krempuff | [for Biffy; April]

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[for Biffy; April]

The better weather and start of some formal season or another with the local school-age citizens meant that Krem's hours had picked up at Bardolf's. He was hardly complaining about the hours, working them in around everything else. There wasn't so much everything else to work around, after all, and beyond having to sometimes supervise the fittings, he was left pretty much alone to do his job and get things done.

That evening, arriving at Bardolf's, he was aching and distracted. The weight of fight club was still on him, and his evening and morning after. But he was there, blissfully and entirely sober for the first time in a surfeit of months, and staring at the list of projects left for him by the day seamstresses to complete as the secondary tailor.

"...you'd think they'd be able to get more done," he mumbled to himself. "With three of them and using machines. Why's the singular hand seamer faster than the lot?"

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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.

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[for Biffy; April]

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