i'm writing poems about you, and they're not very nice

[marketchippie]

you could do so much better (you said it in your letter)
R, rated for grief!sex. ~5500 words why and how.
THEATER-DYNASTY CRACK AU: Lucrezia, August to December after Alfonso Bisceglie's assassination, all the way up to Christmas, wherein you realise that actually this is ridiculous/emotionally-self-indulgent holiday fic. I make no apologies for anything I choose to be anymore. For vega_ofthe_lyre. (Congrats on your last day of classes, bb! Have some siblings~ and Sufjan allusions!)

When she gets out of the shower, there’s just one message on her phone. She listens to it with wet hair still looped up in the towel: it starts out silent, ragged breaths into the receiver, and she cups it closer, presses it tight to her skin, listening and listening.

“Lucrezia,” she finally makes out. “Come.”

It’s from Alfonso.

She drops the phone-only because she needs both hands to grab a dress, a pair of underwear, the nearest ones without looking. It’s not because she’s shaking. It’s not.

The towel drops, slides off her shoulders; she leaves it lying damply on the expensive parquet and she is not shaking, she is not shaking, she steps out with wet bare feet into the Los Angeles sunlight that still feels foreign to her shoulders and into her car, there are sandals in the back seat, meant for emergencies, but who knows if this is one-

She does. Oh, yes, she does, and (skidding in a swift circle, she’s not a very good driver but god her hands are not shaking, she is not shaking, her heart is in her mouth, but her feet are heavy on the pedals and her hands are tight against the wheel) she’d be lying if she said she hadn’t been-

What, expecting it? There is no expectation, not for this.

Something bad has been about to happen for days. She’s a Borja-a Borja-Bisceglie, spiritually, but she has never taken names; even before Sforza she knew better than that; bad for the career, be memorable, be memorable, be remembered. Remember.

She punches the first speed dial on her phone.

It isn’t her husband’s phone.

The other line barely rings before it picks up.

“Chez, what’s going on?” she asks.

“There’s been an accident.” His voice is calm, flat. “We’re in the studio parking lot.”

We.

The light is red; she speeds.

When she gets to the studio, the parking spaces are bare and Cesare is sitting on the back steps of Alfonso’s trailer, elbows on his knees, a cigarette in his fingers. He is not wearing a suit-she has not seen him out of one in some time.

“Where is he?” she asks, and he raises an eyebrow, raises a hand against the sun. The sleeves of his white shirt are rolled up to his elbows, the shirt is pure and bleached and almost stings her eyes to look at today, today when the world is too bright and her veins are too spiked with fear. It isn’t panic. She swears it’s not panic yet-

“Good afternoon to you, too,” he says, and she steps forward in several short steps; for a moment she longs to hit him.

“Where is he,” she says, and he moves an inch to the side.

“Aren’t you going to let me tell you what happened?” His eyes dart to the scant space beside him, and she shakes her head like a twitch. “No?”

“Tell me,” she says, and she will not sit, her skin is not at ease in her bones and he, damn him, looks almost liquid with ease. It is a lie, she knows, it is always a lie, he never slips out of that-alertness, that trap of alertness that he lives in. “Now.”

“He was on the sidewalk,” Cesare tells her. Calmly, too calmly, that’s a lie, it is always a lie. He flicks the cigarette onto the pavement, steps onto it with one shining black shoe. She watches the fire grind into ash. Everything is too bright today. “There was gunfire. A car driving off. A Los Angeles accident. It was almost too late when we found him. You should be-”

“What,” she spits, “grateful? Show me where he is,” she says, she has said that before, and her brother’s face is as calm as one of the Madonnas their father likes to collect, she could slap it, she could dig her fingers into the flesh of his face, or her own, tear the fear out by its twitching roots, but she does not. She is a Borja, and she waits.

“He’s inside,” he says at last, “probably getting blood all over the sheets.”

She would run past him, but he’s in the way once again. “Crezia,” he says, catching her, his hands lighting on her bare shoulders, “calm down.”

“What,” she sputters, and his palms weight down against her shoulders, sinking her into one place. His fingers trail along the nape of her neck, and he leans in. His hands are heavy but his lips, brushing along her forehead, are very light.

“It’s going to be all right,” he says, and for a moment, she is still.

“Cesare,” she asks softly, voice faint and distant, as if it filters in from somewhere outside the odd sphere of silence and shared air between them, “what have you done?”

She opens the door to the trailer.

Michael Corella is standing at the head of the bed. Four other men stand around it, men she doesn’t recognize, when did she stop knowing their faces?

Corella has blood on his hands.

Her husband is lying on tousled sheets with his shirt open and his skin gaping, a red cavity cracking through his ribcage, below his heart. His ribcage, which is does not rise and does not fall; she sees bone, white at the tips, poking through, and she sees the blood on Corella’s hands.

“We did all we could, ma’am,” Corella says in that gravel voice of his and yes, yes, she supposes they did.

She does not scream.

She does not scream.

She has seen blood before, blood from the heart, someday all this will be useful-

Her husband lies dead on his borrowed bed and Lucrezia runs.

She does not scream until she is on the highway in Pasadena, and then she nearly runs into a rail, use your head you dumb cunt! yells the driver behind her, leaning out the window to flip her off, and someday she will remember how-but there is blood on her feet between the straps of her sandals, her husband’s blood, and yes, she is screaming in a car whose windows she has forgotten to roll up. The wind sucks the sound from her lungs, and there is nowhere to leave the highway to cry. There is only ahead.

She bites her teeth against her knuckles and blinks into the road. She will cry on the plane, behind an eye mask, in the bathroom. She will cry, later. Until then she will swallow and swallow and palm her passport, her checkbook, everything she needs. (Her binder of scripts in the back seat, pages dog-eared and marked, she does not leave that behind either.)

That night, she is out of Los Angeles; the next morning, back in the city.

Her apartment is awful-worse than any one she’s ever had-no marble or scalloped taps, that’s for damn sure; instead there’s a bathroom the size of a matchbox with mold blackening the corner.

Still, it’s a space to sleep, and that is enough. It looks out on lights, and that is enough. It is never quiet, not even when the night slips all the way into fresh daylight and that-

That’s a blessing, she thinks, blinking out of something that would be too generous to call rest.

Her first sound sleep is October 12, and she wakes up weeping-guiltier at her lack of ghosts than she ever was with them. It is two months, then. Two months past.

That first night, she had checked into a hotel. “Name?” they’d asked. “Sancia,” she’d stuttered before she could swallow it back.

In the bathroom she had scrubbed her feet over and over again with the hotel’s loofah, raked her skin pink and fresh, and her phone had been buzzing from the other room.

When she’d picked it up, there had been a message from the real Sancia; it had begun how could you let- and Lucrezia had deleted it before she could listen to the rest.

For that night, she supposes she is her own sister-in-law. Next morning, she takes a cab to the Hudson River Parkway and throws her phone in the river. Dramatic, she supposes, but she’s gone off-script enough already. She can spare the gesture.

For a moment, she’s tempted by her wedding ring; something she couldn’t name halts her hand before she touches it. Save it for the funeral, she thinks, and she brings her hand to her mouth almost unconsciously, teeth scraping diamond and gold.

There is no funeral.

For three months, she does not read a newspaper. Still, she knows: it’s a scandal, of course it is.

Would, she thinks, that it were more so.

Every week, without fail, Cesare sends her an email.

They are not lovely-her brother was never one for poesy, not composed by him. His strength had been in making words come alive, that voice of his. Echoes in the cold chambers of facts he sends her: casting lists and stock in ascendancy, the climb and climb and climb of everything, drowning Aragon Studios he does not have to mention for she knows it intuitively. For a month, she deletes them; even then, though, she reads them, and the accounts still drum in her brain, known too well too clearly for too long. Everything he says makes perfect sense: simple economics, everyone in the family's versed in them.

Burkhart, he confesses once, is beside himself. Fucked, really. Brilliant accountant, but as an artistic director he's a mess. No eye for the finer things.

The office pens miss you, he writes. The paperclips miss you.

They buy out Aragon.

Father misses you, he says, and by that time the emails have started to pile up in her inbox, but she forgot to delete one October day, and the next and the next and the next.

She reads his words with her chin in her hand, silent.

As do I.

“You should get back on the stage,” her agent tells her, and Lucrezia smiles thinly to herself on the other end of the phone.

“I will.”

“Good.” Penny Tallis exhales hard on the other line, just for effect, and Lucrezia waits for the new shoe to drop. “There’s a Nativity revue, you know, just a little theater, off Broadway, cute, they’re doing something real new and subversive-”

“What are you talking about?”

“Wanna be the Virgin Mary?” Penny asks, and Lucrezia hangs up, a bark of laughter she barely recognizes as her own echoing in the air.

That night, Cesare writes.

That night, she responds. Hello and half a story, nothing else. No questions answered-the missive is six lines long and takes her three hours to write; the simple fact is that no one would know why to laugh the same way. Would echo the sound of her own from a thousand miles away; the thought is not reassuring and she does not break bread with herself that evening, just drinks a full bottle of Pellegrino with a knotted stomach and tips her ear toward the bottle between sips, listening to it hiss. The apartment is silent around her and she curls up with the thousand dog-ears of her old scripts, flips to a page taken from the Compleat Works.

To whom shall I complain?

These are not questions that have occurred to her, though she has asked them onstage ten or fifteen or one hundred times. But she’s out of her text now; she has more time to ruminate on the words.

She pauses to write to him every now and again-

Her hands shaking slightly, she likes to set her drafts to paper first. Lined paper, black marker, thick like they use to mark tape onstage.

Fuck you, she inevitably writes. Fuck you, she inevitably crosses out.

Her fingers tap on the keys: look out for father, she tells him, visit mother.

It’s getting cold. She spends Thanksgiving in Chinatown, reading Chekhov, not regretting and not making a sound in the corner of the restaurant-still, she says happy holidays in her email later, right before she falls into red-eyed sleep.

She writes poems on the back of her calendar, in lieu of an advent.

(Fuck you, she inevitably writes. Fuck you, she inevitably crosses out. Sometimes she looks at what’s left between her scratched-out lines and sees nothing but fuck you couched in new words between the scribbles. She crumples them up and makes a tree of them in the trash can, overflowing as it is with paper fruit.)

She buys herself a tree-purple tinsel, garish and cheap and silver-baubled and hers. That evening, she sits by the window in three sweaters and looks out at the light, the reflection of her tinselled tree against the window, the city an orange-dotted expanse outside. The shadow she casts on the floor is small and curled and even the apartment, with no spare space to breathe, feels large around her. She peels a chocolate orange and memorizes the patterns of thread in the rug under her feet.

Every now and again, she feels very young indeed. An ancient life, miscast.

That Pogues song is filtering out through windows between stores, in collision with “Carol of the Bells” from the Bloomingdales awning, she is surrounded in a crush of humans and secular carols and she herself could not tell you why exactly she is buying Christmas presents, but a man in the corner of her eye is lifting his cell phone and she turns around just in time to see him snap a picture of her face.

“Hey,” she says out loud, shoving through the crowd and catching him at the curb (where the walk light is flashing red), “wait, you.”

She collars him before he can turn away again. “Well,” he shrugs with an uncomfortable smile, “isn’t this a surprise?”

“Should I know you?”

He shifts his shoulders and she knows, then: one of Cesare’s.

(When, she thinks again, with a stab of emotion between fear and something deeper, did he start hiring men without faces? She thinks momentarily that she could cry, right there, for a man she doesn’t know, for a reason neither of them would be able to identify. Blame the holidays, she thinks, blame the snow. It’s a vulnerable season.)

“Merry Christmas,” she says, because-oh bless him-he’s got bags too, emblazoned with the red Macy’s star.

“I’ll tell him-”

“No,” she says, “I didn’t mean it for him.”

Before he disappears into the crowd, the man nearly (nearly, mind) smiles.

For a week, she watches the door.

For a week, the door remains unknocked. And after. Even when (she tells herself) she stops watching.

Silence is golden: she strings fairylights and reads increasingly poor stage adaptations of Dickens; she can’t help giggling every now and again, marking maudlin and remembering awful child actors, God bless us, she reads, every one, then-

oh Lucrezia love you are better than this, don’t cry over Tiny Tim of all things.

She buys plum pudding and wishes more than anything that she had a husband to help her eat it, an Alfonso sitting at the table to applaud her wielding the dessert torch, a Bisceglie to pour the rum in overabundance and whoop when the kitchen doesn’t burn down. She wishes in precise clarity, she knows the exact words for everything she is missing, that is gone from the empty spaces. When it comes to filling them in, though-

They always say the laugh’s the first thing to go, but she remembers that just fine, timbre and cadence, she thinks she’s got it right. But the shape of his hands flat on the table, the focus of his eyes watching her: these fade into sepia, into time, into a place delineated away from what is now. What isn’t here. What isn’t here: him.

His handprints on her hips faded what feels like a thousand years ago. She presses her own palms against bare skin that night, tries to remember. Can’t.

Don’t think about the empty spaces, she tells herself.

She wraps gifts, sends them roundabout to her family. If anyone knocks down her door, it’s not going to be Papa. Mr. Alexander, she thinks, rather. A reminder, every time, tinged with rue.

God, she really hates that name. Nothing great about it, she thinks, and kicks a gift box with a petty foot-not too hard. She’s fairly proud of having wrapped these, if nothing else. No papercuts: she bought pretty paper with snowflakes printed on and did it herself and for a moment there she hadn’t been thinking about anything but the folds of bright paper around new boxes. She will keep that pride, she thinks, and falls asleep on her couch watching A Wonderful Life on her rather flickery TV: is it? she thinks sleepily, her eyes closing. The maudlin curls around her like a second afghan, but she is too sleepy to indulge it with any articulated thoughts, just presses her cheek to the arm of the sofa and wraps herself more tightly in it. Every now and again, sadness is cozy; for some months now, it’s helped to keep her warm.

Outside the world is white and whirling and for a moment she thinks it’s just the wind before she realizes she’s listening to the door.

In stockinged feet, she tiptoes to it. Just for a moment she is reminded of being four and sneaking down the stairs, anticipating Santa, her brother’s hand in hers.

Her hand on the knob, she rests her forehead against the door, just for a moment. It’s cold against her skin; the hallway must be colder. When she turns the three locks to the side, they sound unbearably loud to her: she wonders if they’re audible from the other side, too.

She opens the door.

“There’s snow in your hair,” she says.

There is snow in his hair, on his scarf, on the shoulders of his coat, white against a constancy of black. He blinks at her, for a moment looking shockingly vulnerable and barely grown. Before she is thinking in thoughts or words, she is remembering snow angels and snowballs and she has to work to not stand on her toes and brush off his shoulders. He is in her and he is blood and he is her brother and he has blood on his hands. The murderer, her brother, these are things she knows, these are litanies she has considered, these are words she has crumpled up time and again.

He nods and brushes his head ineffectually with a snowy glove. “May I come in?” he asks, words selected and stiff. His head is bent slightly forward: he keeps it so, as she watches.

She moves aside just wide enough to let him pass.

“This isn’t big.”

“No,” she says. “It isn’t.”

He stands there, too tall in her small hallway-how is it, she wonders, that she is so much shorter? What ill luck of heredity leaves her constantly tipping her chin up to him?-and she shrugs, some five layers of wool and cotton shrugging with her, wishing just for the moment that she was shivering. She tips her chin toward the kitchen and he follows her lead: she waits and he sits at the chair in her kitchen before he realizes that there is only one, half gets up.

“Please, Cesare,” she says, her voice sounding odd and brittle to her own ears, “you don’t have to pretend to be chivalrous to me.”

“Crezia,” he says, and he looks as though she’s slapped him-her stoic fool of a brother with wide eyes and cold-peaked cheeks. She looks at him and sees everything he’s ever been, child to monster to whatever this man is who is sitting in her kitchen and taking too much space; the weight of memory and knowledge and Cesare Borja is almost physically overwhelming to her. She stands in the corner of the counter and the refrigerator and rubs a hand over her forehead.

“You should tell me why you’re here.”

“It’s Christmas Eve tonight,” he says simply.

“Yes.”

He’s watching her. The silence stretches between them-elastic, and not as discomfiting as she wishes she could make it. “It reasoned in and of itself,” he said. “Father’s with Mama, the company’s doing well, the play’s on hold-and you’re here.”

“Yes?”

“You shouldn’t be alone on your holiday,” he says, and she folds her arms tight across her chest, fingers digging into her arms so hard she can feel them through the layers of sweaters.

“I wouldn’t be,” she replies, “if you’d left my husband alive.”

There’s that silence. It prickles horribly, and she waits again: for the gauntlet to be picked up, for a reason, for something. Anything.

His mouth gives a little twist to the side. “I brought you something.”

“Cesare-” She stops, shakes her head, she is almost laughing, five sweaters and she’s still shivering, four months and she’s still shivering- “did you hear me?”

“You’re acting like you miss him,” Cesare says, and she slams a balled fist into the fridge. A few magnets fall, her knuckles sting, she is very much her brother’s sister sometimes, and she wants to vomit her heart onto the floor for it.

“I do miss him! What part of the past three years weren’t you paying attention to?”

His face is dark, words muffling against the wool of his scarf: “you’d think you were in love with him,” he says, and her breath catches.

“I was.”

“Don’t be stupid, Crezia,” he says, and she laughs, the sound sharp in her throat.

“You took a plane across the country to call me stupid?”

“No.”

“Then listen to me. I loved that man.”

“Say that again, Crezia.”

“I loved him.”

“One more time.”

“What? I did. I loved him.”

He smirks. “The lady doth protest too much.”

The kitchen takes less than two steps to cross, and this time she does slap him.

Both her knuckles and her palm are stinging, now, and it is only when her hand has cracked against his cheek that he catches her. He could have-before. She is not so importunate as to believe otherwise. Her palm stings and it is an allowance and she wants to hit him again, to hit and to tear and to shoot straight. The pain impulse runs in the family, it runs high and it runs fine, skilled. His fingers are tight against the bone of her wrist.

“What else do you want me to say?” he asks, and his voice is impossibly calm, August calm, Cesare Borja: adult. He is at his most soft-spoken when there’s blood in the air. She can feel her own running high, spotting up in her cheeks, and she bites the inside of them, trying to cool the rush of it. “He would have done more than wreck the show. He was a threat to the family.”

“The family,” she spits, and his fingers tighten just one increment closer, the leather glove slipping between her sleeves over her skin. Control yourself, she thinks again, straightening her spine. He has not stood up; she has the rare opportunity, now, of looking down to him. The one person around whom she has rarely sought control, the one, then, for whom it would take effort to be in it. She holds herself together and nearly shakes with it.

“You loved him?”

“Yes,” she says, she enunciates with a thousand lessons’ diction and a thousand memories’ worth of control ingrained. “I loved the man I married. That’s how it’s supposed to-” She swallows and fixes her stance just a bit more. “That’s how it’s meant to work.”

“Then you would have chosen him before me,” he replies and-

oh, she thinks; his fingers relax and she realizes it is, of all things, a question.

“How can you say that,” she breathes. “How can you ask.”

You of all people should know better.

They both know better.

“Then here we are,” he says, dropping her wrist and placing both palms flat black on the white plastic of the table. “I can’t take that one back. Merry Christmas, sis.”

Next to him, he reaches down, pulls out a small gold-crêpe handled bag, and pushes it across the table, the bottleneck of something sticking out. She pushes aside the tissue paper and pulls it out: it’s a cheap, terrible rosé, a label she recognizes. Wine she drank a full bottle of at her seventeenth birthday party, the first cast party for her last Romeo and Juliet, Sforza's; her brother had held her hair in the bathroom and waited for her, driven her home, stayed there at less than an inch's distance for the rest of the night. Him and her, there and sodden and humiliating and young and truly, dismally, each other's.

She stares at him; she will not cry. “I hate you,” she says, and he merely looks at her with a quizzical expression on his face, shoulders on the brink of a shrug. “Take off your coat.”

“I wonder if I can take this from you,” he murmurs as he unwinds his scarf. “I suppose we’ll have to see.”

Her nails dig into the bottle, unscrew the cap, oh yes, she thinks, not even corked, their family could afford so much better, they could do so much better, but at sixteen-flush-on-seventeen she had bought it herself and felt flush with joy when she did, and now-now she has an apartment of her own, a history of her own, her own ghosts. Before she gets out glasses, she waits: for that last knock of conscience, a final tap of a ghost on her shoulder. She doesn’t receive it.

“Here,” she says, coming out empty-handed and passing the bottle back. “Drink it down a little.”

He does so; she watches his throat as he swallows. “God,” he says, “that’s awful. What for?”

“Call this a wake,” she says, and pours vodka into the newly empty neck of the bottle. Two tiny bottles, kept from the plane-all these months, kept. Emptied in her palms, she thinks of elves, of Santa’s workshop, and for a moment she tips her head up to him, almost smiling.

If she laughs, she might cry.

She drinks instead.

They sit side by side on her sofa in front of a blank TV screen.

There’s rather a lot of silence to cover.

The bottle’s half-empty before he says anything else:

“You should get back onstage,” is what he tells her, then. “You’re missed. You’re needed. You’re wasted here.”

“I’m not in retirement.” She hiccups his name-such a lightweight; she’s never been anything else. “I’m in mourning. Do you want to toast to my husband, or shall I?”

“I will,” he says, and takes the bottle from her with bare hands, gloves and scarf and coat still strewn on the kitchen chair. “To Alfonso.” He raises it, tips it just a little toward her, pink light refracting from the Christmas lights through the wine. “Who meant well.”

She snorts and wipes a hand inelegantly under her nose, presses her palm over her mouth for a brief, wordshy moment.

“He did, you know.” Cesare tips the bottle between his palms like a metronome needle, voice conversational. “He would have fucking destroyed the family and everything we’ve ever hoped to be, he would have taken apart the company and ruined the stock and put on some truly terrible shows. He would have been the worst investment we ever made. He would have hid you in the house instead of the stage. But he meant well. And he loved you very much. Requiescat in pace, sir.” He drinks long and full, wipes his mouth hard with the flat of his hand. “Now never talk to me about him again.”

Her fingernails curl in against the pillow in her lap. “That’s not fair.”

“It’s not?”

They stare at each other for just one minute: knowing.

There are tears in her eyes, she realizes. Four months. A lifetime of control. No audience. There are tears and they are on the brink of spilling.

Cesare looks down first. This is a gift, this too, she knows. Merry Christmas. “I would go if you asked me,” he says, words falling unevenly out.

She doesn’t believe him, but: this too, this too.

“I won’t.”

The bottle is empty.

He stands; she stands and wobbles only a little.

“Should I go now?” he asks. “I’ll let you say when.”

“You’ll let me,” she says, she laughs, she breaks-she stumbles forward, into him, and is caught in the clutch of his hands, the brace of his elbows. Her face into his shirt, cheek to the buttons. She leaves it wet when he holds her back.

“Are you going to be all right, Crezia?”

His eyes are serious; he holds her like she’ll break if she falls. He knows better. He knows better than so many of the things he’s done, he does. “Not for some time,” she says, and pulls him in by his collar.

His mouth is warm and tastes like hers, his tongue soaked in the strawberry-vinegar of the wine. She feels him bending in toward her and she pulls and pulls his body like a bow, to bow to her, her teeth catching his lips and biting until she can feel blood edging against her teeth. Blood they share, her hands tangling in his hair, her vision is blurry and wet, so she closes her eyes. She doesn’t have to open them to know how he looks, to know the structure of skin and muscle and tendon and bone. The couch is too small for him, and she pulls him astride her anyway, blood on her tongue and broad palms pressing along the small of her back. Their bones match up, for all their asymmetries: she feels herself in the empty spaces of him, the hungry hollows of his skeleton which she can almost touch under his skin. His face pulls back, and one hand delicately cups the curve of her face.

“Crezia,” he whispers, and she does not open her eyes.

“Yes?”

The tip of his thumb slides between her parted mouth, the print of it against her lower lip. “Look at me.”

She cracks her eyelids at last. His face is close, breathless, he leans in until she can’t see his eyes apart any more.

“Tell me you’re going to be all right.”

“You should know.”

“Don’t miss him.”

Her lips curl back, her hips slamming against his like a preemptive strike, a rattle of joints. Her face is wet and her mouth is wet and she could drown in this, could go down here and now with him as the anchor on her ankle. Hands beneath the untucked tail of his shirt, on the warm expanse of his back, she presses her fingertips into the places between his vertebrae, watching his eyes widen, his mouth gasp.

“Make me not.”

He is too long for her bed, too, but he curls over her and his mouth is featherlight on the curve of her neck, the underside of her breast, and she lets her fingers bite into his skin until they mark it: they are patterns she will remember, they are patterns that drum in the marrow they share. She pulls him closer, fingers curled loosely around the nape of his neck, closer and closer until she refuses to pretend she has ever known where one of them has ended and the other begins.

Her fingers on his throat, but she does not have to steal his breath. Her hand is small, a palm no broader than the space between his collarbones; his own nearly covers the expanse of a parted thigh. Infinite asymmetries, enjoined. When he is inside her, she thinks she might shatter, but her bones are true-proven and not made of glass: outside the window is etched in icicles; here, inside, she remembers that she is not.

It’s four in the morning when she wakes up, watching the sky pale and lit up over the city from under the adjunct crook of her brother’s arm. When she gets up, she pulls the quilt off the top of the bed and leaves him snoring slightly-pads out into the kitchen for a glass of water and rifles through his jacket pockets for an inevitable pack of Parliaments. When he wakes up, she’s curled on the window seat with her scripts, the butt of one stubbed out in a makeshift saucer ashtray.

“Which one?” he asks sleepily before he says anything else.

“Henry VI. We’ve never done it in full. It would be ambitious and beautiful, you know. If we did.”

“Then we will.”

“I don’t know how long that would be. Something ridiculous. Nine hours.”

“We will. Utopia did it, and-we’re Borja. People will come to see.”

He stands up, walks over and puts his hands on her shoulders-in the daytime, she cannot help but flinch a little at them. His thumb strokes the nape of her neck idly, and she shivers. Partly out of fear: still. Not all out of fear: still.

“Call it a Christmas gift,” he says. “Merry Christmas, Crezia.”

“I didn’t get you one, you know.”

“I know.” She feels him shrug behind her. “I wouldn’t ask.”

He does not ask for forgiveness. He has not asked.

She reaches an arm out and he steps in next to her, lets her loop her arm around his waist with the quilt, her fingers lighting on the bone of his hip, grazing the edge of his stomach. She does not know if it is given, either: but he is here, and they line up and from the neighboring apartment through the thin wall, she hears the tinny sound of a Christmas CD.

“I’m going to call Papa,” she says. “This afternoon.”

He smiles. God help them both, but he means that smile: it cracks the structures of his face, the set lines of it, with unpracticed truth. “Do that.”

Christmas is for family, she thinks. She has a headache scraping her skull and a thousand regrets tainting her marrow: but what else, she thinks with an unhappy smile and her head resting against her brother’s side, is the family for?