last thing he does. By the looks of it, that truly is going to be the last thing he does!"
"You said Ralphus would die too?" I press towards her.
"Yes," Set's teeth sink into the flesh of her lips, "it was part of the contract when Ralphus entered the household."
"Then you have nothing to worry about, he wouldn't kill Lutra if his life was on the line." I throw my hands out.
She shakes her head furiously, blue eyes seeking some apparent answer, "The Caesluphius house, they're lunatics don't you know? It's a family tradition."
Her words ring senseless to my submerged mind. Lunatics? Love? Tradition? How do these things thread together to make the vaguest logic? And these things, no one except Romeo with his reckless abandon would do these things
Set presses the heels of her hands into her eyes, "Julius and Zus... They wouldn't, yes! As long as... yes. That'd do!" Without one more word to me, she cuts a gash in the air and steps in with a flying step.
I stare out at the empty space. What had all that been? I fight through the static buzzing of heat and try to unravel the tangled ball of yarn. Lutra has vowed to kill me, that is correct, and say that Ralphus would, despite the ludicrousness, try to kill Lutra, the rest of the brothers would surely try to stop him. If then, Ralphus truly had the strength and power to kill all three at once, he would proceed to doing so and after the death of the Kades, he would then die due to the certain magical contract. The snarl lies bare before me. This whole series of events would be entirely probable if firstly, Lutra does try to kill me despite his brother's many warnings, and secondly, that Ralphus would sacrifice his life to protect mine.
A strange nothingness descends upon the whole scene, and a disturbing, faint ringing approaches the station of my ear. It all sounds ludicrous and yet nothing is quite nonsense. Lutra, bearing all his arrogance and self-importance, wouldn't hesitate to kill me. But Ralphus, that's a different question. Why would anyone go as far as sacrificing their life for a relationship as flimsy as ours?
The Pit stretches and yawns, didn't you sacrifice your life for an unknown kid?
My fingers pinch together, and my arm seizes with a jolt.
It stretches its cavernous mouth into a haunting mimic of a smile, it wouldn't be too bad for you would it? The Kades would die, you'd be free of your slavery, and then you'd be able to leave this place for good without Ralphus tying you down.
I hold my breath and flee from the ever-watching eye of the sun above my head towards the dust filled darkness of the servant dorm. Swinging through the doors, I crash into the cool silence of the abandoned lobby. Safe. I cannot think of this now. Not now. My feet dance towards the darker depths of the corridor, that little white-washed room with its scratched wooden door at the end of the way. The bed, the pleasant release that sleep would bring, everything about that enclosure rings in harmony with the distressed notes of my head.
Thunk.
A movement that does not belong to me.
The tips of my toes turn, I draw my eyes through the specks of dust falling through the dull air like glitter. A long leg unfolds, familiar dark waves curl from the tattered leather seat, "Cynder."
"Declan." The voice that comes out of my throat is bizarrely detached and blanched of all emotion.
His smirk hints of melancholy, and the drunken razor point of his air is damp and mellow.
"What are you doing here?"
He slides his head across the armchair's surface, spilling strands of hair everywhere like a dark halo, "Are you familiar with the Lilith?" His smoke filled voice clenches at the title.
I glance over him, eyes drifting to his hands, then back to the landscape of his profile, "Fuck off."
A murky laugh pours from his mouth to the yellowed ceiling, "Do you know what he whispered to me that day?" His fingers smooth over his nails, "He said, "Is this the hand you touched Cynder with? What a dirty, shameful hand.'"