Round Four: Team Alan/Sin
Title: You Who Never Arrived
Authors: aiscat93, hanelissar, kiyala, orexisbella, tkp
Pairing: Alan/Sin
Rating: T
Summary: One war. Five dreams, five nights, an infinite number of worlds to conquer. Alan and Sin struggle to find each other.
Three hundred nights like three hundred walls
must rise between my love and me
and the sea will be a black art between us
- Jorge Luis Borges
i. The first syllable of recorded time
The boy gazes avidly at the countryside flying by, nose pressed against the glass, his feet in bright white new trainers kicking against the as-yet unscuffed leather of the front seat. He wriggles his shoulders, jiggling with badly contained excitement. The man beside him glances from the road momentarily to look down and chuckle.
“Looking forward to the Market, Alan?” Daniel ruffles his son’s hair affectionately. “Have you thought about the sort of talisman you’d like?” Alan’s brow furrows in concentration as he thinks. He’s mature for his age but still really just a little boy.
“I’d like ... I’d like a big one, Dad. A really big one so it can protect Nick as well.”
There’s silence for a moment. Daniel feels it hanging, an awkward burden on the humid air inside the car. “No, Alan, you don’t need to do that. Nick will have his own talisman, remember? You don’t have to share.”
“But I want to, Dad. I want to look after him!”
A fond smile, soft as a whisper, fleets across Daniel’s face. “I know, son. And you will. But you and Nick will have separate talismans - after all, if he has a whole talisman to himself, he’ll be safer, won’t he?”
Alan beams up at him, trusting. “Yes, Dad.”
Daniel turns his attention back to the road. “Now ... is this the turning? Can you check the map for me?”
o 0 O 0 o
The Market is bustling and mad and nothing like Alan could ever have imagined. None of his storybooks have ever prepared him for this profusion of noise and colour, of strange, acrid smells which burn his nostrils, and strains of haunting music that make him want to run and run and never ever stop.
There are so many people, and so many weapons ... Alan’s never seen a gun before. But he sees guns now, sees more guns than he’d ever imagined the world could hold, as Daniel pulls him past a stall covered in muskets and rifles and pistols and guns Alan doesn’t think even Long John Silver would have recognised.
“Alan? Are you alright, Alan?”
Biting his lip, Alan nods cautiously.
“Yes. Yes, I’m fine, Dad. It’s just a bit...” He waves his hand, not able to quite find the words for it. Daniel gives his hand a quick squeeze.
“I know. But this is our world now, Alan. And it’s new and exciting! Come on, I’ve been told to find someone called Merris. Do you want to see if you can spot her first?”
o 0 O 0 o
The girl is young, younger than him, but if she stood next to him he expects she’d reach his shoulder. Her long dark hair is a sweeping curtain that swishes as she turns and laughs, like the women on television. Olivia’s hair is just as dark, but it doesn’t swish like that. But then, Alan thinks, Olivia’s also never laughed like the girl is laughing, and Olivia’s skin is pale and sallow, sickly. This girl, who is getting closer every moment, has brown skin, the colour of the swirly coffee stain on the sideboard, which Daniel has never remembered to wipe off and Alan has never wanted to remind him about. It’s a nice colour, a rich colour, and he can’t stop staring at it.
“What are you looking at?” He’s drawn from his daydreams abruptly to find the girl is standing only a few feet away, hands on her hips. She’s glowering at him and he jumps to his feet quickly.
“I, I’m sorry. I ... I’m new. My dad told me to, to wait here while he spoke to Merris and stuff.”
Her face relaxes. He’s not a threat. “Oh. Alright then. Are you going to watch the dancing?”
Alan looks a little helpless; he has no idea what she’s talking about.
The girl grins. “You do know about dancing, don’t you?”
“I … no. I don’t.” She’s younger than him but she makes him feel like a baby. “Will you tell me?”
“No.”
Alan’s face falls and he is about to turn to slink back to his father, who is bargaining with a crooked man over some terrifying-looking blades, when he feels a little hand on his elbow.
“I won’t tell you. I’ll show you. I can dance now - I’ve been training and training and mum took me to Merris the other week and she says I’m ready so I’m going to do my first dance today. Only a little demon of course, you can’t start with any of the big powerful ones, but you can’t dance up a demon can you?”
Alan has absolutely no idea about half of what she’s just said, but he’s fairly sure he can answer her question. “No.” He says honestly. “Are you going to do it now, then? Can I sit here?”
“Yes. Sit there and watch. We’ll be starting soon.” She’s about to spin on her heel and run back to her fellow dancers, when she sticks out a confident hand. “I’m Sin, by the way.”
“Sin? Like a Bible sin?” Sin laughs at him, her cherry mouth wide and smiling and his heart lifts. He likes her.
“No, it’s short for Cynthia. But nobody calls me that.”
Alan takes her hand and shakes it firmly, the way he sees his father do when meeting strangers on the way to becoming friends. “I’m Alan. I’ll call you Cynthia.”
Her eyes glitter as she moves away from him, back to the spot where they are cutting lines and circles into the soft earth in patterns he’s sure he’ll never understand.
“Alright.” She throws the acceptance over her shoulder casually and he catches it. Keeps it.
o 0 O 0 o
It takes longer than he expects before the dancing starts. Alan has always been a patient boy, happy to sit wherever he’s put and wait for as long as it takes, but today he’s fidgeting. For some reason his leg keeps twitching and no amount of glaring and firm gripping above the kneecap seems to stop it.
But at last, as the last of the sun’s rays clip the tree tops and the Market is swallowed into dusk, they’re ready. A myriad of bobbing Chinese lanterns flare into brightness and everything suddenly seems to become more mysterious. More serious. The dancers are all barely clothed in scraps of red silk; Alan can see creamy white thighs and languorous dark limbs wherever he looks. It would be easy for a little girl to get lost in the bustle, for him to blink and miss her moving to the right, stepping forward to take a bite from the dark fruit spilling its juices over her chin.
It would be so easy.
But she doesn’t get lost and he doesn’t blink and miss her. He watches as she steps confidently onto the circles, as she lifts her head and tosses her hair coquettishly. It should look comical on such a little girl but somehow ... she carries it off. She’s so sure of herself.
She wasn’t really that good...
The words whisper insidiously into his ear and he whips his head around. Nobody there. And suddenly he isn’t sure if he even heard anything at all. Shivering, he pulls his sleeves over cold fingers and huddles a little closer to the dancers. To Sin.
o 0 O 0 o
It’s over soon, far too soon. Sin accepts something shining that might be gold doubloons or might just be pound coins from a tall, rake-like man shrouded in powder blue, and then she sashays over to sit next to Alan. Her red dress is slipping from one shoulder and Alan automatically reaches over to pull it back up for her. She laughs unselfconsciously.
“What did you think, Alan? Did you like it?”
Alan nods fervently. “It was the best thing I’ve ever seen.” His eyes are glowing. “I wish I could dance like that.”
Suddenly Sin bounds to her feet, seizing Alan around the wrist. Her fingers are warm.
“I’ll teach you! I’ll teach you to dance and then you can practise and practise and maybe one day you can come and dance with me. It’ll be really fun, Alan!”
Alan is still stumbling to gain his footing on the ground - his leg’s fallen asleep after sitting in one position for so long.
“No, Cynthia, I can’t. I’d be really bad and my dad’s probably waiting... ” He turns, but unfortunately Daniel is very much not waiting. He’s leaning on a counter, speaking to a veiled woman. Sin laughs.
“That’s my mum. She’s probably telling him about dancing, how it works and stuff. It’s not very interesting really; the dancing is the important bit. Come on Alan, there’s a field over here we can practise in...”
Not knowing what else to do, Alan lets himself be dragged across the grass.
“Put your foot there, no, turn your toes out. Then turn ... no, the other way!” Alan stumbles through the steps and then, quite suddenly, he’s got it. His body twists lightly, gracefully, and the soles of his shoes strike the ground in perfect time with the clapping of Sin’s hands.
She laughs, delighted. “See, I knew you’d be good at this!” Alan’s flushed and sweaty-faced from the exertion, but he’s exhilarated. He beams back at her, then grabs her by the wrist and pulls her into a spontaneous dance. Laughing, they muddle through the improvised steps, moving back and forth until Alan tries to spin Sin under his arm and underestimates how tall she actually is: they stick halfway through and have to untangle themselves.
“Very impressive.”
Sin’s head snaps up at once.
“Mum!” Loosing herself from Alan, she runs over to hug her mother. “Mum, did you see me dancing? I called up the demon-all by myself!”
Sin’s mother sweeps her into a hug that puts a lump in Alan’s throat. He turns to his father, who has stridden up beside them. “Hey, Dad.”
“Alan. Have you been enjoying yourself?”
Alan slips his hand into his father’s. “Yes, it’s been brilliant. This is Cynthia, except everyone else calls her Sin. She’s been teaching me how to dance.”
“Mm. We were watching - very impressive! Ms Davies here has been telling me you’ve got the makings of an excellent dancer.”
Feeling his face warm with pride and embarrassment, Alan looks shyly up at the tall, beautiful woman Sin is skipping around. “Really? You, you think I could dance with proper dancers one day? With, with Sin?”
The two adults share a look which Alan cannot interpret. A wry smile, a twinkle of the eye that he knows won’t be explained, no matter how much he begs.
“Maybe,” said Ms Davies. “Your dad tells me you’ll be back soon - keep practising and maybe one day you can help Sin here dance up a demon. If,” she adds, grabbing her scampering daughter by the shoulders so that she has to stop frolicking, “she can stop trying to give us all motion sickness.”
Sin grins, utterly unabashed. She’s so full of confidence, of her sense of self. “Sorry, Mum.”
o 0 O 0 o
Later, in the car on the way home, Alan is almost as bouncy as he was on the way out. He can’t wait to tell Nick all about the Market, to practise dancing.
Daniel says: “I’m so glad you've made a friend. Especially such a nice girl as Cynthia. What was it her mother called her? Sin? And she's teaching how to dance - that's exciting. I'm really happy you're friends. Perhaps one day, when you're older, you might even...”
And then suddenly Alan is awake and sitting up in bed, sweat-slicked and hand on his heart. It’s totally dark, totally silent. And his dreams - his memories - are totally heartbreaking.
ii. This is the city where we are mended
“Cynthia Davies, why on earth did you choose this place?” Isabelle feels her eyebrows skip up her forehead as she ogles the miniature jukebox and blue suede shoes mounted on the cherry-red walls. “It’s awfully quaint. Is your new boy toy too highbrow to meet your best friend at a club like a normal person?”
Across the table, a hint of colour blooms in Sin’s cheeks. “Oh, don’t full-name me, Miss Chang. I mentioned this place to him as a joke, okay? But he looked ... interested.”
“You agreed to go to this cheesy 1950s diner because he looked interested? Dear god, it must be love.” Isabelle snickers and watches her friend fiddle with the red-and-white striped straw bobbing in her cola float. “You took your time before revealing him to the outside world, too. Haven’t you been dating for ages now?”
“Almost two months.” Sin’s always been a bit of a fidgeter, and now her slender brown fingers travel restlessly up to worry the pendant hanging around her neck. “I wonder where he is? It’s not like him to be late, Izzy. And I told him I’d punch him if he was.”
“Oh, I think that’s him now.” Isabelle doesn’t miss the way the other girl’s eyes slide to the door at her words, and she watches speculatively as it swings open to admit a tall, slender redhead.
She has to admit, Alan Ryves isn’t the sort of boy that she ever thought Sin would be interested in. Oh, he’s popular and athletic and brilliant - all things Izzy approves of, of course - but he’s rather harmless-looking, lacking the bad boy edge of a Seb MacFarlane or Joe Carr.
His smile is warm, though, and he gallantly offers a hand as he reaches their booth. “Isabelle Chang, I presume? It’s lovely to meet you, finally.”
A little bemused, Isabelle gives him a firm handshake. “Please, call me Izzy.”
o 0 O 0 o
“So, tell me how you guys met. I have to admit, in spite of her legendary powers of attractiveness, I didn’t expect Miss Davies here to hook up with the Head Boy quite so quickly - and withholding all the details, moreover,” she adds archly.
His laugh is rich and sunny: it draws her in, like a fire. Isabelle is surprised to realise it, but she’s starting to understand Alan Ryves’s appeal.
“I sang for Ms Beacon’s class.”
“Ms Beacon? Your nutty history professor?” Izzy raises an eyebrow at Sin, who dissolves into a fit of giggles. “That’s the one, Iz. The one who dresses like a pastel gypsy and has, like, thirty lamps in her office. She just adores Alan.”
“Hey,” he laughingly protests, cutting into his burger, “Ms Beacon isn’t so bad. She’s just ... eccentric.”
“This one’s too nice.” Sin pinches his arm. “She had him come in and sing for her folklore class - introduced him with heaps of gushing, too,” she says, smirking.
“I wouldn’t get too cocky, Cynthia,” Alan teases. “She might try to steal me away.”
She snorts. “You’d look cute together. Anyway, he sang, it was gorgeous, I caught his eye and he couldn’t look away.”
“Definitely couldn’t,” he says amiably. “But you’re the one who showed up at my football practice the next day.”
“Oh, she’s a forward one, alright,” Izzy puts in.
Sin rolls her eyes. “Well, you looked like the sort who liked to take things slow. Slow’s just not my style, darling.”
“I’m not complaining.” The smile he gives her is rich and almost predatory, and for a minute Isabelle thinks she sees sparks flying between them.
She’s starting to understand it very well indeed.
o 0 O 0 o
“Sorry I’m late, Ms Cromwell.”
Merris nods briefly at her student. “Just as long as it doesn’t happen again, Cynthia. We’ve got less than a month until the UDO championships. Go ahead and get warmed up; Rhiannon’s already started.”
The two girls are a study in contrasts: Sin, dark and passionate, cuts a fiery figure against red-haired Rhiannon’s cool, measured movements and icy poise. Graceful as water, Rhiannon slides down to the floor as Sin executes a perfect switch leap over her body and drops to her knees; hands together, they rise and segue into a series of concentric spins.
The drums of the song are rising as the girls freeze, face to face, but instead of the next movement, Sin’s back snaps to ramrod straightness and she begins to step, quick and sure and completely wrong.
Merris rises from her seat, confused and irritated by this ridiculous turn of events, but Rhiannon has apparently decided to join her partner in this mutiny: face as implacable as ever, the redhead is matching Sin move for move in a bizarre tango. Their steps draw invisible lines across the room’s floor as they dance and turn amid the throb of the music; Sin throws her head back as if possessed, feet flying almost fast enough to blur.
The song peters out and - as suddenly as she started - Sin drops to her knees, panting.
“What on earth,” says Merris, “was that?”
Rhiannon says nothing, studying the other girl coolly with her unnervingly still eyes.
o 0 O 0 o
Alan hums as he turns the corner of the oval, sneaking a quick peek at his wrist to check his time. Not bad, but I’ll have to speed it up a bit if I’m going to win a better medal this year.
His legs are pleasantly warm as he lengthens his stride. The track speeds easily beneath his feet: he’s always loved running, and he’s always been good at it. I’m going to miss this.
The reminder that his last school games are soon approaching spurs him on, and he kicks it up a gear. The sky is flying by now as he streaks towards the next turn -
- pain.
Gasping, Alan stops in the middle of the track as his left leg threatens to crumple beneath him.
Not again.
o 0 O 0 o
“Umm, Coach Carl?” Jamie knows his voice is wavering a little, but in these circumstances he feels it’s called for. “These things look ... dangerous.”
Carl Steele laughs, waving the bow with the confidence of a man who sleeps with sharp edges. “Don’t worry, Jamie, they’re really not. Well, they are if you shoot one another with them, but they can’t hurt the targets!”
Not at all reassured, Jamie casts a suspicious eye over the rest of his classmates, taking a moment to be grateful that Seb and Joe and Nick and their little gang of bullies are in a different class. Quite a few other people look as nervous as he is, but a few yards away, Sin Davies is hefting one of the heavy bows curiously. Alan’s new girlfriend, his brain supplies. Pity. He’d always hoped Alan and Mae would start going out.
Jamie sees a smile curve her cherry mouth as she assumes the stance, and an unbidden shiver runs up his spine.
The arrow flies straight and true, penetrating the bullseye with a killing blow.
o 0 O 0 o
In that moment, Sin catches herself waiting for blood to spill.
The stunned silence is broken by Isabelle’s crowing laugh. “Oh my god, Sin, how did you do that? That’s amazing!”
She faces her friend with a ready smirk, but all she can think of are lines blurring under her feet and a cold, rising flame.
What’s happening to me?
o 0 O 0 o
“Checkmate.” Mae knows she sounds smug, but she doesn’t care.
Alan stares down at the board, then narrows his eyes at her for a moment before leaning back with a sigh. “That’s my third straight loss. It’s really hard to play against someone as attractive as you, you know.”
“Excuses, Ryves, nothing but excuses. You’re a bloody sorry excuse for a co-captain.” She laughs and flips her hair back, raising one pink eyebrow. “Is your new girlfriend tiring you out that much?”
“She is, but don’t tell her that,” he says, grin alight with self-deprecating charm as he sets up the pieces for another go.
Mae leans forward to examine the board. “Does she play?”
He moves his King’s pawn two spaces, then looks up with a dry expression. “No, but she seems utterly thrilled when I start relating my exciting tales of chess practice. Maybe you should try to recruit her.”
She grins at him as she mirrors his opening move. “Yeah, I suppose she would think we’re all boring nerds around here. You most of all.”
“Ah, but chess’s effect on society was so intense and widespread that a saint once denounced it for its evil effects! Men have died for chess, Mae.” The edge to his smile is a little manic, and Mae can’t help but give him a look.
“I know you’re big on your Discovery Channel factoids, Alan, but you really have the weirdest notion of what’s interesting.”
o 0 O 0 o
Isabelle stretches out her legs, sliding on her dancing shoes. “Listen, girlfriend, not that I’m not flattered, but you’re really have been better off asking Mae to run through this with you if you really didn’t want to take another spin with your creepy partner. I’m not much for jazz, you know.”
Sin makes a pleading face at her. “Please, Iz? Mae had chess, and Rhiannon really unnerved me last time. You’re my only hope.”
“You’re lucky you’re gorgeous, missy. But none of that jumping over my head business, okay?”
“I know.” The other girl beams at her as they settle into the first movement. Izzy knows she’s a little awkward at this, but Sin compensates, somehow managing to slow down while still staying in time with the music.
Izzy meets Sin’s eyes with a grin as they finish the spins, but as the drums rise and pound, her friend’s eyes suddenly snap wide -
o 0 O 0 o
It’s as if a curtain has come rippling down: Isabelle’s face distorts, and Sin sees her friend in a locked room, eyes vacant and black. As she watches, horrified, a cockroach creeps out of her mouth and down one waxy cheek. She grabs at the door, digging her fingernails into the cold metal, and is surprised to feel it give under her hands.
“Sin!” The shock and pain in Izzy’s voice is like a splash of cold water, and she jerks, realising she’s clutching the other girl’s arms. “Oh my god, Iz, I’m so sorry! I don’t know what just happened...”
As she sinks to the floor, Isabelle slides down with her, gathering her into her arms. “What on earth is wrong with you?”
“I don’t know, Iz. Maybe I’m just tired.” She leans into her friend’s shirt for a moment before straightening up, trying to shake off the terror still thrumming through her blood. “I’m going to find Alan and talk to him before practice, okay?”
Her legs feel heavy as she makes her way across the room, feeling Isabelle’s eyes on her with every step.
o 0 O 0 o
“Hey, sweetheart, I’ve been looking all over for you. Where have you been?”
Sin slides up on her tiptoes to press the quickest of kisses to the corner of Alan’s mouth, and his hand settles on one slender hip. “I was just out on the field,” he says, blue eyes warm. “Are we going out for dinner?”
“Not right now, unfortunately.” Sin wrinkles her nose as she fiddles with his lapel. “We have practise with Ms Cromwell again, so I’ll be here until seven-thirty or so. Come and get me after?”
“Of course,” he murmurs, and with a lush smile she spins away, gold necklace glinting against dark hair.
Mae eyes him curiously. “Alan, why did you lie to her?”
He blinks at her, confused. “What are you talking about, Mae?”
“You weren’t on the field; we were at chess club. Remember?”
Panic fractures his features. “Oh my god. It’s happening again.”
“What’s happening again? Alan, where are you going?” Mae’s voice echoes down the hall, following him as he runs for the doors. “What the hell is wrong with you?”
The doors swing closed behind him.
o 0 O 0 o
Nick watches the tall redhead curiously as he slams out of Trinity’s front doors. Alan Ryves is the antithesis of everyone Nick hangs out with: Head Boy, star athlete, winner of the hypothetical Least Likely To Get An Asbo, Ever award. In any other world, Nick would dismiss him as a self-righteous goody-two-shoes - all the other guys certainly have. But something about Alan Ryves intrigues Nick (well, something other than his blistering hot jazz dancer girlfriend and his luscious chess club co-captain), and he finds himself following the clearly agitated boy as he wanders through the streets of Exeter.
He’s so intrigued, in fact, that he somehow misses the three or four shadows that accumulate stealthily behind him - and the fist that slams him into an alleyway.
Nick rolls with the first punch and grabs the wrist attached to it, pulling back just enough to notice the odd tattoo on his attacker’s forearm. Damn. Seb had warned him about these guys - they called themselves the Green Circle or something equally stupid, and a turf war was escalating between him and Joe’s “superior”.
He curses as he ducks another first and sweeps a second man’s legs from under him. Nick’s a good fighter, but he’s outnumbered - and about to be even more outnumbered, judging from the approaching footsteps on the pavement behind him. He tenses, readying himself for the next blow -
- and stares in amazement as Alan Ryves barrels into the third man, landing a punch directly on his face.
o 0 O 0 o
Sin’s going to kill me.
Alan really doesn’t know what drove him into this fight - into the middle of a gang war. He doesn’t even know Nick’s last name; he’s just one of the boys who makes Jamie’s life a living hell. But something inside him flinches at the thought of this virtual stranger bloodied and hurt, and so he drives his fist into his opponent’s stomach.
“You’re going to lose this fight, you bastards. Celeste doesn’t tolerate anyone moving in on her turf!” The attacker’s voice is an ugly hiss, and Alan catches the glint of metal beneath the dull glow of the streetlights.
Shit. Well, Sin’s really going to kill me - if these guys don’t finish the job first.
Nick’s spotted the gun, and has gone straight for the man brandishing it. As they struggle, the weapon clatters to the ground - Alan doesn’t think, he just dives -
His hand wraps around it like a glove, and he straightens with his arm out. “You should all back away now.”
The largest man bares his teeth in an ugly, mocking grimace. “Do you even know how to use that, boy? I could have you on the ground before you figured out how to shoot.”
A second later he’s jumping away as a shot finds its mark right between his feet.
Alan feels a cold smirk crawling across his face. It’s hard not flinch from the steel in his own voice. “I don’t think you want to bet your life on that.” And they don’t.
When the attackers have scattered, he turns his attention to the other boy. Nick’s taken some obvious damage, but he’s leaning against the alley wall with apparent nonchalance, studying Alan with blank eyes.
“Alright there, mate?”
For a moment he thinks Alan sees a rush of fire in the black pupils, but a short nod and a grunted “thanks” is all the reply he gets as Nick turns away and vanishes into the night.
o 0 O 0 o
“Are you crazy? You could have been killed! For a boy you barely know - for a boy everyone barely knows!”
Sin drops like a stone on to her favourite chair in the music room, burying her face in her hands for a moment before snapping back up to glare at her boyfriend. He looks as calm as ever and even a little defiant, which infuriates her even more.
“They could have really hurt him, Sin.”
“They could have really hurt you.”
Alan falls to his knees in front of her, meeting the worry and fear and anger in her face head-on, and she lets him take her hands in his. “I’m sorry. But I did what I had to do. And ... I don’t think I was in any real danger.”
She feels her mouth tighten. “How were you not in any real danger? They had a fucking gun!”
He hesitates for a moment, midnight eyes shifting between the cold tile floor and her face. “The gun - it got knocked around a bit during the fight, and ... I grabbed it. And I knew what to do with it, Sin.”
Alan’s face is miserable and scared, and his the familiarity of his story makes her queasy. She leans forward, resting her forehead on his, and takes a deep breath. “Have you ever handled one before?”
He shakes his head, runs a hand through his tumbling russet curls. “I knew exactly what to do with it. Like it was an extension of my arm.”
Sin purses her lips. “I shot a bullseye on my first try in Archery the other day. I’ve never even touched a bow before.”
He looks at her with surprise and worry and - is that pride? “Has ... anything else happened?”
It all comes spilling out, then: the visions when she’s dancing, his uncontrollable white lies. She feels lightheaded and overwhelmed, and they can only sit there for a while, clutching each other for balance. The world seems fuzzy and surreal: even the sunlight streaming through the windows is a little too yellow, a little too cold.
When he finally speaks, his voice is hoarse. “It doesn’t matter.”
Confused, she pulls back to look at him. “What doesn’t matter?”
“This. All of it, any of it.” Alan’s eyes are on her face, lush and dark and fever-bright. “Maybe we have fallen down some kind of rabbit-hole, and that’s why all these bizarre things are happening. But whatever world we live in, I just know I want to be with you.”
Sin isn’t the sentimental type, but his words warm her in a way even the sun can’t match. She leans in to kiss him, pausing briefly to murmur a quiet “yes” against his mouth.
o 0 O 0 o
It’s only a practice run, but Alan’s legs are burning.
The track feels like fire beneath his feet as he turns the corner. He can see Sin waiting just beyond the finish line, the wind whipping her hair into a black flag. He puts on a burst of speed - and then he hears her scream, and the pain shoots up his leg like a bolt of lightning.
Alan stumbles, but pushes himself forward. The ground is dissolving into flames, crawling up his heels and ankles. His blood thrums with fear but he knows that he has to keep going, has to reach her: she’s calling out to him, now; he can’t make out her words but he can feel her urging him on.
Behind him a terrible avian cry rings out. His mind flashes back to hours spent watching the Discovery Channel: is it a monster? A vulture on speed? The bizarre thought wrings a sob-laugh from his lips as his feet pound what’s left of the oval.
He’s getting close to Sin, now. Alan can make out the shape of her mouth, twisted in anguish, the hand clinging to her pendant like a lifeline. He mirrors her, clutching at his chest-and pulls his hand away with a hiss when it encounters hot metal: his second place medal from last year. He doesn’t remember putting it on, but now the fire has turned it into a branding iron and it’s impossible to ignore.
Her words strain towards his ears, shrill with fear.
“Take it off, Alan! Take it off, it’s burning you! Alan!”
He reaches for the ribbon, but her voice sounds wrong: he can see her mouth moving as she cries out, but his eyes are jarring with his ears. He hesitates - and then he sees her fall, and her name tears itself from his throat.
“Sin! SIN!”
He spurs his ragged legs onward, one hand scrambling at the ribbon, but his leg -his leg’s stopped working, he’s dragging it with every lunging step but it’s not - not moving, oh god what’s happening-
Sin’s pushing herself up and towards him, her body jerking unnaturally; the fire is blistering his feet and his leg is folding beneath him and he’s falling and darkness is closing in on both of them -
o 0 O 0 o
- Alan’s lungs are still on fire when he jerks awake, clutching his talisman.
o 0 O 0 o
On the other side of the Market’s camp, Sin buries her face in her hands and tries to push the fear away.
iii. O, afternoons earned with suffering
Here, there are circles within circles, infinite concentricity, and Sin thinks that perhaps it’s an apt reflection of life. After all, there’s nothing that makes her feel more alive than this, dancing along the seam between two worlds, relying on her own strength and ability not to miss a step. It’s a long fall from here, she knows, and shivers.
Her face never betrays her thoughts, cherry red lips arranged into a slight pout as she concentrates, her grip firm on the ceremonial knife, its blade biting into the cool earth beneath her. She moves her arm in arm arc that is perfect from practice, and begins on the lines of travelling. There was a time when her mother would have watched her do this, making sure it was correct. Then, it would have been Merris, but that time has passed now, too, and there is nothing to be done but grit her teeth and carry on.
Around her, the other dancers cut their own circles, merely part of her periphery. The musicians set up their instruments, warming up to the undertone of muffled drums. Stalls come up as the sun sets, and the Goblin Market slowly comes to life.
o 0 O 0 o
The dancers’ circles have been cut into the ground and with a whirl of coloured skirts that stand out against the black of the night, the real dancing begins.
Sin’s feet move along the lines she’s cut into her own circle and around her, the others dance to their own time, all to the steady beat of the music. She’s done before her partner and she glances around, taking in the Market, her Market.
There’s the usual ring of tourists and other patrons, watching the dance. For a moment, she sees the glint of glasses, a soft, familiar face that she recognises immediately. Her partner is done and they’re calling up a demon to answer a question, and Sin pushes all other thoughts out of her mind. Before it disappears, the demon looks at her and she wonders if she imagines its chuckle.
Before she starts the next dance, Sin makes sure that it is Alan in the crowd, that he is watching her. She affects disinterest in this and reaches for another piece of fever fruit.
The moment she bites down, the entire world comes alive around her, in splashes of colour and shimmering light. She sees her dancing partner, watching her with the unmasked lust of the fever fruit. She sees Alan, and she laughs a throaty laugh.
Are you watching this, Alan Ryves?
She dances. She has no choice but to move her body, twisting, turning, stepping and returning to the precipice. She feels inhuman things reaching for her - hands that stretch toward her and through right there, simultaneously one of the most valuable and most unpredictable allies of the Market, and it’s the danger that draws her in, the knowledge of the fall that awaits her if she isn’t careful. It’s just like dancing: electricity in the air, heart pounding, and adrenaline pumping.
And they’re not even looking at each other yet.
o 0 O 0 o
That night, she dreams. Memories weave themselves together, held in place with dream logic, making no sense but fitting together perfectly all the same. In the snapshot of one moment, Sin’s mother is dead, stolen from her by the demons. In another, she watches Merris resign herself to the same fate.
Alan is there in both. Alan is silent and sympathetic and Sin wants to cry, to scream, you don’t know what it’s like, but he does and it’s all the more frustrating. She can see the understanding in his soft gaze and it’s worse than all the pity in the world because she wants to share nothing with this traitor, this demon-lover, this liar.
Then he is no longer Alan, but Nick, or perhaps both. She looks at him and thinks that perhaps she could love him, but there is a coldness in his eyes. He has no emotion. No heart. His words mean nothing, his actions are purely for his own gain and in this dream - or perhaps it is a nightmare - his face flickers from Alan to Nick to Alan to Nick to -
“Alan,” she says, and her voice catches in her throat. He has a mark on him and she never truly said this to him, but she thinks that perhaps she should have. “Thank you.”
He smiles his infuriating smile. She can never measure its sincerity; it is careful and calculated, just like her own. Chameleons, Mae had called them both. She knows it’s true. Perhaps that is the reason she can’t stand him. Why she is inexplicably drawn to him, and cannot escape him in the real world, not in the Goblin Market, and not even in her dreams.
Dreams... she thinks, and Alan’s smile grows.
She’s dreaming. The knowledge startles her awake and she breathes, slow and calm, as she opens her eyes and looks at the ceiling of the caravan.
Lydie sleeps on, undisturbed. So does Toby. Her little brother, safe because of Alan. She knows, on some level, that if it had been anybody else, if he’d done something so stupid and noble for anybody that wasn’t hers, she would dismiss it as just that. Misguided nobility, or something equally laughable.
And yet...
It’s different, because it’s Toby, and she knows this. She is all too aware of the fact that this one simple action has made her see him in a different light. A new perspective, and if it doesn’t let her see past his masks and through his carefully-planned actions, at least she’s looking at the puzzle from a different angle.
And perhaps, from this angle, she will allow herself to like Alan Ryves.
iv. Nights hoping for the sight of you
When Sin dances, Alan watches.
Sometimes he still dreams she dances for him.
She did the first time. Alan remembers it like sleeping: the thing that happens when the real world falls away. She danced for him and then he woke up.
The next time, Alan could barely walk, and had a cane. He used a branch he had found and Nick had carved. Even so small, Nick had been good with sharp objects.
Alan hadn’t been ashamed. He’d remembered her dark hair, her eyes, not-the-Bible, and her smile. Alan never forgot when people were kind, and so he’d sought her out.
She was in her circle. She’d been dancing, but now the dancing changed; he caught her eyes somehow and she smiled, remembered who he was, eyes alight: dancing. Now she danced for him.
He’d limped one step through the crowd toward her.
Between them, in that moment, the thing happened where the real world fell away. She danced in a classroom; he played chess but never won. It was all wrong: a gun. She shot an arrow straight, too true, and he ran and ran until his leg became crooked and too real.
He limped that one step toward her, and her eyes pierced through all the lies of worlds that never were and now never would be, to this one thing that was true. Her smile turned inside out, her eyes went cold. She faltered and then danced again, but now the dancing was not the same. Before, she had danced for him. Then he woke up.
It lies beneath his clothes and dreams, this scar, a talisman to other worlds. She sees it every time she looks at him. Now she never dances for him. He still watches anyway.
That’s when the real world starts to fall away.
He could swear she’s dancing for him now. He never did stop watching; she can sneer and turn her back as much as she likes, doesn’t change the fact she looks like that, can dance like that, breathes like that.
Most the time, sometimes, he feels sorry for her: a patronising, wish-that-bitch would something-or-other, that bigot. Usually he respects her: the way she feels for the Market, family, Lydie and Toby, the way she understands what must be done. Every once in a while he thinks he hates her; most of the time he practises, most elaborately, indifference. But never once has he tried claim indifference to the burning-writhe and turn of her in a circle. Alan is too subtle to say anything so obviously a lie.
Still, he knows well: look, but don’t touch; wonder, but don’t taste; dream, but don’t ever wish you could be friends. Alan, the one who always longed for knowledge, knew he would never know her; she was not a snake that would speak to him. She was not fruit from a tree. She’d told him when they met: “No, it’s short for Cynthia,” and Alan used to try to be the good kid. He’s been lost a million times for a dozen other girls, but not for Sin.
But now he can’t stop himself from thinking that she’s dancing for him, and it’s playing tricks inside his mind. “I must be sleeping,” he is thinking.
You are waking, says Sin with-her-feet, in two-step time. Her red silk swaying, swinging looks like tongues of flame. He thought her so stone-cold, and here she is, dancing all for him.
Alan is indifferent to her. He has ... other things to worry about; he had Jamie, Mae, Nick ... is in a gang; Nick’s in a turf war; Nick ... doesn’t have a last name ... Alan shakes his head to clear it.
Wake up, Sin sighs in slide of arm, an arch of back, and come to me. He feet are fire, her legs limber, licking flames. She’s lit-up somehow, from within. The fire is for him.
Alan wants to stop watching, but Jamie’s gone away from them. Mae never wanted him, even when she kissed him, and Nick ... Nick has no last name, has always been of two worlds, a world of never was and now, never would be. Sometimes Alan is afraid Nick will leave him completely, become something else, find a new family ... find a new name.
Come inside my circle, dances Sin, warm and so full of fire. She burns with every turn. Come inside my circle, come inside, come. Wake up!
Alan feels so cold, and all alone. Here it is so dark.
She ate the fever fruit: for him. Juice at her mouth, her throat, running down inside her, opening her, so ready. The spark inside her kindled, so he knows her; he can see her. Then she began to move: for him. The sway of her, the silk, the stoking of the flame. And still, she dances for him, his illumination in the dark, his signal in the blackness, his hot in the cold -
he’s coming to her -
Liannan gets there first. It was for her, of course, that Sin danced all along.
“We never told Sin about our deal,” Liannan sighs.
“How can you be here when you’re supposed to be Merris?”
“I can be more than one person at once.”
“Then I’m dreaming,” so Alan concludes.
Liannan laughs, a dry rasp on her white throat, with blood. “Or maybe I’m just you.”
“No,” breathes Alan. No...
Inside Sin’s circle is a flame, and here it is so dark. So cold, and all alone. Sometimes there’s the fear Nick will leave completely, become something else, find a new family ... Hnikarr will find a new name...
Sometimes Alan fears the ones he loves will leave him. Sometimes he fears his lies have left him in the dark. Sometimes he is sure he is less human.
Sometimes he wished the circle had burned him all the way.
He wakes up and wishes she danced for him.
v. Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow
“Sin,” Mae whispers, “who’s that?”
“Let me guess. The redhead?” The twist to the other girl’s cherry mouth is wry. “That’s Alan Ryves.”
As if on cue, the tall boy in black - the most graceful boy Mae’s ever seen - falls upon them like a hunter’s shadow. “Hello, Cynthia. Who’s your friend?”
His smile is warm, but she doesn’t miss the way Sin’s back stiffens as his eyes slide down to her leg and back up to Mae’s face.
“I’m Mae,” she says, stepping protectively in front of the other girl. “I want to dance.”
o 0 O 0 o
“Mum?” her daughter asks. She turns and sees Sin, slight and small in her nightgown, past her bed time, standing in the hall. She is blinking, sleepy. Still not sure what is going on, until her eyes fall to the knife.
“Toby,” says Sin, stumbling in. “Toby, wake up.”
The child does not wake like other children do. Eyes snap open, black, and suddenly he is in this world.
“Sin,” says her mother, as if she could explain.
“Come on, Toby,” says Sin, not looking. In a hurry, as if that knife could still fall. As if she could still be sleeping and not have awakened in time. “I had a nightmare,” Sin tells it. “I need you to sleep with me.”
o 0 O 0 o
“You are such a liar!”
“I thought that was why you married me.” The man’s deep blue eyes are narrow with bitter humour behind his glasses, and Jamie sighs. He’s seen some real gems in his years as a relationship counsellor at MI6, but these two really take the cake. It’s like something out of a film. A terrible one.
“Mr Davies-Ryves, Ms Davies-Ryves, please. You’ve been in deep cover for a long time, and naturally you both have trust issues-”
The woman snorts, dramatically tossing her dark hair. “Oh, I can trust him just fine - in the middle of an operation, with fifteen lives on the line and a gun pointed at my head. But I can’t trust him to pick up the fucking dry-cleaning!”
“That’s rich,” he says coolly. “You’re the one who keeps forgetting to feed our cat. It’s lucky to be alive at this point.”
“I didn’t even know we had a cat until three weeks after you brought her home!”
“I wanted to see if you’d notice.”
Her eyebrows are all but leaping from her forehead as she cuts her eyes to Jamie, and then points at her husband. “This is exactly what’s wrong with you. You think everything is some kind of ... stupid game!”
And then their eyes meet, and it’s like the world narrows to just the two of them, and his voice almost resembles tenderness. “Not everything.”
Spooks are a tricky lot: Jamie’s seen too many relationships soar and crumble as they search for release. But these two - there’s a remarkable amount of passion that brims between them. More than enough to save them...
One corner of his mouth flicks up, and her poppy-red lips tighten just a fraction. “Besides, I always thought you liked our stupid games.”
...or destroy them. Jamie shakes his head as the war starts again in earnest. It’s going to be a bloody long day.
o 0 O 0 o
Alan is the perfectly wrong person to be seeing a psychiatrist. He’s happy, well-adjusted, never awkward. He’s the sort of man who makes you want to trust him, the sort of man you can talk to. The sort of man who should be on the other side of the desk, and that makes Gerald distrust him.
“Yes,” Alan agrees, mildly surprised. “Of course it’s all a lie.”
“But why?” Gerald has to know.
“Pathological, I suppose.” Alan smiles genially. “Isn’t that why I’m here, Doctor?”
Gerald marks something on his chart.
Alan gives a fluid shrug and goes on, “It might have something to do with Olivia.”
Gerald checks his notes again, and, “Your step-mother,” he remembers.
Alan nods. “She drowned my little brother in the bathtub when I was four.” His face carries all the trouble of a man who sips his tea and found that it has grown too cold. “He was a baby. She thought he was a demon, you see.”
Gerald usually shows his emotions. It’s a manipulation; it makes his patients comfortable. But something about Alan makes Gerald want to hide his shock. “A demon?” he repeats.
“Oh, yes.” The answer is off-hand, but Gerald begins to doubt everything about Alan, right down to his clear, bath-water eyes. “The problem is, my wife...”
“Sin,” Gerald supplies.
“Cynthia, yes; that’s right. The problem is that Cynthia’s brother...”
“Yes?” Gerald feels as though he’s on tenter-hooks.
“Cynthia’s brother was going to be possessed. She just didn’t believe me.”
“But you said...” Gerald flips through his notebook. “You said Cynthia’s brother-”
“Toby,” Alan says benignly.
“You said Toby was dead.” Then Gerald’s eyes widened. “You said that he was drowned.”
“Yes.” Alan sighs, almost amused. “You see the problem. Cynthia suspects.”
o 0 O 0 o
BREAKING NEWS BREAKING NEWS BREAKING NEWS
“Entertainment Tonight has just confirmed the breakup of one of Britain’s most beloved celebrity couples, Cynthia ‘Sin’ Davies and Alan Ryves.”
“Representatives for Sin, who was the runner-up on the first series of So You Think You Can Dance, and Alan, who has just released his second independent album following his successful stint on X-Factor, say that the separation was mutual and amiable. However, it comes amid widespread rumours of what sources have referred to as ‘dishonest’ behaviour on the parts of both parties.”
“The young pair first captured the public’s attention after Alan performed as a musical guest on So You Think You Can Dance. They revealed their relationship with a kiss on stage in one of the season’s most intense moments.
“The news will come as a terrible blow to fans of the couple, who referred to them as ‘Cynthialan’. Catherine Joyce and Hannah Kilpatrick, who run a site dedicated to the pair at singdancelove.com, say that fans remain hopeful amid a lack of confirmation from the couple themselves.”
“It’s perfectly possible that it’s a ruse,” said Ms Joyce. “So-called showbiz news is often inaccurate.”
“I won’t believe it until I see it on @soyouthinkyoucansin or @alanryves,” Ms Kilpatrick added.
“This is Rhiannon Leith, reporting for ET.”
o 0 O 0 o
“We’re putting on a play,” says Liannan, and looks just how she looked when she never danced with Sin, when Alan was a track star and Sin knew no more of dance than jazz ballet.
“I don’t act,” Alan said, acting his most bland and earnest.
“I’ll be Merris,” said Liannan, “and you can be me, and Hnikarr can be ... can be...”
“My brother,” bland and deadly.
“See!” she said, putting on the wrong costume. “You’re already one of us.”
“I’m not one of you,” Alan says.
Liannan shrugs. “Hnikarr was ours first.”
“These can be for Sin,” Liannan says, and pulls from the props-box Anzu’s wings. “She always was more human.”
o 0 O 0 o
In the end, he’d destroyed them all.
Sin had been the first to go: Nick had been having a bad day and she’d given Alan one of those looks and the next thing anyone knew, she was falling to her knees - to a hungry Anzu - in her circle.
Mae had been dancing with her. Collateral damage, Merris said. Regrettable, but we need the demon. We can’t fight the magicians without him.
Alan’s been looking after the remaining Davies siblings in a pathetic attempt to make reparations: Toby and Lydie have clung to every friendly face after the death of their sister, and he’s always been good with children. Sometimes they even smile. He knows it shouldn’t make him feel better.
They haven’t heard a word from Jamie since Mae was lost: sometimes Alan wonders if he’s given himself over to the Circle. If, someday, Nick will have to kill him too.
Sleep has evaded him for months, now; the whispers chase him as he walks through the Market, as he makes his plans, as he stumbles into his caravan at night.
You’ve already ended the world, Alan Ryves. It’s only fair that you end yourself first.
o 0 O 0 o
In the end, she’d loved them all.
Nick had been the first: Sin had been having a bad day, but Alan had given her one of those books to pay her to be nice. The next anyone knew, she was smiling - at a deadly Hnikarr - and he was in her circle.
There was Mae, of course, dancing with her. A great deal of initiative, Merris said. What the Market needs is someone intelligent and independent. Even if they were competition, now, Sin had liked Mae from the start.
There’s the remaining Crawford sibling, but he’s easy to like. They’re all depending on him now for information on the magician’s Circles, and that makes him a part of hers. Though he’s tired from Gerald and betrayal and the darkness, sometimes he even smiles. She knows it shouldn’t make her feel better.
She’s heard less from Merris now that Liannan is here. Sometimes Sin wonders if Merris let her in her circle, the one deeper than lines cuts in ground, deeper circles in the body or in blood. Even demons can be loved, and sometimes Sin wonders if she’ll have to love Liannan too.
Sleep comes more easily than it ever has. Sin loves, and trusts, and does not feel alone. Only then does she realise she’s left one person so close to her outside her circle, and it feels like waking up.
I already love everyone you love and all you stand for, Alan Ryves. It’s only fair I love you too.
vi. We wake like the gods
On the sixth day, Sin forgets how to breathe.
She has a burst-sun slice of fever fruit between her fingers and the sea is crashing metres from her feet, crescent crimson toenails, and she is trying to work out how one ends a war. There have been casualties recently, and her own strange dreams - Alan, soaked into her very soul, and she doesn’t understand - and she is thinking that this has gone on long enough. It’s time she took a stand, decided, did what she is meant to.
Pity she isn’t entirely sure what that is.
The sun paints her vision into gold strips and she turns to cut circles in the sand, the pieces of her skirt whipping around her bare legs. It’s cold out, that sort of sea-air bite that makes goosebumps explode, and she wishes she could go home and think.
Only, it’s Market night and Alan will be there and she still doesn’t know what’s going on.
She cuts the last edge of the circle and licks a drop of fever fruit juice from where it curves along her wrist, matching the tracery of veins. The world blooms brightly when she tastes it and she steps onto the edges of the circle, the seam crossing a world, and lets the beat of the sea start her dance.
Sand sprays up as she turns, twists, slips sideways for a second and nearly falls. This - this is what she loves: the excitement, the thrill of certain death if she trips. The tang of salt in the back of her throat and sun in her eyes and the vastness of a world that is not hers but could be, so easy. She could own a sunrise and a span of stars and this beach, this life, hers to take and live.
Sand sprays, and Sin slips.
There’s always a first time, her mother chimes in her ear, and she is not screaming but sucking in air, on all-fours in the sand. For a moment there, a heartbeat, she saw death curve its way above her, the horrors of what could have been if she had been dancing a few seconds longer, if a demon had been called sooner, if things had gone wrong.
She crunches sand between her fingers, dreams in her hands, and there is a voice, the last (first) person she wants to see right now.
His limp is a slap across her face, concern something ugly as she stares. “Cynthia,” he says, and his voice is layered deep with something dark and raw and hard - everything they are, these days. Sin lost a mother and Alan never really had a brother - it is strange, really, how broken they are, how their hatred fuels them, brisk and sad.
“Alan,” she says, and weariness lines the edges of her voice, the lilt of vowels. She is a girl who uses her words and her smiles and the curves of her skin to get what she wants, but Alan is different, strange; he doesn’t call her Sin, like he can make her less than she is. Like he can devolve her back into that twelve-year-old girl who thought the longer her name was, the prettier it made her feel.
She is so tempted to stay where she is, half curled over in the sand, but she hates the disadvantage of height and unfurls to her feet, scraping her hair back. “I’m fine,” she says, sharp. “What are you doing here?”
His eyes flash gold in the sunlight, glazed. “Battle plans,” he says, and there’s something expansive, uncharacteristically awkward, in the way his mouth curls. “I needed to talk to you and I was told you came here.”
Sin looks at him, eyes bitten by the wind, and she is no longer sure what they are; before, she had her hatred, pinnacled and decided, easy to cling to. Now - now she has dreams that slide through reality, confuse her; now, she has an Alan who played varsity sport, and an Alan who fought demons by her side and won, and now she has an Alan she can’t hate.
Her hair sprays around her, lashing, and he watches her, something steady and solid in his eyes, in his hands, in his soul. She can taste it, feel it, touch it-understands him, in that moment. Understands that he is a boy who has made better what he was dealt - that brother, this leg - and that she is a girl who is simply too scared to see.
He calls her Cynthia, a child’s name - perhaps because she still is.
The sun burns her eyelids, turns his irises to a streak of gold. “It’s harder here,” she says, too loud, her voice a ragged, streaming edge. “I have to focus and it takes me away and. I can’t dream.”
She watches his face, sees the way that half-edged curl of his mouth doesn’t move, his eyes don’t change at all. Knows that he has dreamt things too, simply because Alan is a boy who hides secrets and Sin is a girl who finds them out.
She is a Market girl, and he is a demon’s brother. They have been shaped, for each other, against each other, almost since birth.
“Do you dream?” he says, and she almost smiles with it, wide and raw and brilliant, the burn of a sunset, slow. These games they play, dancing around each other, feinting and tracing and making moves - how she loves them. They never end.
Sin tips her head to the side, smiles her secret smile, waits for him to figure it out. “Do I dream? Alan Ryves, dreaming is the only escape.”
His eyelashes are stark black, shadowed by sun. The sea screams a chorus and she realises that this is the defining moment she has been looking for; her whole life is caught up in strands of other people’s, tangled with siblings, bogged down by a Market she loves - she wants heartbeats, seconds that are only hers.
Somehow he is here, but she is still just Sin.
It has been a long time coming this moment, foreshadowed in memories, suggested in demon landscapes woven through time. Perhaps that is why she can taste the history in her mouth when she kisses him, tastes him, holds onto him, and perhaps that is why he kisses her back.
The sun is a triumphant burst behind Sin’s eyelids. She drags her hands through his hair and he is a long, lean warmth all down her stomach, hands hard on her back, pushing her in. His mouth is brilliant, alive, and she thinks she might explode with it, torn nerve-endings, the raw thrum of a power she only feels in dance.
And maybe that is why Alan Ryves lost a leg and a life: to give him something back, energy, that beat of understanding, the drunken tang of lies so powerful and sweet that Sin can taste them on his tongue.
Her nails scrape in his hair, his hands are hot on her skin. They crash apart as Time slips from one step into the next and stare at each other, her mouth a swollen crimson gleam, his eyes wild, dangerous.
“Sin,” he says, and she hates him, loves him, because this - this is what she has been looking for. Someone who she can play games with, but someone who ultimately understands.
His smile is sudden and fierce with borrowed sweetness. “Sin,” he says again, and she wants to taste his smile again, balls her hands into fists to stop herself from taking and not giving back. “Don’t we have a war to weave?”
Her laugh is electric, thrumming along his spine, chasing its way through his nerves. “Of course,” she says, and drags him down into the sand, pressing a brief, open-mouthed kiss to his cheek, trace of tongue. “Battle plans, and then the rest of our lives.”
“If we get a chance to live them.” But she can see the excitement in him, tempered with fear of what is to come; she loves it, loves that he cares and then loves that when it comes down to it he wants blood.
He somehow steals her knife - the easily reached one, not the one hidden in her shorts - and she leans over as he traces maps, plans, diagrams into the sand, building worlds and elaborate, distinct ways for them to win. She rubs out his drawings when they don’t make sense - Alan is used to working with a brother, not an army - and he turns and smiles at her, slow and sweet and wild.
“Sin,” he says, like he can’t stop, as the glaze of the sun starts to sink.
You who never arrived
in my arms, Beloved, who were lost
from the start,
I don’t even know what songs
would please you. I have given up trying
to recognize you in the surging wave of
the next moment. All the immense
images in me - the far-off, deeply-felt
landscape, cities, towers, and bridges, and
unsuspected turns in the path,
and those powerful lands that were once
pulsing with the life of the gods-
all rise within me to mean
you, who forever elude me.
- Rainer Maria Rilke
Ephemera
CREDITS
Section titles, in order of first appearance, are taken or adapted from: Despedida, Jorge Luis Borges; Poem For A Birthday, Sylvia Plath; Macbeth, William Shakespeare; Perfest Love Casteth Out Everything, Randall Jarrell; You Who Never Arrived, Rainer Maria Rilke
Images: sxc.hu, Deviantart, Google Images, weheartit
Footage: So You Think You Can Dance (Karla and Legacy); Bluebells by Patrick Wolf
Song: Easier to Lie by Aqualung
Casting: Karla Garcia, Patrick Wolf, Ryan Taylor and Katerina Graham
Authors: aiscat93, hanelissar, kiyala, orexisbella, tkp
Pairing: Alan/Sin
Rating: T
Summary: One war. Five dreams, five nights, an infinite number of worlds to conquer. Alan and Sin struggle to find each other.
Three hundred nights like three hundred walls
must rise between my love and me
and the sea will be a black art between us
- Jorge Luis Borges
i. The first syllable of recorded time
The boy gazes avidly at the countryside flying by, nose pressed against the glass, his feet in bright white new trainers kicking against the as-yet unscuffed leather of the front seat. He wriggles his shoulders, jiggling with badly contained excitement. The man beside him glances from the road momentarily to look down and chuckle.
“Looking forward to the Market, Alan?” Daniel ruffles his son’s hair affectionately. “Have you thought about the sort of talisman you’d like?” Alan’s brow furrows in concentration as he thinks. He’s mature for his age but still really just a little boy.
“I’d like ... I’d like a big one, Dad. A really big one so it can protect Nick as well.”
There’s silence for a moment. Daniel feels it hanging, an awkward burden on the humid air inside the car. “No, Alan, you don’t need to do that. Nick will have his own talisman, remember? You don’t have to share.”
“But I want to, Dad. I want to look after him!”
A fond smile, soft as a whisper, fleets across Daniel’s face. “I know, son. And you will. But you and Nick will have separate talismans - after all, if he has a whole talisman to himself, he’ll be safer, won’t he?”
Alan beams up at him, trusting. “Yes, Dad.”
Daniel turns his attention back to the road. “Now ... is this the turning? Can you check the map for me?”
o 0 O 0 o
The Market is bustling and mad and nothing like Alan could ever have imagined. None of his storybooks have ever prepared him for this profusion of noise and colour, of strange, acrid smells which burn his nostrils, and strains of haunting music that make him want to run and run and never ever stop.
There are so many people, and so many weapons ... Alan’s never seen a gun before. But he sees guns now, sees more guns than he’d ever imagined the world could hold, as Daniel pulls him past a stall covered in muskets and rifles and pistols and guns Alan doesn’t think even Long John Silver would have recognised.
“Alan? Are you alright, Alan?”
Biting his lip, Alan nods cautiously.
“Yes. Yes, I’m fine, Dad. It’s just a bit...” He waves his hand, not able to quite find the words for it. Daniel gives his hand a quick squeeze.
“I know. But this is our world now, Alan. And it’s new and exciting! Come on, I’ve been told to find someone called Merris. Do you want to see if you can spot her first?”
o 0 O 0 o
The girl is young, younger than him, but if she stood next to him he expects she’d reach his shoulder. Her long dark hair is a sweeping curtain that swishes as she turns and laughs, like the women on television. Olivia’s hair is just as dark, but it doesn’t swish like that. But then, Alan thinks, Olivia’s also never laughed like the girl is laughing, and Olivia’s skin is pale and sallow, sickly. This girl, who is getting closer every moment, has brown skin, the colour of the swirly coffee stain on the sideboard, which Daniel has never remembered to wipe off and Alan has never wanted to remind him about. It’s a nice colour, a rich colour, and he can’t stop staring at it.
“What are you looking at?” He’s drawn from his daydreams abruptly to find the girl is standing only a few feet away, hands on her hips. She’s glowering at him and he jumps to his feet quickly.
“I, I’m sorry. I ... I’m new. My dad told me to, to wait here while he spoke to Merris and stuff.”
Her face relaxes. He’s not a threat. “Oh. Alright then. Are you going to watch the dancing?”
Alan looks a little helpless; he has no idea what she’s talking about.
The girl grins. “You do know about dancing, don’t you?”
“I … no. I don’t.” She’s younger than him but she makes him feel like a baby. “Will you tell me?”
“No.”
Alan’s face falls and he is about to turn to slink back to his father, who is bargaining with a crooked man over some terrifying-looking blades, when he feels a little hand on his elbow.
“I won’t tell you. I’ll show you. I can dance now - I’ve been training and training and mum took me to Merris the other week and she says I’m ready so I’m going to do my first dance today. Only a little demon of course, you can’t start with any of the big powerful ones, but you can’t dance up a demon can you?”
Alan has absolutely no idea about half of what she’s just said, but he’s fairly sure he can answer her question. “No.” He says honestly. “Are you going to do it now, then? Can I sit here?”
“Yes. Sit there and watch. We’ll be starting soon.” She’s about to spin on her heel and run back to her fellow dancers, when she sticks out a confident hand. “I’m Sin, by the way.”
“Sin? Like a Bible sin?” Sin laughs at him, her cherry mouth wide and smiling and his heart lifts. He likes her.
“No, it’s short for Cynthia. But nobody calls me that.”
Alan takes her hand and shakes it firmly, the way he sees his father do when meeting strangers on the way to becoming friends. “I’m Alan. I’ll call you Cynthia.”
Her eyes glitter as she moves away from him, back to the spot where they are cutting lines and circles into the soft earth in patterns he’s sure he’ll never understand.
“Alright.” She throws the acceptance over her shoulder casually and he catches it. Keeps it.
o 0 O 0 o
It takes longer than he expects before the dancing starts. Alan has always been a patient boy, happy to sit wherever he’s put and wait for as long as it takes, but today he’s fidgeting. For some reason his leg keeps twitching and no amount of glaring and firm gripping above the kneecap seems to stop it.
But at last, as the last of the sun’s rays clip the tree tops and the Market is swallowed into dusk, they’re ready. A myriad of bobbing Chinese lanterns flare into brightness and everything suddenly seems to become more mysterious. More serious. The dancers are all barely clothed in scraps of red silk; Alan can see creamy white thighs and languorous dark limbs wherever he looks. It would be easy for a little girl to get lost in the bustle, for him to blink and miss her moving to the right, stepping forward to take a bite from the dark fruit spilling its juices over her chin.
It would be so easy.
But she doesn’t get lost and he doesn’t blink and miss her. He watches as she steps confidently onto the circles, as she lifts her head and tosses her hair coquettishly. It should look comical on such a little girl but somehow ... she carries it off. She’s so sure of herself.
She wasn’t really that good...
The words whisper insidiously into his ear and he whips his head around. Nobody there. And suddenly he isn’t sure if he even heard anything at all. Shivering, he pulls his sleeves over cold fingers and huddles a little closer to the dancers. To Sin.
o 0 O 0 o
It’s over soon, far too soon. Sin accepts something shining that might be gold doubloons or might just be pound coins from a tall, rake-like man shrouded in powder blue, and then she sashays over to sit next to Alan. Her red dress is slipping from one shoulder and Alan automatically reaches over to pull it back up for her. She laughs unselfconsciously.
“What did you think, Alan? Did you like it?”
Alan nods fervently. “It was the best thing I’ve ever seen.” His eyes are glowing. “I wish I could dance like that.”
Suddenly Sin bounds to her feet, seizing Alan around the wrist. Her fingers are warm.
“I’ll teach you! I’ll teach you to dance and then you can practise and practise and maybe one day you can come and dance with me. It’ll be really fun, Alan!”
Alan is still stumbling to gain his footing on the ground - his leg’s fallen asleep after sitting in one position for so long.
“No, Cynthia, I can’t. I’d be really bad and my dad’s probably waiting... ” He turns, but unfortunately Daniel is very much not waiting. He’s leaning on a counter, speaking to a veiled woman. Sin laughs.
“That’s my mum. She’s probably telling him about dancing, how it works and stuff. It’s not very interesting really; the dancing is the important bit. Come on Alan, there’s a field over here we can practise in...”
Not knowing what else to do, Alan lets himself be dragged across the grass.
“Put your foot there, no, turn your toes out. Then turn ... no, the other way!” Alan stumbles through the steps and then, quite suddenly, he’s got it. His body twists lightly, gracefully, and the soles of his shoes strike the ground in perfect time with the clapping of Sin’s hands.
She laughs, delighted. “See, I knew you’d be good at this!” Alan’s flushed and sweaty-faced from the exertion, but he’s exhilarated. He beams back at her, then grabs her by the wrist and pulls her into a spontaneous dance. Laughing, they muddle through the improvised steps, moving back and forth until Alan tries to spin Sin under his arm and underestimates how tall she actually is: they stick halfway through and have to untangle themselves.
“Very impressive.”
Sin’s head snaps up at once.
“Mum!” Loosing herself from Alan, she runs over to hug her mother. “Mum, did you see me dancing? I called up the demon-all by myself!”
Sin’s mother sweeps her into a hug that puts a lump in Alan’s throat. He turns to his father, who has stridden up beside them. “Hey, Dad.”
“Alan. Have you been enjoying yourself?”
Alan slips his hand into his father’s. “Yes, it’s been brilliant. This is Cynthia, except everyone else calls her Sin. She’s been teaching me how to dance.”
“Mm. We were watching - very impressive! Ms Davies here has been telling me you’ve got the makings of an excellent dancer.”
Feeling his face warm with pride and embarrassment, Alan looks shyly up at the tall, beautiful woman Sin is skipping around. “Really? You, you think I could dance with proper dancers one day? With, with Sin?”
The two adults share a look which Alan cannot interpret. A wry smile, a twinkle of the eye that he knows won’t be explained, no matter how much he begs.
“Maybe,” said Ms Davies. “Your dad tells me you’ll be back soon - keep practising and maybe one day you can help Sin here dance up a demon. If,” she adds, grabbing her scampering daughter by the shoulders so that she has to stop frolicking, “she can stop trying to give us all motion sickness.”
Sin grins, utterly unabashed. She’s so full of confidence, of her sense of self. “Sorry, Mum.”
o 0 O 0 o
Later, in the car on the way home, Alan is almost as bouncy as he was on the way out. He can’t wait to tell Nick all about the Market, to practise dancing.
Daniel says: “I’m so glad you've made a friend. Especially such a nice girl as Cynthia. What was it her mother called her? Sin? And she's teaching how to dance - that's exciting. I'm really happy you're friends. Perhaps one day, when you're older, you might even...”
And then suddenly Alan is awake and sitting up in bed, sweat-slicked and hand on his heart. It’s totally dark, totally silent. And his dreams - his memories - are totally heartbreaking.
ii. This is the city where we are mended
“Cynthia Davies, why on earth did you choose this place?” Isabelle feels her eyebrows skip up her forehead as she ogles the miniature jukebox and blue suede shoes mounted on the cherry-red walls. “It’s awfully quaint. Is your new boy toy too highbrow to meet your best friend at a club like a normal person?”
Across the table, a hint of colour blooms in Sin’s cheeks. “Oh, don’t full-name me, Miss Chang. I mentioned this place to him as a joke, okay? But he looked ... interested.”
“You agreed to go to this cheesy 1950s diner because he looked interested? Dear god, it must be love.” Isabelle snickers and watches her friend fiddle with the red-and-white striped straw bobbing in her cola float. “You took your time before revealing him to the outside world, too. Haven’t you been dating for ages now?”
“Almost two months.” Sin’s always been a bit of a fidgeter, and now her slender brown fingers travel restlessly up to worry the pendant hanging around her neck. “I wonder where he is? It’s not like him to be late, Izzy. And I told him I’d punch him if he was.”
“Oh, I think that’s him now.” Isabelle doesn’t miss the way the other girl’s eyes slide to the door at her words, and she watches speculatively as it swings open to admit a tall, slender redhead.
She has to admit, Alan Ryves isn’t the sort of boy that she ever thought Sin would be interested in. Oh, he’s popular and athletic and brilliant - all things Izzy approves of, of course - but he’s rather harmless-looking, lacking the bad boy edge of a Seb MacFarlane or Joe Carr.
His smile is warm, though, and he gallantly offers a hand as he reaches their booth. “Isabelle Chang, I presume? It’s lovely to meet you, finally.”
A little bemused, Isabelle gives him a firm handshake. “Please, call me Izzy.”
o 0 O 0 o
“So, tell me how you guys met. I have to admit, in spite of her legendary powers of attractiveness, I didn’t expect Miss Davies here to hook up with the Head Boy quite so quickly - and withholding all the details, moreover,” she adds archly.
His laugh is rich and sunny: it draws her in, like a fire. Isabelle is surprised to realise it, but she’s starting to understand Alan Ryves’s appeal.
“I sang for Ms Beacon’s class.”
“Ms Beacon? Your nutty history professor?” Izzy raises an eyebrow at Sin, who dissolves into a fit of giggles. “That’s the one, Iz. The one who dresses like a pastel gypsy and has, like, thirty lamps in her office. She just adores Alan.”
“Hey,” he laughingly protests, cutting into his burger, “Ms Beacon isn’t so bad. She’s just ... eccentric.”
“This one’s too nice.” Sin pinches his arm. “She had him come in and sing for her folklore class - introduced him with heaps of gushing, too,” she says, smirking.
“I wouldn’t get too cocky, Cynthia,” Alan teases. “She might try to steal me away.”
She snorts. “You’d look cute together. Anyway, he sang, it was gorgeous, I caught his eye and he couldn’t look away.”
“Definitely couldn’t,” he says amiably. “But you’re the one who showed up at my football practice the next day.”
“Oh, she’s a forward one, alright,” Izzy puts in.
Sin rolls her eyes. “Well, you looked like the sort who liked to take things slow. Slow’s just not my style, darling.”
“I’m not complaining.” The smile he gives her is rich and almost predatory, and for a minute Isabelle thinks she sees sparks flying between them.
She’s starting to understand it very well indeed.
o 0 O 0 o
“Sorry I’m late, Ms Cromwell.”
Merris nods briefly at her student. “Just as long as it doesn’t happen again, Cynthia. We’ve got less than a month until the UDO championships. Go ahead and get warmed up; Rhiannon’s already started.”
The two girls are a study in contrasts: Sin, dark and passionate, cuts a fiery figure against red-haired Rhiannon’s cool, measured movements and icy poise. Graceful as water, Rhiannon slides down to the floor as Sin executes a perfect switch leap over her body and drops to her knees; hands together, they rise and segue into a series of concentric spins.
The drums of the song are rising as the girls freeze, face to face, but instead of the next movement, Sin’s back snaps to ramrod straightness and she begins to step, quick and sure and completely wrong.
Merris rises from her seat, confused and irritated by this ridiculous turn of events, but Rhiannon has apparently decided to join her partner in this mutiny: face as implacable as ever, the redhead is matching Sin move for move in a bizarre tango. Their steps draw invisible lines across the room’s floor as they dance and turn amid the throb of the music; Sin throws her head back as if possessed, feet flying almost fast enough to blur.
The song peters out and - as suddenly as she started - Sin drops to her knees, panting.
“What on earth,” says Merris, “was that?”
Rhiannon says nothing, studying the other girl coolly with her unnervingly still eyes.
o 0 O 0 o
Alan hums as he turns the corner of the oval, sneaking a quick peek at his wrist to check his time. Not bad, but I’ll have to speed it up a bit if I’m going to win a better medal this year.
His legs are pleasantly warm as he lengthens his stride. The track speeds easily beneath his feet: he’s always loved running, and he’s always been good at it. I’m going to miss this.
The reminder that his last school games are soon approaching spurs him on, and he kicks it up a gear. The sky is flying by now as he streaks towards the next turn -
- pain.
Gasping, Alan stops in the middle of the track as his left leg threatens to crumple beneath him.
Not again.
o 0 O 0 o
“Umm, Coach Carl?” Jamie knows his voice is wavering a little, but in these circumstances he feels it’s called for. “These things look ... dangerous.”
Carl Steele laughs, waving the bow with the confidence of a man who sleeps with sharp edges. “Don’t worry, Jamie, they’re really not. Well, they are if you shoot one another with them, but they can’t hurt the targets!”
Not at all reassured, Jamie casts a suspicious eye over the rest of his classmates, taking a moment to be grateful that Seb and Joe and Nick and their little gang of bullies are in a different class. Quite a few other people look as nervous as he is, but a few yards away, Sin Davies is hefting one of the heavy bows curiously. Alan’s new girlfriend, his brain supplies. Pity. He’d always hoped Alan and Mae would start going out.
Jamie sees a smile curve her cherry mouth as she assumes the stance, and an unbidden shiver runs up his spine.
The arrow flies straight and true, penetrating the bullseye with a killing blow.
o 0 O 0 o
In that moment, Sin catches herself waiting for blood to spill.
The stunned silence is broken by Isabelle’s crowing laugh. “Oh my god, Sin, how did you do that? That’s amazing!”
She faces her friend with a ready smirk, but all she can think of are lines blurring under her feet and a cold, rising flame.
What’s happening to me?
o 0 O 0 o
“Checkmate.” Mae knows she sounds smug, but she doesn’t care.
Alan stares down at the board, then narrows his eyes at her for a moment before leaning back with a sigh. “That’s my third straight loss. It’s really hard to play against someone as attractive as you, you know.”
“Excuses, Ryves, nothing but excuses. You’re a bloody sorry excuse for a co-captain.” She laughs and flips her hair back, raising one pink eyebrow. “Is your new girlfriend tiring you out that much?”
“She is, but don’t tell her that,” he says, grin alight with self-deprecating charm as he sets up the pieces for another go.
Mae leans forward to examine the board. “Does she play?”
He moves his King’s pawn two spaces, then looks up with a dry expression. “No, but she seems utterly thrilled when I start relating my exciting tales of chess practice. Maybe you should try to recruit her.”
She grins at him as she mirrors his opening move. “Yeah, I suppose she would think we’re all boring nerds around here. You most of all.”
“Ah, but chess’s effect on society was so intense and widespread that a saint once denounced it for its evil effects! Men have died for chess, Mae.” The edge to his smile is a little manic, and Mae can’t help but give him a look.
“I know you’re big on your Discovery Channel factoids, Alan, but you really have the weirdest notion of what’s interesting.”
o 0 O 0 o
Isabelle stretches out her legs, sliding on her dancing shoes. “Listen, girlfriend, not that I’m not flattered, but you’re really have been better off asking Mae to run through this with you if you really didn’t want to take another spin with your creepy partner. I’m not much for jazz, you know.”
Sin makes a pleading face at her. “Please, Iz? Mae had chess, and Rhiannon really unnerved me last time. You’re my only hope.”
“You’re lucky you’re gorgeous, missy. But none of that jumping over my head business, okay?”
“I know.” The other girl beams at her as they settle into the first movement. Izzy knows she’s a little awkward at this, but Sin compensates, somehow managing to slow down while still staying in time with the music.
Izzy meets Sin’s eyes with a grin as they finish the spins, but as the drums rise and pound, her friend’s eyes suddenly snap wide -
o 0 O 0 o
It’s as if a curtain has come rippling down: Isabelle’s face distorts, and Sin sees her friend in a locked room, eyes vacant and black. As she watches, horrified, a cockroach creeps out of her mouth and down one waxy cheek. She grabs at the door, digging her fingernails into the cold metal, and is surprised to feel it give under her hands.
“Sin!” The shock and pain in Izzy’s voice is like a splash of cold water, and she jerks, realising she’s clutching the other girl’s arms. “Oh my god, Iz, I’m so sorry! I don’t know what just happened...”
As she sinks to the floor, Isabelle slides down with her, gathering her into her arms. “What on earth is wrong with you?”
“I don’t know, Iz. Maybe I’m just tired.” She leans into her friend’s shirt for a moment before straightening up, trying to shake off the terror still thrumming through her blood. “I’m going to find Alan and talk to him before practice, okay?”
Her legs feel heavy as she makes her way across the room, feeling Isabelle’s eyes on her with every step.
o 0 O 0 o
“Hey, sweetheart, I’ve been looking all over for you. Where have you been?”
Sin slides up on her tiptoes to press the quickest of kisses to the corner of Alan’s mouth, and his hand settles on one slender hip. “I was just out on the field,” he says, blue eyes warm. “Are we going out for dinner?”
“Not right now, unfortunately.” Sin wrinkles her nose as she fiddles with his lapel. “We have practise with Ms Cromwell again, so I’ll be here until seven-thirty or so. Come and get me after?”
“Of course,” he murmurs, and with a lush smile she spins away, gold necklace glinting against dark hair.
Mae eyes him curiously. “Alan, why did you lie to her?”
He blinks at her, confused. “What are you talking about, Mae?”
“You weren’t on the field; we were at chess club. Remember?”
Panic fractures his features. “Oh my god. It’s happening again.”
“What’s happening again? Alan, where are you going?” Mae’s voice echoes down the hall, following him as he runs for the doors. “What the hell is wrong with you?”
The doors swing closed behind him.
o 0 O 0 o
Nick watches the tall redhead curiously as he slams out of Trinity’s front doors. Alan Ryves is the antithesis of everyone Nick hangs out with: Head Boy, star athlete, winner of the hypothetical Least Likely To Get An Asbo, Ever award. In any other world, Nick would dismiss him as a self-righteous goody-two-shoes - all the other guys certainly have. But something about Alan Ryves intrigues Nick (well, something other than his blistering hot jazz dancer girlfriend and his luscious chess club co-captain), and he finds himself following the clearly agitated boy as he wanders through the streets of Exeter.
He’s so intrigued, in fact, that he somehow misses the three or four shadows that accumulate stealthily behind him - and the fist that slams him into an alleyway.
Nick rolls with the first punch and grabs the wrist attached to it, pulling back just enough to notice the odd tattoo on his attacker’s forearm. Damn. Seb had warned him about these guys - they called themselves the Green Circle or something equally stupid, and a turf war was escalating between him and Joe’s “superior”.
He curses as he ducks another first and sweeps a second man’s legs from under him. Nick’s a good fighter, but he’s outnumbered - and about to be even more outnumbered, judging from the approaching footsteps on the pavement behind him. He tenses, readying himself for the next blow -
- and stares in amazement as Alan Ryves barrels into the third man, landing a punch directly on his face.
o 0 O 0 o
Sin’s going to kill me.
Alan really doesn’t know what drove him into this fight - into the middle of a gang war. He doesn’t even know Nick’s last name; he’s just one of the boys who makes Jamie’s life a living hell. But something inside him flinches at the thought of this virtual stranger bloodied and hurt, and so he drives his fist into his opponent’s stomach.
“You’re going to lose this fight, you bastards. Celeste doesn’t tolerate anyone moving in on her turf!” The attacker’s voice is an ugly hiss, and Alan catches the glint of metal beneath the dull glow of the streetlights.
Shit. Well, Sin’s really going to kill me - if these guys don’t finish the job first.
Nick’s spotted the gun, and has gone straight for the man brandishing it. As they struggle, the weapon clatters to the ground - Alan doesn’t think, he just dives -
His hand wraps around it like a glove, and he straightens with his arm out. “You should all back away now.”
The largest man bares his teeth in an ugly, mocking grimace. “Do you even know how to use that, boy? I could have you on the ground before you figured out how to shoot.”
A second later he’s jumping away as a shot finds its mark right between his feet.
Alan feels a cold smirk crawling across his face. It’s hard not flinch from the steel in his own voice. “I don’t think you want to bet your life on that.” And they don’t.
When the attackers have scattered, he turns his attention to the other boy. Nick’s taken some obvious damage, but he’s leaning against the alley wall with apparent nonchalance, studying Alan with blank eyes.
“Alright there, mate?”
For a moment he thinks Alan sees a rush of fire in the black pupils, but a short nod and a grunted “thanks” is all the reply he gets as Nick turns away and vanishes into the night.
o 0 O 0 o
“Are you crazy? You could have been killed! For a boy you barely know - for a boy everyone barely knows!”
Sin drops like a stone on to her favourite chair in the music room, burying her face in her hands for a moment before snapping back up to glare at her boyfriend. He looks as calm as ever and even a little defiant, which infuriates her even more.
“They could have really hurt him, Sin.”
“They could have really hurt you.”
Alan falls to his knees in front of her, meeting the worry and fear and anger in her face head-on, and she lets him take her hands in his. “I’m sorry. But I did what I had to do. And ... I don’t think I was in any real danger.”
She feels her mouth tighten. “How were you not in any real danger? They had a fucking gun!”
He hesitates for a moment, midnight eyes shifting between the cold tile floor and her face. “The gun - it got knocked around a bit during the fight, and ... I grabbed it. And I knew what to do with it, Sin.”
Alan’s face is miserable and scared, and his the familiarity of his story makes her queasy. She leans forward, resting her forehead on his, and takes a deep breath. “Have you ever handled one before?”
He shakes his head, runs a hand through his tumbling russet curls. “I knew exactly what to do with it. Like it was an extension of my arm.”
Sin purses her lips. “I shot a bullseye on my first try in Archery the other day. I’ve never even touched a bow before.”
He looks at her with surprise and worry and - is that pride? “Has ... anything else happened?”
It all comes spilling out, then: the visions when she’s dancing, his uncontrollable white lies. She feels lightheaded and overwhelmed, and they can only sit there for a while, clutching each other for balance. The world seems fuzzy and surreal: even the sunlight streaming through the windows is a little too yellow, a little too cold.
When he finally speaks, his voice is hoarse. “It doesn’t matter.”
Confused, she pulls back to look at him. “What doesn’t matter?”
“This. All of it, any of it.” Alan’s eyes are on her face, lush and dark and fever-bright. “Maybe we have fallen down some kind of rabbit-hole, and that’s why all these bizarre things are happening. But whatever world we live in, I just know I want to be with you.”
Sin isn’t the sentimental type, but his words warm her in a way even the sun can’t match. She leans in to kiss him, pausing briefly to murmur a quiet “yes” against his mouth.
o 0 O 0 o
It’s only a practice run, but Alan’s legs are burning.
The track feels like fire beneath his feet as he turns the corner. He can see Sin waiting just beyond the finish line, the wind whipping her hair into a black flag. He puts on a burst of speed - and then he hears her scream, and the pain shoots up his leg like a bolt of lightning.
Alan stumbles, but pushes himself forward. The ground is dissolving into flames, crawling up his heels and ankles. His blood thrums with fear but he knows that he has to keep going, has to reach her: she’s calling out to him, now; he can’t make out her words but he can feel her urging him on.
Behind him a terrible avian cry rings out. His mind flashes back to hours spent watching the Discovery Channel: is it a monster? A vulture on speed? The bizarre thought wrings a sob-laugh from his lips as his feet pound what’s left of the oval.
He’s getting close to Sin, now. Alan can make out the shape of her mouth, twisted in anguish, the hand clinging to her pendant like a lifeline. He mirrors her, clutching at his chest-and pulls his hand away with a hiss when it encounters hot metal: his second place medal from last year. He doesn’t remember putting it on, but now the fire has turned it into a branding iron and it’s impossible to ignore.
Her words strain towards his ears, shrill with fear.
“Take it off, Alan! Take it off, it’s burning you! Alan!”
He reaches for the ribbon, but her voice sounds wrong: he can see her mouth moving as she cries out, but his eyes are jarring with his ears. He hesitates - and then he sees her fall, and her name tears itself from his throat.
“Sin! SIN!”
He spurs his ragged legs onward, one hand scrambling at the ribbon, but his leg -his leg’s stopped working, he’s dragging it with every lunging step but it’s not - not moving, oh god what’s happening-
Sin’s pushing herself up and towards him, her body jerking unnaturally; the fire is blistering his feet and his leg is folding beneath him and he’s falling and darkness is closing in on both of them -
o 0 O 0 o
- Alan’s lungs are still on fire when he jerks awake, clutching his talisman.
o 0 O 0 o
On the other side of the Market’s camp, Sin buries her face in her hands and tries to push the fear away.
iii. O, afternoons earned with suffering
Here, there are circles within circles, infinite concentricity, and Sin thinks that perhaps it’s an apt reflection of life. After all, there’s nothing that makes her feel more alive than this, dancing along the seam between two worlds, relying on her own strength and ability not to miss a step. It’s a long fall from here, she knows, and shivers.
Her face never betrays her thoughts, cherry red lips arranged into a slight pout as she concentrates, her grip firm on the ceremonial knife, its blade biting into the cool earth beneath her. She moves her arm in arm arc that is perfect from practice, and begins on the lines of travelling. There was a time when her mother would have watched her do this, making sure it was correct. Then, it would have been Merris, but that time has passed now, too, and there is nothing to be done but grit her teeth and carry on.
Around her, the other dancers cut their own circles, merely part of her periphery. The musicians set up their instruments, warming up to the undertone of muffled drums. Stalls come up as the sun sets, and the Goblin Market slowly comes to life.
o 0 O 0 o
The dancers’ circles have been cut into the ground and with a whirl of coloured skirts that stand out against the black of the night, the real dancing begins.
Sin’s feet move along the lines she’s cut into her own circle and around her, the others dance to their own time, all to the steady beat of the music. She’s done before her partner and she glances around, taking in the Market, her Market.
There’s the usual ring of tourists and other patrons, watching the dance. For a moment, she sees the glint of glasses, a soft, familiar face that she recognises immediately. Her partner is done and they’re calling up a demon to answer a question, and Sin pushes all other thoughts out of her mind. Before it disappears, the demon looks at her and she wonders if she imagines its chuckle.
Before she starts the next dance, Sin makes sure that it is Alan in the crowd, that he is watching her. She affects disinterest in this and reaches for another piece of fever fruit.
The moment she bites down, the entire world comes alive around her, in splashes of colour and shimmering light. She sees her dancing partner, watching her with the unmasked lust of the fever fruit. She sees Alan, and she laughs a throaty laugh.
Are you watching this, Alan Ryves?
She dances. She has no choice but to move her body, twisting, turning, stepping and returning to the precipice. She feels inhuman things reaching for her - hands that stretch toward her and through right there, simultaneously one of the most valuable and most unpredictable allies of the Market, and it’s the danger that draws her in, the knowledge of the fall that awaits her if she isn’t careful. It’s just like dancing: electricity in the air, heart pounding, and adrenaline pumping.
And they’re not even looking at each other yet.
o 0 O 0 o
That night, she dreams. Memories weave themselves together, held in place with dream logic, making no sense but fitting together perfectly all the same. In the snapshot of one moment, Sin’s mother is dead, stolen from her by the demons. In another, she watches Merris resign herself to the same fate.
Alan is there in both. Alan is silent and sympathetic and Sin wants to cry, to scream, you don’t know what it’s like, but he does and it’s all the more frustrating. She can see the understanding in his soft gaze and it’s worse than all the pity in the world because she wants to share nothing with this traitor, this demon-lover, this liar.
Then he is no longer Alan, but Nick, or perhaps both. She looks at him and thinks that perhaps she could love him, but there is a coldness in his eyes. He has no emotion. No heart. His words mean nothing, his actions are purely for his own gain and in this dream - or perhaps it is a nightmare - his face flickers from Alan to Nick to Alan to Nick to -
“Alan,” she says, and her voice catches in her throat. He has a mark on him and she never truly said this to him, but she thinks that perhaps she should have. “Thank you.”
He smiles his infuriating smile. She can never measure its sincerity; it is careful and calculated, just like her own. Chameleons, Mae had called them both. She knows it’s true. Perhaps that is the reason she can’t stand him. Why she is inexplicably drawn to him, and cannot escape him in the real world, not in the Goblin Market, and not even in her dreams.
Dreams... she thinks, and Alan’s smile grows.
She’s dreaming. The knowledge startles her awake and she breathes, slow and calm, as she opens her eyes and looks at the ceiling of the caravan.
Lydie sleeps on, undisturbed. So does Toby. Her little brother, safe because of Alan. She knows, on some level, that if it had been anybody else, if he’d done something so stupid and noble for anybody that wasn’t hers, she would dismiss it as just that. Misguided nobility, or something equally laughable.
And yet...
It’s different, because it’s Toby, and she knows this. She is all too aware of the fact that this one simple action has made her see him in a different light. A new perspective, and if it doesn’t let her see past his masks and through his carefully-planned actions, at least she’s looking at the puzzle from a different angle.
And perhaps, from this angle, she will allow herself to like Alan Ryves.
iv. Nights hoping for the sight of you
When Sin dances, Alan watches.
Sometimes he still dreams she dances for him.
She did the first time. Alan remembers it like sleeping: the thing that happens when the real world falls away. She danced for him and then he woke up.
The next time, Alan could barely walk, and had a cane. He used a branch he had found and Nick had carved. Even so small, Nick had been good with sharp objects.
Alan hadn’t been ashamed. He’d remembered her dark hair, her eyes, not-the-Bible, and her smile. Alan never forgot when people were kind, and so he’d sought her out.
She was in her circle. She’d been dancing, but now the dancing changed; he caught her eyes somehow and she smiled, remembered who he was, eyes alight: dancing. Now she danced for him.
He’d limped one step through the crowd toward her.
Between them, in that moment, the thing happened where the real world fell away. She danced in a classroom; he played chess but never won. It was all wrong: a gun. She shot an arrow straight, too true, and he ran and ran until his leg became crooked and too real.
He limped that one step toward her, and her eyes pierced through all the lies of worlds that never were and now never would be, to this one thing that was true. Her smile turned inside out, her eyes went cold. She faltered and then danced again, but now the dancing was not the same. Before, she had danced for him. Then he woke up.
It lies beneath his clothes and dreams, this scar, a talisman to other worlds. She sees it every time she looks at him. Now she never dances for him. He still watches anyway.
That’s when the real world starts to fall away.
He could swear she’s dancing for him now. He never did stop watching; she can sneer and turn her back as much as she likes, doesn’t change the fact she looks like that, can dance like that, breathes like that.
Most the time, sometimes, he feels sorry for her: a patronising, wish-that-bitch would something-or-other, that bigot. Usually he respects her: the way she feels for the Market, family, Lydie and Toby, the way she understands what must be done. Every once in a while he thinks he hates her; most of the time he practises, most elaborately, indifference. But never once has he tried claim indifference to the burning-writhe and turn of her in a circle. Alan is too subtle to say anything so obviously a lie.
Still, he knows well: look, but don’t touch; wonder, but don’t taste; dream, but don’t ever wish you could be friends. Alan, the one who always longed for knowledge, knew he would never know her; she was not a snake that would speak to him. She was not fruit from a tree. She’d told him when they met: “No, it’s short for Cynthia,” and Alan used to try to be the good kid. He’s been lost a million times for a dozen other girls, but not for Sin.
But now he can’t stop himself from thinking that she’s dancing for him, and it’s playing tricks inside his mind. “I must be sleeping,” he is thinking.
You are waking, says Sin with-her-feet, in two-step time. Her red silk swaying, swinging looks like tongues of flame. He thought her so stone-cold, and here she is, dancing all for him.
Alan is indifferent to her. He has ... other things to worry about; he had Jamie, Mae, Nick ... is in a gang; Nick’s in a turf war; Nick ... doesn’t have a last name ... Alan shakes his head to clear it.
Wake up, Sin sighs in slide of arm, an arch of back, and come to me. He feet are fire, her legs limber, licking flames. She’s lit-up somehow, from within. The fire is for him.
Alan wants to stop watching, but Jamie’s gone away from them. Mae never wanted him, even when she kissed him, and Nick ... Nick has no last name, has always been of two worlds, a world of never was and now, never would be. Sometimes Alan is afraid Nick will leave him completely, become something else, find a new family ... find a new name.
Come inside my circle, dances Sin, warm and so full of fire. She burns with every turn. Come inside my circle, come inside, come. Wake up!
Alan feels so cold, and all alone. Here it is so dark.
She ate the fever fruit: for him. Juice at her mouth, her throat, running down inside her, opening her, so ready. The spark inside her kindled, so he knows her; he can see her. Then she began to move: for him. The sway of her, the silk, the stoking of the flame. And still, she dances for him, his illumination in the dark, his signal in the blackness, his hot in the cold -
he’s coming to her -
Liannan gets there first. It was for her, of course, that Sin danced all along.
“We never told Sin about our deal,” Liannan sighs.
“How can you be here when you’re supposed to be Merris?”
“I can be more than one person at once.”
“Then I’m dreaming,” so Alan concludes.
Liannan laughs, a dry rasp on her white throat, with blood. “Or maybe I’m just you.”
“No,” breathes Alan. No...
Inside Sin’s circle is a flame, and here it is so dark. So cold, and all alone. Sometimes there’s the fear Nick will leave completely, become something else, find a new family ... Hnikarr will find a new name...
Sometimes Alan fears the ones he loves will leave him. Sometimes he fears his lies have left him in the dark. Sometimes he is sure he is less human.
Sometimes he wished the circle had burned him all the way.
He wakes up and wishes she danced for him.
v. Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow
“Sin,” Mae whispers, “who’s that?”
“Let me guess. The redhead?” The twist to the other girl’s cherry mouth is wry. “That’s Alan Ryves.”
As if on cue, the tall boy in black - the most graceful boy Mae’s ever seen - falls upon them like a hunter’s shadow. “Hello, Cynthia. Who’s your friend?”
His smile is warm, but she doesn’t miss the way Sin’s back stiffens as his eyes slide down to her leg and back up to Mae’s face.
“I’m Mae,” she says, stepping protectively in front of the other girl. “I want to dance.”
o 0 O 0 o
“Mum?” her daughter asks. She turns and sees Sin, slight and small in her nightgown, past her bed time, standing in the hall. She is blinking, sleepy. Still not sure what is going on, until her eyes fall to the knife.
“Toby,” says Sin, stumbling in. “Toby, wake up.”
The child does not wake like other children do. Eyes snap open, black, and suddenly he is in this world.
“Sin,” says her mother, as if she could explain.
“Come on, Toby,” says Sin, not looking. In a hurry, as if that knife could still fall. As if she could still be sleeping and not have awakened in time. “I had a nightmare,” Sin tells it. “I need you to sleep with me.”
o 0 O 0 o
“You are such a liar!”
“I thought that was why you married me.” The man’s deep blue eyes are narrow with bitter humour behind his glasses, and Jamie sighs. He’s seen some real gems in his years as a relationship counsellor at MI6, but these two really take the cake. It’s like something out of a film. A terrible one.
“Mr Davies-Ryves, Ms Davies-Ryves, please. You’ve been in deep cover for a long time, and naturally you both have trust issues-”
The woman snorts, dramatically tossing her dark hair. “Oh, I can trust him just fine - in the middle of an operation, with fifteen lives on the line and a gun pointed at my head. But I can’t trust him to pick up the fucking dry-cleaning!”
“That’s rich,” he says coolly. “You’re the one who keeps forgetting to feed our cat. It’s lucky to be alive at this point.”
“I didn’t even know we had a cat until three weeks after you brought her home!”
“I wanted to see if you’d notice.”
Her eyebrows are all but leaping from her forehead as she cuts her eyes to Jamie, and then points at her husband. “This is exactly what’s wrong with you. You think everything is some kind of ... stupid game!”
And then their eyes meet, and it’s like the world narrows to just the two of them, and his voice almost resembles tenderness. “Not everything.”
Spooks are a tricky lot: Jamie’s seen too many relationships soar and crumble as they search for release. But these two - there’s a remarkable amount of passion that brims between them. More than enough to save them...
One corner of his mouth flicks up, and her poppy-red lips tighten just a fraction. “Besides, I always thought you liked our stupid games.”
...or destroy them. Jamie shakes his head as the war starts again in earnest. It’s going to be a bloody long day.
o 0 O 0 o
Alan is the perfectly wrong person to be seeing a psychiatrist. He’s happy, well-adjusted, never awkward. He’s the sort of man who makes you want to trust him, the sort of man you can talk to. The sort of man who should be on the other side of the desk, and that makes Gerald distrust him.
“Yes,” Alan agrees, mildly surprised. “Of course it’s all a lie.”
“But why?” Gerald has to know.
“Pathological, I suppose.” Alan smiles genially. “Isn’t that why I’m here, Doctor?”
Gerald marks something on his chart.
Alan gives a fluid shrug and goes on, “It might have something to do with Olivia.”
Gerald checks his notes again, and, “Your step-mother,” he remembers.
Alan nods. “She drowned my little brother in the bathtub when I was four.” His face carries all the trouble of a man who sips his tea and found that it has grown too cold. “He was a baby. She thought he was a demon, you see.”
Gerald usually shows his emotions. It’s a manipulation; it makes his patients comfortable. But something about Alan makes Gerald want to hide his shock. “A demon?” he repeats.
“Oh, yes.” The answer is off-hand, but Gerald begins to doubt everything about Alan, right down to his clear, bath-water eyes. “The problem is, my wife...”
“Sin,” Gerald supplies.
“Cynthia, yes; that’s right. The problem is that Cynthia’s brother...”
“Yes?” Gerald feels as though he’s on tenter-hooks.
“Cynthia’s brother was going to be possessed. She just didn’t believe me.”
“But you said...” Gerald flips through his notebook. “You said Cynthia’s brother-”
“Toby,” Alan says benignly.
“You said Toby was dead.” Then Gerald’s eyes widened. “You said that he was drowned.”
“Yes.” Alan sighs, almost amused. “You see the problem. Cynthia suspects.”
o 0 O 0 o
BREAKING NEWS BREAKING NEWS BREAKING NEWS
“Entertainment Tonight has just confirmed the breakup of one of Britain’s most beloved celebrity couples, Cynthia ‘Sin’ Davies and Alan Ryves.”
“Representatives for Sin, who was the runner-up on the first series of So You Think You Can Dance, and Alan, who has just released his second independent album following his successful stint on X-Factor, say that the separation was mutual and amiable. However, it comes amid widespread rumours of what sources have referred to as ‘dishonest’ behaviour on the parts of both parties.”
“The young pair first captured the public’s attention after Alan performed as a musical guest on So You Think You Can Dance. They revealed their relationship with a kiss on stage in one of the season’s most intense moments.
“The news will come as a terrible blow to fans of the couple, who referred to them as ‘Cynthialan’. Catherine Joyce and Hannah Kilpatrick, who run a site dedicated to the pair at singdancelove.com, say that fans remain hopeful amid a lack of confirmation from the couple themselves.”
“It’s perfectly possible that it’s a ruse,” said Ms Joyce. “So-called showbiz news is often inaccurate.”
“I won’t believe it until I see it on @soyouthinkyoucansin or @alanryves,” Ms Kilpatrick added.
“This is Rhiannon Leith, reporting for ET.”
o 0 O 0 o
“We’re putting on a play,” says Liannan, and looks just how she looked when she never danced with Sin, when Alan was a track star and Sin knew no more of dance than jazz ballet.
“I don’t act,” Alan said, acting his most bland and earnest.
“I’ll be Merris,” said Liannan, “and you can be me, and Hnikarr can be ... can be...”
“My brother,” bland and deadly.
“See!” she said, putting on the wrong costume. “You’re already one of us.”
“I’m not one of you,” Alan says.
Liannan shrugs. “Hnikarr was ours first.”
“These can be for Sin,” Liannan says, and pulls from the props-box Anzu’s wings. “She always was more human.”
o 0 O 0 o
In the end, he’d destroyed them all.
Sin had been the first to go: Nick had been having a bad day and she’d given Alan one of those looks and the next thing anyone knew, she was falling to her knees - to a hungry Anzu - in her circle.
Mae had been dancing with her. Collateral damage, Merris said. Regrettable, but we need the demon. We can’t fight the magicians without him.
Alan’s been looking after the remaining Davies siblings in a pathetic attempt to make reparations: Toby and Lydie have clung to every friendly face after the death of their sister, and he’s always been good with children. Sometimes they even smile. He knows it shouldn’t make him feel better.
They haven’t heard a word from Jamie since Mae was lost: sometimes Alan wonders if he’s given himself over to the Circle. If, someday, Nick will have to kill him too.
Sleep has evaded him for months, now; the whispers chase him as he walks through the Market, as he makes his plans, as he stumbles into his caravan at night.
You’ve already ended the world, Alan Ryves. It’s only fair that you end yourself first.
o 0 O 0 o
In the end, she’d loved them all.
Nick had been the first: Sin had been having a bad day, but Alan had given her one of those books to pay her to be nice. The next anyone knew, she was smiling - at a deadly Hnikarr - and he was in her circle.
There was Mae, of course, dancing with her. A great deal of initiative, Merris said. What the Market needs is someone intelligent and independent. Even if they were competition, now, Sin had liked Mae from the start.
There’s the remaining Crawford sibling, but he’s easy to like. They’re all depending on him now for information on the magician’s Circles, and that makes him a part of hers. Though he’s tired from Gerald and betrayal and the darkness, sometimes he even smiles. She knows it shouldn’t make her feel better.
She’s heard less from Merris now that Liannan is here. Sometimes Sin wonders if Merris let her in her circle, the one deeper than lines cuts in ground, deeper circles in the body or in blood. Even demons can be loved, and sometimes Sin wonders if she’ll have to love Liannan too.
Sleep comes more easily than it ever has. Sin loves, and trusts, and does not feel alone. Only then does she realise she’s left one person so close to her outside her circle, and it feels like waking up.
I already love everyone you love and all you stand for, Alan Ryves. It’s only fair I love you too.
vi. We wake like the gods
On the sixth day, Sin forgets how to breathe.
She has a burst-sun slice of fever fruit between her fingers and the sea is crashing metres from her feet, crescent crimson toenails, and she is trying to work out how one ends a war. There have been casualties recently, and her own strange dreams - Alan, soaked into her very soul, and she doesn’t understand - and she is thinking that this has gone on long enough. It’s time she took a stand, decided, did what she is meant to.
Pity she isn’t entirely sure what that is.
The sun paints her vision into gold strips and she turns to cut circles in the sand, the pieces of her skirt whipping around her bare legs. It’s cold out, that sort of sea-air bite that makes goosebumps explode, and she wishes she could go home and think.
Only, it’s Market night and Alan will be there and she still doesn’t know what’s going on.
She cuts the last edge of the circle and licks a drop of fever fruit juice from where it curves along her wrist, matching the tracery of veins. The world blooms brightly when she tastes it and she steps onto the edges of the circle, the seam crossing a world, and lets the beat of the sea start her dance.
Sand sprays up as she turns, twists, slips sideways for a second and nearly falls. This - this is what she loves: the excitement, the thrill of certain death if she trips. The tang of salt in the back of her throat and sun in her eyes and the vastness of a world that is not hers but could be, so easy. She could own a sunrise and a span of stars and this beach, this life, hers to take and live.
Sand sprays, and Sin slips.
There’s always a first time, her mother chimes in her ear, and she is not screaming but sucking in air, on all-fours in the sand. For a moment there, a heartbeat, she saw death curve its way above her, the horrors of what could have been if she had been dancing a few seconds longer, if a demon had been called sooner, if things had gone wrong.
She crunches sand between her fingers, dreams in her hands, and there is a voice, the last (first) person she wants to see right now.
His limp is a slap across her face, concern something ugly as she stares. “Cynthia,” he says, and his voice is layered deep with something dark and raw and hard - everything they are, these days. Sin lost a mother and Alan never really had a brother - it is strange, really, how broken they are, how their hatred fuels them, brisk and sad.
“Alan,” she says, and weariness lines the edges of her voice, the lilt of vowels. She is a girl who uses her words and her smiles and the curves of her skin to get what she wants, but Alan is different, strange; he doesn’t call her Sin, like he can make her less than she is. Like he can devolve her back into that twelve-year-old girl who thought the longer her name was, the prettier it made her feel.
She is so tempted to stay where she is, half curled over in the sand, but she hates the disadvantage of height and unfurls to her feet, scraping her hair back. “I’m fine,” she says, sharp. “What are you doing here?”
His eyes flash gold in the sunlight, glazed. “Battle plans,” he says, and there’s something expansive, uncharacteristically awkward, in the way his mouth curls. “I needed to talk to you and I was told you came here.”
Sin looks at him, eyes bitten by the wind, and she is no longer sure what they are; before, she had her hatred, pinnacled and decided, easy to cling to. Now - now she has dreams that slide through reality, confuse her; now, she has an Alan who played varsity sport, and an Alan who fought demons by her side and won, and now she has an Alan she can’t hate.
Her hair sprays around her, lashing, and he watches her, something steady and solid in his eyes, in his hands, in his soul. She can taste it, feel it, touch it-understands him, in that moment. Understands that he is a boy who has made better what he was dealt - that brother, this leg - and that she is a girl who is simply too scared to see.
He calls her Cynthia, a child’s name - perhaps because she still is.
The sun burns her eyelids, turns his irises to a streak of gold. “It’s harder here,” she says, too loud, her voice a ragged, streaming edge. “I have to focus and it takes me away and. I can’t dream.”
She watches his face, sees the way that half-edged curl of his mouth doesn’t move, his eyes don’t change at all. Knows that he has dreamt things too, simply because Alan is a boy who hides secrets and Sin is a girl who finds them out.
She is a Market girl, and he is a demon’s brother. They have been shaped, for each other, against each other, almost since birth.
“Do you dream?” he says, and she almost smiles with it, wide and raw and brilliant, the burn of a sunset, slow. These games they play, dancing around each other, feinting and tracing and making moves - how she loves them. They never end.
Sin tips her head to the side, smiles her secret smile, waits for him to figure it out. “Do I dream? Alan Ryves, dreaming is the only escape.”
His eyelashes are stark black, shadowed by sun. The sea screams a chorus and she realises that this is the defining moment she has been looking for; her whole life is caught up in strands of other people’s, tangled with siblings, bogged down by a Market she loves - she wants heartbeats, seconds that are only hers.
Somehow he is here, but she is still just Sin.
It has been a long time coming this moment, foreshadowed in memories, suggested in demon landscapes woven through time. Perhaps that is why she can taste the history in her mouth when she kisses him, tastes him, holds onto him, and perhaps that is why he kisses her back.
The sun is a triumphant burst behind Sin’s eyelids. She drags her hands through his hair and he is a long, lean warmth all down her stomach, hands hard on her back, pushing her in. His mouth is brilliant, alive, and she thinks she might explode with it, torn nerve-endings, the raw thrum of a power she only feels in dance.
And maybe that is why Alan Ryves lost a leg and a life: to give him something back, energy, that beat of understanding, the drunken tang of lies so powerful and sweet that Sin can taste them on his tongue.
Her nails scrape in his hair, his hands are hot on her skin. They crash apart as Time slips from one step into the next and stare at each other, her mouth a swollen crimson gleam, his eyes wild, dangerous.
“Sin,” he says, and she hates him, loves him, because this - this is what she has been looking for. Someone who she can play games with, but someone who ultimately understands.
His smile is sudden and fierce with borrowed sweetness. “Sin,” he says again, and she wants to taste his smile again, balls her hands into fists to stop herself from taking and not giving back. “Don’t we have a war to weave?”
Her laugh is electric, thrumming along his spine, chasing its way through his nerves. “Of course,” she says, and drags him down into the sand, pressing a brief, open-mouthed kiss to his cheek, trace of tongue. “Battle plans, and then the rest of our lives.”
“If we get a chance to live them.” But she can see the excitement in him, tempered with fear of what is to come; she loves it, loves that he cares and then loves that when it comes down to it he wants blood.
He somehow steals her knife - the easily reached one, not the one hidden in her shorts - and she leans over as he traces maps, plans, diagrams into the sand, building worlds and elaborate, distinct ways for them to win. She rubs out his drawings when they don’t make sense - Alan is used to working with a brother, not an army - and he turns and smiles at her, slow and sweet and wild.
“Sin,” he says, like he can’t stop, as the glaze of the sun starts to sink.
You who never arrived
in my arms, Beloved, who were lost
from the start,
I don’t even know what songs
would please you. I have given up trying
to recognize you in the surging wave of
the next moment. All the immense
images in me - the far-off, deeply-felt
landscape, cities, towers, and bridges, and
unsuspected turns in the path,
and those powerful lands that were once
pulsing with the life of the gods-
all rise within me to mean
you, who forever elude me.
- Rainer Maria Rilke
Ephemera
Click to view CREDITS
Section titles, in order of first appearance, are taken or adapted from: Despedida, Jorge Luis Borges; Poem For A Birthday, Sylvia Plath; Macbeth, William Shakespeare; Perfest Love Casteth Out Everything, Randall Jarrell; You Who Never Arrived, Rainer Maria Rilke
Images: sxc.hu, Deviantart, Google Images, weheartit
Footage: So You Think You Can Dance (Karla and Legacy); Bluebells by Patrick Wolf
Song: Easier to Lie by Aqualung
Casting: Karla Garcia, Patrick Wolf, Ryan Taylor and Katerina Graham