Well, hell's bells. I've rewritten this plot-line about…five times? I'd rather just get it out here and move on with my life, so maybe there'll be two/three chapters, not the twenty of A la Folie. Mind you, they are lengthier than usual. Unfortunately, that means I had to delete A la Folie…which received more feedback than I expected and was absolutely painful to part with but wouldn't have made sense with this final draft.
((Also! Everything except for the first scene in this chapter is a flashback of sorts. We all know this would go down in flames, didn't we? So, I'm establishing that first thing.))
All disclaimers apply.
He hates being sentimental. He hates standing around watching the sun set, the ironic gleam bobbing just above the trees. He hates the ash sinking into the river.
Macon's words in his ear are all that keep him sane, not that he wants to be.
It's entirely too cold. Remember the plan. Not that Macon had sounded optimistic when they were plotting what seemed like weeks ago. Now, he can imagine hearing Macon try, at least, for what little it mattered. Even that was diminished when he remembered the hearse running off the road into a heavily forested slope of a hill. The kid—gods, what they named her?—was probably tucked into the back of a car, on her way to Valerian, and into Silas's arms. Leah had probably already left town. He didn't even want to consider Macon.
He shivers. We don't know anything, yet. And yet, his car is sinking into the river. He hates the thought of all the small things becoming lost to the water—the infuriating etchings Leah made with her pocket knife, the smell of old books and gunpowder that surrounds (surrounded?) Macon, the map he kept in the glove compartment with all his getaway routes marked clearly.
He wants to believe everyone's somehow still alive. Maybe in a cell. Maybe in Valerian's custody. But alive, at least. He wants to believe all the way at Ravenwood Manor things will be as they were and one misstep isn't the end, can't be, won't be. However, the facts are there and Fitz has never been great at denying them. If he begins, he'll never stop, won't be able to, and then he'll never get out of this town alive.
Fitz starts walking because he can't do much else.
The sun starts to set.
The heist began at five o'clock in the afternoon.
The beginning of everything else is far earlier when Macon decides he's going to become, if not a happy man, then, at least, a very well known one. He straightens his back and counts up some of his old contacts, writes letters, and makes shadowy meetings as he once again starts the decent into the morally gray underworld. His name is already known; people are whispering his name around the edges of circles and inside dark, hidden houses. He doesn't mind. He wants them to.
The whispers are sure to get the word out, and true enough, within days, Leah, the confident woman and somewhat loving sister she is, shows up happy to join Macon in his venture. He vaguely remembers her penchant for poisonous flora and acts accordingly. They have, of course, worked together before, always separated by several miles and links in the chain of command. Leah has a little diner in the middle of town that sells New Orleans inspired food and has the same dull interior as nearly every other eating establishment the town has to offer. While her business isn't booming, it's sufficient enough to launder some money. A good start up, certainly. It has a somewhat large basement that connects to the natural caves that sprawl under the town, which, while intimidating and not everyone's cup of tea, is hardly a downfall. They work well together, the two of them, almost as though they actually had grown up together. It isn't long before she gives him the grand tour of her establishment, and he can't help but notice the various potted plants beside classical literature.
Macon handles the project like he deals with most things: slowly, but decisively. He sets up safe houses by trading and intimidating. The first of which is the Manor he claimed from Silas, a relic of the family name and the family's criminal history. While he doesn't occupy it often, and the reinforced shack by the river is better by far, it is safe; no Caster would set foot beyond its threshold.
The pair starts to earn money, starts to think about the future of their little operation. Macon begins lurking around other town's speakeasies under a fake name, Mel Valentin, and finds a distant acquaintance.
Obidias has a crooked stint to his nose and thinness in his lips. He's thrown out on a regular basis, from what Macon has observed, and nearly every single time sports bruised knuckles. His name is known in almost every establishment, which is how Macon relearns it and is why he becomes interested.
Macon follows him out onto the cold, rain-slick street one night. Obidias is wet from more than the rain. The tenseness in his shoulders causes Macon's breath to huff. He stops stumbling and stands straighter when he looks Macon in the eye.
"What's the matter?" Obidias drawls, rolling his shoulders.
Macon shakes his head. "How are you?"
A thick eyebrow rises. "None of your business, boy."
Macon hazards a step towards him and takes his hands out of his pockets. "Why do you fight?" he asks, trying to perfect his tone of voice. He's always too conscious of how he sounds—which is what happens when you have plenty of secrets that could very well kill you, and whose every word could be the difference between lead in his chest and a knife at his neck.
"To show I can," is Obidias's cryptic answer. His voice hides thing, too. Macon can understand the sentiment all too well.
"What if I could give you something to fight for?" A sharp bark of a laugh escapes the man, and Macon can't help but flash a smile. There's blood running from the wound on Obidias's lip, and Macon remembers the taste of the aftermath of a fight like that, the rush of adrenaline, the feel of bones breaking under palms.
"I am not a cheap thug."
"Think bigger."
Obidias is quiet for a minute, then two. He pulls a cigarette, lights it, and is halfway through it before he passes a sideways glance at Macon. "You trying to save me, Cubus?"
"All I want, Obidias, is for you to make both of us very well known, very rich men." He pauses and hooks his thumbs in his pockets. "Drugs, liquor, murders…" He speaks slowly, allowing each word to click in his head. When Obidias opens his mouth to refute, Macon adds, "It can't be worse than where you are now, can it?"
Macon jots down the address in his black notebook, on the back of a list of establishments, and tears a page from it. He hands it to Obidias who tucks it into his pocket and puffs a few smoke rings into the evening. There are droplets of water on his skin.
Obidias was on the street for a while. Then he was off the street. Then he was on morphine and laudanum for a while. Then he was off them. Then he was off his rocker and then he was down in the gutter and his clothes still aren't clean—there's a ruddy stain on his white shirt and some of the pearl buttons are missing—and his skin hasn't healed when he shows up at Macon's front door. He knows enough to understand it's not Macon's private place, that he probably has several other safe houses and places around town. He still feels nervous, queasiness knots itself in his stomach, and he dimly regrets not finishing off the flash he had and getting somewhat drunk, when he knocks on the door.
The shack is very empty.
Of course, he is pleased to find there's no initiation or cultish ritual to pass. No band of wild, angry men. He's seen recruits beaten half to death to prove their loyalty, but Macon simply tells him to make himself comfortable. When he puts his hand on Obidias's shoulder, it feels like it leaves behind a mark not unlike a tattoo. Leah accepts him with a simple nod, and the three of them begin plotting how to advance the business horizontally.
The first time they send him out to kill someone, he notices Leah studying him more than usual. He can't distinguish if it's concern or if he's being tested. It's a quick kill, a hunting knife beneath the ribs and jerked sideways, and, after it's done, Obidias can simply forget about it and leave the corpse behind as he backtracks through alleys. The dead man is some conman nobody will miss—except, maybe, for those whose distribution he was handling.
He spends the days at Lucille's and the nights in his own flat south of town, sleeping better than he has in months.
Macon pins the grand map of the city above his desk at Lucille's. The tacks don't match—one of them is from the corkboard downstairs, didn't evade Leah's busy hands, and sticks crookedly—and the map has more than a few tears in the corners, but he has to admit it belongs there more than another portrait from the Ravenwood family. He remembers his half-sister, then. He makes a note of it in his notebook and starts to strike up old ties with family, particularly the Natural, Izabel, his half-sister, the next day. While she was disowned from the Duchannes side, and Macon knew Silas was intimidated yet curious, he begins to make himself somewhat close to her.
Izabel evades his polite requests for visits enough in the first month of correspondence that Macon turns to her husband, John Eades, the illusionist. He is, undoubtedly, kinder and less skeptical than Izabel, but fears Macon's history would be dangerous in the Eades-Duchannes household.
The first break through he has with John and Izabel is when he finds the girl, completely out of the blue and with soot-covered knees.
Neither Obidias nor Leah has seen Macon the entire night. It's not unusual, but when the two of them eat breakfast together and Obidias asks about the situation, he learns Leah doesn't know either and becomes slightly worried. Leah, normally, knows all but the darkest things about Macon's comings and goings. Obidias finds himself fidgeting a little.
Then Macon shows up, and Obidias just laughs over the pouring rain pounding against their roof.
"Did you roll in some ashes, boy?" he manages. Macon looks at him harshly, as though he's too sober for that conversation, but he doesn't relent. "You've got bedhead." It's true—Macon is more messed up than normal with unusually mussed hair and dark circles under his eyes, wearing the same wrinkled shirt he wore the last time they met.
Then, a girl steps forward from behind Macon. The girl has the wild curls of her mother and the green eyes of her father. Her father who could be the mangled piece of bone and char inside the skeleton of their home. The girl hiccups and sobs into Macon's shoulder while he holds her, cries because she doesn't like the color of Obidias's eyes, and his hands are trembling, not because he cares, because he had killed with those hands not an hour before. The rain stops not ten minutes later.
When he finally gets to glance away from the mess of the girl's hair, he almost smiles at the look on Leah's face. The chair in front of her has been pushed to the floor, the map is rolled up firmly, and she settles for having Macon sit the girl on the edge of the newly cleared hickory desktop.
Macon lingers in the doorway while she gives the girl a run down. Leah doesn't ask questions other than where the girl hurts and mumbled apologies for the alcohol smarting. The girl asks where the scary man went, and all Leah can manage behind a giggle is that he's gone away for a while. The girl inquires what the plants are on the bookshelf, and Leah responds as efficiently and thoroughly as an encyclopedia. The girl didn't ask more than that; Macon assumed she thought the botanicals were simply flowers, simply pretty things for the office Leah kept.
They run into Fitz by accident. Or, rather, he runs into them. Macon walks down the street with his head down and shoulders squared, an umbrella up among the rest of the pedestrians, and with a vision on his mind. He hadn't voiced it to Leah yet—his beloved sister was busy teaching the young girl they rescued how to protect herself—but he had made quick sketches on the grand map of the city he had rolled and leant against his desk.
He doesn't notice, then, when a man bumps shoulders with him on the narrow sidewalk, steals his wallet, and mutters a polite, brisk apology. He only realizes his mistake when he stops into the general store, and has to walk another three blocks to the pawnshop, the one he made a deal behind only ten minutes previous, and has to pawn his pocket watch to buy a decent set of shoes for the girl.
Three days later, Fitz isn't dead.
After he realized he had pickpocketed Macon Ravenwood, the Macon Ravenwood, son of Silas Ravenwood, Fitz had gone into lockdown. He burned the wallet—the smell of burning leather had been overwhelming in his small apartment, but he had refused to get close enough to the window to consider opening it—and shoved the cash under his mattress. He had enough food in his cabinets to sustain him for a few days, a week; perhaps he had enough to stay however long it took for his hands to stop shaking whenever he thought about going outside. He drank a lot of coffee, smoked through a bag of tobacco, and didn't sleep more than his sanity would let him.
Somewhere in the back of his mind, he knew, objectively, the smartest thing to do was to pack his meager belongings, what belongings a nomadic lifestyle would gather, and skip town. It would be easy enough to hire a taxi to take him out by Lough Borough and King's Cross. He doesn't want to chance walking out of his apartment, though, and the thought of Ravenwood lounging against the wall with a knife-gleam smile is enough to keep him wary.
But, three days later, Fitz is still alive. No one knocked on his door. His apartment had not been bombed. His window wasn't shattered. His landlady hadn't been threatened—he supposed Macon preferred the term coerced—into opening his door. And, three days later, he begins to breathe easy again.
He leaves the house for the first time later that day to buy more coffee, toilet paper, several packages of Comet rice, and three glasses of Ballantine's ginger ale. He makes another quick stop to grab rolling papers before locking himself in his apartment. That night, he took Ravenwood's cash from under his mattress and stared—the bills weren't sequential, there was nothing to deem them as belonging to Ravenwood—and after a moment of deliberation, he folded them into his wallet.
He goes out a few nights later, to a different side of town. He dresses carefully, making sure not to wear anything he had the day he pickpocketed Ravenwood, and liberates wallets and bracelets from victims who are too busy to care. Once, he thinks he feels eyes on him, but he shrugs the feeling away with the paranoia. He'd gotten away with it, scot-free. Ravenwood wasn't coming for him.
When he returns home, he spends the next day on the verge of a panic attack, locked and barricaded in his apartment with the lights off. The wallet he's stolen, one of them, was cheap leather and absolutely desolate for cash, but there is a business card. A business card that, on one side, read, in ornate calligraphy, I expect you at seven in the evening. He didn't have to turn it over to understand who, exactly, had sent it.
Ravenwood had found Fitz, had planned it. He wonders how long they had followed him, because they had to be, had to—the man at the store had entered a few minutes after Fitz, and he wonders how close the man was to Ravenwood, how many he had killed, and if he even knew what had been planted on him. They knew where Fitz lived, certainly. They knew where he shopped, where he bought back-alley cigarettes.
Fitz memorizes the address. There isn't any way he's leaving town, not now.
He heads out the next evening with plenty of time to spare, just in case he mysteriously falls from a height or ends up at the bottom of a river. He can't afford to be late. The address on the card leads him to a quiet diner with yellow glowing streetlights and a quaint sign heralding its name. Lucille's. He wonders how many if Ravenwood will kill him quickly or slowly. His hands shake. His hands sweat enough to smear the ink on the card and he pulls the fob out of his pocket in time to see the second hand strike 50. The door chimes with the soft ringing of a bell and closes behind him as his watch ticks over to seven. Seven-o-one comes slowly. Then seven-o-two. Then there's a gleam in the shadows of the empty diner, something blunt hits him over the head, and he's out before he has time to make a noise.
Leah had mentioned the man at a distance. Macon had complimented the coat she had worn one day, a French Paletot in a navy hue, and she had responded with some anecdote about her persuading it off of a soldier. Later, off-handedly, she mentions he was a sniper. He deems the position necessary for building his small empire and marks it down in the small black notebook he carries around, next to the note about the electricity bills. In his mind, he already has the Frenchman in the office down the hall.
The man in front of him is not French. His English is basic and often broken with bouts of German, Austrian, and Hungarian. He's stumbling through apologies. Macon lets him. If nothing else, it makes his spirits slightly higher. With the constant mantra of please, please, please, Macon almost pities the man.
He crouches in front of the man in order to stop his babbling. "What's your name?" The man's brows furrow. "Come now. What do you call yourself?"
"Ludovic."
"Ah, well. That wasn't difficult." A smile tugs at his lips. "Ludovic," he repeated, the name clipping off his tongue sharply. "Do you have a last name?"
The man's green eyes dart to the floor. "Fitzwilliam."
"Now, Ludovic Fitzwilliam, do you know why we called you here?" Tenseness finds itself in the Caster's upper lip. "If I wanted you dead, Ludovic, I would have killed you days ago when you stole my wallet." He meets the green stare. "That was my mistake. I don't blame you for that much." He takes a breath and stood. "The only thing I'm curious about, the only thing that matters, really, is if you can shoot." Fitzwilliam's hands twitch. "A rifle?"
"Steyr-Mannlicher."
"German?"
"Austrian." Macon nods once. He turns on his heels sharply to look at Fitzwilliam. There's madness in his eyes, something that burns with a passion that causes Fitzwilliam to square his shoulders and ball his fists. Macon grabs Fitzwilliam's wrist quickly and presses his palm against his own.
"There's an apartment closer to here. Given, it's in poor condition." The key glimmers and, instinctively, Fitzwilliam's fingers close around it.
"What do I have to do?"
"Carry on as if nothing's changed." He hopes Fitzwilliam hears the implied knowledge Macon has of where Fitzwilliam lives. He wonders if Fitzwilliam even cares. The man leaves, then, as though nothing has happened at all.
It becomes a running theme with Fitzwilliam.
Leah starts visiting his apartment every few weeks. She asks questions when they are on jobs together, does her best to become close acquaintances, but Fitzwilliam is closed around himself. They never get much closer than Leah occasionally making late night pancakes for Fitzwilliam.
He's a bit jittery and there are awful circles under his eyes, but he's entirely competent all the same. The first time Macon gives him a target, it's a clean kill, bullet between the eyes eight hours after Fitzwilliam gets the letter. It's the same for the next one. And the next. And the next.
Sometimes he helps Leah, who has time for a multitude of odd jobs. Macon sends them to move packages, deal with people who don't pay, scare off rivals. She notices it's a lot easier to be intimidating with Fitzwilliam at her back.
Even when they manage to find the funds to repair another room, the nice one with two windows and access to the attic, Fitzwilliam doesn't move in. Instead, Lena—they've decided on it by altering Leah's nickname for her, String Bean—receives a room to herself, which houses the few possessions she does have.
The four of them don't see each other often, despite the living arrangement. Their sleeping patterns are too irregular for that, but every time they share a morning together, Leah swears Macon looks a little fonder. They maintain a professional relationship, all of them; Leah suspects Macon takes great care too make sure none of them see him blackout drunk or showering. Still, for Leah, seeing Macon late at night, pouring over that map with his suit jacket slung over his chair and sleeves rolled up to his elbows, is enough.
Macon takes things into his own hands a few days after Fitzwilliam's fifth kill. Fitzwilliam skulks in for a briefing and hangs around when they have a small meeting around the map of the city. They pay more attention to Macon when he explains what has to be done and by whom, if there's anything (or anyone) they need to take care of, where there are and what the police know. Fitzwilliam leans against the bookcase, beneath the nightshade and narcissus, and bites his lip.
"I can do that," he states, interrupting Macon's plan.
Macon nods and agrees to let Fitzwilliam accompany him into the field later that week because he sure as hell isn't taking down an establishment alone. This means Fitzwilliam stays slightly more often. And once they return from the job, Macon seems to have taken a liking to the immigrant.
For some reason—maybe because Leah actively tries to make it so—Fitzwilliam and her end up working together very often. She shows him what alleys are safe and what stores will let you hide in their backrooms, and, slowly, they become somewhat close.
When Fitzwilliam awakes, there's coffee brewing and Leah sitting on his table. "Macon's planning something," Fitz mumbles as a garbled question.
"Just a little robbery, Ludovic."
"I bet we—" He cuts off with a yawn.
"Tired?" She's too chipper for what looks like four in the morning.
"I didn't sleep well, is all." He takes a breath and stretches. "Pass me some coffee." Leah pours it for him without really questioning it. It seems somewhat natural. And they don't say much while Leah makes him breakfast—Leah watches Fitzwilliam, the moonlight still brightly shining through the open window and onto his face. He smiles a lopsided smile and criticizes her for her kindness and the slight burning of pancakes. She supposes it's somewhat rude but his smile makes up for it.
Fitzwilliam gets up and puts his plate in the sink, and Leah follows suit. Knowing Fitzwilliam had to dress and prepare, Leah offers to do the dishes, and he reluctantly accepts. A second before darting off to get properly dressed, he presses a quick kiss to Leah's cheek; his lips barely brush against skin, but the sensation is enough to make Leah stop for a second.
She resumes cleaning more slowly, rubbing large circles on the plates with a sponge. She'd need to get back to Lucille's soon. Boo, as much as he was Macon's eyes, couldn't babysit Lucy's adopted child. Macon, the capable man he is, could very well watch the kid while Leah makes a run with Fitzwilliam, but she wonders if she trusts him, trusts herself. She barely trusts herself with whatever's transpiring between Fitzwilliam and herself.
She turns on the cold water and puts the last cup up to dry. Frustrating, all of it.
