pas de deux

They’re dancing! A man and woman are dancing!

Sounds like you’re not having any trouble seeing it. Are they dancing well?

Yes, yes, they are. It’s the most adorable thing.

… Wha? Adorable? That’s funny, I asked to have it modeled after a ballroom dance.

Ah, um, yes, it’s a very elegant dance. But, you see, they’re small, like little dwarves, which I thought was kind of cute… And they seem so close — going round and round without ever letting go of each other’s hands.

There is an unused great hall in the mansion, sparkling clean and wonderfully appointed, despite it being bereft of either laughter or joy. The household staff avoids it, speaking of the uncanny whispers and childish giggling despite not a soul ever standing on its polished floor. 

It had never been used in all the time he owned it, spare for that night where he permanently ripped asunder the smile he once swore to protect.

He likes to stand in there and let her words incinerate him from the inside; if a gentle voice and ink on paper could make a man burn.

Phenakistoscope spinning in his hand, he stares at endlessly turning figures, their hands entwined and harkening back to happier days. The paper is yellowed and tattered, the drawings fuzzy at the corners.

There are one or two smudges marring the colored parts. Water had at one point trickled down on it in tiny droplets.

He knows their very shape; could see them even in an unlit hall. He knows the shape of every mangled word in that letter, they’re all burned inside his eyelids.

“Master, your eyesight will go bad if you continue to pass your time this way.”

The jade-eyed maid hovers at the edges of his vision sometimes, her brow knit, hand raised. But there is an invisible chasm between them in the shape of a pale-haired ghost, and no meager words of comfort leave her lips.

(A memory draped in a dreamlike haze momentarily creeps to the forefront of his mind. Of a cold, cold hand wrapped in his, the fingers far too rough to be that of the person he should never have let go of. Oh, but he was a fool to the core.)

This is fine. He would have spat nothing kind to her if she ever tried, and he’s hurt enough women in his life. 

“Is it really a servant’s place to question how the master treats his health?” This is the kindest he could manage. Once, perhaps, he could have worked up the old vitriol he had for most people.

He sees her stony smile freeze on her lips out of the corner of his eye. Listlessly, he turns his attention back to the dancing figures on the wheel. 

It’s none of your damned business if I want to go blind now, is it?

“As you say, Master,” the head maid demurs, always gentle and never quite warm. “My apologies for… overstepping.” 

He hears soft footsteps and lets out a sharp bark of laughter once they’re out of earshot. They both very well know that she’s capable of gliding across the floor with nary a noise.

How considerate.

“Needlessly apologetic, aren’t you,” he mutters, yet the face in his visions is not one of the maid. 

Overstepping? Exactly what boundaries did they share? 

Comical, that one word. She knows the full extent of his failings, and yet she still treats him with that measure of respect that he knows, she knows, he never deserved.

“I was once not terribly fond of you.” 

Once, in a moment that would be forgotten in the darkness of the mansion, the maid laid bare her true thoughts of her master.

“Hah. Sounds about right.”

He was not at all surprised and welcomed it with a twisted smile.

“But that is not true any longer.”

His hand tightened around hers, chasing warmth where it couldn’t be found.

For a moment, he allowed himself to be weak.

“Is that so.”

Briefly, her fingers squeeze back.

“It is.”

The two of them pretend that the lost moments in the tower are nothing but a dream, but it leaves a lingering aftertaste in the back of his mouth. 

He starts seeing more and more of the maid around the mansion, not that it was a challenge to run across her. The household still loses maids on a regular basis, gaining prospective new hires only to lose them as the rumors of the ageless head maid prove to be too much. 

At least, he muses with a measure of tired irony, it keeps the spies from his rivals and other factions from infiltrating the ranks.

When he mentions this observation to her one day, she gives him yet another of her placid smiles and asks him what he’d like to be served with his coffee. 

Often, she dwells in the rose garden that he’s permitted her to restore. It would never return to its full glory, not without the one that made it come alive with her maternal love for the many flowers that bloomed under her care.

And that’s fine. She was the true owner of that garden, the one he utterly robbed of the few things that gave her life any real joy. 

But he can see that the maid has the beginnings of something humble but lovely, growing nestled in the earth. The rosebushes have begun to show the signs of the maid’s labors, blossoms full and heavy.

He wonders how he keeps finding himself retracing his steps, again and again, to the maid crouched in front of her small flowerbed.

Perhaps it is to chase away the voice that haunts his steps. It comes after every deal he’s paid for in blood, slithering up his back with the cadence and intimacy of a lover, crowing in joy at his guilt. Like a bird of carrion, it perches on the rot of his corpse and savors. He is little else but leathery skin and bones; he has nothing left to give that he hasn’t allowed the mafia to devour. His heart was already a horrific, shriveled thing when he gave it to Michelle, and it poisoned her as surely as Maria’s actions.

Jacopo Bearzatti is a dead man walking. Knowing this, was it really so far-fetched to keep in his company such a maid?

Truly, witnessing your inability to escape the shackles of your upbringing is quite the delight. 

On a cold night, he finds himself stumbling on unsteady feet toward the garden. The voice continues to croon in his ear, at once triumphant and sorrowful, sometimes he hears Maria, sometimes he hears Michelle — 

And sometimes — 

Still aiming to follow that glory that your father has set like broken clockwork, aren’t you? After your wife paid for it, you continue as the coldhearted man you indeed are.

He groans and clutches at his temples. There should be no such thing as a witch in this mansion, despite what tall tales the maids liked to tell, is what he wants to say — no such thing as a damned ghost .

The head maid happily quashes that very notion flat under her graceful feet with her very existence.

But he is a stubborn man, and in this situation, he would cling to that stubbornness. This woman deserves that much. Here, he could at least be magnanimous to one even more broken than himself.

Hah. He entertains the notion of it — kindness, given without strings attached — and that craven part of him that flinches away at what’s real, at what’s genuine, cowers like a man blinded by the sun. It’s an odd description to attach to this pale husk of a woman — a sun , as if you could even believe something so preposterous — but he entertains the fleeting illusion of a radiant grin. It was never real, not in that isolated little crevice born from their realities being brought together for one day.

He wonders what snatched it away, forever, if her own love let her down as badly as his own mistakes with Michelle.

He wonders who it could have been for, all the while an aching in his chest for the smile of someone… 

Someone who doesn’t exist.

“Master? You mustn’t be out of bed in such a feverish state.” The maid moves to stand up from her spot in front of the flowerbed.

Shaking his head, he raises his hand and stifles a hiss of pain. “After I took care of that worthless cur, do you really think I could sleep so soundly?”

His shoulder throbs where he took yet another knife in an attempt on his life. What value it has continues to elude him as the days pass. Yet another fever to follow, with his damnably bad luck. This is his lot to bear, to weather and survive all the beatings that his body, heart, and mind could take, yet losing all the people he ever cared for as payment instead.

Becoming the head of the cosca after his father passed the mantle has only increased such attempts.

Does it hurt? 

The voice persists, eager in its pursuit to drive its hooks deeper into its prey’s flesh. 

You pitiful little thing. All those sacrifices and you’ll only ever live in strife. Dreaming to change things for your country? 

“Master-”

“The physician has seen me.” He deflects the maid’s concern, halting her in her tracks. “It’s not as if I’ll die, you’re too damn worried.”

She freezes entirely too still for a moment, reminding him of the uselessly pretentious paintings on his walls — still life , Michelle would have told him — that he’s never understood the point of. The gears behind those eyes shift until he’s left staring at a woman with a sharper smile than he’s used to, at once both empty and scornful.

“You are but a human man, master. Perhaps you should reconsider your limits.” With impudence born out of weary familiarity, she steps up to him. The passage of time weighs on Jacopo, more than ever before, as his own servant hefts his arm over her shoulder.

Aha, haha… Not a single thing has changed, my dear. You are only a single, impotent man.

He ignores it; he breathes a little easier, in the maid’s presence, despite the rather telling scolding he’s just received. From someone like her, this is a tongue-lashing. It’s perhaps a mark of how he’s grown that he could feel a smirk tug at his mouth.

Jacopo grunts as they begin walking, a twinging in his body he summarily ignores. “You’ve sure gotten bolder.”

“Oh my, whatever gave that impression?” With effortless movements, they make their way back inside the mansion. 

They stop upon the threshold, looking into the lamplit foyer; out the corner of his eye, he sees a flicker within the maid’s shadow. It is gone by the next heartbeat, but the red has him breathing a little sharper.

Red. Red eyes? Red hair? Does it make a damn difference, in the end? 

“Is it normal for a maid to lecture their foolish master?” His voice remains level as he makes a pointed motion to step inside, freeing himself from her with barely a stumble.

Every Bearzatti has his pride; perhaps there is little else, all things considered. 

A wisp of a laugh. “Hehe… If that is how you interpret my words to be, Master, then who am I to deny you?”

“What do you mean… oh, do shut up.”

He walked into that one. But calling himself a fool doesn’t leave a sting this time.

“I shall escort you to your quarters, then, Master.” The silence that follows is as close to companionable as they could get, around each other. 

The pale maid with her lifeless smile, who none can linger around for long without feeling the first pricklings of fear; the man with tired eyes, whose actions should give people more cause to fear him.

Another flicker, as they take the staircase. Bone white, and then burning, virulent gold, all melding into one unrecognizable mass. The only thing one can discern is hate, and even then, it is immeasurable.

He finds that he cannot step inside his cavernously empty room, once they reach his door. 

“Wait.” 

She stops, listing her head to one side. “What can I help you with, Master?”

“I can’t sleep.” The admission is torn from him, like a nail from a corpse strung up on a cross. It grates to show this much of himself to anyone, but it is almost bearable around her. “Come with me to the great hall.”

“Have you ever danced before, Master? You seem woefully inexperienced.”

A scornful click of the tongue is her only answer. That question is not worth even dignifying with a response. They both know of the woman who once gazed, so longing, at a phenakistoscope; a whisper of a dream in her heart, begging to be held within the arms of a bloody fool. 

She is not that woman, though she has the embers of a similar dying dream lingering in her eyes. 

He is still the same imbecile he was years ago, a dreamer come to reality too late and left with naught but a cold and empty hall and no wife to hold.

What shall they do with that?

The master holds his servant with a gentleness belying the severity of his face. She is a ghost, the pale beams of faint lamplight rendering her almost transparent, as delicate as a spider’s web. Yet she is far, far realer than his delusions, and much less monstrous.

This ramshackle and ill-matched pair begins to make their way across the floor, their heels echoing against polished marble.

For once, the voice that haunts him in his waking moments is silent, leaving a yawning emptiness.

There is no music for them to match their steps to. This is fine, for neither of them seem to have any experience in holding another person for the sheer joy of passion expressed through movement. 

And passion? How laughable.

Rather, this is like an automated movement, like the machinery he is so fond of.

“Have you danced with them?” He does not beat around the bush. “Once, did you have someone who you wanted to ask?”

In the hazy, dreamlike hours past midnight, where a trick of the light can distort the truth so easily, the maid appears younger. 

“I did not get the chance,” she says as they make one turn, raising their clasped hands high. “Or… I imagine I never did. It is hard to say.” A breath, thoughtful and measured as she picks through the broken glass of her memory, all to find one recognizable shard. 

Maybe it would be easier on him, if he shatters the same way. 

She offers him a vague smile. “Though I doubt that what you call dance in this fashion had existed during that time.”

Mulling this over, he murmurs, “Couldn’t have been that different.”

Did he not know a dancer, once? And a festival, where he clasped his hands and stamped his feet with Maria, and their friends.

No. 

What festival?

The maid takes one look at his face, and lowers her gaze. “They were not a very… physically active master, I believe. I recall singing sometimes, though-”

Singing?

He remembers starlight captured in a melodious verse, but not the one whose lips once uttered it. He cannot, for it will undo him.

Jacopo laughs low in his throat, through the blinding agony. “I can’t imagine you doing that.” 

“Hehe, so do I.” Her fingers tighten on his. “A rather humorous scenario, is it not?” 

No, but their lives seem to be living comedies, he finds. “Well, I seem to remember a tune, somehow. Not that it matches this kind of dance.” The latter part is muttered to himself, but a flicker of life appears in her face.

“I have not heard a good song in so long, since the young Miss Rhodes passed on.”

There is no Miss Rhodes within the storied history of this property’s owners, when he acquired it. He dismisses the thought. 

“Don’t expect much.”

And yet the voice that slips out of his mouth is — 

It’s — pleasant, in a way that is at odds with Jacopo Bearzatti. He has not sung for anyone since Maria, back in their little Casa Nostra. And yet. The tune is warm like a sunrise spent walking while carrying someone precious, a loved one’s arms wound around his shoulders as they bury their face against his back.

Who is he? Who is that person?

The maid looks upon him, smiling wide, a flicker of not-quite envy making her gaze all the greener. It disappears once she shuts her eyes, choosing the path of pretending that he is someone else.

They make a full circle around the wide hall, the steps mismatched to the rhythm of his voice. It is the nearest that either of them will come to peace, under this mansion’s roof, for the days to come. It will be swallowed up soon by the voices, and the weight of unseen decades that continue to drown what remains of the maid and whoever lurks behind her smile. But for now, it is enough.

She recognizes the person who once was capable of humanity in him. And he acknowledges the woman who tends to a garden, to offer a rose to a memory.

It is as brief as all moments of respite afforded to people like them. Soon, they part, once again a master and his enigmatic maid. 

Jacopo breathes out, “Thank you. Maybe…” He grants her something rare: his own, unskilled attempts at comfort, years too late for the one who needed it most. “Maybe, one day, they will come back.”

Raising her jade stare to his, she arches one dry brow. “And maybe, one day, you will find forgiveness.”

Before he could give his harshest bark of laughter yet, she lets out a soft sigh. 

“Until then, I will keep you company, Master.” She reaches up and pats his head; the brief flash of a blonde girl, messing up his brown locks, steals his breath away.  “A dance partner, if your nightmares prove too unbearable.”