the black swan.

Evelyn Bryant
Tue 01:17AM CST
She’ll never get used to the cold.

California girl born and raised, she’s defying the turning seasons and standing out on the balcony of her apartment. Her slender fingers wrapped loosely around the stem of a wineglass. Eyes shut, gentle breeze soothing the tired muscles beneath the honey-gold tan. Evelyn has a liking for loose fitting garments. Jumpers, sweaters that slid off one shoulder, she likes them especially when she’s relaxing. As she is now.

The curtains flutter out every so often, tickling the bare skin of her thighs. She defies this cooling weather and wears a loose knitted jumper and shorts. Her gaze absently fixated on the street below her, elbows resting on the cold steel railing. There’s an edge of exhilaration for her, leaning over like this. Four stories up is a long way to fall.

Glass is raised to her lips as the stereo inside lets out the sound of something classical. Could be Mozart. Could be Chopin. Not exactly what you’d pick as her musical tastes but then, she’s a complicated woman Evelyn Bryant. Never exactly what one expects. If he’s stepping off the lift, he might hear the flourish of the rising crescendo. She never plays this sort of music when James is around. This is for her own private enjoyment. As is the open bottle of wine.

Another sip and she turns her head slightly, glancing over her shoulder as if she heard the door.

Sevastian deValois
Tue 01:35AM CST
But it's not the door Vast knocks on. It's the balcony he lets himself in through. The turn of her head makes her miss his grand entrance: not so determinedly grand after all, his athletic grace understated as he climbs down the fire escape from above and swings -- easily, as though the 12 story drop were nothing -- onto the edge of her balcony.

For a moment he is balanced on the edge of the rail, crouched. They say man is descended from apes. He, at the moment, looks to be descended more from mountain cats. Then he lowers himself to the floor, one foot and then the other, lean and powerful and silent. All in black, like some sort of cat burglar. No, wait: the shirt, closefitting and longsleeved, the material heavy but thin, ribbed, high-collared, buttonless, closed instead with a zipper up the front -- the shirt is forest green, dark enough to be mistaken for black.

He tosses something at her. It's large, irregularly shaped, heavy, solid, with a bit of give. A plastic bag rustles around it. If she opens it -- it's a wheel of smoked gouda cheese, a large sliver cut out of it.

"I was visiting a friend upstairs," he explains, carelessly, as though it were perfectly normal for men to climb onto their ex-lovers' balconies. The zipper is halfway undone on his shirt; there's lipstick on the edge of his jaw, smeared where he'd wiped, and not thoroughly enough. One can guess what sort of friend. "I had to leave rather suddenly, but I smelled your wine on the way down. Thought you could use some cheese to go with it."

Evelyn Bryant
Tue 01:53AM CST
She’s silent as he makes his grand entrance. Startled a little, yes. Obvious in the way her hand tightens around the glass. In the way she straightens up and after a minute, steps back. Her dark eyes crawl over his torso, his black outfit as if he were trying to escape all notice at all, before he tosses the large object at her and she catches it. A little awkwardly. It’s cradled in her arms, droplets of white wine spill over her arm, some onto the concrete beneath her bare feet.

“Thanks.”

Really, what else is she supposed to say? When your Ex Lover arrives a la Tarzan from your balcony in the late hours of the night. Evelyn glances at him once more, her gaze lingering on the lipstick a minute before she turns smoothly and slips back inside, the curtain sliding against her body before regretfully being lost as she walks toward the kitchen.

Still the music plays, and you could be forgiven for thinking it was mimicking her reaction to Sevastian’s sudden invasion of her evening of solitude. The way it dips low and slowly builds again, the violin’s melancholy eerie in the otherwise silent apartment.

She doesn’t open the cheese. Simply places the plastic bag on her counter and leans against the edge of it, feeling the slight press of hard plastic against her hip. Her eyes surprisingly clear for the amount of wine it appears she’s consumed. At least half of the bottle. Those large obsidian eyes are watching the dark figure still hidden by the curtains.

“Rough night?”

Sevastian deValois
Tue 01:59AM CST
"Rough?" He cants his head to look at her, remaining on the balcony. After a moment, he levers himself slowly up to sit on the edge of the balcony. "No. Interesting."

As though he could see sound, his eyes trace the music to its source. He studies the stereo with its deliberately subtle lighting; none of the flash and glitter of cheaper college boomboxes. Then he looks at her again, his eyes pale, clear like ice. Raptors have no mercy.

"Be hospitable, Evelyn." Always, it sounds like a command. "Pour me a glass. For old times' sake."

Evelyn Bryant
Tue 02:13AM CST
Hard to trace where her annoyance stems from.

Maybe it’s that she’s absurdly pleased to see him. Maybe it’s because James hasn’t been in contact for a few days. Maybe a thousand other things.

She lets out a soft breath that could be a quiet laugh of sarcasm, amusement. Most likely a combination of the two. Still, she obeys. Moving around, the sound of the cupboard door opening, the soft clinging of the wine glasses as she selects one muted by the music.

“I wondered if you were alright.”

She pours out a generous glass, refilling her own before she moves around, walking back out toward where he’s still perched. She wonders absently if she should feel guilty for his presence. Wonders if she’s slightly cruel in not entirely caring. Certainly there is a part of Evelyn that’s naïve enough to believe she’s just offering a friend a glass of wine. But even as she thinks it. She knows.

They have never been friends.

“After the other night, you just took off. I assume since you’re here now that you got home alright.”

She finishes, holding out the glass to him, her eyes slowly rising from where their fingers may briefly touch to hold his gaze. She settles back against the railing, strands of hair blown by the wind impatiently pulled aside with her free hand.

Sevastian deValois
Tue 02:23AM CST
The reminder of the other night seems to annoy him, displease him. A shadow crosses his face -- those noble features, anglo-gallic; norman-gallic, nordic-gallic, if you traced his lineage back far enough. His mother descended through the Latinate peoples that have lived and died, bred and ruled in France for thousands of years: olive-skinned, Romance languages; his father descended through the old money aristocracy of New York, and back through the old money aristocracy of England, and back through the Norman conquerors and kings, and back through the north-european northmen who first conquered Normandy. That history is a part of him, no matter how he tries to buck it. It's writ in his face, in his carriage, in his bearing. Wolfkings and kings of men. Warrior kings and poets, philosophers, lovers, rebels and revolutionaries.

And now, distilled down through a thousand generations: him, Sevastian de Valois Sturtevant, motorcycle-riding, slumming, careless he. He turns away to look over his shoulder at the skyline. When he turns back, he is composed, accepting the wineglass with a hint of a smile dismissive on his mouth.

"Of course I did." He swirls the wine in the glass. Without warning, he slides off the balcony railing, briefly too close: maybe that was his own cruelty, to push and see how far he can go, without ever entirely caring. He brushes past her. "You may not want cheese with your wine, but I do. One complements the other, or didn't you know."

Evelyn Bryant
Tue 02:35AM CST
She watches him a moment before she too glances out over the nightlife milling down below, glances upward at the cloud-ridden sky, if it’s out of some kind of sympathy that she looks away, that she senses he doesn’t want to discuss it, it’s not shown. Either way, he eventually turns back, smiles and so does she.

She can’t help the tensing of her figure as he’s briefly [achingly] too near to her. He brushes past and for a minute she’s still. She stands outside a minute longer, staring out over the balcony, before she slips in behind him, her own smile painted on. Some slight curve of the full lips.

“It might surprise you to know that I did know that.”

She moves into the kitchen, sliding open drawers and finding a cheese knife. Holding it out toward him, a slightly too sharp smile on her lips. Her eyes slip down to where there’s a faint smudge of red.

“You have lipstick on your jaw. Might want to get rid of it.”

Sevastian deValois
Tue 02:40AM CST
Sevastian glances down at the knife held out blade-first. How impolite. He closes his hand over hers unhesitatingly, prying the knife loose.

"Handle-first next time. Please." He unwraps the cheese and sets it on the cutting board. Distractedly, he rubs his jaw automatically against his shoulder as she mentions lipstick. "Do I? My mother won't mind." Knife sinks into cheese. He catches her eyes abruptly; he hadn't been absentminded on the subject at all. "Why, do you?"

Evelyn Bryant
Tue 02:58AM CST
He catches her eyes, but only just. She glances away and lifts her shoulders in a careless shrug. Leaning back into the corner of the kitchen, where the small counters intersected and draining a large portion of her wine with a hand that trembled just slightly.

“Why should I mind? I don’t care what you do with your time anymore.”

She catches his eyes perhaps briefly, before turning to place her glass on the counter by the sliced cheese.

Sevastian deValois
Tue 03:02AM CST
"Exactly. Why should you mind?" He leaves the lipstick stain where it is, steadying the wedge of cheese with a finger as the knife cuts it from the wheel. Turning it on its side, he further splits it into uneven quarters, takes one for himself. A twist of his fingers spins the entire cutting block around, and sends it sliding over to her. The knife wobbles dangerously on wood.

"Help yourself," he offers, lifting his glass and strolling from the kitchen. At the stereo he pauses, listening for a moment. "Mozart? More classical? Don't you get sick of it, dancing to this drivel day in day out?"

Evelyn Bryant
Tue 03:10AM CST
She glances down at the dairy, then at the knife, stained with flecks of the cheese before picking up her nearly finished glass and following him out of her kitchen. The food is untouched by her. Most food is. She leans her slender body against the wall and again it’s a light shrug, followed by a small swallow.

“Sometimes. But since James insists on playing rock all the time I find this rather soothing.”

She moves smoothly, sinking into the cushions of the sofa and tucking her small feet beneath her. A plush throw pillow is drawn to sit against her stomach. She watches him, her eyes rarely leaving his form as he moves about her apartment. They moved differently to normal people. Evelyn had begun to notice. First with James and now as she watches Sevastian she notices it again. A sort of confidence that regular guys didn’t possess. Or at least, very few did.

“Don’t you like it?”

Her head tilts to one side, the fall of her gold hair over one shoulder a gradual thing.

Sevastian deValois
Tue 03:38AM CST
With a certain measure of deliberation, Sevastian sets his wineglass atop the stereo. When he crouches in front of it, his knees do not pop, and there is no strain in him. There are dancers who will never approach his consummately self-possessed, self-enclosed balance. The messy cube of cheese is devoured all at once. Let his manner tutors turn over and over in the early graves he doubtlessly sent them to. No one spoke of manners to him anymore, and none have since his first change.

"No." CDs clack on one another as he flips through her collection. Eventually his fingers pause; he's found an acceptable replacement. "I don't like it."

The piece cuts off mid-measure as he ejects the CD. A lifetime of agony and ecstasy, creativity and strife, condensed into one imminently breakable disc: a piece of plastic that fit in the palm of the hand. And people wondered why creativity had no value anymore. He slaps the CD atop the stereo and slips another into the tray in its place. Rising to retrieve his wineglass as the first strains of something doubtlessly familiar to Evelyn uncoils into the air, he turns to face her.

"Though I could, and did, make an exception for you." His elbows resting atop the stereo, the Silver Fang is lean, dark, full of shadows and flashing pale eyes. "Poor Tchaikovsky, countryman of my most distant ancestors; sixty tortured years and all that noise, and this is the only truly great piece he ever produced, and no one even really knows it. Swan Lake number twenty-seven, Act Four, Scene Two:Danses des petits cygnes in Moderato. You know it?" He pauses for the inevitable nod. Lower, rough like raw silk, "Dance the Black Swan for me."

She's not in the scene. And--
--what would James think?


Evelyn Bryant
Tue 03:54AM CST
She frowns lightly as he cuts Mozart off mid way through. One does not simply turn off a master now do they? Well, if you were Sevastian apparently you did. He might feel the intensity of her eyes upon his back as he rifles through her CD’s and slides in what he feels is acceptable and you can almost see the recognition flicker in Evelyn’s dark eyes. Watch the slight smile curve her lips. Oh yes, it’s barely needed the nod she gives. She knows this dance.

Knows it the way a lover knows the swells and dips of their partner’s body. She’s played with the intricacies of it for years to perfect it. And yet, even now she finds she discovers new delights in it as she dances it. But, she also knows, this dance is far too intimate for her to dance for him. Isn’t it?

Evelyn just looks at him for a long moment, then carefully rises from the sofa, placing her glass on a small side table. She shakes back the mane of blond hair. It slips over her shoulders to settle against her spine like a golden rope.

“I shouldn’t be doing this.”

She murmurs, a brief smile curving her lips before she closes her eyes to his gaze, shutting out everything but the sound of the music, unraveling around her and then—

--She begins to move.

Sevastian may never have seen Evelyn dance before. And certainly this is not her most polished work. But there is a certain sensuality to the way her body twists and turns. The smooth makeup of her pretty features, so composed as she turns about, dancing for her former lover with the sounds of the street below faint through the open window, and the faint stirrings of her guilt beginning to sound in her head.

What would her Mate say...?

Sevastian de Valois Sturtevant
Sat 02:05AM CST
Improvisation. The ability to, they say, is the mark of a great artist. And she's obviously up to the task. No Black Swan in this piece at all, and yet -- and yet, in that subtly insiduous minor melody, some touch of her intoxicating evil. Black swan, black magic.

And he who had once shared her bed, and shares now only her living room, watches, his expression closed, his eyes unreadable, leaning against the stereo. Maybe she loses herself in the rigid structure of the dance, which paradoxically calls for grace like water; or maybe she can feel him watching her body, the way three thousand eyes watch her body on opening night when the curtain lifts. Taut lines, impeccable balance, impossible twists and archings of the spine: ballet is demanding. One gives one's body over to another. To the dance coach, to bend and push and stretch to breaking. To the choreographer, to position and angle and ply. To the audience, to consume and devour, hungry for the shreds of beauty found in the shattered and reknit remains of the dancer.

She can feel him watching her, not quite like the masses watch her.

At some point she turns, pirouettes crossing the hardwood floor of her living room -- leaps, gazelle-like, and suddenly he's there: his scent not quite that of his aftershave, rawer, more pungent -- wine and illicit sex. His hands at her waist assist her in her jump easily, effortlessly, sending her far above the floor in what is too negligent, to careless, to be the lift of a trained and practiced partner.

"Do you know what I've always liked about you?" When he sets her down his hands remain at her waist, impersonal yet firm, stilling her.

Evelyn Bryant
Sat 02:16AM CST
It wasn’t quite like dancing for the masses that flocked in their finery to watch Swan Lake. Them she could so easily tune out, ignore, pretend that past the edge of the stage there was nothing but black space. It wasn’t quite like dancing for James, either. He never touched her. Just watched. But with Sevastian she was acutely aware of those gray eyes upon her figure. Even with her eyes closed. And when she moves, leaps, there is suddenly that which she was unprepared for and did not want—

Touch. Contact.

She is still as his hands lower her, his grip around her waist firm. It takes Evelyn a moment to respond, to speak. As always, she’s been moved by the dance. By the music. It takes her a moment to shift her realities. From the motion of the dance, to the stillness of the present.

“What have you always liked about me, Sevastian?”

She murmurs, her blond hair loose, framing her flushed cheeks. She meets his eyes after another moment. The clash of dark brown with the lighter shade of his. And all the while her body and mind are in agreement on one point—

He was too close.

Sevastian de Valois Sturtevant
Sat 02:34AM CST
For a moment he's silent; he makes her wait. Too close, his hands at her waist, his chest inches from her back if her back was to him, closer still if she faced him directly. Perhaps she looks over her shoulder to see him, her face a profile. Perhaps her hands rest on his forearms, stabilizing.

"The way you dressed again," he replies at last, a faint half-smile slowly seeping onto his mouth like a bloodstain, "after we'd made love. The way your fingers moved when they put your hair up and threaded your earrings in. The way you tilted your head for that, and kept your elbows in. And how you always put your blouse on first, and then your underwear.

"And how you laced up your boots when you were finished. Bent over just like this," his right hand shifts, slips up her back, and he bends her over easily, smoothly -- you might even think chivalrously, somehow, in spite of time and place and situation, "from the waist, legs straight. With neither effort nor thought."

The pressure of his hand on her back and at her waist eases. His hands stay on her as she straightens again. "I would've known you for a dancer even if you hadn't said a word."

Evelyn Bryant
Sat 02:48AM CST
He cannot see, perhaps given their position, how her lashes slip closed and her lips part in a silent gasp that could easily indicate her pain [not physical, just emotional] or something else entirely as his hand slips up her body to press her forward. She allows him to guide her movements, her body is trembling so finely as she rises again and his hands do not move.

She makes no remark at first, still with him so close behind her. Still with that light touch on her waist perhaps, or her arms. Finally Evelyn’s eyes open again, staring ahead of her, and there is a faint crease in her brow, the soft lips form into a frown. Because…something he said upset her.

“Is that all?,” The pause as she takes a breath, turns around finally, his hands sliding over the material of her shirt till she can finally clearly look at him. “Is that all you like about me then? My body…”

She gazes at him, and then her eyes lower, tick over to where she can still see the smudge of lipstick on his jaw. Her lips twist into a smirk. She lifts her hands to where he still touches her and gently seeks to removes them. “You shouldn’t.”

What exactly he shouldn’t she leaves unsaid. But her actions speak it for her.

Sevastian de Valois Sturtevant
Sat 03:03AM CST
His hands don't move for a moment --

"Yes. Isn't that fair?" He gives her a shake, small but firm, forces her to look him in the eye again. "I enjoyed your body. You enjoyed the freedom I let you taste. You think you loved me, Evelyn; you didn't. I never said a kind word to you. You very nearly hated me. But you loved what I did to you. You loved what I made you into. Free, wild, angry, scandalous."

-- and then he lets her go, stepping back to turn his back and suddenly clip off the music mid-strain. "And now look at you," he closes the glass door of the display case that houses the stereo, "the respectable Mrs. James Wagner," click -- he turns to face her, "still dancing for her illicit fuck."

Evelyn Bryant
Sat 03:15AM CST
Her face would be fascinating to watch as Sevastian speaks—shakes her once, her hair slipping into her eyes—and then lets her go. Her features seem to harden. Still lovely, even in her most distressed state, a state that Vast is quite talented in bringing out in her. But harder. Paler.

“I loved what you---?” She breathes, then lets out a soft laugh. It’s shattered, and then silenced as he turns back to face her and his next words have barely left his lips before Evelyn—Soft-spoken, fragile little dancer—is advancing on him and lifting her hand to slap him clear across his cheek. She lifts her hand to do it, that is, before she stops herself. As if she couldn’t quite let him bring out that sort of violent reaction in her.

“You don’t know anything about me, Sevastian. I think you should leave.”

And, just like that.

She turns away from him.

Sevastian de Valois Sturtevant
Sat 03:24AM CST
She lifts her hand -- he comes forward a bold unflinching step and his eyes flash like lightning, snap to her hand and back. Silken, "You don't want to--"

She checks herself, speaks.

Sevastian falls silent. A pause lingers thick. He licks his lips briefly, but it's not nerves. Something of the wolf in him, always, and his motions steady as a mountain cat's. In the end he says nothing, and there's nothing more to say. A moment later he brushes past her back, and a moment after that he'll let himself out.

Evelyn Bryant
Sat 03:35AM CST
She stands, resolute and still as he stands silent behind her a moment before she feels briefly his body brushing past her and then the sound of him making his way to the door this time, not the window, still open, the curtains moving in the night’s cool breeze.

Evelyn turns, looks after him as if she would say something. [What, exactly?] But, as before her action is stalled, and instead she simply watches him leave with a maelstrom of emotions flickering over her face. Not the least of which is longing. And not the least of which makes guilt quickly follow it.