Orthodoxies [In progress]

Monserrat

One week later.

Seven days. They say the Lord threw together this sad-sack world in just that time. The deepest oceans and the vast continents marooned in them. The vault of the sky and the furnace of molten rock at the earth's burning core. The sun and the moon and the innumerable stars. The birds and the beasts and everything that breathes and grows and crawls and lives and dies.

Man, and all his many predators.

--

Nothing has changed at the Meralta in those seven days, except for the second-run film in the dusty, rarely used balcony theater. From NavarIn to O Pagador de Promessas. After midnight, just barely, when the streets of the Red Light District are just beginning to fill up, with sorority sisters on pub crawls and hipsters seeking sex and donuts. With truck drivers and drug dealers, lawyers and insurance agents, prostitutes - professional and amateur, of every age, sex, build, and potential persuasion.

The Meralta is not a place for red-lit revelry. No one brings their bachelorette party here. The patrons are lone and furtive, seeking a different (or perhaps merely cheaper) solace than the men and women, boys and girls displaying themselves in the red-lit display windows elsewhere in the district might offer. An insipid looking man with a comb-over and a clip-on bow tie mumbles something to the (same) bored clerk, shoves a crumpled handful of change beneath the bars of the ticket-seller's cage, then disappears inside.

The same prostitute in the doorway of the downstairs theater. The same scent of stale popcorn hanging in the air, a faint but filmy suggestion of chemically enhanced butter-substance. The same dull flicker of dying bulbs in dim sconces. The same worn red velvet runners on the once-grand staircases leading to the upstairs balcony. The small theater.

O Pagador de Promessas has already started. The musical, murmurous cadence of Portugese is audible three-quarters of the way up the stairs. If he does not speak it, but speaks one of its Latinate cousins, the language has a sliding sort of familiarity - like the new scent of old blood. Perhaps, like the trash downstairs, this one runs on a continual loop. A constant circuit of Zé do Burro's pledge, promise and fall.

The doors are open again, expectant.

This time, however, he can see her from the entrance. She stands at the front of the aisle, one shoulder leaning against the cheap baffling meant to sound-proof the balcony theater, arms crossed and resting against her narrow torso, her elbows sharp, pale face lifted in profile, dark eyes moving faintly as she follows the movement of the oversized figures on the screen. Hair loose, tonight, dark and sleek, the faintest hint of curl to it.

Something in her stance says that she is aware of him when first his shadow crosses the threshold of the old theater. Before then, even. But her attention remains on the screen until he draws abreast of her. Only then does she turn, catch him with the edge of a smile like a hook.

"William." The hint of a smile smoked dark eyes. "I have decided that I am no longer in the mood for pious fools," - and the flash of something dangerous, some flare of temper, grasped and then thoroughly leashed. Mastered. "Will you walk with me, instead."

William

He is on time: not early, not late. He strolls to the Meralta via the same route he took last time: down the street as if he was a piece of the night-life -- not aimless but not part of any pack just yet. Tonight William is not dressed as Timothy Dalton in A License to Kill, but affects the casual chic of an actor who wears expensive clothing that fits him well, flirts with modern-day dandyism without discarding masculinity.

And there is the 'Ventrue,' her hair a sluice of darkness, the faintest hint of curl. He doesn't know her well enough to be surprised by the fact that she is not lounging, this time, and when he does come abreast of her, when she does turn to catch him with her hooked smile (fish-hook, open eye?), there is a millisecond, his blue eyes direct and curious, and then he smiles all brash and easy and golden. There is a point to it: not sharp, but as if there were a joke to be shared -- as though there might be a joke to be shared.

And then she wants to change the plan. Go, from this safe, vetted meeting-place to the open street, where anything can happen.

Nobody ever said the monster behind William's eyes wasn't adaptable.

"Yes, I think I will, as long as I can extract your solemn promise not to slap me if I try to hold your hand. The city at night, the stars; a man can be held accountable, but one hopes not by the five-fingered judge."

Energetic, William; and all that energy turned into Force of Personality; a certain rueful, but strong, assured way of speaking, his voice pitched low so it skims conspiracy without ever actually getting its toes wet.

Monserrat

Ahh. She is dressed rather differently tonight as well. Gone the short skirt, the impossibly high heels, that could double as weapons. Stillettos with toes of gold. Replaced with thick-soled, well-oiled boots, black leather, flat to the ground. The sort of boots one could run in. Fight in. Stomp a stranger's face to an unrecognizeable and pulpy mass of blood and bone in.

Jeans and a low-cut, spaghetti-strapped blouse the color of the sea at midnight, the latter beneath a vintage wool blazer, menswear, the subtle hint of a plaid or pinstripe beneath the nap of the wool.

In the millisecond as she turns to him, his blue eyes direct and curious, her own catch the light. Not of the religious fable unfolding in a constant drone of Portugese on the screen, but one of those guttering sconces that line the balcony In that moment, her own eyes are not merely dark, but a deep, humid, murky sort of green.

And then the charm - open, golden, engaging - she by contrast seems disengaged from it, but willing to cede him the space required, willing to indulge it and then be so indulged. That lashing suggestion of leashed anger dissipates. She allows it to dissipate, grits her teeth (the molars, grinding. Not the eyeteeth. Not the canines. Not the fangs), and it opens up, spreads through her, makes room.

"Then you have my pledge. My solemn promise, should you try to hold my hand, I will not slap you." Murmured. The hook returns to the edge of her smile here. Suggestion, perhaps, that she would do rather worse than a slap were she of a mind.

"Shall we." The loose tip of her head toward the lobby, the sweep of inky hair, and she begins to walk. Behind them, on the screen, the Brazilian police murder this weeks Christ stand-in on the steps of he church, and the crowd begins to fight over his corpse.

William

Shall we, she says, and they shall, as simple as that.

The door catches their (no) reflections, disperses them among light. William tears his ticket stub in two and tosses it into the trashcan which waits, squats, hulks, just outside the faded lion-glory of the Meralta's carpet. The first re-emergence into the night and the blue-eyed boy looks both ways, up and down the street, getting his barings, a faint line between his eyebrows, his eyes squinched. Ages gone, men lead: nations, rebellions, revolutions. Artistic movements, underworld politics, scientific discoveries. And dances. William might well be from an age where social cues were controlled by a lady, and Monserrat counts, even edged as she is now, even swallowing grit and anger, sharpness, her own hooks: a lady or a land-mine. He's curious to find out which.

And so. A second to let her pick the route. The second squandered, he'll tip his head and indicate the left. Flash of jaw, of adam's apple, golden stubble: Did he die with his beard on or like a boy, naked, waiting still to be somebody? His hands find his pockets and his shoulders lift, as if seeking warmth: tiny masquerades that have become second nature (as once they were first, for it was no masquerade), and then...

Frank, invitational: "Tell me about your week. Who happened to sour your appreciation of pious fools?"

Monserrat

Monserrat squanders no such seconds. Outside, the cool, crisp night air. Winter fading into spring. How many winters fading into how many springs, with the night sounds cast around them in an ancient whirl. They go east, down the block and she is swift and assured even now, when she works to keep her pace a measured amble. Scattered in front of the hash parlor, a quartet at least of young, stoned men stand smoking on the sidewalk. She takes pleasure in scattering them. In the way they dance like atoms on the head of a pin.

Fewer masquerades than he employs, out here, though she employs a few herself. Breathes in order to feel the cold air enter her lungs. Would perhaps unearth a cigarette were if colder, so that the smoke could stand in for the exhaled mist of human breath.

Doctrinaire Sabbat - oh that great unwashed rabble - howl at such affectations. Tear down the walls and rule in truth, they shout at each other. Less than children, worms who have not seen a single human lifetime's worth of stars and moonrises and murders.

"Hah." He asks about her week. She laughs aloud; utters the laughter as just one exclamation, but there is a skin of a sharp and genuine humor wrapped around the jagged edges of her voice. She is watching him aslant, the gleam of the streetlights against his golden stubble.

A moment's frank appraisal. She holds him steadily in the disc of her gaze, steadily enough that her pace slows as her dark eyes skim him up and down, and down and up, and one more time before some circuit turns, some lock clicks home, some decision is made and not to be regretted. "I recently learned of the death of a colleague."

Her own gaze is heavy, and heavily lashed, her eyes ringed with kohl. ANd her hair gleams blue-black in the darkness.

"A pen-pal. A correspondent. A scholar, of sorts. Condemned for his many heresies, or some such. Some trumped up, imaginary infraction against the proper social order."

Their pace has slowed, and her eyes remain on his face, cast slantwise. Ahead, the gleaming lights of a nightclub chasing neon against the dull and blasted sky. Stars pulse beyond, in the murky haze of a gathering fog, their brilliance blown out by the light pollution.

"Now you."She breaks off, cuts a glance away, and then back to him, steady now, as frank as he, though not precisely invitational. "I want an answer from you. Are you working for someone else. Or for yourself."

William

He makes some small sound in the back of his throat - resonant, deep, gleam-hint, neutral (fill in the blank [sympathy or interest or courtesy] - of acknowledgment when she mentions her colleage. The pen-pal. The correspondent. The scholar, of sorts. His regard is on her face, mostly; her eyes, as she speaks, but it sweeps once over her mouth and the skin of her throat, whether her body moves as she speaks, what sort of punctuation or lack there-of all that makes. "Good pen pals are difficult to find; my condolences on that point," he says, as if it were a natural thing to say.

Now you.

William's gaze drinks itself down. He still seems engaged; his eyes are still meeting hers, still easy enough doing so; maybe they go skyward for a second, as people's eyes will when they're thoughtful, when they're searching themselves -- but he knows himself well. His gaze drinks itself down, and though he seems so engaged, so present, there's a certain stillness -- a second in which he does not breathe when he should breathe, when he'd been playing the game 'til now -- that speaks of distance. Not, necessarily, from Monserrat: but wool-gathering, William, for a second.

"That's fair," he says, and then he appears to measure her before saying: "I'm working for myself."

It might be the truest thing he will ever say to her. Maybe once upon a time, a long, long time ago, there was a prince (our hero), and he lived in the day (which was bright), but did such deeds at night (as those who slept would quake to think on), and maybe then it was all for Some Thing, some Great Thing that was Yet To Come, that was to be Cherisehd and Protected. Something that lit a fire in his bones, that burnished his voice into the honey-whiskey thing it is today, the thing of power: and maybe then, that long time ago, maybe just maybe then he worked for somebody or something else. Maybe even now that all is mostly darkness and shade he still works for something that is only his because he has decided he will believe in it and because he has decided that it might as well be true:
But that's a fairytale, and when you say something is a fairytale in these modern nights, you're calling it a lie.

He has always worked for himself.

He grins at her. "As far as I'm aware."

Monserrat

As far as he knows.

Oh, this. This seems to please her. There is a glimmer of dark approval in her eyes, a certain unbending of her frame. That low hint of laughter that accompanied her earlier exclamation finds a sort of slow-burning, subvocal expression. A deliberate one, as all such sounds must be, in creatures who do not require oxygen for their continued existence. For whom respiration is now merely an artform, a frame that they inhabit to blend into the crowds of short-lived kine.

Monserrat offers William her arm, just so. Crooked. The gesture has a girlish feel to it. Can her perhaps imagine it – the quiet courtyard, the standing, radiant heat, the long shadows countersunk beneath the honeycombed gallery. The sound of water from a trickling fountain in the center, and two girls, dark-headed, crooked arm in crooked arm, tucked together and making a circuit of the velvet shadow and the scintillating sunlight. Whispering whatever paltry, wicked little secrets they might have to share. The sordid testimonials of an adolescent heart.

“Now, William,” their footfalls are soft, dampened by the night, the drifting mists, the shadows through which they stroll. Ahead a group of young women, drunk, gleaming with sweat spills from the nightclub on the corner. Billows open like a mobile, single-celled organism and contracts again, searching for shoes, keys, drinks, wraps, partners, cell phones and the way back home. They slice through them neatly, but her head is turned to follow the trajectory of one of the girls down the sidewalk, lingers, and then, finally returns to him. “ – we have discussed my week. Tell me of yours.”

William

Monserrat offers William her arm, just so. Crooked. A reward? William's grin has subsided in the natural course of things; he is no psychotic or addict, to grin and to grin, until one notices his grin is a skull's. Nope: He has the rhythm of a living man down pat -- the grin has subsided, but the remnants of it are in his opaque eyes, the lift of his eyebrows, the contours of his cheeks, the almost-faded twist of his mouth, which twists again -- crooked -- at Monserrat's gesture. He takes her arm, just so. Having taken it, he keeps it close. His clothing soaks up what borrowed heat he gives-off: the cold pale stars have secretly been burning all these nights, but William, who gives off the impression of dynamism or of vigor even when he is not in a passion over something, is secretly ice. He might have been a boy once who, when his cheek was touched, was told: you burn like a bonfire. Until one night: your skin as cold as winter -- come in. And maybe that was when he knew.

"Have we really, though?" William says, and the cadence might conjure up some other place briefly: some place more North Easterly or last Centuryish. He doesn't go so far as to lose his common-day television American accent. "I'd say it was more of a mention, though I'd be happy to discuss it in greater depth: I find rebels interesting -- and all proper heretics are transformed into rebels eventually." Thoughtful: and it seems perfectly sincere, this musing, as if it might take him away, though he shan't let it.

He smiles at her, something with the eyes that the flickering neon of a sign have limned in hallucinogenic amber; have darkened the blue to a near black; have gilded him as gold as a knight in an illuminated manuscript faced with Hellfire. "My week," he says, and directs their walk across the street. The traffic is in a lull. Somewhere nearby horns blare, the tipsy impatient to get somewhere else, impatient with those who are skulking from sidewalk to sidewalk, narrow black shadows. "No deaths, so you've one up on me there. A number of books, and librarians." His voice flattens on the word 'librarians,' and the name of that tone is dislike. "For the most part, I've been exploring, as happy with Seattle as a clam with a pearl. If you haven't taken one of the ghost tours, you're missing out."

What he's not saying is of course that some of his week has been spent inquiring after her. The blueblood who isn't. Monserrat, sired by a man of faith and conviction. What he's not saying is of course that some of his week has been spent setting up some insurance, contacting someone who might be able to follow her after this little meeting, discover what neighborhood she sleeps in, some scrap of information that'll let him excavate whatever false identity she's living under, and there-by excavate her true identity. What manner of beast he's working with.

What he's not saying is, of course, that he spent the week hanging out at Voodoo Donuts, and directing servants.

He did spend a lot of time with books. And Librarians.

Even recently arrived in a city, William is a good boy; he has already been working on their mutual project. He might even have something, but he's in no hurry to divulge: that vampiric patience -- a learned trait -- at work again.

Monserrat

Without her heels they are quite of a height, a matched pair, one might say, with a certain degree of humor. The kind of irony one inhabits rahter than breathes. The sun and his enshadowed sister - some dark, twinned star. She makes a noise - a back-of-throat - noise, when he corrects her. That her confession was more of a mention, musing over the progression from heretic to rebel, and back again. Her eyes are sharply focused on his profile in this moment, tracing the smooth cut of cheek, the gleam of his eyes beneath the amber glow of the few still-working streetlights. The ghastly slice of neon as they walk below a brothel's garish sign.

"And all rebellions turn static. Doctrinaire. Revolutionaries begin the endless, feverish search for counter-revolutionaries and create new orthodoxies of thought and belief. Once you have established a new orthodoxy, what do you create but new heretics, who will someday seize the terrible courage of their outsized convictions and take up arms against their father's gods.

"Rather like the life cycle of a moth, the endless rounds of creation and destruction. The burrowing blindness of the cocoon, the brief burst of brilliance as it emerges from gestation, only to end, ragged and terrible, circling some buzzing, ugly, electric, man-made fixture, imagining it the moon."

This is all briskly spoken, and though there is a keen edge to the words, her features remain dispassionate, quite nearly clinical. As if she herself had not lived and relived this monstrously vexing little cycle too many times to count.

"So you see, I do not find rebels interesting. I find them foolish and foolishly dangerous. I prefer a world without orthodoxies. God hardly requires our permission to be. It simply is."

--

She remains as close as he keeps her, but no closer. There's no ceding to this, just that lingering sense of girlish intimacy, the dark head tipped toward his own golden one, the settled, matching pace achieved without apparent thought.

He is happy with Seattle as a clam with a pearl.

"Are clams really happy with their pearls?" - she murmurs in response, challenging but not arch, beneath the drift of his voice.

Then at last, a low noise. This one of clotted bemusement at his endorsement of ghost tours.

"And did you see any ghosts, William?

"Do you have any to see?"

William

The glint of sound in the back of his throat which is now familiar: a chuckle arrested -- a vibration of sound that doesn't seek to become bright. The glint of it is enough -- like an almost-light on the edge of a sharp-thing, or on jewelry, ornament. "I applaud your metaphor, Monserrat, if not the implication behind it. Is there something unworthy or wrong with living out the life cycle of a moth? Why not say that rebellions are a first step?"

Caesura.

"Familiar with Dylan Thomas? The force that through the green fuse drives the flower, yadda yadda," and he speaks with one hand, sketching with great energy a line that means the rest of the poem, a hobbyist's enthusiasm. It's his voice that is arresting, however. His voice that is most alive. Engaged, as much in her reaction as the apparent hint of his beliefs. "And that's why I find rebels interesting, heretics as much so, and why -- " with an air of rue " -- while I might be moved to name some individual revolutionaries 'foolish' or 'foolishly dangerous' -- " and the rue disappears, swept as surely away as a thread of blood in a river " -- I'd, shucks, I'd feel like a heel for letting that get in the way of an interest. Have you ever found a place where you could live without orthodoxies?"

That last question is polite, but there's no malice and no edge buried in it: a matter-of-factness, as if she might very well have found some out-of-the-way village once upon a time and set-up her own cult of kine and taught them how to think. Or perhaps he's only thinking of a cult, or a club, a coterie of like-minded individuals, a controlled crowd beneath them all: Perhaps he's only wondering at her contentment. Making conversation.

And he always has an answer, a quip, at ready: that's as true as the sun is (and the languor it brings, entirely natural after so many years).

Are clams really happy with their pearls?

Angelic: "Oh, sure. Happy until some amateur pearl-diver comes around and pesters it."

Then: a cut of a look, a deepening of the shadow at one corner of his mouth. He rubs his hand across his jaw. Scritch-scratch, a faint sound.

"I rather think I might have."

Navarin

Monserrat
There is a double-feature at the Meralta tonight - the old movie theater tucked away on an otherwise rather quiet street in the Red Light District. Quiet is relative here. There is a brothel across the way, redlights on in the picture windows, and a low-key hash parlour with the clever name, HASH PARLOUR written in soap on the window. The goods are hidden behind bamboo blinds, but there is light and music just inside. A long, narrow alley bisects the block and spills out behind the Meralta. The logo of a greasy spoon gleams in neon between the dark buildings, which sketch and skew strangely together at this hour of the night. The low throb of bass from the club a block away, the crowded shout of laughter as a group of co-eds spills out onto the sidewalk, debating whether to tramp down to the strip club, or try to find a cab with the persistently loopy logic of the well-intoxicated.
BARELY LEGAL: XXX has top billing, and the bored clerk in the glass ticket booth brilliant like with a sickly white flourescent flare hands out tickets to a semi-steady stream of seedy types without every asking which of the two movies offered his customers wish to see.
Nazarín is below BARELY LEGAL: XXX on the Marquee. They haven't the proper accent for the i, so it is capitalized. NazarIn in big block letter.
That is the movie William has been directed to see.
"Buy a ticket," she instructed into his voice mail. In a low voice made of smoke and whiskey. The smallest laugh. "I do not believe in charity."
William How will our hero appear, one wonders? There is the noise of a host of bikers who host as angels host understand: all fury and sound. Maybe he is one of them? But they pass by.
Here is a sleek town-car, its armored carapace inscrutable as it glides toward the quiet street and the Meralta, and the only thing that can be guessed about whoever is within is that they've got money. Maybe the person within is a gangster of the elegant savage school of gangsterism? But the town-car pauses only to allow a burly man to get out and purchase cigarettes, and it is clear after a moment that our hero is not in the car and is not the burly man. Maybe he is one of the young men who comes pouring out of the Has Parlour, their eyes pink, their smiles varying shades of out-of-their-minds? Maybe he's the one with torn jeans, paper-clips and safety pins thrust through the skin of his jaw -- a beard of wire. But no, they pass too. What about that man, over there? He almost looks as if he were dressed for a wedding or a black tie occasion and has been separated from his party, and his tuxedo has to be a few decades out of fashion -- thankfully for him a good suit never goes out of style, hmn? And it's just possible that there are movie nerds enough to recognize a simulcram of the suit Timothy Dalton's James Bond wore in A License to Kill.
He's strolling easily down the street toward the theater, and he even stops in front of it for a moment, eyes flickering over the marquee just in time for a rather wry movement of his mouth. Amusement, or something like it. Certainly amusement, the sort-of head-shakey amusement belonging to one who's just had one put over on him. He pats himself down as he approaches the window and taps two fingers imperiously against the glass of the ticket booth in order to recall that clerk's attention from a chatroom. "One for Barely Legal," he says, and he has our hero's voice. A voice that is the sort of somber people expect not to stay somber for long, as if behind that resonance there's a smile waiting in the wings -- there's some oratory, some compliment, some passionate avowal, just readying itself for its cue. Liveliness. His voice gives the impression that if you scratch him with your nail there's something essentially present there. Something forceful. Something to be remembered by. He is charismatic, our hero, or could be.
The bored ticket-taker couldn't be less helpful when he slides the ticket to BARELY LEGAL XXX over, and William could not be less interested in the life of a bored ticket-taker when he catches their eye and winks - giving the clerk cause to blink - and then takes the ticket and strolls into the lobby.
He doesn't bother with buying popcorn, though he does regard the candy with interest. He's fairly certain that particular candy bar was discontinued back in the 80s. He knows what time it is; and even so, he heads to the men's room, where he is abandoned to privacy until he emerges ten or so minutes later and walks into Nazarín.
Monserrat There are two theaters in the Meralta: downstairs and upstairs. The doors are propped open to Barely Legal, the several iterations of which (all appear to be the thirtieth of their name) are on constant streaming rotation in the downstairs theater. The air is redolent of popcorn and, shall we call them, secretions? - and a bored looking prostitute hangs out just inside the open doors, texting and snapping her gum. She herself seems barely legal, though in an infinitely more used-up way than the doe-eyed co-eds in brief flickering contrast on the screen.
She does not notice our hero, or anyone else. Not until they feel her up. Or shoot her up. One or the other will pull her away from her twitter feed and texting.
--
The Meralta was never a movie palace, but it did aspire to grandeur, once upon a time. Our hero has his choice of curving staircases opening off the lobby, leading up into darkness where the second theater shows the classic Mexican film.
Threadbare red velvet beneath his feet, and worn faux marble beneath his hand if it skims the bannister. A moment for the eyes to adjust to the too-dim sconces lining the walls; a view over the lobby, the clerk returning to his chat room, eyes glazed with the reflected light from his laptop window.
The dusty candy display, the filthy popcorn dispenser.
The doors here are open too, propped open. On the screen, in flickering black and white, a slim young girl wrapped in a headscarf staggers through an open square, while the handsome priest fingers his rosary and prays.
She is seated three rows up, arms open wide to either side, rather like Christ on the cross. One leg across the other, desultory, her dark head aslant, her eyes affixed to the screen as the prostitute climbs through the noble priest's shuttered windows until the scene changes.
Then and only then does she lift her dark eyes from the screen and settle them directly on him, finding him whereever he may be in the darkness. The edge of a half-smile, carved into a shapely mouth and a visage like marble.
"I am surprised you came." Her voice, in his presence, is lighter and brighter than when mechanized and digitized and compressed. There is no particular accent to it, but her words are too precise to be entirely American. "I confess it."
Call it the weight of age.
William He was not lost in the dark. William stood, looking up at the screen while the slim young girl wrapped in a headscarf staggered through an open square, while the handsome priest fingered his rosary and prayed, a figure cut out've the theatre's gloom by the light of the film. He patted his pockets with the unmistakable air of a man who was about to take out a cigarette case, unclasp it, and smoke. He is probably the sort of man who'd bend his golden head to the cigarette, the better to flick a cynical or laughing look up at the target of his next remark. But instead, he undid his bowtie as if he were one of those in the other theatre, preparing to squeeze some enjoyment out've - er - life. And William swept a look around the theater, of course. Saw the woman, desultory, dark, and casual as a mistress or an artist or an actress. Saw no one else.
But she did not react immediately. She did not so much as look at him, unless briefly. And William waited, with the kind of patience belonging to vampires, and turned his head back to the screen, standing at his ease in the front of the theatre. He is not a tall man, William, though he may once have been accounted tall, coming to only five feet and eight inches. It is a height that has never done him harm, and he seems perfectly capable of being taken by bemused absorption in Nazarín.
It's possible that he is remembering a time before film. It's possible, just, that he remembers long years before the movies, long years before the movies learned how to truly echo life in colour, and that the first time he saw a colour film the dessicated lump of cold red meat in his chest spasmed, and he thought: That's not how the sun looked. They've got it wrong. But the thought hadn't been as one with certainty as this man who looks forever-young usually contrives to appear. It's possible. But is it likely? Perhaps not.
Either way, once she speaks, he turns and offers Monserrat a smile directly. The film-light flickers through his hair like a halo, gives him a shadow-crown. The smile: Engaging boy, and encouraging: "Very good, if that's the least of your sins. I stand-by, ready to hear and offer absolution."
A swift stride or two, something leggy and energetic, forceful, brings him up the stairs and into her row, where-upon he offers the creature his hand.
Monserrat "Clever boy." The edge of her smile deepens, and finds some gleaming answer in her eyes as he offers her absolution, some facsimile of it. And climbs the steps with that same engagement, that same energy that animated his retort. "But I have already been blessed and absolved of all my once-and-future sins."
When he is half-way to her, she stands and stands and stands, not so much straightening as unfolding impossibly long limbs from their lazy arrangement in the threadbare velvet seats to something more alert. She was perhaps his height before she added rather casual four inch heels to the ensemble and now, therefore, towers above him as she holds out a slim white hand and a long white arm. Cool as the first kiss of winter, smooth as glass.
When he draws abreast of her, she takes the time and care - takes out the time and care - to look him up and down. Head to toe and toe to head and back again, lingering on his eyes, his feet, his hands in this order. There is a decided note of appreciation in the frank assessment of her gaze - the appreciation of a drover for a particularly fine pack mule, and no more.
"Monserrat," an earnest pressure of her palm to his. A certain grip. A show of strenght, and perhaps a test of the same. "I think that is all the name you will require."
William There is a sound in the back of his throat: the opening salvo of a chuckle -- a glint of sound that doesn't seek to become light or brightness or fire. The glint: that's enough, accompanied as it is by the deepening of his smile, the crooking of it into an asymmetrical thing. "Oh-ho? By who or by what?" His voice is stripped of challenge and shies away from mockery by dint of being rather dryly chiding -- inquiry sans fangs.
William is either too patient or too slowed down and well-used to taking his tithe of time to find anything odd or hackle-raising in the tone of Monserrat's appreciation: or perhaps he is a beatific creature -- an angel, of sorts, happy with existence for existence's sake, and easy in the moment. His gaze is to all appearances frank, if not precisely open. The blue eyes manage to just refrain from twinkling, though a twinkle warning has been generally issued. In the theatre, looking at the dark-haired kindred, her bloodline enshadowed, enshrouded, his eyes are an obfuscated blue. William does not take the four or so inches she tops him by in good part, but that's only because he doesn't seem to regard it. He adjusts any expectations he may have had about looking physically down on the monster before him and that is that. She presses his palm, and he squeezes her hand.
"I suspect that name suits you," says he. "Mine is William." He switches languages, then, from All-American American to Spanish, heavily influenced by Mexicans in California, to gauge by the accent. "Have you seen the film before?"
Monserrat "By myself first and foremost," a dry chiding, a dry return, her voice deepening with the crisp heat of a longstanding bemusement. There is the faintest pause. Deliberate, deliberative certainly, for the creature now beside him is nothing if not considered.
"I have always believed," settled back into the theater seats, she crosses one long, long leg over the other. Her tone is lightly conversational, as if they were discussing their favorite Superbowl commercials, or the ideal week to visit Disneyland. "you see," and lightly confidential, though in this tone serves curtain rather than mirror, masking whatever lies beneath all the more. " - that we are blessed rather than damned.
"And our sins forgiven, one and all."
--
"Mmm," a faint noise of acknowledgment when he remarks that her name sutis her. "Monserrat, of Clan Ventrue." She is in profile to him, the hook of her half-smile just visible in the flickering half-light. Smug enough that she expects him, when called to do so, to parrot the lie though perhaps not to believe in it. "A pleasure, William."
Then, her chin rising to the screen, she tips her head aslant to take in his accented Spanish. And nods, and replies in kind, "I have." Her own Spanish is European. With a Catalan lilt, should he have the ear for it. "Shall I tell you how it ends?"
William It is difficult to tell whether or not William waits for Monserrat to be seated out of an adherance to chivalry (ladies' first) or because the square-cut window to the projector room distracts him for a second and his eyes snag there. Either way: He takes a seat only a moment after she does. He takes the seat beside her as if they were friends or on a date and he pulls his suit-pants up with the tiny gesture of the habitually elegant and then slouches his spine against the faux-velvet faded tatter-red seatback. Synchronization, he crosses his leg too, ankle on his knee, long-fingered hand on his ankle, a ring to glint cold gold in the dark like a promise of things to come.

Monserrat, of Clan Ventrue. He huffs a chuckle, this one more fully realized than that which had glinted, sharp, in his throat before. Bright boy. Keep him around for eternity. That was somebody's idea. There are men who can chuckle and giggle and generally seem like idiots or hucksters. Then there are men like William, who, when they appear surprised into betraying amusement, seem only as if they're fully entering the conversation, sweeping the clouds away from it, making it real. "I wouldn't have pegged you for a blueblood," says he, as angelic as you'd ever please.
He's still speaking Spanish, and if his accent is Mexican, then he is fluent enough: "Don't, 'til I guess. The priest loses his faith and is ruined by women. Everybody and everything he loves turns on him. In the end, he's a broken man, and one wonders what - if anything - one was supposed to learn."

Monserrat And she in turn forsakes the screen as he breathes out that chuckle, as the laugh finds deeper resonance somewhere in his throat and chest. Her eyes quick and dark upon his features, the only light within them the glimmer reflected from the screen. An encapsulation of the body of the work before them.
"Would you not." No implied query leavens the words themselves, and her voice is a careless decrescendo. "Perhaps that is why I am so often misunderstood."
Her attention remains on him now, unyielding to the pleasures of the screen. The dark sweep of the story, the endless humiliations and betrayals to which the saintly priest is subjected throughout his long road to perdition. Now comes the madwoman to set his home on fire.
"A fair guess. Men are always ruined by women. And the virtuous are beset on all sides by the world. Though perhaps the lesson is more evident than you imagine."
A well life well-lived," and still, and still, and still, dark eyes simmering on his angelic countenance. " - and a poor life badly lived end in much the same way."
The coil of her half-smile deepens. "Which is to say, the gallows. And faith be damned."
William "What, because you won't be pegged," says he, the golden remnants of that deep-throated chuckle hinted at yet, ruins surfacing in his tone: which is the equivalent of a shrug. "Well sure, that's an invitation to misunderstandings. Let's take a moment," and it is possible to imagine him malicious, though he has grown blander, "to bow our heads and pray for those who don't realize they've accepted the invitation, eh?"

His eyes flicker unwillingly from Monserrat when the madwoman comes to set the priest's home afire. That dessicated red muscle again: it does not spasm but only imagine it does, or did once. Gone with the Wind. Tara Burning, and how many lives were really lost when the Sunset Syndicate gave a private screening to kindred. How many were unprepared by the sudden wet blanket of flame that was not there: heat they could not feel: consumption they could only see. Then William turns his attentive gaze back to the woman, a faint smile on his lips, caught in his eyes, bestowed like a thundercloud or a star on his brow.
"How stark your assessment. Did your Sire teach you your inclination for this philosophy or did you spring fully formed from his brow?"
"But I must defend the easiness with which I reached my guess and disagree with you on one point." When she'd been in profile, when the line of her throat had been proffered just so, he'd studied it. Perhaps he'd thought: A waste, to find no pulse there, and no outlet for hunger but a cold one. "Men are sometimes ruined by their brothers."

Monserrat "There will be times to come, William," she returns, dark voice whetted now. A gleam of something well-honed beneath. A knife, a blade, a glittering scalpel, the edge slicing nearly, firmly into tissue beneath. " - when I think I shall not like your tongue.
"Not tonight," reassurance, this, some bemused simulacrum of it, and a sense of laughter deep and resonant swallowed back into her lungs, subsumed beneath her cold, pale skin. "Tonight you have amused me, and therefore I forgive all."
--
She has uncurled her long legs, now, planted both feet in their high heels solidly on the ground and leveraged herself up with the easy grace of a black swan gliding on some mirrored lake.
"My Sire was a man of great faith," slung across the back of her chair, a wrap of dark cashmere. She lifts it and slings it around her shoulders with evident ease, then dips low to retrieve one last belonging - a small leather clutch, black as sin. " - and little understanding.
"Call me self-made."
Standing straight now, she edges past him and begins to walk carefully down the steps. She says nothing more until she has nearly reached the side door, but then she turns, tugging on a leather glove.
"They are showing O Pagador de Promessas one week hence.
"You will join me. Won't you."
William He is on his feet when she stands. This time it is undoubtedly because of a chivalrous impulse, because he has been honed these many years into a courteous creature, and thus courtesy has become as a shadow is to a body. An action that requires a courteous reaction occurs; the courteous reaction is already occuring. He is on his feet when she stands, all leashed energy, enabled to offer his hand should her ballet of leaving give him a space to do so, and otherwise he stands inches shy of her in those heels and he is playing at ornament.
"I'm happy to hear it. And should the night come you find your forgiveness difficult to reach," says he, "tell me in words. I'll remind you that we are blessed."
When she passes, our hero -- for he is our hero, let us not forget -- reclaims his seat, though a different one, one arm slung over the back of the seat beside him, his head aslant. His is not a conscious echo, and his eyes are tracking Monserrat down the stairs. To the side-door. His eyes are on her glove. The pale hand disappearing within. He inhales and exhales: just like a real boy!

And says, "Bet on it. I'll see you then, Monserrat."