The Keepers' Evil

Thirty-Two: I need those pages

Song- Me and my husband: Mitski

"I need those pages, so I suppose I better meet you."

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Perhaps it was a telling sign about the little girl that I clung to that the tiny, gentle, clinks of pretty china teacups sent my eyes into a glare of a delicate panic. It was a sound that was out of the ordinary, it wasn't one to be heard everyday, and her small figure hid behind my bones to tug on my organs and limbs to comfort herself when it was all too unfamiliar.

My hand placed the daintily intricate cup on the matching porcelain saucer, tapping the cup's glazed gold handle until the elegant pink painted flowers lined up exactly. I smiled down discreetly onto the remainder of the swirl of sugared tea that swam in the bottom, the remnants of the sweet taste lingering on my tongue. Some things were a kind reminder that the world still held my hand sometimes rather than suffocating me.

The café on the corner, almost directly opposite the Sallows' rather picturesque home, had drawn me in with the warm, cakey, scent of chocolate and candied fruit one afternoon, almost exactly twenty minutes before they had closed. The young girls who had managed to take over the quaint space were kinder than most, seemingly overlooking my rather out of place appearance as they offered me a limitless flow of tea and a dip into the biscuit tin every time the last few crumbs fell onto the table of the previous.

"We didn't see you last night, April! Josephine and I began to worry, didn't we, Josie?" I smiled through the pinch to my nerves that the name twang through my body in a series of emotional shivers. Names had a powerful connotation; you'd always remember the most important body linked to the name even if a thousand people were called the same.

Josie was Sebastian's mother.

Sebastian seemed to linger everywhere, exist in every world that I did despite the desperate sprint away from the ones I needed to leave behind. I swapped my uniform for darkness, and Sebastian had remained at the crumpled red tie. I had left him to become lost, yet he had only found me every time. I had discarded his name from my mind, but another figment of him arose.

Sebastian was mine, the world knew that, it was just me that didn't.

"I was busy, I had a few things to attend to." The girl huffed a small smile of her own in return, shrugging her shoulders before setting down another teacup that dripped down the white china with the sweetly scented concoction that I had already finished.

"I didn't-" she chuckled to interrupt me with eyes as kind as the tea was to my body, warming in ways I couldn't explain. She knocked her head to the side of where she stood, her eyes framing the subtle expression of a smirk over her face. She stood for a moment as if to hide my confusion, only allowing the figure she had meant to highlight to replace her at the table once spying the look of familiarity slick my cheeks.

"You must be following me, Corvinus." Though his apparent appearance in this town was rather suspiciously in the trail of mine, I couldn't deny that the unique understanding that this man provided was comforting to say the least. Corvinus was but a few years superior in age, his life already forming the pureblood insanity that he too had shared felt unnecessary.

Corvinus' dark hair blended in coexistence with the darkness of his clothes as though it were a symbol of the background he was from. His long coat fumbled against the legs of the chair as he took a seat opposite me, the neatly tucked and tailored suit beneath it nothing but a demonstration of his wealth. He stuck out as the black paint on a pastel canvas within the delicacy of the café, yet he was nothing that I was not also.