Guine let me borrow Chris, ‘cause we dun have time to RP everything we’d like. QQ
Word Count: 3308
They pulled through a heavy, wrought-iron gate set in a long wall of stone, and onto a winding, paved but unkempt drive lined by tall, old trees and littered with browning pine needles.
“So what are we doing here again?” Paris wondered, looking out the passenger side window of Chris’s car with only a vague, distant sort of interest.
The property was located outside of Destiny City, ten or so minutes away from Chris’s parents’ house where once upon a time the city’s wealthiest had constructed their vast estates, an area of old renown and even older people, stubbornly clinging to the sort of luxurious past that didn’t seem to have much of a place in a more modern, utilitarian era. It was, Paris had to admit, lovely in its timelessness, the grounds he could just see beyond the trees covered by fluffy snow, the gray sky obstructed by large pines and the thick, empty branches of naked deciduous trees.
There was something sort of mystic and ethereal about the place—peaceful too, as if in crossing beyond the walls and heading deeper into the grounds one was provided with an escape from the present, pulled into a past where the troubles of the modern age seemed obscured, and so very far away.
“Nana wanted us to come,” Chris explained, in the sort of voice Paris had come to learn meant there was more he wasn’t saying, probably something he expected Paris to object to and therefore thought it more pertinent to answer with a more innocent, less involved explanation.
“How long’s she in town?” Paris asked, letting Chris think he hadn’t noticed and keeping his gaze focused out the window instead of watching his fiancé shift nervously in his seat.
“Just for a few days.”
“I thought she didn’t like to travel.”
“She wanted to see how the wedding planning was going,” Chris said.
“What, she can’t be satisfied with phone calls and emails?”
“You know how she is. Always has to be involved.”
“Hmm,” Paris hummed.
It didn’t bother him too terribly to have other people plan his wedding. When it came down to it, letting Momma Gallo take care of it all, with the occasional assistance in the form of Nana and Paris’s mother (enthusiastically from the former and somewhat grudging and prideful from the latter) was, once they’d finally been convinced to have the actual ceremony at the courthouse, easier and less stressful than if he’d been left to plan it himself.
Often he wondered if he should be more concerned about it, if his antipathy meant anything about his readiness to get married. He simply didn’t feel like putting the time or energy into something he thought unnecessary. He didn’t need a wedding. He didn’t need flowers or the dress Momma kept insisting on. He didn’t need a party.
All he needed was Chris. If it had been left up to him, he’d have been satisfied with a quick stop at the courthouse some afternoon after school, and then a normal evening spent at home.
They drove some ways in before Paris could see the house nestled in the midst of the acres and acres of land. Chris pulled the car up the drive where it curved in front of the house, parking beside a set of six stone steps leading up to a landing of stone path, grass, and unkempt bushes. Another car, one Paris recognized as Momma’s, was already there parked in front of them, and when Paris peered closely at the house he could see figures moving behind the windows.
It looked old, and not just in style, but in years as well. If Paris knew anything of architecture he might have been able to put a name to it, but the only words he had to describe it were “big” and “old” and “rich.” It was one of the larger houses he’d ever seen, and after seeing a few of the Gallos’ properties it was hard to believe they could get any bigger, with a façade of stone and outdated windows, a large surrounding porch with columns for support, and two turrets Paris thought made the place look a bit ostentatious, like a small castle some self-important dolt had built outside of a city that had no place for it.
Paris opened the passenger side door to step out into the snow, waiting for Chris to do the same and circle around to join him.
“So what is this place?” Paris asked as they ascended the first set of steps together.
“Just an old house,” Chris said with an attempt at a shrug, the tone of his voice no different than before.
“I can see that,” Paris said. “But why does Nana want us to see it?”
“Who knows…”
“We already told her we don’t want a big wedding,” Paris continued. “I’m not getting married at a place like this if that’s what she wants.”
Chris made a noise that sounded like agreement but could have just as easily been tired resignation.
They climbed the next set of six stairs and approached the front doors, which had been left unlocked for them. Chris pushed them open, and Paris followed him in.
He made no move to take his coat off, for it was quite cold inside, not low enough to match the temperature outside but not as comfortable as he might otherwise like. The lights were on, so the place still had working electricity, but a few of the bulbs had blown and others flickered creepily, leaving them to explore with dim, unwelcoming illumination.
“You’re late,” Chris’s grandmother said.
She stood in the middle of the entrance hall with Chris’s mother, who quickly shuffled closer to pull them both into a hug and kiss their cheeks as she was wont to do, fawning over them even when it wasn’t necessary for her to do so.
“Sorry,” Chris said, though he didn’t sound particularly apologetic, but then Nana didn’t sound too terribly annoyed either. “I forgot how to get here.”
Nana clucked her tongue and turned without another word, leading them on something of an impromptu tour with an energy one would not typically expect from someone of her age.
She wore a dress and heels even in the cold weather, with her silver hair twisted up and pinned in place. A string of pearls hung from her long neck, and both hands glittered with rings, though not so many that they looked weighed down. On top of it all she wore a coat of fur; Paris, still somewhat ignorant of the ways of the wealthy, and the Gallos in particular, couldn’t tell if it was real or fake.
He would have asked if he cared to know, or if he could actually predict Nana’s answer, but she was so capricious he never knew what to expect from her. Either she’d scoff at him and say “Of course it is,” or she’d scoff at him and ask, “You think I would stoop so low as to harm an animal simply to make a coat of it?”
Momma, by comparison, looked much less formal, for while she was known for her elegance and sophistication when it came to her choice in clothing, she was also much more down-to-earth and was no stranger to a pair of jeans, which she wore now with fashionable boots, a warm wool coat, and a scarf Paris knew to be made of cashmere, having seen it and touched it before.
The house, however, took up much of his attention, and whatever conversation the others were having around him faded into the background for the time being. There was too much to look at. He started with the hardwood floors, which creaked beneath his feet but seemed to him to be in relatively good condition otherwise. The walls varied from room to room; some had been painted—red, blue, cream, there was even an old-fashioned parlor painted a pale peach—others papered or paneled in wood, and still more that combined the two, painted or papered on the upper half with wainscoting on the lower.
He saw little of the furniture, at least until Nana began to lift the white sheets that covered them. It, too, looked old to Paris, though like the floors in good condition, carefully preserved over time.
“This sideboard is from the 17th century,” Nana said of one piece in one particular room, “Welsh made,” and then, “These chairs are Louis XV’s,” she said in another.
“Wasn’t that the one who had his head cut off?” Chris asked.
Paris, paying only slightly more attention now as these rather impressive sounding names and dates were being thrown out, looked at Chris with an expression of scornful disbelief, mostly feigned and put on more for the show of it than anything. “That was Louis XVI. God, Chris, you’re marrying me and I’m half French and you don’t know that?”
Chris smiled, clearly amused. “I was being facetious.”
Rolling his eyes, Paris began mumbling a tune to himself as he lifted a few more sheets to get a look at the furniture beneath. “Allons enfants de la Patrie, Le jour de gloire est arrivé~!”
“We should auction some of these pieces off,” Nana decided. “After the family’s had their pick of them, of course. They can collect dust in some other collector's home, unless you’d like to keep any.”
“Louis XV’s not really my style, Nana,” Chris said.
“I thought as much.”
“Shouldn’t you ask Granddad what he wants to do with it?”
And here Nana scoffed and waved one of her hands as if it hardly mattered what her husband, still in Boston, thought of it. “Your grandfather will hardly spare it a thought. He’s not so interested in furniture that he’ll miss any of it. No one’s lived here in years, not since Ed’s sister Evelyn and her husband left and built their own house.”
“Why auction any of it off?” Paris wondered, examining yet another fireplace. There were so many of them in the house. “What are you gonna do, tear the place down?”
“Of course not,” Nana said, laughing as if she found the very thought of it amusing. “Don’t be ridiculous, Paris. I’m giving it to you.”
Paris stopped his observations to whip around and stare at her, mouth agape. “To me?”
“To you and Chris.”
To that he said nothing, simply stood there in shock.
“Think of it as a wedding gift.”
“But… we already… I mean, we don’t… we don’t need anything. We were gonna... if people really wanted, they could just… donate to charity… or something…”
“You’ll be married,” Nana said, as if that explained everything. “You don’t expect to keep living in your apartment once you’re married, do you?”
“Um… well, yeah…”
“Oh, Paris, you are sweet,” she said with something that sounded like amused pity. “You’ll be married. You’ll need a proper home.”
“A proper… but we have one…”
“Oh, no, no, no, dearest. A proper home.”
At a loss, Paris looked from Nana to Momma, who smiled indulgently and seemed not at all phased, and then from Momma to Chris, who shifted nervously and looked back at Paris sheepishly, made uncomfortable not by Nana’s exceeding generosity, but by Paris’s inevitable reaction to it.
“I’ll take Paris out to see the gardens,” he said and, grabbing Paris’s hand, pulled him from the room Paris hadn’t finished exploring, through the back of the house and out a set of French doors into an area of gardens that, in the summer, would surely be awash with color, but which in the winter seemed cold and sparse.
The rose bushes laid dormant, the wisteria covering the pergola not yet in bloom, the gazebos icy, the pond near frozen.
Paris took it in in a quick, sweeping glance before rounding on his fiancé—a term he had not quite gotten used to using. He pulled his hand from Chris’s grasp and stepped back to put what he thought was an appropriate amount of distance between them, and stood stiff and defiant in the face of Chris’s look of timid hope.
“Why didn’t you tell me about this?” Paris said, voice a bit strained from nerves, but still stern.
“Because I knew how you were going to react,” Chris said easily enough.
“So you decided to bring me here and put me on the spot instead?”
“If I didn’t, you wouldn’t have even agreed to come look at it. You’d just say, ‘Oh, no, we don’t need a house,’” he said, in a voice Paris refused to admit might sound remarkably like him, “and then go on another one of your tangents about paying for things.”
“We don’t need a house,” Paris argued.
“No, we don’t,” Chris allowed, “but there’s one sitting here, unused, that Nana wants to give to us.”
“And you knew about this?”
“Yes.”
“For how long?”
Chris shifted on his feet nervously again and rolled his eyes indignantly at the same time. “Since I bought your ring.”
For a moment, Paris stood quietly, staring at Chris with rather a lot of mixed feelings.
He didn’t know what he was supposed to feel, or think, or say, which, when it came to Chris, was not an uncommon state. The shock was beginning to wear off; there were only so many times he could be surprised with yet another display of the Gallos’ wealth before he began to expect it with a sort of weary acceptance. Yet the rest of his emotions still mingled, swirling around in a great ball of anxiety he thought he’d never be rid of.
It was no longer a matter of coping with the newness of it all, adapting to a strange, uncharted world, but reconciling his pride and giving up a small piece of the control he’d worked so hard to gain.
“And you want to live here?” Paris asked once he’d taken a settling breath.
His fiancé shrugged. “It might be nice to have a house,” he said.
“But… this house?”
“It’s been in the family for a while,” Chris explained. “Nana was gonna give it to Mom and Dad when they decided to move to Destiny City, but Mom… well, for a while she was like you… independent and stuff. She wanted her own place, so Nana helped them with their house instead and this has just been sitting around waiting for someone to take care of it.”
“What about Michael?”
Uncharacteristically, Chris snorted at the mention of the older brother he idolized, though Paris thought it might have been the result of a new bitterness that had come about following the revelation that Michael had, unknown to them until now, been a knight for a majority of his time back in the states—and one as close to them as Sessrumnir.
“Michael’d rather be in the city,” Chris said.
“And you’d rather not be?”
Now it was Chris’s turn to stand quietly, staring at Paris with sad eyes. After a moment, Chris crossed the short distance between them and took one of Paris’s hands. Chris’s other hand, freed from any restraint, went behind Paris’s head to slide into his hair.
“I don’t want you to be,” he said, low and quiet. “I want you to be healthy, and happy, and safe. I want you to have a place where you can feel free, like you do when we’re in Boston. I know this isn’t very far away, and the war’s still here, but… it’s removed enough, and it’s quiet… peaceful. I thought it’d be good for you. After last summer…”
Paris didn’t need to question it and Chris’s didn’t need to elaborate any further, so the sentence was left hanging there.
It bothered Paris that the previous summer, and the months leading up to it, had so much of an effect on Chris’s thoughts, feelings, and decisions almost half a year later. He wished they could forget about it, move on and pretend as if it’d never happened, rather than concerning themselves with it any more. Paris liked to think he was better, even if, after particularly stressful events, he still felt the overwhelming need to run, to purge himself of all thought and feeling until he was nothing but a numb shell, incapable of being hurt when he’d already hurt enough, even if he still had nightmares, and took pills to help him sleep, to help him calm when he couldn’t do it himself.
Logically he knew that it would never go away. No matter how much he might like it to, no matter how much he might wish the memories would leave, and take his shame with them, it was something he, and by extension Chris, would likely have to concern himself with for the rest of his life.
That Chris would accept this place, not for himself but for Paris, who, if Paris would put aside his stubbornness and admit to it, needed the freedom and the escape more than Chris did, reinforced for Paris all the many reasons he’d said “yes” backstage that night in December.
“I don’t know…” he said, hesitant even now that his resolve to refuse was crumbling.
“We don’t have to keep it the way it is,” Chris told him, rushing to cajole now that Paris had left an opening. “It’s pretty old, so it could use some updates. Nana said we can remodel, keep the furniture we like and sell or donate the stuff we don’t want. I can draw something up and we can design it together. Maybe knock out some walls, or… add some things here and there.”
In response, Paris mumbled a quiet, “… maybe…”
“The kitchen should probably be redone completely…” Chris tried.
Very slowly, Paris nodded to agree. “Probably…” he said.
“And we’d have to have some help with it…”
“… Yeah…”
“But we can still do a lot of it ourselves,” Chris said, watching Paris with undisguised hope in his eyes. “That way, even though we’re not really paying for it, we still put work into it. Wouldn’t that… would that make you feel better?”
“I don’t know…” Paris said again.
“I thought about maybe moving back into my old apartment, and then taking the money we’d be spending on rent and bills at the place we have now and putting it toward some stuff for this place. Nana wants to help, but… we don’t have to let her do all of it.”
There was still a part of Paris that wanted to argue, that wanted to launch into a tangent about wants and needs, and quibble about relatives and trust funds and gifts that might be undeserved. But when he looked around with Chris’s heartfelt concern so fresh in his mind, and he tried to picture himself sitting in the gardens in full bloom, or walking the paths he could see through the trees some ways off, and he realized that, yes, he did feel free here, he did feel removed from it all, safe from a war that had come too close to destroying him, he could no longer find a reason to argue.
There was something fantastical about this place, akin to all those fairytale worlds he danced among in ballets, like the rest of the world had fallen away the moment he’d crossed through the gate.
And he liked that feeling, perhaps more than he should.
Staring up at Chris he asked, almost timid, “Can I have a ballet studio?”
For just a second Chris looked shocked by what might as well have been agreement, then like he might actually cry from relief. In the end he laughed, and pulled Paris close to hold him and kiss his hair.
“You can have anything you want,” he said. “Everything. Just name it.”
