milliways_bar | (no subject)

Damian looks down at his hands. "I care about him. I want him happy. He deserves to be happy."

"Happiness is not a constant state. It comes and it goes. Right now, it goes. When he is happy again, he'll appreciate it all the more."

His frown eases a little. He may not like it, but he knows how very true her words are. He won't deny them. What had happened with Anita had made him ecstatically happy because of all the darker times in his past. Her actions meant more because of the pain he had gone through with his previous mistress.

"Forgive my sadness, Lady. You are right, and I should try not to dwell on what cannot be changed." He scoots a little closer to her with his chair, eyeing her hands. "What are you doing with the string?"

"Playing a game."

Her eyes sparkle.

"Your sadness shows how much you love him. His hurt shows how much he loves you. You'll both understand how important that is soon enough."

And she shifts topics again.

"I move the string about until I make a pretty pattern."

He opens his mouth to comment on her words, then shuts it again when she switches to another subject. It might not be a sign, but he takes it as one anyway, letting his questions rest.

"Will you show me?" he asks, having never seen such a thing before. There are worse idle pastimes, after all, and simply being in Moon's presence is calming. Her random quirks intrigue him.

Moon hops up from her chair and settles herself in Damian's lap.

"Like this."

She dips her fingers, shifting the string from finger to finger, until it makes a starburst pattern.

"See?"

No matter how many times she does it, Damian will never quite get used to someone just plopping down into his lap. One arm circles her waist to steady her, and he watches intently as the string pulls on itself with the various transfers from finger to finger.

It seems so silly to draw such amusement from a piece of string, but he has to admit the final design is nice. "Strange, how it all looks tangled until you pull the final time. Then the mess just seems to right itself."

Reading more into his own words, he smiles slightly, suddenly realising why Moon would like this game. Is the crimson-haired vampire always this deep when speaking about string? Maybe, though this time it isn't intentional.

Her eyes dart up to him, a knowing smile on her lips.

"Everything is a mess until you give one final tug and the knots come undone and the pattern is revealed. It is the metaphor, and the metaphor is it. Things always seem to be the messiest when you stand outside and look at it, but when you're moving the strings, you see what it is you need to do, which finger it needs to go on, to make the mess into something beautiful and understood."

"And how do you coordinate the fingers that pull the strings? There are many of us tangled in this web with Anita."

Moon leans up, her lips so near his ear, and whispers the secret.

"You all need to stop bowing to her every demand, for she is the knot that breeds other knots."

"It is easier said than done, I fear... especially for me."

He has tried, though, and last night the results were more than promising. He can't refuse her direct orders, but he can try to help her see when her orders are ideal or psychotic.

"Not forever," she says absently, creating a new pattern. "There is a new path created every day, every night. You created a new one last night. For you. For her. For the kitten."

Damian doesn't usually ask after the future, believing that it's best to know as little as possible, but his worry compels him.

"Will it be beautiful?"

Her eyes dart him, a little unsure.

"It is a pattern of five, though it is really of six, but six isn't a stable number like five. Five is solid, six breeds jealousy."

Damian's brow furrows as he tries to decode that. Five is a nice, odd number, to be sure, but six isn't all that bad, is it?

"There are six faces to a stable cube."

Moon smiles slowly.

"There is. Stable if the sixth side wants to be the sixth side. If it doesn't... well, then, it makes being a cube hard."

He understands her words, but not the context of them. He isn't sure how they relate to what is happening in his life as well as Anita's and Nathaniel's. He supposes it will be clear in time.

"So when it becomes five with a sixth outside, we'll try to include the sixth. We can't have an unstable, unhappy cube, now can we?"

Damian only half understands his own response, but in a convoluted way, it does make sense. As long as he thinks geometrically, the metaphor doesn't make his head ache.

"No," Moon says. "Asher should be included. He should always be included," she murmurs absently, creating a new string pattern.

Damian frowns. "Asher can't be excluded. He holds marks with Nathaniel, and..." His voice trails off as he concentrates a bit too hard on the puzzle.

His head does begin to ache, and he comes no closer to unravelling everything than he was when he started.

"I won't exclude Asher," he concludes, for what it's worth.

Moon smiles.

"Good."

And she accepts it as the end of that line of conversation.

He can tell the discussion is over, and accepts it in turn.

"Make me another pattern?" he requests, looking down at the sparkly string again as his mind clears.

Moon shows him, fingers dipping and shifting, and then the string sparkles in the shape of a daisy.

"Daisies are happy flowers."

"They tend to close at night, though," Damian says with a hint of sadness, though it is a superficial sadness that does not take root. "It has been a very long time since I saw daisies and other sun-loving flowers in natural bloom."

Her eyes, deep and bottomless and full of truths he can't understand, hold his gaze.

"You will soon."

There is slow, contemplative blinking, but once again Damian only gives himself a minor headache trying to unravel the mysteries that Moon speaks so plainly about.

He just ends up giving her a small smile that eloquently expresses that he doesn't have any idea what she's talking about but doesn't hold it against her.