#jinx introduces awkward dad silco to the concept of hand holding

[revelisms]

Excerpt: Business is Only Theatre

Little Jinx receives an acting lesson.

From 'like leaves of a lotus,' a oneshot following Silco and Jinx on a Topside errand run. Full story on AO3.

They're buzzed through the gates in a flourish of blue light. He taps the corner of his paperwork along the desk, once, twice. Scrapes it away—thinking, thinking—steps echoing over the cold marble. The burly guard seated at the gate's edge doesn't give them a passing glance, tension curling through his shoulders.

They walk on. Their reflection glints in the wide, gold-paned doors of the ground floor elevator bay. She peeks up at him through her hair. "You didn't make an appointment," she whispers, punching her finger into the button.

"The boy didn't know that," Silco whispers back. His eyes are faraway.

The sterility of the building's dry air heightens the sooty-sweet of the Lanes that sticks to his clothes, the hint of cigar smoke that sits beneath it, the lingering touch of his cologne. It's comforting to her, in this awful space. She clings to the familiarity of it, in the whirring of the elevator: in the white of the halls: through each tick-tack of their shoes across too-clean marble. 

They fall still in the threshold of an open door, three rooms down from a sharp corner and a statue depicting the glory of their squashed rebellion—bridge, fire, death, hell—that makes her skin crawl. Inside, a man slumps over a mine of zoning requests in a disorganized room, pen scribbling. It smells of stale cigarettes and antiseptic.

"Marcus." Silco's voice is a satin-cloaked knife.

Their pocketed enforcer flinches; spits, "What—what are you doing here?" with a baffled stare.

Silco steps into the room. Slow, half-minded. She scuttles in behind him.

For a moment, silence clots every breath, sucking out the oxygen by fractions. His fingers tap against the folder of paperwork at his back. "Shut the door, Jinx," he says lowly.

Marcus shoots her a look that stabs with daggered disdain. Any threat in it falls flat. She's faced down too many of those in her short lifetime to care. She glares right back; knocks the door shut behind her with a shove of her foot. 

The clap of its hinges echoes. Another breath. The line of Silco's back is still. The silence of the room changes the air: changes him—and though there is nothing noticeable that shifts in the way he carries himself, his presence plummets, like a toxin slow-released. 

"You're three days late."

Marcus fumbles, splutters. "I've—I had other commitments."

"Other commitments," Silco echoes, mulled over like a twisting dagger. "Interesting." There's resentment, fear, in Marcus's eyes. "I bought you two weeks," Silco rumbles on, stepping closer, and she flattens herself against the door: watches, in morbid fascination, where Marcus leans back in his seat: squeezes his palm around his pen, with a tense breath. "Are you asking for another?"

"No." 

"No?" The repetition boils, like burnt sugar.

Marcus hisses through his teeth. "I'll have it, first thing in the morning."

Silence, for a long moment. She can't imagine what look has passed between them. Something has paled the warmth of Marcus's skin, his eyes frozen upward, a rabbit before a wolf. Silco slips the folder from behind him: tosses it heavily onto the mountain of files already littering the gloss of his desk. "Hudge, Lanceister, and Putnel," he says calmly. "As requested."

Three new-acquired outputs, bought off from the mine operators and a port base down South. She'd seen him pen in profits with enough figures to make her head swim.

A snarl carves minutely through Marcus's mouth, there and gone again. His fingers twist over his pen. His eyes cut up again, a hiss of static.

"First thing in the morning," Silco leaves him with, the water's depths in his voice, "or Sevika will be retrieving it, herself."

The shaky nod given to him is ignored. 

Silco turns, back to her—fire, fury, murder in his eye—to the door she quickly pulls creaking open—and they are leaving, before her mind can catch up with the rush of it. She can't remember which turn they took to find Marcus's office. A pen cracks hard to the floor, somewhere behind them. His hand has found the back of her shoulder: steady, guiding.

The elevator is too quiet. 

She comes back to herself, gradually, with the soft droning of the cables above them. Lifts a quiet glance towards him, swallows. His brow is furrowed: wrath in his tealish eye, where she can catch sight of it, but simmering down, simmering down; the claw-tipped shadow of his wings tucking back into their chrysalis, unseen: the venom on his tongue fading.

It fascinates her, how quickly he can don those pieces of himself, when the time calls for it. Terrifies her. And, in some small way, turns her envious.

(No, you can't control what they think of you. But you can command it.)

She reaches up for his hand, squeezes it slow in her skinny fingers. He squeezes them back, gently.

(Become what they fear.)

She stares hard at the elevator grates as the doors slink open, at the seamless grouting of the marble as they walk the twenty-two steps that stretch between them and the front entry. The guards and attendants leer as they leave.

Outside, back in the blinding winter sun, the bustle of the busy streets, the strangely clean air, she sucks in a breath for the first time. It's as though a stone has lifted from her chest.

They stand in the cool breeze, for a moment. "Are you alright?" he asks quietly.

Her fingers stutter beneath the loose cradle of his own. "I'm—yeah. I'm fine." She frowns. "I'm fine." A million thoughts simmer freely in her, now that they're out of that horrible place—now that she can think. She presses her thumb into his. "How do you do that?"

He seems perplexed, by that. "Do what?"

"I don't know, you—" She waves her hand, the words struggling to come to her. "You just—you change." 

"Ah." He studies the treeline far beyond them: between the towering old buildings, the blue-gray sun. "The world's a stage, little one," he says. "Business is only theatre." He turns a wry glance down at her. "You learn which costumes to put on, over time."