if that diamond ring turn brass

[toujours_nigel]

So this is the post-movie Sophia/Charlie fic that ended up being more about Mikhail, which, I think, might just be a trend, given how he's taken over my fic-writing brain. ah well, what's to do.

not-mine, post-film, undertones of slash, read at your own discretion.

For applegnat, whose Sophia made me actually think about her, unlike, say, the one-minute-long appearance in the film itself.

*** *** ***

His roof has sprung a leak half a foot from his bed. It always does. The first year, Mikhail—who has been raised on a steady diet of classic rock—had lain on his bed and crooned tuneless songs about fixing his roof, and looked shocked when asked for help. Last year, he’d got Mansoor to lend him one of the boys, finally high enough up the hierarchy to steal people from under Shumon’s not-really-absent eyes. This year he sets a bowl underneath it and watches the water, forced to stay on his uninjured side. Couldn’t fix it if he wanted, and wanting is ridiculous.

 

He sleeps here because he cannot—will not—admit to how pathetic it is to act on the desire to move into Mikhail’s house. If it’s a different kind of pathetic to commute needlessly back and forth, when five people are inhabiting a house meant for five times as much—the servants have been sacked, Malati’di’s left—nobody’s said as much, yet, except Sweety of an evening, interrupting herself. The house feels like a mausoleum, he finds himself listening for gunshots and raucous laughter, and meeting himself-but-for-the-grace-of-god around corners for fumbled conversations.

 

But he’s there all day, fending off Sweety being solicitous and Mujeeb’s associates being snarly or smarmy, as the hierarchy went, and helping Mansoor decide which of the boys should go break which body part. Shukla’s still the steady hand on finances, Mansoor’s still the scariest enforcer he’s ever met, but somehow—Shukla’s too much of a coward, Mansoor just plain won’t—executive decision’s devolved on him. Gangs aren’t inheritance you can will away, and there’s nobody to will it to, anyway, save a dotty old woman in Kolkata who might be formidable, but is nearly seventy and the daughter who, if younger, has nowhere near her mother’s steel. So he’s taken over, and if he feels he’s nurse-maiding the whole setup, holding it in trust for ghosts and speaking corpses, he’s got a large and well-established place in his hands, without bloodshed or struggle. He isn’t complaining. Sod bloody Sweety and her imaginary perception, he hasn’t anything to complain about.

 

Sweety and her perception are lying in wait for him when he gets in next morning, ears still full of the sound of water dripping into water—he’d dreamt of Mikhail coming in, drenched, that night and woken still aching—mind buzzing with the details of ‘bloody fucker got drunk last night, he can’t stay on, man. Hasina’ll carry him if he can, but we’d have to strap the lund down, and Charlie, yaar, we were betting on her to win, dammit.’. Mansoor’s boots stomp down on the floor in mid-sentence, the last bit of ‘and I think someone else better do it, cause Imma nail his legs to the…’ left to obvious imagination. He looks around, slow and resigned, because Mansoor dislikes cursing in front of women and the only such in residence is…

 

“Fweety.”

 

“Some girl called for you, last evening. Didn’t leave her name,” she says, as his shoulders go down, because who else can it be, “and rang off when I said neither you nor Mikhail was there. Wouldn’t let me explain.” She stops with that, last few words stumbling out like she’d never meant to speak them, and stands looking at him, eyes soft. Some days he wants to prostrate himself in front of her, some days he wants to kill her slowly. It comes and goes. “Do you want tea? Coffee?”

 

He waves her off and puts his cell to charge, still switched off, and gets back to work till Mansoor has to head out—little Ashmit, who’s barely sixteen and looks younger, tends to try violence first, and Mansoor’s taking him along, to teach him, personal-like, how to use his smallness to better advantage—and then sits with his face buried in his hands till the starburst behind his eyelids turn the bright red of pain.

 

He’s pacing the corridor outside when the phone rings, trying to rehearse the best way to tell her. “Hey.”

 

“So, finally you got the time, hey? I even rang you up at Mikhail’s house, girl who answered said you’d gone out, what, you two’ve been on a bender again, yeah?”

 

He lets himself enjoy the sound of her voice, the lilting harshness of it, breathes, “Fophia.”

 

“Charlie,” she smiles, he can feel the word stretching with her lips.

 

“When did you get back?”

 

“Last morning.”

 

“Yeah? Where from?”

 

“Wouldn’t you like to know?” She’s been gone a month and a half. She’s been gone a lot longer, and never come back to find her world changed. She’s going to kill him if he hears it from someone else, and sahamaran isn’t something that holds any appeal for him.

 

“Fophia.” Almost he calls her Sophonisba, to bring alive the ghost between them. “What’re you doing right now?”

 

“Soaking a week’s grime off,” she laughs, and he has to close his eyes against the thought of her. “Hygiene, what hygiene? Running water, what?”

 

“Can we meet? When you don’t look like the Flumdog Millionaire kid?”

 

“You had a fight with Mishka and haven’t got any for a week, what? Why so eager?” She sounds happy enough that something in his stomach uncoils and begins a slow, choking, slither up his throat. “I have to talk to Papa, but I can… say tonight, yeah? I’ll come over.”

 

“Okay,” he says, and cuts off the call before she can respond and spends the rest of the day in forced activity, and tries to bully Sweety and manages to bully Ashmit and fucks up a phone-call to Mikhail’s Mashimoni, who is still to come to terms with the fact that her nephews—Mujeeb and Shumon were never related to her, but try explaining that to a seventy-year-old—are dead and the man she’s seen once, and that as the youngest’s disreputable friend, is now in charge. He’s out the door at six, and has to sit on the side of the road and breathe through his terror of telling Sophia that Mikhail’s dead.

 

Because he’s always known—and never wanted to—that whatever Sophia thinks of him, Mikhail she loves with the smiling ferocity she brings to shoot-outs and bar-brawls and bed.

 

***

 

Mikhail had, in the early hours of the morning, taken one lazy, blissed-out, fucked-out look around the bare interior of his place and decided that it served as a tree-house substitute—then he’d had to explain the function of a tree-house, and that it was usually found in books, but that he’d forced one to be built for him; Mikhail’s good at things like that—and chosen to ignore all extraneous facts and reality. And because Mikhail’s—was, had been, before worms ate him and maggots nested in his flesh—beautiful enough and insane enough to bend reality, he’s grateful for the few times Sophia’s stood looking around disapprovingly, heels clicking smartly on the floor.

 

“Hullo, hi, Charlie,” click-clack, stomp. “This place is a dump.”

 

“We aren’t all you.”

 

“Neither’re you Mishka,” she retorts, perches daintily on the hammock. He flinches, but she can’t take a chair, they’re full of junk, and she likes the fact that it’s a swing, and he’s.

 

He’d got up, eventually, and gone to the jeweller who’d looked at him goggle-eyed when asked to estimate the price of his twins, and been oily and gleeful when told to make one into a ring, till Mansoor started paring his nails with a khukri and then promised great work, and that fast. The weight of the black velvet box, shoved hastily in, is pushing his pocket out of shape. It looks a lot like the future he’s getting. Be careful what you ask for, you might get it. Thank you, Baba, for those words of clichéd wisdom.

 

“No, seriously, where’s the damn broom, c’mon Charlie, hand it over.”

 

“Marry me,” he says, and they stare at each other, blankly for a second before she starts laughing. It’s an old joke. Don’t marry her, fuck me. Lie still in your grave, fucker, the dead cannot speak.

 

“What’re you hiding in here, now? Bodies?” She scrunches her nose up, makes a point of sniffing. “Doesn’t smell bad enough.” She stares at him when he doesn’t join in, make a joke of it. “Oh, c’mon, Charlie, what’ve you, had a fight with Mishka?”

 

He’s looming over her, now, and she hates being thought weak because she’s petite—how anyone can think that who’s seen her is beyond him—so he sinks heavily to his knees, tugs at the inner lining of his pocket and fumbles out keys and wallet and box, fumbles with the catch while she looks anxious, and offers it up, open, diamond the brightest thing in the room.

 

“No, Charlie, put it away.” She sounds like he’d thought girls did when guns were pulled around them, save she has a love-affair with her firearms. “You know I won’t.”

 

“Why not?”

 

“Because,” she snaps, impatient and long-suffering, but he’s never asked her why before, in three years of fake-proposals, “We’d kill each other without Mishka interfering, and he’d do that all the time and ménage-a-trois only works with people who aren’t us, and Mishka’s like the second cousin I never wanted, but I don’t share.”

 

He hasn’t laughed since Mikhail came stumbling in through the door behind him, cocky and drugged-out, and it rasps his throat like a dull knife trailed over skin, and brings tears to his eyes. “I’m not going to cheat on you,” he promises when he can speak. “You don’t have to fhare, there’f nobody to do it with. Mikhail died,” he says, and cannot find another word to speak, so he puts his head in her lap and shuts his eyes against the silk of her dress and waits and waits for her to speak, to hit him, to scream hatred at him.

 

She puts her hand in his hair, nails five sharp points against his scalp, and when he lifts his head her tears fall on him, but her eyes are suspiciously narrowed and she’s managed a smile. “You just want to marry me because Mishka’s dead, that it, yeah?”

 

“Yeah,” he says, because you fuck a man for need or loneliness or simple desire but you don’t admit to loving him, you don't marry him, and you sure as fuck don’t ask him to stand up as your best man and he’s always always wanted her more, because Mikhail’d been easy and he’s always loved chasing dreams, money, women. “Nobody to call me hen-pecked.”

 

“Pussy-whipped,” she grins, leans down to kiss him, mouth salty and the fingers in his hair twisting cruelly, pulls back to hold his head tipped up to her. “If you name any of my boys Mikhail, I’m going to divorce you. Deal?”

He nods and picks the ring up from the floor and puts it on her and rests his weight on his hands to watch her examine it, a sharp eye on cut and colour and carat, and watches the tears fade to stains and her smile dim the stone.

*** *** ***

So, mushy, I guess, and possibly a little OOC, in the end, idk, but protracted angst doesn't seem Charlie's thing. hmmm