Chapter Text
The world was built to be beautiful. It birthed life and laughter and kindness, engulfing and thus becoming reality as the most profound thoughts behind the simplest of things: the antiquated library housing intimacy and promise in endless words, the ardent painter overwhelming the wall beneath the bridge with prolific lilies, the sister who smiles kindly so as to take on burden from the people she could never foresee—was he expected to fail at falling in love with beauty when he was given it so plainly, splayed on pages and pictures and people with something frank to make it real?
The world was supposed to be beautiful, and so he lived and wandered and loved until he soon realized it had long since stopped being so. The library, after all, is but a remnant of an aged bookkeeper’s extorted generosity; the painter took his talent to the shadows of some nameless bridge because it has no worth in one of the infinite markets run by inherited status; and the kind sister blames herself for the lies of a nobleman who sought the money he’d already had far too much of in just his coat pockets.
Something was beautiful but something was wrong, because corpses can retain their darling features whilst maggots infest their inert lungs. They are packaged in caskets, remembered beautiful; they are buried to rot.
(The incisions burn like fire. They are precise and just wide enough to keep blood from spilling excessively on their rich carpeted floors but still deep enough to sting like salt in the rawest of wounds.
The woman he’d called mother mere hours ago pants above him, the barest sign of effort. A boy watches from behind, a grin sewn into his expression. It is the kind of grin wrought with blades, with the sharp sparks of barely-concealed glee. Sadism isn’t quite the word for it, of course, because surely no face as young and round and abhorrently noble as his could possibly be sadistic. It is only wrath and pleasure staring him down from where he has fallen, wounds still searing like hot coals.
A sharp slice.
I hate them.
Again.
I hate this.
Again. It grazes his cheek and it hurts, it truly does, but he bites down and concentrates on a thin trail of blood trickling down his arm.
I hate it…
Again.
I really hate this world.
And again and again and again—)
He can’t go back. Knowledge is a forward path; understanding is a painful one.
So became this: the world is deadish and grey, something called beauty lost in the folds of hierarchical propriety. Children do not tend to lose sight of the world’s light in their youth, so young that they will forever fail to recall how the world looked in the lens of immature naivety, but in calling him a kind prodigy (a smart slum boy, an eccentric orphan case, a solution) with such morose smiles they had sealed injustice in his eyes and allowed him to steal away from childish temptation.
In spite of their roles, in thanks and in the very end, he cannot blame anyone when he had chosen knowledge and thus taken on his sins, forgoing what remains of this naïveté.
Knowledge is a blessing.
Knowledge is a curse.
(Knowledge killed irrevocably, and suddenly the blind veneer that veiled an innocent child’s eyes dropped to disclose its rot and there is no one to blame but a boy who made a choice)
Someday, he orders it like this: the abandoned books of their old shelter, crammed with weathered scripts comprised of temptation in beauty, if only in fiction, first produced the apple amidst the blissfully glorious garden. Eden is ephemeral, but so often too are humans. The apple goes made and unblemished, unperceived by the masses as a child in weary garments and grimy perspiration climbs the bark of its lonely tree.
And then their smiles, their kindness and gratitude and the frankness of it all, the hope to alter the backdrop into something real and honest and pretty—he takes a bite of the apple and it is bittersweet as he rids himself of Eden and watches his naive world (a mockery, a surrogate) go still and monochrome.
A child makes a sacrifice and then a few more for the sake of restoring beauty he does not plan to see. After all, to discard Eden was to live with knowledge, of which coalesced into the final conclusion that was how the world was wrong; to discard his right to youth and his privilege to humanity and his namesake and his pristine hands were whole other steps toward making it right.
The world is greyish and dead and it doesn’t matter because it’s always been that way—
(Because all resided in Eden, and he would and could only drag those he loved down so far alongside him. Because they too discarded their rights to youth and humanity and immaculate lives, but Eden was blind to all aside from that precious apple.
It is lonely, being expelled from paradise)
—until you.
“...a mathematician.”
William shifts his gaze from the staircase (which possesses an overt resemblance to either the Fibonacci sequence or the Golden Ratio, of which he’s not quite sure) to a man accessorized with a trio of curious noblewomen. He doesn’t seem to care all that much for their presence, however; he’s likely indulging them either to garner attention or receive some sort of payment through amicable means. His attire is scruffy yet, when orderly, respectable. A decent build as well, likely reflecting physical prowess. There also exists a faint whiff of some remote scent—tobacco, perhaps?
“Sorry, sir, we were in the middle of a bet.”
“A bet? About what?”
“This man is saying that he can guess someone’s line of work just by looking at them. And he hasn’t guessed wrong yet!”
Said man asserts himself between William and the stairs, running through his process with a practiced though rather bored ease. His deductions are swift and taut in some areas, yet in hearing someone work through something as irrelevant as his occupation in mere seconds of chance time he’s not quite sure if he cares all that much for its sloppy aspects when, in sum, it is sure and right. Words done away with by the ladies who are far more invested in the ends than the means, the man watches him with dull eyes that subtly dart between him and the backdrop, sentences beneath his tongue on countless idiosyncrasies and overt habitualities that William himself could perceive yet has never witnessed another doing the same.
Is there not more? He thinks, letting the question sway behind his smirk as the man then stares at him head-on with a look of tedious expectancy. He’s done this nearly a dozen times within the last hour and expects William to have the same astonished reaction as all the other participants: applause, praise, general amazement and wonder at a simple party trick.
“Let me see if I can replicate your process.” His eyes—oxford blue, rich and dark but suddenly drawn in light by a slight sparkle—go wide, so easily lauded and so rarely challenged. There is always the thrill of being pleasantly surprised and, just as persistent, the kind gesture of returning the favour.
A violinist, by the slight calluses on his fingers, yet not inclined to consider himself a musician; the aforementioned physical prowess that seems fitting to subsume a form of martial arts; the whiff being sure indication of drug use upon closer inspection—William himself is as subject to deduction as anyone, yet this stranger has always considered himself the only one capable of playing this game and thus tired of it.
Is the world as dim for you as it is for me?
(Have you relinquished Eden too?)
“And while you obviously hail from Oxbridge, you choose to speak with a Cockney accent. Surely it must be because take pride in your roots… specifically your mother’s, correct?” The sparkle swells at some effulgent crescendo in his gaze, distinctly sad but heavily delighted. His nonplussed silence morphs into something sly, eyes narrowing just above his smile.
With mirth, “How’d ya know?”
“It was obvious.”
His laughter shakes the world awake.
Its sharp edges grasp at the coffin long since laid to rest, prying it open to the cold corpse of some child’s right to blind purity; the softer frays that follow as his laughter falls into words (“I like ya!” he says, and William can only offer an “oh?” of silent reciprocation) soothe the writhing maggots and festering rot away, till there is but a gentle cadaver with its weary bones.
The deadish, grey world is given a fire and suddenly it breathes as something monochrome and tainted.
(Prometheus was seen as a saviour by mortals.
Prometheus was good.
Good, invariably, rests in Eden, because he’d been a moment’s fool to consider otherwise)
“See ya, Mr. Mathematician!” His retreating silhouette is distinct against his entourage, and as it fades so too does the smile still playing on William’s lips. When was it that he began smiling in earnest? He’d lost himself, for a moment, reveling in—
“Something happen?”
Moran’s sudden presence nearly startles him, before he recalls the plan that had drifted to the back of his preoccupied mind. Yes, the purpose of their voyage was Enders. A murderous noble, a man wreathed in blood without a second thought of its virtue. He is to act tonight, and the stage will be set for his premature demise.
“Not really. I’m sure he won’t be a hindrance to our plans. How are things going?”
“Enders was seated at the appointed table. Everything is still proceeding as planned.”
All is as it usually is, as it is supposed to be. His hands are still stained and the grand plan featuring the great Lord of Crime is still being initiated so far without any flaw so why is he rattled, even for a moment?
“Perfect. Continue on then. His patience must be wearing thin.”
Moran leaves him be and William loiters, an excited sensation buried beneath his skin. His priority is the plan, of course, but in envisioning the precise pieces of the script he’d plotted there are disturbances. Most specifically of the sparkling, oxford blue kind. Whilst he is no stranger to affection, being with even the quiet flashes of lust, never has he been distracted by it, especially in the midst of a plan as significant as this. Would he even constitute this as affection? He considers consulting Albert before scrapping the idea, knowing his ideology on intimate indulgence.
He isn’t with his diverging thoughts for too long; eventually, he heads to his station in the first act of their performance, rid of the wait that bid his mind to wander. The sky dims into night, and yet in watching the stars he feels something familiar and ancient. The moon hangs in the air like a silver tear threaded amongst diamonds, and there is vague poetry and Shakespearian recollections on his tongue.
‘The moon shines bright. In such a night as this. When the sweet wind did gently kiss the trees and they did make no noise, in such a night.’
The Merchant of Venice, he thinks, and the scene shifts to silver strands weaving through the shattered windows as Louis huddles beside him. The tattered pages are just about legible, and he makes out tragedies and romances in the dark. He sees societal prejudices in words and realizes it is not quite fiction.
(—and again, because the scars and the blood have long since vanished, the perpetrators far deceased, but his arms still ache in fire)
“Was a pleasure, yes. See ya ladies.” A voice—novel, bored, and familiar in how he’d been tossing it through his head since its departure—sounds from beneath his feet. William leans over the rails slightly and watches the man from before waving to an augmented group of noblewomen. His back is to William, but it would be far from a hassle to call out. This man would turn around, would meet him on the upper decks and steal time with him, and he is sure of it for no reason at all beyond the vague memory of the light in his gaze.
And William wouldn’t mind. If anything, he wants to shout, to speak from the depths of his lungs and throw the man off the trail of a pristine noble, to see his oxford-blue eyes and retain the specific scent of the tobacco lingering on his suit, to prod at his thoughts and wonder if they function like his, swift and curious and self-assured. It sounds, above all, fun.
But the pain. The coals, the burning.
It is nearly time.
William turns back toward the guest rooms; the silver tear and its diamonds blink away and later, whilst heaving a dead man over a balcony edge, he does not remember to seek them out again.