Almost done!

[shiromirai]

Fandom: Original - Hinta'verse
Characters/Pairing: Cel/ Nik & Payne / Hugues
Prompt: (Table)
Rating: PG - PG -13
Notes: Any comments/ critiques/ etc. would be welcome. All mistakes are mine.
Summary: Nik really shouldn't try his hand at summoning demons.

#20 - Prophet

"What do you mean you're going to summon a demon?" Cel almost shrieked as she stared at the black pentagon drawn on their cellar's floor.

Nik rolled his eyes at her. "Come on. It's not as if anything would happen--"

"Then why are we doing this?" 

He ignored her. "--and if things did, at the very least, we'd get to see something interesting. "

"No. No no no. Don't you ever watch though old movies? Things always come to a bad end."

"Cel, look. We're not actually summoning a demon. We're summoning 'a figure of evil'. Whoever it is, between the two of us, we can mope the floor with him. And Payne and Hugues are guarding the door, just for your peace of mind.."

"I have a bad feeling about this," Cel huffed at him before waving a hand dismissively at him. "Just get on with it."

Nik did. He stood beside, his hand upon a book that was falling apart. The seller of the book had told them it was wrapped in human skin. Cel had acidly told him most of humanity were rats but not to this degree. 

She heard a mumble of words. The earth rumbled and the heavens shook. She moved onto the balls of her feet, ready for any sudden movements from within the pentagon.  There was a silent boom, a flash of light, and a figure shimmered into appearance within the pentagram.

The smoke started to precipitate and Cel tightened her grip on the scimitar - an old one she had kept around as a memoir and slicing apples.

There was a fit of coughing from the figure. The smoke cleared further, and she could make out an outline. It was enough. Cel dropped her stance and laughed.

"A figure of evil. Really now. "

 "We shall never speak of this, " Nik glared across at her. " Now erase the damn pentagon."

Cel chuckled. "I warned you."

Fandom: Original - Hinta'verse
Characters/Pairing: Cel/ Nik & Payne / Hugues
Prompt: (Table)
Rating: PG - PG -13
Notes: Any comments/ critiques/ etc. would be welcome. All mistakes are mine.
Summary: Payne and Hugues had their lives ahead of them. The orphanage was just a pitstop.

#21 - Mecca

By the time a year had passed since Payne and Hugues had crashed through the roof, Cel and Nik had forgotten that Payne and Hugues were staying at the orphanage under a pretense of paying off their debt, that in truth, they were strangers with no ties to each other. If Payne and Hugues wanted to leave, they left. And unless Cel and Nik were willing to arouse the attention of the city and a good chuck of the underworld, there wasn't a whole lot that they could do about it.

But still, they were surprised when Hugues and Payne did leave, and beyond anyone’s expectations, Payne was the first to go.

She'd cheerily gone to bed that night, having just finished a chicken dinner, and in the morning, she was just gone. Cel had been furious – she had never been able to handle betrayal well - raging through the house to the point that even the Horde was afraid to approach her. Hugues had taken the brunt of her fury as she needed a convenient scapegoat for her anger and she blamed him for not being enough for Payne. Not enough so that she would stay. The man had taken it; let her rant and narrowly dodging her wilder and wilder swings until Nik finally had to lead her away.

Three months later, Hugues disappeared as well.  

Cel gave up on them then, refused to hear any mention of them even while Nik used his contacts to hunt them down. Hugues he managed to find rather easily - the young man having returned home to receive his rightful inheritance and had begun to run the LaRue company under a firm but gentle hand. Payne, however, seemed to have completely dropped out of sight. The rent for her apartment continued to be paid, but the landlord swore that he had never seen her coming by since she had moved in with Nik and Cel.

And then at Christmas, eight months later the doorbell rang.

Expecting a sentimental couple who believed that they should adopt a child for Christmas, Cel wearily reached for the door to turn the people away, only to hear very familiar voices.

"Do we have to get murdered for Christmas Hugues? This wasn't even my idea!"

To which a low, pleasant voice responded calmly, "Yes. If you noticed, I'm standing right here so that if she tries to attack us, I can pull you in front of me."

"Why me? You're supposed to wear the pants in this relationship."

"Because if you get knocked out, I can be chivalrous and carry you into the house and I will be kind and comforting and it would be fine. On the other hand, if I got knocked out and you had to carry me, my manly pride would be quite damaged beyond repair."

And when Cel finally opened the door, there they were, squabbling back and forth as they always had. They were dressed oddly, or at least, oddly to the inhabitants of the slums.

Payne's tattoos had been bleached, almost faded against the tanned texture of her skin, the holes in her lips, nose, and eyebrows had healed over and she was wearing makeup. Makeup.

And not only that, she was wearing a white evening gown and heels, her hair done up in a sweeping up-do with tendrils of hair falling around her face, softening her sharp features. Hugues stood beside her, resplendent in black attire, his hair pulled back with a black ribbon, giving him the fine-featured look of the aristocrats that were his ancestors.

Celosia simply stared at the two of them for a moment, unable to take in their appearance or the fact that Payne had stripped her hair of the black dye and was in fact a platinum blonde. Definitely not both at the same time.

And then somewhere it clicked in her mind that it was Payne and Hugues and not some couple willing to adopt one of her precious orphans. Before she could stop herself, she was seeing red and the doorframe shattered under her grasp as she swung her fist up without letting go of the wood.

It was as though eleven months hadn't gone by. Payne easily sidestepped her with her natural agility and they both ducked underneath her arm to disappear into the building that they'd called home. Both of them had been subject to Cel's violent tendencies before and their instincts were as sharp as ever.

Nik played the perfect host and ordered the orphans to bring out an old china tea set that Cel hadn't broken yet and the duo flinched at the obvious jab at their appearance but they settled down to a drink of dry whiskey while Cel quietly fumed in the corner.

  
It was discovered that Payne had left at the news that her father was dead and Nik realized just how little he had known of this girl who had only introduced herself with a mononym. He had looked into her past several times, knowing that there had to be a connection with Hugues, but had found nothing. The Marques had hidden the fact that they ever had a daughter who had rather run away by faking her death than stay in their old-money society. But then Payne was an excellent actress.

But with her father's death, she had returned to the world of cutthroat business, challenging her father's will, claiming that by falsifying her death, his will was naturally forfeit.

And so she got rid of her tattoos, her piercings, hid her coarse behavior and stripped her hair of the dye she'd applied all those years ago. She'd destroyed her father's legacy by disbanding the Board of Trustees and reinstating new members, reorganizing every facility and withdrawing all of the Marque's investments.

And when Hugues left, he'd not only fulfilled his terms of the agreement but had received a letter from his family, informing him of his former fiancee. He'd returned home immediately and the rest was history.

"We're getting married." She informed the two casually. "And we come bearing gifts. It should arrive tomorrow."

"We figured it was only right to come back." Hugues remarked gently. "Payne and I will be leaving this place for good. She will no longer make payments to her apartment; I will no longer have direct business dealings with this city's mafia unless they decide to travel. But we'll be coming back here often. After all, this is a special place to us. We can't just leave it."

Payne glanced at him. "Of course we can. You compared it to Mecca didn't you? Muslims only have to go there one in their lifetime if they can afford it."

  
"...Ailbhe-"

"Payne."

"Payne. Be discreet. We don't want them to know just how much we hated the fact that they exploited us by making us take care of the kids, do the manual labor, fix the electric circuits and the refrigerator, do the plumbing, random pieces of carpentry, drive the bus when it broke down, and causing us to actually buy food with money that came out of our nonexistent pay as they neglected to feed us on certain days.” Hugues smiled at the room in general.

“And you can't offend them by mentioning just how much you resent getting plates thrown at your head by a hormonal matriarch of this place and just how much you and I hated having the room right next door to a couple that can't go more than two days without having sex that keeps us up all night."

By this time, Hugues was already helping Payne up as he continued, still smiling. "After all, just because one of them spends most of his free time trying to crash my stocks and looking for a way to destroy me financially and mentally, and the other threatened us into being good little guests by destroying antique chairs, that doesn't necessarily make them bad hosts. Of course, anger management issues is something that we've all gotten used to over the years, isn't it?" He cast them a bright smile and waved graciously as he and Payne put on their shoes again and opened the door.

"Well, you have a good night now, we have to be going."

Cel and Nik sat in a rather stunned silence before the implications sank in. Payne and Hugues were really still just Payne and Hugues. Despite the pretentious outfits and the cultured look Payne was sprouting (and goddess forbid Cel ever had to think of cultured and Payne in the same sentence), they were still the two that had lived with them.

Cel had lived most of her life in her childhood though she was never a child. She had fought more battles than Payne could ever encounter, built a higher mountain of corpses than Hugues’ family put together. She had ruled the world, and found it not to her liking. The orphanage was her haven, her undeserved reward.

Nik had done things he could not be less proud of. He had set out to make a name for himself and now there was no one in the underworld who did not know who Nikolai Cross was. Or what he capable of. The orphanage was his conscious, his light, his life  - it stood for everything he had gained when he gave up a life of murder and rape and drugs.

Payne and Hugues, on the other hand, had their lives ahead of them. (Cel still harbored a secret desire to mold Payne into taking over her position as leader of Flare and have someone else take care of that mess.) 

Cel glanced at Nik and deadpanned, "If they ever show their face around here again, I'm going to hit them with a frying pan."

Fandom: Original - Hinta'verse
Characters/Pairing: Cel/ Nik & Payne / Hugues
Prompt: (Table)
Rating: PG - PG -13
Notes: Any comments/ critiques/ etc. would be welcome. All mistakes are mine.
Summary: Some things you can't hide.

#25 - Alms

When Nikolai had first met Celosia, she was a mess.

She was huddled into a corner of the dark alley, her face covered in soot, her hair mottled as it tumbled down her back; and from the smell alone, Nikolai could tell she hadn’t bathed in weeks. Her eyes had the look of the Slums though  - you can always tell if someone grew up in that hell, no matter how much they try to cover it up.

But no one who survived the Slums would be so stupid as to end up in this destitute state on the Hill no less. This was the district where the old-moneyed families lived. Even petty theft would bring a hefty sum.

He had meant to walk away, wrapped securely in his air of pragmatism. Look out for number one. He had never helped a single person in his life before, not without benefits to himself.

Nikolai hadn’t wanted to help her.

But instead, he took off his expensive suit jacket, brushed off a piece of lint. Yes, you can always tell if someone grew up in the Slums and expensive jackets do nothing to cover that up. He drapped it over her small shoulders, perhaps as an act of pity, perhaps because he saw himself in her, and walked away.

A few weeks later, the jacket showed up at the doorstep of the orphanage, cleaned and freshly ironed. His neighbors had claimed a member of Flare, the almost mythical organization that controlled the entire planet, had delivered it.