nekare

I am aware that I still haven't posted my reactions to OotP. Most of them are positive, though, so you can imagine. It's just-- I haven't felt all that happy or good all day long, so whatever. More on that tomorrow, probably, when I'm feeling better. So instead, have a short story.

Er, you guys know I hardly ever beg people to read my stories, but it's original, so I know it wouldn't be as popular as fanfic. So, um, give it a try, if you feel like it?

Title: Mythomania
Word Count: 3700
Summary: You run into him seven times in two years. He introduces himself with a new name each time.
Author Notes: A translation of Mitomanía. If it reads like a hasty translation, that's because it is, but I really wanted to have it done today before I forgot about it.



Mythomania

The first time you see him, he’s a Baron and you’re a debutant worried about the stain on your white gloves. He’s introduced to you as Arthur, and he smiles at you when you curtsey (hands holding your dress up and foot sticking forward) as you’ve been taught. You’re nervous, and this man is at least ten years your senior, so you start blabbering about the weather non stop and it’s not until he yawns that you realize that you haven’t let him get a word in for more than ten minutes.

You blush, and he smiles.

You ask him about his life, still red and with your hands smoothing an inexistent wrinkle on your white dress. He runs the lands his father left him and he’s close with the Prince’s brother. His life in court is the most exciting thing you’ve heard in your life and you listen to him with your mouth hanging open, forgetting that the protocol dictates that you should introduce yourself with as many people as possible instead or lingering with a specific guest.

You ask him a thousand and one questions, one after the other one. When he grows bored of you, he tugs on one of the curls of hair that hang around your face and says, “Why, but you really look like a twelve-year-old, just like Goldilocks,” and you frown and say you’re fifteen, thank you very much, and walk in the opposite direction, trying your best not to turn around and slap him.

----

The next time you see him he’s a Russian Grand Duke and you’re eighteen and you have your entire hometown charmed with you, so you approach him with confidence, head held high, and you tap him on the shoulder. When he turns around you feel like laughing at his mustache, but you swallow the urge down and keep on smiling. The party’s host loves to dance, and the music is a tad higher than you’re used to, so you pretty much end up yelling at him how surprised you are to see him again.

“I think you’re confusing me with someone else,” he says in a broken English and a guttural accent, the words stumbling out of his mouth, and you can’t help the confusion that shows in your face. He gives you a Russian name and a story of intrigue in the Tsar’s court and the barren winters in Siberia.

You try and tell him over and over again that it can’t be right, that you know him, that his name is Arthur and he’s an English Baron, and he says over and over again that you’re mistaken, that this is his second time in England in his life.

You leave after a while, annoyed, and what bothers you more than anything is that just before you turn your back on him he smirks at you, and it is obvious that he’s enjoying to rile you up.

You go out into the gardens at near midnight, still irritated, and you see him walking with fast steps to the gates. You follow him out of some odd impulse, and when you see him tearing that mustache off you’re so close to him that he hears your yelp of surprise, and he turns around to see you there, pointing at him while he still holds the fake mustache between his hands.

“I knew you were lying!” you say, and you sound so smug that it is no surprise that his expression turns sour, lips pressed tight together.

He sighs in frustration, but instead of trying to deny it he just shrugs, staring at you. He chuckles at your confused expression. “Come on, where’s your sense of adventure?” he finally says after a moment, and you don’t quite know what to say.

He tosses the mustache at you, and in the time you lose trying to catch it he’s already run towards the gate. The night is dark, but you can see him blowing you a kiss just before leaving the gardens.

You don’t tell anyone, because he intrigues you more that his lie bothers you.

----

You run into him seven times in two years. He introduces himself with a new name each time.

You don’t understand how can no one notice, how he can be with the same group of people in the same week with a different identity and everyone will believe he is who he says he is, no questions asked. After a while, you stop finding him annoying and start finding yourself intrigued by him, by the way he uses English society as a giant game to which only he seems to know the rules.

----

It’s March and you run into him in London, in a ball dedicated to the beginning of spring. The ballroom is decorated with thousands of flowers that hang from the roof. There are tiny lanterns from each strip of flowers hanging like colorful rain, each one of them giving off a different color of light, and the dance floor looks like a kaleidoscope that changes every time the breeze enters through the open French doors and moves the lanterns. He smiles at you from the other side of the room, where he’s surrounded by society ladies, all of them older than he is and staring at him as though they’d like a bite.

Half an hour later and you find yourself dancing with him, and the first thing you say to him is, “Who are you today?” He laughs, and turns you around, breaking the music’s rhythm.

“Henry,” he says into your ear. “A bourgeois without a drop of blue blood that wants to marry a title. Of course, I shouldn’t be saying this to someone I just met,” he adds as he looks into your eyes, eyebrows raised.

You take a hand to your mouth in the perfect image of indignation. “Ah, but Mister Henry, I should warn the good ladies that are after you! I couldn’t possibly let them be deceived like that,” you say as you rush the dance, leading him instead of him leading you, because two people can play this game.

“Ah, but women just love being fooled, don’t you happen to think that way?” he says, his face close to yours, and you just have to laugh.

“So am I guessing correctly that after the wedding you’ll take her title and a mistress and you’ll make a goal out of getting into the Queen’s bed?”

“Oh no, there’s no reason to be crude, I’ll happily settle for her sister,” he says with his tongue between his teeth, and he spends the rest of the evening telling you exactly how he’d deceive each and every one of the women that are watching you dance with their fans covering their mouths, eyebrows raised as they talk about the way you’re massacring the waltz.

----

He’s the one that finds you at the terrace of the countryside manor of one of your parent’s friends, after you’ve grown bored with the ladies conversation and the gentlemen have excused themselves to the smoking room.

Your pulse skyrockets the minute you feel someone crossing their arms across your stomach, pulling you close, and then it goes even higher when you hear his voice against your ear. “My name Is Earnest and I’m cheating on my wife with the maid,” is the first thing he says, and you laugh, your head resting on his shoulder. He bites your earlobe, and you get chills down your spine.

“Very honest of you,” you say, and he lets you go. Your turn around and sit on the railing, and it’s only then that you notice his thick glasses. His sideburns are huge, and you slip your fingers between the coarse hairs, pull at them a bit and smile when he lets out a pained noise. “What else?”

He puts his hands on the railing at both sides of your hips and slouches until his head is at the same level as yours. “We’re planning to murder my wife with a small dose of cyanide in her morning tea,” he whispers, and you interrogate him in whispers too about the sordid murder this stranger wants to perform.

He kisses you right before you have to go back inside, and for a moment, you wonder if he didn’t spread poison on your lips.

Afterwards, as you play bridge with the rest of the women, you spend hours watching him through the corner of your eyes as he discusses politics in the other side of the drawing room, an you try not to laugh too hard when he explains his wife couldn’t attend because the poor thing is sick.

----

It’s autumn when he introduces himself as Louis in a little picnic on the countryside, and he excuses himself from hunting with the men with the excuse that blood makes him horribly dizzy. So he stays with the rest of the women on the checked blanket under a willow that sheds a rain of yellow leaves every time the wind blows.

His French accent makes you bite your lips so as to not laugh out loud, and every time he sees you trying to hold the laughter inside he exaggerates the accent on purpose. He’s an artist this evening, a Parisian painter with barely two cents to eat but with connections in the upper society. Your cousin is a debutant, and she’s been coming to you to every social meeting for a couple of months. The poor girl is as taken with the fake painter as the rest of the ladies surrounding him, and it reminds you of the day you met him. It doesn’t matter which character he might be impersonating, he always has a certain charm about him, something in his eyes that keeps him surrounded by attention, which you guess is what he really wants.

The afternoon passes by under the tree, people coming and going until finally you end up alone with him. He lies on the blanket, his head against your knees, and he blows the smoke of the cigarette he just inhaled on your face. Your wrinkle your nose and hit him lightly on the forehead. You want to lie next to him and stare at the sky from in between the willow’s branches, but you know anyone could show up any minute, and you have a reputation to uphold.

You don’t even have to ask, he starts talking on his own. “The only reason I’m here is because I’m the lover of one of those ladies we just had lunch with,” he ways, still in his French accent, and you finally let yourself laugh as much as you’ve wanted to all day long.

“Which one of them?” you ask, an eyebrow raised and your head tilted down to see his face.

“Ah, but it’s a secret, mademoiselle, I’m afraid you’ll just have to guess.” He lifts his arm to offer you a drag of the cigarette, and you inhale without holding it, feeling his fingers against your mouth. He keeps on talking. “In all honestly, I’m tired of the old cow already, but I still remember how it was to sell my paintings in Montmartre in the winter, and she’s given me so many opportunities…”

“Don’t tell me, you’ll try and poison her too?” you ask, more amused that you had been all day long, but he frowns and breaks character from the first time since you’ve known him.

“Please, I don’t ever pull the same stunt, you better than anyone should know already,” he says, his eyebrows still close together and you have to be surprised – it’s the first time you’ve seen him as he is, no lies in between. You open your mouth to say something, maybe ask his name, maybe ask him who he really is, but he seems to guess what you’re about to do and goes back to the French accent. “Non, chérie, worse, I’m going to blackmail her by threatening to tell her husband all about it. Then I’ll take the money and go back to my belle France to drown myself in opium.”

“Mmm, it certainly sounds interesting,” you say, trying to get a leaf out of your hair. “Maybe you should take me; you do know opium has always been my weakness, after all.” He sits up, and after glancing around to make sure there’s no one else he takes the leaf out of your hair and leans toward you, but he doesn’t kiss you, he just bites your lower lip softly, still smiling.

“Would you go with me?” he asks you, after, his face still close to yours. “To Paris?” he asks, but you know it is Louis the one suggesting it, not the nameless man that is mystery personified.

You smirk, maliciously, and say, “But I just met you, Monsieur Louis! Surely you wouldn’t dare suggest such a thing to a decent girl like me.” You try to fake indignation, and he laughs before lying back on the blanket.

He turns his head around to bite you lightly on the thigh, leaves the fabric of your frock a bit wet, and starts telling you all about his childhood in France and how his poor brother died of tuberculosis when he was barely seven.

You lie that day too, because you know that if he ever was to ask you for real, you would follow him wherever he wished.

----

You’re twenty-two when you drag him out to the gardens and press him up against the wall of a manor right outside London, and even in the darkness you can see his surprised expression right before you kiss him, getting as close to him as possible until the buttons of his jacket leave imprints on your skin. He slides down the wall until he’s sitting on the ground, and you go with him, knees on both sides of his legs as his fingers dig into your hips.

He breaks the kiss to concentrate on your neck, and you sigh, the tension of years of desire finally dissipating. You can hear the music and laughter on the other side of the wall, and instead of it making you regain your wits and make you realize you’re out in the garden and everyone could see you, the adrenaline flows through your body and you forget about everything that isn’t his hands under your skirts, struggling with your undergarments and his mouth against your neck, saying your name time and time again.

You half laugh, half moan, and say, with your eyes closed and your head thrown backwards, “Why, Mister grand lawyer from Liverpool, I thought you had never met me before, how is it that you know my name?”

You can feel him smile against your skin, and he drags his teeth across your jaw. “Mmm, maybe this lawyer has spent years stalking you,” he says, but the lie lacks strength, a certain aplomb that had never been missing in his voice, and you take pleasure in the way his breathing grows shallow and he can’t seem to remember how to speak properly.

“Who are you?” you ask just before he comes, and he growls and kisses you to shut you up.

“The mystery is what makes it interesting,” he says for an answer, and then he does something with his fingers that leaves your breathless and makes you forget you even asked.

It doesn’t last much, and afterwards your hands are raw from having pressed them against the wall for support but you still feel more alive than even before, your frock gluing itself to your skin with sweat. He’s resting his head on the wall, eyes closed and mouth moving in a slur of words you can’t quite grasp the meaning of. You watch him for some moments, even when your knees hurt from being in that position for so long, and when he finally opens his eyes one of his hands is still wrapped around your hair.

“If I had known ladies throw themselves on one before even having been introduced I would’ve come here to visit a long time ago,” he says, getting back inside his character’s skin, even with that nervous tic on the eyebrow and that odd way of slouching that you’d never seen on him before that night; another of the thousand and one different gestures you’ve seen him use over the years. You laugh, because you cannot expect anything else from him.

Your dress ends up completely ruined, but you don’t mind at all.

----

It’s winter when you introduce yourself as a millionaire widow with four husbands on her record and he stands there for a moment, staring at you with his mouth hanging open as if he couldn’t understand what you are saying, but then it’s gone, and he’s smiling as he’s struggling not to laugh as he asks you whether you’d used poison like someone he once had known.

He’s a Czech ambassador tonight, but instead of telling you all about the small son he had to leave back home due of his blindness, he devours every detail you say to him, and you tell him about each murder as you stumble on the stairs outside the elegant apartment in which the wine sampling is still crowded. You finally find a room where to hide as you whisper in his ear how you strangled husband number two, and he demands you to tell him every detail of your new invented life as he kisses every bit of skin he can reach.

Afterwards, when your arms are still wrapped around his neck and his heart is still beating far too fast, you ask him when you can see him again for the first time since you have met, but if he understands that it is you who is asking not the murderer widow, he doesn’t show it.

----

You’ve been married for three months when he spends hours telling your husband how his poor old mother has just died and he has no idea what to do with all the money she left him. Your husband pretends to be interested like the gentleman he was raised to be, and while the man that introduced himself as Simon seems to be immersed in his story, you can’t help but notice the way he’s holding his champagne flute with a far too strong grip and you can tell that beneath his gloves his knuckles are white.

Your husband manages to disengage himself with a grimace once the gruesome diseased that caused the lady’s death is explained to him with painful detail, secretions and smells included, and you finally find yourself alone with him. When he finally looks you in the eye, there’s disappointment there, and when he walks away from you, you follow him because he shouldn’t have any right to ask anything from you. You end up in a corridor somewhere in your parent’s country house, and when he pushes you against the wall you let him kiss you without caring whether someone might see you.

He asks you if you’re as bored as you look, and the way he pronounces your new last name makes you cringe. You shrug, because you can’t deny anything, and he barely bows to you before turning his back on you, walking down the hallway without another word.

You want to yell at him, because it is not as if he ever gave you another choice, but you remain quiet until he turns at the end of the hallway and then you break your mother’s Ming jar out of anger, although you don’t know for sure whether you want to yell at him, to your husband, or yourself.

----

The next time you see him is in a masquerade, and even when you’ve never seen him with his hair that color or with that particular way of standing, you recognize him as soon as you enter the room. As always, he’s surrounded by people, and you smile when you see him making big gestures, no doubt telling a grand story. You’ve been married for a long, boring year, and your husband has been commenting the weather and complaining about today’s youth with the party’s host for half an hour.

He’s an Egyptologist this night, and when you walk next to him he’s talking about how brave he was to enter a cursed tomb when everyone told him he wouldn’t survive to a horde of young ladies that listen aghast. You ask him if he ever did see a mummy, and he turns around to stare at you, expression surprised, for a moment before assuring you that of course, that the bastard tried to kill him. The rest of the women let out yelps of horror and ask for more, but he keeps on staring at you as he tells his tale.

The ballroom is decorated in hues of golden and purple, all sparkles that after a couple of glasses of wine become hypnotic and you can feel your head swimming as you follow him outside the party onto the street that looks far too blue and washed off in contrast. The hem of your frock gets wet with the fog that laps at your ankles. You still have your mask on when you catch up to him a block away, and he doesn’t look too particularly surprised to see you. You stand there in front of him for a moment, biting your lip, and then you take off your wedding ring and place it on a gas lamp nearby. You can smell the Thames from here, bitter and penetrating, as he laughs out loud, pure mirth in his voice as he grabs you by the hand and drags you to wherever it is he’s going next.

You ask him about those mummies he had been talking about, and he draws a landscape painted in yellows and the red of the sun at sunset and boiling sand under your toes as you touch ageless inscriptions with the pads of your fingertips.

You’re twenty-six when you follow him outside the door and start living a lie.

----

Every day, when you wake up, you ask him his name, and he tells you who he is that morning; sometimes a doctor and other ones a mercenary and a few of them a museum curator. He’s never the same person he was last night, and he becomes the riddle you have to solve from day to day.