krempuff | [for Biffy; April]

"Well, they can't all be werewolves and chargers, I suppose," Biffy said. He put a lidded cup of tea down on the table next to Krem and tried not to think of how many scents clung to Krem. Across the room, he could smell the faint impressions of several other people mingling with Krem's normal scent. A few steps closer and he'd picked out the scents of antiseptic and other medicines.

He really should have called off work last night, clearly. He'd been asked to assist with a wedding party and the pay had been enough to tempt him away. After everything that had happened, Biffy had thought it was high time to save up for...something with Dorian. A house. A ring. He wasn't sure, but he found himself idly thinking of both.

Krem smiled softly, only half turning toward Biffy when he approached him. It was less a lack of respect for the other man and more the knowledge of the vertigo that would come along with the move; he was going to be slower than normal for all his aches and pains today.

"Evening, Biffy," Krem murmured. "And I suppose we'll both just have to suffer everyone else's slowness and incompetency then."

He picked up the cup and let the smell of it waft over him once he was holding it in both hands. "If I have to spend half my time correcting another person's stitches again? I'm doing everyone a favor and promoting myself."

"So long as that's the only thing you're suffering, I suppose," Biffy said with a wry smile. Sitting down at the other end of the table with a computer, he began entering a list of new clients and their measurements, color palettes, and preferred assistants. It was boring work and less exciting than his afternoon and evening tasks, but essential.

"How many did you send away limping?"

Krem thought over his evening at the fight club and hummed contentedly. He rolled his neck, taking out his kit to start working on the first project he had. Tailoring, for him, was mostly an automatic task and having Biffy around to talk to was good for filling the hours as his fingers flew on the hand stitching he preferred over the machines.

"A good handful. I had to concede a couple of fights, but they were amiable." He huffed a breath and shook his head. "Had to have one broken up before it got out of hand with me, but it got out of hand with someone else."

He snorted. "I don't think I'll be organizing for a while."

"The best kind," Biffy said. Having learned how to fight as a gentleman, he'd boxed at White's and gotten quite strong in the process but they'd always known when to concede with dignity. Or at least an offer of a drink after. Darrow's own Fight Club was a more vicious thing, better suited to a werewolf than a vampire's drone.

With a sly smile, Biffy glanced over at Krem. This close, the myriad of scents was more distinct. "And how many took you home to mop your wounds?"

Krem nodded a little in agreement. He was much more pleased with the outcome of his earlier bouts, of his brief foray in training--those seemed to happen with at least one person at each of these, after the first; he hoped he'd keep that up, too--than he was with his behavior with Ronan.

Biffy's question, couched so casually, rose a flush on Krem's ears. He tried to keep things as discrete as he could, now, though he was hardly reclusive about his proclivities.

"None," he confessed honestly. But then, more candidly, "I went over to one of mine, just after."

Biffy nodded, turning over the idea in his mind. He had make the mistake of presupposing that Krem had brought all of his paramours home with him. Of course, it was because Biffy was conflating his own experience of being part of a hive with his assumptions. They had all lived in Lord Akeldama's quarters, furnishings changing almost every week.

And Akeldama had loved them all, in his way, but he had loved Biffy best.

"Do you entertain very many people?"

Krem paused, momentarily, in his stitches. He wondered if Dorian had put Biffy to asking about this, since he knew that Dorian was curious about it, after a fashion, but never quite to the point of noising in on it; it would be very Tevinter of him, after a fashion, to get gossip some other way.

Finally, discretely, Krem said, "I've a few. Some a bit newer than others."

It was hardly all, or really even half of it. But if Biffy wanted more than that, he'd have to be a bit more direct than that.

"Mm," Biffy said. He looked back down at the computer and sighed with dissatisfaction before going over to the hat rack and finding a blank hat that had been thrown out from an order. The poor thing–a modish little cloche–looked unfairly abandoned and Biffy was fairly untroubled by abandoning the inventory listings.

So he sat down across from Krem with a cloche hat, some lace, and a few tiny gems, shaped like fruit.

"I was one of many, before, though I think it's not my natural inclination. You seem happy though."

As happened so many times that other people brought up their own proclivities in comparison to his own, their own tendency toward a more sociable morality or moderation or whatever it was, Krem found his chest go tight, his stomach dark and leery. He picked up his stitches, careful but swift as ever, and looked at those rather than at Biffy and his millinery.

"I don't think it's much of most people's natural inclinations," Krem said, a little slowly, a little bitterly even. He could say quite a bit of how he, himself, didn't fit neatly into most people's natural inclinations, but that seemed a bit off color, somehow.

He sighed a little. Not dismissively. He wasn't upset, even. Just-- "I try not to stand on any toes, I suppose. Just be very clear on where I stand, now, and make sure I know where everyone else is at as well. It's better that way. Less messy."

Less likely to run astray from him, like with Noah.

"That was flippant of me," Biffy supposed, catching the faint change in Krem's tone. Pithy might be the better word. Or maybe the word came to mind because he was carefully affixing a tiny lemon to the hat. "And not very much the same, beyond the shallow comparisons."

Krem's way, he thought, might be better, for all that Biffy had loved Lord Akeldama dearly and had accepted from the first that he would be one of several ornaments.

"I didn't say it to criticize, though clearly what I intended is not what I said."

This was why he always brought tea to people first.

"No," Krem conceded, shaking his head and still looking down at the stitching. He rotated the piece in his hands, holding it up. It was hard to imagine that this slip of a dress was meant to be worn out in public, but Krem supposed he'd seen people wear less.

"No, I know that it's not how things are exactly done." He often worried he came across more like a covetous bird than anything else, spying beautiful people and collecting them, harboring little jealousies to himself when he knew he would never be enough for them and preening endlessly when they doted him.

He reached for the tea and sipped it, letting it warm and sooth.

"Did Dorian set you on nosing it out, or you curious on your own behalf? Because he keeps not asking about it, like I'll tell just him if he stares hard enough."

"I should be offended," Biffy said delicately, "that you think I pry into my coworkers' lives at my lover's bequest. Especially when you know I am naturally a busybody who can't resist the smell of information and gossip." He said it with a smile, resting his chin on the palm of his hand.

Changing the subject in an abrupt way, meant to give Krem an opening if he chose, Biffy held up the little cloche with the cluster of gem fruit above where the ear would sit. "What do you think? A leaf border along the bottom?"

Krem looked over at the hat and hummed, speculative and considering. Millinery wasn't something he'd ever been particularly good with, and while he had a certain eye for patterns and prints that was necessary in a tailor and clothier, he wasn't the best when it came to accessories.

"It'd look nice," he finally settled on, and nodded.

He returned, however, to the overarching subject--which seemed, unfortunately, to be his bedfellows and habit keeping. "You're not denying that it's good gossip, though, or information that either or both of you are invested in--for whatever reason. And I did allow the idea that you might just be curious on your own behalf."

"I like knowing, if only for the sake of knowing." Biffy was an incurable gossip, he had just admitted it. That did not mean he was indiscrete, for all his curiosity, but he did feel a bit poorly that Krem thought his secrets might be spilled on Biffy's next round of pillow talk. "It's not for me to tell Dorian, unless you'd like me to."

Biffy affixed the first tiny leaf with careful, elegant fingers. His touch was not so delicate as Krem's but he liked to think that at least Madame Lefoux would not have thrown him out if he tried to be helpful.

"I am invested in the wellbeing of my friends."

"Well, it's not as if I've told you anything he doesn't already know--there's a selection, I am seeing people, this and that," Krem said, and then gave a sort of cheeky smile.

With Noah, things had been straight forward and obvious as soon as he'd moved in. It was perhaps obvious, given such circumstances as their cohabitation, that they were intimate--though the intimacy had predated the cohabitation, as it ought to have. The others...

"My well-being is as well as can be expected," Krem assured, softly. He shrugged.

Biffy carefully mirrored Krem's own smile, subtle and a bit cheeky, and then swept his eyes back down to the hat. It was progressing quite tastefully, he thought, and would look very nice on someone with sleek, dark hair, elegantly pinned at the side.

"I wish I'd gone to fight," he admitted. "Everyone's been so wrought after the last few weeks."

It was a tense little understatement if ever he'd made one.

Krem nodded, quiet. Dorian had been well enough but, in the small hours of delivering the weapons home to his apartment, before he'd gone to Thomas, Krem had worried about him. He often worried about Dorian, after a brotherly fashion.

"Some were very good," he said, in a conversational way of things. "Some were there because they like the club and it's a good recreation. Others...it's been a trying time, since the last one. People have lost. And, with Kirin..."

He didn't need to tell Biffy, though. He knew. So, instead, Krem said, "That's why I pulled it together, now."

Biffy nodded somberly. Dorian had gone and he could not fault his lover for it. Though Dorian Pavus was no wolf, he fared just as poorly in captivity; Biffy had seen it in the seething rage that he'd turned upon Kirin and doubted it would be enough.

So many people that night, so many emotions. Some had been sad and scared. Some had been burning with anger. All of them had been hurt.

"How are you faring, after that?" Because after all, Krem had been a victim of Kirin's wretched deeds too. "And your...ward sounds like something from a workhouse but I cannot find another one."

"I'm breathing on the other side," Krem said. Some nights, that knowledge was exhausting. Others, it was elating. Just to be breathing was a triumph in some ways, and Krem was glad for it.

He didn't know quite another word to call Aggie. Ward might not be the right one, but he didn't know what else to refer to her as. His Aggie.

"She's...she is as well," he said, though his mouth turned down a little. "I should make more time for her, I think. Her birthday is at the end of the month. I should do something for it, I think."

It sounded terribly unpleasant and Biffy was set with the sudden and uncomfortable reminder that he had forgotten how terribly long it took to heal on mortal bodies. Broken bones would have taken mere hours for Biffy to heal on a slow night. It was why one of the only definitive ways to end an Alpha challenge was a bitten eye, which took a full day to heal.

"Does she like clothing?" Biffy asked. Eyes twinkling he held up his efforts once more, "Hats?"

Biffy wore that look that Cassandra had verbalized at Founders Day, and Krem decided that he needed to find a new way to articulate the sentiment he felt. How else, though, was he supposed to explain the feeling that there was nothing physically wrong, but that everything was still awful? He was breathing--therefor, things were alright. But--he was breathing, and so there was nothing to explain the all encompassing dread and melancholy and exhaustion, or to explain Aggie's fear, or Blue's anguish.

Krem looked over at the hat, the little motifs coming together quite nicely, and he smiled a little, though was contemplative. He tried to recall if he had seen Aggie in a hat.

"It can't hurt to get her a nice accessory," he supposed.

"It's a lonely thing to have been discarded," Biffy said, meaning the hat, if only because Formerly Prenderghast had never been discarded so long as she had been in Darrow and Biffy thought that Krem would keep it that way. "And just properly eccentric for a young lady who likes snakes and lizards as pets."

It was an easier point to discuss than that of pain and the ways it could be felt, at least.

"You know, I thought I was clever with my hands before this. When I played the piano, I mean, but your sewing has to be seen to be believed."

Krem chuckled a little, because the hat was a handsome thing, and he thought that Aggie would like it. And she was a bit eccentric, with her oversized cat and her reptiles. He hoped that it would bring her a little bit of cheer, as well.

The compliment made him laugh a little, and shrug. He shifted the piece he was working on, checking all the points he was bringing in. In the time they'd been talking, he'd nearly finished with it. He knew that the day-shift workers probably would have taken at least twice as long.

"I never thought it much impressive back home," he said with a shrug. "It's just something I've trained myself into doing. Been stitching almost as long as I can remember. The hidden stitches are always the easiest and the fastest."

"I've always admired fine craftsmanship," Biffy said. "Which I suppose is very easy to say when all I've ever had to do is admire it." He spoke rarely, even to Alexia, of his life before Lord Akeldama. Statements like that were as close as he came to admitting he was born of the aristocratic class.

"I'd be afraid to even attempt it when I haven't got much soul left." This he said wistfully. Biffy hadn't touched a piano since he'd died, afraid to see what became of his talents now that he'd traded his excess soul for immortality.

"At least the hat is simple."

Krem said nothing on the implication, but he did let himself chuff slightly under the compliment. He liked to think, sometimes, that if things hadn't been what they were, he might have managed to become the second in his father's shop, that he might have made apprentice and journeyman and, when he'd made a masterwork, had his own shop some day.

"I don't know much about anything but soldiering and tailoring, honestly," Krem said with a shrug. "Lucky me, both of those are still of use, even here."

"I never had any interest in being a soldier," Biffy said. His words were a bit guilty and also a bit sad. "Another reason I didn't fit in with my pack."

He carefully and studiously applied a bit of gold braid trim to the hat and then removed it, thinking that the effect was a bit much, especially now that its intended recipient was a teenage girl. She would do better with something simple, fresh.

"Military service is compulsory for Britain's packs."

"It might as well be for the majority of Tevinter," Krem said softly. He checked the project again, decided it was neatly complete, and hung it back up so that he could grab the next piece and start in on it. This one needed more details, a closer match to the existing embroidery. His fingers were slower, more methodical.

"The soporati, the lowest free class in Tevinter, they range anywhere from barely scraping the edges of slavery all the way up to being nearly as wealthy as the greatest altus. But, none of us are mages. So, especially second sons in less affluent families, turn to the military. It pays well. It gives great prestige, if you live long enough for it. The two best honors in the military are station, and death."

He was quiet, picking small details into the finery. "Women are allowed very few positions in the military. Secretaries. Couriers. Scribes, if they were from a family affluent enough to know how to write. Healers, if they're a mage. Company women for the frontier or the front lines. I paid every sovereign my mother and I had for a piece of paper to make sure I had a sword in my hand."

Biffy could think of many responses to that. He could describe England's progressive nature, its system of poor and almshouses, the vaunted and celebrated position of officership in England's armies. None of those were truly relevant to Krem's own experiences or the difficulties he had suffered.

"But that's not why you began to dress and act as you did," he supposed. If Krem had done it only as a means of security, he would not be dressed and acting the way he was now. Biffy was tempted to ask if he'd known before or during the army but that seemed too daringly personal.

"It must seem rather pitiful that I dreaded the idea."

"No, I'd been doing that as much as I could for years before. My mother hated it. The piece of paper and a sympathetic, bribed, healer just made it look like there was nothing beside it."

Krem had no problems talking about that part of himself. What was there to hide? Especially now, with the slow evolution of his face, his body, his very voice. It was a dream he'd had once and that had never been possible, but was here in Darrow. There was no escaping what he was.

"I don't," he said, shaking his head and comparing his stitches to the original embroidery. He looked up at Biffy and offered a candid smile. "Our paths were very different, I think. Much like mine and Dorian's. Though, over the months, I've come to realize that mine and Dorian's had more in common than I care to enjoy. Tevinter was not a kind place to anyone, I think, though I miss it terribly."

"It must still be a little like home, in some respects," Biffy supposed. It was, perhaps, a little bit like Spain in that respect for him. It wove into his name and it was inextricably part of his heritage but Biffy did not so much love his father's country as dance an extremely complex and overly polite dance with it at an uncomfortable party.

He wondered now if he would do that dance in Lord Akeldama's townhouse or in the Maccons'. What place was home to him, anymore?

"I am glad, then, that our paths saw fit to cross."

"It always will be, I think," Krem said speculatively. "I am always a product of my past, as much as I am a prospect of my future. But, I don't see a particular point in pining for my history, I suppose? Tevinter is who and what I am. I always carry that with me. If I could, I suppose, I would go home. Just to see it. But--"

The but sat between them, filled with unspoken things. But Darrow. But everything Dorian and he had left in Thedas. But that Dorian had been abducted by this place, and Krem had not. There was no point in speaking any of those things.

Biffy smiled a bit sadly. There were days when he still pined terribly for the life he'd once had and for the elegance of the vampires, but he knew no amount of wishing could undo what had been done. "I wish I could be so sensible as you," he said.

And that but hung in the air.

"I suppose, Darrow being what it is, the whole thing is moot."

"I don't know if it's sense so much as stubbornness and denial," Krem admitted, a bit candid. Not getting caught up in his past made it so much easier to not let his past be too much a danger to him. It meant it wasn't a thing that could injure or torment him. It wasn't a thing that could touch him.

But he had still punched Dorian straight across the mouth that first fight club. Had still frozen in the midst of wrestling Thomas on the beach. He still flinched and retreated when men tried to hand him things too quickly, or pass things around him, or when women raised their voices too rapidly around him. These were things ingrained in his bones and his muscles now, as much as his swordplay was.

"I suppose so, for most of us."

"In some people, they mix well," Biffy said, not dismissing Krem's self-assessment but also thinking there was more to it than plain stubbornness. Krem was a remarkable man, the type of whom Biffy had never met before but for strength and mettle Biffy hoped to meet a great many more.

"I, for one, am glad to have been brought here. Without this place I would never have met Dorian, nor you." That was enough, Biffy thought, to recommend Darrow.

Somehow, when Biffy said it, it did not seem quite as pithy as it could have from other people. His earnestness won the strength of conviction, and Krem appreciated the sentiment, even if he didn't believe it, on more days than not.

Today was a slightly better day, aching and clarified and feeling closer to whole, closer to how he ought to, if he'd been back home. That made it easier.

"Dorian is certainly a reason, all on his own."

"And you?" Biffy asked, thinking again of the various scents that clung to Krem. "You also have reasons?" It seemed almost an innuendo despite how earnestly Biffy asked it. Krem seemed happy enough in his companionship and, perhaps romantically, Biffy thought that that could often be reason enough for anyone.

"And I do mean it." Biffy was grateful to Krem for many acts of friendship and one great act of courage on a particularly awful full moon.

"I'm certainly coming up with several," Krem said, a wistful note in his voice. It was probably unsafe to become so attached, in a place that could so easily take from people. He'd seen how it ruined Blue, and Ronan.

He did not think of himself as, particularly, a reason to find Darrow otherwise endearing or desirable. But that was likely the soldiering. He had fixed himself as an object of transience for nearly half his life now. His lot was meant to be discarded in the end.

But it was nice, he supposed, to end up a facet.

[for Biffy; April]

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